Evicting azaleas and a part of myself.

These crappy cell phone photos speak volumes...

This week has been slow weight loss wise, and news wise. It has been an incredibly busy week in the yard. I've redone the front walk way of our house so that it no longer looks abandoned, and actually has some fresh personality that I feel more accurately reflects the inhabitants inside.  I've been pretty frustrated with my weight though. Since last Saturday, I have not lost one single ounce. Not one. My eating has been totally offset by the 2-4 hours of moderately intense yard work and landscaping I've been doing, and my calories have been negative each day. Meaning I'm using more energy than I'm taking in. Instant weight loss though, right!? Nope. 

The crappy pics above are of the scraggly azaleas that have been a scourge on the asthetics of our home for years now. My mom planted them when she lived here, and I'm no landscaper, so they look like this because I don't care about them. What these pics are saying relay into a cry for help! Just like my body, unattended, carelessly cared for, neglected, and malnourished. What a metaphor for myself! I've dug these suckers up, chucked them into the woods, and put in something with less work, more beauty, and better suited to life under the filtered sun of the tree canopy. Let's hope for success when everything blooms fresh as of next spring.

Let me refer you to the article that got me started on this entire process.  I've said before that when I started this whole journey, I was doing a self restricted low calorie diet, an hour of moderate cardio per day, and gained 4 lbs. That was my "WTH" moment, and how I found this article, titled "Why Big Caloric Deficits and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss" by Lyle McDonald.  It's about how doing too much cardio can wreck your low calorie diet. No joke. Sounds totally backwards from what I've always been taught, and probably you too, but using my body as the science experiment, I'm finding that it is gospel truth. (And just for the record, I'm going off of the diet for the weekend, to try and get my innards reset. I've burned too much calorically, and I'm putting in some carbs, only to restart on Monday.)  Anyway, probably the best way to sum it up is with an excerpt from the article.

As noted above, chronic elevations in cortisol can cause a lot of bad things to happen. One of them is simply water retention and I’ve mentioned in previous articles that water retention can mask fat loss, sometimes for extremely extended periods.  I talked about this in some detail in The LTDFLE and suspect that some of the ‘fat loss’ is actually just water loss when calories are raised and cortisol mediated water retention dissipates.  Reducing total training (volume, frequency, intensity or some combination) does the same thing.

But that’s probably not all of what’s going on.  Another effect of chronically elevated cortisol levels is leptin resistance in the brain.  I’m not going to talk about leptin endlessly here again, you can read the Bodyweight Regulation Series for more information.  When the normal leptin signal to the brain is blocked, a lot of things can go wrong metabolically and I suspect that this is part of the problem.

In this vein, although not necessarily related to cortisol per se, at least one study found that the addition of 6 hours per week of aerobic activity to a very low calorie diet (in this case a protein sparing modified fast) caused a larger decrement in metabolic rate than the diet alone.  The body appears to monitor caloric availability (simplistically caloric intake minus output) and if it gets too low, bad things can happen.

This is why I so strongly suggested AGAINST the inclusion of much cardio in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook; it causes more harm than good.  Invariably, the biggest source of failure on that plan is when people ignore my advice and try to do a bunch of cardio.  And fat loss stops.  ("Why Big Caloric Deficits and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss, by Lyle McDonald)

Okay, so that is that, and that is what I think has happened to me this week with all of my extra activity. Speaking of that activity, would you like to see what I've been doing this week? Yes, I'd love to show you!  The first pic is of my container garden: evening primrose, astralgus, basil, hyssop, horehound, cayenne peppers, peppermint, calendula, chamomile, and valerian. The intention is for these to propagate well enough to transplant into larger beds.  The other pics are of a hosta bed that should be large and fluffy next summer. I love hostas!  Thank you to the amazing Diane from Sweet Serenity Greenhouse in Bedford for all the plants. She is amazing! And talented! And an awesome friend.

I'm out for now. Tomorrow I leave for Rodanthe, NC for a week for our yearly family vacation. I'm going to be sticking to the diet next week, so I will probably update then, hopefully with a beach pic.  I'm never sure of the atmosphere of vacation, but I am looking forward to getting my base tan ready so that I'm prepared for another summer on the river. Ahhhhh, the river. The romantic, lazy, lovely, familiar James River.