Potatoes Day 6

Right. So I have had no cravings for other food, no desire to binge and no major issues so far. I have had a few times where I felt a little spaced due to low sugar levels but I just ate a potato and it passed.

Fucking potatoes eh? Down to 100 kilos in less than a week. Am blown away.

Am expecting to gain some weight when I begin eating other foods again but it's pretty great to see some unprecedented progress on the scales. I can't see any difference yet but I'm pretty tall so my weight gets spread across quite a distance. Only 25 kilos to go!

And here is a list of shit fat people get;

• Skin tags (those fuckers are gross and annoying)
• Puffed walking to your car
• Beards growing before you're 30 (PCOS)
• Sweaty all the time!
• Makeup wears off quickly due to oily and sweaty Jess of being fat
• It's hard to put shoes on
• Your arse flopping over the edge of the toilet seat
• Hard to wipe in stalls cause there's no room!
• Saggy ass boobies
• Old man arse
• Random hairs sprouting everywhere, like horrible surprises 
• Scars on the inside of your mouth because your cheeks are too fat for your jaw and teeth 
• Almost impossible to cut your toenails so you pretend going to get a pedicure is something you just want to do
• Waxers commenting on how hairy you are and how sweaty you are because you stick to the paper
• Tattoo chairs drenched in sweat when you get up
• Chairs with the butt sweat on them
• Dark, sore, red marks where your bra, underwear, tights, pants and jackets have rubbed all-day
• Giant boobs that are too big for life
• A sense of humour used to self deprecate before anyone else can

Boom. I'm sure there is more, feel free to add below. 

Potatoes Day 5

I am very tired but it's not because of eating potatoes, I just had nightmares last night.

So headaches gone, weird flushes gone and I still have a good amount of energy.

Going to head to bed now but feeling great about my new diet - also looking forward to eating something other than potatoes in 9 days. :D

Presto Diet - Day Three

My partner showed me a video of Penn Jillette talking about his weight-loss. Said video is here.

I bought his book 'Presto' and started upon a reading rampage. His book is funny and I definitely don't agree with everything he talks about but the main pretence made sense to me.

I've only ever done one diet before, the Liver Cleansing Diet - which my Mum and I did together when I was about 16 or so. I did it and lost a bunch of weight and got a crazy amount of comments and positivity from EVERYONE. It was stupid, because as soon as I began to eat like myself again (binges and all) I just gained the weight back on. Plus I felt like a fucking failure.

Recently I decided to go back to Over-Eaters Anonymous again. I'd gotten to the point of exhaustion with my bingeing - my obsession with food had taken up so much of my energy that I was barely able to keep the rest of my life together. OA is a strange place, you go there because you really don't want to and you keep going because you really really don't want to. It's that type of awful feeling, deep down in the pit of yourself that is just screaming to leave the room - and your rational self realises that sitting in a room for an hour with strangers, telling you about their lives and eating habits should not illicit that reaction. The only reason your mind is reacting like that is because it's trying to save it's addictive self. You and your body want to keep running yourself into the ground because the addiction is just that strong, it has been your coping mechanism for life.

That addiction has both helped and hindered me through almost my entire life, starting back when my relationship with food and my body went sour. Much like how most of my future romantic relationships would go, it was a one-sided, needy-as-fuck relationship. Food was my first love. My second was my friend at Primary School that I used to obsessively stalk whilst he played soccer on the field.

Needless to say, the unrequited loves of my life made me terribly unhappy and food was a comfort to my loneliness, anxiety (that one has become quite the fucking buzz-word lately hasn't it?) and fear.

So this book by a Magician who at best I find funny and at worst I find annoyingly arrogant, felt refreshing and interesting. It also sounded like an bizarre way to implement the Meal Plan which OA recommends as part of your recovery process. A bit like doing an experiment on my fucked up, self-abused body.


At the real core of it all, I don't want to think about food constantly, I don't want to be obese and have all these shitty health problems at 31 years old, and I sure as hell don't want to die early because I ate too much BK.

The Potato Famine part is tough (it's also pretty offensively named). I have done it for almost 3 days now and my obsessive mind has been obsessing about potatoes a lot. And then this morning I woke up and I wasn't hungry, I think mainly because I don't really feel like a plain potato or kumera. That's interesting to me - that because I've taken the choices and pleasure out of my food (it's for 2 weeks), my mind doesn't feel like eating and I can clearly listen to what the rest of my body needs.

So I feel okay, more okay than I expected to feel. Although Penn mentions that the third and fourth days are generally the shittiest for people, so I'm waiting for that. The headaches are shit, the hot flushes are annoying and the puffy face is too but so far that's it. In the meantime I see my weight has gone down - whether or not it's just water weight or something else I don't know but that's cool, I'm in this for the long run. I started at 106 kilos and I'm now 102, my goal is 75.

I want my body to be healthy and live a long time and I'm eating potatoes for two weeks, then a mainly vegan based diet until I reach my target weight. Once I'm there I'll be vegan most of the time and eat what I want every two weeks, for a 4 hour period.

Penn's book may be a money-making venture, it may have more jokes and ego than medical advice (he does mention that he is after-all not a Nutritionist but a Las Vegas Magician) but it has helped me because it led me to believe that with my naturally obsessive and extremist personality (much like his), I needed to make changes that go with my nature, not against it. I cannot eat like a 'normy' and I don't want to. I'm going to eat like a big fat Magician whose trying to heal his body, and so far I feel like this is working for me.

Watch this space...