This Week's Weigh In

This past week has been an interesting one.

With no diet soda to control the water retention issues, I spent quite a bit of my afternoon in bed. The vertigo worsened tremendously, plus my weight was still bouncing. So I'm not so sure the diet soda was a contributor to that, after all. Stalling the upswing, then bringing my weight back down (one time) might have just been a coincidence. I don't know yet.

Now I don't want to sound like others who are currently rationalizing and justifying their "sweet" addiction and habits. And I most certainly do NOT want to tread behind them. But I can't spend my life in bed either. Plus my weight has been on the upswing again, even with the no soda.

The weather here has been freaky lately. Storms moving in and out several times a day, a most unusual occurrence for June, which has been playing with me as well. According to my digital scale my water retention is waaaay up. So I did add back in the diet soda to try and help control that a bit. Like I said, I can't spend each and every afternoon in bed. I might change my mind again later on, but that's what I'm doing for right now.

The scarey thing, however, was that my fat level is....well....THE SAME.

So I had my husband take a picture of me early Sunday morning so that I could see if I was experiencing some body recomposition. It's been 6 weeks since my last pictures, and I've seen plenty of folks lose a lot of fat even though it doesn't register on the scale. I was sooo hoping that would be true for me too. But it wasn't. In fact, it's even worse than staying the same. Cuz I've gained a roll of fat just above my belly button. A blue jean overhang I didn't have before.

It was quite a shock. So my husband took more pictures an hour or so later, when the sun was out in order to give us a clearer picture. And YEP. I'm FATTER than I was before I started dieting again.

Say what?????

I went into the bedroom and took my measurements. There's a person on a lot of my low carb egroups who is always advising folks to use measurements rather than the scale. But that didn't paint a better picture either. I've gained 2 inches in my waist, and 1 inch in my belly/hips. Which doesn't make any sense at all.

I'm doing zero-carb for heaven's sake. Can't get any lower on the carb scale than that. And yet...there it was. In both the pictures and the measuring tape. I couldn't DENY IT.

Sunday we were invited to dinner by a close friend. I was a bit nervous, not only because of my zero-carb diet, but also because of my gluten intolerance. If I'm exposed to gluten in any form, I always gain a couple of pounds which takes me a week to 10 days to recover from. As well as all the other physical stuff. I realized that because of "who" this friend was, and how often we get together, that I would have to make some concessions. But it went a bit better than I expected.

She was serving bbq chicken breast, a nice lettuce salad with ranch dressing, and baked corn on the cob with butter. Sit down style though, so there was no dishing up your own. And no way to get out of the food sitting there on my plate. Now the marinade on the chicken made me nervous, cuz it tasted a little bit like Heinz 57 was in there. Not good. But the more interesting thing was that I did NOT react to the salad the same way I had when I'd tried to add it back before.

So I took a step back to reason that out a bit.

When I tried to do salad after the first week on Atkins '72 Induction, I used an olive oil and vinegar dressing (homemade) so as to avoid dairy and soy. But it made me hungry as heck. Previous to this new salad experience, sometime during this past week, I had been thinking about my difficulty in adding back salad (partly because I'm really not digging this zero-carb stuff) and decided to check out olive oil.

To do that, I scrambled up a couple of eggs in it. And surprisingly, that too made me hungry as heck. Sooooo there's clearly something in olive oil that doesn't agree with me. I don't understand WHY oil would raise my hunger level, since fat is not supposed to raise blood sugar or insulin, but...nevertheless it did. SOMETHING is amiss.

We ended up staying with our friends for most of the afternoon, watching a very long movie. And by the time we got home early in the evening I was still not hungry. Now, I already KNEW that about corn. So the welcoming relief for me about this was that I got NO stomach/belly cramps from the Ranch. NO stomach/belly cramps from that one meal of carbs. Which means that maybe, when I reach the 6 month gluten-free point, I'll be able to add back in a small bit of dairy. At least, I hope so.

The bottom line from eating the salad and corn, and chicken with who knows what on it, was that yes, I did get a strong hot-flash gluten reaction to the meal (which could be pan contamination rather than the food), but didn't gain any weight from it all. In fact, Monday morning for my weigh-in this week, I was down a pound. So my weigh in for this week places me at 175.2 pounds. Probably the release of some water from adding back in the diet soda....but still.

Still got the roll of fat and increase in inches to deal with.

So I high-tailed it back over to the Zeroing in on Health forum, trying to figure out what was going on with me, and ran into a thread for those over the age of 50. It seems that I am not the only one this has happened to. Several older folks over there have had to cut down on the amount of fat they were eating, because when they ate like the youngins, they put a roll of belly fat on -- right around the middle. Exactly the same as me.

WOW.

Okay, so my diet -- what I'm eating, and maybe how much -- needs to be reconsidered and evaluated. Most of those posting on that thread, or being discussed there, had better success with 60 to 65% fat calories. Basically what Atkins recommends, rather than the higher fat most on that site typically eat.

But then, they aren't a 5ft woman with gluten intolerance, missing a gall bladder, and post meno. Interestingly enough, 60% is what I've been doing -- yet I gained all that fat.

So I'm going to try cutting down to 50% this week instead, and see what happens. I've been eating quite a bit of 80/20 hamburger which fitday pins as 70% fat calories. Don't really wanna give them up, so I'm going to try throwing in some tuna and chicken breast along with the fatty meats. And see where that lands me.

At least...that's my current plan for this week.