I'm a fat bastard: time to go on a diet

[FRAGN'STIEN]

Originally posted by utabintarbo
You tiny people crack me up!

240 at 6'2" is my ultimate goal! But this weight loss is killing my strength (Bench Press 397 @ 291, now 375 @ 272.5 . Squat 485 @ 291, now 385 @ 272.5 ).

But at least I'm not hungry .

Bob

I'm 220 and 6'1" so I'm not to far behind you and no it's not all fat................. yet.

[airspirit]

By the way, N8, you should check out Sakura when you get out of induction. They'll make their chinese food down there without sugar if you ask, and quite a bit of it is legal if they do. The cashew chicken and dynasty beef are especially good down there ....

[pHaestus]

I started the atkins diet yesterday. I really was inspired by your thread Airspirit; hopefully I can drop a good portion of the 30-40 extra lbs I am carrying around. Seems like I've just put on 5 lbs a year or so since I started grad school and now it's getting a bit much. Might as well get back down to fighting weight.

It's HARD to give up coffee cold turkey! I had been drinking probably 5-6 cups of coffee per day in lieu of sleep for the last year or so. Basically I had become one big bad habit as far as eating goes:

Lots of coffee in am
one big meal in evening (with a beer)
another couple of beers through night
snack before bed

I am eating breakfast lunch and dinner now and no coffee and no beer. Hopefully I can get my blood sugar levels to stabilize and feel better in a few days. Right now I have a slight headache but I think the extra water I am drinking is helping minimize that.

[BillA]

its a good program, I'm -27 and been stuck here a while
but at 180 don't have much more to lose anyway

I did not think to check coffee, of which I drink ~10 cups/day
not so bad @ 0.7 gm

[pHaestus]

I read it is really bad for trying to regulate insulin levels. Plus wife wouldn't agree to adjusting meals at the house unless I stuck strictly to the diet. I will add a cup in the morning back after induction as it is allowed then. A friend who's a doctor treats coffee like any other drug with potential for addiction: he drinks it as much as he likes for 3-4 days and then goes off it for 3-4 days. I guess that makes sense.

[joeyd]

I went to the vitiam shop . Got these shakes called extreme pure protien by worldwide sport nutrition. Its 130 calaries . 3 carbs and 40 grams of protien. I have one when i wake up at around 6. I don't get hungry till around 1-2 in the afternoon. I have another one at around 2. Then 6-7pm I eat dinner. I loose about 3 pounds a week and I am never hungry. I'm also working out now and those shakes give me a ton of energy. I used to have ceral at 6 and then was hungry around 10. So i would eat something then and get hungry again at 2ish and have fast food.

You mix the shakes with water or milk .I normaly add milk and it tastes really good that way.


Hope this helps a bit.

[airspirit]

Coffee can interfere with insulin levels IF you get it primarily in sweetened coffee or in soda. It is a pavlovian reaction (like the dogs). Aspartame does the same thing. It doesn't affect me that way, but I still limit intake to help me sleep better. I've got five pounds left to go and it is coming off SLOW ... but those last pounds always do.

You'll feel better in a couple of days, pH ... the first few days make you feel like you've been through a gauntlet you are so sore (metabolism conversion), but then you'll be good sailing after that. Just make sure you eat enough, and don't feel bad about eating fat! Load up on the bacon, pork rinds, and other stuff that is supposed to be bad for you and enjoy it ... it makes the first few days easier.

Milk has sugar in it, so be careful with that (half and half is better, and heavy cream is best, though it still has sugars). The reason you don't feel hungry is because your body isn't going through any insulin caused blood-sugar deficiencies that eating lots of starches and sugars can cause.

Oh, and pH: pick yourself up some Michelob Ultra. Even though it isn't good beer by any stretch, it is something you can have now and again while on induction (the book says no, but please ... we need SOMEthing to drink while geeking out). Once off induction you can go back to the light beers and the GUINNESS.

edit: while milk/cream sugar is bad, your body doesn't typically metabolize it as quickly, so it won't cause as high of an insulin reaction. That is why once you get out of induction homemade ice cream can be your friend ....

[pHaestus]

Yesterday sucked. I woke up at 6 with a headache that just got worse and worse until about 1pm. Then it actually started to subside and was almost gone by bedtime. Oh yea that's another thing. I am sleeping a lot more now (8-10 hours/night). I hope I can get back on a more reasonable sleep schedule (5-6 hours) when I am fully off the caffeine. Hard to get anything done around here when I goto bed at 10:30 :/

This is a weird diet. I went with wife to grocery store, and about 75% of the stuff there was off limits. So far I haven't felt too limited though. It's just an adjustment to skip the snack I would normally eat at night and to eat all through the day instead of just dinner.

I can't tell that I've lost too much weight yet, but I was extremely dehydrated before due to coffee diet so rehydration may kinda slow down the weight loss. I am actually feeling a little better through the day energy-wise and so I am hoping the new eating schedule and diet will kick in soon and the weight will start dropping soon. I didn't get a set of scales until yesterday and so I don't honestly know if I lost much weight the first 2 days or not.

From the scales, I have about 35 lbs I want to lose. I am hoping to be down at least 25lbs by Christmas.

[airspirit]

Okay, first, you need to get yourself a water bottle. I have a 24 oz Aquafina bottle with a "squirt mod" (hold your applause!) on the top (oh god, please shoot me ... I just took it off a generic sport drink and screwed it on the water bottle ... I told you I was hard core!!!). I drink anywhere from six to ten of those per day on average. Low carb diets are diuretic in nature, so you will lose alot more water than normal. The reason is that your body, once it starts ketosis, will be constantly flushing any excess ketone bodies out through sweat and urine. Sounds bad? It is actually good, because that means you're literally pissing your fat away. If you don't drink enough water then your body can't burn the fat away properly and you will be extrememly fuggered due to lack of energy, headaches, etc. If you want visual confirmation of this then go down to the drug store and pick up some ketone detection strips (in the diabetes care section) and see if you're registering ketones yet. If anything it will verify your progress. If it shows ketones present, then you know you're burning fat (and that is a good feeling, let me tell you).

The reason that you're having headaches is primarily due to the fact that the hardest organ to convert to a fat metabolism is your brain. While much of it can live happily off of ketone bodies, there are still parts that require glucose to run properly. When you aren't taking it in through simple carbs, your body converts to burning dietary protiens through glucogenesis to provide the necessary glucose to your brain. The headaches go away after a maximum of one week. Try some Naproxen Sodium (aleve) to take care of the headaches ... works wonders and doesn't screw up your stomach.

You will find that your sleep schedule will change, though you will shortly find that the sleep you get will be much more efficient than the sleep you used to get. Again, that takes about a week. If you need snacks, try to find a store that sells sugar free hershey's bars (bite size), sugar free russell stover's candy (chocolates, etc), or anything with splenda. Many of those candies have less than .5 NET carbs per serving and are made with sugar alcohols and sucralose (splenda) so they are still good for you in induction. Don't eat too much of them, though, because one out of three people get a serious case of the shits from the sugar alcohols if they do so. Luckily, neither my wife or I have THAT lovely little problem.

As for food shopping, make sure you're getting enough greens (2-3 cups of vegetables per day) and that will help the headaches quite a bit, get good meat (you'll appreciate it and it really doesn't cost that much since you're not buying the junk food with it), and as a rule try to stay to the outer walls of the store ... for some reason all the low carb stuff is kept there while the inner isles are pretty much off limits.

If you stay strict with not eating any off-limits foods (for some people a single M&M can send them out of ketosis for days) you'll learn that you really don't miss that junk too much. As much as you may feel horrible this first week (I only did for a day, whereas my wife was in hell for the whole week), just know this: the moment you get weak and go off plan you will feel sicker than all hell ... let that be a warning to you! I once accidentally ate piece of ice cream cake about three weeks in (I wasn't thinking ... and didn't realize what I was doing until I was looking for a place to chuck the plate at) and I was one sick mofo the rest of the night.

On the positive side, though, have you noticed any lack of hunger yet? Soon you will need to start reminding yourself to eat, hehe .... And just think, one you're done with the first couple of weeks, then you can start adding some good stuff into your diet (if you choose ... I stayed on my homebrew induction method for around a month) like ice cream and fruit and low carb breads and ... you get the picture.

[pHaestus]

I am pretty sure the headaches were from going from 5-8 cups of coffee a day to none cold turkey. I drank a ton of water yesterday and it still sucked. I have a 24 oz coffee cup here at work that I refill 3-4 times a day and then I drink water from a big wooden mug that holds 32 oz at home. I refill that at least twice overnight. I haven't been peeing all that much more than normal; I assumed I was just super dehydrated from living on coffee and beer only for the last year or so

Thanks for the advice though; I have an ice cream maker and a bread maker so the recipes will be welcome in a few weeks. I am thinking I may also stay on this diet for closer to a month for best effect. We'll see how it goes.

I started taking the stairs rather than the elevators at work (5 floors 4-6x a day) and going for walks in the evenings too. I already feel like I have a little more energy from eating regularly. Had sausage on the grill last night, and then cut up leftovers with a bit of bell pepper and cheese in a 3 egg omelet today. Breakfast is the best meal of the day for me now

[airspirit]

Just wait until ketosis kicks in fully: you'll be pissing like a racehorse. Seriously. I do understand about your headaches ... though the glucose reduction can't be helping much either. Seriously: try aleve. Those pills can even mute nicotine withdrawal headaches to nearly nothing. Unfortunately your body goes through longer withdrawals from caffiene than nicotine, though it is nowhere near as nasty. If you really need a crutch you may want to look at Hydroxycut pills (yes, they are ephedra free). One pill taken three times a day will give you the equivalent of three cups of coffee, though it also contains supplements that reduce hunger cravings and assist in raising your metabolism, kicking the process off quicker. It doesn't work for everyone, but it may prevent some of the pavlovian insulin release that coffee can cause to the hardcore coffee drinker. You can then start weaning yourself off going from three pills a day to one and eventually none. That is your call, though. My wife didn't like them at all cause th1ey make you a hyper sweat'n'shake machine, but they didn't disagree with me, and they probably helped in the initial conversion to ketosis quite a bit. I'm not going to recommend them, however: I'm just throwing a possibility out there if you desperately need a crutch. If you think it will help I would suggest you research the benefits and side-effects (they are completely non-threatening but sometimes a bit uncomfortable) thoroughly to make an informed decision. Anything is better than the amount of coffee you were drinking!

Ooh ... pick up some Diet Rite or Diet Hansen's soda ... both are sugar free and use sucralose (splenda) as the sweetener. You can have those in induction, if you want, without having to count them as carbs. Now that they use splenda they don't taste like crap like when they used saccharin ... I actually like Diet Rite cola more than Pepsi. Did I mention that they are also caffiene free? Yeah, that too.

Isn't it funny about breakfast, though? I have the same feelings about it. My wife has a recipe for making pancakes out of eggs and cream cheese (I know it sounds weird) that are excellent ... I'll try to weasel the recipe out of her. If you put some splenda based syrup on them they are wonderful. Combine that with the greasy stuff and breakfast is the shiz ....

So, have you invested in a Foreman grill yet?

[pHaestus]

I don't need a foreman grill; I have a big burly one already. I had sausage on it last night, pork chops tonight, and steaks tomorrow. There were a FEW things I could get at the grocery store

Yea now that you mention it I am peeing a lot today. I can't tell if it's just due to swapping coffee with water or if it's ketosis kicking in. I am confident the diet will work though and I feel a LOT better today so no worries.

[airspirit]

Sorry, I was hoping to edit the above before you posted ... ROFL.

[joeyd]

If you guys have a gnc by you they have atkins food. I picked up brownie mix , mapple syrup pankcake mix and a few other things for my mom . They also have this new pill that my friend is trying and its working for him so far. Its 27$ for 60 pills and you take 2 a day in the morning. He has been on that and atkins for about 3 weeks now and has lost 25lbs . While also lifting more weight at the gym.

My mother has tried the atkins diet 5 times and has failed each time. One of the main reasons is she doesn't do much during the day. So now when i have time off from school i make her come walking in the park with me . So right now she is at week 2 with no mess ups which is good she normaly makes it 3 days . SHe has also lost 10 pounds . My family and i are trying to loose alot of weight quick. We have my sisters wedding nov 8th.

[pHaestus]

I can't see myself going off this diet because I REALLY want to lose the weight and I believe this will work. I guess if after a couple weeks I was actually heavier then maybe I'd say **** it and grab a beer and some cake, but otherwise I am in it until I am trim again. Being able to add coffee back in moderation will be a big plus in a few weeks though; I can't get my life in order sleeping 8-10 hours per day.

[airspirit]

It is impossible to gain weight on this diet unless you are either eating the wrong foods (some people keep drinking milk, for instance, not realizing it isn't allowed) or you are GORGING yourself on approved foods (you can't lose weight if you're eating six pounds of beef per day or if you eat TOO MANY vegetables due to their carb content). If you follow it to the letter you will find it impossible to gain weight ... nobody's metabolism works like that. Just make sure you're under 20g of carbs per day ... or under 10g if you're hardcore.

Here's a hint: weigh yourself each morning and evening. Write it in a nice little chart you printed out of your favorite word processor and tape it over the scale. After you weigh yourself, be sure to write the amount down EVERY time. You'll notice a few times that it goes up a hair, but usually during your first two weeks you'll lose weight EVERY DAY along the lines of .2-1.0 pounds. That is the best motivator ever. Just make sure you weigh yourself in your birthday suit every time so clothes don't affect the outcome, and do it after you use the bathroom each time to eliminate that variable (you can lose a pound by pissing when fully hydrated ... seriously! I've lost 1.4 pounds once that way, hehe).

edit: as for the sleep, another thing is that you are currently in sleep debt. When you quit caffiene or smoking you will find that all the bad nights of sleep that you accrued over the years come back to bite you and you end up paying for it for a while while your body recuperates. Once it is done you'll fall back into your old pattern or possibly sleep LESS because you're sleeping more efficiently. I noticed that big-time when I quit smoking ... for the first couple of weeks I went from 7 hrs/night (waking up tired as fsck) to 10, and now I'm back to around 6-6.5 hrs most nights and I'm perfectly content.

[Joe]

I have had 3 friends who used to be on atkins, just ditch it...

They liked it but overall didnt feel that good since starting the diet. They all went to the weight watchers flex points thing and really I havent seen these dudes as enthused about dieting since I have known them.

the main thing they say that makes it better is " With atkins, you screw up on one meal or not notice somethings in it thats against the diet.. you have to pretty much start from the begining to get back on track. " and with the flex points thing there is much more flexability and also, they can eat stuff that they like again not just meat meat meat. beer is still a big no no in the flex diet.

If I seriously go on a diet I think it will be the weight watchers one after seeing my buds go to it and loose weight just as fast with atkins and feel better about themselves.

Also it finnaly gives geeks a real use of a palm pilot ( since they have tracking software for them)

[airspirit]

Not necessarily, Joe. My wife and I go out every so often and have an off-plan meal just for kicks. Once you are in the later stages (i.e., near where you want to be) you can bounce around much more easily. Plus, if you are smart about it, you can really have just about everything you could ever want and stay on plan (my wife's weakness is oreo milkshakes). Whenever I do that I will instantly gain 10 lbs in water weight which disappears two days later. The only real problem time is during your initial induction ... once your body is more accustomed to this, it is much easier to vary your diet ... and in many cases it is recommended to aid in keeping your metabolism high.

Many people that don't have success with this diet attribute it to the diet itself and try to justify their position when the reality is that they just don't have any willpower. It is a very rare case for people to have little to no success, and the weight watcher's plan can not compete with this if you are doing this right. I have yet to see anyone in weight watchers lose 30 lbs in a month, yet is is extremely common if they use a low carb diet.

[pHaestus]

Yesterday: 224.5 lbs. Today 222.5 lbs. Butt naked both times (I put loungewear on when I come home and weighed then. So I am guessing the diet must be working. It's very encouraging to see weight coming off.

I hope that a single night of binge drinking in 3 weeks won't destroy everything. I'm supposed to go visit Joe

[airspirit]

It depends on what you drink. Rum, whiskey, vodka, and other hard liquors are perfectly okay. The only way they hurt you is that you're not burning fat while you're burning alcohol. Beers, if sufficiently light, can be had in moderation as well (3-4) without any problems. At that point, though, you could probably just take a night of it and go for shit and be perfectly okay if you go right back on the wagon.

I ended up famously drunk just the other day for my birthday ... three shots of 151 proof rum at each of a number of bars can do that to you ... ahh, good times.

[Joe]

air, I said they had success with that diet and they had the same or better with the weight watchers one, and actually felt better in daily life.

And to them they considered an overall "quality of life" aspect, and if they had to keep changing their eating just to fit some uber protien diet, it wasnt worth it. Atleast now they have a regiment that lets them have a much more normal eating style, rahter than protein all the time, and 0 carbs.

to each their own.. call it will power or overall quality of life... everyones gotta do what makes em happy.

For me.. thats saying "****" diet's, and going out to culvers for some damn good custard and a burger.. dont forget the beer and fried cheese chasers

makes my quality if life damn good

I figure I will repair the damages later in life hehehe.

[airspirit]

Well, you do have a point. Some can convert easily to this diet and enjoy it (such as myself). Some have a harder time dropping the bread and potatoes. I guess in many ways it just boils down to how badly you want to enjoy it ... if you go in expecting to be miserable you will most assuredly be so. My wife was like that at first ... she was a little bit happier about the whole situation after dropping twenty pounds, though.

[BillA]

the carnivores will like it,
potato people will not

airspirit
I must commend you on your apparently encyclopedic knowledge of this diet
you are posting LOTS of good info
Thanks

[pHaestus]

Yes indeed thanks airspirit. I am also pleasantly surprised by all the good info and recipes that are at www.atkins.com.

The diet is definitely working now; I was peeing all yesterday evening and was thirsty as hell. I am going to start weighing every am after peeing I think to get more reliable readings. 218.5 today so I am definitely making progress. I weighed in the 224-226 range several times over the weeks before starting the diet.

I am really starting to feel better now; stayed up later last night and still popped out of bed this morning. Going to find time tonight for soldering up a tbredb for temp readings and testing out some heatsinks. I can get a LOT more done when I am not drinking beer all evening

[mad mikee]

I'm jumping in too. Been cutting out most of the carbs (or so I thought ) This thread made me take a closer look and made me jettison the 1 pint of grapefruit juice (35 GMs CARBS), the protein drink (22 gms of protein AND 22 grams of CARBS + 14 GRAMS CARBS in the MILK ), and the apple sauce (10+GMs). That oughta have some impact. . For the record: 5'10" and 205 this morn. Don't need to loose much, but this has been stubborn. Eat lots of fish and chicken, some beef, lots of salad (dressing only 2GMs carbs), and the 'healthy' nuts. Sufficient vitamins, fatty acids, aminos, etc.
Exercise w/ weights, walk 2+ miles a day (weekends, etc take between 8-14 miles) Soaking up the water all day at work (please body, don't decide to release whilst halfway home on train )