Midweek Update of my Egg-speriment!

After Day 1 of my egg-speriment, that night the induction flu or low-carb blues hit me hard. Basically, during the day time, I ate my eggs (x 5 Scrambled with plenty of butter and cheese) for breakfast but I forgot to take my lunch (boiled eggs x3) to work with me.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am now a postman by trade, and this day I was delivering a new unfamiliar and huge route. (Now if your from the USA or Canada and even an Australia, a postman here in the UK actually delivers mail mostly via foot and bike). Now, today's round was quite long and arduous and with no food for lunch, I soldiered through, which meant me not eating low-carb every six hours as I am supposed to. For all you people reading my blog, who maybe interested/considering trying out a low-carb lifestyle or following along, you should be eatting every six hours, regardless if your hungry or not, its just the rule to feel good and to get the maximum weight-loss results. Remember, that low-carb dieting is all about eating yourself slim, not like the alternative diets where you starve yourself to lose, which is very unhealthy.

So yep, basically I made this mistake (Although, I took and drank a lot of water) and what happened? Well, I think this really brought on the induction flu big time. For those, also who don't know what induction flu is... well it's a culmination of symptoms. Mainly, headaches, dizziness, weakness, fatigue, some report being sick too. But my symptom was a huge headache, you know the splitting of your head in half kind. Fortunately this passed rather promptly and the majority of time I was sleeping through it ;) It did however, linger around until the very next evening. This wasn't too nice, but I know it's part of the low-carb process, and although some would consider this a negative, I knew it was a step in the positive direction. What I mean by this is, my body was now beginning to change its major fuel source from Carbohydrates to Fat, and thus from this stage on it was the beginning of me losing weight and the start of the benefits of receiving extra energy and loss of appetite.  Now when I say loss of appetite, I am less of a slave to over eating, and that's a good thing, because I am not constantly feeling hungry or thinking I want to eat.

Yesterday, I also had a physical examination for two reasons mainly. The first reason is, because I am planning on teaching English in China in September, and it's a visa requirement. Second reason is to collect some stats on my health. Unfortunately, in this country if you want to take a cholesterol test, the doctors have to take a blood sample and send it off to a laboratory. So I will keep you posted on these results. They also took my height and weight (I will reveal my weight measurements at the end of this week) measurements and a PH sample (As I had another long day at the office, so to speak aka delivery wise) and that I just started this low-carb diet. My PH results weren't surprising in that they was a little acid, a value of 6 (6 is nothing to worry about though), rather than the optimum of 7. But I imagine as the next two weeks progress this will eventually equalise. My blood pressure was 120/60mmHg. Which in fact, I thought the diastolic pressure was a bit low, but I feel great and the Doctor seems to think this is normal and fine, so no worries there. Healthy BP by the way is 120/80mmHg. I also had some other tests performed but again these are for the first reason.

Ok it's getting rather late, so I will update you on my progress more tomorrow :D

Whaaa nobody missed me!

Hi, am back due to popular demand lol! Ok maybe not, but I am back to report my progress or the restart of my challenge to reach my goal weight of 12 Stone. OK, OK, OK, so I failed you and myself, sorry! But I will try better this time ;-)

Let me explain what has happened, well for the longest time now, I think since I last posted on my blog (In September 2009), I have been jumping in and out of the low-carb lifestyle. I have struggled since moving back home into my Dad's house (Which is now over two years ago), to maintain a healthy balanced diet. Instead, I have found myself at times to have a blow out and eat tones of unhealthy foods, whoops! Scoffing down any good tasting food which is not necessarily nutrient dense or good for my health.

The problem's I have been facing generally are;

Disruptive Diet Scenario 1: Too Tired and looking for convenience.

I get really hungry and being too lazy to cook or prepare any decent tucker, I try to outsource this issue either by going to a restaurant or by finding any convenient food possible to snack on :-P

Disruptive Diet Scenario 2: Falling into the temptation of devilish delights.

Now, although I don't go out of my way to buy junk foods or high-carb products, family members in my house do unfortunately (And for me). So as you can imagine, Scenario 1 tied with this current scenario the food monster within comes out. The problem is however, this advertisement of bad food (As far as waving it in my face every time I open the fridge or cupboard or just the smell of it ready cooked and then offered me) cannot be avoided. Of course, my family members may choose to eat what they want to eat, but for me, this is an area I need to personally work on, by mentally being strict on myself and not joining them.

Disruptive Diet Scenario 3: Holidays away from home and working.

I haven't managed to solve this major problem yet besides not going on holiday (So something to work on during the next one). As most of you can sympathizes, when you go on holiday, you want to relax, soak up the sun, absorb the culture and experience/sample the local dishes, especially the all you can eat buffet and drinks. Well last year, this is exactly what I did during my 10 weeks of travelling.

At the start of the year in celebration of completing my dissertation and University, I went to Dominica Republic (Puerto Plata) for 3 all inclusive weeks in the sun. During this time, I drank way too much (soft drinks) and ate all sorts of delights (Plus prior to this holiday I had a treacherous week of Christmas over indulgence) and so I gained around 0st 6.6lbs | 3kgs | 6.6 lbs. Ecck!

Once I got back from Dom Rep however, I had lost the path to low-carb and fell into the trap of reasoning with myself, by saying "You know what, I don't need to watch what I eat, because I am still close to my goal weight. I can be liberal with my choices still". Weirdly enough, I was able to maintain my weight even with many poor meal choices. Only problem here I found during this time however, was I didn't feel as good as before whilst on low carb.

Later in the middle of the year, I then took another holiday but this time to the Philippines (Manila and Lingayen) and for 5 weeks. This is where it then started to go pair shaped for me, basically I gained 0st 8.8lbs | 4kgs | 8.8 lbs by repeating the same mistakes of what I did in Dominica Republic (This time with different food).

Between each holiday period and afterwards, I suddenly found myself on the creeping path to weight gain (Living a high-carb style). So roughly around this period I was about 13st 12lbs/14st 0.2lbs | 88/89kg | 194lbs/196.2lbs .

So in September I tried to counteract this, if you look at the last 3 previous post's on my blog, you can see I started to make an effort again by sticking with the low-carb lifestyle. I was having great success reducing the size of my pants and my weight to roughly 13st 9.1lb | 86.7 kg | 191.1lbs ;-)

Until the next natural disaster struck. Yes you guessed it, another holiday appeared, hehehe! I basically went to Canada (Vancouver, Vancouver Island) for a further 3 weeks and boy o boy did I try out lots of food. By the time I got home, I had put on 1st 2lbs | 7.3 kg | 16 lbs. Bringing my weight up to 14st 9.7 lbs | 93.3kg | 205.7 lbs. I couldn't believe it, and this made me realize, it's no wonder why obesity is so rampant in the United States and Canadian.

Anyhow, that point on, I struggled to lose weight and I lost my motivation drive for low-carbing (Again Scenario 1 and 2 started to overwhelm me).

So you can see from each scenario above these are my personal area's of doom which can affect my weight adversely. You may struggle with the same or different things, but if you can identify them as your weak points, maybe there is hope to avoiding them ;) This is my hope.

You maybe wondering however, what has motivated me again. Well three main things:

1. I managed to find a job at Royal Mail as a Postman. Since I started work there which was 3 months ago, I have managed to drop my weight from 14st 9.7 lbs | 93.3kg | 205.7 lbs to 14st 0.2lbs | 88kg | 194 lbs. I have also found regardless of what I'm eating, I keep losing weight, that is until now.
2. Yesterday, I stumbled over Jimmy Moores Egg-speriment video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtC-E_zztEk <-- located here. I was amazed by his results, In a span of 28 days, Jimmy was able to shed a total of 27 pounds on this all-egg diet. That's pretty mind boggling, so it go me thinking. I could do the same but eat eggs for Breakfast and Lunch and a regular low-carb meal in the afternoon. So this has got me excited to experiment this out for myself, to see if I can achieve similar results.
3. Lastly, my other reasons to climb back on low-carb, just because I haven't been feeling to good in myself. I think all the junk food is starting to add up in my body and make me feel like crap, I really am beginning to crave good food and feel sick of eating rubbish. As in, crap food in crap out right! And I mean crap out as a double meaning, as in, crap performance and crap <-- I think you know where am going with the latter ;)

So after a lot of thought over the weekend on this and the burning desire within to get back on my mission, I choose today to restart.

This morning, I weighed in at 14st 0.2lbs | 88kg | 194 lbs. I ate 4 scrambled eggs with plenty of butter and cheese for breakfast, for lunch i ate another 3 boiled eggs and for dinner I had a lovely cauliflower mash (With cream cheese) with two chicken breasts marinated with garlic and mushroom Sauce. A picture can be found below.

Today, my journey begins once again. For the next two weeks, I plan to do this egg experiment for breakfast and lunch as a kind of induction period to reintroduce me into the Atkins program again. Feel free to follow along, monitor my progress and maybe get involved yourself. I plan to post my official results starting tomorrow. This will include my weight, body measurements, possible picture and my cholesterol values.

Stay tuned, I will be adding new features too, and thanks for reading. Feel free to comment below :D