Category: Phase 3

Ms Marvel and Spider Woman.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 126
Phase 3 ends Wednesday. There’s a difference between putting a positive spin on something and mindless optimism. I have a method of 6-days ultra strict and 1 cheat day that seems to be working. There’s a combination of significant discomfort followed by a release. Today I’m back on track and I actually wanted to be back on track. My innards truly let me know when there’s been too much sugar, dairy and wheat.

However, I suspect that my allergies are hosing the overall results. Given the air quality in Vancouver, everyone is respiratory challenged and I doubt my body chemistry is normal these days, which means I’m likely holding onto water.

Because there’s a lot of travel disruption in August, Phase 4 will start in September and last until I have my hernia operation. What I have to think about is how to break the allergy cycle. Coffee, beef and chicken are frequent parts of my diet and there’s evidence that they are allergens or food intolerances that are holding the results back.

So, that moves me to bison and turkey. I guess I could ask my buddy Jerry to roast a whole turkey and then chop it up and freeze it. I looked online and if you can believe it, Costco will ship me 10 bison rib-eye steaks for $140. That’s expensive set of dinners. I wonder if it would be cheaper to drive to Alberta and buy a whole bison.

Keremos BC, north east of Osoyoos, posted this sign.

Ms Marvel at maximum power. My future travel is taking me to Ontario.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 125
In the department of not making sense I had two glasses of wine last night and was wasted. It had been an early day and on the strict side diet-wise. (Today is a cheat day.) But it was emotional because my daughter did have her wisdom teeth pulled and there’s something that plucks at the core of your parent chip when you let trained professionals deliberately drug and cut up your kid.

Today’s cheat day featured pancakes. My family likes my cheat days. But I’m so full, I don’t know what else to eat today. My kid is into mashed potatoes and smoothies due to the dentistry.

Could it be that the intensity of this process of strangling the carb-and-sugar flow has lessened? I guess I find out tomorrow. It’s nice on the cheat day to not feel so freaking desperate.

Ms Marvel turned into Captain MarvelHere’s what the Travel In BC site has for restaurants.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 124
I had to wake up at 5:30 in order to make sure my eldest child was feed and moving 8 hours in advance of having her teeth pulled. We snuck out and headed to Siegel’s Bagels where I had eggs benny on a bagel, but with some effort I managed only to eat about 10% of the bagel.

This is of course madness because I paid for that damn bagel and it was a good one.

I must be doing something right fitness-wise because my abs were killing me after Wednesday’s yoga class and Thursday’s Bulgarian Bag run. However, the low back is tight and achy so I will lay low today.

Also, wish my daughter luck as well. She writes a Chemistry 11 final before having teeth yanked.

Ms Marvel is the predecessor to Captain Marvel, which is an upcoming movie. Vancouver is still way too smokey.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 123
Accepting that something is difficult does not mean that you are whining. But I find I’m whining a fair amount and I want to move from whine to acceptance and, maybe on Saturday, to wine.

I’m hoping that if I write about my fears that they’ll stay here in the blog and not bug me when I’m trying to actually do something useful.

1. The scale will never yield. Solution: become sufficiently strong that you can lift a horse without looking like one.
2. What I’m attempting (i.e. significant weight loss for purposes of pleasing the cardiology industry) is impossible. What whirls around my head is the fact I’ve never read about an old white guy — who was never sporty — losing a ton of weight without benefit of a doctor holding a scalpel to parts of his body. Solution: Try not to think about it. Just because you’ve never heard of someone doing this, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
3. I will become a grumpy old pus bag. Solution: monitor, monitor and monitor attitude by channeling a neutral or positive state of mind. E.g. yesterday when my bike got a flat I was angry but replaced it with the thought “glad it didn’t go flat while I was on the road!”

The problem with irrational fears is the irrational part.

My last Justice League image. I saw a cool news piece about tall ships in Halifax.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 122
I am displeased. Rear tire of my bike was completely flat. At least it was before I started riding this morning.

I am down a belt notch. Pity the damn scale doesn’t seem to get the message. If you look at the chart below, you will see that my weight in the last couple of weeks has plateaued. I am at a record low % body fat, but apparently I’m hanging onto 8 pounds of water that I wasn’t.

I have a theory that in order to test I won’t enjoy at bit. My allergies are fairly low grade (except for satanic eastern ragweed and alder trees in March in BC). But there are many. My reaction is either respiratory or, in the case of food intolerances, I retain water. My theory: I’m going to have to try to go off coffee.

Click image for larger version

Justice League Dark. I wish that movie would come out. Vancouver is supposed to be super hot today.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 121
I’m panicking. It isn’t because I see the personal trainer today to find out what type of odd expression I can see on her face when she looks at my freakshow numbers from the scale. However, I am proud that the gym moved the scale from the front of the gym (where everyone walks in with huge glass windows so that everyone can see my lardass frame be weighed) to a more secluded location.

I’m panicking for another reason. I have an umbilical hernia that has to be fixed sometime in the Fall. Upon talking with others who had this surgery, stairs are a problem in the first couple of days. I have two flights of stairs to my apartment totaling 30 stairs.

I wonder if I can get a Corporate Hernia Rate at a nearby hotel.

In the meantime the strangulation of my formerly generous glucose flow has led to random energy drops and surges. Yesterday I was doing a kettle bell swing. At rep 10, I felt like I could go for 16 reps; at rep 12 my body said, “put it down now”. When riding home I was dragging my ass to the bike cage. But a couple of blocks later, I had enough energy to ride hard for about 7.5 km.

Honestly.

Justice League with Earth 3’s Crime Syndicate. It’s nice and cool in Tofino.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 120
Back in saddle. Can I go back to bed now? There’s not enough coffee.

The key issue is controlling mood and attitude. Perhaps a start would be to avoid the news. The only real change is that I don’t feel as desperate. The cravings may have lightened. I wasn’t 100% carb free yesterday because I had rice last night. Ooooo. Rice. A killer. But that’s how strict this thing has to be.

One other thing that happened. I saw a picture of myself from 2002. My face then was chubbier than now. Hard to tell about the rest of it. I do know that if I took that guy and put him through the fitness stuff I do now, he would not make it. I wouldn’t mind having his lack of grey, however.

All right. Back to work.

I love these group shots. Looks like Justice League Dark is in the mix. Check out my latest Sophie’s and Fireworks article.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 118
Yesterday’s cheat day was good. Pancakes. Beer. Hamburger. Not always in that order.

On Friday though I was tired in a new way. Normally when I’m dragging myself and laundry up and down the stairs at our place, it’s’ my muscles that are whining. But in this low carb world, I was simply standing at the bottom of the stairs hesitating. My mind was wondering, what’s the deal? There were no overt aches – not like last week with my quads – just a complete stall.

I later spoke with a friend with more background in biology that me and she told me that since I was cutting off the access to easy energy, the body was summoning glucose from storage and that takes longer and, obviously, I’m not used to doing this. This I find odd as this is my fifth cycle with this ultra low carb strategy and I was hoping by now I would not be so screwed up by it.

I also don’t know how much more my kids can take. When I was discussing what a terrible impact the process has on my mood, my daughter said, “yeah, don’t leave the dishes out when he’s in the middle of that.”

At time of writing I’m back into the process. I figure my body will notice the change back to ultra low carb in about five hours.

This is a more modern Justice League. Looks like decent weather in Winnipeg today.

Mutant Diet Phase 3 Day 117
Nothing proceeds quite as expected in this ultra lo-carb approach. I had a planned beer night cheat last night and I was expecting the beer to hit me harder than normal due to the strictness of the previous four days. Not so. The beer tasted fine and my reactions too it were completely normal and uneventful. I arose at the same time today and rode my bike. I’m a bit more tired, but not feeling off.

My body is quickly realizing that I’m back at ultra lo-carb and it’s starting to whine in its normal way.

One of the discussions last night touched on glucose and the brain. I knew that the brain needed glucose, but I wondered in my strangling the supply was pissing off my brain. So web searches to the rescue.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3900881/

This section jumped out at me.

The mammalian brain depends on glucose as its main source of energy. In the adult brain, neurons have the highest energy demand, requiring continuous delivery of glucose from blood. In humans, the brain accounts for ~2% of the body weight, but it consumes ~20% of glucose-derived energy making it the main consumer of glucose (~5.6 mg glucose per 100 g human brain tissue per minute).

I wonder if I think harder if my brain will use up more glucose.