So much stuff there! I pulled out some things that simply hit home for one reason or another:



I know that I will never be 'normal' sized again
-I often feel this way. But the immediate reaction I have to that thought is: 'Of course, I can be as slim as I want. It is not impossible. Think of the rock star reference in a diet book I once read. How is it that rock stars, people who only sing and perform, always stay so svelte. Never gain weight. They are people like anyone else, with the same food issues. Yet they do not dare let those issues get the best of them because performing requires them to look a certain way. It's no accident that drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes take the place of food issues!'



Every day my father takes rat poison (Coumadin) ...
-My elderly friend takes coumadin, also. Tolerates it well. Is 84, which is around 10 years longer than the average life span for women in this country. For her, it's a blessing, not a curse.



So although I have already drastically reduced dairy in our lives, I'm not going to try anymore to keep it out.
-maybe drastically reducing something is enough. It SHOULD be enough.



Maybe if you accept that challenge it'll be easier for you to succeed and she could get inspired by that.
-I have never been able to diet given moral incentives.



..and she doesn't want what we have even if I do make it ...
Wow, is this every frustrating to me. At the moment, my kids are home for the holidays. I've loaded the kitchen with carbs for them, carbs they swear they love. Most of it will rot, untouched, while they dither on about what they are 'hungry for' at the moment. And meat? My son loves hamburgers and insists on cooking his own burgers. I bought the ground beef. He made the two burgers he wanted. Then the ground meat sat in the refrigerator for a week. I called husband while I was out shopping and told him, 'Throw out the ground beef. I'm buying new ground beef. The old beef is no good after 2 days in the fridge.'
Did husband throw out the beef? No. I had to. Did son get the message that ground beef has a very very short fridge life? Sort of; he commented that 'it was smelling kind of funky'. I'm the curator of the fridge. And nobody is happy about it. And nobody learns anything. And it's a horrible waste of money. And children are starving in Africa.



I think one problem I've had is that I spent some time learning to eat "a version" of low-carb that I found tasty and interesting and creative and that worked for me.
-I get a 'version' going that works for awhile, too. The trouble is, 'for the rest of your life' is a long time (if you're lucky) and at some point, something fails. How is it that Jennifer Aniston can eat the same boring low-carb lunch every day? Motivated by having to see yourself on camera a lot, having wardrobe people point out what is getting bigger and requires adjustment, watching people around you get slimmer, having money to pay a 'nutritionist to the stars', 'personal chef to the stars', anything 'to the stars'. Trying on dresses for awards ceremeonies and looking like crap if you're not a size 6.
I'm guessing it's harder to get to the point where 'something fails' if it's your career and your reputation. See 'Fat Actress', the series starring Kirstie Alley.



I once made crockpot chili verde and ate 4oz servings for 32 meals in a row, about 5 a day. Lost tons of weight fast.
-I was eating round steak and baked sweet potato for days on end. I couldn't stick to it, as much as I liked it. Life intrudes, you can 't live in a vacuum. At some point, it falls apart. Whether it's 32 meals later or 5 meals later. My favorite diet book, 'The Dieter's Dilemma', by William Bennet, says boring diets are one of the keys to successful weight loss; not the only key but one of them. I admire Judy NYC because she makes her diet fun; at least she enjoys cooking the things that work for her on the South Beach Diet. Weight Watchers goes to great lengths to make up recipes that work for their diet. However, when reading Judy's latest recipe, as delicious as it sounds, I realized I would eat the whole pot, not just the 1/6 of the pot that makes a serving.



except we don't have nearly enough exercise... opportunity, energy, inspiration, time, space, are all issues there,
-I exercise when I go to the Y. Otherwise, do I ever just go out in the yard and do something active? No. And I rarely see anyone else do that, either. Excepting raking leaves in the fall, the yard is an ornament to the house. This is bizarre. This is fact. In my town.
There's a video tape in my TV room that has the viewer walk in place in front of the TV. 2 miles, 5 miles, you name it. You don't go anywhere, no one sees you, you don't bother anyone, it's free, it's low-impact, it's private. It's
perfect! Am I using it? No. I bought my elderly friend a 'yoga from a chair for the elderly' DVD for Christmas. Will she use it? I doubt it.



I can lose weight slowly while she doesn't, but if anything she wants to eat as much or more than me. It is juggling two very different bodies WHILE trying to maintain lowcarb AND extensive food restrictions -- gluten I dealt with, but losing dairy via h&h/hard-cheese (just those two) was the last damned straw.
-this is the difference between the 'democratic' household I live in and the authoritarian household I grew up in. When I was growing up, I could express a preference but I got an answer about the limits we faced and how I had to
adjust to those limits. It very slowly sank in that what we had were money issues. We weren't rich, my mom wasn't a personal chef. She got what she could afford for the week and no more food came into the house. We lived on
that and we had to be happy with it - the point was, we should be happy with it. It was better than not having food come into the house for our meals to be prepared two or three times a day. So we should be glad and appreciate that.
I never got fat on that way of life. I also knew that when I had a job and a place of my own, I could eat anything I wanted. The reality after leaving home was that I starved - I couldn't afford food in college when I lived off campus. When I lived in the dorm, with unlimited servings of delicious food three times a day in the dorm cafeteria, I never wanted to leave the dorm or its food.


there is some kind of max tolerance or limit for these things, where the combination of time and circumstance finally drags you down.
-Yep, a lifetime is a long time.



But the minute I started trying to get ALL dairy out of our lives, it wiped out almost the entire tiny menu we had adapted to,...
- I don't think there's anything we eat in my house that doesn't pose the temptation of adding just a little bit (or a lot) of cheese.
I love cheese. I LOVE cheese. I want to build an entire meal around a piece of cheese - French, German, Italian, even American cheese (Vermont and Wisconsin but, really, any state produces something). I have tried to think of a cuisine that doesn't allow you to add cheeses to a dish - Asian cuisines would be the answer. I cooked Japanese food ONLY for a while and my family mutinied. I'm convinced that if I cooked and ate only Japanese cuisine, I would lose weight - for awhile. Then my problems controlling portion size would make me look like a sumo wrestler.



I feel like just crying that she is so chronically unhappy with the food choices. I can live with the sense of deprivation usually; but on her behalf it's another story.
-Food should just be fuel. That whole 'Eat to live' thing, as opposed to the 'Live to eat' thing. But it's not just fuel. You need it every day and it tastes good or it tastes bad.



It's a way to work out emotional issues, too, and on some level, you and your daughter plug into that big time.
-Also, at my house, this is the case. Husband and I use food that way (as did his father) - there is not a single thing we can't discuss or communicate and not use food as a proxy. There not any disagreement that can't be turned into or expressed with a 'food fight'. Right now, I'm on the low-carb wagon - he's on the 'I'll eat only what i want to eat the way I want to eat it' wagon. They don't blend.




maybe it was more the improvement in my u3:u6 ratio?
- I'm not using fitday anymore, nor am I logging all I eat. I reached my 'snapping point' with that. Instead, I'm spending a lot more time using Internet Explorer with nutritiondata.com. Looking at omega-3: omega-6 ratios (nutritiondata has that information), I find the foods that have more 3s than 6s and there are a TON of vegetables there. (Strangely enough, not tomatoes, not olives, not avocados...)
From reading other parts of your post, I can see that maybe I should just write down what I eat and my feelings of well-being, etc. I was starting to resent not the diary but the constant need to be at the computer.




But then when I tried to exclude all cheese.... AND still cook/eat several times a day for the kid, despite her hatred of our food... uh, my brain was working on wrapping around this but this is where I essentially hit the wall and fried. :-(
-Here's my dream: (it gives me some pleasure just to daydream about this!) I buy an old house on the beach and I open a 'spa' there. Women (can't handle the co-ed dieting thing) come for a weekend or a week or a month or
whatever and I get to be the authoritarian figure in their lives for a short time. I cook - and I make up the meals and the portions - and they get sun every day, walk on the beach (in groups, supervised) and log so many miles a day of walking. Take a yoga class in the morning to rev up for the day, lift weights before dinner, have a hypnosis session every other day. It' so ideal. It's so great. It's such a fantastic idea. It's wildly successful. It's never gonna happen.
One thing I know now is that I would go completely crazy dealing with disgruntled women who have all sorts of food issues. I'm not an authoritarian figure enough to handle that. They'd just leave. They'd find the food tasteless or too spicy. Not enough fat or too much fat. They'd complain that they pulled shoulder muscle while they sat in lotus position. They'd hide when they had to go for a walk.
Men would do the same thing (but it would take a while because they want to put up a 'manly front' first) if I had 'only men' sessions.
The thing is, you can't read minds and emotions and be that person for another person - they have to adore absolutely everything you cook and serve and crave the very seasoning you sprinkle on a piece of meat. They have to be entranced by what you serve - if the food is going to be what attracts them to the table. All these diets: The Hamptons Diet, the South Beach Diet, the whatever-locale-you-can-name Diet, they are palatable but what draws people to them is the magical promise of successful weight loss. Not unlike, say, the Cabbage Diet - which so many people have tried and it doesn't even TASTE that good.
Imagine my dream spa - me cooking delicious Japanese food, truly fresh and homemade stuff - and the women liking it for oh, say, two meals and then, phttt.




If I had a way of forcefeeding myself 100g of protein a day totally without regard to anything else in my life -- that did not require cooking time/effort/money/planning/cleaning, or protein powder which I find absolutely vile -- I think I would run into less 'issues' of 'everything else'.
-This is what I love about Whey concotions. That powder you buy and it makes a bland, fairly disgusting drink if made with just water (the quickest, simplest way to mix it) - it's packed with protein. Amazing. You can get it on
Amazon grocery - there are so many things you can get on Amazon grocery!
But it never, ever tastes good - I treat it like medicine.



That often "sheer exhaustion" contributes to anger, apathy, frustration, and poor choices,...
-When I did heavy resistance training twice a week (plus pilates once a week), I soon had the leg strenth to really move. Maybe my body was still heavy but boy, those muscles in my legs really carried my heavy body along with ease. So much so that I craved walking up hills and covering territory in my little town because it was such a pleasure to USE that muscle power. Getting to that point - it was a couple of months - was the hard part, the
working-against-my-psychological-resistance-to-exercise-part. But when I got to that point, it all took off, like a rocket.



I do the "things I know I should do" pretty much 24/7 every day every week every month,..
-This is what drives me crazy about the 'change this thing or things' diets. You can change something or some things, and then subtly, you adjust something else. To be back where you started. Like: give up coca-cola for a
year and lose 10 lbs. AS IF everything else just stayed the same.



This lowcarb forum is a huge resource for me and there are people here,
- I stay with this lowcarb forum even when I'm slipping off the path of low-carb. Why? Because I know WW is a resource (it's where I have my weight registered and where I listen to motivational talks) but I think low-carb is the
way for me to control my slow progress towards diabetes. I've been watching my fasting blood sugar climb over the years and I'm pretty sure that low-carb is the diet choice best for controlling or avoiding that disease. Right now,
my friend's mother is suffering the effects of her diabetes and I watched her develop the full-blown disease over the years. Always in denial, always on a 'diet' of sorts, always making an exception for the pastries in her life!




The smell of french fries are in the air if I so much as stand on my porch.
-When I worked at a KFC, in my youth, I moved around so much on the job and ate so much fried stuff and LOST weight. At home at night, bored in a small town, played cards until 3 a.m. with my best friend, nearly every single
night, eaing bags of potato chips. And STILL lost weight. Bored, boring food, even though it tasted good, we had little choice so it still was ultimately boring.




I cannot control what my 2 year old eats, much less a 13 year old. Make what you like. She can add something extra for herself.
- I had a lot more control over my two-year-old than my twenty-year-old. I control NOTHING. My 19-year-old is the same. They just go and you don't direct a thing.



It is not about you anymore, your demands are about ME, and about not caring about me, my energy, my work, my own eating issues which are affected by your demands or timing, or anything else.
-This is what I see in my 'democratic' household when the kids are home. Husband stands behind them and says, 'We can work it all out with give and take and sharing and being flexible, blah, blah, blah' and I have to say, 'Yeah,
but I'm doing all the work. How can that fact possibly escape you, given how all this is so free-flowing and relaxed and laid-back, etc.'! Bottom line: nobody, least of all husband, WANTS to work if someone else will do it.




If I had money for retail I would open an In-N-Out burger franchise...
-OK, that's a kind of spa.




People who have weight loss surgery, once they are unable to use food as a drug,...
-OMG, not being able to use food as a drug? The thought scares me. Really. I'd reach for a cigarette.

Wow, that has to be the "mother of all posts" and very interesting.
Rightnow, a few random thoughts. Some (including Mercola) have reservations about taking vitamin D as a food supplement. Vitamin D is in reality a steroid hormone, not a vitamin. Using the appropriate tanning in the winter may be better. For dairy, that means cheese and ice cream (if high quality ingredients), but not milk.
What i am about to write is purely from the standpoint of an amateur who has recently been reading on the subject.
Obesity is one result of a metabolic disorder. Either the hormones are not being produced (low percentage of people) or the tissues are not accepting the thyroid hormones (more people). Synthetic T3 in small doses, administered by a doctor, may help, and may not be necessary the rest of ones life. From the weightlifting sites, large amounts of T3 will strip off muscle tissue, and lead to a lifetime dependency on medication. T3 is potentially very dangerous.
I have replaced ice cream with canned sweet corn, after examining the amino acid profile of corn. Shooting for 60-70 g carbs per day. Almost all native Americans ate corn with their meat diet, and were known to have impressively strong bone structure at the time the Europeans first met them.

Healing the metabolism has to be the primary goal - as measured by body temperature, and by ones obesity. Adequate protein = job 1. The right amount of carbs, whatever that is, is job 2, and may not be zero. It may be 50g per day, or more, per Broda Barnes.
If one is 400 lb, consider a 200 lb person trying to carry an extra 100 lb dumbell in each hand. Then do it all day long. At 400 lb, you have tremendous amounts of muscle, and do not need exercise beyond walking.

I'm with you on the deviant eating. Eating everything and anything and tons of it all month. It's so hard to get back on the wagon when you know in 2-3 days you'll end up back off it. Can't wait until the holidays are over.

So PJ- when do you plan on getting back on the wagon? I agree with some that say that your girl may just have to fend for herself. At some point you just have to work on doing what is right for you and hope that she can learn from your success.
Best of luck to you! I hope you have great success in 2010.

I'm already eating decently again. I had two chicken breasts (baked with some steak seasoning and green goddess herbal mix) for brunch. We are having protein salad (chunked chicken, bacon, a little hard cheese, and typical salad veggies, and dressing) for dinner. I will try and get a protein powder drink down my throat before I sleep. I have like 6 different kinds and flavors of the stuff. As long as I mix it with the smallest possible amount of the coldest possible water and drink it as fast as possible and then rinse my mouth really fast, it is not so bad. Well it's so bad but it's not so LONG, anyway!

Matt, the native americans ate maize, which has approximately no resemblance except shape to modern sweet corn. :-) Not to diss your corn, if that's your thing. I like corn tortillas in tacos but otherwise...

I've read some about the muscle in the morbidly obese. Some say it is more atrophied than powerful since unless they are 'fit' (most aren't) they actually move a lot less than people smaller because it's so exhausting. I dunno. My arms are pretty weak, my legs are only 'comparatively' but I DO know that if I exercise a little regularly and do some bodyweight wide-stance squats and weight lifting for even a few week, WHILE getting sufficient protein throughout that time, my leg strength exponentially increases (although it's the hip flexors that make the biggest difference for me). I don't walk much for a couple reasons, the body is misaligned at a certain level of adiposity. But I have weight lifting stuff I like just fine as long as I'm ingesting protein and around 360 my body is usually just starting to morph into a shape that can walk for exercise without causing back pain.

I agree about healing the metabolism being the primary goal, and it is mine, which is why some of my logic is what it is, my resistance to drugs like T3 is huge or at least verrrrrrrrrrrrry leery, and most the last 18 months have been ongoing "experimental" for me.

As for D3, well, I love the stuff. I'm part native grown up on the southern california coast, and I have lived inside a building nearly 24/7 for the last 15 years, and live in a winter climate in the midwest. If I had my way I'd take it more often and in greater dosage than I do. But I haven't read a lot "against" D3 so I will look up Mercola, thanks for that reference.

As for my kid... I think I'm just going to have to be ruthless and see how well that works out for us. This late morning I baked chicken and asked what kind of dipping sauce she would like: salsa, sour cream, or ranch? She wanted lots of cheese, too. I said no. She whined. I said, you're sick of being fat and I'm sick of you whining about it, so no. Pick a dipping sauce in the next 3 seconds or you eat it plain like I do. She chose one and shut up about it. She is currently in collecting trash from the kitchen and I already told her she will help me cut up stuff for the salad-with-chicken/bacon for dinner tonight or she will not be eating. I'm trying to be friendly but so curt about it that she doesn't dare fight it. She really does desperately want to lose weight so hopefully she will see the sudden discipline, eventually, as a comfort of sorts and let it happen. To my surprise she is helping without griping although it has taken me nagging her all day to get her to do it. Tomorrow I will come up with something for her to do and a specific time and throw the mother of all hissy fits if it isn't done by then and see if we can actually work on getting her DOing something for the oversized allowance she gets dropped on her student paypal visa every 2 weeks.

It is possible that taking care of the "kid" issue -- or, arranging food and then just letting it be HER problem, not mine, when she decides she doesn't like what we have -- would go a lonnnnnnnnnnnng way toward "dealing with" my own issues which are usually 80% filled with hers. She not only should be helping with cooking but she should damn well be helping with chores, too. I did nearly ALL the chores for a family of 4 when I was 12. She thinks cleaning her own room is for the housekeeper to do. I think it's time I resolved that problem along with the food problem because oddly I think they may be connected.

PJ

I don't think you can be quite that harsh, but it's certainly time she learned that you're not her personal slave - I feel that blowing up when you lost your cool was probably the best thing that could have happened because you got it out in the open. And yes, when my daughter was that age it was probably 2 or 3 years of constant PMS and angst. There were times when she was almost right when she accused me of hating her - I didn't hate her, but I sure hated the way she was behaving! I'm quite sure she didn't understand the distinction at the time, although she's told me since that she's glad I didn't give in to her tantrums.

Now I think that you have to follow up by letting her know at every meal what you intend to cook, and that if that suits her you'll cook enough for both of you. If not, well there's the stove, there's the fridge with supplies, have at it kiddo! It's not that many years ago that 13-year old daughters were expected to do most of the family cooking while mom helped run the family farm, milked cows, slopped hogs, etc.

PJ, I've been feeling for you since I read your first post and I'm really impressed with some of the insightful responses you got!

And as far as fast food and convenience foods, why hasn't someone marketed a gluten-free frozen pizza for heaven sake! And why can't some of the in-store bakeries make some sugar-free, wheat-free treats? How hard would it be for them to make fancy meringues sweetened with Splenda? You just can't find convenience foods for diabetics or celiacs at all!

They have! See:
http://www.amys.com/products/product_view.php?id=100
http://www.amys.com/products/product_view.php?id=193

Even a dairy-free version:
http://www.amys.com/products/product_view.php?id=266

Though it contains nasty soy cheese, so give me the dairy version! I've tried this (in the days when I was less strict on LC) and it's actually pretty darn good and tasty. The crust is really excellent.

Wow! Thanks Debbie ... and I just googled them and apparently they are available in Canada, so I'll have to ask around. DH can always have left-over chicken wings or something while I get a pizza fix! A lot of anchovies and the cheese pizza sounds perfect!!

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot....tuations-2.html

Peter has some interesting discussion on D3, part one is very informative. I have decided to drop the D3 supplement, and rely on the sun and meat.

A great thread, and I know the feelings precisely...so I'm just inserting this bookmark to read all the following posts when I have less chaos coming from the kids' room...so I can process and enjoy it.

PJ, what do you mean when you say you feel "crappy" or "horrible" on VLC? I ask because my history with lowcarb mirrors your own in so many ways. I've been on and off for five years now. When I eat regular lowcarb I always end up overeating cheese and lowcarb recipes and casseroles and finally can't handle the cravings for "regular" food. I go back to eating SAD until I can't take the depression, joint pain, eczema, sneezing, coughing, GERD, etc., etc. anymore at which point I go back to LC.

This past November I discovered ZC and thought I had finally found my answer because I had no desire to overeat at all and NO cravings whatsoever. I thought I'd stay ZC for life. Then, about the third week in, I started feeling extremely weak and tired and COLD all the time and I had dark circles under my eyes.

I added back some carbs and limped along that way for a week or so until last week when I just dove back into carbs full-on. Energy returned somewhat, but most important I was warm again and no longer felt like a corpse. Now, after only a week, I'm already starting to feel the effects of the carbs - mainly just indigestion and fuzz-brain at this point. I miss waking up in the morning with my brain feeling completely awake and alive.

I got some good suggestions over on the ZC thread - to eat fattier, more satisfying meat (although I'm pretty sure my fat content was high enough), and also to try waiting longer between meals and then eat more. I also think I might just need to drink more water. I'm confused, but willing to keep trying. (I have no choice, actually, lol...can't go on feeling like this anymore...)

Happy LC: People here and in the general population don't seem to realise there is an in-between between ZC/VLC, LC and the SAD. I felt craptastic on SAD and also craptastic at <10 carbs daily. So, I switched and have been eating round 100 carbs daily since February 2009. Cravings and hunger are not generally an issue for me unless it is TOM or something like that. Also, I am losing.

I would encourage you to read Life Without Bread and The Schwarzbein Principle for guidance on how to do a more moderate low carb regime.

Thanks, Scarlet, for that suggestion. I've read both those books. Over the years I've done Schwarzbein (at the suggestion of posters here), Paleo, Kwasniewski, the Steak Lovers Diet, Carbohydrate Addicts, basically all of them, with all levels of carbs. Unfortunately, increasing carbs seems to be my main problem. The more carbs I eat, the more likely I am to experience overwhelming cravings and fall off the wagon. My one month on zero carb was the longest I've ever gone in my life without bingeing on bread and chocolate (or potatoes, Doritos, cake, you name it) and even without a single craving for said foods. Zero carb seemed to turn off the food obsession switch in my brain. I know one month isn't very long in the scheme of things, but sadly it's by far the longest success I've ever had.

I'm just wondering if the fatigue, etc. that I experienced after several weeks is what PJ meant by "feeling horrible" and if we might be able to find an answer together.

Excellent point and one that I totally agree with Lynn!!
There is a lot of leeway between zero and 100.....100 is still considered low carb just the higher end of low.
zero does not work for everyone...not at all.

What type of carbs do you eat when you increase carbs? I find fruit makes me hungry and craving whereas starch satiates me and keep me going without any cravings. I eat gluten free also due to the celiac thing.

The fatigue on zero carb could be a low T3 or reverse T3 problem. Have you ever had your thyroid checked?

Fatigue and hunger/cravings can also be caused by high or low cortisol. Have you ever had any adrenal tests?

Since you brought up the psychology aspect -- I'm really wondering now what behavior modification therapy might say about saying "no" to yourself and how that works over the long run.

I had some health issues flare up and wanted to cut down on foods high in oxalic acid (many low-carb veggies are high). I had shunned potatoes for two years but thought I'd try them along with higher-carb veggies like winter squash and onions. I also decided to experiment with wild rice, rye crackers, and garbanzo beans. So basically I was saying OK to some foods I had shunned for over 2 years.

The result? Did fine with potatoes, squash, and onions; all organic from a local farmer and cooking them myself, watching portions. No cravings triggered. I actually think the veggies improved my overall balance. However, the rice, crackers, and beans all seemed to cause digestive problems and I didn't enjoy them at all so gave them up.

But the point is that I think I needed to say OK to trying some of these things again, at least temporarily. I wasn't consciously rebelling about the foods allowed on LC but maybe subconsciously it did FEEL very restrictive at times given the carb culture we have to deal with. Now I can just say, eh, now I know I'm not missing anything.

I know it's a slippery slope, though, and I still abstain from refined carbs or sugar.