They think it's all over...

This morning as I gasped my way through my 15C bath, I reassured myself that it would be my last.  It's Day 42!  Six weeks have passed (I added a few days to the end to make up for my gluttonous trip to France).  I can relax - or can I?

Actually, I quickly realised that it just can't end here.  I've been through six weeks of privation, chills, and annoyance - but rather than stop it all, I'd rather make sure I keep the gains that all this has brought me.  I've lost over a stone in weight (about 7 kilos), and I'm fitting my clothes better and looking much trimmer too.

Moreover, I haven't actually reached my targets.  I'd rather carry on while I've got some momentum, than leave it all for another year.  However, it does feel like a good time for a rethink.

What to keep?

The main components of the programme are:

1. max 60g carbs per day
2. cold bath - 15C for 15 minutes each morning
3. delaying food - waiting between exercise and your next meal - which in effect means skipping breakfast
4. three periods of movement each day (45, 30, and 15 minutes)

I'm sure the carbohydrate restriction is a good idea - there is a tremendous amount of research evidence for this, and it also fits with my intention to improve my brain health by restricting carbohydrates, hoping to prevent it becoming insulin-resistant.  It also just feels right - I feel physically better if I restrict carbs.

The cold bath is surprisingly bearable, and I know I am burning fat because the water temperature now typically rises by about 1.4C while I'm in there - and at that point in the morning I haven't eaten yet.  I am tempted to change my regimen rather than dump it.  For example, 15C is extremely hard going, and it also takes a long time - making my morning pretty rushed.  If I were to get up earlier, I could have a more relaxed morning, and have time to do some exercise right after the bath, to warm myself up a bit.

Delaying food turns out to be a lot easier than I expected.  Unfortunately, I'm noticing myself becoming increasingly hungry at my two main meals - the effect of skipping breakfast, I imagine.  Here again, my thought is to stick with the delay, but start managing my other meals more closely in terms of calories, not just carbs.  I'm generally having a healthy mix of protein, fat, fibre (from vegetables) and carbs at each of these meals, but afterwards I feel I've eaten too much.  If I can work out sensible quantities that will give me the energy and nutrients I need, I may feel better and lose more weight.

The exercise has been very hard to fit around my busy schedule.  Once again, an earlier start to the day may help.  It doesn't suit me to exercise in the evenings anyway, so pushing the first session early into the morning might well help.  If I do it after the bath, it could help me recover from the chilling as well.  The second and third sessions similarly need to be more carefully thought out - for example using every break and lunch to go for a short walk or run, and to time this so that I can eat my second and third meals after the designated delay.  It just needs more advance planning, so I don't reach the end of the day and find I haven't moved around enough.

To get my weight properly settled into my target zone, I have more work to do, which means continued work with the programme.  Moreover, I need to genuinely get used to these things in order to maintain that weight.  As you can see from the chart on the right, my weight has hit a plateau.  This is not just about gluttony in France - it's about metabolism.

Now, there is one small wrinkle in the past couple of weeks' programme: I take thyroid hormone because I have no thyroid gland at all, and this hormone regulates energy in the body.  I started running out of my medication a couple of weeks ago, and I was completely out by last Sunday.  Owing to mistakes and poor decisions made by the people at my GP surgery, I only managed to get hold of my medication today (by saying some very forceful things to their receptionist, in person, with other patients able to hear my concerns).  It probably helped that when your thyroid hormone is low, you tend to feel pretty grumpy anyway.

However, the low thyroid hormone levels will have also meant that my metabolism was a little slower than usual.  Not so much that I couldn't run, of course.  However, it may well be that my body just wasn't long maintaining the levels of energy that the cold bath is meant to kick into action each morning.  I should see my weight leave the plateau and start dropping again if I carry on with the programme, now that I have caught up on my medication.

In short, it's not over yet.  They say in the US, "it's not over til the fat lady sings" (a phrase originally coined with respect to opera).  In my case, it's not over til the fat lady is gone.

Days 24-25: on the run

On day 24 of this diet, a letter turned up fromVirgin London Marathon, saying I'd won a place in the ballot.  That means I get a place on the London Marathon in 2013, and I don't have to beg it from a charity.  In fact, if I do fundraise, I get to do it for any charity I like, and they don't have to pay Virgin for the privilege of getting the money I raise.

But the main thing is - I'm going to be running a marathon in less than 7 months!  I'm not sure whether to be thrilled or terrified.  I'd signed up in the euphoria of seeing my husband finish it last April.  I never really aspired to do such a thing, but you sort of get caught up.  At any rate, I'm very glad I started my diet before this, because people say that trying to lose weight and train for a marathon at the same time is not a good idea.

I plan to finish the diet anyway while I start my training, and to try to make the two fit with each other for the next 2 1/2 weeks.  Exercise is a part of the OMG programme (if not a big one), and sensible eating is part of the training for the marathon.  It must be possible.

On the other hand, carb counting is not part of the marathon training ideal.  I think I will have to deal with this by making sure I get my full complement of 60g of carbs per day in ways that deliver useful content for muscles - perhaps not grains, or sugary foods, but rather lots of vegetables, and a bit more fruit than I've been having.

And I suppose I'll have to play it by ear.  The good news is that I am able to train despite all the weight loss - I'm not weaker, but rather stronger!  I went for a run today for the first time since week 1 of the programme.  I found it much, much easier than on any run in the past year, and in fact genuinely enjoyable.

I'd gone out a few times before in the pleasant summer weather, but I found the running exhausting and hard to keep up.  At that time I was about 15 pounds heavier.  Perhaps the fact that I don't have to haul all that weight around is making the running easier.  They say that exercise doesn't really help you lose weight.  But maybe losing weight helps you exercise....

Days 15-17 Heavy drinking

If you're heavy, drink more water.  I've heard that advice many times from people who have tried it and assured me it works.  It never worked for me before, but then maybe I wasn't really keeping track properly. To see whether an "intervention" (i.e. a change) really works, you have to make sure that a) you only change that, and nothing else - for instance don't make a change while on holiday, because all sorts of things change when you're on holiday b) you record the things you want to assess both before the experiment and afterwards, ideally several times over the course of several days.  You want to eliminate the possibility that the change isn't real - it was just a blip one day - or that you've mistaken one cause (e.g. water) for another (e.g. more sleep).

Last week my weight loss slowed down, and I looked back over my notes to see what had changed.  I'm keeping a paper diary of my days - what I eat and drink, time and activity type for exercise, when I wake, how I feel.  I noticed that two things had changed.  One was that I wasn't sticking to the exercise timings as I should.  My intention is to have three periods of "movement" - it doesn't need to be vigorous but just needs to get my circulation going - of 45, 30, and 15 minutes respectively.  The other difference was that I wasn't drinking as much water as I had in the first week.

I decided to pick just one thing to correct - the water.  I'm rising each morning with a tall glass of water, and trying to remember to drink water whenever I feel thirsty.

Does it make any difference?  We shall see, because I've only been making this change for four days, but I did sneak a look at the scales this morning, and if that's anything to go by, I'll have lost more weight this week than I did last week.  Three cheers for water!

Days 12-14 Slowing down

As with any new activity, once the novelty wears off, it can be hard to stick with it.  You get distracted.  Other things may seem more important.  Now, I wouldn't say that I have fallen off the wagon, but home and work have been busy, there have been deadlines and pressures unrelated to my weight, health, or long term brain function, and meanwhile I've felt quite settled into the OMG routine.  And perhaps for these reasons, there are some things that have slipped.

Slightly to my surprise, one thing that I've stuck with is the cold bath.  For the end of week 2 the temperature continues to be 19.0C, as measured on my Avent bath thermometer.  The precision of the temperature is reassuring, though I do wonder whether it's genuinely accurate.  Perhaps I am being lulled into thinking I'm doing better than I really am by a thermometer that gives a water temperature much lower than it really is?  At any rate, my daily 15 minutes in the bath have raised the water temperature as one would expect - to 19.8C and 20.0C on days 12 and 13, and from 18.8C to 19.6C on day 14.  If nothing else, my body must be burning some calories to warm up a deep bath of water.

So much for the good performance - on the flip side, I've been pretty poor at fitting in my "POMs" - the "periods of movement".  I should be doing three per day, of 45, 30 and 15 minutes, in that order.  Lately I've barely managed to do any movement, much less these times.  Because I work in a desk job and am frequently on the road, getting movement in requires a bit of planning and creativity.  Perhaps the advantage of the bath is that it requires neither of these - you get up, you run the bath, you get in.  Because I always have a morning routine of some sort, it's not hard to just push this to the front of the schedule.

So today I must make a renewed commitment - I must squeeze those POMs in!  Step 1: go do something right now.  As they say, there's no time like the present.

Days 10-11: wilfully cold

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.

Days 6-7 - take a deep breath

Over the past week, I've noticed a number of changes.  Some were expected - I'm often tired and hungry, for example, and I've lost some weight already.  Some are entirely unexpected - and the strangest one is my tendency to take deep breaths.

Now, I've taken deep breaths before, so this ought to be a normal thing - but I can't say I've tended to do it when I'm just walking, or sitting, or standing around.  Deep breaths are for when I'm preparing for exercise, or drinking in a pleasant summer breeze, or just sighing over something.  I've also had to breathe deeply to blow up those balloons that are supposed to make my tummy flatter.

However, over the past couple of days I've frequently felt the urge to take a deep breath, and have been surprised - I can't work out why I want one at that moment.  No matter - breathing deeply feels good, so I'm entirely happy to cave in to these urges.  I'm just puzzled as to why I'm getting them.

For example, I wondered whether I was short of oxygen?  I don't have any breathing problems like asthma or allergies, and I've never smoked; I live and work in a rural area and I get plenty of fresh air.  So I can't see why either my lungs or the air itself should be a problem.

One possibility is that I just need more oxygen on this programme, and my body hasn't yet got used to that so my breathing is bringing in a little less air than I now need.  On average, that might add up to one extra big breath every hour or so.

I've been web surfing to try to find an explanation, and my best guess so far is this: burning fat apparently uses more oxygen (per unit of energy produced) than burning carbohydrate.  In other words, this low carb diet needs more oxygen than my normal diet would have required, just to keep me warm and moving.  In fact, given that I'm moving around a bit more than usual, I probably need still more.  And if my body's expectations of the amount of oxygen I'll need for a given level of exercise were set by my old carb-rich diet, then it may take a while for it to adjust to this diet that has almost no carbs at all.

Thus ends Week 1!  Tomorrow I start the day with a colder bath - 19C instead of 20C.  Can't wait.

Days 4-5: the first weekend

Well, I failed to write a blog entry yesterday, because we had visitors.  However, I managed to stay on the programme.  That surprised me - most diet and exercise regimes just don't go with playing host.  This fit seamlessly.  The cold bath happens at my normal bathtime.  The exercise fits with the housework to prepare for guests, and with a gentle game of badminton in the back garden.  The food restrictions are fine as long as I plan the menu to allow me to fill my plate with allowed food so I won't look as though I'm denying myself.  I blew up balloons for my children and their visitors so they could play with them.

Skinny dipping
The cold bath has been the most interesting part of the OMG plan.  Originally I found it very hard indeed, but this weekend it has seemed much less daunting.  In fact today, I almost enjoyed it!  Of course, a big part of the reason for this is that I've managed to actually brave the bath for 15 minutes as required every day, and have even managed to wash my hair during those baths, so I feel a tremendous sense of achievement.

Immersing my torso (and head) has been a lot harder than my legs, but I've developed a trick - I imagine my children's lives are at risk.  I've got to get the bath water higher or something terrible will happen.  This is silly and should not work, but it does.  I can suspend disbelief for long enough to grab the sides of the bath and push myself further down, until eventually I'm fully immersed.  Once I'm there, it's not so bad - I get used to the cold water fairly quickly.

Another trick that has helped me get going is to put things that I like around the bath - nice-smelling bath scrub, expensive shampoo, a sparkly rubber duck, and a wooden handled back scrubber.  The idea of getting into a cold bath has filled me with dread, but these things have made the "ritual" of getting ready a great deal easier to face.

Yesterday I had a very deep bath and raised the temperature by about half a degree centigrade.  Today I went for a smaller bath and raised it a whole degree.  I wondered how many calories I was burning on raising the bath temperature?

Science interlude
So this morning I measured the depth of the water, and the width and length a bit below the fill line (the sides of the bath slope a bit, so I took a midway point to try to get the estimate more accurate).  The dimensions: 25cm x 46cm x 130cm.  Multiply those and you get 149,500 cubic centimeters of water.

Conveniently, a calorie is defined as the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one cubic centimeter (actually, it's 1 gram, but the two are in fact the same thing) of water by 1 degree centigrade.  That means that it must have taken 149,500 calories of energy to increase my bath water's temperature today.  When we talk about calories in food, we really mean kilo-calories - i.e. 1000s of calories.  So to get the calories I must have burned in dietary terms, I divide by 1000.  That means that my body used about 150 calories during the 15 minutes involved just to warm up my bath.  That's equivalent to around 30 minutes of walking at my weight, so in terms of calorie burn, it's pretty efficient in calories burned per unit of time.  Given that I have a busy life, I find that a very appealing statistic.

Black coffee and green tea
I've got more used to hot drinks without milk (or in my case, soya milk).  Although I've decided to allow myself to put soya milk in my drinks, I figured I would do without when I could.  In fact, I've gone without all weekend, without really trying.

In short, at the end of my first weekend, I'm feeling remarkably positive about this weight loss plan.  And of course feeling positive is meant to be good for your brain!  I've been at it for nearly a week, and if it's going to carry on like this, I'm sure I can manage to carry on for the full six weeks.

Day 3 Week 1 - not easy, but easier

Was I more organised this morning?  No.  I tried, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to get up half an hour earlier - as if the OMG routine weren't a big enough ask.

The hardest part is the bath.  It's painful, yes, but the point is that you've got to stick with it for 15 minutes.  That's a quarter of the hour I usually give myself for getting ready in the morning, and the routine didn't have me sitting and wondering what to do for 15 minutes - it's got to come from somewhere, and clearly my morning ablutions must have been quicker than 15 minutes.  Maybe 5.

At any rate, skipping breakfast today was remarkably easy, and my work day was unusually productive.  I even had an odd sense that I was living off my own fat - very pleasant, but I wonder whether it's that, or just that it was a sunny day.

Unfortunately, my thighs have still not recovered from yesterday's morning run.  I stuck with housework and walking for my movement today, but my legs feel like I have only just finished a 200m sprint.  I think I should avoid taking the cold bath right after a hot run.

Getting through the day with the low carb diet and exercise was easy, though not always easy to remember.  That is the hardest thing about this diet - every day I forget something important.

Day 2 - Ouch!

I wasn't wholly prepared for today.  In addition to getting used to a new routine, I had to get the kids to school for the first day of term, and of course I had to get to work.  I got up at 6am and by some miracle the kids were more or less on time and so was I, but what a rush!

First came the pain, though.  As soon as I was out of bed, I was into my running kit and out on the road.  The sun was out and warm on my face, the roads were quiet apart from a few long distance commuters, and I could smell the faintly musty, warm fragrance of recently harvested grain.  Of course, all this distracted me, and so I failed to stretch before running.  I followed the book - the exercise followed by the long wait before eating - but the book isn't there to remind you to stretch - you're meant to have a bit of sense.   My thighs still hurt, many hours later.

After an invigorating run, I thought I'd be in great condition to brave the cold bath.  Yet again, a triumph of hope over sense.  It was far more painful than yesterday.  By the end of my bath, I'd warmed the water by 1.5C, but I felt nothing like the sense of accomplishment that I felt yesterday - I just felt cold.  Very, very cold.  Nevertheless, I survived the full 15 minutes, including a good scrub and washed hair.  An hour later, as I was finally eating my breakfast, I still felt cold.  I thought my body was supposed to warm itself up - that was how I'd lose weight, by burning fat to stay warm.  Is this working?

Lunch was a huge salad - a whole head of cob lettuce, a tin of sardines, a handful of walnuts.  This was actually pretty satisfying, so I didn't feel hungry at all in the afternoon - but I did need my cups of milky tea and coffee.  You're meant to have these drinks black, but somehow I knew that I needed the white stuff to keep myself motivated.  Never mind the cold bath - I want my tea!  So I have officially decided that black tea and coffee are optional on my version of the diet.  But no sweeteners, and I'm not going overboard, it's still mostly water - besides, I'm using unsweetened soya milk, which has a very low carbohydrate count.

The hardest thing to get used to (at least, as of Day 2) is remembering to plan exercise and waiting time before a meal.  I get to lunchtime, I think - Hooray!  Then I remember that I haven't gone for a walk yet, haven't had the wait.  So today's lunchtime was a walk around our site, followed by making my salad (a shorter wait than I was supposed to have, but it will do for today), and finally the meal.  I got several comments on my "healthy" lunch.  No one has guessed my guilty secret - that I am desperate to lose weight.  Will they notice when I come in wearing a size smaller outfit?

One great relief today - I had no headaches.  I don't know why yesterday was so bad and today has not been.  Have I been slacking, or was it a 24-hour wonder?  I hope it's the latter - a sign that I had some clearing out to do, and that now the worst of the toxins are out of my system.  However, that once again sounds like a triumph of hope over sense.  So have the toxins stayed, and am I in for more headaches?  One thing is for sure - painful thighs are much more tolerable than a splitting head.

Day 1 Week 1

I try not to buy diet books.  They always disappoint - either they're the same old thing in a different package, or they just don't work, or look so badly researched that I'm not even going to try them.

However, what I did pick up this week was the latest edition of The New Scientist, which featured an article on a possible link between obesity and alzheimer's disease.  Because Alzheimer's runs in my family, I've kept an eye out for any research that suggests preventative measures.  This article ticked that box in a big way, and also noted other possible links including stroke and heart disease (which also run in my family, especially stroke).  Having read it, I bought the next diet book I saw, and this turned out to be the unpromisingly titled Six Weeks to OMG by London-based sports scientist Venice A. Fulton.  The book is written in the style of all successful self-help books, full of exclamation marks and enthusiastic statements of the obvious.  However, I was looking for anything that contained a programme, and this book does.  I've tried to lose weight and get fit plenty of times, and without a detailed plan, I tend to drift off course.

This is a seriously eccentric plan.  It combines several conventional ideas with some that are entirely new to me.  The dietary advice is pretty normal - low carb, high protein, plenty of low carb veg, some fasting (skip breakfast), and forget the low fat advice but do stay away from all forms of sugar, especially the sneaky ones with names like high fructose corn syrup.

The exercise plan is not onerous at all, but it contains some truly weird advice.  To get a flat tummy, I am to blow up a balloon 20 times, ideally just before bed.  In the mornings, I have to take a cold (room temperature) bath.  Apart from that, I must do three sessions of exercise per day, including the occasional session of weights (3 times per month ideally).  Eating and exercising are spaced out so that the pattern is exercise - wait - eat.

I'm going to give this a go - why not?  I find weird ideas oddly appealing, and this at least has some familiar aspects that I've tried successfully before, such as the low carb advice.

At the moment I weigh a shocking 168 lbs (76 kg) - the most I have ever knowingly weighed, outside pregnancy.  The last time I went on a serious diet and exercise regime (many years ago) I weighed 66 kg.  Shrinking my belly has enormous appeal, but the main motivation is my brain.  I would rather die of just about anything than get Alzheimer's Disease.  I just hope no one comes up with research later on to suggest that major fat loss increases your chances of developing the disease.

My plan is to keep a record of my progress through this blog.  For one thing, it might help me stay the course.  Also, if it's successful, I'll appreciate having the record of what happened if I ever have to do it again....