Hi Lynn,
I read your post today and I smiled, laughed and shouted (quietly in my head) “I get ya my low carb sista!”
See today I feel “blah”. Everything is great in my life, eating well, exercising regularly, clothes fitting better and better each day! Yet I’m feeling “blah” and feeling heavy. The joints in my legs feel sore, my legs and arms feel like I’m wearing 10 pound weights on them.
For the past 4 weeks, I’ve been getting to the office early each morning and doing a 1 mile walking video by Leslie Sansone. It’s getting easier and easier every day, but today I felt like I was back at square one! I felt clumsy and heavy and unorganized and finally gave up at only half a mile. Poor Leslie tried to motivate me but it just didn’t work!
So I sat down at my desk to drink my coffee and get ready for my day and I started thinking about why I feel this way physically and mentally. I went over in my head wondering what I did differently yesterday that might have caused this and guess what I think it was? National Root Beer Float Day! Yep, National Root Beer Float Day was yesterday and I found this great little recipe on making a low carb root beer float using diet root beer and heavy whipping cream.
It was a super easy recipe and I really enjoyed the float and did a blog post on it right away to make other low-carbers aware of how you can make simple adjustments in your life to still have some of the goodies regular folks enjoy.
I don’t know if it was the chemicals in the diet root beer, or the fat in the heavy whipping cream but it made me super sluggish today. Ha! Never thought about the word sluggish, but that’s exactly how I felt this morning, like a slow moving, heavy slug!
Once I realized that, I told myself “Self, no more low carb root beer floats!” And then I figured the best way to start feeling better was to start drinking water like crazy to flush all the toxins out of my body, so that’s what I did and by 10am this morning, after about 44 ounces of water, I was able to do my 5 minute walking video by Leslie Sansone without quitting early and I actually felt better, lighter, more energetic. Is it all in my mind? Maybe, but sometimes the mind has to be mightier than the body!
Then reading your post I realized that you might be feeling the way you mention you are feeling because of the “crutch foods”. You’ve been doing this such a long time that you realize that it is the “crutch food”, but a lot of people that are newbie’s to this way of eating use those “crutch foods” and they never learn to lose the cravings for sweets or carbs and therefore give up.
Will I never have another low-carb root beer float? Of course I will, but they will be a special treat, once in a blue moon. I won’t train my body to start craving sweets again!
So Lynn, in closing I just want to say that you have made a big difference in the way I do low carb. You make it so much easier by posting your food because I see ideas that I never would have thought of before. I’ve done low carb on and off for the past 10 years, but this time I feel so much more motivated and I understand that this is not a diet, it’s not a short term thing, this is the way I want and need to eat for the rest of my life. So thank you for making it easier, for motivating me, for sharing not only your high points, but also the low points…like you did today!
