I have immersed myself in this journey. I have the uncommon luxury to spend countless hours on the internet reading and learning and finding new philosophies on weight loss. I started by buying the 'The New Atkins For a New You' book and read it cover to cover in one sitting. I loved it so much I shared all that I could with my husband, Brett, who, you will get to know a little if you stick with my Blog as I tend to talk of him frequently.
We both had weight to lose, unlike me, Brett had lost 20 lbs and kept it off in 2010, but he still wanted to lose 20 more lbs. We began focusing on Protein and Good Carbs and cutting out things like pasta, bread, potatoes and fruits and vegetables high in natural sugar like carrots, bananas, grapes, peas, apples.
After following the Atkins diet and also reading some of the negatives regarding Atkins I decided I wanted to learn more. I was losing weight but I knew our family dr. really liked the Mediterranean diet. I kept reading and looking up different things on the internet. My weight loss stalled and frankly I was tired of the idea that I would have to eat vegetable greens with every meal in order to get the recommended quantities daily.
I realized my interpretation of Atkins or the Mediterranean diet left me frustrated and kind of confused. One diet says to eat this and another diet says stay away from it. As an example, one diet says to avoid diet soda while another one says you can drink them in limited quantities and yet another would say you can drink them with no restrictions. This of course is just one example of the many different camps on losing weight and how to do it. There are many more examples involving such things as milk, avacodos, cheese, etc.
I was watching Dr. Phil one day and he had the author of the '17 Day Diet' on his show. It promised to have quick results and interested me so I bought it online. When it arrived, I read it cover to cover. I paid attention to the approach and the focus foods as well as the forbidden foods and tried to pick up on the consistencies between diets. There are a few consistencies among all of the diets so far - drinking water, exercise, taking vitamins and protein are just some of them. I started to realize I would have to do what worked for me and had to try to figure out what was hype and what was real. Believe me, you are not alone, if you are like me and have tried different diets I know first hand the confusion and frustration all of this information can cause.
A few weeks later I walked past the books in the local grocery store and saw Jillian Michael's book on 'Mastering Your Metabolism'. I bought it and just as I had devoured the Atkins and the 17 Day Diet books in one sitting I did the same with Jillian's book.
Jillian's book took a slightly differnt approach in that she actually helped explain how the human body works in much greater depth and what makes up your metabolism and what foods, products and environment can do to mess with your metabolism and what happens when your metabolism isn't functioning properly. In Jillian's book she recommends having blood work done to see if your hormones are functioning properly. I decided to do that and made an appointment with my family dr. I explained why I was there and that I was starting a weight loss program and wanted to make sure my thyroid was functioning properly and also wanted to test my cholesterol levels as well as glucose levels to test for diabetes. I wanted to know if there was a reason I put on weight, hoping in some sick way that the tests would find something so I would have an 'excuse'. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you want to look at it, everything was normal and no pills were gonna fix fat!!!
I kept reading Jillian's book and referred to it frequently to better understand how my body works. Jillian speaks of environmental factors and how they can affect your weight loss so I followed some of her tips, one of them being tossing out all of our plastic containers and replacing them with glass. Over the past few weeks my weight loss has stalled. I have lost 21.5 lbs but the scale hasn't dropped below 248 yet.
I bought a treadmill 2 weeks ago and started walking on it daily. With my disability, it is very hard to do something as simple as walk and while I can't walk far or for long without rest, I figure no matter what I do it is better than nothing.
Last week I heard about the Dukan Diet for the first time. I read a little about it online but decided to purchase the e-book last night. This time instead of reading the entire book cover to cover, I read what I needed to know to get started. I read the basics to understand the philosophy behind it and the research and work that has gone into the Dukan Diet. Understanding it is a 4 phase program similar to Atkins, I covered what the 4 phases are and how you transition from one phase to another. As soon as I realized I would not use phase 3 or 4 until I reached my ideal weight which is almost a year away I decided to focus on the starting phase and so today, I started phase 1. Again, there are similarities between Atkins and Dukan but there are also plenty of differences.
For the next 5-10 days I will be solely on a high protein diet eating only the allowed foods for the first 5-10 days. I am reenergized to see what weight will drop the first 10 days since the Dukan Diet is designed to kickstart your weight loss and give you a sense of euphoria, designed in part to get you motivated to continue on.
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