Phase I, Day 4

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Breakfast: asian breakfast scramble

Midmorning snack: 1 oz macadamia nuts, can of V-8

Lunch: tofu stir fry with cashews (we have a nice food court grill where you pick your own veggies--like bell pepper, summer squash, spinach, mushrooms, etc.--which they then stir-fry for you. Surprisingly, I didn't miss the brown rice I normally eat with it); can of Diet Dr. Pepper

Midafternoon snack: cucumber slices with baba ghanoush (eggplant spread) from Trader Joe's

Dinner: Stalk of celery, 1/2 red bell pepper, 3 T hummus

Dessert: mug of hot chocolate

Exercise: walked home from work, 1.5 miles

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I feel much, much better today. Still low-grade weak, but no headache. It's been very easy for me to avoid both dairy and high-GI carbs. I walked home from work tonight; that was the only exercise I could bear.

My resolve will be tested this weekend. I just found out I have a job interview in Chicago, and I'm going to fly out on Saturday and return on Tuesday. (Yay me!) This will involve going out to eat. For pretty much every meal. Ugh. I'll try to pack a lot of nuts and V-8, and pray for inner strength and a lack of easily available peanut butter cookies.

I've been giving more and more thought to this 8-13 pounds deal. The 8-13 pound claim could work via water-loss. When the body stores glycogen, which it gets from carbs, it stores 3 molecules of water for every molecule of glycogen. This is why marathon runners gain so much weight when they carbo-load before a race; 3/4 of it is water, the other 1/4 is the glycogen (essentially, circulating blood sugar and liver sugar). On a low carb diet, you're drastically reducing the body's stores of glycogen, and the water along with it. This is why you feel weak; you don't have the blood sugar the body normally uses for day-to-day fuel. (And again, this is why endurance athletes focus on eating carbs -- it pumps up the fast-burning glycogen stores they need for energy).

The diet *could* also work to genuinely eliminate 8-13 pounds of fat (or at least more than 1-2 pounds of fat) in the first two weeks by shifting your metabolism so that you are burning ketones for energy, which your body produces from fat. To do this, you really, really, really have to purge your body of all glycogen stores. If your SBD Phase I is super low carb (like virtually zero), then you will indeed bump yourself into ketosis, and burn fat at an impressive rate. This is how the Atkins diet works, in fact, and it *does* work (though it's hard to sustain and not very healthy). For vegetarians and vegans, though, the SBD is not going to be super low carb, even in Phase I, so we aren't likely to get into ketosis, and we aren't likely to match the 8-13 pound loss the book touts.

On the other hand, we will lose weight, and more painlessly than on most other calorie-restricted diets, because the low GI-carbs, frequently eaten, prevent us from getting hungry. Plus, avoiding carbs makes it easier to keep the calorie counts low. And we *will* lose at least some water weight, since although the diet for us isn't going to be low-carb, it will likely be *lower* carb than our usual diets, and that will make our body release some of the glycogen it's been holding on to. Actually, I'm convinced this is why I was peeing so much on Day 2 and Day 3, well out of proportion to the amount of water I was drinking/eating. Though I'm still drinking about 80 oz. of water today (Day 4), I'm peeing about half as much. All the glycogen is gone now, I guess.