How Do I REALLY Feel About My Diet?

Even though yesterday was my 'official' day one on the program, I've been pretty much following this diet for a while now. I started the two week prep part on Friday, August 3rd; that was fairly extreme, cutting out sugar, flour, alcohol, and caffeine.

I started following the food rules of the advanced plan on Tuesday August 14th; further cutting out all grains, fruit (except half a cup of berries a day), dairy, and starchy vegetables.

If you didn't know me well in person before this, here are some things you should know about me: For starters, I'm 33 years old, and I was raised on a fairly traditional Midwestern diet. Meat, potatoes, overcooked canned or frozen veggies, lots of breads. We drank pop pretty regularly. Sweets have been prevalent in my home from the time I was a kid, and I have always loved them. If I were to go to my mom's house right now and poke around for food (which all of us DO every time we go over there), I'd find:

• a counter with Twinkies, cookies, coffee cakes, white bread, brownies, fudge, probably some candy
• A freezer with several kinds of ice cream, frozen dinner's (Stouffer's and Hot Pockets), ice cream bars
• A fridge with lunchmeat, pop, milk, butter, cream cheese, American cheese, probably sliced cheese, leftovers (often meat and potatoes and a veggie), refrigerated Bob Evans mashed potatoes, instant puddings and jello desserts. On top of the fridge is a basket filled with potato chips, tortilla chips, cheetos.
• A cabinet next to the fridge with macaroni and cheese and white pasta
• A shelf with several kinds of crackers (Town House, Club Crackers), popcorn, instant microwaveable cakes and brownies, sugary oatmeals and breakfast cereals (Fruity Pebbles, Corn Pops), bags of marshmallows
• And a giant glass jar filled to the brim with chocolate, chocolate, chocolate - Hershey's, Reese's cups, Kit Kats, Baby Ruths

I don't know if it was exactly like that when I was growing up, but that's pretty much the setup it's been for years. Everyone likes visiting mom's house - it's full of goodies! It's hard for me to even go over there right now because it's really hard to resist those things. I was raised on them, and I really believe sugar and flour are very addicting. It's hard to change a habit as it is; it's even harder when your body is having physical reactions to the mere IDEA of putting those things in your mouth.

I mention all this to illustrate the fact that I was raised on lots of white, white, white foods. Processed foods. Flour and sugar. The very things that seem to be worst for my body right now.

So to have been on this incredibly restrictive diet for a good four weeks now, and to have another 6+ weeks staring me in the face - it's HARD. It would be hard for anyone... but it's REALLY hard for someone like me who suddenly can't eat ANY of the things that are habitual foods. I'm attempting to force my body to eat in a COMPLETELY different way from what it has known for all 33 years of its life. I've made small changes over the past decade; mostly adding in foods I knew were good for me, not as much taking out foods that I knew were bad for me. I got rid of pop years ago; I almost never touch the stuff. I've added in more vegetables to my dietary repertoire. I've experimented with whole wheat grains, pastas, and breads. But cutting out all of the things I DO eat? And doing it so suddenly? I've had a lot of unhappiness these past four weeks. I'll be honest - part of me HATES this diet. Part of me is really, desperately bitter about NOT being able to eat those foods. The logical side of me knows this is a much healthier, more sustainable diet. The emotional side of me is mostly placated by the knowledge that I FEEL so much better most of the time. I don't dwell on it most of the time. But I'm unhappy. I have cravings. They're not as bad as they were at first, but the people who said they go away after a few days? Obviously weren't really addicted, and obviously didn't have habits as bad as mine.

Here's my journal from yesterday.

 Breakfast is hard every day. I skipped breakfast for YEARS. When I became diabetic, adding in breakfast was one of the hardest things I had to do.  Forcing myself to eat in the mornings made me nauseous for almost two years, but I did it. I finally found something that worked reasonably well for me - a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and a glass of milk. I had that for breakfast for more than a year. Now I can't eat cereal. I hate oatmeal, but even if I liked it, I couldn't have it right now. My body, still not thrilled with the idea of breakfast in general, finally adjusted itself to the general idea of something sweetened with a dairy in the mornings. I can't have either of those things now. I like eggs, quite a bit, but a) I'm only supposed to eat a max of 8 eggs a week and b) I don't really DO eggs - or anything savory - for breakfast. I'm also not a morning person, which means I HATE cooking in the morning. I want an EASY, quick breakfast. I finally hit on a solution that is working pretty well, but it's still quite an adjustment.

Lunch has always been hard. I could very easily skip it now that I've had breakfast. I'd have the occasional sandwich... cheese quesadillas are big over here... or hot dogs, or franks n beans, or mac and cheese. Can't have any of those. I'm trying to eat soups and salads or leftovers now. I've never been a salad eater - leafy greens don't feel or taste like food to me. I really have to jazz them up with carrots and cukes and seeds and maybe some ham or turkey or a bit of hard boiled egg. I can't even have cheese or dressing. Soups and stews are fine EXCEPT I have to cook them, and sometimes they don't turn out very tasty (I need to build up my 'delicious meals' repertoire for this diet!! I'm working on it!) and then I'm just left feeling really unhappy with my diet again.

Snacks - another hard one. Berries are OK but they've never been my favorite fruit, and to be honest, I've always put sugar on them. I'm trying to eat them but they're much more tart than I'm used to and I'm mostly just unhappy while I'm eating them. Salsa and/or guacamole are delicious - but no chips. Eating it with veggies just isn't the same. I'm working on it. Hummus is good - but no pitas. Again with the veggies. I eat my sad carrot and cry on the inside.

Dinner - I DO like to cook (my problem with doing it for every meal is the sheer amount of TIME it takes up! And also how filthy my kitchen gets every day!). I've been going through my cookbooks and making lists of every recipe that fits this plan and categorizing them (dinner, side dish, lunch, etc). Before I go grocery shopping I put together a meal plan for the next few days from this recipe list. It's... kind of exhausting. SO MUCH PLANNING. There is no real easy 'grab and go' meal idea on this plan. Not unless I cooked it ahead, anyway. Some dinners have been very tasty. Others, not so much. Then I'm unhappy. And so are the kids. Last night's dinner? SUCKED. The chicken was OK. The vegetables - I'm not even sure if OJ liked them. The kids and I barely touched them.

Late night - I allow myself a Larabar, and sometimes a small bit of dark chocolate if I really feel like I need it. I look forward to that fucking Larabar ALL DAY. It's hard not to eat it earlier in the day. But if I don't end the day with something sweet I want to kill someone, and I will be looking for food all night then... and sometimes even after the Larabar I'm still craving something. Nights are hardest for me. I just want to eat and eat. Last night I gave in and made a plate of scrambled eggs. Still on the plan, so that's OK, but I REALLY wanted to sneak out after everyone went to bed and hit a drive through or something. I could TASTE Taco Bell's nacho cheese. I'm not kidding. If Taco Bell had been in my house I would have eaten everything they could give me.


So. In conclusion, I kind of hate this diet. I like the results I'm getting, and that's really the only thing that keeps me going. If I hadn't gotten so sick for so long, and didn't have that to compare my currently much healthier self to - I wouldn't be sticking to this diet. It's REALLY difficult. It's very extreme for someone coming from a food background like mine. I think the idea behind a lot of it is sound and the principles for eating for life are good but I think I might take a gentler approach if you're not as sick as me (though the Basic Plan isn't nearly as tough as this one is. I'd be MUCH happier if I could have rice, the occasional potato, or an apple, or banana). 

I'm not giving up. I'm just... trudging through with a sort of grim determination, is all. I think it's important to be honest and examine feelings. I'm laying this out there in case anyone else is trying this, or something like this, and hating it too and getting down on themselves about it. It's OK to feel your feelings. It's hard to make changes, especially when they're this extreme. Do the best you can. It's OK. Don't beat yourself up. I'm not. This is a long term change, over the course of your life, and a few negative feelings for a time aren't going to make or break your life. A few deviations from the plan won't either. Perserverance is the key to success. Even if it's done grimly. :)

Week One, Day Two

It's week one of the preparatory phase for The Blood Sugar Solution and I'm tackling another five items today. Most of them involve getting your kitchen ready for this big lifestyle change. 

Step one: Set a date to officially start the six-week program.

OK. There are two prep weeks to this before we jump into the six week program. I started week one of prep yesterday, so my six week program will officially start on Friday, August 10th.

I will be on North Carolina at that time, at the tail end of a 10 day vacation. I thought long and hard about starting before or after vacation. It's going to be ridiculously difficult to start something like this while on vacation, out of my own kitchen and home element. On the other hand, I'm sick all the time and it won't be much of a vacation if I'm not feeling good. So either stay sick in the cabin all the time, eating 'vacation food', or put in a bunch of extra work and planning to be able to start this new health plan and hopefully feel well enough to get out and enjoy things with my family. We're planning lots of fun activities like hiking and swimming in natural water spots and bonfires and gem mining; it should be a fairly active vacation. I'd like to be WITH my family for those things.

As part of my prep next week I will spend a good deal of time planning out meals as best as possible in advance of the vacation. I'm also bringing my exercise program with me.

Step two: Prepare Your Healthy Kitchen

Well, they have a check box by this but really it's a headliner for steps 3, 4, and 5. So... done! (as soon as I tackle those anyway!)

Step three: Rid your kitchen of disease- and obesity-producing Frankenfoods.

Here he gives you rules on what NOT to eat, to ideally be followed for life. He says "if you read these rules and think there will be nothing left to eat, then you have been eating in exactly the way that will make you sick and will keep you that way." That is certainly a fear of mine! I guess that's saying something. Here's the rules in brief:

• Get rid of most foods with labels - labelled foods you keep should have fewer than five ingredients
• Get rid of all sugar (any form) and any foods with a form of sugar on the label; same goes for white rice and white flour. For me all flour has to go, even whole grain stuff, because I'm in the advanced stage.
• Get rid of anything with high fructose corn syrup.
• Get rid of anything with the word 'hydrogenated' on the label.
• Throw out any highly refined cooking oils such as corn, soy, etc. Also avoid toxic fats and fried foods.
• Throw out any food with ingredients you can't recognize or pronounce, or are in Latin.
• Throw out any foods with preservatives, additives, coloring, or dyes, "natural flavorings", or MSG.
• Toss all artificial sweeteners - ANY of them, or any foods with them. Include sugar alcohols - basically any word that ends in 'ol'. 
• If it was grown on a plant, not made in a plant, then you can keep it in your kitchen.

I'm a little confused because I've looked ahead at some of his recipes and sometimes he uses raw honey. I know I won't be using it because I'm on the advanced plan, so it'll be out for at least six weeks, but it would seem that honey is a sugar? Yet we keep it? Maybe it's not a sugar. Whatever, I'm keeping mine, I just won't eat it for six weeks. 

This is going to be a little rough because my son turns eight tomorrow and we're having his birthday party so I won't be getting rid of everything until after Monday (it's a sleepover of course!). I'm going to go clear out everything I don't need for the party right now though!

...

SEVERAL HOURS LATER...

My husband was a great help with this task. It was pretty overwhelming. I guess I hadn't cleaned up my diet as much as I'd THOUGHT. I know I fall into traps of 'I'll just buy this for the kids' and 'but we need this for a paaaaarty'. We did keep some things for Drake's birthday party tomorrow, and we will do a final kitchen clean out on Monday evening. 

All the opened items that needed to be trashed.

The hardest thing here was tossing the cooking / baking staples I have used my whole life. Flour. Sugar. Panko. Worcestershire sauce. Soy sauce (it has wheat). Powdered sugar. Brown sugar. My entire 'cooking staples' cabinet is almost empty. My anxiety is pretty high over this one. I feel a little nauseous, a little like crying.

All the unopened items that will be donated to the food pantry.

Biggest points of panic: soups. I keep chicken noodle soup on hand for when I'm sick. With all my stomach problems it's become quite a staple. I guess I'll have to plan ahead and make / freeze my own? Also broths. All my chicken broth had undesirable additives. So did my canned tomatoes. Will I have to make *everything* on my own from now on??

And pastas. I've been eating Dreamfields pastas because they have a low amount of digestible carbs. Giving them away makes me really sad. I won't be eating any pastas for at least six weeks though. And they aren't whole wheat anyway.

A bag of stuff my husband couldn't stand to let go. He's taking it to work with him.

A bag of stuff for my mom that I know she'll use.

Overall this was REALLY emotionally draining. I wanted to cry more than a few times. I did a little dance of joy when I found some bags of nuts I didn't know I had because that means there's actually still something in the house I can snack on. We decided to keep a few things for the kids - mac and cheese, yogurt, ice cream, popsicles. I won't be buying more when it's gone, and if it becomes a problem for me I'll toss it, but they should be eased into it a little bit. Largely because there's practically nothing left to eat in the house except nuts and frozen fish, which they really don't like. My son helped me clean out one of the freezers though and was excited that we are getting rid of all the unhealthy stuff. Kids are amazing.

This was confusing at times too. There's a lot of stuff in food! Calcium chloride! Ferrous something or other! Artificial colors! Natural flavors! Sodium benzoate! Carrageenan! Lecithin! And many, many more. Very overwhelming. What's ok, what's not ok? We had to keep asking ourselves 'was it grown on a plant?' 

Finally, this is frightening. We are, like many in these economic times, struggling financially. The cost to replace these foods with healthy items is going to be painful for us. Honestly, I'm not sure how we're going to do it. I've kind of been pantry-eating the past week as it was... now my pantry is almost bare and I feel more than a little panicked at the thought of finding the money to fill it with foods to nourish my family this week. Health is costly. I just keep reminding myself that in the long run, sickness costs more.

I did it. I know I should congratulate myself for it but right now I just feel kind of sick over it.

Step four: Watch the Supermarket Savvy video at his website.

You can find Supermarket Savvy here. It's 11 minutes long. 

Discusses - soda pop, liquid calories, breakfast, oils, proteins, plate proportions.

Step five: Get your essential kitchen tools.

In the book he has included a list of tools he considers necessary to prepare and cook food. He says to make sure you have most of them. I'm not listing them all here. Luckily I enjoy cooking and I already have a well stocked kitchen. The only things I am missing from the list are:

• dutch oven
• an immersion blender
• a coffee grinder for flaxseed or other spices
• a fish spatula

Of those, the only thing I really want is a dutch oven (not the farting kind!). It's actually been on my list for a while. I've been making stocks and things this past year and it would really come in handy. I think, at least for now, I can live without the other three. I've never needed them or noticed their absence in my kitchen before. I'll have to investigate the cost of dutch ovens though and bump that up the list because I have wanted one for a while.

Any recommendations for a good dutch oven?

Anyone else inspired to clean out their pantries after this?

Comparing Weight Loss to Financial Peace University

My husband and I recently began attending Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. (We've gone to two sessions thus far - I will be talking about this aspect of our lives more on my main blog.) One of my goals when we signed up was to take this knowledge and his methods and apply them in some fashion to not just our financial lives, but also to my quest to be healthier (and possibly even my quest for organization). As we go through each lesson, I have been spending some time thinking about how I would apply them to my weight loss / health plans.

Lesson one focuses on Super Saving. The upshot of the lesson is that you should strive, quickly, to save up $1,000 in an emergency fund (his Baby Step One) because saving money is important, because it's something that most people can do fairly quickly, because it provides peace of mind (in case of 'unexpected' events, you don't have to turn to your credit cards, which you are to stop using because they're bad for you!), and because it is a quick accomplishment that will make you feel good about this path and help jumpstart the process for you.

So, with that in mind... what would be the 'Super Saving / Baby Step One' equivalent for weight loss / living a healthier lifestyle?

Things I have considered...

1) taking a walk every day (jumpstarting exercise)
2) kitchen clean out - getting rid of all the crap foods in your house
3) identifying some quick, healthy meals to replace junk food and eating out in your life
4) BASIC kitchen refill, using step 3 as a guide

Any other ideas? Thoughts on the items I was considering?