Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Back At It

It's now 2008; after some re-fattening up, I'm back on the diet track. Unfortunately, I didn't gain the amount of pounds that I wanted to play with this time 'round, so I'm going to limit my fooling around with the Plateau Buster to this one test: for the first four weeks of this phase of the diet, I'm not going to use it - plateau or not. For the next four weeks, I'm going to whenever I bump into a plateau. Instead of a sliding scale, I'm sticking to a straight 1,000 calories/day until my goal is reached. This eight-week straddle will determine whether or not the Plateau Buster speeds the weight-loss process up.

As far as the last five+ weeks are concerned, I spent them using what could be called the "inside straight" of dieting: eating as much as I want of three foods, all of which are low-calorie bulk foods: celery, cabbage and carrots. The plan is simple: eat as much as you can, whenever you want, of those foods. "Cheating," or deviation from this plan, is all-but mandatory for nutrition needs. The rationale behind it is to lose weight without enduring hunger pangs, as the stomach is kept full with low-calorie bulk food. Supposedly, this bulk-up makes for an easier diet.

Unforutunately for me (as well as for anyone else who has tried it, I suspect,) there are two types of "hungries." The first comes from an empty stomach, and is one which every dieter is familiar with. This type of hunger is avoided by the "CCC" diet. The trouble is, there's a second kind of hunger that does not go away with this kind of diet - the "hungries" that come with consuming a below-maintenance number of calories. This kind of hunger is essential to any diet, as it signals the body to metabolize some of its fat. I found that the disjoint between the lack of the first hunger and the presence of the second, instead of making me easier with the diet, instead made me feel querulous.

It is possible to lose weight with this diet, but only slowly. I "cheated" frequently while on it, including spells of outright backsliding. One of the lethal risks results from the much greater sugar hunger it engenders. Normally, I found, drinking a sugar-filled liquid made me queasy after a few swallows. Not while on this diet, though: shortly into it, I gulped down more than a cup of maple syrup (which I had to get rid of anyway or else mold would have gotten to it) without any quease that would indicate that enough sugar has gone down the gullet. In other words, my sugar hunger had increased dramatically. This side consequence meant that I had to abjure sugary foods as completely as I could. A sugar-laden diet would have taken away the safety-belt feature of this kind of diet: making cheating impracticable because of an already-filled stomach.

I did lose a few pounds while on it, although slowly: seven pounds over the course of four weeks. This kind of diet can work for someone who likes to lose weight slowly and doesn't mind putting up with the querulousness caused by the above-noted disjoint. It may suit a true endomorph well, and/or someone who's uncomfortable with rigid food restriction. At the price of feeling both full and hungry at the same time, of course.

It also may work as a prelude to a diet because of the resultant stomach fooling. One day, about two and a half weeks ago, I had to shovel a lot of snow. Because I had to get out there, I forgot to eat anything. By the time I remembered, it was dinner-time. Despite me going hungry all day, which I didn't notice for most of it, I only had room in my stomach for a regular-sized meal. Had I decided to start a more rigourous diet at that time, I might have found it easier to do so because my stomach was fooled into shrinking already.

Nevertheless, I have to confess that this approach, as a full diet in itself, isn't the one for me: I suppose I need a more structured approach. So, I'm back to the more rigid, fatburner method of eating five snack-sized meals a day, all of which total up to 1,000 calories. To start off, my weight as of about 6 PM today, unclothed, is noted just below. As is usual for this blog, I will be measuring myself in that state of undress for all of the measurements in order to whisk away the effect that different clothes have.


Weight as of approx. 6 PM today: 246 pounds.

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