Ken Nelson

Another week, another binge day. To me it might as well be called “twinge day” because I have a constant twinge of nausea and malady on it.

First off, I may have to change binge day from Saturday to another day.  Because I compete in a sport (USPSA pistol shooting) most Saturday’s I am usually up early, and out,  and then going all day, and forget the little binge day tricks.   I’ll think on that. Because I like to align it with my wife’s and Saturday is really good for her.

Breakfast – at 0700 at iHop:

Eggs, Over Medium, Bacon, Belgium Waffle. Fake maple syrup.

Snack: 2:30 (too late!)

A Halloween sized PayDay bar dug out of another shooters range bag.  Tasty. Hadn’t had one in at least 30 years.

Lunch:  3:30 at Texas Roadhouse

Why not have some of the rolls they offer when you are seated?

And follow that up with a nice juicy steak:

10oz Ribeye, Green Beans,Apple sauce (unpictured)

This was tasty. 

2000 – Bella Maria’s Pizzeria

Some calamari, bruschetta, and this awesome NY Style Pepperoni Pizza:

I like my 4HB breakfasts better than iHop fare. And I like my steak with double green beans instead of the applesauce. But I have to admit.. that pizza is really good.

Throughout the day I was busy participating in my sport, which requires a lot of walking all day with bursts of flat out sprints.  Here I am shooting a fairly typical stage:

I made a big mistake tonight and I did it for you, dear readers. In my quest to find something new at Wingers, I ordered something I thought was okay, but turned out to be 4HB bogus.

Here is the menu description:

Wingers Fajitas
Your choice of either grilled chicken, steak, or both. Served along with sautéed onions and peppers. Add plenty of lettuce, sour cream, pico de gallo, cheese, and flour tortillas.
    

Here is what showed up:

I never planned to eat the tortillas or the cheese and I held the sour cream in the order. But what is that teriyaki sauce all over the meat?

Next I SCREWED UP.   I figured, ah, there ain’t that much, and cheat day is tomorrow anyway, and I’ll just scrape the excess off.  And I ate it instead of sending it back for no sauce.

By the end of dinner, my head was spinning and I was feeling like I did before 4HB and like on cheat days.

So the lesson…

BE FIRM WITH YOUR SERVER IF YOUR FOOD ARRIVES 4HB UNFRIENDLY.
SEND IT BACK!

I will next time. I just hope this headache goes away soon.

Chili’s has lots of options. Today, I went with this classic:

Margarita Chicken, Black Beans, broccoli, and a lime.

Very good. Ate it all except for the tortilla strips.

Start: 201
This Morning: 186

Status:

Last night… I was busy interviewing people and then getting ready for SHOT show, and I FORGOT (gasp) to take a picture of my meal at Outback.  But, no worries, I had exactly the same food, and the same waitress even, as last time I ate there. (Wedge salad, pork chops, green beans).

Feeling Invigorated

I cannot stress enough that weight loss is a small part of why I’m liking the 4 Hour Body nutritional approach.  I feel GREAT.  I’m sharp and clear thinking. I do not get sleepy after I eat, or lethargic.  This is how I felt before my accident.   I suspect that my endocrine issues make me susceptible to sugar surges from regular carbohydrate and sugar laden food.

This morning

I plugged in turkey and spinache to my breakfast “formula” (breakfast = $availablemeat + eggs + beans + $veggie + salsa + sauerkraut) this morning. And came out with this:

This is a new batch of black beans, just cooked last evening with a big hunk of ham in it. Super tasty.  I ate it all + 3 brazil nuts.

A note on “cold”:

The book suggests cold water immersion as a way to help weight loss. I’ve not tried this, and probably won’t.  I do, however, walk the dogs most nights, dressing down below what I might normally wear. And I sleep with a light blanket only, and usually end up out of it.

I’m not doing the cold water stuff because I want this to be a sustainable nutritional approach that I can do for a long time.  Suffering isn’t part of my plan.

Applebee’s has lots of options for the 4 Hour Body participant.  Today I went with a simple choice… steak and veggies:

Frankly, I don’t miss the mashed potatoes that would have come as one of the sides.

BTW: On appetizers I wasn’t so lucky. This was all I could eat out of the “Sampler Platter” my colleagues ordered:

(-:

Start: 201
Today: 188

I expected an uptick today, as 3 pounds in a day is probably a touch of water weight. And I was up about 1/2 a pound, skipping over into 188.something.   Or I didn’t sleep enough. Counter to my plan, events (work), kept me up late. So I only got about 6 hours.

Breakfast

I thought I was out of sauerkraut this morning, so I dug out a bottle of red cabbage. I figured, it’s just sauerkraut with a different color.  But, on a hunch, I read the ingredients… #2 fructose from some plant,  #4, sugar.  Back into the fridge it went, destined for a cheat day of stuffed pork chops and German potato salad.

Fortunately, I recalled some sauerkraut maybe being in another part of the pantry and I found a bottle of Steiners Homestyle Sauerkraut there.

Turkey, Egg Beaters, Pinto Beans, Spinach, Sauerkraut, Salsa.

Yum. I don’t care for pinto beans much. My wife made them and then said in a crotchety voice “you haven’t tried the pinto beans”. So I tried them. They were good, especially if I got some of the spinach/sauerkraut in the same bite.  They taste fine alone, it is more of a “texture” thing.

Well… duty calls. Today we interview software engineer candidates in the (probably vain) hopes that we won’t have to crunch so hard into the wee hours in the future.

Meet Piccadillo:

It contains hamburger, olives (and the juice from the jar), onions, tomato, tomato paste, roasted red peppers, and garlic.  Brown the burger, then mix it all in and let it simmer to a thickness you like. 

Paired with black beans it meets all 4 Hour Body requirements AND is off the charts for flavor and character.

Where are the veggies???   I had broccoli laid out, but lost my veggie mojo and put it back in the fridge. I’ve eaten piccadillo since I was a little kid, and never had veggies with it. It didn’t seem right.

I had two helpings of the above. Tasty stuff!

I really like SmashBurger.  Before 4HB, I went there once or twice a week.  But it mainly makes meat on buns – not 4HB friendly. They do offer salads, but most of them have sugary sauces.  One doesn’t – the Grilled Chicken Jalapeno Cobb Salad:

It has chicken, lettuce, spinach, onions, tomatoes, peppers, jalapenos and guacamole. I donated the guacamole, which I view as green mayonnaise (ick!)  to a colleague and dug in.  It was tasty and lasted me til 5:30’ish at home.

Start: 201
Today: 187

I’ve been pondering my stalled weight loss. And I’ve come to these conclusions:

• I lost a lot quickly. The body probably over did it.
• I’ve continue to lose body fat, that’s a good thing.
• I seem to be a near perfect lentil burning engine. I eat, a lot.. You’ve seen the pictures.
  Yet… nothing comes out. I haven’t had a decent “poo” in 1.5 weeks. Unless an occasional deer dropping counts. TMI? Perhaps, but hey, you’ve seen what I eat, you ought to know what is coming out.  I’ll take steps on that. More fiber, and perhaps an “easing” medicinal tea.  And this will be my last report on this particular topic (-:
• I’ve been stressed, in a good way, at work.   We’ve burned the midnight oil this week and my sleep pattern has been severely disrupted by working til the wee hours (2AM).

So, with the work crush over, I slept. A lot in the last two days. And what do you know… 3 pounds came off.

So expect me to snooze a bit more in the coming days.  But I also expect that next week, when I attend the SHOT Show (a firearms industry trade show), my schedule will be really messed up and that weight loss will stall again.

Breakfast:

We boil up lentils, pinto beans, and black beans at the beginning of the week and store them in tupperware in the fridge.  My wife also made refried  beans last night, but I haven’t tried those yet.

So the “breakfast” formula is:

• find meat in fridge
• add eggs
• find veggies (either spinach or greenbeans)
• add lentils or black beans, usually lentils, since I like them better.
• add sauerkraut and/or salsa for “kick”

Today, the formula produced this:

Ground beef, egg beaters, lentils, green beans

I got busy with e-mail when cooking this, and I forgot to throw on kraut and salsa. But it tasted just fine anyway.  I ate it all.

Nobody else was hungry when I was hungry about 5PM today. So I rummaged around the fridge and found some halibut steaks I felt should be eaten before they went sour.

Halibut, sautéed in olive oil, balsamic vinegar and lemon juice. Black beans, spinach and salsa round it out.  Very tasty.

Tomorrow I expect to be 189 pounds again. With about 9 days since any weight loss.

I think that counts as “stuck”. Sure body fat is dropping, but I’d like to lighten the load on my joints.  I’ll be thinking on next steps and will pass them along, maybe in the morning.

I tried to talk them into Outback again, but off we went to Ruby Tuesday.

Which is a fine, 4 Hour Friendly place. Lots of options.

Today I went with the “Chicken Fresco”:

It has chicken breast, with tomatoes, and a light lemony butter sauce (no crème – I asked).

Very tasty. I added as my sides, peas and green beans.

John is blogging his 4 Hour Body results as well.
See it here: http://newjohn.wordpress.com/

I awoke this morning with a 4 alarm headache.  Why? Was it the Tom Kha Gai soup.. hope not.  Bummed that maybe the diet had let me down, or me it, I went out for my morning routine.

And I noticed I hadn’t taken my bedtime pills. Head ache explained. Because of an accident that killed an important chunk of my endocrine system,  I take a cocktail, a cupped hands full, of pills each morning and evening. Plus some at lunch. And one injection a day.  If I miss my evening pills, especially, the next morning goes bad.

Lacking much will, but needing to eat within a half-hour of rising,  I threw together something that took about 2 minutes of my time, and maybe 6 minutes elapsed:

Pre-made hamburger patty (CostCo), Lentils, Spinach, Sauerkraut, Salsa

The patty was tossed into a George Forman grill. The rest prepared from the fridge.

It tasted great. But I’m feeling lousy, so I only ate about 1/2.

I didn’t get to try Thai at lunch, so we resolved to give it a go at dinner.   Especially after all the comments and e-mailed suggestions – THANKS very much for those.

We went to Benja’s, an excellent Thai & Sushi place with two locations in St. George. We are truly blessed to have a restaurant of this quality in our town.

I’d been worried, but the worry was needless. I’d been eating Thai for 20+ years, but could not remember the last time I didn’t get Pad Thai noodles. That was “Thai” to me. Turns out, the menu is a lot broader and VERY 4 Hour Body Friendly.

I started with the Tom Kha Gai soup:

This looked 4 Hour Body good when I looked at just coconut milk on CalorieKing.com. Coconut milk, isn’t dairy, it has few sugars.  Alas, the soup, while tasty probably isn’t a great pick on the 4 Hour Body plan. Not a terrible one, and one I’d probably indulge in because it isn’t that bad, and it is SO DARN TASTY!

Next up… edamame:

Could this be the perfect 4 Hour Body food?  It’s a bean, but mostly protein. Pinch me!  It almost makes up for my miscalculation on the soup.

And finally, we chose two entrées:

Thai Basic Chicken, in stir fried veggies and Thai chilis.

Garlic Chicken on a Bed of Broccoli

Both were terrific. No rice needed, they tasted great as is. The Garlic Chicken broth seemed sweet, perhaps something was added that wasn’t on the menu description. To minimize that we took care to not get much of the broth. It tasted fine without it.

The Basil Chicken in Stir Fry tasted great and was 4 Hour Body Clean. And did I mention Tasty?

All in all Thai food is definitely a GO for 4 Hour Body, if you avoid the noodle/rice dishes and stick to the awesome selection of stir fry dishes.

And if in St. George, definitely drop by Benjas.

My Japanese guests elected for steak over Thai food. So off we went to Outback.

You can pretty much throw a dart at the Outback menu and get something good for 4 Hour Body – as long as you avoid the appetizers and the bake potato.

I had this excellent, well prepared, and VERY tasty meal:

Two Grilled Pork Chops, Green Beans. The remoulade is good, but I skipped it.

This was one of the better meals I’ve had out on the 4 Hour Body diet. I’ll be back for this one…