While I Rip and Burn...

CDs, that is, not clothes that don't fit, or recalcitrant scales.

I've got a new laptop and external hard drive that holds soooo much stuff that I'm sitting here organizing all my music files and burning yet more CDs so I can get *all* my music on my new 30gb ipod.

All very exciting.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck at my computer waiting for the CDs to burn - this one is taking an unconscionable amount of time - so I thought I'd take the opportunity for a post.

Right now, at the beginning of this blog, I'm taking things that are happening to me on a daily basis as a starting point for some larger discussion. So, what's happened the last couple of days?

I was ill. Went out for a very nice meal with my parents on monday night, but a few hours after I got home, I started to feel really sick, and ultimately ejected all the contents of my stomach in a rather violent and unpleasant manner. It left me feeling weak and horrible, too, I wasn't better once my stomach was empty. This meant that Tuesday became a bad food day (as well as just generally a bad day).

I'll leave the larger discussion of 'why low carb' to another time, and talk about one of the issues of low-carbing.

Who wants to eat chicken or eggs when they feel nauseous?

Nobody. Definitely not me, at any rate. Which does leave me with a problem on the days I do feel nauseous. (Seriously, I'm really concerned for what will happen if I ever get married and get pregnant).

Carbs are not good for me, at all. If I eat them, whether we're talking sugary stuff like chocolate or cakes, or complex carbs like whole grain bread or pasta, they make me feel hungry - and that feeling has effects that last for days, making sticking to plan difficult. I love them, don't get me wrong, but they do nothing good for me at all. Well, except for my tastebuds. Unfortunately those damn things still love carbs.

Still, when my stomach is off there's really no choice for me. Some people might just not eat at all until they feel better, but I'm not that much of a martyr. In the five years that I've been low-carbing I've worked out how much leeway I can give myself, and how easy or hard it will be to get back on the wagon depending on how badly I get off track in the first place.

Yesterday I ate a yoghurt, and a few slices of wholemeal bread with butter. And since I knew it was a wasted day , carbwise, and I felt miserable as hell anyway with my sickness, I also ate a couple of packets of crisps, some biscuits and some chocolate. Not exorbitant amounts, given my dodgy stomach, but on a regular day I wouldn't have had *any* of it.

It meant I stayed hungry, when if I'd eaten other food I wouldn't have been. Seriously. It flies in the face of all 'accepted' nutrition laws, but put it this way: If I eat a plate of spaghetti bolognese, well, first off, one plate won't be enough - I'll need seconds. Once I've had seconds, I'll feel full temporarily. Like, for half an hour. Then I'll start feeling peckish again. I'll have an uncontrollable urge to eat, even though really I'm not hungry. But I'll actually feel hunger. After a meal that could easily top 1,000 calories. Whereas if I ate just half a plate of the bolognese, sans spaghetti, it'll fill me up for the next three hours or so, until it's time for the next meal. No hunger, no cravings, no interest in more food; real satiety. On probably a third of the calories, at that.

Seriously. Less is more, if the less is protein and fat, not carbs.

That phenomenon has really been the key to my success at losing weight - and the reason I put on weight in the first place (double-edged sword that I'd rather not have to know about at all, really).

So, what's going to happen to me over the next few days? Well, yesterday I ate carbs, but today is another day, right? Half right. A new day always fixes part of the problem, so today it hasn't been hard to stick to my usual low-carb choices. Wanna know what I ate today? Breakfast was my usual two fried eggs (in pam spray) with some lc ketchup, lunch was burgers wrapped in lettuce, with tomato, pickle, onion and thousand island dressing made with low fat mayo and low carb ketchup, and supper was chicken breast with spicy vinegary garlicky courgettes. At various points in the day I had a couple low-fat, sugar free bio yoghurts, and a handful of pecans. Tomorrow is going to be the problem, though. The day after the day after. That's when the carbs still in my system from two days earlier make it harder to stick to the straight and narrow. I'm tempted because the carbs are still in my system; I'm hungrier than normal and I crave carbs the way I don't when they're not in my system. It takes a few days to restart the system, as it were. This is difficult when every few days comes the weekend, and socializing and group meals. But not impossible.

Anyway. I don't think this has been a particularly coherent post, but then I'm far too excited about all the new music about to go onto my ipod to really focus on this :-) So next post I'll try and do a basic, thorough explanation of why low-carb works. What the end of hunger really means.

Wish me luck to beat the cravings tomorrow without succumbing to bad eating!