As I Wake...

Ok, I lied. The next post isn't going to be about the basics of low-carb. It's going to be just a little bit about hunger and cravings.

It always amuses me when I read an article about the low-carb diet, which is generally disparaging, and then they add in this little gem: "low-carb reduces hunger." Um, hello? HELLO?????? Did you just hear what you said? Dieting is about reducing the amount of food you eat. That means you tend to be a little bit hungry. Hunger is hard to ignore. That means people eat more than they should. LOW CARB REDUCES HUNGER, DUMMIES!!!

The reason they write it as this tiny little sidebar comment is - in my opinion - they don't really understand that many fat people aren't 'greedy'. They're not eating 'too much and all they have to do is cut back and exercise'. Many fat people are fat because their bodies keep demanding food of them and it's downright painful to refuse.

This morning, I woke up hungry. It's like I was saying in my last post - this is the day after the day after, and today's going to be difficult, carbwise. I ate carbs two days ago, and now I'm paying for it, because I'm hungry now. Is that such a big deal, I hear you wonder? Well, yes, actually. It's different, you see.

Before I low-carbed, I would wake up in the morning and the first thing on my mind would be food. Crappy food, at that. I never woke up with images of omelettes or salads floating in my head. No, it was crisps and chocolate. And I would often be eating those things before I started work. When I was a kid, it was on the way to school. And then in break, at the tuck shop. And then at lunch time. And then on the way home from school too. (And then I didn't want the nutritious supper on offer). Eating that way made me feel sick, often. But I couldn't stop.

Nowadays when I wake up, the first thing on my mind is either - time to visit the bathroom, or let's see what email I got overnight. I have the luxury of working from home, so often after I've paid that initial visit to the bathroom I'll head straight for my office in my pjs, and start working. I do get showered and dressed eventually, honest. At some point I'll realise I haven't had breakfast and I'll go make myself my eggs. It might be an hour after I wake, it might be two hours.

Food just isn't on my mind. And it's not in the pathways of my brain. I experience real hunger now, the hunger that 'normal' people experience, not the hunger that carb-addicted people experience. And right now, because I ate carbs two days ago, I'm experiencing a small resurgence of the carb-hunger. Which is why it's only 8.30am and I've only been up for 15 minutes, but I'm hungry and thinking of breakfast. At least it's only to the extent that I need my eggs sooner than usual. I'm not heading facefirst into a pile of chocolate.

Incidentally, I realised something about my first post that I think might be misleading to anyone who comes along to this blog and isn't already an expert in low-carbing. I said that I discovered that my weight problem was about an insulin imbalance.

That made it sound like I'm really different from other people. That there is some obvious recognisable and recognised medical condition that made me the way I am. Well, that is and isn't true. If you're overweight and you find it hard to restrict your consumption of bread and pasta, you might have that same insulin imbalance. The Hellers, who wrote the Carb Addicts Diet, think that as many as 80% of people who are overweight have this imbalance.

Nothing abnormal will show up on any regular blood tests I do. The glucose levels are measured from blood that is drawn at fasting levels, and that's not when my insulin goes whacky. I know what's wrong with me because I've read the Hellers book, and Dr. Atkins' book, and I've researched low-carb with a passion. I've lived it for five years and learned a lot about my body; a body that previously seemed designed only to spite me and frustrate me and be infinitely uncontrollable. Also, just because I 'found out' what was wrong with me doesn't mean I had an easy time losing weight.

Even when I lost 50 pounds in 9 months, that only works out as about 1.2lbs a week - and at that point I was over 100 pounds overweight - you could expect a little faster weight loss than that. And it came in fits and starts, too, even at the beginning I'd stall for over a month without losing anything, and then lose 14 pounds in two weeks. But I never absolutely knew that next whoosh of weight loss was coming. Then I stalled out at around 190 pounds and didn't lose anything at all for 8 months. And then when I switched from following the Carb Addicts Program to the Atkins program and jumpstarted my weight loss it still took another two years to lose that additional fifty pounds, which is less than half a pound a week, again in weird increments, not steady at all. During all that time I had to hang on to the hope that I'd continue to lose weight, and hang on to my diet plan in the face of temptation and difficulty. And travelling. And eating at other folks' homes, where I wasn't in control of the menu. I've had all the trials of dieting just like other people, it has not been easy. This past two years of maintenance I've seen my weight fluctuate up and down about ten pounds, as I get less and more careful about what I eat. And I still want to lose more weight; I'm still not at my goal yet. After five flipping years.

All I'm saying is that I didn't find some miracle cure and that made everything easy. I found a miracle cure and it made everything possible. And that I'm not that different from many other people out there, who may not know what the root of their problem is. Just like I didn't.

It's been the saving of me. I hope they find out too. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this.