Part 5: Orientation

Couple of things about eating less than 30 grams of net carbs a day:

1. It makes you a believer in all those “Drop a dress size by the weekend!” headlines.
2. It makes you feel like craaaaap.

I actually wasn’t expecting anything too dramatic to happen, because we already ate sort of low carb. But apparently ultra low carb is a whole different animal. In the initial orientation phase, M.H. and I each lost about 8 pounds. And we didn’t even do the whole 10 days. (We had a barbecue to attend, and the choices were to either have our first Carb Nite a bit early or to stand around empty-handed, having to explain to everyone why we weren’t eating or drinking anything.)

The flip side of all this lovely weight loss was that I was dragging. Muscles are used to burning glucose, and it takes time for them to adjust to burning body fat instead.

Then, after all that…guess how stuffing your face with a bunch of carbs makes you feel? Like a different kind of crap: Light-headed! Thirsty! Like you never want to see another piece of chocolate cake as long as you live! When we got home, I speculated that I’d probably do a lot better on a gluten-free Carb Nite. (Six Carb Nites later, I still don’t know because I haven’t tried it.)

I was slightly concerned about feeling so rotten, but I’d been told it would pass. And, frankly, I was willing to put up with it if I was really going to lose weight so effortlessly.

(No idea what I’m yammering on about? Start at Part 1.)