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 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.