30 Days Completed!

The total weight gain for my 30 Days of 10 Cokes a day is 23 pounds. I’m going for a blood lipid test tomorrow morning, and I’ll see if my cholesterol levels have been affected. I started out with Paleo cholesterol, which is radically high good cholesterol, and we’ll see if just 30 days can change that.

Yesterday was the first day of no Cokes and it was such a relief not to have to slam cans of soda all day, and also I spent less time running to the bathroom. I haven’t been particularly hungry the last two days, but I’ve been eating Paleo again right from the start: eggs and beans yesterday for breakfast, plain burger meat and cheese for lunch, but then I ate out for dinner and had fish and chips. Today, so far, no carbs. Buttered coffee and bacon for breakfast, deli meats for lunch – but I honestly don’t have much appetite and still feel full – maybe I’m not used to the new fat around my organs, or my body’s reacting somehow to not eating all the sugar, but I don’t have appetite.

A couple of readers commented that they thought my weight gain was mostly water weight. 23 pounds of water weight?! On top of 168 pound starting weight? I’d jiggle like a water balloon. No, sorry, it’s bulging fat cells, not water-logged skin. Here’s the Paleo argument about why it’s totally possible to put on 23 pounds in a month:

The reason why we have the ability to gain weight when we have an abundance of food is because there were no refrigerators back in Hunter and Gatherer times, and food sources were inconsistent. People had to be able to gorge themselves on available food to store as fat and get them through times when there wasn’t much food. Fruit ripens on the walla-bulla tree? Eat it quick and store it as fat, because it’ll all be gone in a week. Killed a cave bear? Feast like it’s the last cave bear in the world, because you need to store that energy until you catch the next cave bear, and that could be a while, right?

It’s a simple and wonderful strategy – that was only screwed up by our success as humans: we now have constant abundance, and we’re constantly eating and storing food.

Anyway, totally possible to gain this much weight as fat, and totally healthy – as long as lose the weight now.