My avocado-bodied self salutes you ;-)
Today I started Pomroy again. If you somehow don’t know what I’m talking about, click HERE – it links up all (I think) of the blogs discussing what is going on in my self-centered little world (laugh).
The biggest issue for me is DRINKING ENOUGH WATER. If you’re starting today too, are you in this boat?
I did my cardio this morning – it’s Memorial Day and so everyone at my Crossfit box was doing Murph, but my hip/back are still in trouble, so I did a 5,000 meter row. I did it in 24:15, which is a little slow for me, but I didn’t feel terrible. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, since the sciatica drugs aren’t working, and neither are 800mg Tylenol. I gotta get this fixed somehow. It’s terribly debilitating.
Remember, Phase 1 in Pomroy (Monday and Tuesday) are cardio.
For breakfast, I did have time to make oatmeal, so I ate my oatmeal (1.5 cups – that is a TON of oatmeal!) with 1.5 cups of mango chunks. Then I went out to do the rowing.
I brought a bottle of water with me . . . and brought it home again! Harrumph. On the drive over, I had a big glass of hot herbal tea with stevia (stevia is allowed).
Then three hours later, I had my snack (an orange), and I had another couple cups of herbal tea. (My water bottle, however, is still sitting here in front of me untouched.)
My friends George and Donnalei Sumner gave me a little glass teapot and some tea for Christmas. The teapot has written on it “Sumner Serenit-TEA.” On the inside were tea “balls” – if you’ve never seen these, they look a bit like acorns. You add hot water to them, and they “blossom” into herbal tea. They’re apparently hand-“sewn” so that they do this.
I hadn’t used them, and thought this would be as good time as any. Here are some photos that show you what they look like going from the “tea ball” into the full “flower” in the pot (NOTE: I can’t seem to get them to line up as I’m typing this, but you can get the idea from the captions):
The issue here is that Pomroy states that you can’t “count” herbal tea, or even water with lemon in it.
I am already making bargains with this program, because I just can’t do that.
Straight water makes me feel bloated. I don’t like the “taste.” I put this down to the way I was raised – my parents never, ever drink water. Like, never.
So since I have to have a pitcher and a half (half your body weight in ounces) daily, I’m going to count herbal tea and things like water with lemon in it. I have to make this work somehow, and drinking straight water makes me ill. Are ya’ll making any bargains? I think this one isn’t a bad one to make, but maybe that’s because I’m making it! I’m going to drink the “plain water” too – but to get up to the ounce amount, I just gotta do something else too. What about you?
The only other bargain I’m making is that I need to remember to have a cup of coffee (black) every day.
This eating plan says no caffeine/coffee (even decaf); however, when I did it the time before (after doing the Gottfried metabolic reset, which also cuts out caffeine), I had the mother-in-law of all migraines.
That time, as usual, I was lying in bed with the curtains closed waiting for my sight to return, belatedly remembering my first neurologist in high school, who said I could take a Cafergot pill every day, or drink a cup of coffee every day. When I say “waiting for my sight to return,” it’s because when I have a migraine, my sight dims from the inside out. When it’s at the worst, I can just barely see out of what would be the “corner of my 
eye.” The rest isn’t black it’s just “clear” . . . totally scary. I spend the hour or so that it takes for my sight to wane then wax reminding myself that this has happened before . . . “You will not be permanently blind, Sandy, chill.” (Only once have I had this happen while driving, which is quite awful. I spent a couple hours under an overpass on the highway, hoping a police car wouldn’t try to make me “move along.”)
While lying in bed, I listened to the Girls Gone WOD podcast about disordered eating. I had some thoughts about it. Perhaps my trying out different eating plans trying to address the 30 pounds of extra “me” that has accumulated is “disordered” eating. The gals on the podcast seemed to intimate that. However, the biggest difference that I personally see is that I’m not comparing myself to some Pinterest mythical “ideal.” I’m comparing myself to myself just a couple years ago. Due to hormone/metabolic changes, I have packed on the fat, and want to address it. On this episode (and the one before it) the gals being interviewed state that you can’t “just do an eating challenge for 30 days and then quit if you don’t see dramatic changes,” I beg to differ. You can have changes that occur in those 30 days, and they can then spur you on to continue on that program for another 30 days…and another 30 days. If you don’t see any improvement in 30 days, I don’t see a reason to hang on.
The reason I’m starting Pomroy again is that, after 10 days, I did have some noticeable changes, and it was easy. Sure, I’ve had friends do the “cabbage soup diet,” or some other crazy thing where you lose weight (likely water), and then gain it all back when you stop. But while on Pomroy, I was eating a lot, didn’t feel deprived at all, and saw changes in my skin, body fat percentage, etc. So while one of the interviewees on THIS episode states that “you have to be on a regime for more like years” because “it took years for you to get this way,” I’m not so sure that’s really exactly right.
I have to say that it’s been immensely frustrating trying to address this issue. (Don’t get old.) I was never someone who actually thought that much about weight, which is probably why this has sort of blindsided me. In my teens, 20s, 30s, even 40s by and large I’ve been one of those “pesky” people whose weight issues were easy to address. If it went up due to some bad decisions over time (like taking advantage of the donuts that were always available in Accounting on Mondays), I could stop whatever I was doing, pay attention, and I’d re-stabilize at the same weight. However, after I turned 50, things went haywire. Since I’ve never really had this issue in my life before, it’s been super frustrating. More so when my doctor (I blogged about this a while back) told me that I basically should just eat 1200 calories, work out more, and “realize” that “this is what happens” when you get older. Harrumph.
But back to migraines. I have “vasodilator” migraines, which means that I have to keep the blood vessels to my brain “constricted” a little bit, which caffeine does. (HERE is a blog post that talks about it.)
This is the opposite of “vasoconstrictor” migraines, where you can not drink coffee, eat chocolate, etc. because they can set off an attack.
“My” kind – also called “halo” migraines because of the sight issue – don’t lead to throwing up, and supposedly our headache is not as awful as the vasoconstrictor migraines.
Personally, I feel that the blindness part makes up for the headache not being so splitting. And my headache is quite bad enough, thank you.
If I have to have migraines, mind you, I also don’t mind the fact that I “have to” drink a cup of coffee or have some dark chocolate every day to ward them off. I’m going the black coffee route, to stay as close to the eating plan as I can.
Anyway – I hadn’t had a migraine in forever – and I did have one after going completely cold turkey as I stated above – so I’m not doing that again.
Some readers mentioned (when I blogged about it before) that perhaps what I was having were caffeine withdrawals. However, since I only was going off of having a cup or two of half-caf a day, and the headache was preceded by that pesky “losing sight” issue, I know what I know.
This happens to me now probably once every couple of years. I decide to “eat healthy” and “go off” things that are purportedly “bad for me” – alcohol, caffeine, etc. – and then WHAM I get a migraine. It’s so silly!
Anyway – so those are my bargains. I’m going to count unsweetened, hot herbal tea and water with lemon in it as “water.” And I am going to have a cup of black coffee a day.
Now it’s just about time to have lunch: for me, that’s going to be a smoothie of greens from the fridge, uncooked oats, and watermelon (bought a big seedless one yesterday, cut it up and froze the pieces…why YES, my freezer is stuffed to the gills!), plus some steak left over from last night.
Snack will be an orange again…Dinner tonight will be a weighed-out 4 ounce 1/2 buffalo 1/2 grass-fed beef burger with tomato and onions on romaine lettuce leaves instead of a bun, an artichoke (no butter/mayo), plus a cup of quinoa. I got the buffalo and beef on Sunday, mixed them together, then took out the scale and weighed out burgers. I kept two out for today, then froze the rest of them to have them ready. (I did mention that packed freezer, didn’t I? :-) )
How’s it going for you??