I figure it’s time to check in on how my carb testing is going. Days 3 & 4 were really tough, day 4 especially. I was exhausted, so much so that I didn’t go to work yesterday. But it hasn’t been all bad!
The positive effects, thus far:
- My skin looks better. Especially my pores.
- My eczema is a lot better. Not totally gone, but I’m not scratching myself until I bleed. 🙂 (I wish that were hyperbole.) The eczema that I have on my face, centered around my right eyebrow: above it, beneath it, on my eyelid and to the right of my eye approaching my hairline, is about 90% gone and the bit that’s left, above my eyebrow, doesn’t itch as much as it used to.
- My teeth feel cleaner and look whiter. (That last bit may be the power of suggestion since I’ve read quite a few accounts of people who are low carb and reported the same.)
- I’ve only had mild nausea once, yesterday, when my mom made me some homemade vegetable patty thing and fried it in grapeseed oil which I’ve stopped using in favor of more traditional fats like: butter, lard, coconut oil, and bacon fat.
- The chronic pain I’ve had in my lower back on the left side has disappeared.
- Today, and we’ll see if this is a trend that continues, I’m not tired. I am always tired. Since I can remember. A constant refrain in this community is that once your body makes the switch from burning carbs to burning fat, and once you get over the initial “carb flu”–hello days 3 &4!–you end up with a ton of energy. Again, we’ll have to see what happens tomorrow and the day after, but it would be awesome to not be tired all the time.
- I had already started cutting back on sugar and bread July 6th, the day after I watched Dr. Lustig’s video, and when I started this on July 19th I had lost 6 lbs and .5% body fat changing absolutely nothing else. Obviously, I was eating a lot of sugar. I’m not doing this to lose weight; I really am doing it for health. But it would be nice to fit into the jeans I bought that were the exact same size on the label as another pair I bought from the same manufacturer and yet somehow when I got them home and went to put them on 3 weeks later were 3/4 of a size smaller. *Eyeroll*
The difficulty with all of this has been mostly psychological. I really miss fruit. A lot. What I’d give for a juicy Georgia peach or the ability to make a banana smoothie. Nine more days, nine more days. I hate feeling restricted. My mom made baked “fried” chicken and coleslaw and I couldn’t have the chicken because she’d breaded it in panko and I couldn’t have the coleslaw because she’d put agave in it. (I’m not even going to talk about the fact that she used chicken I bought and made it in a way I couldn’t eat when I can only eat 5 things right now. Nope, not mentioning it.)
Speaking of chicken! I have a Grand Canyon size insecurity when it comes to cooking meat (hence these years of lazy vegetarianism) but on Wednesday, I baked some chicken (crusted in almond meal seasoned with s+p, cayenne and paprika in a cast iron skillet with lard and 4 garlic cloves on 400 for about 35 minutes) and it came out so juicy and delicious!!
My cameraphone did not accurately capture its delectableness.
In addition to the chicken, I’ve also been eating loads of eggs–I want to keep chickens, that’s how many eggs I’m eating–cheese, bacon, avocado, coconut flour biscuits, zucchini, bell pepper, mushroom, cabbage, almond meal pancakes (which certainly don’t compare to buttermilk pancakes in terms of taste but my God are they filling) or just skipping meals because I haven’t been as hungry.
So all in all, started a little rough but slowly getting better.
Footsteps On Concrete 