I want Leopard pants like @VirginiaEdie. Not these Octopus pants…sigh. 
JanZC --- No Plants! Smaller Pants!
FrankoBear
#142
I really find your posts in this thread a very good read. Thanks. You also have so much lived experience with this WOE. So, it will be great to read more.
Just listening to Amy Berger (https://www.dietdoctor.com/authors/amy-berger) talking to Dr. Brian Lenzkes (https://www.dietdoctor.com/authors/dr-brian-lenzkes-md) on the Low Carb MD podcast. Dr. Lenzkes mentions a patient who rapidly lost 150lbs in scale weight but has loose skin as a result. That person is beating theirself up about the loose skin, and Dr. Lenzkes is countering with, “You lost 150lbs, you have improved your health, and probably extended your life!” It made me think of your post and the calm approach to the excess skin, with the acknowledgement that it will take time to change.
The other thing they were talking about was the body weight scale being mutated into a moral compass. It’s at about the 15 minute point onwards. That’s why I think the “No Plants! Smaller Pants!” is such an important discussion thread title. For me, I think clothes fit is a better indicator than body scale weight. It’s not dichotomous. I also enjoy the end of the 30 day-ish challenges report-ins where the crew report non-scale victories, and a variety of measurement changes.
My understanding about loose skin is that, as you mentioned, using fasting in a psychologically stable person, to stimulate autophagy and redistribution of those loose skin resources back into the body is the current method.
I was listening to Dr. Tommy Wood discuss the ketogenic diet for weight loss, just stepping away from ZC for a moment, and how it works better when combined with planned fasting (which is antithesis to ZC in some ways… @Fangs explains the non-feasting time in ZC as not feeling hungry, ZC eating is guided by appetite, rather than scheduled).
Back to Tommy Wood, and also Dr. Jason Fung (fasting proponent, https://www.dietdoctor.com/authors/dr-jason-fung-m-d), they both talk about autophagy and fasting allowing the body to remodel.
So, that brings my thoughts back around to ZC, the other thing I see with ZC is that is not so much a weight loss way-of-eating but a metabolic remodelling. I see ZC carnivore restricted to beef and water as an elimination diet to form a base for re-introductive foods testing. But ZC in itself, as we see in this thread has no limits in feeding once inside the parameters of the plan, with the guides being a personal understanding of satiety and hunger signals that return to the healing body.
You probably know all this already, but I’d be really interested to learn more from your experience @LizinLowell Liz.
Fangs
#145
Feel you on that Vic. I have been languishing over dropping all salt and by gosh it will be the same for me as it is for you! ugh. And I haven’t even started it yet LOL You are doing great, dig in and hang on!
food yesterday was
10 oz sirloin steak
few slices taylor ham
finished off my roaster chicken, 1 breast leftover
10 of NY strip steak
Like mentioned above I am thinking of dropping all salt…I go back and forth on this. I wanna, but geez I love the crap. So thinking hard on it again. we shall see how I roll 
feeling wonderful, all good, just zc’ing along in usual form.
VirginiaEdie
(Edith)
#147
I went through caffeine withdrawal when I quit diet Coke. But, once the withdrawal was finished, I felt really good. I realized that afternoon tiredness I used to get was because of caffeine addiction. Once I no longer had caffeine in my system, my energy levels were much better throughout the entire day.
Shinita
#148
I laughed at it. Thank you. I always can use a laugh but after this December (and year), it’s even more so!
I don’t have just slightly tight pants I like… I have okay ones - and I have a pair of punk pants I bought many, many years ago, it was quite small back then and it’s quite small now. But if I will fit into it some time in 2021, I will be very happy. Hopefully it allows slightly muscular legs, Alvaro has problems with pants now and he isn’t even thin! But he has muscular thighs due to cycling to work and pants are usually problematic for such people. We could handle a little difference, there are methods to fix pants a bit loose on waist quickly and easily… But they are VERY loose.
Right now, my goal is to go back to 71kg, I had it on November. A few days ago, I was 74kg and it’s quite horrible but probably temporal. I didn’t even eat near as horrible as I did when I gained nothing or almost nothing in December. Oh well. I will behave now, for months. It must have an effect. Right now I am not even as energetic as I was. Nothing really bad but I had it better before and I want it back. It’s not all about eating, of course. I need to make various changes.
This is the first day in January when things seem okay eating wise. 3pm and I haven’t eaten yet. I so missed this This is normal to me. My plate is already fill with eggs and liver (and a little something in my fried egg whites. my last 5g sausage, tiny cheese… we barely have any cheese now but it’s fine)… My pork isn’t fried yet, it was too lean and hard (leftover from the freezer) and I made sausage with it! If I can call it like that, oh I totally can. Spicy shredded pork with a bit extra fat (and obviously with an egg, it’s me and I needed something to keep it together) and I will fry that 
I tasted it, it will be good. It has a tablespoon of paprika. IDK if I ever will skip that spice but definitely not in the near future. I don’t use it often but when I do, it’s in proper amounts. If it doesn’t make my (white) meat very red, it’s not enough.
My 3rd day without coffee. It’s ridiculously easy as always. I have coffee, I drink 10+ a day. I haven’t (Alvaro keep it hostage because I asked him for it) and I simply don’t drink it for a week. I thought about it only once, after 2 days and after lunch, habits. But just thought, no hard feelings. If I WANT coffee, I demand it from Alvaro and who he is to deny me my coffee when he doesn’t even mind if I eat it… Hopefully it won’t happen for a week, just like last time.
It’s totally mental for me as coffee doesn’t affect my body much. At least not that way that most people experience.
KellynP
(Kellyn )
#149
Thank you, @Fangs! I’m glad to be back. So many horrible symptoms returned while I was off plan. I am looking forward to getting back to a happy normal on ZC.
I am ditching the coffee, too. I’m sure this week is going to be rough with all of the caffeine, sugar, and carb withdrawals. In the end, it will be worth it though. Hang in there!
Oh, I hope this happens to me, too. I have always enjoyed sipping something hot, so I am thinking maybe I should just heat water and sip on it. I am looking forward to increased energy, the crap I’ve been eating really too a toll on my energy levels.
For Breakfast I had two eggs and 4 sausage links. I brought two steaks for lunch. I may just eat one but brought the extra in case I get hungry. Drinking only water and seltzer.
Ellacosew
#150
My waist measurement is still 28 inches.
I don’t want to buy new clothes until I am down to a 26 inch waist, but the only thing I have left to give up is leisure, pick up some weights and grow some mitochondria.
My accountability picture is due for an update on the 17th.
I do see some muscle definition from the leaning out that comes from an all meat diet.
But in order to get where I want to be, I need to increase the intensity of my workouts.
KellynP
(Kellyn )
#151
I ended up eating both steaks at lunch. Good thing, too, because a patient brought in cake and sausage sandwiches that I was only able to avoid because I was so full. I realized that I should have brought some floss with me though…gotta remember that next time. 
FrankoBear
#155
I ate a steak last night that took 20 minutes to cook in the iron pan. It was called a ‘Cattleman’s Steak’ but I can see it was a 4cm thick rib eye. It was all I had for dinner. Must have been close to 450g (16oz?). I am disabled when it comes to US cooking weight measurements. Can’t get my head around pounds and ounces.
Seeing Vic’s prawns reminds me that I had prawns available as well. @Carnivoor . I love seeing the amazing variety that Vic and @Ketodaisy present with their ways of eating.
These past few weeks I have had the thoughts of wanting to eat more fish and seafood with my steaks or omelettes, so I have been eating smoked Atlantic salmon and canned mackerel. 4 days ago I made a 4 egg omelette, with cheeses, cooked in butter, with fresh scallops. That was an amazing combination. I recommend sea scallops with your eggs.
Yes Fangsy, I hear you about cheddar cheese and the link to heart-rate problem triggers. I wanted to say I heard you, and the thought has lodged in my thinking. I am not ready yet to turn away from cheeses. I’m an addict with coffee and dairy. Small steps. But I have lost the urge to use heavy cream in my coffee, I just realised. I haven’t had a cream coffee for quite a while. It’s amazing how food crutches fall away when access is limited (cream goes off so fast in a hot summer). Cream is one of those infamous things that mainstream nutritionists bang on about, a ‘keto crutch’. I’m sure I’ve got that right.
image: Sea scallops in butter (from: https://www.dietdoctor.com/?s=scallops)
Yesterday I had a standard 3 slices middle bacon, 3 eggs and cheeses omelette. But I had it at about 10 am instead of the usual NoFUN. No Food Until Noon - not a rule, but a guide to allow hormonal stabilisation (food hormones). The reason was that the evening before I was not hungry and didn’t have a dinner meal, the steak went uneaten 
. It was interesting to wake up and feel I needed breakfast.
This morning I am not hungry. So, I’ll drink this milkshake cup size black coffee and go and water the food forest trees after a week of continuous hot summer days 
. The coffee is a standard 2-shot coffee but has ice blocks and the milkshake cup is filled up, topped up with rain water.
I have another Cattleman’s steak ready for dinner tonight and must remember the prawns are available. I’ll see how I feel for a NoFUN breakfast after some morning activity. It will be bacon and eggs. Oh, hang on, there are some big beef breakfast* sausages in the fridge as well. (*only called breakfast sausages because I have my eye on them now).
Oh, 1 week in to No Pants January, I put on some pants and they fit better than they did in December 
FrankoBear
#156
I used to sip hot water when I was on a low calorie, salads based diet. It was comforting, the sipping of a warm liquid.
My wife returned to Oz from working for a year in England in the late 1990s, at a time before we became engaged, with a tea and McVities addiction. She hasn’t thrown the tea drinking addiction, but ditched the tag along snack. These days she is a yoga teacher and drinks lots of hippy teas that are more herbal infusions than standard English teas. That whole yoga lifestyle is very vegetarian biased, but it’s her gig, and we meet at pan-fried salmon, cheeses and eggs.
Anyhow the point of this post is that to maintain my marriage to this beautiful lady I join her for what we call a “kettle drink”. My kettle drink is usually beef bone broth, but it varies through chicken or beef stock, through to full-om home made slow cooked beef bone broth. Yes, full-om due to the yoga connection. So, as Dr. Phinney suggests to keto WOE practitioners, a bullion cube per day as hot drinks is a satisfying electrolyte balancer, if needed.
Let’s watch @Fangs get stuck into bullion cubes… 
Fangs
#157
Now that’s the ticket 
Your eating will change and evolve. You will love your steaks and your seafood breakfast combos and more…you will fall into a zc groove that is THE best place to be, you are heading there now I love it!
and yes food you loved or thought was a ‘little crutch’ maybe that we keep in our menu like cheese or bacon or others stuff, we find we drop kinda…we just don’t need them like we did. Once we cruise thru more time on plan, many of us zc people truly whittle our food choices down to our most beloved and the food we feel best eating. All changes that happen on plan with time for each of us. Again, you are slowly changing just like any old other longer term zc person has changed! Cool! Love your posts.
bullion cubes. you can’t get me to drink that crap LOL
I tried it. I tried all kinds of broths, bought, homemade and more and in the end, truly I don’t require sipping a hot drink or ever need any type of ‘supp balance’ thoughts from it either. Just me, never a fan, won’t ever will be. All I drink is water…with that occasional nasty old rum drink when I feel snazzy and uppity!!
FrankoBear
#158
You are right Fangsy. In the year and a bit of low carb ZC challenges I can see the changes in eating. It’s not a linear progression. But gradually my preferences are toward the beef and water, New York stripped down, simple WOE. And at the same time I can still see people in maintenance mode, like Vic, enjoying ZC carnivore with a dash of ketovore, as a demonstration that an exciting and motivational part of these explorations is not to eat like others, but to take their examples, and discover that reconnection between mind and body. Where the body (the trillion chemical voices of the biology), my body, can be heard again.
FrankoBear
#159
Hey All,
If you are interested in tracking your stories or meal posts, you can click on your face picture icon and a small panel comes up. In that panel is a "Posts in this topic" (filter) button. Click on that and the discussion thread is automatically reorganised so you can just see your posts. It’s a great record of your progress through a challenge. It’s a diary. Get diary addicted rather than dairy addicted.
To reset the filter just click on your face icon again and press the same button.
Some may find this useful.
If you want a longer term record, the next step, with your diary on screen, is to hold down the “Ctrl” button and press “P” (Ctrl + P). Ctrl +P = Print. This gets you a printable copy of your diary to archive on your computer, for when you want to right your own book of WOE. Yes, everybody should write (and illustrate) a book of WOE, I think. #bookofwoe
KellynP
(Kellyn )
#160
I love this! I think though I will stick to the broths as the last time I tried bullion cubes the msg messed with my stomach. Thanks for the suggestion, FB