14 Days Out - Appetite and Mood different by the minute

Put off nuts, and most cheese, for as long as you can. They are healthy, but it is incredible easy to eat a billion calories worth.

We all start off counting out a certain number of nuts. But after a while, we end up eating al the nuts. Eventually, they find you on the floor of the supermarket nut aisle, laughing maniacally, surrounded by empty nut packages.

I hear you there!

Pistachios are my kryponite.

Very few of us can accurately eyeball volume/weight of food without the help of a food scale.

I use a food scale for everything.

That was 1.5 ounce of ham, and less than a quarter of an ounce of cream cheese.

I ate half of it, so 3/4 ounce of ham and half of a quarter once of cream cheese, along with 1/2 spear of pickle.

Did anyone notice the little ****tail fork on the baby plate? I put that there for comparison.

Little bit of advice.

Ditch the pickle spear for now (you can have them a little further down the road) and concentrate on the proteins. I lived on deli ham and turkey with a slice of thin cheese (any kind) for the first couple of months. Boar's Head and a few other brands have no nitrates in them and if you get the meats sliced thin or even shaved they will be even moister. Don't forget you can also cook your own ham, turkey breast ect. and get a cheap slicer for homemade deli meat. At least you can season it the way you want and you don't have to worry about what was added.

I also lived on scrambled eggs, cottage cheese, yogurt, ricotta bake and refried beans. Have you ever checked out eggface. There are tons of post-op recipes and they are all so darn good.

I LOVE Eggface! I started following her a long time ago, but have only recently started visiting her page regularly. She's my hero. :)

I also really like Boar's Head, just about all of them. I usually get it sliced really thin...probably shaved? I'm going to wait on the buffalo chicken and the roast beast. I had some pureed buffalo (it was ground, then I pureed it after cooking) the other night and I only ate a couple tiny tastes. It's still too soon for me to have red meat.

Ricotta bake! I wonder if I have any ricotta cheese....hmmmmmm

Quite a bit of research contradicts the idea nitrates are bad for the human diet. This article summarizes a fair bit of research nicely and has aged well. Nina Teicholz also talked about one of the frequently cited studies about nitrates being evil at the 2018 low carb Breckenridge conference...it uses animal models and the amount they gave them was far higher than what humans would consume percent wise.

Even if they were dangerous, you have more of a chance of getting listeria from produce than nitrate accumulation from 1-2 slices of deli meat. There are far worse pathogens to contract from agricultural produce potentially than nitrates (slight) chance of harming us. We also, as WLS peeps, consume a significantly smaller amount anyway.

Sodium is also not the devil we may think, as well.

Amen.

An apple a day can build up a dangerous level of pesticides as well.

Yup. Vaguely related tangent before people say organic apples don't have pesticides:

it's a pet peeve of mine when people go on and on about organic farming being safer. It isn't necessarily pesticide free. And most organic agriculture does use pesticides to varying degrees. Ironically, some non-organic farms use less.

Absolutely. When people see "organic" on the label, they picture someone farming with a horse-drawn plow and maybe a little horse manure. Organic has an extremely loose definition, and is a guarantee of nothing.

The only way to truly "eat clean" is if you use a time machine.