Carbs or what?

The good news this morning was three pounds off what I hit yesterday.
I did keep away from carbohydrates yesterday, so, maybe that was part of it, but as I am also  having my monthly visitor I don´t know if the upward tick was due to PMS or eating carbs any more.
Still, I am determined this time to stick with fewer carbs, if only to get results.
Yesterday, I came home from work later than usually, and DH had already eaten. So, I managed to eat just some canned tuna with olive oil and freshly ground pepper, plus a few unsalted peanuts.
For today, I am determined to pass the carbohydrate part of dinner, too.
As I am cooking and serving the food, that entails cooking the carby stuff seperately and putting it just on DH´s plate.
DH is convinced that harm could befall me were I to significantly reduce my carb intake.
Like yesterday, when he saw me eating that tuna with olive oil, and first thing, he said, why don´t you have a slice of bread with it.
Because that stuff, to me, is poison. That´s why.
I´m not ready yet to go completely paleo, but I feel better when I do not eat refined carbs.
Case in point, I used to have, for breakfast, some cereal with yoghourt on it. Two hours after, I´d be fighting fatigue and rummaging thru the infamous candy drawer in my office.
Which led me to assume that breakfast had to be bad for me.
Either I had it, then I could not stop myself from eating all day long, or I didn´t, in which case I could go without food until late in the afternoon.
In both cases I had low energy all day.
Today, I am having breakfast every day. It consists of two eggs sunny side up, with two stripes of bacon underneath, fried in a cast-iron pan (you have to try that to see how different the taste is from frying in a teflon pan).
And I am no longer getting tired two hours later, nor do I have to eat more carbohydrates during the day.
That drawer in my office has been empty for some time already.

Lowering one´s carb intake does, of course, require a lot of label reading.
I used, for a pick-me-up, to have some protein bars, and I always wondered why they were prone to causing me fatigue attacks a short time later.
Until I read the nutrition information.
I was shocked to find that the so-called protein bars actually had more sugar in them than the carby-looking cereal bars next to them. No wonder they had been giving me reactive hypoglycemia every time.
So, whenever I want a pick-me-up today, I stick either to nuts (sans carby coatings) or I make myself a protein shake.
When choosing the brand of protein shake to buy, btw, I looked out for carb content, too. It´s amazing how they keep trying to sell you sugar instead of what it says on the package should be inside.
So, it´s buyer beware all the time.

Watching my body´s reactions to different foodstuffs is educational, too. Perhaps Mr. Taubes is right, after all.
And while "ymmv", I am trying to find out what my mileage will be.

Oh, I did re-evaluate my weight loss goals, too. It was obviously more than optimistic to assume I would be able to regularly lose one pound a week. The difference between where I was and where I should have been had, by now, become painful indeed.
So, I am right now aiming for about a pound every ten to eleven days. I know that is not much, but perhaps it is more realistic to set a goal that is more easily attainable and hope I can get even beyond it than it was to aim high and miss.
The thing being that I am, that way, still hoping to be back at a normal weight before my (gulp) next birthday with a zero in it (no, I´m not telling which). Because that is approaching one of the next years, and I can be either something-oh and fat or something-oh and slimmer than I am today.
Guess what I´d prefer.


Julia