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Health and Fitness [1401.15]

Low Carb Diet, Part 3: Results So Far

After all my due diligence (see parts 1 and 2 of the low carb diet series), I was all set to go.

Normally when I enter into a "gotta get seriously into shape" phase, it would be for something specific like a kendo championship tournament. I'd have specific weight goals as well as workout and practice goals. Unless I got injured, I'd be pretty good about persevering with an "eat less, exercise more" regimen, ineffective though it had come to be.

This time, my training goals were more general: basically, to continue trying to get back up to snuff in kendo (a torn knee in 2007 and subsequent surgery in 2008 had really put me in the basement). For the LCHF diet:

  1. I scheduled the start time to coincide with some kendo down time
  2. I vowed to stick with it for at least 3 months, no matter how much suffering and anguish I had to endure
For point 1, I started the LCHF diet a little before the annual carnival at my local Japanese community center, during which time and for two weeks afterward we would have no kendo practice. For point 2, I mentally girded myself to give up gohan (Japanese rice)!

This may seem hard to understand, but to the Japanese, rice is more than food. Even though I'm technically third generation, meaning my parents were born in the U.S., my mom and dad were raised in Japan and then came to America in their early twenties, so we were, for all intents and purposes, an immigrant family. Gohan was pretty central to life. To give it up, I was expecting to have to exert more will power than I'd ever had to before.

Amazingly, that test of will power never occurred. It turned out the hardest thing about restricting carbs was all the time and effort required to pick it out when eating restaurant food (in retrospect, I should have carried chopsticks with me; it would have made things so much easier!).

Below is a graph of my weight, including body fat percentage, for the past 17 months, from 1207.23 to 1401.14 (let's not worry about the exact units, shall we). A few notes about the graph:


Some notes about the first month: Right now I'm still following a LCHF diet, but not as strictly as before. I probably eat 75 to 100 grams of carbs a day, give or take a fair chunk. I still have a bit of excess fat (the lower abdomen and upper thighs are real buggers!), but I'm not worried about it. I'm also not worried if I'm still slowly losing weight (as I seem to be), as long as it's from excess body fat and not muscle.

Well, I think that's enough about me! I'll end with a couple of notes that may make my mileage differ from yours:

In my mind, the allergy experience is germane. My body has become sensitive to carbohydrates. It doesn't go into shock like it does with shellfish, but the reaction is still bad, and it's worth being vigilant about avoiding it.

In my next post in this series, I'll talk about other references and tools that I've found useful (like how I do the charting above). Stay tuned!

 
The Seeking42 low carb diet series (note: this list will be updated as articles are added):

If you wish to comment on this post, see the companion blogspot entry.


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