Milestone

I'm traveling again with no access to a scale but I think I hit another milestone, 23 lbs lost. I thought I would be ecstatic when I reached this goal but instead I'm focused on how much more I have to lose! I'm feeling much more comfortable in my body now -- can curl up on a chair without my tummy getting in the way, for example.
I'm starting to get some blowback from my boyfriend, who thinks I'm being too strict with my diet (no refined sugar/flour and Fast5) and losing too much weight. I think he's wrong, of course, but I'll get a personal trainer friend to calculate my body fat percentage just in case. I believe a normal range is 18-25% bodyfat for women. My BMI is 22.3; I'd like it to be 20-ish, for which I'll have to drop another 10 or 15 lbs.

Slow and steady...

I'm on a high-stress business trip now and I am amazed by how much my colleagues eat. I informed everyone at the beginning of the trip that I don't eat lunch, which is a blessing as we're spending an unfortunate number of meals at crappy midwestern buffets. Seeing plate after plate piled to the angle of repose with chunks of meat and fried things is enough to make food abstinence seem positively attractive! And the places are full of fat people. I wish they could have the same experience I'm having of feeling clean and empty and calm.

In my last post I mentioned some social aspects of being thinner that are new to me. Another distasteful issue is men staring. It's not much of an issue in the well-educated, liberal north-eastern city where I live but in the midwest and the south it's a problem. These yokels never learned about how long you can appropriately look at a woman before it becomes offensive. Sometimes I'll catch their eye and give a nasty look but, given that they don't seem to think women are sentient, I don't imagine they really care what I think. It makes me so glad to be surrounded in my regular life by men who treat women like the human beings we are.

Good luck to everyone out there trying this! How are your experiences going?

plateau? what plateau?

I recently met up with some friends who haven't seen me since I started Fast Five and they were gratifyingly surprised and complimentary about my new weight. Nice that they can see the difference even if I can't! Sometimes it feels like one long plateau.

One friend in particular started in immediately with subtle sabotage about how unhealthy fasting is and that I shouldn't follow society's beauty standards, etc. She's always been the thin one of the group (and still is much thinner than I am!) and I'm wondering if she was feeling threatened. She pressed breakfast and lunch on me at every opportunity and pointed out how weird it was each time I joined the table to socialize without eating. Made me realize that I'm very lucky to have an extremely supportive boyfriend and friends who refrain from undermining my efforts. This is new for me -- I've never really had to deal with that type of cattiness among women because I was never attractive enough to be a threat.

My darling boyfriend, in contrast, supports me completely and is starting to experiment with his own fasts. He chose the GM diet (or cabbage soup diet - editorial here, recipes here). It's a 7-day very low calorie diet meant to cleanse and jump-start a new eating style. I didn't feel that I especially needed to do it but I joined him for moral support -- and I'm so glad I did! It has blown my most recent plateau to bits! I really recommend the GM diet to anyone who needs a motivation boost. It provides much more instant scale gratification than FF.

Has anyone else tried the GM diet? What was your experience?

three weeks / insulin / sugar is evil

Three weeks of fasting and I'm feeling better. Less anxiety at the end of each eating window hence eating less to prepare for the fast. I hope as my appetite lessens the weight will start to come off. Haven't been able to weigh myself for a while. Chewing less gum.

In my recent reading it seems that fat metabolism depends largely on insulin. Low insulin allows the body to correctly manage its fat deposits. Fasting is one way to regulate insulin; lowering carb intake is another. Hence I've quit eating refined sugar. Had a couple weeks of cravings but, as with fasting, the anxiety dropped away soon. At first the idea of not eating mom's cookies again was very sad and a little scary. As time passes I realize that sugar does not equal love and my relationship with my mom and other loved ones can be expressed in ways that don't involve sugar. My skin is clearer than ever and I wake up easily in the morning even after a short night.

Check out these resources...
Sugar: The Bitter Truth -- Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF (video)
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
The No Sugar, No Flour Diet -- Dr. Gott (book)
http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Gotts-Flour-Sugar-Diet/dp/0446177903/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273110552&sr=1-1
Lecture at UC Berkely -- Gary Taubes (video, Real Player)
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216