Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Low-carb purgatory

For quite a while M.H. and I have been “carb cycling” by eating them only on Friday nights, but some new reading on the topic recently suggested to me that that was maybe not the best pattern. Of course M.H. was doing fine on that diet, just like he does fine on every new thing I suggest, but he’s super-cooperative in going along with all my experiments. So together we decided to try instead spending six straight weeks eating low-carb and hopefully get into a ketogenic state, leading up to a family wedding we attended last Saturday.

Being keto is supposed to make you feel amazing, and M.H. pretty much did feel amazing. I didn’t feel bad, but I didn’t feel great, either, and as you may remember I was having a hard time swimming and walking in the morning. So, anyway, the six weeks were over as of our car trip to the wedding, where we ate essentially whatever we wanted, including wedding tacos and wedding ice cream.

I thought I would feel awful the morning after returning home, and I wasn’t really planning to swim. But it turned out that I was awake at 5:10 a.m. and feeling fine, and so I went. And the swimming went great, and the walk home was easy, and I felt fine and not at all exhausted the rest of the day. BECAUSE OF THE STUPID CARBS.

My working theory is that I was essentially doing it wrong (because of COURSE it’s trickier for women than for men) and not actually in ketosis at all but merely in “low-carb purgatory.”

Sorry if I sound like I’m talking gibberish, but I just wanted to vent, and if you care you can Google all these terms.

Monday, July 9, 2018

Important updates

  1. I finally finished the final edit of M.H.’s new book, turned it into an ebook, and UPLOADED that baby onto Amazon. We decided to do a 99-cent promotion to get it into as many hands as possible, so you can preorder it now for that low, low, very special, limited-time price right here: https://amzn.to/2KZrPVn.
  2. It came as a shock to me, as I think I’ve mentioned before, how hard it was to get back into swimming (and walking, even), but I think I’ve got the hang of it at last. At any rate the cotton candy in my arms seems to have been replaced by something more effective at swimming. There are only a couple of weeks left in the team’s outdoor season, but I guess I can still go to the pool on my own, pay money, and swim if I want. I won’t, but if nothing else I need to at least continue walking in the mornings.
  3. I’ve rediscovered the wonders of infused water, and in particular the wonders of infusing it with lemon and strawberry slices. My adapted-to-low-sugar palate feels that this is basically a more refreshing version of strawberry lemonade.
  4. Finally, it is a new month, but I don’t see the point of declaring that I’m working on a new habit when there are at least four perfectly good other habits from previous months that I have failed to incorporate into my life in any way. Some of them are very simple (“Start each day at the standing desk” literally requires only that I log into my computer from there) so I think I’ll just focus on actually doing the things I already said I wanted to do.