Let's Try again

Day 1  Monday

weigh in

92kg ouch.
waist 107cm, but my belly (section around belly button) is bigger at 114cm.  My rib cage, as measured right under my boobs are 96cm.
Hips 115.5cm
Bust 116cm.

I have so much to lose.

No breakfast yet this morning.  Only a mug of black tea.
Had a quick walk on the beach, but it started pouring rain, so I probably only lasted 15mins. Am thirsty and givene the overnight fast would be in a mild state of ketosis.  I can't help wondering whether this time around sending my body into ketosis would be less of a shock and thus less effective than the first time I did this experiment.
When I first attempted LCHF all those years ago, I could not even imagine not eating carbs.  I didn't know that it would be possible, it was going to be a huge learning curve.
This time the concept is not an alien one.  I know how it feels, I know I can do it easily.  The hard part is staying with it.  Self discipline. ahhhh.  THAT'S the hard part.

Food

It's 10.30 and I am hungry.  So here starts the day's eating.....
Breakfast:
Three egg scrambled eggs cooked in butter.
Black Coffee

Lunch:
Lamb,pumpkin,carrot, onion, gravy wrapped in nori.
Dandelion tea, splash of milk.

Snack:
handful of nuts, 85% chocolate.

Dinner: Spaghetti bolognaise with zucchini noodles.  The meat sauce was made of mince, tomato puree (no added sugar), capsicum, onion, garlic, mushrooms, herbs and tomatoes.

Post dinner: Cup of dandelion tea with splash of soy milk.

Mangoes

This always happens in February, we have an abundance of delicious mangoes.  These must be eaten of course.  So I need to reserve at least some of my carb allowance for some mango each day.
Yesterday we picked all of the left over mangoes from our tree.  I figure there are about two weeks left of mangoes to eat.  I counted 25 mangoes last night.

It is interesting, the mangoes look green and unripe.  These ones are still hard, so are not ripe.  But over the next week they shall soften and ripen, but remain green.  Some will get a slight yellow blush, but most will still look very unripe, even though inside they will be a gorgeous yellow/orange colour and soft, sweet and ripe.

LCHF three years on

Wow, just read day one the weigh in from when I first tried LCHF.

Scary stuff.  I thought I was fat and needed to try something back then.  I weighed in at 79kg.

79kg, I wish.

Last week I weighed myself and came in at 92kg.  Yep. I knew I was carrying some excess weight, as my clothes are tight and I have had to consign many items of attire to the sin bin.  (one step before being turfed out the door to charity).

Ok what happened, what went wrong?

My guess is once you fall off the wagon with LCHF it punishes you- mercilessly.  You still tend to eat the higher fat part of the regime, but the excess carbs creep up and up over time.  Even though you might have lessened your carbs, you are still eating a lot.
With insulin and leptin resistance there is very little room for error. You seem to have to strictly adhere or suffer the dire consequences of rebound weight gain.

To lose weight there seems to have to be suffering involved.
1. Sickness
2. punishing exercise regime
3. starvation
4. manic self discipline to never let forbidden foods pass lips
5. strict adherence to an eating plan such as lchf that requires the pain of fat adaption.

All diets sell the dream that it is easy to follow their plan and that it is not so much a diet as a way of eating (WOE).  Yep woe pretty much sums it up.  Only true fanatics can follow and stay on the wagon long term.

The world is full of temptation and delicious food.  There is a never ending range of  celebrations, events or social occasions just waiting to trip you up.  Success can only be assured if you move to a Tibetan monastery and isolate yourself from civilisation for the remaining term of your natural life.

So what to do?
Keep getting fatter?  Or bite the bullet, get some self discipline and suffer for the name of weight loss?
Yummy food, eat what I want - get fat.
Restricted food, compromised social eating opportunities and possible weight loss for the short term, but not necessarily long term unless the self flagellation can be maintained.

How about complete suffering and just go for the intermittent or full on fast. God I love food.  I keep thinking fasting maybe the way to go, but I LOVE FOOD SO MUCH.
And I am lazy and tired. Bad combo for weight loss.

Think I might shove my head in the sand and ignore it all for a bit longer. Keep telling myself fat and happy is preferable to thin and miserable.

In the meantime I shall read back over my previous success and see if I can find some inspiration there.

Custard in a cup, made with a milk frother

Now here's a weird one.

As I lay in bed last night I pondered the pros and cons of making real egg custard using my milk frother on my cappuccino machine.  What first seemed a little crazy, became saner the more I thought about it.

Making custard the traditional way is a bit involved.  It requires a lot of stirring and a lot of patience, and still you can run the risk of burning it, or making it go lumpy. It also involves dirtying two pots.  One for warming the milk in and thickening the custard, and another to beat the eggs and sugar together.

What if I could simplify the process and make it quickly in small quantities for the times when you just want one or two serves?

After pondering the night away on this topic, today I leaped in and gave it a go.  This is what I did.

In a small pudding basin I whisked together one egg, one teaspoon of sugar (or sweetener of choice) and half a teaspoon of vanilla.  When that was smooth, I added about 3/4 cup of cream and again whisked it until it was smooth.
Then I turned on the steam on my coffee machine, and "frothed" the custard til it was hot and thick.

It worked!  It didn't curdle,lump or burn.  It was delicious.

Now I am wondering, has anyone else ever had this crazy notion?  Time to check google.....

Ok there seems to be some mention of dessert sauces, custards and gravies in those automatic milk frother jugs, but I have been unable to find a post where someone has made custard using the steam wand like I did.

Hmmm it does make we wonder though, what other creations could I make with my steam wand?

Actually now that I have differentiated between milk frother and steam wand, I did another search specifically on using a steam wand and found some interesting posts.

It just goes to show that nothing is ever truly original, someone has always done it before.

Here's a you tube video showing scrambled eggs.

So give it a try, custard or scrambled eggs with your steam wand, who would have thought?

Addictive chocolate mousse

Yesterday I made the most amazing chocolate mousse.  It is delicious and silky in the mouth, so hard to stop eating. yum!  I have to blog the recipe so that I can remember it and make it again.

Chocolate Mousse

600ml thickened cream beaten to soft peaks
1/2 cup full cream milk
1 tablespoon of gelatin
5 heaped tablespoons of cocoa (adjust to how chocolatey you like your mousse, I like it quite chocolatey)
sweetener of choice ( I used between 1/4 and 1/2 cup of dextrose)

Put milk into a saucepan and sprinkle gelatine over the surface of the milk. As the gelatine soaks up some liquid, whisk it into the milk. Put the saucepan on the stove and turn on heat to medium. Whisk in your sweetener and cocoa.  This makes a thickish paste.  Heat just long enough to dissolve the gelatine.  Meanwhile, whip your cream.

When the gelatin mixture is ready, cool slightly and then add to the beaten cream, continuing to beat as you add the gelatin mixture.

When completely mixed, cover the bowl with cling wrap and place into the fridge to set.

Variations to try in the future are replacing the dextrose with my own stevia concoction which will turn this dessert into a true low carb high fat extravaganza,  and to use raw cream to replace the commercial cream that I used this time.  The raw cream may not whip to the soft peas which will undoubtedly affect the consistency, but I will have to try it to find out.


Speaking of raw cream, our latest shipment of raw milk turned up at the beginning of the week.  It was 50% cream which amounted to 2 litres of pure cream to get through while my main milk drinker was away at school camp for the week.  Necessity breeds creativity, so I looked up some recipes that utilise cream and of course found the mother of all cream recipes.... ice cream.

Now the other thing that we have an abundance of at the moment is lemons.  Our lemon tree has gone berserk this year with lemons.  Last year we got barely any as it was severely attacked by the dreaded citrus stink bug.  After a concerted campaign of eradication that involved physically vacuuming them off the tree, the lemon tree has bounced back with avengence. This photo of the tree is taken after a concerted effort of eating, drinking, storing, preserving, giving away bags and bags of them and using them in every dish we can think of, there are still a huge number of lemons sitting on the tree.
We are getting to windy season and it seems whenever I use up some lemons in the kitchen a gust of wind will blow up and knock at least double the number of lemons I have just used to the ground.  Needless to say that we accumulating lemons on our kitchen bench at a great rate of knots.

So where was I?
Yes an abundance of fresh raw cream and lemons.  My Googling lead me to lemon ice cream. Concerned that the lemons would curdle the cream and having only really experienced lemon sorbet before, I must say that I was a little sceptical of lemon ice cream.
I should have worried not.  The ice cream was delicious and tasted just like lemon cheese cake, mmmmm.

Lemon ice cream

3 cups of raw cream beaten until it thickens.
rind and juice of 2 -3 lemons
3 whole eggs
sweetener of choice ( I used 1/4 to 1/2 cup of dextrose)

Beat cream, add rind and then eggs one by one, beating well after each addition. Beat in sweetener and juice. Put into ice cream churner and churn until ready. Enjoy

The flavours were delicious, but there was a grainy texture to the ice cream which I wondered if it was due to the egg white part of the egg going more icy than the rest of the mixture.  Many ice creams call for just the yolk ( the fatty part) to be used.  I hate wasted egg whites so decided to throw the whole lot in.
This is another recipe I would like to try and remake this time with my stevia concoction as the sweetener.

So continuing the theme of lemons, I have been busy creating a few more recipes. One thing leads to another in this business.  As there is also an abundance of strawberries in the shops for quite cheap, I had a surplus of them to use.  I made a strawberry mousse similar to the chocolate mousse recipe above, using raw honey as the sweetener this time.

Strawberry Mousse

1 punnet of cleaned and hulled strawberries, chopped.
1 cup of raw cream
1 cup coconut cream
squeeze of lemon juice
1 tablespoon raw honey
1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon of gelatin.

Sprinkle gelatin over the water, add honey and heat just enough to dissolve the gelatin.
Crush the strawberries with a stick blender and add the lemon juice. Add the creams and continue to blend.  Add in the gelatin mixture in a thin drizzle.  Beat enough to combine and then refrigerate until set.

This was delicious, but was possibly a bit too firm, next time I will either lessen the amount of gelatin or increase the strawberries and cream component.

This recipe left me with some leftover coconut cream.  So I opened two cans of coconut milk and made coconut yoghurt using this basic soy yoghurt recipe.

Then I decided to make probiotic lemonade to use up a fair whack of my lemons.  For the lemonade I needed whey.  How to make whey?  With yoghurt of course, and the only yoghurt I had was the coconut yoghurt.  I'd never heard of coconut cream cheese before, but nothing ventured nothing gained.

I drained the yoghurt through a clean cloth and then tied the cloth with string and hung it up over night while the remainder of the whey drained off.  Voila whey for my probiotic lemonade, not that I had ever heard of coconut whey either, but I wasn't going to let a small thing like that stop me.

So I have followed this recipe from Wellness Mama and have 4 litres of lemonade brewing on my bench at the moment.  I have made her ginger beer before, so here's hoping that it all works out okay.

But that left me with coconut cream cheese. My original idea was to salt and herb it and use it as a savoury cheese.  But coconut is quite sweet, so I soon decided after a few taste tests that a sweet cheese cake was the way to go.  So I invented a coconut and lemon cheese cake a perfect way to use up some more lemons and that coconut cream cheese.

Coconut cream and Lemon cheese cake

(At a guess) 500g of coconut cream cheese
1 can of coconut cream
juice and rind of three lemons
1 tablespoon of gelatin
Sweetener of choice ( I used 1/4 cup of dextrose)

Beat together the coconut cream cheese and cream.  Add the rind and beat some more.
In a saucepan pour in half of the squeezed lemon juice and sprinkle over the gelatin.  Allow the gelatin to soak up some juice and then whisk it into the juice.  Add the dextrose and then heat the liquid until the gelatin dissolves.  Remove from the heat and whisk in the remaining lemon juice.  Add this lemon juice and gelatin mixture to the coconut cream mixture and beat well.  Pour into a dish to set.  You can add a biscuit crumb base if you wish, eat it as is or do what my teenage son did and add blobs of it to digestive biscuits and eat it that way.


So with some inventiveness, access to Google, a surplus of produce and a bit of time it is amazing what wonderful creations can be concocted in the humble kitchen.

LONG OVER DUE UPDATE

My last post here has been ages ago, back in May!

I have kept meaning to get back on here and update my progress.  But time marches on.

So how have things been going?

Firstly adherence to the diet

I'd say I have been about 80%, so not fantastic, but not too shabby either.  The family are still happily chowing down their starchy carbs, but I do believe I have drastically cut down on their sugar consumption, and most notably in Harry (the 12 year old) have reduced his tolerance for sweet food.  He has remarked a few times about certain things tasting too sweet.

I am not consuming carbs in great numbers, though, being winter, I have been partaking in starchy root vegetables.  They have probably had enough carbs to generally keep me above ketogenesis level.  Beetroot, carrot, parsnip, sweet potato, pumpkin and very occasionally a small amount of white potato, or a piece of corn.  The baked starchy vegies strike me as a very wintery type food, with mountains of green salads more suited to summer.  Summer is just around the corner, so baked yummies will no doubt be replaced with more salads.

I haven't eating anymore than a mouthful of things like bread, pasta or rice.  There are occasional cheats, but they can no way be considered staples in my current diet.

I am still struggling to keep my daily fat levels high.  I may manage to get it up there for a few days, but maintaining it on a consistent basis is very difficult, and I have not managed to formulate a regular diet plan that naturally incorporates it.  Therefore I do still crave carbs.  I snack less, have less overall hunger, but still probably tend to eat more often than I strictly need to. Eating has such social connotations that I still feel compelled to engage in the typical 3 meals a day even if I am not necessarily feeling that hungry for a meal.  There is definitely a satiety factor to this diet.

So a typical days eating:
2 rashers of bacon and 2 eggs for brekkie followed by a cappuccino.  (this is probably a little high in carbs as it is made using soymilk).
lunch is more of a snack, as I am not so hungry, so would be most likely some left overs from the night before or some cheese and avocado wrapped in nori sheets.
Dinner is the easiest meal with some form of protein accompanied by steamed and or baked vegies which I add a few knobs of butter to.
85%+ chocolate, nuts and some homemade coconut oil bark constitute snacks and my attempts to try and up the fat in my diet.
Dessert may constitute a piece of fruit, such as kiwi fruit or strawberries and full fat greek yoghurt.

I keep meaning to one day, or for a week, take a true measure of everything I eat and workout the relative fat, protein and carb counts.  I suspect my carbs are sometimes a little high, the protein is probably too high and fat is generally not high enough.

Weight and health

Weight has been pretty stable.  Last time I weighed myself I was sitting at around 71.5kg.  I am slightly disappointed with my body shape.  If any fat has come off my body it seems to be primarily from my limbs.  My trunk (the area that most needs to drop the fat) is stubbornly clinging to its stores. I dropped the initial dress size and now hover between sizes where 16 is too ridiculously large and baggy, but 14 is slightly tight due to the old muffin top poking over the top of my waist band.

Energy and mental health have been great and I have sailed through winter (touch wood) with nary a sniffle.  The odd time I felt I was coming down with something, passed me by without getting its hooks into me.  So I am pretty happy about that.
I am still prone to cramping in my legs at night and feel my bowels could be better, so there is definitely room to tweek my diet in order to address those issues.

I am still reading up extensively on the subject and have begun to listen to podcasts, most notably Jimmy Moore.  I am reading and listening to the LCHF and the paleo commentators, so do find myself oscillating between paleo and LCHF, still unsure of which if either camp I will ultimately land in.

So all in all still chugging along.  We are in holidays at the moment so there will no doubt be some slip ups while we socialise with visitors, but hey, life is for living and I don't want to be stuck on a restrictive diet that hampers my enjoyment in other's company.

I am still breastfeeding so am wary that I don't want anything to strict or restrictive.  I intend to keep going pretty much as I am tending toward high fat low carb and maybe pulling out some more serious ketogenesis as needed. I am also still tossing up the dairy issue and whether I will eventually kick that. But at the moment its inclusion in the diet is helping with upping the saturated fat content.

Hopefully my next update wont take so long.

Current low fat recommendations

I find it interesting to note how dietary recommendations have changed over the years.  It seems the more "low fat" the authorities recommend us to go the fatter we as a population are becoming.  Just today I heard a news report on the radio that commented on Australians now being as obese as Americans and that the rate of obesity has accelerated.  This has lead to calls for an obesity summit.  It does make you wonder if current dietary recommendations are working or are they in fact just plain wrong?
This leads me to compare three separate pieces of dietary information that I have encountered recently.
1. the High fat low carb diet I have been researching and experimenting with for the last few months;
2. a school newsletter article that came home yesterday stating current NSW Health and Heart Foundation dietary recommendations, and
3. An article from 1999 in a mothers' magazine that talks specifically about children's dietary needs of fat and the recommendations from the then Australian Dietary Guidelines for Children and Adolescence.

High Carb Low Fat

1. Low Carb, High fat flies directly in the face of current guidelines.  By reducing carbohydrates, specifically starchy and highly refined carbs we lose weight.  Sugars from all sources increase our blood sugar and trigger an insulin response.  Insulin's job is to process this excess blood sugar and shunt it off into the fat cells. Carbohydrates are digested more quickly than fats and proteins so don't provide satiety and lead to peaks and troughs in blood sugar levels and the resulting insulin responses. This is fueling obesity and other chronic conditions as many of us are developing a condition called insulin resistance by eating this way.  By increasing fat and protein content of our diet we are satisfied for longer so tend to eat less frequently. The fats are essential for satiety and for nutrients and actually assist with weight loss because they keep insulin in check.

2014 NSW Health and Heart Foundation recommendations

2. The school newsletter articles that came home from school yesterday are really interesting and encapsulate the current thinking. The accompanying flyer states a few  "facts" that I will list here:
Did you know?
* National surveys found that the combined level of overweight and obese children in Australia has more than doubled in recent years.
* A major study revealed that the number of overweight and obese children in NSW rose from 1 in 10 in 1985 to 1 in 4 in 2004.
* Healthy snacks help kids and teens meet their daily nutritional needs. Snacks based on fruit, vegies, reduced fat dairy products and whole grains are the healthiest choices. Limit snacks that are high in sugar or saturated fats - such as chips, cakes and chocolate- which can cause children to put on excess weight.
* Reduced fat milk for children over 2 years of age is a nutritious drink and great source of calcium.

And here is a recipe to make for your child's breakfast:
Ingredients
2 eggs
1 tablespoon honey
2 1/2 cups of low fat milk
3 ripe bananas, sliced
2 cups of self raising flour
2 tablespoons of sugar
2 tsp margarine
3 medium apples, peeled, cored and grated.
Method
In a large bowl beat eggs, margarine and milk. In a separate bowl mix flour and sugar, add grated apple and stir into the wet mixture until smooth.
Heat oil in pan over medium heat. Add 2-3 tablespoons of mixture. Flip when bubbles appear and cook until golden. Serve with banana and drizzled honey.
Makes ten.
The picture shows a serve as a stack of three with thick sliced bananas between each layer and a sizeable amount of honey drizzled over the whole thing.

Is it a coincidence that children are eating more often and are getting fatter?  At my child's Primary school there is a breakfast club where the kids can get a feed of cereal and milk or toast and a glass of juice before school.  Around an hour or so later the kids are encouraged to have 'fruit break' to maintain their energy and concentration levels.  Then another hour or so later at ten past eleven they have lunch.  Lunch has been pushed to earlier in the day and been swapped with recess because it was decided that the children's energy was flagging and they needed a nutritious lunch earlier in the day so that they could make it through the next session.  They then have a recess break, for another snack at 1.15pm.  That is a lot of the day focussed on feeding the kids so as to keep them mentally alert. Sounds like the peaks and troughs of a high carbohydrate diet to me.
Then we wonder why they are getting fat and now need to increase physical activity to counteract all the eating. I wonder what would happen if we fed the kids something substantial like sausages and eggs for breakfast.  How many of them would be needing fruit break or even that early lunch?  They'd be able to spend more time playing in their breaks rather than eating too.
A substantial lunch - at lunch time - and they wouldn't be rushing home from school absolutely ravenous and prepared to eat any junk that they could find.  Maybe just a small snack and then they'd be right until dinner.

Now number three, the dietary guidelines I found from 1999.

This article is in response to a mother asking how much fat she should include in her child's diet.  The article is from Nursing Mothers' Newsletter summer 1999 and quotes the then current Australian Dietary guidelines for children and adolescents.
The association between high fat intakes and diseases in adulthood has led to important public health messages urging Australian adults to eat less fat.  It is important to remember that children are not simply little adults and they have special nutrient needs related to their growth and development.
Fat is important for growth because it is a concentrated source of energy. Although children's growth rate slows down during toddlerhood and school years they still require a higher energy intake per kilogram of body weight than adults. A moderate amount of fat in the diet is important to meet those needs.
Fat not only provides energy but also other important components for growth, such as essential fatty acids for cell structure and central nervous system development and precursors for the synthesis of eicosanoids ( such as prostaglandins).  Fat is also a vehicle for dietary sources of fat soluble vitamins. For these reasons low fat diets are not suitable for children under five years......

So in the intervening years 1999 to the present low fat diets have become appropriate for the under fives.  We never hear about the positives to our nutrition of consuming fat.  Fat is labeled as just fat and hence bad for us.  No wonder people get confused about what to eat.  Our health authorities are not exactly being very honest with us. I also don't believe that all of those attributes of fat as an essential nutrient for our bodies cuts out at age five, either.

I am glad that I ignored the low fat advice for my children. I always believed that their growing brains needed fat ( I had never really considered all the other reasons they may have needed fat) and unless they showed definite signs of obesity I would not ever have thought to make them switch to low fat.  My children are 18, 16 and 12 and are slim.  They have never had or needed a low fat diet.  I am glad that I am more informed about fat now and just wish I hadn't spent years trying to adhere to a low fat diet for myself. My skinniest child is now 6 foot 3 and still a bean pole.  He loves his meat and fat.  If anyone is proof that a high fat diet doesn't make you fat, he is. His example is probably the reason why I thought that there may be something in this new way of eating and thus I decided to give it a try myself.

It's now more than two weeks since I have started eating low carb high fat again.  The transition has been much easier than when I first started in February. This time round the sugar cravings (so far) are less and my sweet tooth is greatly diminished, but like any good addict I'm sure it wouldn't take much to push me back to a life of debauchery. Already I have greatly increased energy, I feel lighter and have lost some centimetres around my middle.  I haven't weighed or measured myself, but my clothes feel looser.

Finally, I will end this blog post with some words of wisdom from Dr Seuss.  He has a quote for everything doesn't he? Ellie, my one year old loves the Dr Seuss' ABC book and every time I read this page I think of David Gillespie's Sweet Poison.....

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.