Don't Panic about your Post Christmas Weight Gain: I'ts Mostly Water Weight

Blarg! My Christmas binge has gained me almost three pounds. And before I learned about water weight, i'd be extremely disheartened and discouraged that I'd slid back so much and so fast. So read this, and maybe you'll feel better after your own Christmas binge.

Time to talk water weight again. Cuz boy do I got it. I blame my Christmas binge.

Water weight...it's tricky. CRAFTY.

When you first start losing weight, you lose weight fast. It's cuz of a certain chemicle in your muscles and throughout your body, which I like to call "Goo" (aka glycogen) which is sort an uber-fast energy storage method for the body. And the thing about this "goo" is that it holds a lot of water. When you first lose weight, this "goo"/glycogen gets used up and relases massive quantities of water, which is awesome because it feels like you're losing weight super fast at the beginning of the diet.

When it's used up, then the weight loss slows down. Fat takes quite a bit more time to burn off.

The major bummer, though, comes when you eat more calories than your body uses. Cuz then the glycogen/goo comes back and holds fast to vast quantities of water again. So you can gain three or four pounds all at once. WUMP.

Which is exactly what happened to me this week. I've gained three pounds even though my fancy calorie chart shows that I really only ate about 2300 more calories than I used...less than a pound's worth.

On the bright side, I should be able to drop it pretty fast again considering it's mostly water weight. It would be a LOT more discouraging if I didn't know what was going on. Which I do. So it isn't. I just gotta keep on with what I've been doing for a couple months and everything will be fine.

Back to the Diet: Cheese is part of the Paleo Diet, Right?

Well, that was fun.

I ate food. For Christmas. There. I suspect I've gained back one of the pounds that I workd so hard to kill. Each one of those pounds of fat is 3500 calories. So amazingly easy to put into my mouth. So hard to take off my doughy midsection.

Do I feel some regret? Maybe a little.

Fortunately I'm still on track for my December goal. And now it's time to get back to ye olde diet.

But now arises a new problem: leftovers. Just because I am now seeking my way back to the path of healthy eating doesn't mean there aren't piles of cookies and bags of the traditional Christmas Cool Ranch Doritos hanging around. And real maple syrup. Dammit.

I just have to not put them in my mouth in vast quantities, right?

I should probably go back to my routine of filling up on something like cabbage and hot sauce for breakfast. And on the bright side, we have some fantastic, fancy cheese. Prima Donna cheese and a soft, goaty bucherolle.

Cheese is part of the paleo diet, right?

I'll probably also get out and do some more exercise today. Here's a vid I made yesterday while going out on my Christmas constitutional which theoretically burned about 400 calories.

Ain't Gonna Break Out the Hair Shirt this Holiday Season

Batten down the hatches, mateys. We're most of us in for a pefect storm of foods:
Candies, chips, cookies, cakes, breads, kolač, nuts, crakers...booze, pastries, booze pastries...

It's true. Booze pastries. My wife has a 5 gallon bucket wherin she's steeped, for months now, several loaves of homemade fruit cake in a bottlesworth of high octane brandy.

Am I going to eat/drink that? Yes. Yes I am.

How can I not?

And there's the problem with the holidays. Everything is so good, how can you NOT eat? I admit, I've had terrible luck sticking to my diet these past few days. Most days I've been coming just under the wire of my caloric limit. Yesterday I went way over...but I think I burned most it off by shampooing the carpet and searching around for a gifts for my 789 nephews. Not that it's an excuse.

In a way, I'm trying to keep this in perspective and now allow my failure to stick to a strict diet make me give up the ship once the rough high calorie waves of carbs and sugars have settled down.

After all, Christmas time...the solstice time...it's traditionally been a time of feasting. Perhaps the problem is not the presence of feasts during the Holidays. Perhaps the problem is that we feast all 365 days of the year as well.

Maybe it's okay to have a short time of gluttony to look forward to, and to remember fondly, while we spend the rest of the year adjusting to a healthy, normal eating style.

I remember learning about medival monks. They'd have their strict, regimented lives day in and day out. And then one day out of the year, for the entire day, the youngest monk got to be the head monk and for that whole day hillarity and chaos ensued. A pressure valve. A time of relative abandon.

Food addiction aside, where overeating is a severe, chronicl problem...if releasing the pressure valve once in a while was good enough for Medieval monks, it's good enough for me. I'm going to sample my favorite dishes this time of year. I'll celebrate with friends. I'll try to watch my food intake, but I'm not going to break out the hair shirt if I go over. And then...when the holidays are done, the feast is over, right? Such has been the lot of mankind for centuries.

Venturing into Candies and the Smell of Christmas Things

Today I venture into the high-risk pool of Holiday candy production. Sure, I may be on a diet, but one does not turn ones back on tradition, especially with children in the house. They must know the ways and virtues of the Candied Orange Peel dipped in milk chocolate. And besides, they make fine gifts.

Christmastime is a time of smells and snow. We barely have the snow right now, which is a strange thing in Michigan. So we'll need to go extra-heavy on the smells and create that humid food-preparation environment Grandma used to have going on every time we'd enter her house on any special occasion.

I've got a cabinet full of the spices. I've got the savory spices in one cabinet and the sweet/halloween spices in the other. Strange that synesthasia and spices are so Month-oriented:

In October the smell of cinnamon and clove conjurs memories of Witches brew and pumpkin breads, and watching Young Frankenstein on television.

In December the smell cinnamon and clove awakens memories of raisin breads, raisin sauce, spiced ham and that strange cheese, bread, egg thing at Grandma's house with my family, and those flying-saucer type tree orniments I used to love to pull off the tree and fly around the house.

Anyway, the point is, smell is important. And I want my two little boys to have that smell-memory activated and associated with pleasant home memories when they smell holiday spices.

And so, today, we make candies.