Same Thing Happens to Me

any time I try do this yoga stance, too.

Heck, I waver like that standing on both feet most days!

The comic strip is Between Friends. 

Frustrated and Bored

 I found this old post sitting in my Drafts folder, the original date back in early September.

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I know I've written this probably hundreds of times already, but I'm so frustrated at lack of weight loss and so bored with the bland meals I've been making.

New labwork shows that my thyroid replacement med is at the correct dosage (Doc doesn't care that I still have every symptom of hypothyroid, including a pulse in the 40's). No Hashimoto's disease. No liver problems. No parathyroid disease. But the labs DID show my vitamin d level is plummeting, something it shouldn't do in summer sunshine months, and a positive ANA, which may mean lupus. (sigh)

And what to eat? I had a few lapses in the low-fat vegan food plan, mostly because of being away from home for a good part of the day unexpectedly while caring for the elderly aunt with Alzheimer's disease (Who was finally admitted to a nursing home just 3 weeks ago), and a recent partaking of green smoothies, which are high in fruit as well as greens, which raised my triglyceride level. My HDL went down a bit, LDL went up a bit. But those lapses were no more in number or different from food consumption from previous lapses before other lab tests.

I also gained about 6 pounds in the 6 months between visits.

After getting the lab results I tweaked the food plan a bit to provide for blander, more boring foods. The idea was to make food so unpleasurable I won't eat so much of it. At least that's Dr. McDougall's philosophy - monotonous meals means less pleasure from them so you naturally eat less of them. Of course, it backfires. If a food is not tasty I still eat it, then go in search of better tasting food and eat my fill (or over-fill) of that to get the memory of the monotonous food out of my memory.

So I started eating even more off program foods. Cheese and roast beef sandwiches have had a particular pull. Or more higher fat/salt choices of on-plan foods, like nuts and stews.

And of course, every other web forum I go to tells me to run away from the starch based plant food diet as fast as I can, to avoid gluten, avoid starches, if I want to ever lose any weight. A few cardiologists' sites even say it's better to eat low fat dairy and meats than whole grains and potatoes. Are they trying to drum up business for their professions? They all offer links to as many peer-reviewed articles proving their way of eating is perfectly healthy, that meats and most fats don't raise cholesterol and people haven even lowered their cholesterol levels on their food plans; either that or they say cholesterol levels have nothing to do with cardiovascular health. They, too, show cardiograms with arteries clearing after a week weeks on their diets, just like Ornish and Esselstyn do.