Sugar Blues

As of Dec. 21, I hit my 100-lb. goal.  Actually I weighed in at 141, which was 102 down.

I decided, as I expected, I wasn’t going to stop there, though.  As I had told Jo-Ann at the outset, I knew I might want to lose more than that, as I wasn’t sure what was possible, and she, of course, answered, “Anything’s possible.”  I still had a bit of a paunch, saggy with loose skin, not a washboard stomach yet.  I felt, maybe another ten pounds.

However, that would be after Christmas.  I had planned from the start to do major cheating over the holiday, with foods that I only eat once a year. If there’s any time that should be a major cheat-athon, Yuletide should be it.  That’s exactly what I did.  Turkey… sage stuffing… chestnut stuffing… gravy… trifle… patty shells… and my favourite Christmas food of all time, shortbread cookies.

These cookies are my mother’s simple recipe from northern England, and I cannot imagine a Christmas without them.  In Ideal Protein terms, they aren’t so much non-IP-compliant as anti-IP-compliant, made of a delicious combination of pure fat to load into your digestive tract, and unadulterated carbohydrates, both simple and complex, to stimulate your insulin into telling your body to store that pure fat as pure fat.  The recipe is:

[WARNING FOR READERS SKIMMING THE BLOG LOOKING FOR RECIPES: THIS IS NOT ONE OF MY DELICIOUSLY-IP-COMPLIANT ONE.  WEAK-WILLED DIETERS, AVERT YOUR EYES.]

½ lb salted butter

½ lb. unsalted butter

¼ cup fruit sugar

¼ cup rice flour

4 cups all-purpose flour

In a big mixing bowl, cream butter, add sugar gradually, add rice flour gradually, add all-purpose flour gradually.  Consistency should be such that if you gently knead it, it stays smooth rather than falling apart.  Knead the dough until it’s warmed enough to roll.  Cut into cookies however you want to do it (I use my mother’s old cookie-cutters, some of which are 60 years old) and bake at 275 until slightly browned (20-25 minutes).  You can dip them in chocolate for extra decadence.  I guess there’s a little nutritional value in the butter.

So when Christmas Day came around, or even a little before, I indulged.  I stuffed myself with cheats.  And the very first thing I started with, on the morning of Christmas Eve, was as many shortbread cookies as I felt like, which was about four or five.

And then an amazing thing happened.

Gradually this feeling came up, of being unpleasantly jazzed up, agitated… not a bad mood such as nervousness or anger, but… a kind of disturbing inner restlessness.  And a sense of having been slightly poisoned.  Certainly I was not feeling the happiness, contentment and overall “all-is-well” feeling that I have come to think of as normal.  What the heck was this?  The oddest thing about it was that I knew it… it was familiar, though it had never been so obvious.  I’d felt it many times before—after eating shortbread cookies, after eating trifle—but had just never really been conscious of it, or thought of it as abnormal.  Now it felt really abnormal.  I didn’t like it.

I realized: I was really feeling a sugar high for the first time in my life.  After nine months without sugar, I’d stopped being used to it.

When I thought about it more, I had some truly amazing revelations.  First of all was the incredible possibility that I had been unknowingly causing myself a constant underlying tension, so that I could never really feel “all is well,” by eating sugar like this for my whole life.  I quote me from Day 20, April 26, 2012:

Another fantastic thing that has happened since I started the diet, and, I think, because of the diet, at least in part: every now and then I get hit with the most positive, happy, everything-is-going-wonderfully mood.  I feel inspired, expansive, free, capable... amazing.  I can't say I've never had this before, as I have in recent years, but now it is more intense and much, much more frequent.  In fact this morning, or maybe it was yesterday, I was in a funk, thinking about how my Google Analytics are sucking and how I'll never get a readership and so on, when I whined via IM for a bit with a dear reader/friend, and suddenly I just flipped over into that incredible positive.  It was like a switch.  I've never felt anything like it in my life.

I didn’t connect this with lowering my sugar intake.  I thought it was because I was so happy to be losing weight, or it was some mysterious metabolic effect of the diet.

Then I had another thought.  I was not a sweet tooth at all when I was a kid.  When candy was being offered around, I always turned it down, enough that I felt maybe there was something wrong with me, since all the other kids liked it so much.  I would eat it only rarely.  I remember thinking it would be too much in some way.

Now I thought: could this be because had I learned, so young that it was earlier I can remember, that if I ate sweets I’d get this unpleasant reaction?

Stimulants and I have never got along well.  I never drink coffee, never did; I drink decaf tea.  I had a friend who swore by benzedrine, so I tried it once when I was younger and more open to experimentation with drugs; the result was precisely the feeling I get just before I write an exam, so needless to say I never did that again.  I don’t need stimulants; my own mental energy draws me out of bed, wide awake, usually  sometime between 5 and 7 in the morning, and keeps me going all day unless I have to nap because I haven’t slept enough.

But sugar is a stimulant… a subtle one compared to some of these others I’ve named, but still, a stimulant.  On Christmas Eve morning, and then a couple of times later in the holiday when I did the same thing again out of a combination of wanting to know for sure that’s really what it was, and wanting to eat shortbread cookies the way I had every Christmas before, I really had it driven home to me.

The upshot is, I’m swearing off sugar in large amounts.  Even for Christmas.  That’s it—I’m done.  I don’t like that feeling.  It does not feel healthy.

What I’m going to do is try making those cookies, that I love down to my bones, with sucralose.  I will report on how it works out.

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Reactions

When I started the diet, Melissa warned me that when telling people about it--or manifesting the results--I would get negative responses.  Naif that I am, this amazed me... though I am old and jaded enough that it did strike me as plausible.

I have to say, though, I have gotten very few--just these, with names removed to protect the guilty.

1) "You have to exercise to lose weight."  This person was expressing in an untypically preachy way the greatest misconception that I have come across.  This is a misconception I didn't have myself, because previous diets I tried involved no exercise and worked, albeit not as well as this one, and I have gained fat while doing frequent, rigorous exercise.  But almost everyone assumes that you have to exercise to lose weight.  They are amazed when I tell them you don't.  Read my lips.  See the pictures.  I've lost 102 lbs. while being a couch potato, my most strenuous exercise being housework and recreational swimming.  Couch potatoes, rejoice!

2) "You're losing weight too fast... setting yourself up for a rebound."  Thank you, Mr/s. Positive.  Not rebounding is covered in the IP diet (it's called "Phase 4") and, like losing in the first place, is a matter of choice.

3) "Stop!  You should stay right there, you've lost enough!"  Now sometimes this comes out of genuine, legitimate concern, on the part of people who just aren't used to seeing me slender, so that I appear relatively emaciated.  I have learned, when I mention I've lost 90+ lbs., to add quickly that it was by choice... people can think you have cancer or some other severe disease if you don't.  But it can also be, as Jane suggested, jealousy.  (See previous post re competitiveness.)  Some people--okay, I'll call a spade a space, women--don't want another woman to climb higher than them on the status-scale of svelteness.  Regardless, what I tell them is that my goal is calculated from my adult weight when I was younger.

But that's it, really, for the negative comments.  I'll just add one more pickle-puss reaction that Melissa, not me, got: "You've got wrinkles now!"

My first reaction to this reaction was,"And you have a lovely day, in the deepest pit of hell, too, darling!"  That was before I burned off enough fat to learn there was truth in those words--since my wrinkles got worse.  I'd already observed my skin sagging on the parts of my body where it had previously been most stretched: tummy, under my arms, etc.  But at 80 lbs. or so, I really started noticing my facial wrinkles growing deeper and sharper, and the skin under my chin becoming lined.  Fact is, on this diet the fat goes much faster than the skin can tighten up, apparently even if you're young.

So for now I am telling myself "I look more distinguished!  My face has more character!" while I cross my fingers hoping that I'm still young and healthy enough that my skin will tighten up, and researching wrinkle creams and so forth.

For me, however, 99.9% of the reactions have been unequivocally positive.  The immediate ones go roughly like this:

20-39 lbs.: "That's great, good for you!"
40-60 lbs.: "Wow, that's a lot of weight, you look fantastic!"
60-79 lbs.: "Wow, that's really impressive, what an achievement, you're an inspiration, you're disappearing!"
80-100 lbs.: "OH MY GOD!!!  HOLY SH@#$%&&! I didn't know that was YOU!"  (And if they haven't seen you in months, they cannot recognize you from behind.)

It gets more and more fun as you lose more.  Almost this alone is worth the price of admission.

From my experience, the vast majority of people are genuinely happy for you.

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I did it...!!!

Yes... at my weigh-in today, after being stuck at 97 lbs. down for two weeks, I tipped the scale at 141, or 102 lbs. down.

I have been meaning to update here for a while... even have a bit of a stockpile of recipes built up... but something has been stopping me, and I'm not even sure what.  It's almost as if some part of me feels I ought not to broadcast how much weight I've lost, not share my success, not crow... as if it's bragging and therefore somehow wrong.  Am I proud of myself?  Absolutely--and justifiably, considering what I have sunk into it in terms of money, self-restraint and creative cooking energy (though that third one has been fun).  Do I regret it in the slightest?  Absolutely not; my only regret is not having lost it faster.  Do I have any reason to be embarrassed?  No... but for some reason I am.

I know that I have learned some uncomfortable truths about my own and my culture's prejudices about fat, just by looking at myself in the mirror and seeing the changes in the meaning of what I was seeing.  The time I looked at myself trying on an outfit in the fitting-room mirror and thought "OMG... I'm hot!"... well, of course we desexualize heavy people; in our culture's standard of beauty, fat is ugly, QED.  So that one wasn't a surprise.

It was more awful to look at myself and be struck that I looked more credible.  Or more important... professional... someone to be taken more seriously.  Of course, our culture making judgments like that is hardly news; not if you look at the studies on which personality traits are associated with fatness, the stats on employment prospects, etc.  But I didn't think I was doing that...!

Did I really think these things about overweight people?  And had I, therefore, previously thought them about myself?  Was I going to continue to have such prejudices, even if I was determined not to, because they really are subconscious?  How had this affected how I treated people in the past, and how would it in the future?

Three traits that are obviously associated with fat are gluttony, laziness and lack of discipline... so it occurred to me that for years, people were getting the wrong impression of me from my weight.  They might have been somewhat right about the gluttony part (in case you haven't noticed, I love food), and I admit I have become much less mobile in the past 10-15 years.  But you don't write 1,000-2,000 words every weekday while maintaining two other jobs if you're lazy--in fact I had to cut down to stave off burnout--and you don't get a black belt in karate if you don't have discipline.  But people see what's on the surface.

Given that fat is generally vilified... how many people looked down on me more than they would have if I'd maintained a weight of 140 lbs. or so for my full adult life?  How much did that damage my already-mangled self-esteem?  Would I have been handed opportunities I was not?  How different would my love life have been?  Would I have made more friends?  I will never know.  There is no point in thinking about it, beyond writing this paragraph.  There is only going forward.

I don't want to think that I think better of myself now than I did.  But I do... there's no two ways about it.  How many people have I told that my self-esteem and my social self-confidence have gone through the roof?  I love the way I look and the way I feel.  I think I look more credible.  [Smacks cheekbone-showing cheek with skinny hand.]

There is no question that svelteness is associated with higher social status.  Including by me.  As I've shrunk, I've been more and more inclined to dress more upscale and elegant, despite my relatively-scant means.  (If you frequent places such as Value Village, have an eye for quality and a willingness to search, you can do it.)  At one event I attended where I was called upon to dress in black and red, and added gold, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, 'I can't believe I'm dressing so well, creating such a feeling of luxury and richness...!'  I've never done that before in my life.  When I was previously this slender, my self-esteem was so deep in the crapper that I would never have given myself permission.

And it's okay to do this, of course... but what does it all say about my own attitudes re weight?

I'm embarrassed by the whole thing.  It has an ickiness that makes me just want to turn away and not think about it.  That ickiness is not just in me; it permeates our whole culture.  Which is why it seems so massive; why I feel helpless in the face of it, and therefore would just rather not think about it.

The part of me that buys into it makes me feel like now that I'm hitting my goal, I'm rising above and lording it over anyone who is now fatter than me.  There's this ugly competitive aspect to it, that part of me embraces and the rest of me hates that part for.  This is what's bothering me; this is why I've been stopped from posting here, once I got to a certain point...!  Up to 60 or 70 lbs. down, it somehow didn't matter... I was still struggling, still going for broke, still just dreaming... still the underdog in this fight.  As soon as I became the winner... I wanted to stop all the positive-positive-positive talk, stop sharing my recipes (since they seem like showing off my mastery of this process), stop crowing, when most would say I most deserve to.  I just want to hide away from the whole thing.

Probably there's something even deeper here that I am not inclined to explore yet.

I am not proud of what I have revealed here.

I am determined to treat everyone well, and banish the misperceptions.  I hope I can.

I will crow this much: I did it.

And I will also say: if I can, so can you.

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Clothing goal attained

I quote me on July 8:

I have this absolutely gorgeous black and dark-green satin chongsam, embroidered all over, that dates back from the 80s... I can't even remember how my ex and I acquired it, but I think I only wore it a few times before I got too big to.  I just tried it on now.  Three months ago I couldn't even have got my shoulders into it; now I can, but it's still too small around the middle.

But I will wear it. I am certain of that.

Ta da!

Oct. 16, 2012 - down 83 lbs.

I am standing in my kitchen where I do all my cooking.  For instance:

IP Masala Tomato Basil Soup

I’ve been on a serious Clubhouse Indian Masala kick lately.  That’s another one of these packaged seasonings made by Clubhouse that I’ve been experimenting with.  They are high-quality in my opinion, even if you can get them at your average supermarket.  The first one I tried was the Greek mix much used by Melissa and Marv—a good sign of things to come.

Anyway, this soup came about when I wondered how the  Indian Masala spice mix would go with IP Tomato Basil soup.  It involves three pans, a lot of garlic, daikon for texture and the trick of adding uncooked onion at the last minute.

1 package IP Tomato Basil Soup, mixed as usual

1 bulb garlic

1 tsp olive oil

Zucchini        \

Daikon             --- chopped, 2 cups

Red pepper

Sweet onion   /

Black pepper to taste

½ tsp curry powder

2 tsp Clubhouse Indian Masala

1 tsp minced garlic

1 tbsp low-carb chicken stock

Steam/boil cauliflower to tenderness.  Divide the bulb of garlic into cloves without removing skins from cloves, scorch in dry frying pan at medium high until they have black patches on all sides.  Saute the other veggies except the onion in the  oil at medium low, adding black pepper, curry powder and masala. When they’re tenderish, add chicken stock and minced garlic.  Take garlic cloves off heat.  Drain cauliflower, add to other veggies.  Turn down to low, add soup.  Peel garlic cloves while soup is heating, add to mix.  Serve into soup bowl, add onions, mix and serve.

If the whole bulb of garlic is too much for you, omit and replace with more daikon, mushrooms, etc.  You can also cut back on the sweet onion so it’s just a soupçon.  This was a total bowl-licker for me and you’re talking to a woman who has always hated tomato soup.

Non IP version: use canned tomato soup and add some basil.  I think.  Can’t try it yet.

How cool is this?  Not only am I going to come away from this diet 100 lbs. lighter, but with a bunch of new recipes. 

Hitting difficulty (Day 159)

Sept. 11, 2012.  Triumphal picture after the Muskoka Novel Marathon raised a record-smashing $15K.  One or two people who saw this shot said they couldn't spot me at first.  Of course, they were trying to spot me by my former girth.  But it no longer stands out.  The three left-most folks are all YMCA staff, including the amazing Nancy West, third from left.  Beside me is my awesome co-convenor, Paula Boon.

This post is the difficult one I promised I'd write ages ago.  But it was mostly written early September.

As of now I am down 70 lbs. (Sorry it's seeming to go backwards.)

I am more inclined to enhance my appearance in other ways, too. I've been very blessed with hand-me-down clothes from a couple of dieting friends, and have made the most of that.  (It helps that Melissa's sense of style is similar to mine.)  I've started using a curl-enhancing product on my hair, and decided to let it keep growing longer to make up for the thinning on top.  I am more likely to pose attractively now.  I wear more jewellery.  Trying to look good no longer seems utterly futile.

I'm in the endgame now, the reward after paying the dues... where five pounds more loss is much more noticeable because it's a bigger portion of what extra fat is left, where muscles and bones that were hidden under fat are emerging, both to sight and to touch.  I rub my hands together because they feel bonier and more tendony.  I palpate my own arms because the biceps are so much easier to feel.  I lay my hand inadvertently on a thigh, feel the muscle and am amazed.

The reactions are going from merely encouraging to astounded.  Before, people would say, "That's great, good for you, keep going!"  Now they say "That's incredible, you look fantastic, you're a transformed person!"  I'm getting more used to the slender version of me in the mirror; I changed my build description on OKCupid from "curvy" to "average."  (I figure average is carrying a bit of extra weight.)

Another common response is "You're disappearing" or "You're wasting away!"  I think there's even a little fear around this one.  I purposely came up with a line to answer it: "It's okay, the parts that count will stick around... the mind... the heart... the bones..."  It works.  They usually do a big laugh and are reassured.

I've even had a person or two tell me I should stop now because I've lost enough.  I generally say "to heck with that!  I want to look like"--pointing at very svelte person--"her."

That sometimes gets a bit of a shocked, even almost offended, reaction.  As if I'm not entitled to be that slender, for some reason.

"Oh yes," Jane (whose other job didn't work out, so she came back to MediSpa) says knowingly, when I tell her about it.  "People will get jealous."

"Don't get jealous!" I want to tell such people.  "Just do it yourself!  Holy crap, why envy when there's an opportunity like this--just grab it!"

But the worst fight is always with ourselves.

First thing I noticed was increased hunger, and stronger urges to cheat.  A kind of rebellion against the regimen, it seemed like... telling myself, I can afford more microcheats!  I stopped using the book for a while... you recall in the last post I mentioned I'd stopped updating it daily.  I left off using it all for a couple of weeks.  Then started again... then stopped, and think it's okay not to use it now.

I was hit with a depression, at least by my current standards (by my previous standards I'd have called it "normal life."  I've figured out ways to make myself happier since then.  The diet is only part of what I have done to transform my life.)  Insomnia again (I have the wake-up-too-early kind, 3 or 4 a.m.), a lot of anxiety and guilt and anger and desire not to work.

Then there was a party, and everyone else was drinking wine... I was having more fatty meats during the week... probably I cheated every day.  The scale hit me with a big fat zero that week... I actually thought I'd sort of got away with it all, in that I hadn't gained.  But none of this was where I wanted to go.  At the beginning I'd planned to lose 5 lbs. a week... but I never quite got that, in truth.  And now I felt I was slowing down.

To find out for sure, I averaged the first 10 weeks, not counting the amazing first water-shedding week (Apr 13-June 22), then the last 10 but one (June 20-Aug 30).  First 10 I lost 3.1 lbs. per week... low but still within the "3-5 lbs. on average" the IP folks promise.  But the second 10, it was only 2.3 per week.

I hit a kind of crisis point emotionally yesterday... almost blowing up at an editor for trying to assign me too many stories, feeling like my life was going off the rails.  I had to take care of myself... needed a good talk with my spirit guides.  If you want to know more about them see here.  I didn't know what was wrong.  If you know how to listen, you can get that which is eternal--your wiser or higher self, some might say--to tell you.

I just call them spirit guides, and they told me:

"Physical attractiveness is an emotional minefield for you. What you’ve done is put your physical attractiveness through the roof.  Part of what is bothering you is resistance to that.  This is why you were cheating last week… you felt like you were hurtling and wanted to stop it for a bit."  (I wouldn't call 2.3 lbs. per week hurtling... well, okay, maybe I would.  I'm used to the standards of other diets.)

Changing this much is confronting.  To other people, yes; but the worst fight is with ourselves.  Just as some others feel at some level that it is not appropriate to me, I feel that myself. I meant to write a "my psychology of fat" blogpost... you'll see it's still there, under construction.  I am glad now that I didn't write it, because I didn't fully understand my own psychology of fat as I do now.

More on this later.

And of course, a recipe.  I thought... broccoli-cheese soup... what goes with broccoli and cheese?  Tomatoes, of course. What spice tastes like tomatoes?  Paprika.  It worked...

Asparagus Paprika Broccoli & Cheese Soup

1 packet IP Broccoli & Cheese Soup, mixed as usual
1 tsp paprika
Asparagus, chopped coarsely                   \  ____ 2 cups
Assorted mushrooms, chopped coarsely  /
¼ cup low-carb chicken stock
1 tsp chopped garlic
½ tbsp facon bits  (fake bacon, that is)
2 slices onion, chopped finely
Sea salt & pepper to taste

Include the paprika when you’re mixing the soup.  (I actually include the salt & pepper too, but that’s because I know how much I’ll like.)  Heat a fry pan up to medium high, sear the asparagus and mushrooms until asparagus is bright green and a little scorched.  Turn down heat to about medium, add chicken stock (step back when you do this).  Idea here is mostly to cool down the pan.  Add garlic, cook for a bit, add facon bits (don’t forget to add their carb content to your count), turn down heat to medium low and add soup, stirring thoroughly.  Add chopped onion (remember, it’s a cheat to cook it; you’re just heating it up a bit.)  Season with salt & pepper and serve.

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IP Compliant Souvlaki Chicken Soup (Day... um... 150 or so?)

Okay, before you ask what I’ve been smoking (which I could, because weed is zero-zero-zero and therefore the IP diet doesn’t prohibit it), a little education on what creates that delicious souvlaki flavour.  The secret is to combine the flavour of meat—which by Greek tradition can be chicken, lamb, beef or pork, they all work—with four seasonings: olive oil, garlic, oregano and lemon, and create the grilled flavour also.

Before I get to that... I am down 74 lbs. as of last Monday, meaning it's probably more like 76 or 77 now.  I've started a longish blogpost about hitting an emotional wall with it, which I kind of did, which I will post, I guess, when I'm ready to.  There are more things I've learned:

1) If you microcheat too much, more like mesocheat, not even megacheat, the scale will smack you.

2) Smoked turkey thigh fried with no oil but a little piri piri seasoning is really good.

3) As long as their shells are unbroken, eggs last way way longer than I thought they would.  (I don't eat them because I always want meat for dinner, but my sons do, so I have to have some in the fridge, but they rarely do.)

3) enough that I can now do a quite delicious veggie soup for lunch every time, so I've started to look forward to what previously was my least favourite meal in Phase I.

So I'll get to hitting the wall and so forth in a subsequent post.  This one is about a complete Phase 1 lunch entitled:

IP Compliant Souvlaki Chicken Soup

1 package IP chicken-flavoured soup, mixed in your shaker as usual

Enough diced green peppers, red peppers, mushrooms, zucchini and green onions to make 2 cups (though I want to try it with all mushrooms and eggplant one of these days…tomato would be nice too.)

2 tsp olive oil (maxed for the day!)

2 tbsp low-carb chicken stock

3 tbsp chopped garlic

1 tbsp good Greek oregano (I have Krinos)

1 tbsp lemon juice (if this seems like too much, add it gradually.  First attempt at this, I added way too much lemon juice…. ecccchhhh.)

Sea salt and pepper to taste

Scorch the vegetables in the olive oil until browned (hence the grilled flavour).  Lower the heat, cool the pan with chicken stock, add pepper, garlic and oregano, cook stirring until garlic is cooked.  Add soup and lemon juice then salt to taste (I use none because there’s enough for me in the soup), heat up to eating-hot and serve.  Another bowl-licker.

Oh and here's a pic.  Me at the Muskoka Novel Marathon Wrap-up Party, Sept. 22:

Sept. 22, 2012 - down 74 lbs.

 

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Swimming (Day 123)

(The fact that it's Day 123 was calculated after catching up on my journal.  I am very bad... I have gotten out of the habit of journalling meal by meal or even day by day.  The journal I originally needed as a checklist to make sure I was doing everything necessary--it has check boxes for all the supplements, 10 8-oz amounts of water, etc., plus blanks to fill in your meals and add up your carb count.  But now I am so much in the routine of the diet I could do it in my sleep, no checklist needed, so I get a little... negligent.)

In fact I've been bad other ways this week, and have a feeling I'll pay for it on weigh-in day.  I've crept a little into Phase Two by having meat with lunch a couple of times this week, basically because my fridge was on the fritz and it was going to go bad otherwise.  Then there was the veggie curry Thai dish I had for lunch yesterday, coconut-milk based.  I don't need my coaches to tell me that was a no-no... my tastebuds know full well, the guilty little demons.

I'm being very good for the rest of this week.

But what I really came here to write about was swimming, something I have always loved to do.  I like to do it in freshwater lakes and rivers, not chlorine-infested pools, so it is pretty much a summer activity, though I start earlier than most people.  This year it was during the March Break heat wave; the ice was melted back from the shore enough that I could get most of myself immersed if I sat down.  Then over April, May and June, Lake of Bays warmed up nicely and is now at its very pleasant summer temperature.  And I've been wondering, with all this fat loss (62 lbs. as of Aug. 5) ...would I notice a difference?

In case you don't know, the higher your body fat content, the more buoyant you are, because fat is lighter than water.  (See here for Lynn Johnston's take on it.)  Over the years as I've gained weight, I've noticed it getting easier to stay afloat.  When I was a kid, I had to do the eggbeater kick or scull constantly, usually alternating, to tread water, whereas in recent summers I've just had to scull, and not very hard.  So this summer I've expected a sudden reversal, akin to the one time I went swimming when I was about eight months pregnant, and freaked myself out in the deep end by how much my body wanted to sink (I hadn't been swimming since very early in the pregnancy).

Tell the truth, it's been nothing like that, probably because it's been more gradual.  I hardly noticed anything at first.  I think what happened was... well, two things.  First, I don't tread water all that much; I'm usually moving, most often doing breast-stroke.  Second, I think my body has just automatically kicked into swimming more like I used to when I weighed less, and it's still familiar, so it doesn't feel that different.

However, yesterday, I decided purposely to try treading water.  Sure enough, I have to alternate between kicking eggbeater style and fast sculling to stay up, again.

The other clear difference I notice is that when I swim underwater, which I dearly love to do, it is much easier to stay down.  If I were a scuba-diver, I'd need fewer belt-weights.  So I'm more likely to go longer distances, as I'm expending less energy pointing and pulling myself downwards.  I think I'm also more aquadynamic, displacing less water as I move through it so that it takes less energy to go further, faster.

I feel more sleek, more like a dolphin than a whale.  Like everything else with this diet, it's a good feeling.

And this would hardly be a proper Ideal Protein Days blogpost without a recipe, so...

Thai Tomato Basil Soup

Meh, this is so simple it doesn't even need a formal recipe.  Just cook your veggies--I did it with asparagus but I think it would work with any except zucchini or brussels sprouts--in low-C chicken stock, pepper and chopped garlic, combine with the soup and add Clubhouse Thai seasoning to taste (in my case it must have been a tablespoon).  This was another bowl-licker for me.  You'd never guess a protein packet was involved.

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