Progress!

Well, today was weigh-in day.  I was kind of scared to get on the scale, but I shouldn't have been.  I lost a total of 4.6 pounds last week.  Yay!  I will definitely take that.  I've begun working out in the mornings before work.  Oddly enough I'm really not hating waking up at 7am instead of my usual 8:30am.  I've found that I feel so much better after I've worked out.  I have more energy throughout the day and it inspires me to be more active as the day goes on.  What pleases me most is the change in my mood.  I find that I'm just happier and have a lot more patience because of it when I've worked out in the morning.  It's a great feeling and one I plan on keeping.

I made some delicious bbq chicken and cauliflower mash last week.  It was so good that I went to the store the next day and bought ingredients to make more.  The mash doesn't taste like mashed potatoes because it isn't, but it was stinkin' good.  First, I cooked off some bacon.  I pulled the bacon out and set it aside, then cooked the cauliflower in the bacon fat.  Once it was good and soft I mashed it up and added some cream and butter then cooked it a while longer.  When it was the consistency I liked I pulled it off the heat and added the bacon back to it.  So good.  The chicken I just cooked in a skillet with some of the bbq sauce from my last post.  So so yummy. It completely satisfies my craving for bbq while keeping my carb count low.

I got a Magic Bullet, something I've been wanting for a long time.  My nephew was the first to use it and made a strawberry-apple smoothie.  Not at all low-carb friendly, but a good snack for a growing boy.  There will definitely be future posts containing things I've made that are low-carb friendly with the Magic Bullet.

There seems to be candy everywhere I look.  It's so hard to resist.  Even with my sugar-free alternatives, sometimes I just want to grab a king size Reese's Fastbreak bar.  It's hard to resist, but I am resisting.

What kind of evilness is this?  While shopping I found an M&M vending machine.  Vending machines are bad enough, but a machine that vends only sugary candy?  It's ridiculous.  The US has a problem with obesity?  It's not hard to see why!

I ordered some Ketostix from Amazon so I can test myself and make sure I'm in and staying in ketosis.   I've been lax on logging my carbs because the Atkins app doesn't work on my phone.  It only works on my tablet and I don't like lugging my tablet around.  Estimating how close or far from my 20g net carbs per day is not a good way to make sure I'm staying low enough to be in ketosis.  I think I'll switch to using a written log so I can keep better track as I haven't been able to find a carb counting app that I like that works on my phone.  More on that once I get it worked out!

A Day in the Life of Atkins/Low-Carb Eating

Yesterday was my birthday, but the things I ate during the day were actually pretty typical for what I usually eat on Atkins so I thought I'd share.  This gives just a general idea of the sort of things I usually eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks when doing Atkins.

For breakfast I had a slice of quiche with a dallop of sour cream on top.  Unfortunately I didn't pay really good attention when I made this quiche and what I put in it had no dietary fiber...  Oops.  Next time I'll pay much better attention to the types of veggies I put in my quiche!  The quiche with the sour cream came to 391 calories and 6.3g net carbs.

Lunch was a delicious burger from In-N-Out Burger.  Animal style and protein style meant the onions were grilled and the bun was replaced with lettuce.  I also removed the pickles just because pickles are yucky!  It came out to 520 calories and 8g net carbs.  Usually my lunch wouldn't be quite that high in either calories or carbs, but it was my birthday!  It's actually not bad as long as you're aware of the carb and calorie content and adjust your day accordingly.

Between lunch and dinner I like to have a snack so that I'm not ravenous at dinner and overeat.  Today it was a peanut butter cup Chocolite bar that I'd gotten earlier at Sugarless Delite.  At 35 calories, 0g net carbs, and 6g of fiber it's delicious and filling.  A great snack!

Dinner was a delicious grass-fed steak with garlic-herb butter and a bit of bbq sauce for dipping.  The totals there came to 423.6 calories and 2g of net carbs.

Being a girl from the south, I do love barbecue.  Unfortunately, bbq sauces are just full of sugar.  Molasses, brown sugar, all those things that make it so tasty.  One thing I've really missed on Atkins is bbq sauce.  Fortunately, I found this bbq sauce at Sugarless Delite.  It was a bit on the pricey side, but at 5 calories and 1g net carbs per 1 tbsp serving it was worth it.  It's also delicious!

Along with the steak for dinner I had a nice side salad with chipotle ranch dressing.  The salad had lettuce, cheese, some orange bell pepper, radishes, broccoli, avocado and cherry tomatoes.  It came out to 151 calories and 7.8g net carbs.

These dressing also come from, you guessed it, Sugarless Delite.  They're 0 calorie and 0 net carb and absolutely delicious.  The first ingredient is purified water, but they're so thick and packed full of flavor!

For dessert, again because it was my birthday, I had a cheesecake brownie from Sugarless Delite.  (Think if I drop their name enough I'll get a discount?  Ha!)  There was a 0g net carb brownie on the bottom and their plain cheesecake on top and it was a slice of heaven.  This wonderfulness was 2g net carbs, and I'm not sure the calorie count because it wasn't listed.

All in all my day came to 1,520.6 calories (not counting the cheesecake brownie), and 26.1g net carbs (counting the brownie).  Let's be honest, with the cheesecake brownie we're probably talking an extra 300 or so calories, so my total could be around 1820.  Still not bad.  On Induction, it's recommended to keep net carbs to 20-25g, so at 26.1g I'm still good!

That it what a typical day on Atkins looks like for me, more or less.  I hope it was helpful!

Lesson Learned

It's very late-  Okay, it's 11pm, but lately bedtime for me has been....well, right about now.  I am so ready to head to bed, but I've been wanting to get this post out for a while and have been putting it off.  It's time to stop procrastinating!

I started doing Atkins on November 20th.  I was hardcore into it, following every single rule.  At Thanksgiving I caved for some of my grandmother's dressing, the most amazing dressing I've ever eaten and something I look forward to every year.  It's that good!  I had some dessert, but as soon as the day was over so was my straying from the path.  I was back on it with a vengeance and I lost over 20 pounds.

Right along a month later came another difficult food time of year....Christmas.  My step-grandmother came to town for the holidays and I thought, "Screw it.  It's Christmas.  I don't care what I eat or how much I eat of it.  It's the holidays!"  I don't even want to talk about all the carb-laden foods I've eaten in the last two weeks.  So much so that I've seen a difference.  No, really, I have.

It's weird how just one month of changing your eating habits can change how you physically feel.  I didn't think much of things when I went onto Atkins.  I was there to lose weight, right?  Everything else just kind of fell by the wayside.  You know the phrase out of sight, out of mind?  That's how my physical problems before Atkins were while I was on Atkins.  It wasn't until I strayed for two weeks - heck, a couple days even - that I remembered how I used to feel.

Before Atkins I had a really hard time with gastro-intestinal problems.  I really thought that I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) with the way my body reacted to foods.  It wasn't pretty and I felt miserable daily with stomach aches among other things.  I tried restrictive dieting to get it under control as I found out that IBS treatment asks you to do, but I've talked about restricting myself before and how good does that ever work?  Not very well.  I always just assumed it was eating fatty foods that hurt my stomach so badly so I tried to stay away from fatty foods but it didn't really help much.

With the vicious return of IBS symptoms when I stopped watching my carbs, I realized something....  While on Atkins, my stomach never hurt.  Ever.  I was never in pain after eating, and never had any symptoms whatsoever.  And?  I was eating fat!  And not in small amounts!  I was having cheese, and oil, and butter, and I wasn't having severe stomach aches every time I ate.  It was an eye-opener.  Maybe it wasn't the fat that was messing with my insides, maybe it was the carbs.

I'm one of those people who have to learn by doing.  Telling me that doing something will have a certain affect won't sway me at all.  I have to do that thing to see if that's really true.  It also takes me going off of a plan - like doing Atkins - to realize how great it was on it.  I'm convinced now more than ever that Atkins is right for me.  These past two weeks I've gone off of Atkins and eaten so many carbs.  You know what?  I've felt absolutely miserable.  I'm tired of feeling miserable.  Why would I eat things that I know make me feel that way?  To do so would just be ridiculous.

So, starting tomorrow, I am back on with that same determination when I started.  My eyes are open, my motivation is renewed 100%, and I'm ready.  Now it's no longer just about losing weight, it's about taking care of my body so that it's not reacting with pain at what I'm doing to it.  It's about taking care of myself the best way that I can.