Twelve weeks have passed in my Transformation Day 2012 challenge, and this week’s update brings some interesting news. First, I’ll start with the good news. I lost 4 pounds last week which put me at 258.4 this morning. This means that I’m 20.4 pounds down and I finally made it into the 250s. For a while there, I thought that was never going to happen.
I’ve been trying to convince a dear friend to get on board with me. She knows what she needs to do, but like me so many times before, she’s lacking in the execution. I think that the only thing that’s helped me to be successful this time around is to consider my eating plan to be more of a paleo-type plan. Yes, I do eat dairy on occasion, and I have some peanut butter from time to time, but even Robb Wolf says in The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet — and I’m paraphrasing here, but — you’re going to get results if you stick to the plan at least 80% of the time. To be clear, I don’t think that 80% compliance works in the beginning when you’re breaking your addictions to the nastiness, and I eat paleo more than 80% of the time myself, but eating paleo the majority of the time has absolutely been the key for me. I wish I would have considered it earlier, and I wish my friend would consider it now rather than “junk” low-carb part of the time and just “junk” the rest of the time, but I could write several posts on this topic, so I’ll move on. :)
In my case, with good news also comes bad news. I’d been dealing with symptoms of a sinus infection, so I went to the doctor last week. I was also prepared to discuss my blood pressure, because despite the fact that a low-carb eating plan usually lowers BP, mine hadn’t dropped. I’ve also been experiencing a lot of annoying swelling in my feet and lower legs, and I suspected it was somehow related.
Anyway, I got an antibiotic for my sinus infection (which didn’t thrill me, but I knew it needed to happen, and that’s another story for a different time), and I also left with a prescription for blood pressure meds. So for now anyway, I’m a member of that group of people who has to consider medication in her preps. I wasn’t thrilled about the script, but like the antibiotic, I knew it was necessary.
I’m supposed to go back and see the doctor in three months to see how the medication is doing, and until then, I’m hoping I can take off another 20 pounds and maybe get to the bottom of whatever’s going on with my endocrine system.
I also had an experience last week that was a teachable moment to say the least. For a week and a half now, we’ve had apples in the house. I’m drying apples to put back, and I’ll likely make some no-sugar-added apple butter as well. A couple times, I’ve made fried apples for the family (apples, ghee, coconut oil, and cinnamon) and I seemed to tolerate them well enough. One day last week though, I got out the bag of dried apples that I’d put away for kids’ snacks and whatnot, and wouldn’t you know that between me and my 3-year-old, I ate most of the gallon-sized bag myself. If I had to guess, I’d say I ate the equivalent of 12 or 14 apples all in one sitting! Shocking, I know, but it’s true.
While I didn’t have some awful weight gain or cravings or anything, I DID have the most horrific stomach pain, and that pain stayed with me for hours! Needless to say, I now know that I can’t be trusted alone with a bag of dried apple rings!
As an aside, my husband had an awful stomach ache yesterday, and I noticed that the bag of apples I’d dried the day before had a signficant amount missing. Immediately, it clicked for me and I asked him if he’d eaten too many of those dried apples. He said, “Well, I had a good number of them.” Lesson learned, for BOTH of us!
I’m back to my usual, positive self now. I guess I just needed a week (or a few days at the very least) to be real. I just didn’t feel well at all last week, and I’m hoping that clearing up this sinus infection will keep that stuff as a thing of the past. For now, I’m gonna keep on keepin’ on, and I encourage all of you to do the same. If I can do this, anyone can, seriously!