Encouraged

Monday marks the end of the first month of my experiment with eating low-carb, and while there have been some downsides, they haven't been so bad and so far they have been temporary. The good news is that my weight is still dropping steadily, and I'm down to 250 (give or take a pound or two daily fluctuation). That brings my grand total of weight loss to 15 or 16 pounds, and about 12-13 just since starting low-carb.

I started weighing myself in February, but didn't really start dropping weight until March.

People have started to notice and tell me I look like I have lost weight, although I haven't personally noticed it. Or at least I haven't noticed it visually, probably because I am looking at myself every day. I *feel* like I have lost weight, which is hard thing to know for sure because it's possible that it's just in my head. It sounds strange to say, but I feel like my skin is... more loose somehow. There were times when I was eating everything and gaining weight that my skin would feel "tight." Maybe that is just my imagination, but when you are gaining weight, your skin has to stretch right? As evidenced by my many stretch marks. So it would make sense that when losing weight, your skin would loosen up I guess. Also my clothes are feeling a little loose, but again it could all be my imagination. At some point it has to be reality though, and with 15 pounds down, there's no reason I couldn't be noticing changes already.

So I mentioned the downsides, I should probably go into more detail. Last week I wasn't feeling super positive about the whole thing. I mentioned feeling fatigued, and that feeling actually got a little worse as last week progressed. I started having just a persistent mini-headache behind my eyes, like you get when you go to bed too late and have to wake up too early. I was feeling tired and achy and if those feelings had continued I probably would have given up trying this. I'm not sure if I was just getting used to a lower amount of caffeine than normal, if my blood sugar was adjusting, or if my was body going through ketosis, but it wasn't a great feeling. I was expecting having a hard time in the second week, but I figured by the third week I should have been mostly adjusted so I was caught off guard. Combined with a relative weight plateau at the same time, things weren't looking great for the future of low-carb living.

The good news is this week has been completely different. My energy levels are up, the nagging ache is gone, and my weight loss actually picked up. Overall I feel healthy and thinner than I have in a long time. Perhaps the most encouraging factor is that this diet feels sustainable to me. I don't feel like I am starving myself - I eat until I am full and still sometimes stuff myself. I eat good food that I like, and more of it in some cases (for example: skip the pancakes and go for double bacon). Not eating bread sucks, and skipping out on sodas and desserts in hard but it gets easier over time. I don't really miss soda at all, and I will still occasionally indulge in a sweet snack on special occasions. For example, tonight was a family dinner with out-of-town relatives. I picked low-carb options for dinner, but I joined in when everybody else ate ice cream. For an otherwise low-carb day, a 50-60 carb bowl of ice cream isn't going to do much damage when my daily total is still at or under 100. These kinds of compromises help make this diet more of a lifestyle that I could see myself sticking to for a long time.