Day 5

I felt a lot better yesterday. My energy level is coming up and the queasiness I was feeling after eating is subsiding. I am actually feeling pretty confident about continuing to eat this way. Unfortunately, K is still not adapted. Hopefully it will happen soon.

I got the bikes out of storage last night and got them cleaned up. I went out and rode around a little and felt good doing it. I was surprised that it was as easy as it was. Maybe it was all the walking I did recently in Las Vegas but I didn't feel terribly out of shape.

Yesterday, I first got hungry about 8:30 AM, which is earlier than usual. The first thing I did was try a couple of bites of the pemmican we made over the weekend. Unfortunately it appears that we either scorched the tallow when we rendered it or burnt one of the cracklins because it had a burnt taste to it. It wasn't very good, especially at first. As I chewed it, the meat flavor came out and it was a lot better. I think I am going to order some tallow from US Wellness Meats and try again. I am counting on pemmican to be my travel meals.

After the pemmican, I had two cheeseburger patties. Apparently even two bites of pemmican is filling because I filled up really fast on the burgers and didn't get hungry again until about 5 PM. I drank a cup of tea with a splash of cream right after the burgers and could barely get it down because I was so full.

I was a bit worried about dinner. We had a lot of left over ham and K wanted to make ham skillet. You take the ham, dice it up and brown it in butter with some onion. You then add mushroms and cook on low until the mushrooms are cooked. You then make a sauce with sour cream and more butter. It is very low carb (unless you put it over rice, like we used to do) but not zero carb, since the sour cream, ham, mushrooms and onions all have carbs.

I had a healthy scoop but it tasted really sweet to me. I ended up having another cheeseburger patty to top myself off instead of more ham skillet.

I was worried that the carbs and salt from the ham would bloat me up this morning but I was down another pound, to 192.4. That is a total loss of 7.4 pounds this week. That puts me at a lower weight than I got to a month ago when I went meat only for a week.

The difference between now and then is striking. I was struggling pretty bad then. Part of the problem was impending birthdays and vacations, so I couldn't get into it from the mindset of being in it for the long haul. However, I also was eating a lot of pork and I just don't think I was getting enough fat. I have had the ham this time but I have also been doing a lot of beef. I know that most zero carbers don't do dairy but I think the cream in my tea and the slice of cheddar now and then have really helped keep my hunger in check and to help me get enough fat that I'm not craving stuff in between meals. I think that is a bit of K's problem this time. She hasn't wanted to eat and doesn't eat a lot of fat so it has set up cravings and has delayed getting adapted to this way of eating.