Week 1 - New Year 2014 Low Carb Bootcamp - And We're Off!

[BIWI]

Morning all!

I see several of you have already weighed in on the Spreadsheet of Fabulousness

As of today, though, we also have our bright, shiny, new Bootcamp section on Mumsnet, including our own Weight Tracker, which will only show your own weight/progress.

You can either use the Spreadsheet as we have done before, which everyone has access to and can see, or you can go here and enter your weight.

Obviously you can do both!

When you're in the new Bootcamp, if you click on the tab that says 'more info' that will take you to a section which has loads of information about low carbing, as well as Bootcamp Rules

Before we get going formally, I have to make an important disclaimer:

I am not a doctor, a medic, a scientist, a nutritionist or a dietician. I have no formal training in food, dieting or low carbing. The information that I provide here is based solely on my reading on the subject, as well as my own experience. If you have any kind of medical condition and/or you are taking any kind of ongoing medication, you should consult your GP before starting a low carb diet

That done, good luck everyone!

Morning,
Learned the hard way about sharing what I'm doing. Will work better as a success story (repeats to self) than a scientific revelation.
I feel horrible this morning. Day 3 LC as like Mlig I was stocked up and raring to go so went for it on Sunday. I'd cut my sweet stuff and upped my water the week before but still was having plenty complex carbs. But reminding myself it's only day 6 out of plaster and on my feet. So major changes. Head is less sore but very fuzzy, tired, not concentrating, less sickly than D1-2 so far. It's ok though, whether carb-flu or just post-convalescence-type fatigue, at least I don't have responsibilities ie work and children.

Yesterday's tea included cauliflower puree - wow! It was so nice, and I agree with (sorry not sure who) the poster on the warm up thread that said cauliflower was such a revelation in being sweet! I never thought I liked it, actually - but would make it every night if I didn't have to wash the food processor as well as the pan twice!

Have some leftover HB eggs and a bit of bacon so that with salad will be lunch. Also amazed by how unhungry I am and how easy I'm finding the water. Thank you to all the people that have done this and lent me their confidence - BIWI (especially for my but-I'm-an-addict questions last week!), Willie (obviously) but I have taken much heart from Crabby, Steeleye and ChippingIn, I am really grateful to you all

Good morning everyone. Chester thank you so much for the chicken nugget recipe! Absolutely delicious. So quick and easy too. It will now be known in the dollywould household as 'Chesterdraw's chicken' (Great username btw)

Beige buffet's are grim, aren't they? If you're pushed for time and on the motorway, M&S have roast veg frittata and prawns & mayo dips in their deli section. They cost £££ (service station prices…) but they are useful if you get desperate.

Heirtotheironthrone You've given me hope. I weighed myself this morning and was gutted to see that I've put a stone in just over two months So I hope I can get 7lb shifted soon. Baby steps for me, I think…

Morning! Day 2 for me. I felt so much better last night. Usually my stomach starts bloating after lunch and it's really uncomfortable by the evening, not helped by my usual evening sugar binge. I might be imagining it but my stomach seems a little flatter.

I'm planning today - does this sound ok?
B - 3 fried eggs
L - spinach, cucumber, olives, small amount quorn ham, dressing made with olive oil and white wine winegar. Total yoghurt for pud
B - roasted veg and halloumi from the recipe thread

Oh and this is Dolly's Plan for the Day:

B: leftover cottage pie (with celeriac). Coffee with double cream. 1l of water so far this morning...
L: Chicken with mozzarella and pesto and lettuce.
D: Pork fillet (to use up from freezer - then it's belly all the way), steamed creamy cabbage and spinach.
S: Well, two small wedges of brie and some chilli olives have vanished form the fridge already. And I am ravenous

But I will not crack

Morning!

Owww, Buffy :( Hope you're feeling better soon.

Have horrible taste in my mouth, I didn't think I'd be in Ketotsis this soon so am going to go and reclean my teeth in a minute before going out to inflict my dogbreath on the good people of Essex...

Today's plan:

B - 2 Poached eggs, fat and some meat off last night's roast
L - chicken salad and some cauli soup
D - Lamb leg steaks with fried courgettes & mushrooms in a creamy cheesy shallotty spinach sauce, swede mash

And water. Lots of water. I ended up drinking another litre last night in bed while reading and then woke up at 2am desperate for the loo!

BUffy, ouch indeed! Have you got a lavender heat pack you can put on your bumps?

CY - doesn't look too bad, I suppose!

Cbeebi - just to echo what the others have said it's one of those things that's a mixture of truth and bollocks, so you're never quite sure how much to believe. BUT as others have explained, the water thing = true enough, the rest of it = bollocks.
There is a fair whack of evidence that eating fat actually helps you to recycle stored fat -and the fat you release can be turned into fuel for the body in a lovely process called gluconeogenesis (literally: making new sugar).
Ketosis (production of ketone bodies from protein, that the brain can use instead of glucose if it has to) can reduce muscle mass but only when you're fasting - if you're taking in new protein (as we are in the low carb WOE) then muscle mass won't be affected.

So, I'm up to 10pm now and have managed with no carbs all day - woohoo!

Dinner was fried turkey steak in butter and herbs, with steamed carrots and broccoli. Will make sure we have mushrooms next time as well, as it was a little lacking without the spuds but that's my fault, DH was cooking and although I stopped him from crumbing the turkey, he didn't think about the potatoes being carbs.

Late snack = cheese.

Morning all. Bit chilly today! Car did a little slippy slide on way to school which was a bit if a wake up! Took it very easy after that!

Buffy - ouch. DH did that on 29th - came down hard on his knee 45 mins before we were leaving for airport. DS and I ended up going and leaving him here as he couldn't have travelled. And he reckons last night was his first good night's sleep since.

Just back from chiropractor. Have sciatica. It's feeling a bit better so am hopeful he might have cracked it! In a good way!

B was ham and egg mayo.
L will be broccoli and Stilton soup.
D will be roast chicken. Have cleleriac, broccoli, cauliflower and sprouts. Also have shallots, peppers and carrots. Anyone any nice easy ideas? Thinking of celeriac mash and cauliflower cheese with something.

Have horrible taste in mouth already. Which I suppose is a good sign. Haven't lost any weight yet though!

I wouldn't keep it longer than 5 days, less if it started to look a little green. Other people might say no more than 2 or 3 days, but my parents had a very liberal outlook on how long food would last and I've never had food poisoning from any food I ate at theirs (have had it elsewhere, caught off a cheese sandwich of all things - probably rotovirus)

Afternoon!

One of the key things about low carving is that it burns fat not muscle - this is one of the reasons why you, apparently, can't lose too much weight by doing it. Unlike low calorie eating, which just eats away at your body eventually.

Another point to make is that we are not cutting out an entire food group, nor is this a 'no carb' diet. It is a low carb diet. All that we're doing is 'rearranging' the proportions that we eat. So instead of carbs:protein:fat, we're eating fat:protein:carbs.

Who could argue with a diet that encourages you to get your carbs in the form of vegetables and salad?!

Bloody autocorrect. How many times in the last 3 or 4 years must I have typed 'low carbing'? And it still corrects me to 'low carving'!

Lunchtime! Loving my bacon, avocado and cheese salad.

Soo tasty, so many greens. All my colleagues are well jel :)

I was delighted to see that I have lost 1.25lbs so far. That's the equivalent of 2.5 packs of lard!

Obviously that won't be sustained every day, but it's very encouraging as a start. However, it also made me realise that we need to think about weighing.

Bootcamp has a weekly weigh-in. For some people, though (me included), daily weighing helps to keep me focused. But, you do have to be able to cope with the fact that sometimes your weight will not change, or will go up, even if you have been following the rules perfectly. It's just our bodies and their natural fluctuations. If you're still menstruating (oh the joys of being through the menopause!) then this will also affect your daily weight.

If you can't cope with this, then please revert to weekly weighing.

And, some people I know, feel that the scales become too much of an obsession. You don't have to weigh-in every week, for this very reason. The last thing I want this WOE to do is to encourage any kind of disordered eating.

Good alternatives to measure your progress are to take your measurements before you start, and then repeat these every so often, and/or to find an item of clothing that is just that bit too tight - something that is too tight that you wouldn't contemplate wearing it quite yet. Keep trying that on to see what progress you've made. (Don't make this ridiculously ambitious - if you're currently a size 16, don't keep trying on something that's a size 8! Maybe make it the next size down - if you're like I was when I first started, you will almost certainly have a section of your wardrobe which is your 'thin' clothes as opposed to your 'have to wear right now' clothes! )

Today I've had

B - boiled egg and small wedge of camembert
snack - 4 small meatballs from last night with half a teaspoon of mustard
L - salad (ham, bacon, feta, olives, avocado, leaves, cucumber and red pepper) with oily vinagrette, natural yoghurt.

Not sure what to have for dinner tonight - I have some mince and some chicken but no inspiration.

My kettlebells have arrived. (Don't laugh... they will make lovely doorstops when I'm fed up with them in about a week's time )

Breakfast: cup of tea, protein shake, spoonful of coconut oil
Lunch: scrambled eggs cooked in butter with philadelphia, some enormous pesto olives which are To Die For
Dinner: probably no-spag spag bol, with buttered cabbage and broccoli. Maybe some Total yog afterwards.

Have drunk several glasses of water so far, and one coffee with cream. More water and perhaps a liquorice tea in a bit.

Not hungry at all. Headache gone also. Result!

Dolly

Thank you Dolly - we are in a similar boat I think, I've put on 1.5 stone since I got married in September, damn happiness... This thread is, from experience, great for inspiring you to keep going - plenty of nice food ideas from others and other people's losses are a really good motivator!

I've finally managed to update the Spreadsheet of Fabulousness (I had to use Chrome in the end) and I've printed off lots of the "blurb" for DH, who is hopeless at knowing what's carby and what isn't - he asked me yesterday if wine-gums were OK.

Breakfast was a lump of cheddar and two Oopsie Rolls (I find them really moreish and could have scoffed the lot).

Lunch was some leftover roasted veg from the weekend (mainly courgette and mushroom, with a small amount of squash), with some goats cheese melted over.

Dinner will be whatever falls out of the fridge!

That's really helpful re weighing...and I need repetition to undo all the rubbish advice I've read, heard, and even given out . I will atone in a few months I hope!

I am walking on my own two feet in the house, no aircast, though have pain in my shoulder from falling over my own stick whilst taking weight on it I am only in my 30s for goodness sake!

Feel a bit better after lunch, just very fuzzy...
today breakfast was Live Alpro "yogurt" with vanilla and cinnamon;
Lunch: big pile of rockety salad, vinegraitte, leftover chipolatas (Tesco finest 1.2g/100) and h/m egg mayonnaise.
2 coffees with unsweetened soya milk. 1.5l water.

DH is mostly being awesomely supportive but I can't quite yet sit and watch him eat pudding!

Cointreau sorry but that is hilarious re. DH and the wine gums.

Thank you for the replies

Had a bad slip up earlier but hopefully can get back on track today.

I know it's BS. Annoyed with myself though.

Just a bit of a shock to the system!

Yesterday
B 3 egg yolks poached with smoked salmon
L peppers, courgette, chicken cooked in olive oil with lots of spinach with loads of butter on it
drink of double cream with cinnamon
D last of the smoked salmon and asparagus with butter

Sat in front of a nuts, raisins, crisps and the like in bowls at a meeting for 90 minutes last night and did not eat a single thing - was a bit tempting.

Today
B 4 slices of bacon fried and 3 egg yolks poached (I always eat even on this about 3x what most people do)
L will be when cooked Waitrose porkbelly prepared with pepper dusted over the top - it's a really lovely large piece of meat you can buy and one of my favourites and has loads of pork fat on it. It usually is worth several meals too for me as I'm the only person eating it.

Bought kerry gold butter this morning as is better ingredients than the usual lurpak spreadable although the children will still need the lurpak to spread I'm sure so the kettygold can be all mine.

I won't weight myself for a week I think as got PMT bloating etc which is only just starting to go and I doubt there will be any loss on scales after just one day anyway. I felt much better in bed last night for not having my usual nuts and raisins (or cheese which sadly I am intolerant of so trying to keep off) yesterday.

Fiddled endlessly with the pointy thing on my scales and seem to have it under control. Stupid thing. I'll correct my weight later.

Breakfast - coffee with double cream, best part of day
Then long run after drop off,
Lunch - left over ribs/ courgettes
Dinner - salmon, kids will have sliced roasted pots, spinach, broccoli and chocolate cake made my me for pudding. I make them so many I don't even want it. I know its lovely:)

Lots of water.