WEIGHT: 126.5 kg (The scale seemed pretty sure of itself today. I got this number three times in a row. Because my scale—which is electronic—is so volatile, I normally weigh myself five to seven times, looking for a single number to pop up repeatedly. In today's case, the weights over five weighings looked like this: B-A-A-A-C, so since 126.5 was the "A" weight, I went with that. Now you know my weighing rationale. If you have a more statistically/methodologically rigorous method, let me know in the comment section.)
We can take a moment to recap my weight loss over the past eight days:
Day 1: 129.6 kg
Day 2: 130.0 kg
Day 3: 129.4 kg
Day 4: 129.6 kg
Day 5: 128.8 kg
Day 6: 127.5 kg
Day 7: 127.0 kg
Day 8: 126.5 kg*
That's a 3 kg loss in less than a week: the first four days show no loss at all, so they don't really count. I guess my body wasn't convinced, at first, that I was following a new path, but after four days on this regime, it finally relented and began shedding pounds. Of course, fat as I am, I don't look any different (as I've written many times before); to see a real difference, I'd need to lose at least 30 kg (as I've also written many times before).
APPROX. RESTING PULSE: 87 (20-sec calc method). I counted 29 beats for a 20-second stretch, then multiplied by 3. Since this is the second time I've hit 80-some beats per minute, I'll tentatively chalk this up as a very slight improvement.
BLURRY VISION: none.
SKIN: as before: scabby, patchy, and blotchy, esp. on left shin. Skin on my face is about the same as it always is: slightly greasy in the T-zone, dry and needing exfoliation everywhere else. That said, today is the first day on which I think I might be seeing some fading. On the assumption that the ravaged skin was the result of a diabetically large carb overload, what I'm doing now may be putting a stop to that trend. This also means that I'm going to have to commit to some sort of low-carb, slow-carb, or no-carb regime once the self-experiment is over, which I'm not looking forward to. One of the things I miss, because I can't find it here in Korea, is no-carb chocolate pudding. The Walmart in Front Royal, Virginia, had plenty of it, and that pudding (plus those glorious pork rinds) is what kept me sane when I was trying the low-carb thing a couple years ago.
CHEST PAIN: No tightness at all today.
MENTAL STATE: mostly alert and focused; generally emotionally stable.
GENERAL WELL-BEING: Overall positive. I'm surprised—yet not surprised—at how few ill effects I've suffered from the rather extreme measures I've taken over the past eight days. I suspected that there'd be little suffering because, as is true with camels, when you've got a large supply of fat and retained fluid in your body, your body simply switches over to that supply when your calorie-input situation changes. My body seems to be pretty mellow about what's going on; there's no "starvation response" or anything like that.
I'm a little frustrated that weight loss has been slow from the beginning, but because what I'm doing is an experiment, I'm happy to say that I've been gathering a good bit of data on myself. I'll share my insights in a week.
End report.
*That was my weight when I did the post-excretion weigh-in late this morning. Just now, at 7:06PM, only a few minutes after getting back from a 21,000-step walk, I weighed myself again and got 125.8 kg. I'm about to tank up on fluids, though, so I won't be surprised if, at tomorrow's weigh-in, I weigh more than 126.5 kg.
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I only weigh myself once a week. It is too disconcerting to see the daily fluctuations...
ReplyDeleteI have personally had success with eating some kind of raw vegetable before every meal. Celery is the best, but really anything will do, even iceberg lettuce. The explanation is that our modern diet generally spikes our blood sugar. But the roughage from a raw vegetable serves to slow everything down. A lot of my triathlete friends swear by it.
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