The Diet Rest Day Made My Bile Rise
It's weird. I love my "diet rest day," though I hadn't been practicing it for awhile. Almost every day had become a "diet rest day" for me over the past couple of years.
A month or so ago I got myself back on track - mostly - with the goal of losing 15 of the 20 pounds I had regained. This last week I tried something different with my diet, too. I decided to reduce my carbs and focus on eating more veggies and protein.
I am a big carb freak. I believe in carbs. I love carbs. I live for carbs. But since my goal has been to shock my body back into weight loss action, the biggest shock would be to reduce my carbs. So I did.
My "diet rest day" was actually 1.5 days (shhh). Sunday I was very free with my eating and pretty much ate every carb and sugar that was available to me. Unfortunately, a nice client had sent cookies, cheesecake and German chocolate cake home with me(!) so I had to sample a bit of them all. By the afternoon I started to feel dizzy and sick to my stomach. I could literally feel the sugars racing through my body....and I didn't like it.
Because I had cut down on carbs and sugars so drastically the week before, I was more impacted than usual. And in the evening, when I took my son out to dinner but didn't feel like eating a whole meal, I simply snacked on two of his fried mozzarella sticks.
That's when it happened.
Suddenly out of nowhere I felt bile rise, burning its way up my throat. As if that wasn't bad enough, somehow the lava bile made its way up my nose the "back way," which pretty much left me choking. Everything inside me was burning. I briefly wondered if I would be featured on the TV show "1,000 Ways to Die - Death by mozzarella stick-induced bile overdose."
This episode was odd for me because I wasn't really binging. This was a planned "day off" with no furtive or secretive trips to the fridge, no frantic face-stuffing. I was kind of over all of that and moving forward.
This misery did teach me one thing: my rules of "everything in moderation" and "balance" actually have merit. No, I shouldn't have cut my carbs so drastically, but I still will for the next month or so to keep my body on its toes (I believe overall that a balanced "Zone" type diet is the healthiest). Yes, it's good to shock my body with a heavier carb/higher calorie day now and then. And, surprisingly, massive amounts of sugar do not make me feel good. I should have stuck mostly with whole grains, fruits and just a wonderful bit of chocolate...I would have enjoyed my carbs more - bile free.
Lesson learned.
Onward and forward.
~Helen
