Dulse Let Me Down

Well, this morning I got what could be considered some disturbing information from the scale. I was able to time it so that my weigh-in was after a bowel movement, so I wasn’t weighing myself with a colon full of waste. And yet, even after what I thought was largely a safe day, I showed a weight gain of 0.2 pounds.

I did throw some dulse on my salad with dinner, and that’s something that I hadn’t had so far during the experiment. I have been eating kelp liberally, and I just figured that dulse would be similar. 

Either, we have an anomaly in the data or dulse has proven unfriendly. The high sodium content might be a culprit. At least I assume there’s a high sodium content; it sure tastes salty.

Yummy dulse: A good source of iodine

I like to have a weight loss day under my belt before doing another major food test, so I was sort of pressing my luck by testing the dulse yesterday as it was supposed to be my day to recover from the Two Proteins test before I did the slow-cooked roast beef test today.

Oh well. It is a very small increase. To be fair, I could consider a gain (or loss) of only 0.2 pounds to be statistically insignificant. It is the smallest increment that my scale can measure.  So I’m going to go ahead with my plan to test roast beef tonight anyway, and put dulse into the ‘possibly reactive’ list. I want to go back and retest some of the foods I’ve already tested, just to make sure I get the same results. If they’re not repeatable results then they’re fairly useless.

The only test so far that has failed with a significant weight gain was the whole wheat bread at 0.8 pounds. Rye crackers and tomatoes both only triggered this same 0.2 pounds insignificant increase and should, therefore be considered only “possibly reactive” until further testing.  But scallops and two proteins in one day, both caused double that: a 0.4 pounds weight gain, making them a bit more likely to be considered ‘unfriendly’. 

My energy level is great and I’ve been in a great mood these past few weeks, so it feels like the diet is very healthful. But then there’s also the reality that I might not have that much more weight that I can safely and comfortably lose. Not that I’m a skeleton by any means, but I’m quite lean. In fact, I was quite lean 16 days ago when I started this project and I’m now about ten pounds lighter. Some of my pants are hanging on my waist so low that I have to roll up the cuffs to prevent myself standing on my pant leg. At some point, it would seem that my weight loss would halt just based on that fact alone. I may want to consider a non-weight loss day as a pass at this point unless I record a significant gain.

I’ll continue to explore and report my findings, although I want to stress that the information that I’m discovering is unique to my body chemistry. If you did these same tests, you might find different results. In fact, a friend of mine who reads my blog told me that she is replicating these tests on herself and has discovered that she reacts to chicken.  Isn’t that interesting? A food that makes me lose weight causes her to gain weight. I think this uncovers a very, very important concept in human nutrition: That there is no one diet that is right for everybody.

I highly recommend that everyone take the time to make these discoveries for themselves, especially before trying to follow a diet plan to lose weight. If my friend had taken the information I discovered about myself and applied it to herself without making her own tests, she’d be baffled as to why she kept gaining weight on a ‘safe’ day (because of the chicken). She might be fine with tomatoes and scallops which would make me gain weight, so her data would be completely the opposite of mine.

Using the words of The Nia Technique, we’re discovering My Body’s Way of utilizing food for health and nutrition.