You may have noticed that I was missing yesterday. I had a bad evening. I went to yoga and everything started to hurt. I left midway through (I NEVER leave midway through) and sniffled on the drive home. And felt sorry for myself. And then felt even more sorry for myself when I couldn't fall asleep because my sacroiliac hurt too much.
This morning at PT I asked for reassurance that it was normal to have increased pain. She said yes. She said that it would go away again. That was all I needed to hear. I did today's exercises with more determination than ever. If all it takes is perseverance, I got that. If it takes grace, or some kind of athletic ability, I'm out of luck. But I can keep on keeping on with the best of them.
In the last few days I've been reading up on carbohydrates, trying to figure out what's what. It's confusing.
Per my doctor(s), I'm pre-diabetic. I would like to be completely non-diabetic. One of the things involved is losing weight. And a low fat, high carbohydrate diet just isn't doing it anymore. I track my food using
www.sparkpeople.com (and have for years.) I know how much I'm eating. I know how much I exercise (lots.) I know in theory how much I should be losing. And it doesn't happen.
So, one camp says that I'm insulin resistant, and I need to get the majority of my calories from foods that aren't in the realm of insulin. I.e., fats and proteins. Which, okay, kinda makes sense. But then there's the polar opposite camp which says that carbohydrates are essential, and it's not healthy to eat so much fat and protein, and they also make sense. Everybody sounds so reasonable! If you read their arguments, they all seem sort of logical. But they can't both be completely right.
The Mayo Clinic says the type of diet doesn't matter as much as your ability to follow it. Which my experience has proved wrong, at least for me.
I will say that when I follow the Sparkpeople guidelines on ratios of carbohydrates to fat to protein, it's pretty easy to fit in quite a bit of fairly unhealthy food. In the counter, at least, they don't distinguish between sugars vs other carbohydrates.
A lower carbohydrate diet forces me to lean heavily on vegetables and unprocessed foods, which is a good thing. I "can't" use very many sugar free products, because I don't wish to use artificial sweeteners. I wouldn't mind stevia sweetened foods, but those have not hit the grocery shelves in any great numbers yet.
It would be easy to get too many "bad" fats on a low carb diet, and I need to start paying attention to that. (Hi mother with heart disease!) I don't want my wakeup call to be in the form of an ambulance ride to the ER.
Anyway, I'm reading a lot, and generally eating a lot more vegetables and berries, and a lot less in the way of grains, starchy veggies, bananas, and dried fruit. Ironically, I'm having a hard time getting as much fiber as on a low fat diet. My regular morning cereal had a *ton* of the stuff. And gobs of protein.
I don't think I'm eating at a level that anybody would consider "low carb" just yet, but I'm feeling good about what I'm eating.
JD had just stocked up on a bunch of stuff before I whimsically decided I wasn't eating that way anymore (at least for a while.) And I'm still confused about what's what - I brought home a bunch of brussels sprouts tonight, not having noticed that they're a higher carbohydrate vegetable. We're going to be freezing or wasting some food in the near future, looks like. Either that or JD is going to have to run a LOT so he can afford to eat it all.
