I ended up rereading this thread, and thought perhaps I’d give an update if anyone was interested. But first I want to thank Dseid for all of the good information and cites. I came off as more adversarial towards some of the medical advice than I meant to sound. He or she is certainly the expert, I’m only relaying personal experience and anecdotal advice.
So anyway, not much good to report since I last posted until recently. I ended up staying back home for 3 months. During the time I didn’t low carb - I was too busy going out to eat at restaurants with friends, enjoying the stuff I’d missed (entirely too much ice cream), and too much fast food on account of always out doing stuff.
And I developed a very nasty injury towards the end, plantar fasciitis/bone spur (apparently I have an atypical case for either, but the problem lied in that sort of thing) kept me off my feet. It’s a very limiting condition - it’s very painful to be on your feet - and I’ve been unable to shake it. It was really bad for about 3 months, and since then it’s just been nagging and painful but not too restrictive. I allowed that to end up putting an end to my excercise. I also didn’t immediately switch back to low carb when I got home, instead lazying my way to another month off. So about 4 months in total.
The results are predictable. This isn’t necesarily a harbinger of the future - like I said, I was eating out, eating fast food, eating for pleasure a whole lot more than I would typically - but I was 283 when I left in August, and about 315 when I started again in December. Some of that is water weight - about 7-10 pounds will come on or off within a few days when you switch from high carb to low carb.
So anyway, I’ve been spending time since then getting down. I’m back down to about 297, which is… well, crappy. My behavior and progress was unacceptable - I’ve wasted too much time wavering on this. I’m the same weight now as I was in may of last year, which means I wasted 10 months.
But, on the plus side. I described nagging feelings of pain and leg injuries/soreness that I had all through last year before I left for Ohio. Those aren’t affecting me nearly as much as they did then. I still have no explanation for them. The plantar fasciitis kept me from excercising pretty much at all until recently. I could’ve, and should’ve, worked around it. I could’ve swam for instance, even though a barefoot or slightly padded walk around the gym and pool would’ve been enough to put me in a lot of foot pain, it would’ve been managable.
But really, I just didn’t have my heart fully in it. I missed out on chances to excercise. I took a few breaks to indulge in cravings which stunted progress.
Recently I’ve been getting some physical therapy for the foot, and things are looking up. I’ve been excercising more lately, mostly swimming, and I don’t feel nearly as crappy as when I did it a year ago. I’m not quite sure why it’s changed, but it became something that actually seemed somewhat pleasant and satisfying instead of painful and draining, so it has been a lot easier to do. I hope it keeps up.
In any case, it made me realize how I’ve been wasting my time. I should’ve made 100 pounds of progress by now, instead I’m back to 50. Which, I suppose, by most standards, isn’t a waste, but I don’t feel good about it.
But I’m going to throw my whole heart into it now, increase the intensity, not deviate with any breaks from the diet. I’m still committed to that 80 pounds I said I’d lose. My goal is to do that before June. We’ll see what happens from there.
Oh, and I was incorrect about my medical predictions. Or one, at least. My cholesterol hasn’t improved, and in fact, since I stopped taking statins (near when I started the diet) it went up. What’s interesting is that when I did this all at 17, my cholesterol improved dramatically, into the better than ideal range (I forget the exact numbers, but my HDL to LDL ratio was unusually high), but now I’m at 203 total with 30 HDL (which is very low). My diet actually has less saturated fat and cholesterol now than it did then, so either that means that my body has changed in the years since then, or the excercise was a much bigger factor in the cholesterol levels than the diet was.
My other labwork has improved, though. My triglicerides went from in the 200s to in the 90s, my blood pressure has gone down from ~130/85 to ~115/75, my A1C hemoglobin went from 6.1 to 5.0. I forget the other specific numbers but everything has stayed the same or improved.
My health problems have lessened somewhat. I have very limited access to medical care, so nothing definitive there, but the feeling that I’m at a rather immediate risk for sudden death is less frequent.
So anyway, I’m committed to working much harder to killing the last 30 of my goal, and generally improving my strength and fitness. I don’t know what I’m going to do after that, let’s see how this goes.
