Diet update

Here's what I've learned over the past few days about my diet, or rather, how insulin works.

This is going to be severely dumbed down and simplified, so if you have a good understanding of insulin, don't read this.  Here's my quick understanding of it and how it relates to dieting.  Insulin is a hormone, which regulates carbs and fat breakdown in the body.  It helps your body either store the sugars and carbs as fat, or gets it to turn it into energy which is then used up.  Basically what you want to do is eat just enough sugar (carbs) so that your body is turning it into energy and not storing it up as fat.

Hence the low or no-carb diet where if you intake little carbs, it'll all turn to energy and you will lose weight because your body will start looking for other fat to turn into energy because you're not eating enough of it, and so you'll lose weight.

The way to do this is to make sure your body doesn't build up its insulin resistance because if it does, it'll just ignore what it's supposed to do and just start storing up more fat.  You don't want that.

A perfect example is this past weekend where I engorged in really bad food.  Saturday morning I was 154 pounds, but by the end of the weekend as in Sunday night, I was 160.  Pastries, beer, battered wings, cookies, pop.  Everything that I didn't touch for the past 4 weeks.  Ina and I attended a course over the weekend and they had free food and who was I to reject free food, right?  That and we didn't have time to cook so we had to eat out.

So during the weekend I put on a fair bit of weight because of the sudden influx of sugars and carbs.  But then as of this morning I was nearly back to normal.  This shows how the insulin kicked back into gear and with no resistance, was able to convert any excess carbs back into energy.  The example of insulin resistance is how my wife also gained as much weight as I did, but that weight didn't go back down as easily as mine did.  That's because she's been drinking pop and snacking throughout my diet (she's taken part in it when it's been convenient for her but hasn't gone out of her way to avoid carbs).  So her resistance is higher (this is also because of a health issue she has, btw) and therefore her weight hasn't gone back down the way mine has.

I'm currently at 156.5 lbs.

I'll get into my daily intake and meals with my next update.