No carbs. No sugar. And run!
Actually, it’s nearly impossible to eat NO carbs at all, but I tried to get under 30 grams per day, which is low. I actually measured it with these little sticks you can order from Amazon. Ketostix. Ketosis is this things your body does when it can’t burn carbs for fuel. It produces ketones. You pee on the sticks and they turn a color from pale yellow to dark maroon. The darker red it gets, the more ketones your body is producing, which, if you are cutting carbs, is a good thing.
It was hard to keep it up. I was hungry a lot. Close to starving on days when I could make myself forgo food. Don’t get me wrong. I am not “pro ana” -- in fact I am very very very anti anorexia. However, for the truly obese, a few days with very little food isn’t the end of the world. Human populations have practiced ritual fasting for millenia and I am quite certain I was never in any danger at all. Moreover, if you have never been hungry, it’s hard to know what it feels like so you can respond to ACTUAL hunger rather than the constant sense of perceived hunger that comes when you are a serious food addict. Going a few days on minimal food helps you at least know the difference between hungry and in need of comfort.
The bleeding
Turns out, estrogen can collect in fat. Who knew, right? When a woman drops a lot of weight very rapidly, this estrogen is released and the body has to process it. My body reacted by bleeding. Hard. For about a month. I talked to my doctor, read up on it, and decided to bear with it and see if it stopped as the real bulk of the weight came off. Is I got down below 200lbs, the bleeding tapered and then I went back to a normal cycle.
The running
I ran in high school on the cross-country team, but was never fast. My coach would say “Holly can run for ever. She’ll run to the moon, but she won’t get there very fast.” Well, at 15, lazy as I was, coach was probably right. It’s only recently that I learned I actually might be able to go a lot faster than people thought.
Anyway, running when you are 85lbs over weight is hard. I struggled to complete two miles. And here it was July in New Jersey, temperatures holding steady in the 90’s and barely dipping below 80 at night. So every day it felt like we were being steamed like a pan of clams. I was breathless tying my shoes. Seriously.
My knees ached. My feet spread. My face was raw from me rubbing the sweat off it with a bandana. But I kept right on running. First two miles. Two miles seemed like something a person ought to be able to do. I ran 13 minute miles, so two miles meant nearly a half hour of exercise. It was challenging, but doable.
I set a goal to run 5 days per week and to try to make one of those days a long run. My first long run was 4 miles and it felt like I was going to die the whole time.
I set a goal to run the Philadelphia Rock n’ Roll half marathon in September. That’s 13.1 miles. It was a crazy, over-the-top, reckless goal. But I decided on it and I made myself a huge wall calendar to track my running. I used post-its and big sheets of poster board and loaded it up with pictures of inspirational people and funny quotes to encourage me to run.
(You can see the orange post-it in September...that was my Philly half marathon)
You may not be able to tell from the photo, but these posters took up most of a wall from floor to ceiling. Diane was nice enough to let me put it up in our bedroom, where I like to sit in bed and work on my computer. It was loud and colorful and I couldn’t miss it. I stared at it every day and seeing the numbers of milage go on each day that I ran made me feel accomplished. I didn’t like the empty days. I liked filling those squares. It was tangible. The efforts were acknowledged.
I also checked my weight every morning and posted a little white square with my new weight onto the wall chart whenever I lost a pound. It was thrilling to post those numbers as the slowly went down.
In late July we went back to the Cape and then up to Maine for a couple of days, and I held fast to my super low carb, super low sugar diet. My running wasn’t quite as consistent as it had been at home, but I didn’t let the travels throw me. In Maine I even managed to get up super early (4am!) and run all the way around Alford Lake, an 8 mile loop involving numerous steep inclines and one ginormous hill, which I affectionately named “The Buzzle” because it is on Buzzle Hill Road. I lasted six miles before I had to walk the last two.
I took a picture:
I’m not kidding: it was a serious friggin’ hill.
By the time we got home, the long runs were slowly getting longer.
Then came my first 11 miler. I had to go out at 5am to get it done before the heat was too much to bear. I drove out on the course first and put a bottle of water at the 5.5 mile mark which is at a little park. When I got to that nice bottle of cold water, it tasted better than anything I have ever tasted in my life. I sat down. Drank the full bottle of water. Cooled off for about ten minutes before resuming my run. It felt like cheating a little bit, but I DID run all 11 miles.
I did the same again with a 13 mile run the following week. It was slow going. But I was doing the damn miles, one way or another
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