The holiday is over

Yesterday was mothers' day and that marked the end of the reprieve from the new woe (way of eating).  Not such a good acronym in my opinion.  It has given me a chance to assess the low carb high fat diet, or way of eating (woe) as the proponents would prefer to say.  I have also stocked up on a couple of cook books in the intervening time, Pete Evans' Healthy Every Day and Christine Cronau The Fat Revolution; and started to cook with ghee in the hopes that it will be a more suitable fat for the dairy free members of the house hold.

So first.  What exactly happened?
Well with the Easter season upon me I relaxed the rules and ate whatever was going basically.  So no care for high or low carb/ fat etc.  I ate lots of chocolate Easter eggs, that at first didn't taste the best, but I soon developed a liking for them.  I also tried to keep my fat intake pretty high, so lots of butter on my bread and muffins, cream with dessert, that sort of thing.

How did I go, what did I notice?

The first most noticeable thing was after only a couple of days of increasing my carbs my nighttime leg cramps disappeared.  These had been quite debilitating and annoying.  I had heard that they were a side effect of going LCHF but would pass quickly.  Mine persisted, even when I tried various measures to combat them (high doses of magnesium, potassium, epsom salt baths, compression stockings).  This leads me to believe that perhaps my muscle glycogen levels were falling too low over night and causing me to cramp.  I have never read this anywhere, just postulating from personal experience.  But it does seem pretty clear that I need more carbs in my diet to stop me from cramping.

The second thing that I noticed was the skin eruptions that I was starting to have while on the diet did not improve once I increased carbs.  So there is something else in my diet that is causing them.  The muscle cramps seem to be caused by something lacking, the red itchy and scaly skin patches caused by something I am reacting to.  I used to get similar things on my face from using face creams that had chemicals in them that my skin didn't like.  These ones are occuring on my body, legs, neck etc, so are not related to an external skin product.  That leads me to assume that they are caused by something that is now in the diet that wasn't there in the past.  The most likely culprit is dairy.  I having been eating a lot of dairy in the way of butter, cream, cheese and yoghurt.  I was almost 100% dairy free before the diet. So I may need to consider limiting the dairy, either cutting it out altogether or trialing only fermented dairy and see if I can tolerate that.

Thirdly, yes I did put some of the weight that I had lost back on.  I could tell by the tightness of my clothes.  I have been dreading doing a weigh in, but this morning decided to jump back on the scales and get the tape measure out.  Here are today's measurements:
Weight 75kg
waist 92cm
ribs 85cm
hips 106cm

Compared to the measurements from week 8, they are not too horrible and still down on where I started.  Which makes me think that perhaps the initial stages of going sugar free may actually improve the body's state of insulin resistance.  Again another area that probably needs some research.  The more insulin resistant you are the easier it is to regain weight, perhaps.....
Just to compare week 8 (2 April, almost 6 weeks ago) figures were:
weight 73.5kg
waist 89cm
ribs 87cm
hips 105cm.
So a 1.5kg gain, 3 cm on my waist, I could feel that with the tightness of my clothes, a loss on my ribs (but that was probably dodgy measuring) and 1 cm on my hips.  Not as bad as I feared.  It will be interesting if renewed vigour in maintaining low carbs will have an effect or whether I will plateau at this size.  Around 75 kg does seem to be a bit of a default setting for me.
This week I shall focus on limiting sugar and ease back into low carb eating a bit more slowly and hopefully will find a sustainable woe (though we need a happier acronym for sure) that I can live with.