On Sunday, I came the closest yet to abandoning the diet. I was feeling demoralized, not just about the diet but about my job, and I really craved some junk food. If the appetite suppresent aspect of the diet is one of the secrets to any success I do have, the secret source of failure is the role food plays as an anti-depressant. Like most obese people, when I feel bad, I want to eat. The food makes me feel better, and thus I can sort of forget or at least wall off the sources of my negative emotions.
Under my diet, I can't do that, for at least three different reasons. First, my limited calories prevent any real mid meal snack, outside of a half cup of jello. I have been saving the jello for that purpose, and it seems to help a little. Second, a big part of comfort eating was quantity, and I simply can't eat enough of anything at any one time to qualify as a full meal, let alone a binge. Third, when you seek out comfort food, it's all about carbs. Potatoes, bread, pizza, pasta, rice: that's what you crave when you're down. Even your meats run to things like Fried Chicken, Chinese food, or hamburgers that have large starchy components. Aside from that, fat is a big part as well. Both are highly restricted on my diet.
So, I was freaking out a little bit, ironically after I took one of my walks, when I just felt run down and demoralized. My girlfriend really helped to rally my spirits, which goes to show how valuable the people around me are to this.
After that phone call, I went to the Giant Eagle and bought myself some nice cuts of meat. Man cannot live on grilled chicken breast alone, and so after talking with John the Butcher about my diet, he recommended some nice T-bone steaks and a pork loin I can bake. The T-Bones cut nicely into smaller pieces, yielding three meal sized strips, a break fast sized pile of filets, and a small meal sized filet.
Above you can see one of the strips prepared for my dinner with some green beans. I rubbed the steak with my steak seasoning, and cooked it, alas, to a medium well instead of medium rare. It's a thinner steak than I'm used to, so it got away from me a bit. Still, it was tasty and very satisfying. It's hard to be too totally depressed about what you can eat when you can have a pretty nice steak for dinner. Weighed after cooking, that guy only comes in at 7oz, meaning that while it's a little more than I'm supposed to have for a dinner, if I don't have a snack it's within my daily range.
Go Steve! Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteBTW, what role does exercise play in the diet? Are the walks you're taking part of it, or just something you like to do? I imagine that too much exercise would be difficult since it would increase your appetite...
Exercise is part of it. I'm supposed to do 150 minutes a week. The walks are filling that role right now, mostly because I'm fairly limited in what else I can really do effectively. With the warming weather I plan on driving into the park and getting a bit more different loops.
ReplyDeleteAs far as appetite goes, once you get into the ketosis, you're about as hungry as most people are after a work out. Your body stores energy first in blood sugar, when that's tapped out it goes to the glycogen in the liver and other places. After that, it starts burning fat. Now, your body is using all these all the time, but most of the time it's also laying down glycogen and fat.
So, my body is essentially in a state where it's always burning fat, which is what you generally feel like after a long day. After a few days, you just stop feeling that hungry, as weird as it sounds.