January 20 - Finally Feeling Better!

Woooot!  I'm feeling great today!  First, my cold is finally gone.  Second, my duck lips have receded and now they are just unattractively chapped (but at least not huge!).  Third, a good friend of ours gave us his old mattress, and now Boyfriend and I are sleeping like kings.  Now, this isn't any old hand-me-down.  This friend owns a furniture company, and the bed in unreal - a firm, queen, custom bed that is like new.  We feel so lucky!  We've been working towards buying a new bed for almost a year, and now we have one and we got it for free.  67 bucks for a metal bed frame and 100 bucks for a mattress pad and some new sheets and we are good to go.

Today marks my official return to all things resolved.  I did not make my fitness or eating goals last week because of sickness/busy-ness/stress.   This week I am 100% back on the lo-carb diet.  This is the plan I am following (from Johnny Bowden's book):

• Eat as much meat, poultry, and fish as you like.
• Eat unlimited vegetables.
• Eat as much of the healthful fats - butter, avocados, olive oil, coconut oil, fish oil - as you like.
• Eliminate all potatoes, rice, pasta, breads, cereals, and other starches.
• Eliminate grains.
• Eliminate sugar.
• Eliminate dairy.
• Eliminate alcohol.

This is only supposed to last for two weeks, and then you include more carbs back in slowly.  In my two week version, I'm not cutting out dairy, as I eat a lot of cheese, and Dr. Bernstein says cheese is cool.  Also, in the strictest form of the diet, you don't eat sugar from fruit, but its my life and I'll eat fruit if I want to.  For real though, I know myself and I can't cut out all sweet stuff, so fruit will be my way to go (though in limited amounts, 1-2 servings a day of mostly berries).  AND, my favorite yogurt has sugar in it, and that's staying, too (and it's dairy!).  In the first two weeks you aren't supposed to worry about calories.  Bowden says "First you want to make sure you are eating the right foods.  There's plenty of time later to start fiddling with portion sizes.  At this point in the game, I'm not concerned with calories; centering the diet around protein, fat, and fiber will generally cause you to be full before you've overeating anyway (my note: which I found true when I first when on this diet in November).  For some lucky people, that's all that's necessary - calories will self-regulate.  For most people, it will be necessary to deal with calories if weight doesn't come off."  Sounds good to me, especially since I'm so busy that tracking usually gets the blow-off anyway.

Two weeks from now is February 3rd, which is the perfect time to reintroduce alcohol into my life.  Boyfriend and I are going to Charleston on the 1st of February because I'm giving a paper at an academic conference.  My paper is on Saturday, so I'll defo have some wine on Saturday night to celebrate.  I'll be going 13 days instead of 14 (though I haven't had any booze for the past week and a half-ish, so I'm calling that "day 14").  

When I get done with informative Chapter 2, I'll give you guys a summary of Bowden's book so far.   The studies on the healthful benefits of a low carbohydrate diet are really convincing, though I'm sure the studies in any book about a particular diet are going to be persuasive.

On the exercise front, I'm going to schedule 4 days of cardio, 2 days of strength training and a walk or yoga on the days when there is no cardio planned.  I'm not assigning mandatory yoga this week because my teacher is going out of town and I don't know if we'll be able to meet.

And one final note - I'm sorry but I have to turn on the word verification thing again for posts.  I'm getting upwards of 30 spam comments a day and they are driving me crazy!

Here's to the start of a great week!

This week is going to be as awesome as this pic of Ginny the Dog.  Follow Ginny on Instagram: @ginny_jrt  She is SO CUTE.