Bad Habits

It is most unwelcome to realize that at some point bad habits simply must be sacrificed upon the altar of good health. I am decidedly and unhappily at that point. I'm sure you're thinking that my bad habits must be really awful, but they are of the most garden variety and I cling to them as a drowning man does a lifeboat. What little badness I have is far worse for me than for most and yet I hate to give up my few pleasures, since they are so few indeed. To what do I refer, you impatiently ask? Coffee and alcohol.

Coffee has gone away already, as I ground that habit to a screeching halt when I learned that caffeine spikes the insulin and therefore ruins an entire day of eating. Forget it. My struggles with it in the past buried under my indignation of how ruinous it is to me.

Ah, but alcohol is another story altogether. It spikes the insulin as well, but I have made little headway into eradicating that nasty bit from my daily fare. I get a far bigger jolt of fun from it than coffee and just don't want to give it up yet. I KNOW I must. I resist....... sigh.......

Yet more scale madness...

In the last few months, I've really just been drifting along, wondering what I'm going to do about this whole weight issue and then I found a couple books written by a doctor that I bought almost a decade ago and never really read carefully. So, determined to not give completely up, and deciding that I had nothing to lose except my excess weight, I gave them a try.

The books in question are The Schwartzbein Principle and The Schwartzbein Principle cookbook written by Daina Schwarzbein, M.D. and Nancy Deville. What I like about these books is the Ms. Schwarzbein gives you a thorough explanation of the biochemistry of how your metabolism works and explains why you need to eat the diet she is proposing. It all made a great deal of sense to me and so a few weeks ago I started on the diet.

The first week was lovely as weight just dropped off me, a total of 7 pounds. The last 2 weeks have not proved to give me any more weight loss, although I do feel a bit better than I did before and I'm sleeping rather well, which is always a problem for me. I enjoy the food on the diet as well, as it's not a restrictive or fussy as so many other diets I have tried. In her defense, Ms. Schwarzbein does say that the body needs to heal and won't lose weight until it is ready to do so, and so I'm trying to hold my faith in that while the scale mocks me with the same number day after day. At least it's not going up.....

Her web site has a test you can take to tell you what sort of testing you might want to get to see the state of your health. I just took it and ended up needing the most expensive/extensive one at $495.00, which I cannot afford to purchase. I'm quite certain that I could use some good professional advice here, but poverty has it's limits. I'll have to mull this over while I continue with her program the best I can.

She also has a few helpful items for download on her site including a food, mood and exercise diary, a one year Menstrual Cycle Calender, and a blood sugar diary. I'm printing out the food diary right now! Since my memory can be a little dicey this should prove a welcome addition to help solve my problems.

I just ordered her latest book as well, The Program, which may help me design a more comprehensive diet regime. We shall see...