4 pounds and 3 inches off the waist: Let's do more!
Tunes for Tuesday: Outside, by Calvin Harris featuring Ellie Goulding

A moment of silence, please, for the Angry Polar Bear

image from www.shrinkingsisters.com

Remember the Angry Polar Bear? 

I introduced you to the bear back in September 2012 but it had been around much longer than that. I fought with it, tried to ignore it, made deals with it and sometimes was tackled by it.

Until recently.

I can't find the bear. Sure, I'm still working through the muscle memory of reflexively walking to the kitchen at night, but then I look in the fridge or the pantry and I go "Ehhhh, no. Not hungry. Really not hungry."

There is no bear to wrestle with (sorry, I'm just not writing "with which to wrestle"). I went to elementary school in Chicago -- we put "with" at the end of everything. ("Wanna come with?")

A major part of what my dietitian is doing is tweaking my hunger hormones back to normal -- but what is normal? I've been dieting since the age of 10!

OK, so she's tweaking my hormones to act like they're supposed to act. So I'm not hungry 24/7, ravenous late at night, craving sugar all the time. There are specific nutrients that help coax hormones back into working like they're supposed to, and they include things such as calcium d-glucarate, N-acetylcysteine (NAC), and  L-glutathione. 

Yes, extremely geeky. 

Hormone-Reset-DietI sat in a few nights ago on a webinar by Sara Gottfried, M.D., who is a board-certified gynecologist who specializes in natural hormone balancing. The webinar was actually for doctors and other medical professionals but I hopped on, hoping to make sense of terms like dyscircadianism, leptin resistance, and dysestrogenism. I found it fascinating, and also noticed that a lot of the nutrients she mentioned were in Meryl's supplements. I also ordered a copy of Dr. Gottfried's new book "The Hormone Reset Diet" (HarperOne, $27.99) so I could jump into more hormone talk geared toward non-medical professionals.

You also can hear a great podcast interview with her HERE at The Model Health Podcast.

I find this all fascinating because I thought I was doing all the right things and taking all the right supplements -- but I was getting nowhere. Yes, I lost 30 pounds but then I got stuck and stayed stuck until now.

And what's most different now is that I don't feel like I have to struggle or fight or count every calorie or macro or feel bad about not working out every day. I'm not eating anything I don't want to eat, I get to make smoothies every day, I can fairly easily eat at a restaurant from time to time, and my body is finally telling me "Yes, you've had enough food. You can stop now."

I don't think I've ever heard my body say that.

So, farewell Angry Polar Bear. I will not miss you.