I’ve eaten this meal more times than I can count. It’s utterly delicious, and easy to cook. It makes great lunches that you can batch cook on a Sunday and then throw in the freezer.
Sausage, Chorizo and Bean Casserole
Month: July 2016
1.7lb gain in a DAY!
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I weigh myself daily. Tim Ferriss says to stick to a weekly “morning of cheat day” schedule, on the basis that daily weight fluctuates and that road leads to madness. I get that, but I’m a special snowflake, and I’m sure Tim would say “whatever works for you dude”.
I’ve found that weighing myself daily helps keep me focused and motivated. If I were to heed the “weekly weigh in wisdom”, I would still weight myself daily, but I wouldn’t look at the display, so that I’ve at least got the data, but that it’s not fucking with my mind.
Fortunately, with a few exceptions, I’ve not found it to be a detriment to my mental state. Sure, I get frustrated when it’s not until Wednesday or Thursday that I’m back to pre-cheat weight, but in those cases, I also know that there’s a whole list of weeks where that’s happened, and I’ve then gone on to utterly crush Friday & Saturday weigh in’s.
Today I put on 1.7lbs (and it’s Friday!). That’s soul destroying. I was bad on Wednesday, drinking an extra glass of red wine, and um… “many” Gin and Tonic’s. The resulting Thursday weigh in was a loss, but apparently the subsequent (presumably) water weight was holding off a day and has hit back with a vengeance. Entirely fair, just annoying.
I even feel fatter today, so hopefully that’s a sign that this is just water retention, and even if it doesn’t right itself by tomorrow (cheat day), it’ll come off next week and I’ll have a big loss.
I’m down, but not out.
How I got started on Slow Carb and lost 2st (28lbs/12.5kg) in 12 Weeks
I read “The Four Hour Body” by Tim Ferriss in April 2015. The techniques in the book were something I could relate to, but I was sceptical whether I could stick to a “bean based diet”, and whether I could be organised enough to prepare meals (lunches in particular) in advance. I knew though, that when I hit my “Harajuku moment” this would be the diet for me. I’m not sure that I knew that it would work, but I thought that it was likely.
My Harajuku moment, actually wasn’t. I was sick of my weight, and the poor fitness that resulted – sweating through your shirt after walking from the train station to the office in the middle of winter, is not cool – but that was a constant feeling and I was intentionally putting off doing something about it, until I knew that it would work.
Why? I grew up watching my mother battle with her weight, switching from one diet to another with little joy. I’d rather live my life fat and happy(ish), than go through that shit. Fuck that. So although I wanted to stop being fat, until I found something that I knew I could dive into, I’d watch and listen, assimilate information, and wait.
My Harajuku moment, such as it was, actually happened in the Dominican Republic, at breakfast. I filled my plate with sausages, bacon, eggs and baked beans… or rather, the local DR version of baked beans, which appeared to be large butter beans in a weak tomato sauce. It wasn’t like english baked beans, but it was ok, entirely tolerable, if not “nice”. The beans piqued my curiosity. At lunch I noticed they had a bean based salad, delicious looking salsa and guacamole, so I decided to experiment and loaded my plate up Slow carb stylee (why o why didn’t I take photos!).
I was still on holiday, and many a beer and pina colada were drunk, but I could use the buffet to find very easily the foods I enjoyed, and mentally log those I knew wouldn’t fit with me. Experimenting was zero effort. Breakfast and lunch were mostly slow carb, with extras like ice creams that weren’t likely to be on the cards at home :).
When I got home, Slow Carb began. I lost 5.5lbs on my first weigh in, and I was hooked!
Hello World
I started my weight loss in March, but it took a couple of months to realise I should have started blogging about the journey. Changing your life this dramatically results in a LOT of introspection, examining your reactions and emotions is inevitable when the path you’re on is so foreign.
A “Hello, World!” program is a computer program that outputs or displays “Hello, World!” to the user. Being a very simple program in most programming languages, it is often used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language for a working program.
It’s nearly August and the urge to share has grown, so here I am.
I hope that my reactions and observations to the things I’m feeling will help others, but ultimately this is my journey, and this blog is to help me.
Slow Carb Blog 