#oneaday Day 397: Shedding the Kilos

I'm not well today, so you get an early entry, so to speak. I've been suffering with an annoying combination of stomach-related ailments since last night, which you probably don't need to know the details of but I'm going to give them anyway.

I have a hernia. It is uncomfortable most of the time and occasionally painful. When it gets painful, it also causes… well, there's no real nice way to say this, but a certain degree of gastric distress. That makes me more uncomfortable and annoyed and depressed, and basically the whole thing feeds into each other and gets inordinately frustrating.

After having an unpleasantly painful evening last night, I took today off. I feel a bit better now; I still feel like I might throw up, but at least it's not super-painful any more.

The annoying thing about all this is that I can't get it treated… yet. Because I'm a fat cunt, they won't fix the hernia because it would be very likely that it would just come back. So I needed to lose a lot of weight in order to even be considered for that treatment. And I mean a lot — we're talking in the region of about 8 stone or 50kg.

This has been going on for a while. Shortly before Christmas 2018, Andie and I started with Slimming World again; it was a programme we'd both had success with before, but for some reason this time we found it hard to maintain motivation. I think we just ended up getting bored of the things we had to eat, and how unlike "real" food Slimming World "versions" of classic dishes often ended up being. "Eat this, it's almost as good as bread!" …no it isn't.

So about a month back, the pair of us decided to give the keto diet a go. For the unfamiliar, this is a diet where you scale back your daily net carbohydrates to about 20g or less, and get the majority of your energy from fat. This puts your body in a condition called "ketosis", where instead of burning carbohydrates for energy, it burns fat instead — essentially, you're deliberately not putting carbs in there so your body has no choice but to burn fat for energy.

While, as with any kind of diet, there are limitations on what you can eat, I'm finding the restrictions places upon you during a keto diet to be fairly manageable in that I can still eat a lot of things that I like. Bacon: good. Oily fish: good. Nuts: good (hehe). Meat with fat on: good. I'm missing sugar a bit (stevia and erythritol are not great substitutes for various reasons) and occasionally I'd like nothing more than a big plate of chips, but for the most part, I'm doing fine — and presumably as a side-effect of all this, I've found my appetite has gone right down, too, which is a symptom I wasn't expecting to address, but it's effective nonetheless.

I weighed myself this morning, and in the month since we started, I've lost 10kg, which is about one and a half stone. I'm really pleased with this; at this rate, I might actually get where I "need" to be within six months… assuming progress continues like this, of course. There's always the risk of weight loss plateauing after a while, but the theory behind keto is sound, and I have a lot of fat to burn, so hopefully this will continue.

I'm not relishing my "reward" for all this, as I'm utterly terrified of hospitals and specifically surgery, but hopefully no longer having to live in daily discomfort will be worth it in the long term. I guess we'll have to wait and see.