Oh yah=Trisha, my moms in saginaw (actually a small town outside of birch run) and is doing curves. Can you send her info on the lo carb plan for curves? If she knows someone in michigan is doing lo carb, maybe she'll be inspired to do it.

mmgalway~aol.com

Thanks!

JC

i would be happy to send her some info, but the best thing to do is read the book. i don't go to curves but i do do atkins. Does she not believe you that atkins works? i will let her know i am from Saginaw and that atkins works for me!

i did a carb binge this weekend. I drank margarittas all night long one night and the next day had an oreo blizzard (like from dairy queen) only made with frozen custard (even more sugary i believe). i had a few potato chips too. So i get on the scale 2 days later and i have lost a pound! Actually i was at a plateau and now have broken thru! down 11lbs now! yeah! i'll see how the rest of the week goes, scale wise. but i am back to 20 carbs per day.

one thing i did notice is that after having a lot of carbs for the past 2 days, i felt myself craving them more.(a cream or custard filled donut to be exact right when i woke up the next morning) I think that is one thing you have to be careful of. Just be very aware of what you are eating and of your cravings, and get back on the diet.

scthgharpy:
Your mom's not far from me. I live in Bay City

Trisha, We have a lot in common with our stats/age/profession/hobbies...pretty freaky! Just wanted to say in the past when I have cheated I did seem to lose over the next few days instead of gain. I have been the same weight for the past month and am thinking I need to shock my system with some carbs.

Hey Shelley, Nice Fish...I guess it depends on the beer, not all are created equally!

After reading this thread I decided to do a controlled cheat to see if it would break my stall.....so I made a mess of lovely penne Sunday night. I went to the gym Monday (I never go to the gym) and ate a fairly minimal amount of meat and salad. I felt so virtuous. And damnit, I'm up two pounds this morning! ARGH. I should have known that it sounded too good to be true. (Plus, to be honest, the penne didn't go down all that well at all. Made me feel a little ill to eat so many carbs suddenly. Which is interesting in itself.)

NYorker, It is more than likely water weight and you may notice over the next several days you lose that and more. Just give it time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't!

This sounds too good to be true! Can I really enjoy some Arby's curly fries for lunch and jump-start my way out of a stall?

I think for now I'll keep plugging away with the no-cheating, low-carb thing. I'm waiting for that post-TOM whooosh to kick in this week, and I'm trying to motivate myself to start exercising. If that doesn't un-stall me, I might try the carb-binge idea one day next week.

I'm having a dilemma. We're going to New York this weekend, and one of the main purposes of the trip is to visit this very famous Italian restaurant that is supposed to be out of this world.

I haven't cheated in about 8 weeks. The last time I cheated, though, was at a wedding. I gained SEVEN POUNDS and it stuck to me for a whole week. And the food wasn't even that good. (The wedding cake had frosting that wasn't even made with butter. That nasty fake frosting haunted me every day over the next week as I looked at the chocking numbers on the scale. How could I DO THAT to myself for some nasty grocery-store quality wedding cake?)

I'm sure the food will be good at this famous restaurant. But is there any one meal in the world that is worth a seven pound weight gain?

Simply put; no.

It's all up to you; "cheating" is a decision you have to make for yourself. Since you know how your body reacts, it might help you weigh the options. As someone's signature says, "Nothing tastes as good as thing feels."

You could always go to the Italian place and get a salad and a chicken dish. Just ask that it be served plain instead of over pasta.

Zowie!! I've never heard of a 7 pound weight gain from one cheat. You must put on weight very easily. If that's the case, I'd probably pass on any cheating. I do cheat occassionally but have never noticed a weight gain. Can't help you on this one. It's a personal choice. Good luck!

I'm in maintenance and I eat Higher carb foods not every day but at least once a week no sweets though just a potato or some rice etc..

Morgan, that's some signature!!

Yeah, I've never heard of anyone else gaining 7 frickin' pounds from a damn piece of wedding cake either.

Here's the dilemma:

1. The plane tickets alone are costing us some ungodly some (we live on the West Coast). The dinner's probably gonna run $500. So it's a VERY special occasion -- definitely not the kind of thing we would do every month, or even every year.

2. I don't eat meat, so there's going to be very little OTHER than pasta I can eat at this Italian restaurant.

3. I know that I am not going to live the rest of my life without eating a single plate of pasta ever again. Someday, somewhere, I WILL eat a plate of pasta. I just like it too much to forego it forever.

So, taking all those factors together, it seems like it makes sense to ensure that when I do eventually eat pasta, that plate of pasta is AMAZING. And, as far as I can tell from all the food critics, this restaurant is amazing. (We made reservations a month in advance, and the only table they had left was for 11:15 p.m.)

But then again . . . . seven pounds is a lot of weight. Atkins says one carb binge can set you back a week -- seven pounds would set me back like, two months.

According to the First Law of Thermodynamics (e.g. matter can't be created or destroyed), there's no way a 7-lb gain from a single meal can be fat -- it HAS to be water. You ate, what, a pound of bad food? Even if every bit of the food was converted to stored fat, that's still only a 1lb gain, leaving 6 lbs of water. You can't create more fat than the weight of the food you started with -- it's got to be created from something, right?

Some people just put on more water weight than others, or hang on to it longer. But unlike fat, it does fall off after a while, so it's not like you'll be permanently undoing your hard work if you do cheat. It all depends on how well you cope with a week's worth of bloat. Me, I'd probably take my chances with the bloat for a real gourmet dining experience, the kind where you'll remember the exact menu years from now. I'm not a big advocate of cheating, but there are some legitimate big-deal food experiences that I think are justifiable, and I think a restaurant that's worth flying cross-country to visit qualifies!