Day 1 of the Cleanse went swimmingly. There's nothing remarkable to report, really. I spent the past weekend in bed, reading a wide variety of books, from a Booker-winning effort from Aravind Adiga ('The White Tiger'), to a Pulitzer-winning snooze-fest from another Indian, this time a lady by the name of Jhumpa Lahiri. The book is a short-story collection called 'The Interpreter of Maladies', and while there is little doubt that the author is supremely gifted, her books often feature indistinguishable characters who are more-often-than-not Ivy-League educated Bengali migrants. It's tired. I followed these 2 books with the unswervingly rewarding Miss Christie, a Hercule Poirot mystery called 'Murder in Mesopotamia'. It's a book straight from my childhood (most Agatha Christie's are), but it was still 3 hours well spent, delving into a world at once alien but yet so familiar.... I loved it!
My diet is going well. Today on the way back from work, I stopped at the grocery store and purchased some buckwheat flour, a substance of which I must confess my utter ignorance until about 24 hours ago. I made 2 pancakes from them, mostly to see if buckwheat is a good substitute for regular white flour. It is. I didn't eat the pancakes, for obvious reasons, but I know that there is light at the end of the tunnel - I can stay on a gluten-free, sugar-free, meat-free diet until March or April 2009 and then see what my health profile looks like. Once I get off the master cleanse in mid- to late- November, I intend to eat a healthy, balanced but hypocaloric diet for another 3-4 months before going off to see a doctor again.
Meanwhile, at work today, I was told by a young African-American man, in the most unashamedly condescending tone, that I (i.e. SiddonLookMode) am not 'aware of the way things are done in the USA'. You can imagine what followed from me: this is a man who works for me, and who is still a probationary employee. I think he was astounded by the gentle, yet thorough tongue-lashing he received. By the time I was done with my 5-minute speech, he apologized and said he would never speak to anyone in such a manner. It was 5- minutes well spent.
I'll be back tomorrow.
Cheers,
Siddon-look-mode-activated
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Naija lady on the Master Cleanse - katakata for burst!
When a Nigerian woman means business, she really means business!
I have decided to go on the Master Cleanse. Yes, that most drastic of all diets, where you consume nothing but liquids for 2 solid weeks. Given that I am an all-or-nothing kind of girl, the plan is to be on this diet for 30 solid days, not including today.
Today, October 11th 2009, was meant to be Day 1 of this diet. Alas! I have already fallen off the wagon. :-) You see, the plan was never to go on the classic Master Cleanse Diet (Cayenne Pepper + Lemon Juice + Maple Syrup), but to alter the diet to suit my own individual tastes. I have tried the Master Cleanse before, and while I found it a rewarding and effective 'cleanse' (I lost over 50 pounds on it), I am not particularly wild about the acrid taste of lemons, the cloying aftertaste of maple syrup or indeed the taste of raw cayenne (yes, I am a real Nigerian, but I don't tolerate pepper too well). Thus I made a few alterations to the diet of the Cleanse.
Alteration Number 1: Delete Cayenne Pepper altogether. There is no reason to burn your intestines with pepper every day for 2 weeks, or, in my case, a solid month.
Alteration Number 2: Drastically cut down on the number of lemons included in this diet. In place of the 12-24 tablespoons of lemon juice required per day, I'll be consuming closer to 3 tablespoons a day.
Alteration Number 3: Swap maple syrup for honey. Sweet, delicious, 60-calorie-a-serving honey.
Alteration Number 4: Add peppermint tea. Lots of it.
Alteration Number 5: Do not induce any unnatural *cough* bowel movements with herbal tea.
For health reasons, I have to lose weight - and fast, too! I know, I know, the Master Cleanse should be a cleansing exercise and not a fad diet. Well, stuff me - I need to lose 30 pounds, and I need to do that this month!
It has been a long, yet difficult journey since the day in July 2009 when my doctor, a typically morose and quiet gentleman, informed me that I was 'fat'. I was as surprised as he was to learn that I weighed 202 pounds. This despite the fact that I wear (wore/squeezed into) size 4 pants from the GAP, that I wore (well, squeezed into) 'Medium' clothes in the USA, that I had finally developed the sort of figure I had always wanted. When my BMI was determined, I was again informed that I was in bad shape - not only had I gone past the 'overweight' classification according to BMI ranges, I was firmly ensconced in the 'obese' category.
My doctor (hereafter G-), did a thorough background check on me, and I sincerely appreciate the fact that he took a more detailed history than most doctors will generally do. G- asked for explicit details about my diet; G- made mental notes of the total calorific intake every day; he gave me estimates of what my true calorific needs were; he took down notes about the amount of physical work I engage in every day; he spoke of his worries about what he termed my 'high-fat, hyper-caloric diet'; he expressed grave concerns about the elevated levels of cholesterol; finally, he informed me that if I continued on my diet, I would eventually develop Type II diabetes or a similar disease of insulin metabolism and almost certainly give myself a heart condition due to the rapidly escalating cholesterol levels.
The picture was an ugly one. It turns out I was consuming far more food than anyone my age and gender should have to (over 4000 calories a day), and living a most sedentary, slothful lifestyle, with no exercise and zero regard for physical exertion.
For breakfast everyday, I had at least 8 quarters of waffles, which contained at least a cup of whole milk, 2 eggs, a cup and a half of white flour, a half cup of sugar, a stick of butter, pancake syrup (stuffed full of High Fructose Corn Syrup) and mounds & mounds of strawberries. 2 cups of apple cider (at 120 calories per cup) invariably accompanied my breakfast, and on certain days when I was in the mood for a really decadent meal, I would have some bacon with the waffles - just for good measure.
I work at night (I am a Chemical Engineer and I work in a 24/7 manufacturing plant and will do so until at least March 16, 2010). I typically sleep through the day, wake up at 07:00pm, cook or goof around for about a half-hour and then get to work at ~09:00pm. Before shutting my doors to leave for work each night, I had a mental checklist I used to go through. Atop this list was an item that reminded me to remove a pound of ground beef from the freezer to thaw for the next day's meatball sandwich (see below). I spend the entire night at work, and return home around 06:00am every morning.
Every other day on my way home from work in the early morning, I would stop at the local Shoprite and purchase a loaf of warm, fresh-baked French bread. Around 11am, after reading for a few hours or running errands, I would make a meatball sandwich, with fresh-made meatballs prepared in my humble oven while watching the neighbors' children play in the yard. A generous helping of ketchup went with my meatball-sandwich, which would tide me over until the evenings. On days when I was feeling particularly greedy, I would eat some bacon with my sandwich; I suppose it was more often a bacon-meatball sandwich than just a plain meatball sandwich. In any case, it was always a delicious mid-day snack! It also had the unfortunate side-effect of having a lot of calories and a lot of cholesterol.
On most days, I would put together other meals while the meatballs were cooking in the oven: a quick sauce for my 7pm meal, a vegetable/rice/bacon stir-fry to eat at work together with some baked/fried chicken or pork chops. In fact, I often had bacon in the oven at the same time as pork chops and meatballs.
The tomato sauce was simple and unvaried : a quick yet delicious concoction of tomato paste, canola oil, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, ginger, garlic, fresh diced-tomatoes. Once the sauce was cooked and tasted around 11:00am, I would place the pot on a wooden coaster in the refrigerator, ready for the evening meal.
At 7pm, like clockwork, I would rise to the sound of my alarm clock and begin the next cycle of cooking/eating. I would boil some pasta and have that with the tomato sauce and pork chops or chicken, depending on what I had made. On some days, I had leftover meatballs with my pasta dish. Following this evening meal, I would chop up a wide and impressively diverse array of vegetables - green and red bell peppers, chillies, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, mushrooms, onions, garlic, ginger, etc. and then boil some rice, prepare some bacon (I love this stuff in case you haven't gathered that yet), and stir-fry the entire thing: vegetables, bacon, rice; This meal would go into a plastic container, ready to be devoured on my lunch break at work.
I neglected to mention that I always purchased a whole apple pie (or two), and a rack of chocolate chip muffins whenever I bought the French bread. These I had at all times of the day - at work when I was feeling peckish, at home when I was bored, on days when I was too lazy to cook, etc.
I also did not mention that I never drank any water at home. Indeed I hadn't a water filter until very recently. Instead I had apple cider: gallons of the stuff was always in my refrigerator, and I consumed at least 6 cups of cider everyday, a grand total of 720 calories. At least. *Gulp!* That's about a third of the caloric intake of a normal woman. You see, now, why it was easy for me to eat my way to 202 pounds? The assault on my poor pancreas and digestive system from the incessant sugar intake (from all that apple cider over the course of an entire day), my relentless carb overload (white pasta, white bread), constant cholesterol consumption (pork chops, bacon, meatballs, etc) was enough to land me in hospital and to earn me a rather stern speech from my doctor, who told me in unequivocal terms that things simply had to change.
Today I weigh 102 pounds, and I intend to go all the way down to 90-100 pounds. The Master Cleanse is the fastest way of achieving that. So dramatic has my weight loss been that when I drove up to Connecticut over the Labor Day weekend to visit my sister who had most recently seen me in July, she was shocked to see how quickly I had shed the pounds. Indeed my pants have been falling off my hips, so I have had to purchase a leather belt. The last few pounds have been tough to shed, and it is my hope that I can lose these 30 or so stubborn pounds and then continue with a maintenance diet afterward.
As one might imagine, my diet has changed drastically. I am now vegan - to reduce the cholesterol levels. Indeed I have a zero-cholesterol diet because I do not consume any animal products - no milk, no cheese, no butter, no meat. For calcium, I eat vegetables and fruits rich in calcium. I have also removed apple cider and sugar from my diet. In G-'s words, my diet is now "low-carb, low-fat, no-table-sugar (fructose)" - in essence a low-GI food, which is what Diabetics eat. After losing the bulk of the weight on the Master Cleanse, I adopted a hypocaloric diet rich in vegetables and proteins. High-GI foods (foods which quickly raise your blood sugar) such as almost all packaged desserts (e.g. muffins, chocolates, apple pie, biscuits/cookies, etc), potatoes, sugars, corn flakes, certain fruits such as mangoes, white rice, white flour and thus white bread have been entirely eliminated from my diet.
Well, until today. Today I just had cornflakes with white sugar in it. I did stray off this diet when I went up to visit my sister over the Labor Day weekend, but for the most part, my diets have consisted of mushrooms, chickpeas and a battery of vegetables. It has actually been really easy & surprisingly rewarding sticking to the diet. The difficult bit is losing the last 30 pounds.
I hope that I can blog about this weight loss journey over the next 30 days (Inshallah!), and beyond. I will be keeping track of certain things over the next 30 days: my weight (taken twice a day), body temperature (also taken twice a day), and my blood pressure (also taken twice a day).
We'll see how things go from here. It is my hope that by November 15 2009, I will be at my target weight of 90-100 pounds, with a preference for the 95 range.
Following this, I'll begin a couch-to-5k program which should have me ready to run the 5k some time in March 2010. I will remain on my vegan diet until the next time I see G-, probably in February 2010. I will occasionally have some chicken. G- has ordered a battery of tests for me to have conducted before I see him again. It is my hope that I get these done in February 2010 and he tells me that all is well again.
God dey!
Sincerely,
- Siddon look mode activated!
I have decided to go on the Master Cleanse. Yes, that most drastic of all diets, where you consume nothing but liquids for 2 solid weeks. Given that I am an all-or-nothing kind of girl, the plan is to be on this diet for 30 solid days, not including today.
Today, October 11th 2009, was meant to be Day 1 of this diet. Alas! I have already fallen off the wagon. :-) You see, the plan was never to go on the classic Master Cleanse Diet (Cayenne Pepper + Lemon Juice + Maple Syrup), but to alter the diet to suit my own individual tastes. I have tried the Master Cleanse before, and while I found it a rewarding and effective 'cleanse' (I lost over 50 pounds on it), I am not particularly wild about the acrid taste of lemons, the cloying aftertaste of maple syrup or indeed the taste of raw cayenne (yes, I am a real Nigerian, but I don't tolerate pepper too well). Thus I made a few alterations to the diet of the Cleanse.
Alteration Number 1: Delete Cayenne Pepper altogether. There is no reason to burn your intestines with pepper every day for 2 weeks, or, in my case, a solid month.
Alteration Number 2: Drastically cut down on the number of lemons included in this diet. In place of the 12-24 tablespoons of lemon juice required per day, I'll be consuming closer to 3 tablespoons a day.
Alteration Number 3: Swap maple syrup for honey. Sweet, delicious, 60-calorie-a-serving honey.
Alteration Number 4: Add peppermint tea. Lots of it.
Alteration Number 5: Do not induce any unnatural *cough* bowel movements with herbal tea.
For health reasons, I have to lose weight - and fast, too! I know, I know, the Master Cleanse should be a cleansing exercise and not a fad diet. Well, stuff me - I need to lose 30 pounds, and I need to do that this month!
It has been a long, yet difficult journey since the day in July 2009 when my doctor, a typically morose and quiet gentleman, informed me that I was 'fat'. I was as surprised as he was to learn that I weighed 202 pounds. This despite the fact that I wear (wore/squeezed into) size 4 pants from the GAP, that I wore (well, squeezed into) 'Medium' clothes in the USA, that I had finally developed the sort of figure I had always wanted. When my BMI was determined, I was again informed that I was in bad shape - not only had I gone past the 'overweight' classification according to BMI ranges, I was firmly ensconced in the 'obese' category.
My doctor (hereafter G-), did a thorough background check on me, and I sincerely appreciate the fact that he took a more detailed history than most doctors will generally do. G- asked for explicit details about my diet; G- made mental notes of the total calorific intake every day; he gave me estimates of what my true calorific needs were; he took down notes about the amount of physical work I engage in every day; he spoke of his worries about what he termed my 'high-fat, hyper-caloric diet'; he expressed grave concerns about the elevated levels of cholesterol; finally, he informed me that if I continued on my diet, I would eventually develop Type II diabetes or a similar disease of insulin metabolism and almost certainly give myself a heart condition due to the rapidly escalating cholesterol levels.
The picture was an ugly one. It turns out I was consuming far more food than anyone my age and gender should have to (over 4000 calories a day), and living a most sedentary, slothful lifestyle, with no exercise and zero regard for physical exertion.
For breakfast everyday, I had at least 8 quarters of waffles, which contained at least a cup of whole milk, 2 eggs, a cup and a half of white flour, a half cup of sugar, a stick of butter, pancake syrup (stuffed full of High Fructose Corn Syrup) and mounds & mounds of strawberries. 2 cups of apple cider (at 120 calories per cup) invariably accompanied my breakfast, and on certain days when I was in the mood for a really decadent meal, I would have some bacon with the waffles - just for good measure.
I work at night (I am a Chemical Engineer and I work in a 24/7 manufacturing plant and will do so until at least March 16, 2010). I typically sleep through the day, wake up at 07:00pm, cook or goof around for about a half-hour and then get to work at ~09:00pm. Before shutting my doors to leave for work each night, I had a mental checklist I used to go through. Atop this list was an item that reminded me to remove a pound of ground beef from the freezer to thaw for the next day's meatball sandwich (see below). I spend the entire night at work, and return home around 06:00am every morning.
Every other day on my way home from work in the early morning, I would stop at the local Shoprite and purchase a loaf of warm, fresh-baked French bread. Around 11am, after reading for a few hours or running errands, I would make a meatball sandwich, with fresh-made meatballs prepared in my humble oven while watching the neighbors' children play in the yard. A generous helping of ketchup went with my meatball-sandwich, which would tide me over until the evenings. On days when I was feeling particularly greedy, I would eat some bacon with my sandwich; I suppose it was more often a bacon-meatball sandwich than just a plain meatball sandwich. In any case, it was always a delicious mid-day snack! It also had the unfortunate side-effect of having a lot of calories and a lot of cholesterol.
On most days, I would put together other meals while the meatballs were cooking in the oven: a quick sauce for my 7pm meal, a vegetable/rice/bacon stir-fry to eat at work together with some baked/fried chicken or pork chops. In fact, I often had bacon in the oven at the same time as pork chops and meatballs.
The tomato sauce was simple and unvaried : a quick yet delicious concoction of tomato paste, canola oil, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, ginger, garlic, fresh diced-tomatoes. Once the sauce was cooked and tasted around 11:00am, I would place the pot on a wooden coaster in the refrigerator, ready for the evening meal.
At 7pm, like clockwork, I would rise to the sound of my alarm clock and begin the next cycle of cooking/eating. I would boil some pasta and have that with the tomato sauce and pork chops or chicken, depending on what I had made. On some days, I had leftover meatballs with my pasta dish. Following this evening meal, I would chop up a wide and impressively diverse array of vegetables - green and red bell peppers, chillies, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, mushrooms, onions, garlic, ginger, etc. and then boil some rice, prepare some bacon (I love this stuff in case you haven't gathered that yet), and stir-fry the entire thing: vegetables, bacon, rice; This meal would go into a plastic container, ready to be devoured on my lunch break at work.
I neglected to mention that I always purchased a whole apple pie (or two), and a rack of chocolate chip muffins whenever I bought the French bread. These I had at all times of the day - at work when I was feeling peckish, at home when I was bored, on days when I was too lazy to cook, etc.
I also did not mention that I never drank any water at home. Indeed I hadn't a water filter until very recently. Instead I had apple cider: gallons of the stuff was always in my refrigerator, and I consumed at least 6 cups of cider everyday, a grand total of 720 calories. At least. *Gulp!* That's about a third of the caloric intake of a normal woman. You see, now, why it was easy for me to eat my way to 202 pounds? The assault on my poor pancreas and digestive system from the incessant sugar intake (from all that apple cider over the course of an entire day), my relentless carb overload (white pasta, white bread), constant cholesterol consumption (pork chops, bacon, meatballs, etc) was enough to land me in hospital and to earn me a rather stern speech from my doctor, who told me in unequivocal terms that things simply had to change.
Today I weigh 102 pounds, and I intend to go all the way down to 90-100 pounds. The Master Cleanse is the fastest way of achieving that. So dramatic has my weight loss been that when I drove up to Connecticut over the Labor Day weekend to visit my sister who had most recently seen me in July, she was shocked to see how quickly I had shed the pounds. Indeed my pants have been falling off my hips, so I have had to purchase a leather belt. The last few pounds have been tough to shed, and it is my hope that I can lose these 30 or so stubborn pounds and then continue with a maintenance diet afterward.
As one might imagine, my diet has changed drastically. I am now vegan - to reduce the cholesterol levels. Indeed I have a zero-cholesterol diet because I do not consume any animal products - no milk, no cheese, no butter, no meat. For calcium, I eat vegetables and fruits rich in calcium. I have also removed apple cider and sugar from my diet. In G-'s words, my diet is now "low-carb, low-fat, no-table-sugar (fructose)" - in essence a low-GI food, which is what Diabetics eat. After losing the bulk of the weight on the Master Cleanse, I adopted a hypocaloric diet rich in vegetables and proteins. High-GI foods (foods which quickly raise your blood sugar) such as almost all packaged desserts (e.g. muffins, chocolates, apple pie, biscuits/cookies, etc), potatoes, sugars, corn flakes, certain fruits such as mangoes, white rice, white flour and thus white bread have been entirely eliminated from my diet.
Well, until today. Today I just had cornflakes with white sugar in it. I did stray off this diet when I went up to visit my sister over the Labor Day weekend, but for the most part, my diets have consisted of mushrooms, chickpeas and a battery of vegetables. It has actually been really easy & surprisingly rewarding sticking to the diet. The difficult bit is losing the last 30 pounds.
I hope that I can blog about this weight loss journey over the next 30 days (Inshallah!), and beyond. I will be keeping track of certain things over the next 30 days: my weight (taken twice a day), body temperature (also taken twice a day), and my blood pressure (also taken twice a day).
We'll see how things go from here. It is my hope that by November 15 2009, I will be at my target weight of 90-100 pounds, with a preference for the 95 range.
Following this, I'll begin a couch-to-5k program which should have me ready to run the 5k some time in March 2010. I will remain on my vegan diet until the next time I see G-, probably in February 2010. I will occasionally have some chicken. G- has ordered a battery of tests for me to have conducted before I see him again. It is my hope that I get these done in February 2010 and he tells me that all is well again.
God dey!
Sincerely,
- Siddon look mode activated!
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