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.

Why Were's Still Fat, Explained Again

Another study, reported by Associated Press:

Not your fault! Hormones linked to weight regain

Oct 26, 5:10 PM (ET)
By MALCOLM RITTER

NEW YORK (AP) - Any dieter knows that it's hard to keep off weight you've lost. Now a study finds that even a year after dieters shed a good chunk of weight quickly, their hormones were still insisting, "Eat! Eat! Eat!"
The findings suggest that dieters who have regained weight are not just slipping back into old habits, but are struggling against a persistent biological urge.
"People who regain weight should not be harsh on themselves, as eating is our most basic instinct," Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne in Australia, an author of the study, said in an email. The research appears in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Weight regain is a common problem for dieters. To study what drives it, Proietto and his colleagues enrolled 50 overweight or obese patients in a 10-week diet program in Australia. They wanted to see what would happen in people who lost at least 10 percent of their body weight. Ultimately, only 34 people lost that much and stuck with the study long enough for analysis.

The program was intense. On average, the participants lost almost 30 pounds during the 10 weeks, faster than the standard advice of losing 1 or 2 pounds a week. They took in 500 to 550 calories a day, using a meal replacement called Optifast plus vegetables for eight weeks. Then for two weeks they were gradually reintroduced to ordinary foods.
Despite counseling and written advice about how to maintain their new weights, they gained an average of 12 pounds back over the next year. So they were still at lower weights than when they started.
The scientists checked the blood levels of nine hormones that influence appetite. The key finding came from comparing the hormone levels from before the weight-loss program to one year after it was over. Six hormones were still out of whack in a direction that would boost hunger.
The dieters also rated themselves as feeling hungrier after meals at the one-year mark, compared to what they reported before the diet program began.
Experts not connected to the study said the persistent effect on hormone levels was not surprising, and that it probably had nothing to do with the speed of the weight loss.
People who lose less than 10 percent of body weight would probably show the same thing, though to a lesser degree, said Dr. George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.
A key message of the study is that "it's better not to gain weight than to try to lose it," Bray said.
Why would a dieter's body rebel against weight loss? It's an evolutionary holdover from earlier times, when weight loss could threaten survival and reproduction, says Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity expert at Columbia University in New York. So "it's not surprising at all" that our bodies would fight back for at least a year, he said. "This is probably a more or less permanent response."
People who lose significant weight not only gain bigger appetite but also burn fewer calories than normal, creating "a perfect storm for weight regain," Leibel said.
He said avoiding weight regain appears to be a fundamentally different problem from losing weight in the first place, and that researchers should pay more attention to it.
The study was supported by the Australian government, medical professional groups and a private foundation. Proietto served on a medical advisory board of Nestle, maker of Optifast, until last year.
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Online:
New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org

The Last Heart Attack on CNN

This show was pre-empted a number of times due to unforseen factors, and when they did air it it was unannounced so the people who wanted to see it didn't, so I was so happy to see that CNN posted it on-line. So sit back, grab yourself a cup of tea, and watch this hour-long presentation.

Weight Truisms from Weighty Matters Blog

An obesity medicine doc from Canada has a blog called Weighty Matters, and in this blog post he has "Twitter sized weight management truisms."
 This one is my favorite of them all:

Your best weight is whatever weight you reach, when you're living the healthiest life you actually enjoy.

Now THAT is what the Health At Every Size movement is all about!

Yep. Me, too.

The Grizzwells comic strip

Will Losing Weight Make You Fat?

Will Losing Weight Make You Fat?

An excerpt:

"I often joke that the easiest way to gain 25 lbs is to lose 20!"

"Unfortunately, this may not be much of a joke, as there is mounting evidence that intentional weight loss may indeed be an important driver of long-term weigh gain."


Even though Dr. Sharma is an obesity expert and even proposes WLS for some people, reading through his site is such a breath of fresh air! Just about everything he has said about the effects of dieting rings true in my own life.