The First days...

The hGC diet is great to start. Day one is just normal. Eat as you normally would. Take the drops 3 times a day. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. I felt fine and had a completely normal day. There was just one thing... I was terrified of what the actual diet was going to be like. I read my binder of "what to expect" and all the scientific stuff but I was still scared that eating 200 g of meat and 2 cups of veggies and 2 apples was going to kill me.

Day two is even more fun. It is the first of two "gorging days". You are supposed to eat as much high fat food as you can. It is supposed to make the transition from food burning to fat burning easier. On that day I went to lunch at this fabulous Indian restaurant in Layton. Oh man... anyway, I was feeling ok but low on energy and had periodic headaches. I still hadn't weighed myself. I was so terrified about how much I had really gained this year. Fortunately day two was New Year's Eve so I stuffed myself with potato chips and shrimp dip. Mmmmm.

Day three is also a gorging day. I got a bad headache early in the day. It was so bad, I could hardly force myself to eat. Dilbert took pity on me and let me lounge on the couch and complain. He took the kids out to dinner and brought me back a hamburger, fries and a pumpkin shake. I ate it all, even though it about made me retch. I don't like ice cream, by the way. Anyway, it made the headache go away for a few minutes but it came back with a vengeance. Apparently it is a common occurrence. When I called Richard to chew him out, he said to eat more fat so I made popcorn and saturated it with butter. Again, I felt better for about an hour but then was miserable again. Also, I had no energy. I was so glad I didn't have anything I had to do because it wouldn't have been done. One curious problem was I had no appetite. I wasn't hungry at all so it was hard to force myself to eat, especially eat fat stuff. My kids pledged to be super supportive so they planned menus for the next few weeks so I wouldn't have to cook and they put all the Christmas decorations away while I reclined on the couch like a slug, eating everything fat I could find. Heaven is something like that, sans the headache.

Sunday was day one of the phase 2 part of the diet. On the diet, you can have tea of coffee for breakfast. Since I don't drink tea or coffee, I don't eat breakfast. Fortunately It was fast Sunday so I didn't have a problem with having nothing for breakfast. One very good benefit was I wasn't hungry at all. And my headaches were almost entirely gone. And I had significantly more energy than the two gorging days. By the way, this is not usual. Usually the headaches and low energy begin on this day, lasting for a day or two. For dinner I had my spinach and my 100 g of beef. Yumm (not). Since you can have no fat, you have to be creative as you cook your meat. Herbs and salt and pepper are allowed, so I season it up a LOT. I figured the more flavor, the less I will feel I am missing. I also eat VERY slowly so I can enjoy the time at the dinner table with my family. It is the time we do the most of our sharing with each other so that was really important to me. Oh yeah, I weighed myself and it was worse than I thought. I weighed more than I had ever weighed before. It was very disheartening.

But that soon changed.