This is the end of my first month of moderation! I updated the progress page to reflect this week’s achievement of staying pretty nearly in the exact same place. And it’s okay! It doesn’t look like anything is happening, and yet I just know it is. I’m not worried at all about the lack of anything visible on the outside, because I know a lot is changing on the inside. Blogging is such a huge help, it really keeps me focused on this project, when I’d otherwise get bored and discouraged and wander off. I had some really hard days this week, and at one point I felt pretty sick and thought I was getting the Hamthrax, but through it all I kept thinking about how I could keep working toward my goals, even while I was miserable and curled up whining.
Food tracking success – by which I mean success at tracking, and success at inhaling anything chocolate that came near me
I tracked 4 days worth of food this week, which is a new habit, and an incredibly useful one. I don’t know if it was being sick, or what, but my nutrient percentages are awful. This is the daily average of four days worth of tracking food:
- 10% protein
- 51% carbohydrates
- 38% fat (which is hilarious when you consider that I myself am about 38% fat – suddenly that phrase “You are what you eat” takes on a whole new meaning).
This isn’t normal, for what it’s worth. I’ve eaten a heapload (that’s the technical term) of candy over the last four days, easily many times more than I usually would (normally I don’t really eat candy, to be honest – I’m more inclined toward cookies). What have I learned from this? First: Halloween is evil. Second: a bowl of candy in my house is sort of like a bowl of beer in a frat house – it just isn’t going to last long. Next year, there MUST BE PLANS put in place for the leftover crack cocaine candy.
I’m going to try and kick it up a notch in Month 2, starting with daily tracking using Lose It!, and a more structured exercise program that will include working with weights 2-3 times a week.
Panic attacks and lactic acid?
I’m currently doing research (uh, that is I have a good friend of mine doing research, she’s a librarian) on the connection between lactic acid and panic attacks. I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks, but basically I’ve noticed a very specific kind of “attack” that happens to me after weight lifting. It very rarely happens after aerobic exercise. For years I’ve tried to tell people that I have trouble with panic attacks after working out, and for years the response from shrinks and doctors has been, “Oh yah, people who are anxious get nervous about their heart rate getting high, and they panic.” I get that this is probably true for a great many panic sufferers, and I admit I’m not a big fan of my heart racing, but what I’m feeling is very different. I can do an aerobic workout with my heart thumping and be just fine, but it’s after I do anything with weights that I have this very particular kind of attack.
I finally made the connection to lactic acid, and the small amount of Googling I’ve done on the issue seems to suggest that there is a connection between lactic acid and panic attacks. For that reason, I’ll be starting my strength workouts very, very slowly, and build up. It will take a great deal of consistency to make the slow and steady progress I hope to make, and it’s really important to me that I stick to it. If you notice me over-focused on strength work for the next few weeks, this is why!
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Are your nutrient percentages based on quantities consumed, or on kcals from each source? Remember, fat has 9 kcals per gram while carbs and proteins have 4 kcals per gram. So your ratios might be different depending on how you do the math.
I just checked the program, and it appears to be quantities consumed, because it’s measuring grams, not calories. This means the percentages are EVEN WORSE, doesn’t it?
It’s a high quantity of fat proportionally, yes. A bodybuilder’s diet, for example, is often described as 40/40/20 Protein/Carbs/Fats. That’s in quantity consumed, not caloric value.
The FDA recommends that 20%-35% of an adult’s calories come from fats, which you can essentially halve to come up with 10%-17% of quantity consumed. However, the FDA doesn’t differentiate between recommending a low-fat diet for health reasons (such as lowering cholesterol and preventing heart disease) or for weight loss. No matter which way you slice it, science shows that getting more calories from fat doesn’t make you fat, even if it can make you unhealthy in other ways.
As the poster child for butter, I feel obligated to note that especially if you consume a lot of processed sugar in addition to fats, and if you eat more calories than you burn in a day, it is very easy for your body to use the calories from fat as immediate energy, and to convert the calories from sugar into fat for later use. Foods that are marketed as low-fat often have more sugar to improve their flavor. This is sabotage for someone who only worries about fat content and not calories.
Sugar is one of the easiest ways to trigger the pancreas to produce insulin. Insulin, in turn, causes fat cells to soak up glucose in the bloodstream. Now, protein consumption also triggers the production of insulin, but if there is not a lot of glucose in the bloodstream, the immediate impact of insulin triggering glucose storage is somewhat (but not entirely) mitigated.
(Don’t let anybody tell you that that’s why low-carb diets work, though. They only work for one reason: it’s really hard to eat the same number of calories in protein as you can eat when you also eat carbs. Usually, low-carb dieters just eat less food. The ones who totally compensate for the removal of carbs by eating a proportionally larger quantity of protein and fat don’t lose any weight.)
I’m impressed by how well you are doing with moderation. I confess I was a bit dubious that you’d stick with such a seemingly boring and vague game plan, but the way you are committing to moderation does seem to be the right start for the long road to understanding your own body and long term health.
I, too, have difficulty with cookies (even the crappy store-bought kind). Fortunately, we are not surrounded by children, so I’m able to control the inputs a bit better.
Focusing on tracking right now will give you some great information on your baseline, and the more and longer you track, the more you can look for patterns. For me, tracking showed me something odd: on the days when I eat a big breakfast, I snack less after supper. Strange to have an effect 14 hours later, I admit. This knowledge has given me permission to eat more for breakfast when I’m hungry for it.
Tracking your hunger, cravings, and then looking later for patters may be a bit obsessive, but it you track, at least you can have data to test against later, if you are curious.
Have you charted your caloric intake over the course of the day to see what triggers spikes?
am proud of you and your moderation!
it is very moderate of you and all.
Hollie,
I’ve checked into the lactic acid thing, too. I try to do some cardio after lifting weights, but it doesn’t seem to help too much, unfortunately. I would love to know if you came across anything interesting, though, as I suffer from the exact same thing (I just left a comment on your post about exercise causing anxiety–as you will see, I’ve gotten the exact same response from doctors; they just don’t get it and won’t really listen)….