Holding Steady

"The best laid schemes of Mice and Men often go awry."
- Robert Burns

I wish I could blame it either on mice or men (I had run-ins with both at work this week), but the fact is when I stepped on the scale today my plans hadn't worked out quite the way I thought they would!

After the success of last week, I was all ready to write a nice self-congratulatory blog entry today about how everything is going according to my not-so-evil plans. Whoops! Despite stepping on and off the scale at least a dozen times this morning, I did not repeat last week's loss of over 5 pounds. On the good side, though, I didn't gain. So much for my mental calculations of how soon I would reach my goal at that rate (let's see, 5 pounds a week times 20 weeks equals 100 pounds by June!).

I had been feeling very Paleolithic this week by not eating rice or bread or any grains at all. The idea behind the Paleolithic Diet, also known as the Stone Age Diet, is that you don't eat anything that our ancestors wouldn't have eaten in cave man times. But thinking back on this week, I guess cave man didn't eat mayonnaise or salad dressing!

It would be nice to think that my being overweight is because of some innate inability to process sugar and starch which is one of the cornerstones of the high protein, low carbohydrate regime, but more likely I just eat too much of even the stuff that's good for me.

On the other hand, I actually do feel "skinnier" (I know it's hard to believe someone who weighs as much as I do can feel "skinny," but believe me, it happens), so it could be water weight or some other cycle related reason that the scale didn't go down.

And it could be that I need some grains. We must all be different from a bio chemical point of view. Someone told me we all have different microbes that digest food in our intestinal tracts, so it would stand to reason that there is no one diet that works for everyone.

My friend Lynnette said I probably needed to take more MetaCleanse colon cleanse and it is true that I had reduced my daily dose this week to once a day instead of twice. She suggested I try taking it three times a day. That's probably a good suggestion. Besides helping to stabilize blood sugar, studies show flax helps with menopause symptoms and lowers cholesterol, so it certainly won't hurt me.

And what about the mice and men? My office is in a warehouse out in the middle of the country. For some reason, twice this week a little gray field mouse decided to run under the door while I was in the bathroom. Of course, I shrieked and he turned right around and headed back the way he came. I recently listened to an audio book of "Wind in the Willows" and apparently field mice are cheerful sorts who like to go caroling at Christmas, so I tried not to get too upset about it. As far as the men go, I'll just keep that to myself. As my mom used to say, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all!

Thank you to anyone who is reading my blog. I know it's really helping me to stay committed to my weight loss program.

Today's weight is 256.3 pounds and my Body Mass Index is 44!

Starting Out

"A goal without a plan is just a wish."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Even if you make a few detours on the way, how do you know which direction to go if you don't even have a map? Having set my resolution for the New Year, the first thing I did to start my weight loss journey was to head to the local library. Two armfuls of books later, the options generally seem to fall into two camps:

• Eat high protein, low carbohydrate, whose advocates generally seem to be medical doctors.


• Eat along the USDA recommended guidelines (grains, rice and cereals in the largest part and low fat) but get in touch with your feelings while you are doing it, whose advocates seem mostly to be nutritionists, fitness trainers and psychologists.

At 262 pounds, I'm not even sure it's important to psychoanalyze why I got so fat. What I need to do now is lose weight!

One of the most well known high protein diets is the Atkins diet, which has been around since I was in high school in the seventies. Other high protein diet plans include the South Beach Diet, the No Grain Diet and Protein Power.

Though all the high protein diets have their own particular variations, the general idea is to eliminate as much sugar and starch as possible and eat lots of protein and vegetables, especially green vegetables.

On the whole, medical research related to low-carbohydrate diets seems to support them as a good plan for people who have a lot of weight to lose.

Both a Journal of the American Medical Association report published in 2007 and a New England Journal of Medicine report published in 2008 concluded obese women lost more weight on high protein, low carbohydrate diets than any other plan. The study subjects also improved their cholesterol levels and general metabolic functioning.

With all that in mind, I decided I was good to go on the low carb, high protein approach I already had in mind.

This week I've eaten among other things broiled steak, grilled chicken, eggs, scallops, baked fish with crab meat topping, lamb chops alongside mounds of steamed and sauteed broccoli, spinach, asparagus, soybeans, artichoke hearts as well as raw salad, avocados and mushrooms. None of the diets suggest vegetables like carrots and corn (too much sugar and starch), two of my favorites, but if what I have been eating has been making me fat, that actually makes sense.

I've also eaten out three times this week and didn't have any trouble sticking to the plan other than having to scrape the croutons off my salad at Red Lobster, turning down birthday cake for my son's 19th birthday (he didn't seem to mind) and staring down a loaf of hot bread between me and my dining companion at Texas Land and Cattle Company Friday night. My New Year Resolution held firm, though, and I managed to resist carbohydrate temptation.

Along with a multi-vitamin, I've also taken MetaCleanse every day, always in the morning and sometimes before bed. The Atkins plan specifically suggests a minimum of two teaspoons of ground flaxseed a day along with psyllium husks, which are two of the three ingredients in Metacleanse colon cleanse, along with the additional ingredient bentonite clay. Bentonite is powdered clay that has been used since ancient times for natural detoxification.

And I've also taken a couple of long walks with the dog this past week.

The end result?

I lost 5 and a half pounds in a week!

To say I was thrilled is an understatement. That would be half of the weight I've gained over just the last twelve months.

Of course, it's hard to say if I will see those kinds of results every week. But yesterday I stocked the fridge and freezer with no hormone beef and lamb and lots of green veggies from the local farmers market, so I'm certainly willing to stay on the plan and see what happens.

Today's weight is 256.5 pounds and my Body Mass Index is 44, for a total loss of 5-1/2 pounds!

New Year Resolution

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
– George Orwell

It seems to me that diets and blogs have one thing in common. Even though they are easy enough to start, they are not so easy to stick with!

I'm a fifty something year old office manager with experience in website design and online shopping carts. I've been helping to promote MetaCleanse colon cleanse for almost five years since I first put up a website for my friend Lynnette, developer of MetaCleanse.

I've started lots of diets and successfully lost over fifty pounds with Weight Watchers after my first son was born, though I must admit that was quite a while ago. I also lost about that same amount over the course of the first few years after I was divorced through no specific plan, but about thirty pounds of that has crept back on and I was heavier to start out with than the first time I lost a lot of weight.

Probably no one knows more about MetaCleanse than I do, with the exception of Lynnette. I've written pages and pages of content for her website and I've used MetaCleanse a number of times.

However, I've never made MetaCleanse an integral part of trying to loose weight, despite Lynette telling me that's exactly what I should do.

But recently in thinking of ways to promote MetaCleanse and taking into consideration that I seem to be on the loosing end of my over twenty year weight loss struggle, it seemed to make a lot of sense to use a blog to support my weight loss and use weight loss to promote MetaCleanse with a blog.

One of my problems with losing weight is that I don't feel that unhappy about being fat. I'm not one of those women who are miserable about how much they weigh. But recently I got a scare about my blood pressure and then checked my BMI (Body Mass Index) on a link from a New York Times article about obesity. It is so high that I just can't ignore it. I have two grown sons I love very much, enough to make the effort to try to stay above ground for as long as I possibly can.

According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, one way to reach a weight loss goal is not to keep your New Year's resolutions to yourself. It seems that sharing a goal helps to keep you going in the right direction.

I've got a stack of diet books from the library and a life time supply of MetaCleanse thanks to my work for Lynnette. And I am willing to share my experiences - mostly to give me more determination to reach my goal - but perhaps it will help other folks with the same problems as well.

My intention is to make a post to this blog every week on Sunday. Today's weight is 262 pounds and my Body Mass Index is 45!