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Four Weeks Low Carb And SO Ready To Be Done

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I woke up yesterday morning and as I was weighing myself, I had a terrible thought: If I’d planned this stupid low-carb experiment for four weeks instead of six, I would be done and I could have a bagel for breakfast.

Honestly I have no idea why I picked six weeks. I knew it couldn’t be longer than that because at the end of the six weeks is my daughter’s birthday, and there was no way I was going to eat rabbit food for her birthday dinner and skip the cake. But I could have gone shorter! Four weeks seems like enough time to see if something works!!!

But I said six weeks, and I will do six weeks. I’m in the home stretch.

Last week, the fourth week, I lost 1.4 pounds. Definitely better than week three, which was only a 0.2 pound loss. And my body fat percentage went down a little too.

But now that I’ve had four weeks of this and can compare it to other diets that I’ve done for at least four weeks, I can confirm that for me, it’s just not the way to go. If I’d lost fifteen pounds then it would be worth it, but I didn’t. I’ve lost 8.6 pounds.

When I did SlimFast for four weeks a few years ago, I lost ten pounds. And I got to eat (and drink) carbs. When I counted calories (1,200 a day) about a year before that, I lost 25 pounds in 8 weeks, so let’s go ahead and say that I lost 12 or 13 pounds in the first four weeks, eating a lot of carbs.

Both SlimFast and calorie counting involved keeping track of everything I ate, which is super annoying. But now I know that that is better than cutting out carbs. I would eat 60%-70% carbs (I kept track), and I was still losing weight just fine.

There is nothing magical about cutting out carbs – carbs themselves don’t make you gain wait or keep you from losing weight. The trick is, if you give up carbs you’re supposed to be able to eat whatever else you want, and not keep track of your food, and still lose weight. But that only works because there’s pretty much nothing left to overeat on.

And that’s been one of the big benefits of the past month: For the first time in probably thirty years, I’ve been using food only for fuel, not enjoyment. I don’t overeat because I don’t like the food enough to keep going.

At least, that was true until Wednesday of last week. It was tax day, a very stressful day. I started snacking on peanuts instead of making lunch, and carried that all through dinner. By the time I was done I’d eaten about 2,900 calories just in peanuts, plus breakfast.

I thought maybe it was just the stress of tax day, and I’m sure that’s what started it, but I found myself overdoing it on peanuts for the next couple of days. One of my biggest problems has always been eating when I’m not hungry, and here I was, doing it again. Peanuts had replaced potato chips.

So, for the last two weeks of this thing, I’ve had to ban peanuts. I can still have the natural peanut butter that I put on bananas, but no peanuts. That sucks, but it’s necessary to keep me from ruining the experiment.

I also don’t think I’ve mentioned that I gave up the Kind Plus bars after two weeks. When I started this I was allowing myself one Kind bar each day. I wanted something that I could throw in my purse for a quick on-the-go snack, and I also thought I’d need that little bit of sugar to make it through the day.

The problem was, I was relying on it too much. It really was a huge cheat. It was the only added sugar I was eating, the only grains, the only chocolate. It tasted like heaven in a plastic wrapper. I looked forward to it each day more than I’ve ever looked forward to anything. Once I’d eaten that day’s bar, I was unbelievably sad.

I knew they had to go.

So, weeks 3 and 4 were Kind-Bar-free, and weeks 5 and 6 will be peanut-free. I wonder what I’ll start binging on next: Carrots? Hard-boiled eggs? Blue cheese crumbles?

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