What about fiber and juicing?

Dietary fiber is important and I know it slows down how quickly the sugar from your fruit or vegetable enters you blood stream. The reason many raw vegans juice is in order to get a huge vitamin mineral "supplement" without taking capsules or tablets of artificially created vitamins and minerals. The nutritional boost is impressive and carries far less risk than pills or capsules. When you juice produce that has lower amounts of sugar, such as cucumbers, celery, and greens, the risk of raising your blood sugar is decreased, but you still get the marvelous mega-shot of nutrients entering your bloodstream within approximately five minutes. In a typical day of eating all raw vegan, you will have far more than enough fiber, more than thirty grams. Adding juice is extra insurance that you will get plenty of concentrated nutrients into your bloodstream.

RAWSOME

I finally found a way to maintain my weight loss without counting calories. I eat when I'm hungry and eat as much as I want. I've gone raw vegan; I eat 100% raw, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. For many years I believed complete proteins had to be obtained from animal sources or by strict and careful food combining to balance amino acids at each meal, I was convinced that animal-based proteins were better and easier to assimilate. With all my food sensitivities and now with my RA situation, I can no longer hold onto that view.

Last night I could see the situation with extreme clarity. We assimilate proteins as single amino acids, not as conglomerates of amino acids, as we find in animal products. When we eat animal protein, the animal has assembled the separate amino acids into protein structures that constitute it's flesh, milk, or eggs. When we eat those structures, we have to break them down into their separate, single amino acids in order to feed our blood, where they are then used as separate amino acids, to repair or build our own protein structures.
Look at it this way:

I could tell you I want you to build me a Lego ship, but first you have to make it from a few Lego airplanes, which you must take apart before you can make your ship. Or, I could give you the separate Legos, and ask you to make the ship. You don't have to take apart the the airplanes for Lego parts before you build your ship. This is like taking apart the chicken breast proteins before making your human skin, hair or muscle tissues.

Plant sources of protein are already mostly broken down and if we juice the plants, the amino acids are even more easily assimilated. There is no need for extensive dismantling and breakdown first, as there is when we eat animal proteins. You cut out one of the major steps to getting what you really needed in the first place, separate amino acids instead of already glued together amino acid creations, fashioned into steer muscle or egg whites that we have to disassemble in order to make our HUMAN body parts.

When things go wrong during the disassembling of say, egg or dairy, or parts of the protein in your steak, they can enter the blood stream only partially broken down, causing allergies and food sensitivities, which also leads to RA and other problems. I have developed sensitivities to egg whites, almonds, and dairy whey, all foods I used heavily during my body building days of daily weight lifting at the gym. They over-tax the immune system, especially the lymph glands. I'm now going through lymph drainage massage to address my own over-taxed lymph system. Cooking these animal protein creations harms or destroys some of the amino acids they carried, causing you to receive less than the complete protein (amino acid collection or profile) you anticipated.

GO DIRECT. Take out he middle-man of animals. You really don't need to take in all the amino acids that comprise your muscles or hair in one food product. A mix of living, raw plant foods really does provide the amino acids for skin, hair and organs. There is no such thing as a plant with zero protein content. Only factory-refined foods are made into dead, almost pure carbohydrate food products of starch or sugar.

TRANS FAT, Hydrogenated oil, Partially Hydrogenated Oil, By Any Name, the Shame's the Same

ABOUT TRANS FATS

In case you have not yet heard about them, here is the scoop: They are created by super-heating liquid vegetable fats and adding in hydrogen molecules. The result is a Franken-fat that is now saturated enough to stay solid at room temperatures, just like butter. Add a little fake butter flavoring and salt and you have margarine. Back during the cold war the USA gave this to the Russians as a gift. The Russians did the safest thing with it, they polished their boots with it.
When we eat it our bodies try to make cell walls with the stuff. The resulting cells are like little houses made with straw instead of brick, they are defective and weak. The wolves of disease can easily blow them down and worst of all, they make us look OLD. Screw that! We look old fast enough without adding in fats that give Twinkies a twenty year shelf life but rob us of any shelf life we might have had.

I know hydrogenated fats are convenient and make money for the big time food conglomerates, supermarkets, and chain restaurants, but count me out. Their profit strategies are apposed to our health, beauty, and longevity. You might even call it a war. After all, this stuff kills far more people than all the wars fought in the last hundred years. Cancer and heart disease have touched all of us, either directly or through our families and friends. I just wonder if we can go after them as we did the cigarette companies. With trans fats banned in many countries and some US states, it's not as if they don't know what these fats do to us.

My message to them is: Get the bad fats out of the food or the mother of all class action suits it on it's way to you. Hostess Twinkies still have hydrogenated fats in them! They know people feed them to children. They know how damaging they are. They just don't care. Save yourself. Read labels. If the ingredients include "partially hydrogenated" or "hydrogenated" fats, you are looking at trans fats and trans fats are poison, slow but deadly. Remember, one serving takes your body three months to dump and we don't know how much longer the damage it caused lasts.

hCG Resistance

hCH Resistance:
About six weeks ago I noticed that I was getting cranky and hungry even though I was increasing the hCH dosage from 150 IU to 175IU, then 200IU injections. I had lost a couple more pounds, but my weight kept bouncing back up to 155 pounds. I was breaking the diet and struggling. I realized that I had become resistant to the hCG. Even with the one day each week breaks, after about forty injections the honeymoon was over.

I've been on a break from the diet ever since. I was very afraid that I would balloon up to my starting weight in as little time as it took for the weight to be lost. I've been out to my favorite Thai restaurant a few times, eaten coconut ice cream more times than my husband knows about, and eaten actual baked potatoes with butter a few times. Still, I HAVEN'T GAINED ANY WEIGHT BACK!!!
This is amazing. In the past, fast weight loss always meant a fast gain as soon as I stopped whatever diet I was on. This is a miracle for me.


GOING RAW
Another thing I have done over the last month is transition into eating all raw foods. I have transgressed the raw rules a few times, but what is truly amazing is that my weight is rock steady at the point where I stopped the hCH diet. My husband is doing this too and he has actually lost a few more pounds since he stopped the hCG diet. We will be starting up again on the hCG next week. I'm looking for a raw vegan version of the hCG diet.

Lately, I stuff myself silly with nuts and fruit, plus decadent things like agave syrup, mixed with coconut oil and cocoa or carob to make raw fudge. I eat great piles of macadamia nuts, almonds and walnuts. Each morning I wake up and feel my back and belly to see if I'm the same. I get on the scale and I'm the same weight or sometimes a little less. I have never before been able to eat like this and not gain weight.
I ate a bowl of dark grapes for breakfast and I feel stuffed right now.
I have eaten a few cooked things this month...seafood, chicken, lamb, soft egg yolks,raw swiss cheese, raw milk, and a few potatoes. I am in transition after all.

The milk really messed with me, causing my joints to ache and some swelling. I have RA and certain foods, mostly just gluten-containing grains, refined sugars, sugar alcohols and dairy, cause flare-ups that can take days to resolve. I test (try eating them) every month or so, because I miss these foods, but the pain is just too much to make them worth it. I know when I have eaten a wrong food, in less than an hour because my ears begin to ring. Does anyone else have ringing in their ears when they eat a food sensitivity trigger? It's like having a bad food alarm in my head.

With less than twenty-five pounds to go, I look forward to another, and what I believe will be my last round on the hCG diet. I look forward to the loading days, even though I feel as if many of my days this last month have held enough food to qualify as loading days. This time French fries and burgers will not be on the menu, but Thai food and dairy-free coconut ice cream are a must. The scary thing about french fries is the oil used to fry them. It takes three months to get rid of one dose of hydrogenated fat (trans fat) and that's the usual fat used to make fries. THREE MONTHS! I'll fix them with fats that don't poison me for months.

The two day "eat all you want" hCG loading party is nice, but it really does make you feel so miserably stuffed, the first day of the diet is a relief. The hCG is in your system and the hungry, cranky, "I'm dieting" feeling is gone.

I am not in my twenties, but I wonder if I can or should go all the way back to those weights...the 120's... If so, round three will happen and I'll be done with losing weight and just stay. Raw food, even in huge amounts seems to keep people very slender, and the total calories end up looking like the numbers for the diet used to cause longevity. (CRON - Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition)

31 POUNDS LOST in 4 & 1/2 weeks! hCG is a miracle!

I started out at 186 pounds. This morning I weigh 155 pounds. My BMI is 23.9! My Body Mass Index (BMI) is officially normal! I am ecstatic. I jumped up and down and danced around the house singing silly victory songs I made up as I twirled and jumped. Oh yeah! That’s especially sweet. I am physically ABLE to jump! All this in less than five little weeks!

My goal is 134, but I can go as low as 123 on the BMI calculator and still be "normal". My perfect size may be somewhere between the two.

I have lost 31 pounds. My husband has lost thirty-five pounds. Between the two of us, we have lost a whole regular sized seven or eight year-old child. No wonder I can jump now. I don’t have the equivalent of more than three ten-pound bags of potatoes to haul around. Try walking around for very long in a grocery store with just one or two of those. Fat people really do have strong muscles. They need them to make it across the room or to the car. I feel lighter than air right now. I walk 100% faster and I have a spring in my step. I’ve also noticed that my posture has improved. My energy is astounding. I’m digging into projects that I had been putting off and looking for more to do.

GETTING hCG:
Our family doctor prescribed hCG for me, but when I tried to get my prescription filled, there was no place to go. No one had it. I called every pharmacy in town. It seems that the fertility clinics have first dibs on most of the available hCG. I eventually found a clinic two hours from my home that had it. My husband joined me in seeing the doctor there. They have their own hCG source and supplies. They gave us our protocol workbooks and directions, tape measures, needles, alcohol wipes, tiny bottles of hCG liquid, and counseling with three different specialists.

We had plenty of questions and we received abundant, answers, information, and advice. I was nervous about the shots, but a nurse demonstrated how to inject the hCG using her own belly.

“I used to be afraid of needles, but now and my tummy is just a pin cushion for teaching people to do their own injections.”

“I don’t know if I can do this…” I hedged, holding my new, sterile, practice needle gingerly.

“We use needles that are very tiny, the kind used for subcutaneous insulin shots.” she explained, and popped her needle into a pinch of flesh on her belly.

She didn’t even flinch. She could have been applying a bit of moisturizer.

“Okay, I’ll just do it.” I said as I pinched my inch, aimed the needle, took a deep diaphragm-type breath, and put the needle in.

“Oh! It didn’t hurt! I hardly felt it at all.” I pulled it out and soaked in the feeling of victory. “I can do this.”

“I knew you could. It just looks scary.”

That was just over four weeks ago. I’m in the middle of week five. I took 150 IU of hCG six out of seven days during the first month. Last week I noticed a bit more hunger than I had been used to so I upped my dosage to 170 IU. I take one day off from the hCG each week so that my body doesn’t build a resistance to it.

Other hCG dieters usually take a few weeks off after about a month on the hCG and then start another round on it and the diet to lose additional weight. They continue this pattern until they reach their goals. Our doctor said that he has seen excellent results just taking the one day off each week and that the weight loss that continues without the three week break encourages and inspires his patients.

WHAT I EAT AND DRINK:

First: Enough water to float a ship, two glasses before each meal and several 20 oz. bottles of water in between. I also have coffee in the morning or tea or both. I eat some fruit, usually some organic strawberries or a half or whole granny smith apple with cinnamon or apple pie spice on it.

I drink about two pots of green or herbal teas during the day.

Lunch is a massive salad of organic baby green, or spinach, with cucumbers, celery, a little onion and sometimes some tomato with three ounces of white-fleshed fish, or chicken breast meat (no skin), or very lean beef, grilled on a George Foreman grill or a new grill I just bought at K-Mart for about $10.00. It’s made by Proctor Silex and it's small enough to tuck into an overnight bag to use when I travel. It grills exactly enough protein for two, or one 3 oz. portion with room to grill a bit of red pepper or onion slices. Onion and garlic powders with a little organic apple cider vinegar make my salad dressing.

Dinner is about the same as lunch. I try to vary the vegetables, protein type, or seasonings at each meal and I have fruit as a snack or desert. I also make soup using organic broth, water, “Real Salt”, cayenne, garlic, celery, onion, lettuce, spinach, and add in vegetables such as; summer squash, cauliflower, or broccoli. I add my chopped up, grilled protein of choice and I have a filling meal.

I take calcium, magnesium, zinc, glucosamine, msm, Alpha Lipoic Acid, NAC, C, A&D, E, Fish oil capsules, and borage oil capsules. I also take a multi when, except for the last couple of weeks. I am away from home and didn’t bring them. I’ve noticed that if I forget to take at least two or three fish oil capsule daily, I end up not having a BM for days. The fish oil solves this in less than a day, often in just a few hours.

Because it is summertime, and hot, and I’m drinking at least a gallon of water daily, I recently added 99 mg of potassium to the supplement list. It really helps me when I notice I’m feeling tired. Electrolytes go fast in the midst of oceans of water and summer heat.

I did cheat a few times and used apples, cooked oat bran, with ground flax seed, and psyllium seed on top to cleanse the terrible stuff away. The weight melted like ice cream on a hot sidewalk as soon as I got back on track. I hated that I had wasted time that could have brought me closer to my goal. Nothing I ate tasted good enough to be worth getting to my goal a week or more late.

WHAT’S GOING ON:

The YOUTUBE videos of fellow hCG dieters have made me believe that this really is a weight loss CURE, not a fad diet. They all say the same thing, after getting off the diet and transitioning to more normal eating, they are amazed, day after day that they wake up each morning, still skinny.

I have tried to stay on a diet very much like the hCG and couldn’t hang in for more than a few days. People say, “Well, you do know that you would lose weight on 500 calories a day, even if you didn’t use hCG.”

My answer is, “Then go ahead and do that. Try to stay on a 500 calorie a day diet without hCG and let me know how it goes.”

Without the hCG, it is just too hard to do. Perhaps if someone had anorexia nervosa they could manage it. I don’t. I look forward to reaching the maintenance phase. I have a fairly realistic view of my body shape. If anything, I tend to see myself as thinner than I am, because I was a skinny child and normal to very slender before my pregnancies. I like that the scale and how my clothes fit are extremely honest.

I felt very brave facing the scale after I cheated. The harm was about five pounds in one day. The foods we cheat with are notorious for their high sodium counts, adding pounds of water in hours. One day of only eating raw apples caused all my gastronomic sins to vanish. The scale scared me into repentance and getting serious about this. I’m grateful and glad.

Before now, I was afraid of my scale, and with good reason. I didn’t want to face the truth about my size. Unfortunately, hiding the scale didn’t hide my rear. You might say it was “scenic” rather than shapely. It took up the whole door mirror in my bathroom.

I began to feel agoraphobic. Is there a fancy name for a mental illness that makes fat people into shut-ins because they don’t want anyone to see them waddling around in public? I felt like crying while I tried on everything in my closet, hoping to disguise my arms, my waist, my legs, my butt, and even my puffy cheeks. I needed a burqa, veil included. “Statuesque” morphed into “bovine”.

Here I am though, wearing pants I had hidden behind all my big clothes for almost two years. I am officially no longer in the overweight BMI category. I only have 21 pounds to release. To me, it looks so close I can almost taste it…

This is it. Kick-off time. I feel as if it is a now or never sort of situation. I am “of an age” and time is short. Monday is only hours away. I ate too many things I shouldn’t have in preparation for the Monday detox day. Now I’m deciding exactly what tomorrow is going to be.

I could start with the lemonade detox fast: just the lemonade and distilled water for a few days. A week to ten days is supposed to make a huge difference. I bought some Oxylife Detox, MSM Liquid with Oxygen and silica; 1/2 oz. when I awaken and before I go to sleep. I have some Crystal Star Parasite Destroyer and Swiss Kriss tablets. I have a masticating juicer to bring on the vegetable juice after a few days of Lemonade Detox and water. I know that coffee enemas would help my liver to deal with all of this but the idea of it is difficult for me to overcome.

I think some gentle Yoga, the Five Tibetan Rites; each done only as many times as are comfortable for me, some deep breathing exercises with a few resistance moves and perhaps some cycling and walking, will be more than enough to get my body in motion again.

I am losing 51 pounds. I have done this before. Back when I lost the more than eighty pounds I had gained during the fourteen years I had spent having a baby every couple of years I started out with the Zone diet and a tiny exercise program: I knew with certainty that I could touch my toes ten times each day. I didn’t know if I could do much more than that. It was a start, I was moving my body. I walked about a block and became afraid I could not make it back home without a lot of pain. My legs hurt and I was breathing hard on the first tiny hill. It was a start…

I am not there anymore, but I am also not up at 4:00 A.M. each morning, heading for the gym to do a cycling class (spinning) and an hour of weight lifting as I learned to do by the following year. Even just a bit over two years ago I was still in the gym almost everyday or out for a jog plus sprint or fast walk. I've since moved to another state, fallen out of my gym routine, and now I can’t seem to drag myself out of bed to have breakfast with the kids at 6:30 A.M. before school. In fact, the whole getting out of bed or out of the house for even the shortest walk feels too strenuous. I’m really hiding out in my house and it shows. I don’t want the neighbors or anyone else to see the "fat" me. I can't believe I let myself slide this far.

I was recently diagnosed with RA, Rheumatoid Arthritis,and I have noticed that certain foods leave me bed-ridden with pain. I seem intolerant of some of my favorite foods. Cheese, cream, and dairy in general causes a reaction in less than an hour. RA is supposed to be helped by movement, but I find myself not wanting to move at all. The pain is only part of it, I also feel too tired. It is a downward spiral, a cat chasing its tail, and I MUST break out.

My husband tells me I am sexy and beautiful, but I feel like a girl whose mom is the only one who tells her she is gorgeous. I keep thinking that he is fooled into believing I’m beautiful because he loves me, which is wonderful, but I would also like to believe that he is not the only one able to see me this way. I feel as if I’ve stepped into the Shallow Hal movie.

While I believe that Shallow Hal had a beautiful message and ending, I didn’t see Gwyneth Paltrove giving up her trainer or diets to be loved as she might be if the baby weight she had gained during her last pregnancy had not been whisked vigorously away by strenuous effort and the motivation that being followed by Star and People paparazzi provides. I also find it a stretch to believe that the public or any Hollywood producers would be able to see her inner beauty well enough to give her many leading roles if she kept an extra fifty pounds (not to mention the Rosemarie character's extra two hundred pounds) on her frame. “Character” roles certainly; but not leading lady or love interest roles.

Now, back to the plan…

Lemonade fast for at least three days: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and supplementation with carrot and other juices made fresh from organic produce. I have loads of spinach and baby greens to juice or eat this week. I’d have to eat twenty cups of spinach to equal the carbohydrate and calorie power of one fourth of a plain bagel. Don't even whisper: cream cheese.

Weigh-in in the morning!

Starting, How Do I Start?

BE SLENDER
Since it is Wednesday, I find it difficult to start. Don't diets start on Monday? Every time I have eaten too much on a weekend, I have told myself it is okay because I'm starting my diet on Monday. The only time I didn't say this was when I went to a luxurious brunch in San Francisco and my friend, a nurse, had brought a big box of laxative gum to take after the meal. She had worked with anorexics and learned their skinny secrets. A box of laxatives rushes the food through, saving a few hundred calories from their thighs. It worked and did it a few more times until after eating a huge meal I mixed water pills and laxatives hoping for an even better result. My fingernails and toenails turned yellow. I just missed becoming a liver failure statistic. I wanted to still fit into my clothes the next day, not attend my own funeral.
I'm drinking a bottle of diet lemon aid that I just mixed. I could use it to kick start things with a fast.
BE SLENDER Detox Lemonade Recipe:
64 oz distilled water
2 or 3 drops of liquid Cayenne
Juice from 1 or 2 organic lemons
2 packets of stevia sweetener or 1 tablespoon of organic, grade "B" maple syrup
Shake it up and drink it all day. Add a tea bag of organic dandelion root to the container of Lemon Aid and you can lose up to five pounds of water weight if you are retaining water.

If you have been eating a lot of junk foods, you can be certain there is plenty of water retention going on. 64 oz. of drink can cause you to drop five pounds of water bloat within 24 hours.
I am determined to get my weight down. An ancient proverb says that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I'M READY! I know this fifty or so pounds I've gained is not all water weight.

April 29, 2008

I believe 134 LBS is the correct weight for my 5'7-1/2" body because I looked well and weighed a little less than this during my twenties. According to the BMI calculations, at 134 lbs. my BMI is 21 at that weight, which is healthy for my height.

I am like most other weight watching Americans. I can ignore the upward creep of my weight until I’m no longer able to delude myself into believing that I still look okay. Too many photographs seem to have been taken at an extremely unflattering angle and there are other certain signals…

As a woman, to know if denial has set in, the first litmus test for the “Am I too fat?” query, is to ask:

· When was the last time I was whistled at?

Another is:

· Are men are taking a second glance at me as I pass them to see what my rear view is?

My answers:

· Last whistle was May 2006,

· last “second look” also May 2006.

The truth:

· Men are not interested anymore. I must be fat. This may sound crude and shallow, but it is the truth.

Women like to be noticed, maybe not as potential rape victims, but just noticed, even admired a little. I’m normal and have, as Audrey Hepburn put it, “normal feminine vanity”. At anything over 155 lbs, I become absolutely invisible. The nice hair, lovely bosom, and pleasant face are also invisible. It's amazing but true, and I don't like it. When I am eighty years old, if cosmetic surgery can't make a dent in my looks, I will have to give in to being invisible, but not now, not yet, and not just because I want to eat too much or devour the wrong things! I’m not truly OLD yet, although that may be another subject for discussions on denial at some point.

Anyway, Today I have decided to delude myself no more. A before picture can be great inspiration. I would like to remain somewhat anonymous for a while, because this is extremely embarrassing for me and I am keeping this blog more to keep myself accountable and as a record of my progress.