I lost 11 pounds in 12 days!

Yes, I actually lost 11 pounds in 12 days!!

It is hard to believe and surprising but I did lose 11 pounds in 12 days.  I have talked about my weight loss and how I hate to diet and exercise.  My attitude is that I like to eat and I like to relax.  The last thing I want to do is watch what I eat and go to the gym but let me tell you what happens with that attitude; you get fat!

We all start out as those healthy teenagers and then something happens with life.  We put ourselves on the back burner and start taking care of everyone else.  No wonder we want to eat what we like and just relax because life is hard.  Look at our lives.  We have children and take care of them and then there is working full-time and daycare and then working at home after work.  Even if you stay home with your kids, it is still a full-time job. I won’t even get into having to wash the clothes, cook supper and everything else that goes with running a household.   At the end of the day were are done!

The result of all this stress and hard work is that we are no longer the healthy person we once were.  We start getting overweight.  Our joints start to hurt.  We no longer have the energy we once had. Fatigue sets in and basically, the earlier the bedtime the happier I am.

My wake up call to losing weight was when I started having a stabbing pain on my left side.  I went to the doctor and he said that was my intestine.  What?  That made no sense to me.  He told me to get some blood work and he gave me an order for an ultrasound.  The doctor said that the ultrasound was up to me.  If the blood work came back ok then I didn’t have to get the ultrasound if I didn’t want to.

Then I remembered when I had my appendix out. I was about 24 years old.  That blood work came back fine and in fact, the upper GI they gave me in the emergency room showed nothing as well.  They did the surgery and my appendix was bright red and just about to burst.  Based on the fact that no test showed anything wrong with my appendix except my extreme pain, I decided to have the ultrasound even though I had not gotten the blood work back.  I was going with my gut feeling on this one.  Pun intended!

The blood work, as usual, was fine but the ultrasound showed something different.  It showed gallstones and the possibility of the beginnings of fatty liver.  I can handle the gallstones but what about this fatty liver?  That really scared me and yet the doctors acted as if it was nothing.  To me, fatty liver is a big deal.  Your liver is not working as efficient when you have fat clogging it up and the fact that the liver is the most resilient organ in the body and I managed to make it fat because of my own food choices did not sit well with me.  I was the cause of this and no one else.

How to begin eating right!

I took it upon myself to start my own diet and rid myself of fat and get healthy once and for all. So how do you lose weight?

1. NO sugar!  You give up all sugar.  I can see you rolling your eyes now but believe me that is a big deal.  Sugar is an addiction.  I love sugar and I have a really bad sweet tooth.  No more chocolate and cookies and cakes and pies.  No more fruit juice.  I am reading labels to determine the amount of sugar in everything.  It really hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be to give up sugar.
2. No grain!  That’s right, no bread!  Nothing with flour.  No sweet bread, no rice, no quinoa, no rolls, no oatmeal.  None of those foods.  Each of these foods raises your blood sugar level and I just said in #1 NO sugar.
3. YES dairy.  Well, that kind of is true and kind of isn’t. No milk.  Each cup of milk has 11 grams of sugar.  I do have heavy cream in my coffee and I use heavy cream to make my salad dressing. Yes to butter and yes, I eat real cheese.

So what did I eat these past 12 days to lose weight?  Let me give you a sample of my diet.

For breakfast, I usually cook bacon, remove it after cooking and then I add onion.  I sauteed the onion and I add additional ingredients like mushroom and raw spinach.  Once that has cooked down, I had eggs.  I eat wonderful eggs and bacon for breakfast.  There are days when I eat boiled eggs with salt.

For lunch, I make a huge salad that I can usually eat two days in a row.  I use spinach and iceberg lettuce.  The added ingredients are tomato, cucumber, cheese, olives and whatever else I can think of and I make my own salad dressing.  My salad dressing is Duke’s mayonnaise with heavy cream and salt and pepper.  I like creamy salad dressing and this works for me.

For supper, I have steak or chicken breast and I have vegetable sides.  Asparagus with parmesan cheese or a squash and zucchini dish are wonderful and filling

I eat really well and I try to plan ahead but I have added a small can of tuna to a bowl of lettuce to make this work.  I have just begun and I have lost 11.2 pounds in 12 days. Inflammation has disappeared and  I am no longer bloated or swollen and I feel great.  I wish I would have done this sooner.  Maybe now I wouldn’t need gallbladder surgery.  Stay tuned.

 

Until next time,

Kari