still craving pizza

I'm in the middle of Week 5, which is in the middle of the ten-week Newcastle Diet. And I still want a pizza. I ate my coworker's squid lunch today, having thought of a clever solution: I brought in butter, herbs, and spices, and I turned the squid into Italian-style calamari by pan-frying it. The squid came with veggies, including broccoli and bell peppers, so I chopped those up and threw them into my pan as well (I keep cooking equipment in the office). Some pasta would've been nice, but that would destroy my blood sugar. I also should've chopped the squid up more finely; the squid was already partially cut up into pieces suggesting rings, so I simply finished the cutting and ended up with giant rings. Those proved to be too large, even though they went down easy thanks to the butter, herbs, and seasonings.

But all that just put me in the mood for pizza, and like a musical earworm, I can't get the thought of pizza out of my head. Not to worry, though; when I leave work, I'm doing a 7.5-kilometer walk, and that usually cleanses me of impure thoughts. At least until I get home.

So Saturday marks the halfway point of this diet. I'm still losing weight, but as I said, I think it's getting harder to do so, which means I have to keep ratcheting up my activity to keep burning calories. After this week, I have one more week of taking the stairs to the 10th floor, and then I ratchet up to the 14th floor—the floor on which I live. My appointment at the hospital is on September 16; according to my chart, I should be doing 1.5 full staircases by then (a full staircase = from the B1 level to the 26th floor, which is the last habitable floor).

Dr. Sten Ekberg, whose videos I watch, brings up the interesting concept of the "set point," which is the weight that your body thinks it wants to return to. So for fatties like me, we have bodies whose set points are cranked up pretty high because we've been X weight for so many years (for example, my body thinks I ought to weigh close to 300 pounds). Training your body to lower its set point takes months, even years, given that it took years to get this out of shape. So this is one reason for slow weight loss and yo-yo dieting: the body naturally resists any attempt to push it away from its perceived set point. Once I'm off Newcastle, I'm going to try going full keto, which if done right, ought to lead to fat adaptation and autophagy, especially when combined with intermittent fasting and continued exercise. (It's the dog days of summer, now, so outdoors exercise is becoming a real pain. I don't generally like distance walking in hot weather, but I view everything as a life-or-death situation now, so I keep at it.)

Anyway, I still have a long way to go before I can eat more reasonably and think about having a cheat day. Five more weeks of this nonsense. Gotta stay strong.