Oh Em Gee… I just came back from Hawaii and after eating myself into gastritis and stage 2 bubble guts, I recall all the beach bodies moving around Waikiki Beach. After coming home and looking down at the 10 pound baby I made, I decided to get back into health mode. I’m not the person to make excuses and I dislike “easing” into habits and prefer just to go HAM (Hard As A Mofo) when it comes to decisions. The rationale behind going HAM is that I rather go through hell for a shorter period of time than a gradual transition over a long period of time. Basically, I’m inpatient and I like taking action immediately as soon as I’m sure. The last time I made a successful transition was probably about 10 years ago in my twenties. Looking back at those photos, I wanted to be there again. What I did to get there was eating basically the same thing everyday for months. Refreshing my enthusiasm I decided to follow the diet change from Tim Ferris’ blog post. I respect the level of OCD Tim goes into his research and I feel he can save me the mental hernia of details by simply trying his suggestions out. I successfully completed a whopping two days of this diet and waking up on day 3 has been a mild hell. I completely forgot this purging of evil and price of all the delicious food in excess. After having some emotionally intense and vivid dreams I’ve found myself on the toilet 3 times this morning. Your body gets so used to the easy calories that it’s like trying to run 3 miles without having ran in 10 years. My body feels like it’s in shock like it can’t believe it’s gone three days without “real” food. It responded in kind with more bubble guts, brain fog, fatigue, lower abdominal cramps, and noticeable weakness in my strength training workouts. I’m definitely more irritable and have been attempting to continue my strength training regimen but have dialed it back to compensate for this transition. A quick google search in my Why am I doing this and what’s happening to me!? phase and found that keto flu was the answer for my problems. It was reassuring to know that this is a common side effect of drastically changing your diet. I’m a rice and meat kind of guy. Switching to beans and veggies have been very hard for me because I never really enjoyed them. I usually opt to remove them from my burritos at Mexican restaurants or food trucks. The only solace in this diet is Saturday which I have dubbed my “cheat day”. This is a day I can eat whatever I want. I do place one restriction on myself where despite allowing myself to eat whatever I want, I want to make a complete change to avoid seed oils or fried foods if at all possible opting instead for organic grass-fed butter. I’ve been keeping a diary of all my cravings of the things I will eat on Faturday. It’s become this mild obsession that seems to worsen in intensity throughout the day. What’s interesting is that I did a test run of this diet last Thursday and two days later on Saturday I found that I wasn’t able to eat all the things I wanted. As a matter of fact, my cravings for my list mostly dissapated and I found myself enjoying a few delicious treats but I can only nail a few on the list because once I was satisfied, the cravings were gone. Shortly after my carb binge, I felt kind of sick after. Maybe this is a type of negative reinforcement. That was the beauty of this diet I think though, it keeps you sane while you’re trying insane things. Gives you something to look forward to. Saturday works out because that’s usually the day activities are planned and can attend parties and dinners without appearing to be the health and fitness police. Sometimes working on yourself becomes a public display of shaming everyone else’s negative habits. To each their own. I know there will be light at the end of this tunnel. This is a journey experienced by millions before me and they have all said your body will adapt to the new fuel sources and become more efficient at getting that energy out. I don’t really care about whether the diet will be permanent or long-lasting or if I relapse into my 10 pound baby. What’s important is that I made a decision now and am trying. If I fail, I can keep trying or give up. I prefer the former. This reminds me of “The Man in the Arena”:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."