Well, eating carbs when you’re on a low carb diet is like heroin - it’s hard to stop once you start.

I have plenty of excuses (see prior post), and a husband who is such a pleasure-seeker that he can’t deny anyone else (”Oh, go ahead, you’ve been so good recently” “Oh, don’t you just want a little taste of home?”), but the bottom line is that I just lost focus.

One thing that is very dangerous with low carb eating is cheating.  In any diet cheating is not good (and I’m using “cheating” just in a diet-ish way meaning ‘the food you’re not supposed to eat, or are supposed to restrict’, because fundamentally I don’t believe it’s really cheating - it’s just a choice.  On low carb you are eating foods that are very high in caloric density.  The diet works because of human biochemistry - if you don’t eat the carbs your body has to make them, and it makes them by dipping into your fat.  But it means you really do have to keep the carbs very low, and so if you cheat you don’t get the benefit and instead get all the calories.  Not only do the excess calories convert to fat (like on any diet), but also your body stores of carbohydrate, once depleted, re-fill, and in the re-filling store lots of water with it - making the scale jump up by leaps and bounds, well beyond the impact of the extra calories themselves.

If you don’t get it under control, you regain, and often after low-carb diets people put on the weight they lost plus several extra pounds in the blink of an eye.  If you do go for control, you face the same ‘induction’ trials as the first time - needing to cut carbs back drastically for a week or two to get rid of the carb stores again and get back to burning fat.

The good news is that I’m doing the second option - back in control, and will have a very focused week.

The scale wasn’t pretty (but not shockingly bad either) yesterday upon arriving back from California, but I’m hoping that after a week or so of solid focus I’ll be seeing Onederland again.