Didn’t fall down today. Not too sore, considering.
But Jane and I are both tired of starving ourselves and still not losing weight. So we are undertaking a new weight loss push. I hate walking. I hate walking with a passion. But Jane loses weight best when she walks. So I’ve agreed I’ll walk to support her. Twice a day. Sigh. And—we have resolved to pick the far backside of every parking lot, park there, and walk to whatever store, give or take the presence of shopping cart repositories to help us with the load. This can actually add up. We did two back-of-the-parking lot hikes today.
I’m back at work with the Mantis, but Jane asked me to lay off it today, since I have a persistent headache from the fall yesterday: didn’t hit my head, but the jolt gave me a mild bit of whiplash.
So wish us luck. It’s not reasonable we starve as we do and never have desert and exercise and still can’t lose weight. So we’re going to try Something Different, and just walk more.
I’ve been using soy supplements for a year or two now, after having nightly hot flashes disturbing my sleep for a year. As soon as it was clear that yes, this was the start of menopause (my doctor the year before said I was too young, at 42, for that to be the cause) I started these supplements, and in a week the sleep disturbances had disappeared. After a few years they’re now recurring maybe a few nights a month, instead of every night. I don’t take any other medication for this, so for me at least the soy supplements work well to stabilise my estrogen levels.
I did see a short article recently about a male athlete who stopped using soy milk because he started developing breasts, so it might be less advisable for men; but I don’t know how reliable that newspaper article was.
I think that if an adult wants to use a soy product knowing what it will do and what it might, that is one thing. If soy helps with menopause symptoms, and the user knows what to look for in the goitrogenic/phytic acid/lectin arena then who am I to argue? The key thing, I believe, is to be informed about what the risks are and who is saying what the risks are.
The folks who stand to benefit from your use of their product aren’t the ones to listen to unless they’re corroborated by someone else without a dog in the fight. There are numerous groups out there promoting or warning about soy products, and there are controlled studies showing up in the journals and on PubMed. The biggest thing is weeding out What The Data Say and comparing it to what the article SAYS it says. For instance, here is an example where researchers did research in China aimed at showing benefits of a “vegetable rich food pattern” versus less vegetables. The short story is the numbers didn’t bear out their expectations so the researchers eventually blamed the increased fatness among the vegetable richer patterns on cooking oil. But if you refer to the tables, you see that cooking oil did not vary – was NOT a variable – between the groups. THIS is bad science, and that’s where I need some help interpreting things, or am at least aware that I’m not going to be authoritative on subjects I’m not trained in:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/obesity/another-china-study/
Dr. Eades is a smart dude, but he’s not always as felicitously temperate in his language as the last dude I URL’d. This article isn’t obstreperous, though.
So, I’d say use Soy if it helps you, chances are you won’t be using it in high quantities or forever for that purpose. Just be aware of the cautions – osteoporosis is an issue more for women than men, and while estrogen might help it, mineral binding phytates and phytic acid could counterbalance it.
Interesting. Bone density with my family history (father with bones like iron and mother with bones like chalk) is iffy—so I’m always careful. Fortunately I take after my father in the bone department—thus far. Bone scan says I’m way better than average for my age. But I don’t drink carbonated drinks because they are said to undermine bone health—remember, I skate, and occasionally fall; and that gives me pause about soy—which I haven’t been using. But might not.
My personal athletic vice, Shotokan Karate, can be hard on the bones, I regularly get bruised up a bit and sometimes even get bone bruises. My bones are very solid, though, so far. Also my teeth are very dense according to the periodontist (needed a “crown lengthening”). My teeth have not had ANY new cavs in the last decade and more but the sins of my youth, you know.
I probably should give up the Diet Coke. I know I should. I don’t miss it when I don’t drink it, and I have stopped buying it for home use at least. It’s a big part of my morning commute, though.
Bone density is a big issue. Now with most food production being done on more and more depleted land there is less and less mineral and micro-nutrient content in foods even if you buy the freshest local stuff you can get, unless you have a local farm that has been using sustainable methods. Sustainable farming movements are picking up steam, whole food movements as well.
These issues are why I spend so much time researching nutrition, looking into supplementation and trying to decide if I can afford (and use) half a share in a cow for raw milk and cream. I don’t think getting old and feeble is the birthright of the species. I wanna be like Ilisidi – maybe she’s onto something eating right and getting the fresh air and having all those handsome young men around. I want to get old that way, not in a wheelchair, drooling around dentures and wondering why I can’t remember what happened five minutes ago.
Mild impact exercise isn’t too bad for the bones, I’m convinced. Use it or lose it. One of the issues astronauts face is bone loss—and it’s due to weightlessness: bones lay down calcium in response to a kind of piezoelectronic thing (weight-generating-electricity) as you walk or move about in gravity. Stress on the bones sends the signal, and those little calcitropins come rushing in to lay down more bone-stuff in bones that are bearing the load, taking it from bones that don’t, if there’s no other source.
Most of human activity is calcium-cycle: muscles and bones use it like crazy. And if you float about (or lie on a couch and eat bonbons) you lose that stress.
One of the things most beneficial about skating is the precision with which you have to balance: micro-muscles have to pull your joints immaculately into line, because you’re balancing on 1/4 inch of steel on ice. If you stress your bones in the lines and angles nature intended, it’s quite a good exercise method for making bones stay in good condition, no joint stress, no fuss, no bother. Many martial arts (I used to fence European style) have the same demands of balance, which I think is really, really important—if all you can do is lift cans of soup or work out with a ball, it’s just that much better, as much as you can do it.
This article is on exercise and it’s ambiguous, though much touted, role in weight control, I just came across it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18exercise-t.html?src=me&ref=general
personally I avoid any medication to do with HRT, so in fact logically I should avoid soy, because it comes down to the same thing. it didn’t in fact give me any noticeable benefits except a fuller feeling after porridge or coffee with it, and I think it was messing with my gut. also, I was not happy about the vitamin and mineral losses – so out it went! I do have slight osteoporosis, but I would think eating cheese and yoghurt, and walking as much as I do, plus potting, should keep it at bay.
to add, I eat organic and local mostly, being lucky enough to have an organic farm shop just down the road, which is not expensive if you buy what’s in season, so I should be getting max vitamins and minerals from my food – seems a waste to eat soy and mess that up!
One thing to watch, however, is to be sure you have a normal uptake of certain vitamins and minerals, which a blood test can help tell. I’ve eaten nothing but meat (mostly chicken and fish, however) and spinach for two months, and what do I have? An iron deficiency, so severe I could hardly do anything without panting. (Oxgenation relies on red blood cells which rely on iron.) An iron supplement and I’m good, but apparently I wasn’t getting it from what I was eating, and spinach is supposed to be high in iron. Some people get to where they don’t absorb the B vitamins well, etc.
Re: Iron – serum iron does not make a good proxy for iron status. Most of us have too much iron even if the serum iron is low. The test for that is a “ferritin” test – ferritin is the little packet that holds iron sequestered from the blood, which is the first line of defense against infection. Western doctors found this out the hard way when visiting and ministering to people in undeveloped areas – they’d find an iron deficiency and shoot the patient up with iron only to have them succumb to an infection their body had been fighting successfully up to that point.
So if you have any kind of infection your serum iron will be low to prevent whatever your infection is from using the iron – a ferritin test will confirm real anemia or point your physician at something else.
If you were using any kind of enriched bread or pasta products, you may well have lots of ferritin, which can be dangerous if you have a heart attack – free iron is viciously oxidative – and the packets are destroyed when the blood flow is restored and massive damage is done to the surrounding tissues by the freely oxidizing iron.
Since we do not lose iron except by bleeding a true iron deficiency would be very unusual in anyone who’d been eating a Western diet. Of course I don’t know about your diet except for what you said above, but my first suspicion would be that something else is going on. Also, you might well need more fat in your diet – and chicken and fish tend to be lean. I’d say add some butter back or some other natural fat that isn’t processed veg oil, crisco or transfat. And get your ferritin checked…
http://www.labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/ferritin/test.html
So if you are going back any time soon I’d ask for that ferritin test.
Interesting. But I don’t as a rule eat bread, or pasta. Lots of meat and cheese. And butter. Olive oil. No infections. An internet search led me to thalassemia, which is kind of interesting, and vaguely related to why cats and dogs can’t eat onions safely. I have one very dubious Middle Eastern strain in my ancestry (it is an Egyptian/Middle Eastern/Mediterranean genetic condition, but I am sensitive to onions and do not react well to Tylenol—both of which point up a sensitivity to thiosulfate, which is what touches off dogs and cats who eat onions: it manifests as an anemia. I haven’t been eating onions or taking Tylenol, which doesn’t make me feel well…
😆 but neither Jane nor I can tolerate onions, and neither of us finds Tylenol does a thing for us.
Ain’t genetics fun? Downright tempting to get that test, just out of curiosity.
The other thing that comes to mind for being out of breath is magnesium – most of us are magnesium deficient, which leads to a lot of asthma and other fluid-balance conditions.
I supplement magnesium with Peter Gilham’s Natural Calm, it is a fizzy drink thingy (caution, can give you the runs if you’re not careful). It will also help with blood pressure if that’s high. I use iodine as well, as a hypothyroid (multigenerational history, too) and as a last ditch effort to re-start my possibly autoimmune damaged endogenous thyroid hormone.
Dang, it’s all very complicated and interrelated.
If you have a family history of heart disease or heart attack, I’d get that test next time you’re in, and also check copper. Because copper, magnesium, vitamin D (3) and C are all very protective against CHD, and high ferritin is so damaging in the event of an…event.
Thanks. I know magnesium is always a problem. I try to watch it. But I’ll tell you, with the iron, I took an iron supplement and by the next day the fatigue problem was yards better. Feeling like myself again.
But I find minerals one of the most tricksy sorts of things to monitor and keep up with.
Are you new to the low carb way of eating? That can also make you feel off because of the metabolic re-tooling. I felt so lousy by the time I started that feeling worse would have taken me out the back with a shovel and a .45, but not everyone has that experience.
Minerals are tricksy, if you have a way to keep up with them you’re ahead of me! I just have to assume I am deficient in everything but Iron…
Glad you’re feeling better, I felt lousy long enough to really appreciate feeling well, and enough to resent the mis-spent years of my mid-20s.
Nope, I’ve been low carb for 10 years. What you have to factor in, however, is that I’m not young. I’m at that lousy stage of life when the systems that have made the body perk along fairly thoughtlessly have started to glitch a bit—and imho you really have to watch your vitamins and especially minerals of all sorts. Anemia comes in a B12 flavor (pernicious anemia), an iron flavor, and I’m sure, magnesium and potassium. I take levothyroxin, which plays hob with magnesium, and I’m not allowed to take mg anywhere near the med. But if I start getting muscle cramps, it’s mg and(potassium). At least I’ve stopped panting after climbing 3 steps, but now it’s muscle cramps, so I know what I need. 😉
Oh, cool. I had not heard that levo messes with magnesium, I am on that too so thanks for telling me. I’ve been low carb 12 years, and while I never have trouble with weight gain it is a fight if I want to lose any just because I naturally restrict calories and my metabolism has always been slow. *sigh*
I have been taking my mag with the synthroid! I will have to look into that.
I tend to use the vitamin list for liver support outlined in the Eades 6 week cure even though my liver is fine and I don’t have the visceral fat problem. It’s just having been chunky all my life.
Sounds like you’re pretty on top of it. I have really had good luck this year with supplementing D3 – I have had no illness at all other than allergic issues, and those mild unless I have a gluten or walnut exposure.
with levothyroxine, I’m advised by my endocrinologist that the 2 cancel each other out, probably meaning one absorbs the other. Take your mg in the afternoon or evening, the Synthroid at dawn on an empty stomach and nothing else for 30 minutes. That’s what I know. 😉
Roger that, Thanks!
I’ve been wishing one and all a Happy Earth Day all week…..hey! Earth deserves a long celebration…..anyway HAPPY EARTH DAY!!! 😆
Yay, Earth! 😉
Welllll…..it’s about a week since this thread started and I have managed to lose one and a half pounds….this is on target for me. Biggest thing is eating at the table and not on the go or in front of the tv…….and starting my exercise program again…..plus we are doing a lot of work outside…..hope others are hanging in there…. weight loss is a tortoise program for me. 😉
Congrats!
Slow for us, too. We’ve gained a pound apiece. We don’t snack, we eat half what we want, we never, ever have dessert, we’re doing yard work, and hauling rocks, and we gain weight. It ain’t fair. Typical day: Breakfast: 2 scrambled eggs, sprinkling of cheese. Lunch: me: coffee; Jane: water. Small bowl Kashi with low-fat Almond milk. Supper: 1 helping spinach salad with chicken. Glass of wine. No before-bed snacks. An hour on the ice, 3 hours doing heavy yard work, and we gain a pound. We’re trying to figure what we could eat to break this cycle. We could go stricter Atkins and lose the Kashi and milk. We could lose the wine. And we’ve tried this version with only a slice of cheese or tablespoon of peanut butter for lunch. Other things the same, we either hold steady, drop one pound or gain a pound, unpredictably—no rhyme or reason why either happens, exercise level being equal. We get so frustrated.
Best advice we can give, if you see your weight start to inch up, do something just to stop it. It’s a lot easier to stop a weight gain than it is to shed the pounds after you’ve had it.
the pound could be muscle from the heavy yard work, you know! muscle weighs a lot more than fat, I believe; you can be trimmer and weigh more.
That’s true. I really like to think that. I want to think that. I am now thinking that.
But the jeans still have to button. 😉
WOW! It’s *really* the pits when you are doing the right thing and still gaining. 🙁 Have you thought of consulting a good dietary nutritionist? (I would be banging my head against a wall by now.) Also, if you take any regular medications/vitamins, consider the effect they might have on weight. You are probably miles ahead of me on this.
Our next try I swear is going to be vegetarian. I’ve warned Jane. She’s not enthusiastic, but we’ve tried everything else.
I have a number of recipes, however, that make vegetables-and-cheese/eggs not too bad, particularly if you get meat once a week. It’d at least be something we’ve never tried.
vegetarian using pulses rather than eggs/cheese would be more effective, I am sure – although I know you are Atkins inclined so the calorie thing is less important than the carb thing … I am old fashioned that way … but I believe lots of veg and fruit and pulses is much better for you than lots of egg cheese or meat ….
We like beans, love ferociously spicy dal, but can’t figure how to make it so it tastes like it does at the Indian restaurant, but beans come with cheese. Unfortunately if I eat fruit I put on weight hand over fist—it’s how I got the extra weight in the first place, a sudden taste for oranges, and not owning a scale at the time because I’d never been overweight. Threw my weight gain into overdrive, and I’ve never been able to bring it back to its former level since. No excuses, just that my body seems to love fructose way too much. So I’ve never trusted fruit since.
I took an Indian cooking class once, and based on that can say that the most likely reason that you can’t make it the way they do at the restaurant is that you don’t use the 15+ spices that they do. Which gets into the dilemma that I know it will be better if I get all of those spices, but I also know I am only going to make this dish twice a year, and never use those spices for anything else…. so I get it from the restaurant if I really want it!
And among those spices is asafoetida, 😉 which is not something you can buy in general on American spice shelves; if you go to an Indian grocery, you’re generally stuck buying the pre-mixed stuff, but have no idea which dish the various things (except curry) apply to…very frustrating!