The Salt Vampire

The first day was hell. Ceej and Rob Petrie will attest to this because I sent them mail every 2 seconds: "Are you KIDDING? This is horrible! Does this hell end?" They both assured me that it would get better. It did, the second day. However, that first day I was constantly anxious, I couldn't concentrate for more than the 2 seconds it took me to fire off another e-mail, and I got very little writing done. Ol' Writing Machine Diane did a whole 4 pages, and I fully accept that they, well, suck.

One thing that did NOT happen: I never got hungry. I still haven't. I've done the diet 3 days now, and I still haven't gotten hungry. I know that they formulate these potions so as to minimize such feelings, but please--I'm on 700 calories, you'd think I'd get a little hungry. But I haven't.

The first night I had a very bizarre dream:

I'm in an episode of Seinfeld. Jerry and Kramer live in the same big apartment (not the one from the show), which is a huge, rambling thing in an Old Building. Jerry shows me around, and we come across Kramer ironing a gigantic fish on an ironing board to cook it. Kramer and Jerry are making a whole bunch of food for some party. The table where they're putting the food is already getting full--cakes, weird gelatinous things, other foods...

The second day, which was my first day at school, went much better. On Rob's suggestion I got a big thermos-like exercise bottle and sipped on shakes all afternoon. That worked pretty well, but having a day that went for 10 hours didn't. However, I'm locked into that and I'll survive. I went home and had another strange dream:

I'm in another old, rambling house that just goes on and on. Only this house is like a Cape Cod or a lighthouse that's huge and just continues. I go up in the annex, which is hollow like a lighthouse. The children who lived in the house before stashed cereals everywhere, both in boxes and on weird mobile-type constructions. I don't eat any of this cereal.

Ceej assured me that, yes, at some point the food dreams would end. I don't mind the dreams as much as the fact that they are Highly Symbolic--what do the big, rambling buildings mean? my body? my life?--and I don't get to eat any of the food, which actually makes me slightly nauseous in the dreams.

The only craving I've noted, other than to do the backstroke in the box of Godiva chocolates that sits on the living room table, is for salt. What makes this so weird is normally I hate salt and salty foods. Darin could snack on pretzels all day; I'm like, "This is hard bread with salt on it. Is this a joke?" But now I'm consuming chicken boullion of my own free will. (Like a dork, I bought the beef boullion too--how foul was that? Quite.)

Thursday at school I found a salt shaker, poured about half a teaspoon in my hand, and licked at it gingerly. It made me feel a lot better, if slightly weird for crossing campus licking the palm of my hand.

One reason I'm probably craving it so much is that I usually don't get enough of it and this is a low-sodium liquid diet. I have very low blood pressure--like, 90/60 or something--and so I'm one of the few people in the country who's ever been told to get more caffeine and more salt into my diet. (Can I smoke too?) I've been known to faint if I stand up too quickly--one time Darin thought I was kidding when I slid to the ground after jumping up to hug him, but he soon realized I wasn't.

This salt craving reminds me of the Salt Vampire creature on the Old Star Trek, a show I haven't thought about for eons. Mmmmm. Salt.

Now, before I hear about Oprah again and how she's proof that these liquid diets don't work, let me tell you about Oprah. First of all, she lost a whole bunch of weight--69 pounds in 4 and a half months--and then gained it all right back--84 in 3 months. That's what happens, right?

Wrong.

Or at least, that doesn't have to be what happens. In her own words (from page 13 of Make The Connection by Bob Greene and Oprah Winfrey (emphasis mine):

When people would criticize me and say, "Don't worry, she'll put the weight back on," I couldn't imagine what they were talking about. I thought it impossible. Anybody who had shown as much discipline as I had by not eating for four months certainly had licked this problem for good. What didn't know was that my metabolism was shot. I'd lost muscle weight. I wasn't exercising. And I didn't exercise after losing the weight. There was nothing my body could have done but gain weight...

November 29th, 1988: Exactly two weeks after the diet show, I've gained five pounds...I can't get used to being thin...

December 13th, 1988: I came home and ate as much cereal as I could hold. I eat junk all day. Not good at all. I've never decided how I'm going to keep the weight off...

(By the way, Make The Connection is a good book, and I'm not a fan of Oprah's. I highly recommend it.)

What have we learned from these small excerpts? Well...Oprah wasn't exercising. Exercising, I think we can all agree, is pretty darn key to being in shape. Even if the exercise doesn't burn off the weight, it helps you burn some of the calories you do consume. And you feel better anyhow.

Am I exercising? Not currently, but I'm looking forward to getting back to it. I stopped in December because I was having that funky problem with my left leg, which is now gone. The diet place recommends that I not exercise for the first two weeks. I will probably actually start next week, considering I'm in better shape than most of their clients.

We have also learned that Oprah did not learn anything about behavior modification. She continued to eat as she always had, or even ate worse than she had. Well, there's no point in trying to lose weight in any way--be it radical diet or just cutting down on what you eat--unless you modify your behavior.

I can't eat everything I want to, and I've eaten a lot of stuff I haven't particularly wanted to--I just ate it because it was there. That's how I got to look this way in the first place.

What I don't understand is this Zone diet. A friend of mine recommended this to me, and I've been doing some reading up on it. It's famous for saying that everything you know about eating is wrong--we should be eating more protein (though not to crazy levels, like the Atkins diet) and far fewer carbohydrates, cutting out bread, rice, and potatoes altogether. Fat is an important part of the diet (nice unsaturated, non-animal fat, of course)--you eat in a 40/30/30 carbs/protein/fat ratio.

It sounds very complex. And it doesn't sound as though it can really work. But my friend swears by it, and several people that I've found on-line (like on the Well) think it's the second coming as well: you eat less and you have tons more energy and you lose body fat (at something like a half-pound a week) on it, provided you eat only the protein you need and no more.

Actually, I spoke too soon up above: I did get hungry today, but only because we were in a movie when I was scheduled to take my shake. So I was hungry when we got out an hour later. I had my shake while Darin and Fernando had food.

By the way, I feel the need to point out that Darin is not happy about my doing this diet and he's perfectly happy with me the way that I am. However, he's tolerating my doing it.