Rye and Chocolate


The next morning, after my cheese experiment, I had still registered a weight loss on my scale.  So that would indicate no inflammation triggered by the addition of goat cheese to my diet. I will consider the sleepiness an anomaly for now, perhaps triggered by one or more other factors, and keep cheese in my daily diet of friendly foods.

I feel like I should also mention something that could very likely be a factor, and that is that two days before starting this program, I had strained my lumbar spine. I was in great pain and suffering from inflammation due to the injury.  But the next day after ‘cheese’ day, (the day that I felt sleepy and ended up getting about 11 hours of sleep that night) was the first day I experienced relief from the pain and inflammation of the injury. So the fatigue and the incredibly long night of sleep could’ve been my body demanding the rest it needed to take me over that healing hump into painlessness.

I must say that even though I ate cheese with lunch and dinner the next day, I never felt the sleepy effect that I felt the day prior. I’m not going to completely discount it, though, because after sharing the news of my cheese-sleepiness, I found that two other people reported feeling the same post-cheese exhaustion. I’ll still use it sparingly and keep an eye on it. If I get another chance, maybe I’ll retest it again in the future.

My meals for the fifth day, were basically the same as what I’ve been used to since the start; comprised of friendly foods (now with the inclusion of one ounce of cheese with lunch and one with dinner). 
Rye
On day five, I also experimented with eating two rye crackers, and having some dark chocolate for dessert. It was a calculated risk, trying two new foods on the same day, and also staying with the cheese, but all three items have a low likelihood of reacting, so I thought I’d be safe.


I felt fine after eating both, unlike the cheese which left me immediately sleepy.

My thinking was that if i did fine on this day, I could immediately add cheese, rye and chocolate to my friendly list and that'd be great! But I also knew full well going in that if I did have a reaction, I’d be unable to determine whether it was the cheese, the rye or the chocolate. 

The news came the next morning when it was time to weigh myself. Up to now, I’d been losing about two pounds a day since I starting doing this. I knew the weight loss couldn’t continue at this pace, or I could theoretically just eventually waste away, and I knew I was getting proper and adequate nutrition because of the way I felt and the research I had done. But this morning it came to a grinding halt.

I weighed in and was surprised to see that I had gained 1/5 of a pound. It’s obviously not a lot of weight. In fact, it’s the smallest increment that my bathroom scale can register. But compared to losing two pounds every day, it does seem like it could possibly be a reaction.  

As I said, I was taking a calculated risk, adding two new foods back in. And now I suffer the consequences. I’m not sure if it was the rye or the chocolate or the cheese that caused me to gain weight. I’m going to say it’s pretty unlikely to be the cheese, because I didn’t gain any weight after the first time I added it. It was the sleepiness that I was keeping an eye on, and as I said, it could be due to the injury.

So today, I have some beef that’s been in the refrigerator and waiting for this day to come. Today is Day Six and the day I was planning to test beef. Now, this plan was originally formed under the assumption that I’d be fine with everything up to now. Last night’s reactivity sort of threw a wrench in my plan.

For today’s menu, I’ve cut back on everything but the safest foods and will stick with only adding beef with dinner tonight. I’m testing beef tonight rather than waiting a day because I’ve already had the beef in the fridge for a few days and I don’t want to wait any longer before cooking it. Typically, after reacting, I’d want to go back to friendly foods for a full day to allow the inflammation to recede.

My plan (fingers crossed) is that I will NOT react to beef and will register a weight loss on the scale in the morning. If that’s the case, then I will be poised to go back and retest cheese, rye and chocolate. However, if I DO show a reaction to beef, I’ll have to use the following day as a rest, and go back to only safe and friendly foods for a full day. 

Now that I’ve lost ten pounds in less than a week, and I suspect that my body may have reached a happy set point, I am curious to see if I still lose weight by following the friendly diet on Day Seven. It sounds like, in a few days, after a few more calculated experiments, I’ll have many more answers.

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