My extremish diet log

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

My blood sugar levels will be far more stable than they were before, because there won’t be a massive influx of carbs followed by a huge flood of insulin.

I’m taking special care to watch my electrolytes - using potassium salt on food, taking vitamins, and such.

Really, this is, by far, the best thing I’ve done for my mood in months.

The depression won’t be over, but at some point the massive amount of work will be. At that point I will probably expend a moderate amount of effort to not gain it back because being fat is a pain the ass.

62

Update: I’ve lost 14-17 pounds in the first week, which sounds nuts, but at least 5 of it is water weight. Your kidneys dump a bunch of water in the absense of high insulin levels. I forget the biological reason for this.

It’s a little sketchy. Right now I’m so huge that I need to use two scales to weigh myself. Problem being that one is analog, and one is digital. The digital one takes several samples over 5 seconds… and it’s fairly difficult to stand still without shifting 5 pounds of weight in either direction. So, to try to make it accurate, I take about 5 readings and average them out. Strangely, though, while my first weighing gave me anywhere between 359 and 367 or so, this time I consistently came within a pound or so of 345.

I had a strange problem last night - I had pretty bad stomach pain for about 6 hours after I ate my last meal (meatballs with an italian cheese blend melted on them and some speghetti sauce and some yogurt). I’m hoping it’s because I had a bad reaction to one of the cheeses - I’ve never used that mix before, and I’ve had a history of certain cheeses (mostly ricotta) causing bowel irritation, and not a more systemic problem. Ate today with no problem, though, so it’s looking good.

63

Something I mentioned that was never addressed:
If I start strength training - lets say I record all the excercises I can do at maxed out weight. If I eat like this for another month, but my max out weight increases by 25% or whatever, can it be concluded that my muscle mass is not deteriorating? Or could there be another explanation?

64

Muscle mass is proportional to muscle volume, of course, and the correlation between muscle size and strength is only about .67. IOW, the relation is far less significant than you think.

65

In other words, my muscles can be eaten away, and the remaining mass could become more efficient at the same time, allowing me to lift more with less mass?

66

Yeah. Google on neuromuscular recruitment if you want to know more.

67

I see, thanks.

Is there a practical way me to find out if I’m indeed losing muscle mass? Measurement is an option, I suppose - but I’m not sure if the water level in the muscles is constant or what.

68

Update: It’s been over three weeks now and things haven’t been progressing quite as I’d hoped. This has been largely my fault - I haven’t felt like eating and I haven’t been forcing myself to until recently, so there was a period in there where I probably averaged around 600 calories a day unintentionally. Consequently, I didn’t excercise as much as I wanted to either, because I was too sore.

I’ve been forcing myself to eat more, and have felt better. There’s a definite increase in my endurance and strength, and I’ve down to about 340, +/-, down 25 pounds.

69

I got down to the point where I can get an accurate reading with my digital scale (it gives an error for anything above 338 or so), and today is exatly one month since I started, so I figured I’d post an update.

My scale reads 335.5, and my starting weight was somewhere within 361-366.

Strangely, though, I had my blood pressure taken the other day, and it was typical of what I’m at when I eat poorly and don’t excercise. My average blood pressure is high at around 140/90 average, but with my previous experience, when I ate like this and worked out, I lowered it to around 125/80, so I was expecting to have the same effect. Though one reading doesn’t mean much and could be elevated… I’m going to get it checked probably on Monday so I’ll see what that’s about.

I’ve noticed that I haven’t had the same degree of physiological benefit as I did before - I’m not as free from pain, and especially soreness, as mentally sharp (although medications I’m on could effect this), energy levels and general feeling of fitness and endurance. All of these things have improved as compared to my normal/bad diet and no excercise, but not to the degree that they did years ago. I’m guessing it’s simply a matter of the body running more efficiently when it’s well fueled, and that I haven’t been eating enough.

I may have to alter my dietary plan to include more vegetables and fruits just to get my calorie count up, as I’m having trouble motivating myself to cook frequently, and my diet is pretty limited in terms of variety, and that can really drag on you over time. If I do, I suppose I’d have a good point of comparison to experiment with different macronutrient intakes.

70

Let us know what happens as you alter your diet. Especiall your energy levels and mental acumen.

71

I missed this thread on the first go around. I’d like to add a point I think is relevant.

Part of the reason (perhaps much of the reason) crash diets don’t work is that when you’re on one, you’re not learning how to eat healthily. A liveable diet isn’t something you should be on, and then off again once you hit your goal. A liveable diet is one that when you’re on it, you don’t gain unhealthy amounts of weight, but you don’t lose it either.

Judging by your account, you’ve spent most of your adult life eating either to gain weight or to lose it, but not maintain it. Eating habits can be broken, but it’s difficult. When you go on a such a drastic diet, you’re trying to drastically change those habits. When it’s time to go off such a diet (and I don’t think you’re planning to live on 900 calories a day for the rest of your life, are you?) you have to drastically change your habits again. The sudden change from 900 calories a day to “Hey, I’m gonna eat more now!” is an invitation to fall back into the original habits that caused you to gain weight in the first place. That kind of sounds like what happened after the diet you went on at 17. It wasn’t improving your life, so you stopped. And then gained the weight back.
Why not change those habits only once, instead of twice? What you need to think about doing is practicing eating habits that, once you reach your goal weight, you can maintain without then suddenly changing what you’re doing. The idea is, you never give yourself the opportunity to slide back into old habits, because you never really go off the diet. If (for example) you want to lose 70 pounds, and spend 9 months learning how to plan your meals and how to cook healthy things you like, by the time you reach your goal weight, you’ve got those habits in place. If you go on a crash diet and lose 70 pounds in 3 months, sure, you reach your goal weight, but (even if you haven’t hurt yourself) you haven’t spent the time learning how to maintain that weight. Now you have to learn from scratch, and you might figure it out before you gain a lot of weight back, or you might just get frustrated and give up.
Oh, and in case I didn’t use the word enough above: habits. Habits habits habits habits…

72

I understand the point you’re trying to convey, and it’s perfectly reasonable, but it doesn’t apply to me in the way you’re assuming it does.

I’m not saying it as a crutch or an excuse that I just didn’t care about the weight before, and that’s why I gained it back. That’s really what happened. I made a logical analysis and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to maintain. I did, however, make some changes that were beneficial - for instance, I cut my pop consumption down about 95% (basically only sometimes at restaurants, etc) and cut out other completely nutritionally empty sources of sugar, and that slowed down my rate of weight gain significantly.

I also planned to excercise more in place of a strict diet, but that became impractical due to an irritating string of injuries I suffered over the next few years.

This time around, I’m doing this for different reasons, and at the end - that is, whatever I decide my goal weight is going to be - I’ll do a similar analysis. Whether the results are worth the energy expended and such. If it turns out that I come to the same conclusion, then yeah, I’d gain the weight back. The different motives and experiences I’m having this time around, though, will probably push my decision in favor of staying fit. But it’s not a matter of lack of will, or lack of habit. If I can force myself to eat 900 calories a day now and work out until near exhaustion regularly, I can certainly force myself to change my eating and excercise habits enough to maintain a weight.
Speaking of excercise - I meant to push myself to the point of exhaustion every day, but that has proved to be impractical for two reasons: firstly I simply haven’t been eating enough of an excess of protein to keep me from too much soreness, and secondly because my point of exhaustion is higher than I thought it was.

When I first started, I was in horrible shape. I’d barely moved, generally speaking, in 6+ months. So I figured my point of exhaustion would be really low. But I immediately was able to swim constantly for at least a half hour. Which isn’t much, granted, but I mean constant, active swimming for that long, which is longer than I expected for being completely out of shape.

So, I didn’t push myself as hard as I should’ve then, that is, to the point of barely being able to move, as I had planned, mostly because it probably would’ve left me too sore to repeat for a day or two, and I wanted regular excercise every day. I sort of settled in on doing 35-45 minutes of constant swimming per day, on days I wasn’t lifting weights or doing something else strenuous.

Today I decided to push it, to see how much I was doing under my endurance, and I went 60-70 minutes with only a 2 minute break for stretching. After about 40 minutes, my feeling of exhaustion completely levelled out and didn’t go any further - I feel like I could’ve swam for another hour straight if I wanted to, but my pool closed.

So, concurrent with an increase in protein/calorie intake, I suppose I may start really pushing myself.

Out of curiosity, I weighed myself after swimming, and I’d dropped a solid 4 pounds. Now, almost all of that is water, certainly, but I always had the impression that you wouldn’t lose that much water with swimming because your body wouldn’t get that hot - is the amount of sweat based on the amount of exertion, heat, or, I suppose, both?