Six Weeks.

Christmastime has come and gone, and surprisingly, after all the revelry, I still managed to lose two pounds this past week. It's amazing that I can make this pronouncement. My confidence in this diet only grows each day, and I can only relate my experience as overwhelmingly positive.

I indulged myself today, and took some time to review one of my old journals I used in a forum back in 2004/2005. It outlined my struggle for continued weight loss once I hit the upper 180s. The scale had slowed to a snail's pace, and over the final 8 month period filled with clean eating and weightlifting,  I had only been able to lose 8 pounds. It was excruciatingly slow, and even with increased physical effort and experimenting with different food restrictions, I was losing the logic-battle of effort-relative-to-reward. I was becoming more and more desperate.

Page by page, I relived my posts outlining my macronutrient tracking, the workout routines used, and sadly, the birth of my delusion. Somewhere along the way, I had come to the conclusion that there had to be a reason I couldn't make the scale budge. I hungered for an outside source to blame, and it came as an imaginary* thyroid condition, to be diagnosed and successfully treated. This of course, led to disappointment once I realized there was no doctor willing to treat my hypothyroidism, and therefore, no way to ever lose the final thirty pounds.

This enormous disappointment pulled me up short and effectively killed my dieting and workout efforts. Continuation of a "weight loss journey" is only logically feasible when you know how to get to your destination, or what the next step is, or even to have a clue as to what the next step could be. I had none. I had been beaten, and was well aware of the fact there was no "next step". Weight regain came quickly on the heels of this revelation.

During the next five to six years my weight fluctuated, and I hit my personal weight ceiling several times. It was only then I would put the brakes on and diet until discouragement set in, usually two to three weeks after weight loss slowed, then stopped. (See the graph for the pattern... it tells the story well).

In mid-2010, the next great idea was in calorie tracking hardware, and since I had always guessed at daily caloric burn, I decided to go higher-tech to see where it took me. So I got a pricey bodybugg, set it up and put it on my arm every day and kept it on for the entire summer. It has the ability to track calories burned, and you then enter the calories eaten and compare the two on their fee-based web site.

Seems like a basic, unbeatable approach, right? Calories in versus calories out. What everyone says is all you need to lose weight. Not rocket science. Stop stuffing Twinkies in my face and this will work, guaranteed.

I guess my body doesn't respond to logic or basic science, because of the end results were that this approach was a disappointment also. It is more than calories in versus calories out, and always has been.

Nonetheless, tracking with the bodybgugg took me to a total loss of 6 pounds, from July thru October 19... roughly 1 pound a month. Blech. In my opinion, the results were mildly positive, but not encouraging. The arm band also gave me a goofy tan line.

So, on October 20, I put down the bodybugg, reluctantly cranked the old Atkins wind-up key on my back, and went full-tilt into Induction, this time also limiting calories from Day 1 to keep calories below the burn level. During the next ten days, I lost the obligatory 9.5 pounds of water weight… and then stalled. For the next two weeks and change, the scale would simply not budge from 213.5.

I was determined however, to dig in and press on, stiff upper lip and all that. But I also wanted to see if there was any new buzz about any untried approaches I hadn't heard of. I was still looking for something that would work for me, long term. There had to be a way. Weight loss simply couldn't be this hard forever.

So, I started reading the forums again, and stumbled across JUDDD. I initially dismissed it as another weird low carb trick born from desperation, (not unlike using oregano to rid the body of candida overgrowth and drinking coconut oil to help burn more fat), but there was a difference with the numbers. People had hit goal. Lots of 'em.

This intrigued me, even as I had to look past the sea of jumping, cheering emoticons and sparkling congratulatory graphics. But statistics do not lie. Facts do not lie.

So I decided to start this experiment, outlined in the first entry here, since low carb was taking me nowhere, and I was in no mood to continue on the Atkins train when it had started showing signs of breaking down again. So, on November 14, weighing 213 pounds, I started modified fasting, and kept the lower carbs/higher protein in place to keep hunger and cravings at bay.

It took over a month to see any real progress and up until last week I was still convinced this was no different than any other diet that started off strong but ultimately let me down.

To recap, I lost two pounds the first week. Hardly earth-shattering, I reasoned. Then 2.5 more the next week. No loss the following week, and barely anything the fourth week. Even though I had not weighed on Monday (my weigh-in day), it was not a noticeable loss.

The fifth week shocked me, and the previous entry tells the story. The scale read 3.5 pounds lower, and I weighed in at 205. This past week was even better. I went below my year-end goal of 204, hitting 201.5 on December 23, a number I will likely surpass before the new year is rung in.

Today, after Christmas Eve and Christmas Day gluttony, I weigh 203. This is a Christmas present I will always cherish, because it is the first Christmas in years where I can realistically envision myself at goal in 12 more months.

Merry Christmas to me!

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*The realization that the hypothyroidism was entirely in my head did not occur to me for years. At the time, I was angry at the doctors for not realizing how sick I was, and were just withholding treatment because they were using outdated testing methods. In my defense, I never would have come up with any of this by myself, hypochondria is not one of my faults. I took what I believed to be sage advice from real hypothyroid women who struggled with the disease and "diagnosed" me through the forum posts.

Five Weeks.

Now that I’m over myself at having no scale movement in my third week, I am really starting to think this is the easiest way I’ve ever lost weight. I recently read a post somewhere where a woman claimed she almost felt guilty about the way the pounds were coming off, seemingly without effort.

I can relate, because this week I got a shock to the system. I didn’t get to weigh last week, but five days ago I weighed in at over 207. Yesterday it was 203. For the first time in years, size 16 pants fit.
Granted, they’re vanity-sized Lee’s stretchy Slender Secret jeans, but hey, I’ll take it, and gladly. So goodbye to size 18, and seeyaneveragain!

This is the closest in years I’ve come to what the dieting groupies call “Onederland”. (I also used to have the terminology memorized… I no longer have the patience for the Rah Rah forum crowd with their obsessive overuse of emoticons and graphic scale sliders with butterflies, but it’s useful support for many).

Today, after an “up” eating day, I weighed in at 205. Also started my menstrual cycle today, so water weight was a certainty. It started 3 days earlier than anticipated based on my pre old-woman cycle, but I was tipped off that it might be early because I had an appetite on my fasting day, as in: I was hungrier than normal once I started eating for the day.

In order to find out more about this diet choice, I sought out personal stories from other successful intermittent dieters and subsequently did much more reading of personal blogs. I found the blog  “The Lean Saloon”, authored by an excellently shaped man who basically has three credos: Eat using intermittent fasting, move around a lot, and enjoy living a lot.

I can get behind that. I have also discovered breakfast is simply not the most important meal of the day it has been touted to be, which hearkens back to the way I used to keep trim before I became obese. I used meal-skipping whenever I saw some scale creep and wanted to bring my weight back into the proper place, usually within a 5-15 pound range. And it always worked.

But somewhere along the way, I got brainwashed into the credo of eating 6-8 small meals a day, and never, ever skip breakfast. Eat after a workout. Eat between meals. I drank the Kool-Aid, people. And I liked it. And the lie that did the most damage was: unless I ate breakfast, I was ruining my metabolism and setting myself up for weight gain rebound.

What makes me slap myself in the head and yell "D'oh!" even more is that I lost 10 pounds last summer because I was preparing my home for sale, and didn't make time for regular meals, as well as packing, hauling and stacking boxes, mowing, cleaning, etc. I ate when I was hungry, which sometimes was only once a day. And the light bulb still didn't go off! I wasn't ready to listen to my own body!!

So now, as I come to realize how little value breakfast and rapidly-timed meals hold*, I have a growing sense of abandonment from the nutrition “experts”, and a burgeoning resentment of the entire industry, because all their advice to help me shed weight I’ve been frantic to lose has been wrong all along.

Due to false and/or mis-information, I have to conclude I’ve wasted almost two decades of effort. I’ve had so much frustration and heartache associated with failure it’s mind blowing. It had become acceptable to me to be obese, because other than medication or surgery, I had no options left.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars on the hope of weight loss. I’ve bought many books (including ebooks), used many healthy supplements (and many not-so healthy thermogenics), signed up for online forum subscriptions, calorie tracked, carb tracked, bought specialty foods, dieted using several different methods, and spent hours and weeks and months in the gym tracking reps and weights and time on cardio, just waiting in vain for the fitness fairy to finally let me get back to where I wanted to be, only to come full circle to the method that worked when I was in my 20s and early 30s. So simple.

Skip a meal, stupid. Because of the amount of weight I have to lose it’s had to become alternate-day fasting, but it’s the same exact principle.

I’ll have to absorb this one over time. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.

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* The exception to this are bodybuilders and those trying to bulk for muscle building.

Three Weeks.

Oh poop. I’ve already stalled. No weight loss for a week, despite keeping rigorously to less than 500 calories on my down days, and averaging about 1800 on the up. This is the sticking point where dogged persistence comes into play yet again.

The nagging questions begin again: Is it water weight, or a real stall? Am I eating enough protein? Too many carbs? Not enough cardio? (Well, still none yet… tomorrow, right?) Is my body just adjusting for the next week of loss, or is the macronutrients or calorie ratios going to need tweaking?

I am a daily weigher, because I like to see what the response is from the scale, first thing in the morning. And yes, as a long-time dieter, I know all about how the scale “lies” with water weight. I still like to average out per week based on daily fluctuations.

The problem now lies with the fact that the daily average is a big donut hole. So I hunker down and make minimal changes right now, and give the diet a chance to sort itself out, because next comes radical changes, and I hate to go there until I need the big guns for that last amount of stubborn fat I never seem to be able to get to.

I usually give up 30-60 lbs. too soon. Not this time. I’m a slow loser, but this time I will have patience, fortitude, and the will to just keep slogging, one slow, clawed, scaly, turtle foot at a time.

Two Weeks.

 So. It’s been two weeks today since starting the JUDDD Experiment, and I have to say, I am impressed, intrigued, and annoyed.

Color me impressed, because today I weighed in at 208.5. That is roughly five pounds of weight loss in two weeks. This diet has not only broken my low-carb, post-induction stall, (always such a fun challenge right out of the gate), but JUDDD has given me a normalized range of weight loss. It is the expected (but often unrealized) reward for staying within the parameters of caloric restriction. It is the holy grail. It is the be-all and end-all, to finally (!) be rewarded with a standard of reduction most people take for granted. Calories out > calories in = weight loss, but not for me, not for a very long time now.

Color me intrigued. How long can these results be expected? The posts I’ve read on a particular low carb forum say indefinitely. Johnson’s book says indefinitely. I am counting on this, but it’s way too early to say I can do this for the rest of my life. I am also intrigued by the lack of cravings and appetite on “down” days, and the lack of desire to binge eat on “up” days. This makes it easier to keep this dietary approach going for a bit longer, to see if the other purported benefits of this diet will make an appearance.

Color me annoyed because these benefits have NOT appeared yet, and I am speaking only of energy. The posters from that forum following JUDDD have reported a burst of energy that I have not seen yet. I am simply dragged out on “down” days. I literally run out of steam partway through the day, and need a nap. Again, this may change. It’s very early in the diet, and I may not have had the full effects come into play yet.

I am also not happy about fasting, it’s unnatural to have 500 calories in one day, and even more so to have them all in liquid form for the first two weeks. Since those two weeks of Induction are done, I now need to plan my “down” days so my calorie and protein needs are met.

In an aside, I have to say my husband is very supportive. He has always been patient with the money I’ve spent over the years on all the supplements, shakes, powders, vitamins, protein bars, low-carb snacks, low-fat snacks, subscriptions to diet programs, workout videos, and other assorted crap I’ve lugged into the house.

Maybe now I can finally become the woman he never had the chance to meet before becoming encased in too much fat. I am beginning to hope.

One Week.

 It’s an amazing thing when you realize something profound needs to change drastically, but your own nature fights against it so hard you actually harm yourself with your own stubbornness. I hate spending time working out. Period. I have listened to experts over the years telling me how endorphins are addictive, how working out is addictive, how much better it makes you feel, how the gym is the panacea to all things obesity-related, and I should, in fact, live there if at all possible.

None of that positive reinforcement has worked. If anything, it’s made me resent the fact more that I am being corralled into something I hate. So I find myself doing other things through the day, and making valid points about how “I can’t go to the gym today because…”

I can’t go to the gym today because… it is a Down day, and I need my energy. I still feel a bit pooped on low calorie days, and have been taking naps. I am simply getting sleepy in the mid-morning.

I can’t go to the gym today because… my husband is home over the weekend, and I don’t feel like being the center of attention either before or after I walk through the door.

I can’t go to the gym today because… I’m expecting a FedEx package, and need to be here to receive it.

Same old, same old. So now I put it up again, for the world to see, I am going to the gym tomorrow. (I also couldn’t go to the gym because I lost the ID card to get me IN. Passive aggressive tendencies coming into play, or just another brain fart? Dunno.

So, on to the diet. It’s been a full week since starting the JUDDD Diet, and I’ve lost 2 pounds, total. It’s pretty cool, I was down three, but I must have overeaten both calories and carbs on my Up day from the 18th, since it bounced me up 1.5 pounds in a day. I also went from 20-30 carbs to close to 100. That will make me retain water like a sponge.

The author (Dr. Johnson) of the book “The Alternate-Day Diet” says not to weigh yourself after a Down day so us poor dieters don’t get our tender psyches shattered to widdle bitty pieces. Please. You underestimate so many of us, doc. Sure, there are too many women who can’t handle the idea of scale fluctuation, but if you’re a dieter for long enough, you lose that immediate reaction, and only freak out when it doesn’t budge for a week or longer. The longer the wait, the bigger the freak.

I’d rather track it all with a healthy dose of science so I know what my body is doing any given day. I know the Down day is going to be up on the scale after eating over one and a half day’s worth of calories, comparatively. (I did not realize how much of a slowdown this diet gives to one’s bathroom habits. Not that I’m complaining, but it is a factor.)

Regarding the weight also, I am due for that time where women get cranky and bloat like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. So that’s another factor.

So in a few days I’ll say I can’t go to the gym today because… I’ll have cramps.

See how that works?

So yes, I need to go to the gym. I have to build my stamina, keep my skin from sagging, blah, blah blah. I’ll go tomorrow. I promise.

The JUDDD Experiment.

OK, here we go again with a new approach because frankly, it seems all my old approaches do not work. I am speaking of course, of dieting (yes, I will use that word for the time being), losing unwanted fat, and regaining stamina that seems to have disappeared over the course of the years.

A bit of previous history: I am obese. I got that way through a chain of events, starting with pregnancy in 1994. Up until that time, I was not thin, but I was within range of “normal” weight and BMI. That pregnancy not only changed my body, but my daily lifestyle also. I got married, I had a baby, I stopped commuting (which drastically changed how much walking I did in a day), I got depressed, I got obese.

Probably in that order. From that time on, I have been up and down on the scale, as high as 235, as low as 165, that low weight almost right after the pregnancy. I was forced to lose the weight because my husband (ex, for many years now) insisted I not be a fat wife. He caused the depression mentioned in the previous paragraph.

This is also not my first blog, it is my third on my weight loss “journey”. What a word to use. Journey. It’s not a journey, it’s war. You are fighting skirmish after skirmish with your own tendency to hold onto stores of fat your hormones don’t want to let go. They fight dirty, too, amping up hunger and cravings, slowing down metabolism, making the fat-burning process harder than it ever needs to be, due to some age-old DNA that says “Store it! Store it ALL!!!”

The way to win is to have a better strategy than your body. I have been absolutely positive I have had that winning strategy, only to have my body outflank me time after time. The charts don’t lie, and that’s only since I’ve gone online to track my “progress”.

The things I’ve tried are myriad: Lots of exercise, and no exercise, cycling between weight lifting and cardio. I’ve tried thermogenics, carb blockers, fat blockers, leptin blockers, yohimbe, green tea, cinnamon, CLA, ALA, vitamins, lots of water, no caffeine, HGH, high doses of fiber, meal replacement shakes, creatine, ECA stack, and the list goes back for over a decade and a half.

The “official” diets have been two: Weight Watchers and Atkins. The unofficial one has been just starving myself slowly. I have since learned that approach is the worst of the bunch. Weight Watchers never worked, and Atkins worked until I stalled. And stalled again. And stalled again. And stalled again. Infuriatingly slow and full of weeks or months where the scale refused to budge more than a fraction of a pound a week, or not at all. All this while eating tuna, eggs, meat, nuts, cheese, and salads. And working out like a fiend.

After a year, I started asking in the forum I journaled in what was wrong with my approach. It drove me nuts that other people were seeing progress and meeting their goals, and I was stuck. Simply stuck. After the usual “one size fits all” advice, I was then told I must be hypothyroid.

The advice I got was so insistent to find a “good” endocrinologist that I embarked on a flurry of doctor visits in order to “prove” I had a very good reason why my diet wasn’t working: my thyroid was wonky! Unfortunately, the numbers were low, but within range. No miracle cure to help me lose weight was forthcoming. This news was devastating, and I gave up on Atkins, and over the next years, put all the weight back on again.

And I would diet again. And gain it again. And diet again. And gain it right back. Yo-yo, rubberband, call it what you will. I could not get enough momentum to get to goal, or the desire to do so. It takes a huge commitment, focus, willpower, and patience to diet. If you have all those things and a dietary approach that won’t “work”, the house of cards comes down.

My problem in a nutshell is snacking. I love sweet, I love salty. I love crunchy and creamy. I love indulging in pastries, cookies, pies, brownies, muffins, chips, chocolate, and other foods that are meant to store fat. My Italian heritage made the rest of the picture complete: the overabundance of pasta and bread in my daily life while growing up, which taught my mind and body to love starches.

I also grew up semi-athletic, so this is even worse for me, as I can’t move like I want to any longer. I recently had to run to catch a connecting flight, and couldn’t run more than partway. I literally could not. It was humbling. That was after I started my diet, but had not found a strategy to do so, so it was slow, almost nonexistent weight loss.

I am currently 50 years old. I am a woman. I have not hit menopause, but it’s making itself known in several ways that it won’t wait much longer. I know it’s going to be a worse war if I let menopause onto the field. It’s got to happen before then. I must reach goal, and I keep reading, reading, reading to find the key.

I have bought Tom Venuto’s “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle”, I have bought “Fat Loss for Idiots”, I have both the new and old version of Atkins, I have a membership for the online version of Weight Watchers, I subscribe to ediets, I have “The South Beach Diet”, I have read Lyle McDonald’s carb cycling book, I have read Jon Benson’s material. I am the Energizer Bunny. I won’t give up. But it’s extremely hard to find something that sounds so promising in the first months but ultimately fails me by not taking metabolic slowdown into account. This is true for anyone, by the way.

I not only needs a diet that continues to work, I need something sustainable, and something simple. I can track calories, but planning meals for the long run is just beyond my capabilities. I can’t keep track of all my macronutrients, and don’t want to. I hate many diet foods. Fiber is NOT my friend. I hate drinking only water, and no, I haven’t gotten used to it this past 15 years. I still hate water.

I also hate going to the gym, although I used to be a gym rat. Zumba and other dance-related workouts make me nuts, as I have two left feet and always get the steps confused. I was never a disco girl, and dance like my feet are sticky. It’s not pretty, and I hate doing it. So I tried videos. Then I tried exercise games on the gaming systems.

Nothing stuck. I have a two-day-old membership to Gold’s, which I haven’t used yet. I keep telling myself I’m going tomorrow. And this time, I will. The almighty blog will keep me accountable.
So on to the experiement: For the third day now, I am giving the Alternate-Day Diet a go-round. It’s also known as Johnson’s Up Day/Down Day Diet, or JUDDD. I’m keeping it lower carb for the time being, as I believe starches are still a problem for any dieter.

This time I started dieting again around mid-July at 229. I bought a bodybugg, and will comment on that later. I started wearing it and counting what I was burning, and journaling my food intake. It eventually got me to about 223 pounds, and on October 20 I went back to the old mainstay, Atkins. Except once the water weight was gone, I immediately stalled at 213.5. For weeks. And I realized this was going to take forever again, have the same frustrating stalls again, and settled into the long wait for the first of many stalls to break past this set-point.

Then I came across a JUDDD thread in a low carb forum I occasionally lurk on. I dismissed it immediately, simply because in the past, well-meaning posters on forums were the reason I went a bit batshit while looking for a cure for my nonexistent "hypothyroid problem" in 2006.

But the subject of JUDDDing kept popping up. I lurked and saw the numbers on some of the JUDDD’ers. A good number of them had hit goal. Furthermore, some were having trouble getting the weight loss under control. They were losing beyond goal! I decided to look further, do the research, and read Johnson’s book. The science seems sound, and other professionals have espoused different approaches to this form of dieting.

The method I’ve decided upon is the Johnson method of intermittent fasting. Other IF methods use the approach of eating within a permissible time window, some approach it by fasting for an entire day, from one to four days a week in order to fool the metabolism. The IF theory is that the body does not get the signals it needs in order to slow metabolism, so it can’t create the environment where fat-storing mode is maintained, and by using the Johnson method, cravings and hunger pangs are reduced greatly. The simple beauty is the rapid-cycling nature of the diet keeps the mechanism “guessing”. It claims a SIRT1 gene is expressed, but I am unsure of that at this time. I like specifics, not vague generalities.

Using this approach, I fast every other day, but still eat roughly 500 calories through the day (because it’s easier to maintain for a lifestyle change), followed by a higher calorie day in order to average out to a caloric deficiency. The story goes, every other day the decrease in caloric intake makes the fat release from its stores.

I have seen it compared to a piston action, and it makes sense. I have also seen it compared to anorexia, and that does not make sense. I mean, really. I’m over 200 pounds. I am in no danger of becoming anorexic because I reduce my calories several times a week. If you are in danger of this disease recurring, dieting in any form is off the table.

So what has it done for me so far? On November 1, I was at 213.5.

Until November 13, I was at 213.5.

On November 16, after only one up day and one down day, I was at 211. As an FYI, it’s not water weight. I shed that during the Induction period on Atkins, weeks earlier.

Coincidence? Maybe. Probably likely. But I’m sticking with JUDDD for now and will report further.