lao-ocean-girl

As you can probably tell, I had to take a break from the slow carb diet.  Last weekend, R. came to Portland to pick up his Japanese visa and I planned on taking a 2 day break from the diet.  I felt it’d be too hard to show someone around town and not partake in the deliciousness that Portland had to offer.  We ate tacos from the Korean taco truck, soy sauce wings from Pok Pok, pho, German pancakes, omelets, biscuits and jam, spicy wings, bacon, various soups, and beer.

In addition to all the food, we went shopping at Columbia’s employee store.  One of my brother’s best friend is a shoe designer there and everything was 50% off or more.  Unlike going to an outlet store, the merchandise was exactly what you’d find at Columbia.com.  Columbia also owns Mountain Hardwear and Sorel shoes, so those were also in the store.  I picked up the following jacket for $105, which retailed for $240.  For three days I wore the jacket with the tag still attached on the inside, making sure I really wanted it.  For a girl that gets cold in the sun, it’s so lightweight and warm that I had to keep it.  R. also picked up a down jacket for Japan, since he gave his old Burton jacket to “Part-timer.”  He found one he liked, paid for it, and wondered if he had made the right decision.  When he finally got to a computer and looked through the 103 near perfect reviews for the jacket, he felt better about paying the $130 or so for it.

When I returned to work on Monday, I felt the onset of a cold.  After almost a week, I think it’s finally disappearing.  During that time, I was not on the diet.  When you’re sick, you want comfort foods that don’t require waking up at 6am to make.  I had muffins, dairy, and sweets, but for the most part, I kept to the lunch and dinner requirements of the slow carb diet.  I know breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but I’ve never been a big breakfast eater.  I’ve really appreciated the convenience of the high protein meals for lunch and dinner.  In the mornings, I’d mix a can of black beans ($0.68), a package of spiced soybeans ($0.99), and a can of wild salmon ($1.76) together.  I’ll split this in half and have one portion for lunch and one for dinner.  Before I heated up the meals, I threw in frozen asparagus, green beans, or broccoli on top.  For $1.72 per meal, it’s really cheap and convenient for me.  Sometimes I’ll also throw a grilled chicken thigh, turkey patty, or salmon patty on top so I’ll have leftovers for an after-school snack at 3:30pm.  Of course, it’d be even cheaper with a can of tuna or  some other protein cooked at home, but I love salmon.

I’ll try the diet again, but to what extent?  The only thing I didn’t like about the experience was having to eat breakfast 30-60 minutes after waking up.  I don’t really like eating breakfast unless someone else is cooking it for me.  I’m happy with a liquid breakfast of coffee or tea since it seems like such a chore to force myself to eat when I don’t feel hungry in the morning.  I need to find some kind of breakfast mixture that I’d only need to heat up.  Frying up an egg almost seems like too much.  I’d like to try the experiment again, since 4 1/2 days was not a sufficient amount of time to make a judgment.  Day 1 starts again tomorrow.

No headache today.  Taking Brandon’s advice and others on forums, I tried to drink more water throughout the day.  Another person suggested that it could also be from a sugar withdrawal.  I’m pretty sure I don’t consume enough sugar to get headache withdrawals from it, but who knows?

Day 4 – Breakfast: 2 fried eggs and a turkey pattie with salsa. I had already started eating this until I remembered to take a picture.  7:30am

Day 4 – Lunch: A mixture of black beans, spiced soybeans, half a can of salmon, mushrooms, and asparagus.  11:30am

I only ate half of my lunch and ate the other half after school at 3:30pm.

Day 4 – Dinner: A turkey pattie with lots of salsa, black beans, green beans, and sugar-free Jell-O.  7:30pm.

Evening snack: Another Jell-O and half a cup of curry cashews.  I’m not sure I should have had the cashews… oops.

Tomorrow’s Friday and I’m already thinking about the two cheat days I’m going to have.  That’s right – Saturday and Sunday will be mildly glutonnous.  I already know I can’t be a proper Portland tour guide this weekend without joining in on the city’s delicious food.  Plus, Sunday is the Super Bowl.  Beer and bar food are unfortunately not low carb.  My last justification is that I’m not really fat, so stalling weight loss is okay for now.

Yesterday I had a rough day with my students and had a dull headache after school, around 3:00pm.  At the time, I chalked it up to the kids, even though I’ve never had a headache so far this year.  Today, I had another headache around the same time, even though it was a pretty good day.  So now, I’m wonder if my diet had something to do with it.  Maybe I’m not eating enough, or maybe I’m eating too much protein?  I don’t think so, but I’m definitely more aware of how I feel.  Overall, I feel like I did before, but I think about food more often.  I find myself thinking about my cheat day and fantasizing what I’ll eat.  Actually, I might end up using two cheat days (only 1 is allowed) because a friend is coming in from out of town.

Breakfast: a turkey burger pattie, asparagus, and mushroom.  7:00am

Lunch: 2 chicken thighs, asparagus, and black beans.  11:30am.

Snack 1: 2 mini cucumbers and a hard-boiled egg.  5:30pm

Snack 2: half an avocado and seaweed.  6:00pm

Dinner: 2 pieces of breakfast steak, 2 fried eggs, green beans, and a small bowl of salmon tom yum soup.  A half cup of Jell-o is not pictured.  8:00pm.

I decided last night at 10:30 to cook some chicken thighs in a crock pot to save me time.  I put in five skinless chicken thighs, filled it with chicken stock, 1 tablespoon of minced garlic, salt, and pepper.  After turning on the pot to low, the chicken cooked overnight for 7 hours.  I don’t know why I didn’t fill up the pot so that all the chicken was covered in stock, but the piece on the top was a little dry.  Other than that, it turned out very well.

Since it was hot, I ate one of the thighs for breakfast.

Day 2 – Breakfast: a chicken thigh, black beans, and green beans.  7:00am

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Day 2 – Lunch: 2 chicken thighs, pinto beans, and asparagus.  11:30am

Day 2 – Snack: 2 mini cucumbers, a hard-boiled egg, and half an avocado.  4:00pm

I also finished one of the chicken thighs left over from lunch.

Day 2 – Dinner: 2 pieces of breakfast steak, green beans, and a fried egg.  9:00pm

I was so hungry by 8pm and craving something sweet so badly.  I don’t have to eat a lot of sweets, but I do like having a piece of chocolate or candy once in awhile.  Not being able to eat any made me want it so much more!  Even though I’m allowed to have sugar substitutes, people on forums have said it hinders them from losing more weight.  I’m not concerned about losing weight, but I DO want to stick to the diet as much as possible.  Sugar-free Jell-o seemed to be one of the few things people ate to help with cravings.  Others were cottage cheese and almond butter, but they don’t really feel like desserts to me.  I think I’ll have one more Jell-o cup before bed tonight.  Oh yea… at 5’8″ (173cm), I weighted 132 pounds (60 kilos) this morning.

On a typical day, I usually wake up around 5:30am, get dressed, eat some oatmeal, get my lunch ready, and arrive to work at 7:00am.  Today was my first day on the diet and I set my alarm for 5:00am, but I lounged around until 5:20, when I remembered that I should eat within 30 minutes of waking up.  I wasn’t really prepared, but here’s what I came up with.

Day 1 – Breakfast: 3 fried organic eggs, black beans, and cauliflower and romanesco. 6:00am.

I opened up one can of beans, rinsed it out, spooned some for breakfast, and the rest was saved for lunch.  I heated up the entire bag of cauliflower and romanesco from Trader Joe’s.  The rest of the cauliflower and beans were put towards lunch.

Day 1 – Lunch: chicken thigh, black beans, and cauliflower and romanesco.  11:30am.

The rest of the black beans and cauliflower were put into tupperware and the chicken thigh was laid on top.  It looked like a lot of food for lunch, but what I didn’t eat could be a snack.

Day 1 – Snack: Finished the rest of the cauliflower and beans from lunch.  1:15pm

Day 1 – Snack: 2 mini cucumber and a hard-boiled egg.  (I thought I had taken a picture of it, but I was wrong.)  4:00pm

Day 1 – Dinner: chicken thigh, asparagus, pinto beans.  8:00pm

I was pretty hungry by 8:00pm and still felt hungry after eating dinner.  I didn’t wait for the food to settle.  Immediately after that, I ate 2 mini cucumbers and spooned salsa on top for flavor.  That seemed to satiate my hunger and I’m now enjoying a glass of red wine before bed.

The first day was pretty easy.  Here are some observations:

• I’ve never bought them but canned beans aren’t bad. They’re already seasoned with salt, so after I opened the can and rinsed it, they were ready to eat.  I didn’t even heat them up this morning.
• The food was filling enough, but I’m waiting to gauge my energy level.
• I miss having a dessert or treat, like a piece of chocolate or fruit.  I can’t think of anything that’s a reward or treat.  The closest thing to a treat today was the salsa.
• I forgot to weigh myself this morning.  Oops.  Hopefully I’ll remember tomorrow.

Dear internet, I’ve decided to start an experiment for a month.  I’ve always been a fan of Tim Ferriss and his blog.  Over the past two months, I’ve bought three copies of his newest book, The Four Hour Body, and given them away as presents.  W, who I gave a book to, has been reading it and telling me surprising facts from it.  Specifically, I’m interested in the chapter called: The Slow-Carb Diet I: How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise.  First of all, I want to preface this by saying I hate the word “diet.”  To most, a diet means starving yourself and being unhappy in order to lose weight.  To me, a diet means changing the foods I eat, but not necessarily to lose weight.  I did the Atkins diet with R because I was curious to see what kind of changes my body would go through.  After a couple months, my weight barely moved and I didn’t see much of a difference at all.  I ended up cursing myself for staying away from bakeries for so long.  R,  on the other hand, lost a significant amount of weight.  I concluded that through the luck of genetics, carbohydrates don’t greatly affect my weight.

If that’s the case, why do I want to start the Slow-Carb Diet?  On Tim’s blog, I read a guest post by Robb Wolf called “How to Keep Feces out of Your Bloodstream (or Lose 10 pounds in 14 days)“.  The information on digestion and improving digestion were fascinating to me.  Since moving back to Oregon, good food, healthy eating, cooking, gardens, and ways to improve my body have become important to me.  I believe we are what we eat and I’m slowly starting to become more conscious of how different foods affect me.  About a year ago, I had a severe reaction to something I ate.  I had huge hives from head to toe for about 3 days and was in a stages of agony and disgust at the welts on my body.  To this day, I still don’t know what caused it, but I assume it was food because everything else was as it always was.

I’m trying this experiment for five reasons:

1. Better digestion? I’ve felt more bloated and gassy since being back in the States.  Until recently, I didn’t make the connection that the foods I love could be doing this to me.  Upon coming back in 2009, I heard the term “gluten-free” for the first time and thought it was just another hippie trend.  After finding out what it was, I learned that some people had better digestion and more energy after cutting it out from their diet.  I don’t have Celiacs disease, but I want to know what foods are a good fit for me.
2. I like challenges. I wonder if I have enough self-control to do this for a month.
3. It’s only a month. If I don’t like it, I can go back to my regularly scheduled programming on March 1st.
4. It’s relatively easy. These are foods I’d be eating anyway.  Plus, there’s one cheat day to eat anything you want.
5. Moral support. W is going to do it too, so it’ll be fun to compare our progress.

Here are the five rules:

Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates

Avoid any carbohydrate that is — or can be — white. The following foods are thus prohibited, except for within 1.5 hours of finishing a resistance-training workout of at least 20 minutes in length: bread, rice, cereal, potatoes, pasta, and fried food with breading. If you avoid eating anything white, you’ll be safe.

Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again

The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat loss, eat the same few meals over and over again. Mix and match, constructing each meal with one from each of the three following groups:

Proteins:
Egg whites with one whole egg for flavor
Chicken breast or thigh
Grass-fed organic beef
Pork

Legumes:
Lentils
Black beans
Pinto beans

Vegetables:
Spinach
Asparagus
Peas
Mixed vegetables

Eat as much as you like of the above food items. Just remember: keep it simple. Pick three or four meals and repeat them. Almost all restaurants can give you a salad or vegetables in place of french fries or potatoes. Surprisingly, I have found Mexican food, swapping out rice for vegetables, to be one of the cuisines most conducive to the “slow carb” diet.

Rule #3: Don’t drink calories

Drink massive quantities of water and as much unsweetened iced tea, tea, diet sodas, coffee (without white cream), or other no-calorie/low-calorie beverages as you like. Do not drink milk, normal soft drinks, or fruit juice. I’m a wine fanatic and have at least one glass of wine each evening, which I believe actually aids sports recovery and fat-loss. Recent research into resveratrol supports this.

Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit

Humans don’t need fruit six days a week, and they certainly don’t need it year-round.  If your ancestors were from Europe, for example, how much fruit did they eat in the winter 500 years ago?  Think they had Florida oranges in December?  Not a chance.  But you’re still here, so the lineage somehow survived.  The only exception to the no-fruit rule are tomatoes and avocadoes, and the latter should be eaten in moderation.  Otherwise, just say no to fruit and its principal sugar, fructose, which is converted to glycerol phosphate more efficiently than most all other carbohydrates.  Glycerol phosphate –> triglycerides (via the liver) –> fat storage.

Rule #5: Take one day off per week

I recommend Saturdays as your “Dieters Gone Wild” day. I am allowed to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, and I go out of my way to eat ice cream, Snickers, Take 5, and all of my other vices in excess. I make myself a little sick and don’t want to look at any of it for the rest of the week. Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate (thyroid function, etc.) doesn’t downregulate from extended caloric restriction. That’s right: eating pure crap can help you lose fat. Welcome to Utopia.

All the rules are easy, except for #4.  No fruit!?  Whenever I’m hungry, I usually grab an apple or pear.  I’ll start the diet on Monday, January 31, which will be easier than starting on Tuesday, February 1st.  This kind of meal plan actually suits me pretty well.  I don’t mind eating the same 3-4 meals during the workweek because I’m too busy to think about what to make for lunches and dinners.  Plus, I usually splurge and go to more expensive restaurants on the weekend.  In preparation, I went grocery shopping today.  Everything I’ll be eating will come from today’s purchase, so I’ll also be able to calculate how much I’m spending per meal.  The proteins should last me 2-3 weeks, if not longer.  I’ll probably have to buy more vegetables and legumes in 1 1/2 – 2 weeks.

Trader Joe’s

• spiced soybeans (read to eat)               1.98
• frozen asparagus spears                         1.99
• frozen shelled edamame                        1.49
• frozen french green bean                       1.99
• frozen cauliflower and romanesco       2.99
• frozen bean, broccoli, & cauliflower    2.99
• frozen minced basil                                 1.99
• jar of crushed garlic                                 1.79    *frozen veggies will really save me time.  Just heat and eat!

Total: $17.21

Costco

• ~15 Turkey burger patties                 10.69
• chicken thighs w/ skin (12 pieces)    8.90
• 18 cage-free, organic eggs                  4.99
• 6 cans pink salmon                            10.59
• 1 bag of mini cucumbers                     5.59

Total: $40.16

WinCo

• 1 can refried beans (from black beans)    1.04    * canned beans will be easier this week.
• 1 can pinto beans                                          0.58
• 1 can black beans                                          0.68
• 1 can black beans                                          0.68
• 2 small avocadoes                                          1.56
• dried red beans    (1.59 lbs @ 0.78/lb)      1.24
• breakfast steak                                               4.64    *not the best cut, but it’ll satisfy my beef needs this week.

Total: $10.42

GRAND TOTAL: $67.79

Well, my plan is out there for the world to see, so I’ve got to follow through on it.  Check back for daily updates!

This story makes me so happy.