As autumn sets in, this programme is getting easier. Specifically, it's a lot easier to make my body work hard to stay warm!
Letting the temperature do the work
For one thing, our boiler has stopped, so the house is a steady 16-17C. I'm deliberately not wearing a sweater or fleece in the house, as has been my habit in the past when it's chilly. I don't know how many extra grams of fat I'm burning to stay warm, but I figure every little helps.
Secondly, the cold bath is now a lot easier to arrange. Our mains is a thin pipe running under our front lawn, so the water tends to take on the temperature of the ground a few inches down. Right now it's running at 16C, so more or less the same as room temperature.
In a previous blog entry I measured the calories my body had burned to raise my bath water 1C. It occurred to me that I'd also like to know how much fat that might mean I'd burned (on the basis that I'm bathing after sleeping, and before eating, so I must be burning body fat or muscle, not food). Apparently there are 9 kcal in a gram of fat, so if I've burned 150 kcal in the bath, that would mean I'd lost about 16g of fat, or about half an ounce. So... lying in a cold bath doesn't result in high levels of immediate weight loss. I suppose I knew that. Still, over 32 days (just over a month) of cold baths, that would result in a pound of weight loss - could be worse.
Perhaps a better solution to using cold water for weight loss would be to go for a swim outdoors. Anyone who watched the triathlon at this year's Olympics probably enjoyed seeing the competitors taking on the Serpentine in London. Of course, not everyone lives near the Serpentine, but I found a UK organisation called the Outdoor Swimming Society who have maps of places to swim in lakes, rivers, lidos and so on.
Now, outdoor swimming has a certain appeal. One assumes there are no sharks (I gather you may get fish in some of these locations), and you get fresh air and an outdoor scene to look at. It's probably quieter than the local pool as well. Will I ever try it? I'm not sure, but it's mildly tempting.
In the meantime, I'm hoping that keeping the house cool and not bundling up will help me along a little with this diet.
Who needs carbs?
One surprising aspect of this regime is that when I eat a lot of carbs at once - for instance a packet of cashews - I now feel unpleasantly over-full. Why didn't I feel like that before? I don't know, but it's helping me to avoid eating a lot of carbs at one go. Who needs to feel ill after a meal? I hate it.
Another very odd change is that I used to have a lot of trouble with burping at bedtime. Who knows why - I'd tried changing all sorts of things in my diet but nothing got rid of the problem. Now I'm finding that it doesn't happen any more (hooray!) unless I've just eaten a lot of carbs. So I'm experimenting to see what I can eat last thing at night without getting all this air coming up when I lie down.
On a high
A less surprising but very welcome change is that I've had a lot of upswings in my mood - even when I'm hungry - but no downswings. This is undoubtedly making it easier to stay on the OMG regime. What could be causing it? Certainly not the exercise, which has been very gentle. Something is causing those endorphins to flow. I might do a little research at some point to see what could be causing it. Better regulation of blood sugar? That would certainly fit with the book's focus on improving the body's management of insulin. Who knows, but if it carries on like this, it should make continued weight loss considerably easier! That's always the hard part - staying slim once you've got there. I tend to start gaining weight again pretty quickly. But if I'm feeling cheerful about my new lifestyle (whatever bits of it I try to keep permanent), perhaps I'll find it easier to maintain my new weight.
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