It was a crisp fall day in 1998 (who am I kidding, I live in Texas, it was quite possibly still triple digit weather) when my mother's best friend Jody came over to tell my family about this new diet she had just read about from some cardiologist named Dr. Atkins. She had brought food with her to show us what a typical meal would be like on this diet, and though I can't remember what we had for lunch that day, I remember that it ended with strawberries and whipped cream. Like, actual cream that Jody whipped...like with her triceps. I know, weird concept. Before companies started putting them in little plastic containers under the title Cool Whip (which does make it seem cooler, and more violent), folks could actually whip up their own cream to make a remarkably similar product. Since I do not have said triceps of steel that either Jody or my friend Lisa have, I cheat and use a stand mixer. I figure I get enough brownie points for avoiding the high fructose corn syrup to allow for said cheats. And in an effort to not cause myself to stumble, brownie points from now on will be referred to as celery points. Only that kinda sounds like punishment. Bacon wrapped filet mignon points it is!! Now THAT'S something to get excited about! Anyways, back to the meal.
After eating said lunch and strawberry goodness dessert, something clicked in me. I thought, wow, that was really really good, and Jody said I'm going to lose weight on this (I have always been overweight, and my senior year of high school was no exception), but who the heck has ever heard of something so silly as giving up bread? I mean, seriously. That's just weird. Only she didn't say bread, she said carbohydrates? What the heck is a carbohydrate? I mean, I remember learning about them in biology, but come on, I know about as much about those as I do the infrastructure of a cell, and since I'm pretty positive I just lost a few brain cells from the sheer rememberance of the trauma of learning high school biology, that's not saying too much. So into the pantry we went and I started looking at food lables. Kinda crazy, I guess those things had been on food all along. So, in my parent's kitchen Jody, my mother, my father and myself all began to look at the carbohydrate content of the food in our pantry. Lo and behold, I was going to starve for the rest of my life.
Since my parent's kitchen is not the biggest in the world, I retreated from my nightmare of no macaroni and cheese only to escape to the refridgerator. Surely there'd be something in there I could still eat. Ok, so bologna and cheese were perfectly acceptable, but since bread was out the window (my eyes started to tear), it would be awkward to eat. I looked to my faithful friend milk. Milk had been a before school, after school, and before bed, after bed routine for me for forever. Well, maybe not the after bed part, that would be weird. Let's just say I could personally take down a gallon of milk in about 2-3 days. Pure lovely 2% milk...13 grams of carbohydrates for a cup. Ok, what the heck does that mean?
"Hey Jody! How many grams of carbs are we supposed to stick to per day?"
"For the first couple of weeks, 20 grams or less."
"No, I mean per DAY." Obviously she misunderstood me.
"20 grams or less per DAY, Kell".
I was pretty positive this "diet" was one of the signs that Jesus mentioned and we were all getting raptured soon. After all, Abraham might have been told to slaughter Isaac, but not being able to drink my requisite half gallon of milk a day? Surely this meant the Anti-Christ was rising to power. With the song, I Wish We'd All Been Ready playing on repeat in my brain, I looked forlornly at the bread on the counter, the biscuits in the fridge, the french fries in my dreams that would not be crossing my lips for weeks on end, and seriously contemplated if life was better just being fat. Of course since I was 17 years old, and a month shy of turning 18 and a legal adult, I was not able to make this decision for myself. Well, that and I didn't buy the groceries, so I really didn't have a say.
My mother, I'm sure frustrated by the lack of results from low fat or low calorie diets, looked at Jody and said, "Ok, I'll read the book". And thus started my low carb journey.
Our household went from one of mac and cheese with garlic bread, to burgers without the buns and eggs. Though not together, because that just made me a smidge nauseous. Coca Cola was replaced with caffeine free Diet Coke, or flavored water, and a good grilled chicken caesar salad became something I considered myself a bit of a connoiseur (TOTALLY had to look up how to spell that word) of. The salad from Grandys wasn't so good, but, oooh, if you get the one at Schlotzskys, it's FABULOUS. Minus the croutons of course. I'd say little by little the weight came off, but truth be told, I lost 8lbs in the first two days. By the end of week one I was down 15lbs. By week two, I had lost another 8lbs, and my clothes started to get a little bit embarassingly hangy. And by embarassingly hangy, I mean, my friend Stacy Johnson used to threaten to pants me often, and this was easily accomplished by the meer act of my standing up.
A few months and loads of eggs for breakfast later, and I was down 60lbs. People were noticing a huge change in me. I went from a size 28 at the auditions for a show I did called Harvey, to a 20 by a week before opening night, when Angela Holding and I finally went shopping for my costume. And I did all of this with zero exercise. That is not to say that I'm a proponent of not exercising, QUITE the opposite now, I'm simply telling the story.
So what happend? Why am I not a size 6 now? Well, tons happened. Different events took place my senior year of high school and I became very depressed. Frustrated that I hadn't fixed everything in my life with fixing my weight (why I thought losing weight and becoming the "perfect me" would make everything else in life perfect I still don't know --- although after further review of that sentence, shoot, I think I still believe it...good thing I'm in counseling every other week), I began to say, "forget it! Bring on the ice cream!" And after about 6-8 months (though it had only taken a few months to lose it), all 60lbs came back on, and they brought with them their friends 20 and 30 extra pounds. Graduating high school one weight, and going freshman year of college nearly 100lbs heavier...not fun.
At this time, it seemed like the whole world had heard about low carb dieting, and suddenly places like Popeyes Chicken started offering their own low carb chicken strips. Believe me, this would have made dining out a whole lot easier a year before, but at this point I was bitter. I had gained so much weight and thought this was because I had done one type of diet, and when I quit I gained back everything plus more. Almost like a rubber band effect. Like, when you pull a rubber band to shoot your brother with it, if you don't let go correctly, not only does the band pull back to return to it's original size and shape, it'll actually fly backwards and shoot YOU in the eye. I felt somehow low carbing had done this to me. Not only that, but the medical community was all up in arms talking about how Atkins would destroy your kidneys, give you gout, and increase your cholesterol to heart attack levels. So, ignoring the fact that Dr. Atkins was actually a cardiologist, and probably ran tests throughout his career to cast doubt on these "facts", and or justify them, I just decided to say, you know what? The medical community says this, and I believe them, so bring on the potatoes!
I continued to gain weight. And I continued to blame the rubber band, and never considered looking at my body and thinking, eating one particular way seems to produce in my body X result, while eating another way, seems to produce Y result, and perhaps X and Y are not dependent variables on each other, but rather on the food that I eat. So, low carb = weight loss, and high carb = weight gain, and that's why the rubber band shot me in the eye, not because I "quit the diet", but because I started eating high carb foods again. But then again, I only passed college biology because there was a curve. A GIANT curve. Like, I never once passed a test in college Biology (which I only took because they made me), and somehow I got a B in the class. GIANT curve.
Which brings us to last week. Last week, I was sitting at work thinking about how I wanted to lose weight for the 472,393rd time in my life, and I started remembering those days gone by over a decade ago, and how when I had genuinely done a low carb diet, my cravings for sugar went away, and weight seemed to just fall off of me. My immediate thought was,
"But the medical community will hate you"
"But maybe I don't care what the medical community thinks anymore. I means, seriously, do I trust the government with anything else? Why would I trust them with my nutrition?" (and if you think that the "food pyramid" isn't put together by politcal lobbyists, please PLEASE let me buy you a cup of coffee and let's chat).
"Well, that's true. But what about your kidneys?"
"What about them?"
"You could die!"
"Well, we don't actually know that is true. Perhaps this is something we should start reading up about. In the meantime, my crystal clear kidneys aren't going to save me from the vat of fat my heart is incased in...so about that weight loss..."
"Hmm...good point. It did work before. And now you know your way around a gym quite well...maybe if you did both at the same time, excercise and low carb, maybe you could lose even more weight and maintain a stronger level of fitness?"
"It's worth a shot, right?"
"Ok, I'm in, but you know this means no more Halloween candy".
"Oh crap, let's start tomorrow!"
"No ma'am! You start today fool, or you don't start at all".
"Wow, you get kinda mean on low carb don't you"
"We haven't even started yet!!"
"I know, I'm already scared of you"
"But I AM you"
"Good thing I'm in counseling every other week then"
So, here I go again, but not on my own (seriously WHO CHOSE THAT SONG for our Senior class???!?). Lunacy. Ugh, and now it's stuck in my head. Speaking of my head, in the last week and a half or so of going low carb (minus a few days of emotional eating that got me way off course), I have experienced SO much clarity of mind. Like, literally it felt like a fog has been lifted. And before I went off course, I was averaging 1-4lbs of weight loss a day. A day. I say that because I was literally losing at least one pound every day, and some days I got up on the scale and had miraculously lost 5lbs in my sleep.
I do not believe that low carb dieting is for everyone. I never understood why there would be one way of eating for every human being on the planet. There's not one way of washing our hair, or one way of speaking, fingerprints are different, genetics are different, so why the heck would we fuel our "different in every other way" bodies exactly the same way? What I do know, is that it seems to make my body function better than ever before, and my mood, my brain power, and my body feel more at peace and alert all at the same time.
I'm a long way from where I want to be, but I believe that I am going to get there through knowing my body, and being a good steward of it, the way God designed me to live. In the meantime, I'm doing weigh ins and video blogging for myself, which I may or may not ever post on here. I'm also taking photos and doing all kinds of other things to help motivate me to continue on. i know exactly what my numbers are as far as starting weight, number of pounds lost, and starting pant size, etc. One day I might even be brave enough to tell all of you in cyberspace. Probably not until I've lost a hundred pounds, but at some point I will. And then I'll probably post all of the videos i have of me weighing in and talking to myself and a couple of friends I've shared this journey with. Until then, it's blog posts and bacon wrapped filet mignon points.
