Day 14 - Starch Solution

Today’s stats:

Yet another late day. I didn’t surface until nearly 2pm, which explains the lack of breakfast and any real lunch. I think part of the problem (or solution depending on how you look at it) is that I’m not using caffeine any more to medicate and regulate my activities. Without that, my body is falling back into its own rhythm and that’s taking some time to get adjusted too. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and hopefully once I have repaid my sleep deficit, this will get a lot easier. Otherwise it interferes with the collection of data if nothing else!

So the weight today is looking a little too good to be true. It would appear that I have lost a kilogram in just two days, which seems somewhat unlikely. Then again, it has touched the 93.7 mark a number of times, taking it from being an outlier to being a reasonably possible weight. That said, I suspect that this one is also going to be an outlier. I guess I won’t know until tomorrow and I have a sneaking suspicion it will go up. Still, the trend is doing exactly what it’s supposed to and that is filtering out this noise. Even going purely from the trend alone I’m down around 3.1KG which is hardly to be sneezed at for two weeks effort. And again, I’m still getting the other benefits of this diet, so there’s not much to complain about there.

On a side note, I just noticed that the BMI has just dropped below 30. That means I’m no longer clincally obese (at least until tomorrow when my weight goes back up) and now I’m just clinically overweight. I suspect the term “borderline obese” would still come into play, but it is nice to see this metric going down as well. The body fat has increased but I’m really not convinced about the accuracy or usefulness of this value as it seems to be pretty random to me. Blood pressure is pretty low, or ideal, depending on how you look at it and the blood glucose is right where I want it. So far so good all round…

Rather than lunch I had a mid afternoon snack. This time instead of a 6” subway veggie delight, I instead had… a 12” veggie delight! It also came with two bottles of water which I didn’t need but will keep nice and cool in the fridge in any case. I watched a movie with my family and the sandwich kept me full all the way through. If there had been any popcorn, I would have had some, but alas, although we had some very tasty biscuits, they were clearly full of fat and sugar and so I had to pass. I should point out that I do in fact know that sweet popcorn also has refined sugar on it, and given that it is generally popped in boiling oil, there’s probably some oil in there too. This is all true, but I figure, if I’m only having these every couple of months, it’s not so bad, and it’s more bending the rules than breaking them. That said, I could always get an air popper and pop my own popcorn and then just add a little sugar, which would be within the rules (salt and sugar to taste, but on the surface of foods). Maybe I could get the hang of plain popcorn…

In any case today is the mid autumn festival which is massive anywhere in China and particularly in Hong Kong. It involves eating a copious amount of moon cakes. The filling is lotus seed paste which is made by crushing lotus seeds and mixing them with sugar (and often oil) to create a gooey mass. The pastry uses either vegetable oil or lard as a key ingredient. Now given that Dr. McDougall himself states that he has an egg at Easter and a small piece of turkey at thanksgiving, I think I too could be forgiven for indulging a little here. In fact, although they’re eaten a lot in a variety of circumstances, I was only thinking on partaking with the rest of my family after dinner. A mooncake is about 10cm by 4cm and packs in a whopping 1,000 calories. Generally they are cut into quarters and shared. A good thing too because otherwise you’d be eating your way into a diabetic coma with these things (something that has been known to happen).

Despite all that, when it came to my turn to munch on moon cake I ultimately declined. I could smell them and I knew how great they taste, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Now, I should point out this is not a will power issue. I was quite happy with the possibility of eating one of these and as I said before I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. The reason I couldn’t bring myself to do it was because I knew that over the past two weeks (today is day 14 after all), I’d done everything I could to help clear out my arteries and get my body working again at a decent level. That is a goal I’m well on my way to achieving as I’ve already reported. The problem was, I knew how much oil was in the moon cake and thanks to Dr. Caldewell Esselstyn and Dr. T. Colin Campbell I had a pretty good idea what that oil would do. And basically, given how much effort I’d gone to in the last couple of weeks to clean up my arteries, I couldn’t bring myself to pour oil in there.

So there you go, I was quite happy to eat it, would not have lost sleep over it and most certainly would have enjoyed the taste - but the price just wasn’t worth it…

Aside from the moon cake dinner was good. I had a repeat of the sliced potatoes in tomatos from yesterday (prior to this it had always been potato chunks with a dash of soya sauce) and the usual broccoli. So all full and happy there.