Still Going Renegade (Round 2, Phase 2, Day 15)

I am being far from perfect on this diet this time around, and I was pretty damn close to perfect in Round 1.

Here are the diet tenets I am following:

• HCG drops 3x a day (was doing 12, upped it to 15 to see if helped with hunger)
• Eating 99% protocol foods
• Eating VLCD (I have gone as far as 700 cals, but only on days when I run)
• Drinking tons of water.
• Absolutely, positively no sugar or gluten

Here's where I'm being a bad-ass renegade:

• Diet coke! Drank it a few days in a row and didn't notice a change in weight loss, so I'm having some more often. I know this is something I should forgo because it is chemical crap, but it just keeps me from feeling so deprived.
• Mixing vegetables. Today I had 2 c of salad with all core vegetables. Tonight I'm going to have shrimp with sugar-free salsa.
• A few, small, rare foods that are not on protocol. Ex: 3-5 rice crackers (no sugar, no gluten) last night, protein shake this morning before running (with stevia, not fake sugar or real sugar) and a banana. My run felt fantastic this morning. Much better than when I eat eggs.
• More slacking on measuring vegetables. Spinach is less than 20 calories a cup. Does it really matter if I have 2 or 3 cups?

I'm torn on this. Part of me feels like if I'm going to do this, I should just do it and do it perfectly. Part of me thinks that if I was doing it perfectly, I would have already quit this round. I'm still losing weight at a decent rate even without worrying about wearing gloves when I handle oily food and whether I mix my vegetables at lunch. I also know it is a slippery slope, and part of what I think is great about how strict this diet is that it doesn't give you any room to wiggle, which makes you more successful. Although I'm doing ok even with this amount of wiggle room, will it be a slippery slope to more and more wiggling, eventually resulting in failure?

Final Stats for Round One

Day	Date	Weight	Daily Change	Total Loss
Day 1	11/1/2010	229.6	n/a	n/a
Day 2	11/2/2010	225.6	-4.0	-4
Day 3	11/3/2010	221.6	-4.0	-8
Day 4	11/4/2010	218.6	-3.0	-11
Day 5	11/5/2010	218.6	0.0	-11
Day 6	11/6/2010	216.4	-2.2	-13.2
Day 7	11/7/2010	215.8	-0.6	-13.8
Week 1 summary: down 13.8 #
Day 8	11/8/2010	214.8	-1.0	-14.8
Day 9	11/9/2010	215.4	0.6	-14.2
Day 10	11/10/2010	213.8	-1.6	-15.8
Day 11	11/11/2010	213.6	-0.2	-16
Day 12	11/12/2010	215	1.4	14.6
Day 13	11/13/2010	213	-2.0	-16.6
Day 14	11/14/2010	212.2	-0.8	-17.4
Week 2 summary: down 3.6 # this week; 17.4 # total
Day 15	11/15/2010	212.4	0.2	-17.2
Day 16	11/16/2010	210	-2.4	-19.6
Day 17	11/17/2010	210.2	0.2	19.4
Day 18	11/18/2010	209.4	-0.8	20.2
Day 19	11/19/2010	208.6	-0.8	21
Day 20	11/20/2010	208	-0.8	21.8
Day 21	11/21/2010	207.6	-0.4	-22
Week 3 summary: down 4.6# this week; 22 total
Day 22	11/22/2010	206.6	-1.0	-23
Day 23	11/23/2010	207	0.4	-22.6
Day 24	11/24/2010	206.6	-0.4	-23
Day 25	11/25/2010	205	-1.6	-24.6
Day 26	11/26/2010	204.6	-0.4	-25
Day 27	11/27/2010	204.6	0.0	-25
Day 28	11/28/2010	203.6	-1.0	-26
Week 4 summary: down 4# this week; 26 total
Day 29	11/29/2010	203.2	-0.4	-26.4
Day 30	11/30/2010	203.2	0.0	-26.4
Day 31	12/1/2010	201.4	-1.8	-28.2
Day 32	12/2/2010	201	-0.4	-28.6
Day 33	12/3/2010	200.8	-0.2	-28.8
Day 34	12/4/2010	199.6	-0.8	-30
Day 35	12/5/2010	200.8	1.2	-28.8
Week 5 summary: down 2.8# this week; 28.8  total
Day 36	12/6/2010	200.8	0.0	28.8
Day 37	12/7/2010	199.2	-1.6	-30.4
Day 38	12/8/2010	199.2	0.0	-30.4
Day 39	12/9/2010	198.8	-0.4	-30.8
Day 40	12/10/2010	198.4	-0.4	-31.2
Day 41	12/11/2010	197.6	-0.8	-32
Day 42	12/12/2010	198.2	0.6	-31.4
Day 43	12/13/2010	197.8	-0.4	-31.8
Day 44	12/14/2010	198.2	0.4	-31.4
Week 6 summary: down 2.6# this week; 31.4 total

MEASUREMENTS	Difference 10/27 to 12/6
WEIGHT:	-27.4
Neck	-1
Shoulders	-3.5
Right Arm	-1
Left Arm	-1
Upper Chest	-2.25
Chest/Bust	-3.5
Bra Line	-1.5
Upper Stomach	-3.5
Waist	-4.75
Belly	-5
Hips	-2.75
Right Thigh	-2.75
Right Knee	-0.5
Right Calf	-1.5
Left Thigh	-2
Left Knee	-0.5
Left Calf	-1.5
TOTAL	-38.5

The Diet in Review

I feel like my tag line (a skeptic takes on the HCG diet) requires me to do a little retrospective of the last 43 days. You know...misty, water-colored memories of the way we were.

When I started this diet, I thought it was absolute horse shit. I had seen a couple of good friends do well on it and had resisted joining them for months while I maintained a small weight loss and recovered from a serious ankle injury. But once my weight started creeping back up and I regained in a month what it had taken me 15 months to lose, I just panicked. I did my research. I talked about it with everyone I know (and most people fell into two camps: very in favor or very against). I weighed pros and cons. I carefully considered. And then I just did it, telling Shannon privately not to be embarrassed or to feel like a failure if I dropped out after a few days. I honestly did not think I could hack being super hungry.

And I was super hungry for the first week or so. I'm told it could be because I didn't load up properly or it could be because I had a lot of sugar detoxing to do. Who knows. But I was super hungry. And you know what? It didn't kill me!  I felt otherwise fine. And I lost a shit load of weight the first week (13.8 lbs the first week alone). I started adjusting my expectations and planned to lose 35-40 pounds; after all, if I could lose almost 14 the first week, surely I could lose 26 more in FIVE additional weeks, right?

Weeks 2-5 were actually pretty easy. I ate mostly chicken and lean, grass-fed ground beef with occasional fish thrown in for variety. I pan fried my meat with no oil in a nonstick pan and usually ate it over a salad of spinach or mixed greens, though I did a lot of cucumber and tomato too. I varied my fruit as much as I could considering I was only allowed to have 4 different fruits. I tried to vary the time of day I ate. I did light exercise (yoga, walking) 3-5 times a week (the advice was to exercise a lesser amount but every day, I did more but not every day). My cheats were so minor that I think they hardly count as cheats, considering I could have binged on pizza or something.

I felt GOOD. I felt physically fine, mentally sharp, and mostly upbeat and positive. I felt so good that I forgot to take my crazy pills for a week (wellbutrin and lexapro) and had a bit of a crash, which manifested itself mostly in feeling really pissed off at everyone all the time. But mostly I felt less depressed and less anxious than I have in years. My theory is that sugar really tweaks my anxiety, but it's a theory I look forward to testing in a very conscious, deliberate way either during maintenance or on my next gorge days.

I don't think I had quite as much muscle strength or endurance as I normally do, but I had plenty to do my daily activities with ease plus some light exercise. I had way more energy at night in the 8-11p.m. time frame than I usually do.

I replaced some of my bad eating habits or routines with better habits: I've been exercising with friends a lot this month (shooting for 3x a week of either walks or pilates classes at the gym). I've been knitting at night while I watch TV (mostly Intervention), which feels relaxing and productive. I know watching TV is not ideal and that reading or doing something around the house would be better, and hopefully that will work well for me soon. I have been blogging a lot here and reading up on the diet, which I think has helped my daytime cravings and habits.

Week 6, I started to get hungry again, and I started to suspect that my body was just DONE, but I stuck with it mostly for bragging rights--I wanted to be able to say I finished the whole t hing. But I lost very little weight (in the following chart, you can see I lost only 1.4 lbs in the last 10 days. That would be a pretty normal rate for me on Weight Watchers, by the way; about a pound a week.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that I didn't lose a little more. My goal was to lose 35-40 pounds (I have now learned that the MD associated with my local group says to stop at 34 no matter what, so I didn't even have a realistic goal in the first place!) and then be better positioned to lose the last 20 or so the old-fashioned way. But I have about 30 left to lose, so I feel fairly certain I'll be doing another round in late January/early February to get the last 30 off. And wouldn't it be nice if I could do it in 4 or 5 weeks instead of 6 weeks? I think Holly (a commenter) is going to do it with me then. Olivia can't start her second round until later in the spring because of various other life commitments, but I know she'll be following along and trying to actively participate in her own maintenance.

So, hearkening back to the pros and cons I did at the beginning before I knew what this diet was about, let me give a new perspective on the pros and cons.

PROS (of this diet, as opposed to diets in general):

1. You lose a lot of weight very fast. This allows you to maintain enthusiasm and will power because it gives you instant gratification.

2. You're eating super healthy food--organic meat, fruit and vegetables, which just makes you feel really good and healthy.

3. Anyone can do this--it's so short! It's only 40 days (or less even). If you hate it, you just have to hang in there for 6 weeks. Anyone can do that.

4. I had plenty of energy the whole time while still losing weight rapidly.

5. My body fat monitor says I have lost fat and increased muscle, despite losing 31 pounds in 43 days.

6. The limited choice of food actually frees you up from thinking about food all the time and figuring out how to game the system. You only have a few choices.

7. My sense of taste is greatly enhanced.

8. I understand more about the difference between cravings and hunger and hope to take that knowledge with me into maintenance and beyond.

9. This has been tremendous validation of my willpower for me, considering I haven't had much faith in it. I almost think a total detox diet like this was the only way I could get out of the sugar rut I was in. Had I done WW or a similar program, I would have cheated because I would have still been eating sugar, which would have let to binges.

10. It is relatively easy, or at least it feels easy. While I have blogged at length about how I think some of the rules are really dumb, they really aren't THAT hard to follow, whether or not you believe them. I swear. I know it looks hard, but it really wasn't. I am giving you the straight skinny here--I'm not selling drops or anything.

11. HUGE health benefits. I have lost 31 pounds, reduced my BMI from 34 to 29 (from obese to merely overweight), and some recent lab tests confirmed that this diet (probably in conjunction with the massive exercise program I undertook from January through July) has reduced my bad cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and raised my good cholesterol. The last time I had labs done was in early 2008 right after having a baby, so it's been almost 3 years, but the exercise and diet are the most likely culprits for the positive changes in my labs.

12. Discipline and confidence--it has got to be good for my weight loss efforts and for my psyche overall to really believe I can do something instead of constantly feeling like a big failure.

CONS (of this particular diet, as opposed to diets in general):

1. I was worried about the impact of this diet on my almost-6-year-old daughter, and in fact she was very aware of it. No matter how I tried to explain it to her in terms of health and shrinking my body to make intense exercise safer, she was constantly offering me food. Somewhere along the line, she learned about Karen Carpenter (probably because her horrible Christmas carol is on the radio every five minutes) and in the last few days has asked me if I am starving myself and if I'm going to die "like that singer." I look at it as an opportunity for education, but I would never, ever, recommend that SHE ever do this diet to lose weight (unnecessarily extreme, at least for anyone under 21), which I recognize is highly hypocritical.

2. It ain't cheap. The drops cost between $20-60 a pop, depending on where you get them and what you get. I needed three "pops." I am lucky to have a friend who has been coaching me to prepare for starting an HCG clinic, but some people also pay hundreds for the coaching.

3. Eating is a pain. We eat out a lot, we eat with friends a lot, and there is just no way to do that safely. The food is too specific. So I had to either eat before I went or bring my own food, either of which leads to questions and logistical annoyances. Plus, the food is so limited it gets boring.

4. I felt a little like a crazy person. I have a lot of smart, rational friends and relatives who looked on this diet at best with bemused acceptance and at worst with hostility. This diet just SOUNDS crazy, and when you tell people about it, they think you are crazy. That won't bother some people, but it was really hard for me. The social support for a radical diet like this is just not there the same way it is for other kinds of eating regiments.

5. You get sort of obsessed with your weight and the diet, which could be a bad thing for people with a history of certain kinds of eating disorders. I thought about food very little, but I thought about the diet a lot. I think it would be hard to be very successful without that kind of focus. But I will say my productiveness at work flagged in the last few weeks, what with maintaining this blog and researching recipes and such.

6. There remains little or no scientific evidence of the validity of this diet, which can make it hard to power through when motivation is flagging (which is why the quick weight loss is such a good reinforcement). There are very few case studies out there on the interwebz of long-term, successful weight loss. There are very few studies of any kind either about the HCG diet in general or the homeopathic HCG drops in particular.

*******

On balance? Not the slightest regret. I am so glad I did it. It started out as an experiment, and now I am 31 pounds lighter in 43 days. The real proof will be whether I have kept it off in 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. I feel like I have some things in place that will help me succeed on the maintenance plan, and I have learned a lot about my own body that will serve me well in the next round.

Would I recommend it to someone else? A qualified yes. If you have at least 20 pounds to lose, if you have a history of issues with food, if you feel like you have tried lots of other things and failed, and if you are prepared to really commit to this 100% for 6 weeks of weight loss and 6 weeks of maintenance, then yes, I would recommend it for you.

If any of these conditions aren't true, I would consider a more traditional weight loss program first.

Thoughts? Comments? Agree or disagree with any of my pros and cons?

Last Day of Drops (P2, D40)

Y'all, I have been eating 500 calories a day for 40 days. 500 healthy calories. I honestly didn't think I could do it. Again, not to glamorize starving yourself (because I haven't been that hungry for most of the 40 days), but I am kind of proud of myself that I have stuck with this. It hasn't been impossible, but it hasn't been easy. I have eaten at friends' houses (and brought my own food or eaten before or after) 13 times in the 40 days. I have hosted my WW mother-in-law at my house for the weekend (and am doing it again this weekend). I've survived Thanksgiving and early Christmas party season. It hasn't been easy. But I did it! And today is my 40th day!

After today, which is my last day of voodoo drops, I have three more days of 500 calories. However, we are driving to Washington, DC tomorrow with my inlaws for a special Christmas production--it's a family tradition and one that we do every year. I think I can do pretty well with food choices but maybe not 100% protocol. We'll see how it goes--it may be impossible to get totally naked meat and only one protocol vegetable. I guess I could make some food and bring it with me. I'm gonna think on it.

I lost 0.4 this morning, so continued slow loss. I technically had my third cheat of the diet last night, though it was unintentional. I had to pick up my dinner at the local health food store in between a meeting and my pottery class, and they had chicken deli meat, fresh off the roasted chicken breast. I looked at the ingredients and didn't see anything bad (no oil, no sugar, just spices), so I ate about 4 slices and then saw an asterisk on the list of ingredients that said "*less than 1% of each of the following," and one of them was honey. But I still lost a little this morning. I was kind of expecting a bigger drop today; I feel smaller. Maybe it will come tomorrow, or maybe my body is just done for now.

I haven't reached the goal that I thought would be pretty easy to each (195 lbs or less). And I don't think I'm going to get there in the next 3 days at the rate I'm losing now. But I am really and truly okay with that. I've had a little attitude shift in the last week or so. I just feel really good.

I lost 2.8 last week and 2.4 so far this week. I was thinking this morning that I probably should have stopped this about a week ago, but in for a dime, in for a dollar, you know? If I do another round in late January/early February to get some more off, I think I am going to listen to my body a bit more and quit sooner if I feel like I should.

I feel awesome today. I went to Pilates at 8:10 this morning. I looked around the room, and you know what? I was probably still the biggest person in there, but not so big that everyone else would be wondering what the fat girl was doing in an exercise class. I am wearing cute little yoga pants that make my ass look pretty good and a cute little yoga top that shows off my waist. I'm excited to start doing more strength-building exercise once I'm eating a bit more food and have the calories to support it.

I almost, nearly, for about a half second looked at my body in all those pilates studio mirrors and thought, "hmm, maybe I'm done. Maybe this is good enough." I'm still very overweight according to BMI and weight though, but it was nice to be kind and flattering and appreciative of myself for that one half second. It also helped that I ran into a few people I know at the gym and every single one of them commented on my weight loss. One didn't even recognize me. I know external validation shouldn't mean so much, but it does.

At this particular moment in time, I am nothing but excited and optimistic about the future as it specifically relates to food, eating, diet, etc. I feel really, really good.