Uh oh...

Friends were visiting from out of town, I went to meet up with them, and they made me eat! That food stuff! Ew! I've been on a two-month streak of nothing but canned tuna, canned chicken, mayonnaise, walnuts, protein bars, protein shakes, and peanut butter and now this...

That does it. I gotta go cleanse myself with tuna and mayonnaise...

LOL... don't you hate it when that happens??

Hell yes I hate when that happens. It all gets reflected on the scale, as well.

When I had my 15,000+ calorie weekends with uberfood (smarties and protein shakes) I'd maybe gain 5-7 pounds. This weekend was barely over 10,000 calories and I gained friggin' 9. Real food is cute and everything, but this just goes to show you - eat real food if you want to look like everyone else. If you want to look better than everyone else, then... hate to say it, but tuna, mayonnaise, smarties, and the blender are your only friends.

I do have to admit, since i started this diet i find myself rummaging through the drawers for the can opener more often.

Heck i cant even go near the kitchen nowadays without the cat running up to me and starting to meow.

The tuna/mayoi combo is just too perfect for this diet. High in fat and protein and convenient as heck.


I tried a pack of salmon today, it tastes better than tuna but costs a bit more.

I don't like the canned salmon (blech!), but I love tuna, especially the ablacore....can't stomach the mushy stuff.

Also, if anyone is interested, and I don't know that you are..lol.. but some don't like the sugar or vinegar in mayo....I have a recipe for homemade if you want it. I use it all the time... like today, because I've been too busy to make another batch.

I would have been all over canned salmon for it's oils, but I've not seen it without added salt.

I do know that mayonnaise has added sugar, but if you do the math, it's a tiny amount and should be ok on the diet. Anywhere else you turn (like nuts, etc), you're going to get at least as much or more carbs anyway. Vinegar ought to be ok on the diet. It's basically alcohol at it's end stage of being metabolised (FYI alcohol is broken down to acetaldehyde and then to acetic acid, which is vinegar). There's only one issue about store-bought mayonnaise that bothers me - see below.

Two issues with tuna and mayonnaise that I can think of:

1. Mercury: all fish contains methylmercury to some degree. Although tuna contains least (because they use smaller fish, and the mercury is accumulated over the fish's lifetime), it's still presumed to be a hazard for a developing nervous system. For this reason they caution pregnant/nursing women and children away from eating too much fish. Whether this applies to me (not pregnant, not woman, not child, and had fried my brain with all sorts of things in the past anyway), I don't know. I decided that it's not as bad as the steroids and antibiotics in canned salt-free chicken.

2. Phytoestrogens: most mayonnaises are prepared with soybean oil. Soybeans are known to contain high levels of phytoestrogens. Maybe not high enough so that men grow boobs, but still - I've already posted some references on this. However, it's less clear to me whether phytoestrogens make it into the oil - apparently at various stages of processing the beans the phytoestrogens are either destroyed or discarded. Either way, it's possible to get safflower oil mayonnaise if you're willing to spend the buck, or prepare your own mayonnaise if you're culinary-gifted enough. But that may knock out most males out of the race, so then you might be stuck with issue #1...

West....valid points. I like the homemade because it just tastes better to me.

You know, I had a can of tuna today (first time in weeks) and I'm BLOATED as he!!. I didn't even think about getting sodium free tuna, dang it.

At least I HOPE that's why I'm bloated today.... I wasn't particularly bloated this morning, but in the hour or so after the tuna.....

Also, I really burned out on my workout today. Did really well first couple of muscle groups, but then it was a major burn-out session to the end.... could barely lift my arms to shoulder height when I was done. I mean, it was a freakin' lactic acid party for the ole muscles.

Jalilah,
My best guess on your burnout is overtraining. The chemistry of the carbup would dictate glycogen loaded muscles - maybe fatigue overcame the loading you did.
One thing I'm going to do is switch over to Lyle's workouts. Traindan's full body workout is too much for me.
Lyle recommends splits, a technique that I'm more comfortable performing.

But doesn't overtraining take a long time to kick in? I've been doing a "wussie" workout for a couple of months at the gym.. and NOT getting anywhere with it! And I started BFL about 3 weeks ago. Of course I have dance practices and teaching (dance).

Even now... I'm whooped! My arms are tired as heck.

I bet you weren't drinking water in the middle of the night either!

It's rather common (for me anyway) to be bloated towards the end of the carbup or on the day or two after. This used to be a huge sticking point to me, and I only got over it by getting medieval on the salt and sat fat content. My personal theory, based on what I know of renal physiology, is that it's not just the total salt content but the balance of a whole number of hormones that control water excretion and retention. A big one is aldosterone, which signals water retention, and happens to follow insulin. High insulin causes water retention either immediately or later, because aldosterone will rise and can stick around for a while. This is why ya gotta be careful with high-GI carbs - make sure that they are assimilated by the muscles as easily as possible, with minimal insulin required. Saturated fat blocks the action of insulin, so the pancreas dumps out more - and a flood ensues. This is why those pseudo-smarties with chocolate coating sound like a real bad idea to me.

That's just my theory. Anyone interested in shooting holes in it, please do. Word of caution - I did get an A in physiology!

LOL... I got all A's as well (my favorite subject!!).

So "being careful" with the high GI carbs----what do you mean by that?....Mr. 18,000 man! All kidding aside---really, what do you mean by "be careful?" Eat less of them, make different choices??? I didn't eat any chocolate (recovering chocoholic).

Also, I drank a ton of water during the day. And no, I didn't drink it all night...but I made a few trips to the bathroom...which I do ALL WEEK while LC'ing. Haha.

I had a much better carbup this week by sticking to glucose. I mentioned earlier that I used mostly Phosphagen HP, an EAS drink. It's dextrose and creatine. The only time I felt weird was when I ate some type of complex carb, or something with fat in it.
So West, purely subjectively there may be something to the hypothesis that throwing in some fat with really high carbs might cause some weirdness.

By that I mean that if you need to make sure that they go to the right place (muscles), so make sure that the insulin sensitivity is high - that muscles are depleted, that nothing is getting in the way of insulin (like sat fat or too much caffeine), et cetera.

My 18,000 included only about 200-some grams of fat, spread over the 48-hour period (getting up in the middle of the night and all). It was all unsaturated from organic peanut butter.

Speaking of carbups and how they can stick it to ya, right now I am looking my daily weight chart compiled over the past three months, and it's coming to me that a very important determinant of whether a carbup "fills or kills", so to speak, is activity. On a number of occasions I did a lot of walking during the weekend and those (the 18K among them) were near-perfect. On a number of other occasions I sat on my arse and ate and ended up much heavier, even though I ate less and the activity wouldn't have accounted for the difference anyway. I guess that the increased insulin sensitivity does not last the entire 48- or even 36-hours of a carbup from the depletion only, and needs to be refreshed by some activity. Even though Duchaine and Lyle said to sit on your arse all day and eat during the carbup. Again, another theory for yous to throw darts at.

I got the Chicken of the Sea Salmon in the pouch, it had 140mg sodium per ounce.

The Starkist tuna i get has 125mg per ounce.

is that an appreciable difference?