It pays to watch

For many years, the ups and downs of my weight were, to me, looking like the results of throwing dice- random and frustrating. Many were the days when I would have sworn by all the deities that I hadn´t overeaten, only to find my weight up by several pounds the next day. Less often, I thought I´d goofed, but weight numbers didn´t tell at all.
What that gave me was a feeling of having totally no control over my body. How else to explain weight gains that did not compute with what I´d eaten? As in overeating by one thousand calories, say, and gaining two pounds which would mean seven thousand calories if it were fat?
For a long time, the sheer helplessness of facing what looked like a totally randomized response pattern stopped me from even trying to recondense my excess baggage. I suffered from the effects of dragging around those 100 extra pounds, but I had no idea how to get rid of them. The only thing I knew was that the diets I had tried out until then had not helped. Quite the opposite. They only made me feel worse because, heck, one was supposed to lose weight when sticking to them, and I sometimes even gained.
The fallacy I´d fallen victim to, of course, was that a calorie is a calorie no matter where it comes from. Only when I started tracking how much of the macronutritients I ate did I see that there was indeed a predictable pattern to my gains and losses, one that depended on the ratio of carbohydrate calories to protein and fat calories. In other words, my weight  follows my carbohydrate intake. Many carbs, even if I stay under my daily calories, mean the scale goes up on the next day, and few carbs mean a maintain or a loss.
I´m not going on a soapbox here, but cutting down carbs is what worked for me. It also worked for DH, who has, just by eating the same things I eat, gotten down two pants sizes since May. So, in our totally non-randomized two-subjects study, we have found that keeping our carbohydrate intake below 30 percent on most days has enabled us to condense weight that, with more carbohydrate-loaden diets, no amount of caloric restriction short of starving ourselves would have moved.
This weekend, I put the counter-check to this into practice. We did, for the third Sunday in Advent, have some mulled wine, some lebkuchen with a cup of hot cinnamon chocolate, and dinner was a big portion of spinach-and-feta lasagna. In the end, I had about twice the carbs I eat ordinarily. And this morning, I predictably found myself up two pounds (not what the lasagna weighed).
While any gain is not exactly a reason for joy when you´re as close to an intermediary goal as I am right now (I absolutely want to be below the limit of morbid obesity before Christmas), I know this time that the nominal gain of two pounds is less than three ounces of fat, maximum,  and the rest is water retention from eating those carbs, plus what I still have inside me of the food I ate yesterday. So, today, I´ll cut waaay down on the carbs, drink a lot of water, and go back on plan in general. And that will be a lot easier now that I don´t have to feel I´m missing out on all the season´s goodies this year.
Besides, when looking at where those carbs came from, I could even see that the lasagna accounted for half of them, so if I had had either lasagna or lebkuchen and hot chocolate, not both, I´d even have stayed on plan. As I said before, I may eat every food, just not everything at once, and in moderation. After all, this has to be for life, because if I went back to what I always did I´d be back having what I always had real fast.


Julia