Very Skinny Asparagus Scare

The moral of this story is: Don't freak out about water weight loss.

It goes like this:

Anyone who has been reading my blog for awhile knows that I absolutely adore skinny little asparagi (that's the Latin plural of asparagus, I've decided) and that if I run across them at the store, especially out of season like now, I will buy and eat them immediately. So on Friday night, I decided at the last minute to have dinner CR friendly dinner company, and I ran out to the nearest decent grocery store. Aha! This store must have some sort of connection, because they always have the skinny green ones, even when all the other stores are selling only the icky tough ones. So I bought a bunch, and added them to my delicious-if-I-do say-so-myself dinner, which included:

romaine salad with scallions and grape tomatoes
bean salad of kidney beans and corn, marinated in pureed tomatillos with a touch of green chile sauce
asparagus, lightly steamed (5- 7 minutes?) served drizzled with that Williams Sonoma lemon herb olive oil, the juice of one fresh lemon, and some lemon pepper, all mixed together.

It was fabulous! It made me feel better about this whole olive oil thing too because I loved the asparagus with the olive oil drizzle I had created, and I even put it on my salad. It was the lemon that did it. I find that in my lowfat vegan days, I relied so heavily on strong tastes like vinegar and wine in cooking that I find oil makes things bland. I know this seems totally freakish for people who love French cooking, but I'm getting used to it, okay?

So we ate dinner, and when I was clearing the plates, I discovered about a third of the asparagi bunch sitting still in the steamer pot. (I mean still sitting in the steamer pot... no one thought the asparagus would be dancing in the steamer pot, as opposed to sitting still. I simply adored the "misplaced modifiers" unit in grammar class. For example: "Putting her luggage in the overhead compartment, the train pulled away from the station."I didn't feel like finding a container for the remaining asparagi, and they just looked so lonely sitting there, so I ate them. In total, I ate two thirds of a bunch of asparagus. The entire day had been right about at calorie target, just a touch under protein target, and thanks to the olive oil drizzle and the olives I put in my salad, right on fat target.

The next morning, I got up, and as usual now that I have been scared to death about losing weight too fast, I weighed myself.

I had lost three pounds overnight.

I was totally freaked out.

Now, let's be calm and rational about this. No one loses three pounds of real weight over night. It's obviously water weight. Asparagus is a well known diuretic. So the asparagus, in addition to a somewhat lower salt day than usual, caused kinda the opposite of what Kenton was talking about in his recent post to the list about using soy sauce and nuts to "plump up" for a social event. I just lost a lot of water weight overnight.

But when I discovered this it was 6 am, I didn't think of that. It seemed too silly to email the entire list for confirmation that losing three pounds over night is water weight, not dead rat syndrome in the making. Too early to call ten friends who know nothing about CR but are likely to be supportive no matter what. Too early to do anything other than panic.

So at this point the rational thing would have been to decide to just up my calories a little, maybe throw a bit of olive oil into my whey shake (I am kidding about that, you know. I'm not that nutty... yet!) and go back to regular salt intake, eschewing asparagi, no matter how skinny, for a day.

But did I do the rational thing? NO. In complete and utter panic, and also kinda wondering what it might taste like, I went to Dunkin Donuts and got a bagel with cream cheese!

You know, it wasn't even that good. For one thing, they didn't toast it, even though I asked them to. For another, they gave me plain cream cheese instead of veggie. It took me about an hour and a half to eat the whole thing. It was about 500 calories. That, combined with the heat and the fact that I was feeling a touch under the weather, conspired to make me not hungry again until nearly dinner time. I think my body went into bagel shock at 7 am and didn't really recover.

I walked four miles, however, drank a ton of water (it's in the nineties here, and even with my CR inspired heat tolerance, it's too much) and did a whole lot of packing of the house for the move. That required me to make numerous trips outside to the trash and recycling carrying very heavy things, and by the end of the day I was feeling hot, exhausted, and a little sick. But I had made dinner plans to go to my favorite resturant in Philly, so I went.

My favorite restaurant in Philly is called Audrey Claire, and it's at 20th and Spruce. It is so good, and it is friendly to those who eat little because it doesn't classify things as appetizers and entrees, only as "small dishes" and "bigger dishes." It has tons of great little appetizers and salads on the menu, and it's byo so it's not that expensive, even if you like to have wine with dinner. I only go in summer because while it's delightful to sit outside at the sidewalk cafe tables, the inside is crowded, loud and stuffy. So this was probably my last Audrey Claire visit of this year.

I was really hungry by this time, so I ate a piece of the homemade bread with olive oil that they brought out first. I hadn't had this much bread in one day since pre CR! Then I ordered my favorite dishes: flatbread with toasted walnuts, bosc pears, and gorgonzola, and a pita and dip tray with this spicy fig dip thing, spicy hummus, and white bean and tarragon dip. My dinner companion who is also a very light eater though not explicitly CR (yet... it's contagious! She's about to become one of us! You will be assimilated.) ordered a goat cheese salad with mixed greens. We intended to share, and got the dips first.

We ate all the dips and we were both stuffed. The waiter looked confused but was understanding when we ate about three bites of our "entrees" and asked for them to be wrapped to take home. We said, "We love the food, we just don't eat very much." He was very cool and said, "It's okay, I don't eat much either." We left a huge tip: $12 on a $27 meal. The key to eating in nice restaurants (this place is way cheap but is one of the nice restaurants in Philly... if you are in Philly in summer, you must go there.) is to order the little tiny amounts of food you want, but to tip as though you ate more. If you go to the same places over and over again, the waiters will start to give you things for free. I get free stuff all the time.

By this time I was exhausted, it being past my bedtime, so I went home and crashed. This morning, my three pounds were magically back! I felt so relieved. It may seem odd to the non-CR folks out there to be relieved about *not* losing weight, but for CR to work, you can't lose weight too fast.

One thing that is so wonderful about being a woman (and there are so many wonderful things about being a woman, aren't there? But I don't want to risk quoting Shania Twain.) is that I have so little lean body mass that I easily adapt to lower calorie counts, without feeling much hunger. I remember before I discovered CR, I was jealous of those lean, muscular people who worked out all the time and ate a ton. Now, I'm grateful for my slower metabolism! For me, with little lean body mass, CR isn't exactly easy, but it's not that much of a tradeoff.

This is also good news for the women out there who have tended to be overweight. If you do serious CR, you can outlive your irksome skinny Jane Fonda workout friends.

Today will be a more planned food day. I need to hit my protein target, and I'll be spending most of the day avoiding the heat. I woke up still feeling under the weather, though I think it's the heat and exhaustion more than anything. I'll be so glad when this move is over! No more sitting in traffic for two hours a day... an apartment with a balcony, pool, and fitness center... who could ask for more?