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.