Getting Skinny

After I had gained a few pounds at Christmas, I went on the South Beach diet, and am proud to announce that I am at my skinniest since 1996!!!! WOOO HOOOO!!!!

I had to get down to "skinny" because I am planning to eat like a pig during our cruise and I don't want to worry at all.

Plus, I know that using the South Beach diet, I can lose it all again after the cruise anyway. It is a great diet. I first used it in 2009 and lost ten pounds. Then I stayed at that weight for a year (gaining a bit at Christmas), and now I've gone on it again and have lost 7 more. That is 16 pounds lost in all (but of course I did it in two tries.)

I think it is a very healthy and smart diet. If you've never read the book, the author/doctor explains that when people eat carbohydrates, their blood sugar goes up, their body makes insulin, and then later the blood sugar plummets, and then the person wants more sugar.

I used to do that all the time. I would feel hungry, eat cookies or candy, then an hour later I was ravenous.

With this diet, he teaches you to eat nuts, or cheese, or vegetables, (either a protein or a high fiber thing) and then it satisfies your hunger, and you don't get that spike in blood sugar that makes you hungry an hour later.

I can honestly say I feel stuffed all the time, because I can constantly eat, but it is mostly vegetables and things that make me full without piling on the calories. I lose about 10 pounds in three weeks and it stays off.

Read "The South Beach Diet" by Dr. Agatston, I learned everything from that book. But you can also go to the South Beach Diet website http://www.southbeachdiet.com/sbd/publicsite/how-it-works/how-it-works.aspx




(Sorry, politics is huge this week.)
Here is a great article: "The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama" by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, from the US News and World Report, Jan. 22, 2010. http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/mzuckerman/2010/01/21/mort-zuckerman-the-incredible-deflation-of-barack-obama.html?PageNr=1

Here's a paragraph from the article:

Most critically, Obama misjudged the locus of the country's anxiety: the economy. Instead of concentrating on jobs, jobs, jobs, he made the decision to "boil the ocean" and go for everything, from comprehensive health reform to global warming to a world without nuclear weapons ... and the beat goes on.

This was more than the Congress could absorb and more than the country could understand. Obama, the theoretician in a hurry, made no allowance for the normal resistance to dramatic change and the public's distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits. He didn't seem to realize that Americans understand in the most personal terms that excessive debt has real consequences, given how many have mortgages that exceed the value of a home and credit lines that are too much to carry. Yet this was what the president seemed to be getting us into. Over 60 percent of the country believes that government spending is excessive; Obama's lowest approval ratings come from his mishandling of the present and future deficits.