Yep, I said the forbidden four letter word… we don’t cuss in our household but that is getting pretty darn close! I have always thought diets were pointless. I mean I am an exercise physiologist… my philosophy is if I want to eat it than tomorrow I will just run a little farther. And that philosophy has gotten me through life wearing the same size jeans I wore in college well after my ten year reunion.

But then our nutritionist at work started talking about her eye opening diet revelation that she experienced in her own life and I was intrigued… for other people of course… not for personal use, because I was still sticking to my fitness philosophy and I had easily convinced myself that my diet wasn’t really bad anyways. But I went home and mentioned it to the hubs… because he was one of those “other” people it might be good for. To my surprise it took shockingly little to convince him to give it a try… and somewhere in there it was mentioned that we were “one flesh” and that if he was going to do it I was going to be doing it with him and the next thing I knew – I was on a DIET! People who are on a diet really aren’t fun to be around. They are the ones that always make it awkward at the party- they become the dinner guest no one wants to invite…. And now I was one of them!

Now this really wouldn’t have been all that bad except for the type of diet I had agreed to. One that defied everything I learned in school and how our bodies function… and also just happened to eliminate my favorite food group…CARBS! I had taken the plunge (most reluctantly) into a low carb high fat diet. To some this may be a dream come true… high fat sounds great… until you add the no carb thing along with it. Now look, I am the exact opposite of a carb hater! Gluten is Great in my book! In fact I am the girl that could eat cereal for breakfast, a bagel and pretzels for lunch, and give me a loaf of bread for dinner and I am quite content! So when you tell me I can eat all the cream cheese and butter I want I would say great now give me a bagel and a piece of toast to put it on! Not to mention everything I learned in school (and currently teach to my students) says that our bodies’ primary fuel source is carbohydrates, especially for athletes. My diet was probably 75% carbs up until then…this diet was a travesty in my book. I would rather be tortured than give up my cereal in the morning. So I went down this low carb journey kicking and fighting with every single step. Carbohydrates were my drug and I was being forced into detox. My hubs was the exact opposite on this journey, in fact I think his motto became “how low can I go” when mine was more like “how much can I get away with”? I used any “reason” I could to still consume my carbs. For example, two mornings a week I have to get up particularly early – so on those mornings I would still eat cereal because there was no way I was getting up even earlier to make breakfast or if we were going out to dinner I would say that I didn’t want to pay for a meal that I didn’t really want. The result: I watched my husband’s weight fall off of him while my weight remained stagnant… but I wasn’t going down without a fight… after all the college jeans still fit (albeit maybe a little tighter than they used to and maybe I couldn’t put them in the dryer any more but – they still fit!) But annoyed by my lack of progress and my husband amazing success Not long after that I took the plunge and went “all in” – eggs for breakfast every morning. Here is an email I sent the evil… I mean our nutritionist a few days later…

As you know we are trying out this whole low carb high fat diet thing. To me it’s torture – I would rather be interrogated by Jack Bauer than not eat cereal in the morning, but here I sit a few weeks in and eggs for breakfast every morning! – Raymond on the other hand is handling it much better as he should be because he has actually lost weight and having eggs for breakfast every morning is like a dream come true for him. I on the other hand have not lost one single ounce- NOT ONE SINGLE OUNCE. Yet I push on…

My biggest complaint is breakfast! I have come to HATE eggs…. When I get up at the butt crack of dawn for work I do not want eggs. I don’t want eggs with cheese in them – for some reason people think that helps – it doesn’t. I don’t want eggs and bacon, I don’t want scrambled eggs or eggs over easy and they certainly don’t have a sunny side to even go up. So I decided to seek out some new alternatives for breakfast. Something that didn’t involve EGGS… and I found what seemed to be a great little recipe of low carb high fat Blueberry coffee cake…. I LOVE blueberry coffee cake –WIN. So we set off to the store to buy all the ingredients I have never heard of except for blueberries to make our low carb blueberry coffee cake. Forty hard earned dollars later and a handful of ingredients I was set to finally NOT have eggs for breakfast.  So I got up early this morning and planned to have the smell of delicious blueberry coffee cake wafting through the house as I got ready for work.  Side note… as all things low carb high fat have to basically be made from scratch and we don’t get off work till 8:00pm on Tuesdays,  less than 8 hours  before this I was standing in the same place making our dinner.

So I follow the very odd instructions for our coffee cake- dirty almost every mixing bowl in the house- use up our $40 worth of ingredients and place it in the oven… while cleaning up afterwards I licked a finger that had gotten some streusel on it. Now streusel in the very essence of the word indicates yummy goodness. It is flower and sugar and butter and cinnamon and basically all things good in this world but when I licked my finger there was no yummy goodness to be found. And the after taste of our no carb, no sugar, liquid sweetener was bitter beyond words!   After washing my mouth out with some bulletproof coffee I thought oh – that must “bake” out!- Because surely no one would actually suggest eating such a thing… 30 minutes later when the buzzer goes off and the yummy smell of baked blueberries is filling the house, I take our coffee cake out of the oven. If it looks like a coffee cake, and it smells like a yummy coffee cake- surely it must be a yummy coffee cake… LIES all LIES!!! I pulled out the fork, put a full bite in my mouth and regretted every single morsel. The aftertaste of that liquid sweetener will haunt me in my dreams… IT was TERRIBLE! So $40 down the drain and 3 minutes to leave for work I was in full force rebel mode and had a bowl of cereal for breakfast… yeah you heard me right a carb loaded with REAL sugar bowl of cereal.

Clearly I was not enjoying our new found diet. But then a strange thing started to happen. I too started to lose weight. But not only that I started to lose the right kind of weight from all the right places. Now granted where you lose weight is genetic I know that, but because our bodies were constantly in Ketosis – the process of burning fat for fuel- I was losing fat and because I was still working out, as I started to lose my fat layer ( ok fine … layers) my muscles were looking more and more defined. – SCORE! That was an added bonus I wasn’t expecting. But the results were even better for the hubs. His blood pressure had dropped between 20 and 30 mm Hg on both the diastolic and systolic! THAT’S HUGE!

Now, we are about 5 months in… I no longer hate our nutritionist, and I will gladly eat eggs to avoid any sort of torture. The hubs has lost over 30lbs. and I have lost just under 20lbs. We both feel great. And once we got the hang of some very normal things we could eat it really is a pretty easy diet to follow. Now that’s not to say every now and then I might start to salivate at just the mention of a pretzel but when that happens I can indulge in a bite or two and the world doesn’t come to an end and I don’t gain all the weight back.

And surprisingly, I have found that I am a much nicer person to be around when all the clothes in my closet actually fit. For those of you wondering I realize I haven’t really gone into specifics about ketosis or how my scientific perspective of fuel sources have changed or what we eat or any of that but I will have to save all that for another rainy day as this post is already way too long… or you can leave your comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them. Now I don’t have any awesome pre and post pics- I will have to work on that over Christmas – but you can enjoy this one set of pre and post pictures! Can you tell which is which?