Learning to live low carb

Momma called the doctor,
And the doctor said
No more eatin' starches and bread.

Actually, I did go to the the doctor yesterday, and although her word choice was a bit different, the message was the same. My days of eating limitless carbohydrates are over.

She spoke in a clipped, professional way, but what she basically said was that my particular pairing of genetics makes it easy for me to store food as fat -- especially when I eat carbs. She diagnosed my pervasive water retention problem not as a by-product of faulty hormones, but as a result of unbalanced carbohydrate intake. In other words, I got dumped on in the gene pool, and if I want to experience better health, I will need to eat drastically differently than I've been eating. Ugh!

I spent over a two years attending Weight Watchers every week. In the first seven months I lost over 30 pounds. But shortly after that I hit a plateau and slowly began gaining back weight. After more than a year stuck at the same weight, I stopped going to meetings in March of this year. In light of what I learned at the doctor's office yesterday, it seems that when I track my eating using the Flex plan from W.W. I still eat too many carbs. Dang it!

I'll admit to feeling a bit daunted after yesterday's appointment. Learning a new way of eating is hard! And if I've learned anything about weightloss, it's that there is no such thing as a diet. You can't restrict your eating for a set amout of time and then go back to the way things used to be and expect to maintain weight loss. If I want my weight loss to last, then the eating changes I make have to become a way of life that I can live for many healthier years to come.

Hard as it is, that's what I intend to do. I'm starting out my reading Low-Carb Dieting for Dummies that I checked out from the library. So far so good. I'll keep you posted on my successes, insights and mis-steps.

Cashew later.