I feel so happy today...two pounds down in the first week of this thread!! It's the reward of measuring my food again...whoo hooo!!!

I am doing good this week so far. I have left the processed meats alone and haven't eaten any Low Carb Sweet Treats...which at times can be my weakness. Tomorrow is son's birthday. At first I thought I would have a hard time with the whole "Cake and Ice Cream" thing.....but I think i will do just fine with not wanting those things because I have had a great weight loss this week. I may make some Low Carb sweet treats, but if I do this, I will split the recipe in 1/2 or even 1/3 and only make "just enough". I have a really bad tendency to make the full recipe and eat the whole thing in one day!

I am also working on portion control. This is really hard for me, but I have noticed that I am no longer lingering into the kitchen in the night hours for that late night fix. That is a huge deal for me.

Good luck to everyone over the holiday weekend!

This is a magic thread - I've dropped 2.5 pounds this week! My renewed focus is thanks to all of you. Since PJ started this effort, I've been to the gym three times, have laid off nuts (mostly) and am making a real effort to look at lower calorie low-carb alternatives (eating more chicken than steak, for example).

Maybe I will make that 30 pound mark by the end of the year :-)

I'm wondering about magic myself. TOM started today and instead of the normal +5 or more on the scale today it showed +2 from yesterday. WTF? Seriously, I am not dehydrated and I set Monday the 26th as the day I start behaving properly.

[QUOTE=MorganMac]Reducing aspartame in my diet. Sadly, I am a true diet coke addict and can't get the splenda version here, though the distributor said they'd try to stock it in my local walmart, so maybe! Between the diet coke and the SF jello, this isn't going to be easy!
QUOTE]

From a fellow diet coke/diet soda addict - what's wrong with it? Atkins says ok? Did I miss something - I have reduced at all. I'm still to high to know if I'm losing via scale - I kind of guessed where I started - that's where I got the 420 (my scale goes up to 400 and I get get there by pushing with 3 fingers now - before it took pushing with a hand - how sad is that!) so I don't know if what I'm doing is working. I'm going to the bathroom a lot. My energy is way way up - I am now reading EVERYTHING to check for carbs after my big surprise yesterday. So is diet soda a good thing or bad?

It worked - I left the office - ate a pickle and then got to some grilled chicken and saved myself! At 3 pieces of licorice this afternoon BEFORE reading the package - 38 grams in single serving of 4 - blew that one! I WILL NOT EAT ANYTHING BUT EGGS, MEAT, MAYO AND SOME LETTUCE FOR A WEEK! I can do that - maybe throw in pickes for snacks. I'm drinking enough water to float away and need to hear back on if diet soda is good - once I hit the 399 mark I can judge better. I am in ketosis though. The support hear has really helped!!!!!

Yea for you - WAY TO GO!

I don't think diet coke is bad when low carbing, though some say otherwise. I think it depends on the person. It doesn't affect me at all as far as carbs / ketosis, etc..

But, aspartame is just bad bad stuff and really horrible for you so I'd like to get rid of it as part of the quest for health.

Diet coke with splenda is marginally better, though they're coming out with coke made with stevia soon! I just hope its not too icky sweet!

Some people report that diet soda seems to stall them. I haven't noticed that for myself, but I try not to drink too much.

Some diabetics notice apsartame raising their blood sugar same as sugar... and if that's the case, it's also causing an insulin response, which could be why some notice too much aspartame stalls them... you want to keep your insulin levels low, it's your fat storage hormone. So I think avoiding aspartame as a general rule in favor of splenda is probably not a bad idea, but as with anything *it only works if you can live with it*.
If you need a diet cherry vanilla dr. pepper or a SF jello snack cup in the evening to keep you from going face first into a box of ding dongs, then by all means, do so.

More and more sodas can be found with splenda, though.

There is some evidence with aspartame that points towards neurological issues arising. I believe that one of the byproducts of aspartame (when mixed with heat) is formaldehyde, which is why you can't cook with it. I know that when I drank sodas containing aspartame, I had even more migraine activity than I had without it, as well as more muscular cramping and pain - but this is anecdotal, as I have quite a bit of both of these things even in the absence of aspartame. I have heard of others reporting headaches and neurological pain/paresthesias, as well.

I also drink a lot of TaB! (I tend to drink about 6 cans of soda a day - too much but, for now it's alright). TaB has saccharin instead of aspartame, which probably has it's own list of horrors, lol. I just haven't had any issues with either sweetener diet wise (or headaches, etc) so for me, its not a top priority to get rid of, just one of those "I'd be healthier without this..." kind of things.

As for the SF Jello.. well, like MizKitty said, it definitely keeps me from going face first into the ding dongs, lol.

So as much as I plan on getting rid of the chemicals, for me right now, they're the lesser of two evils.

I have a stationary bike and a rowing machine. That's what I will start with. I also have the "Walk Away the Pounds" DVD for 1 and 2 mile "walks." I also have a yoga DVD, and a friend who will teach me tai chi. I also hope that my new neurologist will allow me to go for walks, but I've decided that if he doesn't, I will put on my pedometer and walk around my backyard. I'll just do enough laps to get me up to a mile.

My plan is to do something different each day, so that I don't get bored or feel like the exercise is a chore. If I can maintain it long enough for it to become habit, then I'll be home free!

The hardest thing for me is getting enough calories. When one lives alone and eats alone, meals don't have a whole lot of interest. Often, people will simply resort to snacking on all the wrong things and end up overweight and malnourished. That was my situation when I first began to lc.

Now, due to the appetite suppression effects of the lc wol, I don't even have hunger to remind me to eat. I tend just to grab whatever I have in the fridge, and since very little satisfies me, I end up not getting enough calories.

I'm making a concerted effort now to eat at least 3 meals/day, and to make sure that veggies are a part of each of those meals, including breakfast. It seems to be working, although I don't expect any remarkable weight loss to result.

I have exactly that problem Kisal. I just don't eat most the time which screws me up in various ways.

I'm dealing with that just recently by deliberately eating something sweet in the morning. That actually amps up my appetite and makes it more likely I'll feel like noshing later in the day.

Oh I agree, this is a magic thread! I am 9 pounds lighter than I thought I was. I haven't weighed in a couple of weeks and I got a new scale. I still have the old one in the garage, it is one of those balance beam types that measure to the 1/4 pound BUT takes up way too much room. So it lives in the garage, buried in junk. It is at least 25 years old, but brutally accurate, it always correlated perrrrrrrrfectly with the Doctors. Anyway I bought a Taylor Flat glass one, 400 pound capacity, with .2 pound increments for $30 at Target. I compared it to the old one, 255 on both scales. I hope I am not going to have a problem with jumping off and on the scales forty times a day now that I have one that is actually convenient to use.

I now have my start weight for the #30 pound challenge ... 255. Which makes the goal 225, I haven't been that weight in at least 5 years! This past week, I had a minor trangression that involved ice cream. I also fell short of my goal of walking outside 3X, we had some brush fires that made the air thick enough to see. Ugh. I just couldn't do it.