November 18
Weight: 266.0/Fat %: 37.5%/Water%: 46.0
So far, we're at 10 days and 17 pounds, or, if we discount the
glycogen/water dumping of the first 3 days, about 4.5 pounds in six
days.
Interesting. Increased protein intake has indeed slowed down weight
loss versus previous 1000-calory true Fat Fast diets in my past. The
science behind low-carb austerity dieting is proven out yet one more
time. Strangely enough, even the scale seems to be agreeing with
Benoit. Averaged over time, fat readings have gone down approximately
0.5% and water readings have gone up 0.5%, which is as it should be
since fat retains less water than other types of tissue.
One of the things that is always a temptation but I'm working on
avoiding is, on the night of the stutter-step second-day (when the
scale consistently reflects a loss), I have tended in the past to keep
myself parched throughout the night in order to make sure the weight
reading in the morning is as low as possible. This can slowly sap at
your willpower. So what I do is make sure I drink a lot of water every
day, and when I feel the urge to deprive myself on that second night,
I drink even more.
By the way, everyone, this is my fourth day with no Kool-Aid.
Sucralose does strange things to your digestive process when it makes
up more than a truly trifling part of your diet, and the aggravation
is just not worth it and one of those small, maddeningly annoying
things that eats away at your willpower on a diet like this. I may
drink a bottle of diet soda walking from place to place, but no more
Kool-Aid. I still have the invisible raspberry stuff in the fridge,
and it's not like my Tropical Punch or Splenda is ever going to go
bad.
-----------------------------------------------
This morning the food demon unveiled his latest strategy, or, at least
one of his old tricks re-mainfested. The full-frontal cravings having
been beaten back over and over again, what I think of diet-fatigue
cravings are starting to set in. The food demon has gotten very good
that this. It used to take a lot longer for these kind of cravings to
get started up, but as my body has adapted over previous attempts to
knowing what's coming, the food demon has come to realize that when I
get past a week on any diet, I can be stubborn about busting it for
any craving.
It's not full-on binge cravings, nothing like the screaming desire to
gorge, or the sneaking temptation of, "Oh, come on...eat just a bit
more. It's all right..." (which then turns into a screaming desire to
gorge). It's more like diet boredom and scorn for the lack of variety
of foods in my diet. Not only is it far more logical than binge
cravings, echoing many thoughts of ridicule voiced earlier in this
thread, but it's accompanied by a sinking feeling of tiredness and
general fatigue. Until I start having suicidal thoughts or sink into
fugue states where I stare at the wall for a few hours at a time, I
really don't think it's fair to dignify what used to be called
"unhappiness" or "melancholy" with the name "depression."
It comes and goes, at least, but unless I recognize it for what it is,
another food-demon strategy, I'm a goner. The food demon twists my
head around and I think, "Today, I'll vary the pattern. I'll change it
around a bit and do something different: not more calories, just some
variety. It's OK...for today."
The second I do, the second one thing varies in the pattern of eating
for the day and the carefully-reinforced pathways of habit in my mind
are deviated from, the food demon attacks again with binge cravings of
monstrous proportion. And because I'm in new territory, I'm more
likely to give in to them.
And, of course, I didn't wake up until 12:30 and I didn't eat until
almost three o'clock. Being significantly late on that 2:00 feeding
time, when I eat the 8 oz. of cheese, is almost as bad as being a
minute early.
To think, just yesterday I was relieved that the binge cravings seemed
to have settled down a bit. The food demon was probably just trying to
give me a feeling of false security before he tried throwing the
craving ball instead of running it down my throat.
So, three kinds of cravings so far.
1) Full-on eating-attack binge cravings
2) Temptation to eat just a bit more
3) Diet fatigue cravings
The three work together, one reinforcing the other and turning into
another at moments of opportunity with a single goal in mind, to get
me to eat MORE. Let's see what else surfaces in the next few days,
because, like most dieters I've talked to, what gets me off a diet
tends to be a very subjective opinion on my part once I'm off the
diet. I either tend not to think about it or make up an excuse that is
absolutely ludicrous once I look at my records. That's how I
discovered the correlation between skipping a multivitamin and giving
in to cravings.
