Thin Again
Wherein our narrator ponders his greatly reduced
self.
Well, it's been 3 weeks on Atkins, and all I can
say is that it's utterly amazing. I've gone from about a 38" waist side to - as
I write this - sitting in my 35" jeans, the pair I brought to Australia as a
challenge to myself: Could I leave the country wearing
them?
At the rate I'm going, I'll have
a 33" waist before I leave this country, and I'll be wearing these with a
belt.
It hasn't been very hard to stay
on the diet, with the exception that I need to make sure the house is always
filled with Atkins-safe low-carb foods. Provided that's the case, I can
probably stay on this diet indefinitely. Or at least until I feel as though I'm
thin enough.
The question now becomes:
how thin do I want to be? And how to negotiate the change back to a diet that's
richer in carbohydrates, without going completely overboard and gaining weight
again? I know that it can be done, but it must be done gently, or else I'll
wreak havoc on my steadily improving
figure.
I dunno. I'm certainly a
believer. All this tripe I've heard - and practiced - about low-fat diets being
good for you is, in my own opinion, just so much hokum. It turns out that
carbohydrates are the bad guys, after all. Everything that I suspected before I
began the diet has been confirmed, in spades: the weight has dropped off me, I
feel really good, and my mood seems very stable. It's funny, because after
Thanksgiving dinner on Friday night, I could feel the emotional ebb-and-flow
that I hadn't felt for two weeks. That must have something to do with my blood
sugar rising and falling.
It is said
that addicted smokers, such as myself, have problems with blood-sugar
regulation, and use cigarettes to kick up their blood sugar, as needed, thus
intensifying the cycle of addiction within the body. That's what I was taught
back in 1986, and I still believe it today. In a few weeks, when I wean myself
off the nicorette, I'll have even more stable blood sugar, because nicotine
causes the body to release blood
sugar.
The other question is: how much
do I want to weigh? A body-mass chart states that I should weigh 172 lbs, but I
haven't weighed that since I was 17. I think I'd be very very happy if I got
down to 185, a figure that seemed nearly impossible last year, when I was
swimming 5x a week and eating a low-fat diet. Now it seems entirely doable, and
probably not more than a month away, if I keep up on a very low-carb diet. I
haven't put myself on a scale since I started this diet, so I don't know how
much I've lost. I've been judging myself by waist size. That figure, and my
figure, is dropping quickly.
It's very
exciting.
Postscript: I had to go buy a
pair of white pants for a "white party" iTV event I'm attending this evening in
Surry Hills. Went downtown and blew AUD$150 on a pair of white Levi's. God, at
those prices an AUD$1200 suit doesn't seem so outrageous. Anyway, I was
offered both the 35" and 36" waist pairs by the clerk. The 35" fit perfectly.
(And soon, they'll be too loose.) Whee!
Posted: Thu - December
4, 2003 at 03:52 PM