Day six recap

Saturdays should, in theory, be the easiest days of this challenge. I rarely have commitments on Saturdays, so finding time for the gym is pretty easy, and because I am more consistently at home it's easy to cook for myself. In practice, of course, my one-day weekend (because of my regular lab work at Roosevelt on Fridays) provides a stiffer challenge because it's easy to just want to relax. As it happened, I weighed not going to the gym but ended up doing so anyway, getting in another hour on the elliptical to bring my "fitness minutes" total to 360 for the week, matching my target in spite of taking Wednesday off.

After the gym I was absolutely ravenous. I think I need to start frontloading my carbs more; on both Friday and Saturday I went to the gym with extremely low carb totals for the day (in both cases, ketosis levels) to that point and both times I came away ridiculously starving and craving carbohydrates. In hindsight, it makes more sense to eat whatever carbs I'm going to have for the day before the gym, leaving me with a little more fuel when I go, and then for the post-gym dinner try to hold the carbs to a minimum, I think.

At any rate, this level of hunger led to my first "cheat meal," as we went to McCormick and Schmick's. I did consider just getting plain grilled fish and not cheating, but I was so low on carbs at this point that one meal seemed like it would be fine. And really it was. Even with a couple pieces of bread, cod wrapped in a pastry shell, and a scoop of ice cream for dessert, my calculations (admittedly rough) only ran me to about 2,000 total calories for the day and 165 grams of carbs - both well over what I'd been doing for the past week, but hardly anything excessive (in fact the 165 grams of carbs still falls a good 62 grams below the recommended minimum on the website I use to track my food intake, even accounting for my weight loss goal). It's worth noting that I woke up this morning with very mild heartburn, which had pretty much vanished during the preceding week. This could be attributable to the extra carbs or to the fact that I ate more than 100 g of carbs in a single sitting, though really it could just as easily be attributed to the fact that I ate a reasonably-sized dinner at 9 pm. I don't know for sure, but I will say that it put a damper on my desire to have any more full-size meal cheats in the near future, although I'm sure those cravings will come back.