Super Low Calorie

This has been a really strange week for me.  After a couple months of binging over the holidays I expected that it would take a month or two to bounce back to my usual plateau.  Well I didn’t.  Over the past 5 years I’ve been trying all sorts of lifestyle adjustments with diet and exercise.  One thing I haven’t tried is a very low calorie diet.  The reason, frankly, is that I thought I simply couldn’t do it.  I just love eating way too much.  I was able to learn to make several very healthy dishes that I’m able to eat day in and day out.  I mostly learned that eating any sugar or carbs instantly adds several pounds.  Though I think that’s mostly because I transform into Cookie Monster the moment I have any, and then overdo it.  And in general found a plateau I was… ok with.  This new plateau… not ok with.  
Usually weekends are my achilles heel.  But thanks to whatever random confluence of events, LAST weekend I just didn’t eat much, and stayed no-carb.  I ended up eating less than a thousand calories on Saturday and Sunday, and amazingly didn’t feel that terrible, so I figured, why not keep it going?  So that’s what I’ve done for the whole week.  In fact, the past several days I noticed that I didn’t particularly NEED to eat dinner, but still did just out of habit.  And finally yesterday I decided to try skipping it.  Yesterday I did 770 calories.  Now I’m really curious how low I can go.  Today I’m coming in at 557.  I feel hungry right now, but so far I’ve found that if I ignore it, it eventually goes away.  I’m discovering just how much of my eating is habitual rather than necessary.  The first ever-so-slight discomfort and it was “time to eat”.  Turns out that’s just my programming.  And it can be overwritten.  I had NO idea!   
I’m doing research on this and finding the usual whirlwind of contradicting ‘facts’.  Ultra Low Calorie diets prolong life and it’s the simplest way to lose fat.  
Also Ultra Low Calorie will kill you faster and only destroy your muscles leaving your fat, and then when you go back to a regular diet you’ll get even fatter.
I came across this article about why “starvation mode” is a silly concept.
While I’m pleasantly surprised to discover this super power I never knew I had before, it’s certainly not something I want to do all the time.  I’m still just way, way happier when I’m eating 4,000 calories of donuts, pizza and cookies a day.  I have yet to find the power to navigate the moderate position between the extremes.  But I’m feeling hopeful that discovering this new tool of super low calories will help me with that.  If nothing else, having EXPERIENCED 600 calories a day might help me to do a 1,200 cal/day with greater ease.  I always felt like I was seriously depriving myself when I did 1,200 - 1,500.  But now that I know that half that actually isn’t THAT bad, maybe it will be easier to stay on a moderate calorie deficit over the dreaded weekends.
The important thing to me is that any lifestyle change I do does not diminish my energy, creativity, health or mood.  One week is clearly not enough time to make that kind of assessment; but so far all those things have been excellent.  All week I’ve been coming home, walking with Heather, then working for a couple (sometimes several) hours on my giant sculpture.  I’m still developing creative ideas for Talifar, drawing more than ever in my sketchbook, and generally enjoying life.  (Not as much as when I’m eating a dozen cookies, but you know…)  


I think I’m going to ride this out as far as it will go and see what happens.  I figure I’ll either hit another plateau, plunge into a gluttonous frenzy at some point, or maybe, just maybe, slide right back into a healthy moderate calorie deficit.  Maybe I can cycle between moderate and extreme deficits!   I’ll keep me updated.  

 ______________________

 Update:  I went through all of Saturday fasting, and into Sunday making it an over 50 hour fast.  I mostly felt fine.  To break my fast I took my son to Denny’s and had a meat lover’s omelette with hash browns and toast.  I’m doing a Carb Night, so I also had some cake and nachos.  Still coming in under 1,800 which is WAY better than most splurges.  I think I’m still ‘on the rails’.  I’m really excited that I seem to have found the key to breaking my plateau!  

Comments

Unknown said…
Good luck to you!
6:36 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Epic Weekend

Image
Wow… I am worn out.  My team’s big project at work is live now, and we just released a big patch to fix some terrible difficulty spikes.  The last time we released Super Adventure Box: World 1 it got pretty universal praise.  (Which I put up here back in April)  Since then our founder/president has used it (Along with the Mad King Clock Tower I designed and built back in October 2012) as examples of content we release that raises retention rate, and therefore revenue.  So expectations were high for this World 2 release which came out on Tuesday.  The day after Labor Day and the Penny Arcade Expo.     Saturday (3 days before SAB World 2 launched) my company held a party at a hotel near PAX for fans, and my project, Super Adventure Box was the main feature.  We were running speed run competitions all night where players tried to be the first to get to the end of the new zones.  I ended up MCing the whole night.  I guess there...
Read more

Covid: 4 Years Later

Image
Before I begin let me quickly sketch the readers I'm writing this for, so you can decide if it's worth your 10 minutes. Firstly, this is for those of you who are at least somewhat sympathetic to people who are still worried about Covid and are sincerely curious why we are this way. I'm trying to present our case as coherently as I can, with references. (As well as I, a not-quite-professional writer can.) I'd like to convince you our stance is not based on fear, hypochondria, conspiracy theory, etc. But based on peer reviewed science. I'm also writing for myself and other folks who are taking Covid very seriously. I'm an ambassador by nature, so I like to facilitate understanding between groups where there is none. Many in my cohort simply cannot fathom how most of the world is not seeing the problem. Here's the agenda. First I'll quickly cover history of this pandemic, then some of what the science says about infectious disease and protecting ourselves....
Read more

A Covid Mask Prediction

Image
In speaking with several other covid conscious people I got a very nicely detailed prediction I wanted to record for posterity. They do not want to be credited with this out of concern for messenger-shooting. So I asked them if I could post it here anonymously and they agreed. Anon:"We are going to have mask requirements. I've done the math on all the possible interventions, and masks are the only one which can get the Rt down below 1 and actually stop the pandemic. Without masks, you can't do it; the other tools put together just aren't good enough (the best one, air filtration, maxes out at 80% effective, and so does Far-UVC, and this simply isn't enough with the infectiousness of Covid -- short-range transmission, which neither intervention stops, will keep it going at pandemic levels). Therefore we're going to get masks. I don't know how many maskless people will die before we get masks. But the math is inescapable. We start using respirator masks. Or m...
Read more