Bummed

Well, I'm bummed. Got my bloodwork results back and, except for a big drop in my triglycerides -- which were already fine -- everything's right where it was three months ago (and this, you understand, is with statins.)

I do think cholesterol is a bit of a bugbear -- most people who get heart attacks, after all, have normal cholesterol -- but I was really expecting it to drop, since I've lost thirty pounds or so. I was hoping I'd just hit the sweet spot with my diet, but I think I now have to do the delicate work of replacing most of my saturated fat intake with vegetables and unrefined carbs (maybe even a little fruit, who knows? Live wild!)

Delicate because I have to do it without kicking off the insulin roller-coaster. It takes a lot more discipline and attention to eat some of things (bread, for instance) than to just do without them.

I read The South Beach Diet yesterday afternoon -- yes, all of it, except for the anecdotes and the recipes -- and I'm a little baffled by its popularity. It's just Atkins without saturated fat, and there's actually very little book there, without the anecdotes and recipes. I think he's basically right, because Atkins was basically right -- that overeating is caused by a disordered insulin metabolism, and you can fix it by a couple weeks of carbohydrate fasting, and then staying away from "white stuff."

One thing I'm not going to do is start eating artificial foods. I'm not going to put things such as non-fat cream (?!?!?!) or something called "I can't believe it's not butter" into my body. If I can't eat something real, fine, I'll eat something else real.

The other piece of getting my blood lipids where I want them is exercise, of course. For various reasons I've been getting very little of it.

Hey ho. Discouraging. But anyway, I've lost about half the weight I wanted to lose, and I've learned to cook fresh food several times a week. That's a lot of the groundwork done.