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 26-28: what can I eat?

Dieting always has this frustration - what can you eat?  Each new programme has new rules, and either it provides menus you know you won't like, or nothing - so you have to invent your own, potentially quite unlike what you're used to eating, and not matching what's in your kitchen.

With that in mind, what I offer as diet foods on the OMG programme are unlikely to suit everyone, or even many.  Nevertheless, I'll share with you some of my favourites, which you can take or leave.

Breakfast

Black gold for breakfast

Breakfast is so easy!  You have a cup of coffee, black.  That's it - you're not supposed to eat until 3 hours after your morning exertions on the OMG diet, and that means skipping food at breakfast.  My advice: buy the best coffee you can afford, and invest in a decent coffee maker - pictured right is my Aeropress, which I highly recommend for a smooth, rich, relatively low-acid cup of the black stuff.

Lunch
Home: cheese omelette.  You need to count the carbs in cheese, but there's not that much in an omelette.  I'll usually have some green veg with this, or perhaps an apple or some grapes (if you have fruit, you have to count those carbs though).

Work: salad with protein and nuts.  Salad greens don't count on this diet, so they're a good thing to fill up on if you like them (I certainly do).  Add a convenient source of protein - cold leftover chicken, a tin of tuna fish, some smoked trout, or whatever works for you.  Then sprinkle with nuts - walnuts are particularly good for this as they're fairly low in carbohydrate - not something you can say of most nuts.  If at home, I drizzle with "Good Oil" - a brand of oil that is very high in omega oils.

Supper
I often have the same things I'd have for lunch.  However, if I have time, I'll fry some fish and serve with a squeeze of lemon, or roast a chicken stuffed with herbs and butter.  I like to have sauteed greens - spinach, kale, chard, or whatever is available fresh.  On Sunday I try to do a proper roast joint with "meaty" vegetables like broccoli.

The principles of this diet are pretty simple: make sure you get plenty of green veg (not beans, just leafy greens), and fill the other half your plate with meat, fish, or tofu.  You can use all the herbs, spices and salt you like to add different flavours, and you can fry, roast, or do whatever you like - fat is okay on this diet.

Snacks
Once again, this is an easy one - no snacks allowed!  So have another cup of coffee.

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.

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.