Life is getting back to normal after over indulging in Thanksgiving feasting. The feasting really began after pictures with pizza and cookies and didn’t end till this past Sunday with left over turkey, stuffing, and chocolate bread pudding. Uh, I felt every toxic calorie seeping out of my pores come Monday morning! I seriously felt like I was in a food hang-over or a sugar coma; although, it was most likely both. That is what happens when you drop carbs for any length of time. I was so happy that I had only done so for a couple of days because I was able to get right back on track with my brown rice, protein shake, egg whites, salads, and ezekial bread first thing Monday. In fact, I was looking forward to it like a lost puppy.What!? Are you serious…could it be that these are my comfort foods now? I felt ‘icky and gross all over, but instead of getting further depressed and continuing to pig out, I turned to the foods that I knew were healthy, filling, and would help me get off the 8lbs of weight I put back on right after pictures!! By the way, another negative side effect of low carbing for any length of time is that, even though you lose a lot of weight fast, you gain it back even faster when you start eating carbs again. I went from a healthy 114lbs at 14% body fat to 108lbs at 12% body fat to 116lbs at only God knows how much body fat, over the course of 2 weeks. Lucky for me, I know exactly what to do in order to get myself back at my normal weight within a week or less. Today I weighed in at 114.5lbs. Dropping carbs to get ready for an event can be very risky for someone who is in-experienced in cutting diets.There really is no reason to attempt this unless you plan on competing in bodybuilding of some form or doing fitness modeling. Today, I looked forward to making turkey meatballs and whole grain pasta with organic marinara. I was so excited but then I realized that I had no ground turkey left and I was not going back out to the grocery store. So, my sweet mother-in-law gave me the only meat she had, ground chuck, so I could cook my family a fresh meal. This is a very fatty meat, but we rarely eat fatty meats and we had been clean all week so I felt we could get away with it for the night. Nearly starving, or so he said, Harold made his bowl of pasta and sat down with it on the couch. He took one bite and looked up at me in shock and asked, “Is this real beef?!?”. “Yes”, I replied, to which the only response I heard after that was, “Mmmmm”. You would think I starved him for weeks….poor thing! In all honesty, this is a meal we usually eat on a weekly basis, minus the ground chuck. And, why not? In moderation, these things are all very healthy. There’s one thing I’ve learned from all my trials and tribulations in dieting is that it has to be something you can do the rest of your life. You need food for fuel, carbs, protein, and fat for energy, muscle recovery/building/healing, fat loss, endurance, metabolic functions, and mental function/clarity. Why would you ever feel the need to cut out one of these food groups when they compliment each other so well?I believe the central theme for a happy successful life is balance and consistency in all things. Why not apply it to your nutrition and training? If you start making changes, but you cave-in to the pressure of cookies or pizza or the holidays, it doesn’t mean you failed. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have enough will power or that, “Oh, heck, I messed up so I ruined the whole day, week, month, or year” mentality. What this does mean is that you are human and destined to err; however, another human trait is the ability to persevere. You accept your faults and aim to better them. So you messed up, but that doesn’t categorize you and destin you to be over weight and out of shape. Just recognize what you did wrong, make a mental note of it, and strive to do better. To pick yourself up after a fall and keep going is a true success. Looking back at an old competition journal, I was reading my food log for 3 weeks leading up to a show in which I cheated and ate a bunch ( and I mean A BUNCH) of chocolate, followed by this comment, “…my emotional addiction to food is debilitating in this sport” . I must have been pretty down on myself. It’s hard to accept you lost control; however, I then noticed I redeemed myself and followed my nutrition perfectly in the last weeks till the show. Four days till the show I wrote, “Sacrifice is only for a short time, to realize a dream is forever.” Was I really deprived of anything, nope, nothing that I truly needed. I finally realized there were alot of things I could live without. I didn’t need chocolate every day. I surely love it, but it’s not essential to my well being; however, when the day comes that I have an irrisistable craving for it, well it will surely still exist.

This entry was posted on December 3, 2009 at 9:45 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Uncategorized by sam | 1 Comment