January 27, 2011 Low-Carb Menu

5:45AM
1 pound grass-fed ground beef cooked in 2 Tbs coconut oil with sea salt, freshly ground pepper, and granulated garlic

12:30PM
6 organic, soy-free, coconut fed eggs cooked in 2 Tbs coconut oil

7:00PM
100-minute competitive volleyball

NOTE: It's weigh-in day today and when I stepped on the scale this morning it showed I weighed 267.2 pounds--another 3.2-pound weight loss since last week. Since I began this new journey earlier this month, I have now shed a total of 19.6 pounds on my way to getting back down to at least 230 pounds again. So far it's been pretty darn easy partly because I've been eating low-carb for so many years that I'm not experiencing the familiar withdrawal symptoms from sugar and starches that I did when I first started in 2004. It's funny how just a few minor tweaks and changes to my diet are so easily implementable. That's a good lesson for people who think this is too difficult to do. Not even close! If you have a sincere desire to change and a willingness to follow through on it, then you can't help but succeed. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens as I continue this.

Today I received a huge shipment of grass-fed ground beef, a box of all kinds of steaks, and some really interesting eggs that I went ahead and added to my menus today. These chickens laying the eggs are fed a unique chicken feed made from the coconut pulp left after the coconut oil is extracted from it. What that means is these chickens are getting lots of healthy fats into their diet which then translates into outstanding nutrition in their eggs. And the taste is so heavenly, especially cooked up in coconut oil as I've been doing. I was telling Christine how surprising it was for the eggs to taste so "buttery" although there wasn't any in it. Once this challenge through April 1st is over, I may consider adding back in some grass-fed butter again. The good thing is I'm not really missing or craving any foods right now. IT'S A MIRACLE! :)

You'll notice I ate my first meal of the day pretty darn early today. I went to bed around 11:15PM last night dead tired and yet I woke up at 2:15AM wide awake. I tossed, turned, flipped and finally resigned to the fact I wasn't gonna get back to sleep. So I got up and did some work on my blog, answered some e-mails, and other work-related stuff (I did take a nap later in the morning) and realized how ravenously hungry I was. I tried to do an extended IF session from yesterday, but the hunger was a bit too much for me to go too much longer than 20 hours. And that's cool. I probably won't do that again and just stick with the plan I've been doing. My body doesn't like being hungry. But it was worth a shot.

At volleyball something interesting happened towards the end...I started getting dizzy. At first I tried to pass it off as me playing hard and needing to suck in more oxygen. But I quickly realized this was likely hypoglycemia and I needed to go lie down for the last few minutes. For the most part this has not been an issue for me since I started my grass-fed beef, pastured eggs and coconut oil diet, but it hit me hard tonight. I got home and relaxed on my recliner watching television for a while and felt fine going to bed. I'll keep an eye on this to see if is a problem again.

One of my most ardent followers Sonya suggested I take L-Tryptophan and GABA to help with my sleeplessness as per my podcast interview with Julia Ross. I also know from Robb Wolf that magnesium helps with this as well. So this afternoon I headed over to The Vitamin Shoppe to get these to help me sleep tonight. I took one 250mg magnesium citrate, one 500mg L-Tryptophan and two of the 750mg of GABA (the store manager said his coach in college said to take 2-3 of these at night and you'll sleep like a baby). We'll see how well they worked. I was pretty darn tired by bedtime from my lack of sleep last night and playing volleyball tonight.