It’s been over 9 months now since I completed my 5th round of the HCG diet.  Kind of exciting to think soon it will be an entire year.

But I’m not perfect, so this blogpost is not about how I never gained or lost and ounce over the last 9 months.

The basics of what I cover in this post are:

• What I did when I DID gain a few lbs due to poor choices
• How Weight Maintenance + Travel to Another State Worked Out
• My Current Trial of a Treatment for Lyme Disease

The Good

I had been easily maintaining my weight between a range of 127-129 lbs for about 8 months.  It has been effortless in the sense that I don’t count calories, I workout only 3 hours a week, I don’t have to *think* constantly about my weight and food, and while I eat fairly “clean”- whole foods type stuff, I do eat carbs.  It has required some work in that I can’t just let loose and eat whatever I want, and I balance days or weeks of a little indulgence with days or a week of real strict eating to even everything out.

The Bad

My health has been declining again recently- the last couple months have been quite difficult for me.  If some of you don’t believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised because it never shows in my videos and only those very close to me have ever seen me in the condition I can often be.  I have been dealing with and searching for solutions to the different symptoms on and off for the past 10 years now.  Recently I had started to feel like I had exhausted every avenue and really didn’t know what to try next or what was really at the core of conditions- this was getting me discouraged and fearful about the future- my lively son needs a mom who can properly care for him and I literally have been scared I just couldn’t provide it lately.

The whole point in me bringing this up even is to say that as a result of my health being worse and being discouraged over it, I found myself not eating as properly.  I think I had been eating more carbs and just more food in general.  I still wasn’t consuming ice-cream and cookies like the old days- thankfully in the past 2 years I have come in a long way in not using food as a major comfort mechanism.  But I am not immune to the effects that struggles in life can cause, so definitely I was not eating as well as before.

Over the period of about a month I’d say I gained about 4 lbs or so.  When the scale hit 131.6lbs I felt uncomfortable because a lot of my pants also were not fitting well enough to be comfortable.  I went in for a hydrostatic body fat test again and I had indeed gained a few pounds of fat.  I was NOT happy about that because in the last two or two and a half years since I began my hCG journey and the many months in between each round that I wasn’t on hCG, I have NEVER gained 3 lbs of fat.  The most gain I saw was a 1/2 lb of fat combined with several lbs of muscle, which was okay in my book.  This test showed my muscle had not increased and my fat had increased too much.

What To Do When You Gain A Few Pounds After hCG From Poor Choices

At first I considered doing another round of hCG since I plan on doing a future “fine-tuning” round anyway.  But I didn’t really WANT to do that round right at this time.  I’ve been wanting to see if I could stabilize my health a little better somehow first, and plus, I’m pretty happy with my body right now and just don’t feel like doing the whole hCG thing if I don’t have to right now.

And I think for many of you guys too- why should you have to jump on hCG again every time you gain a few pounds?  Many of us are able to keep off the majority of our weight loss from hCG, but crises and difficulties in life will occur, and that might on occasion interfere with our “perfect” weight maintenance.  It’s nice if there is something outside of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) we can do to fix minor blunders like this.

I chose instead to try a combo of a strict almost no carb type diet with being very busy for a couple weeks.  The busy factor I didn’t actually plan in advance, but it worked out that way and it turned out to be an important component in my results- I got consumed with the helping the re-design for my website (coming soon folks!!) and it filled my brain and hours of the day enough that I didn’t think about food much.  As a result, I not only ate far less carbs than normal, I ate far less food in general during that couple weeks.

That’s something I’m not usually too successful at doing.  I can easily eat less carbs, or make healthier choices, but one thing I have NOT been so good at, even now, is eating LESS.  Being super busy with something that was really important to me and got my creative juices flowing really made food leave my mind.

I ended up losing like 4-5 lbs in a couple weeks- which for me was perfect- it took me all the way down to between 126.6-127.6lbs.

Traveling and Maintaining Weight

Then we left for Oregon for a whole week.  I was nervous that I might just gain the 4 or so lbs right back since I had been at a higher weight than that for quite awhile and hadn’t really “stabilized” my fresh lower weight again yet.

As we all know, it’s much more difficult to control our life while traveling- we often need or want to eat out more, and we often let our guard down more than at home, simply because vacation IS about having a good time and doing things differently- which might include indulging more etc.

I did not bring my scale with me, so I did not weigh for an entire week.  I was definitely a little apprehensive to weigh when I got back- I thought about not weighing immediately the morning after I got home, because we are all aware of how traveling on planes often leads to a little water retention (puffy fingers, the like) that is temporary.  BUT this morning when I woke up after arriving home last night, I decided to go ahead and weigh because I didn’t feel particularly “puffy” or anything.

Dum dum dum…..the scale read 128.8.  I’m VERY pleased with this, as when I left I believe I just about a pound less, 127.6 or so.  Additionally it’s quite possible that this will go back down further again because I may be retaining a little water and I ate super clean today.

So I’ll talk about what I did that probably helped me to not come home to a scary scale experience.

1.  Tried to balance days of slight overeating or overindulgence with days of clean eating.

There were definitely a few days where I feel like I either over did it a little (overly full feeling) or just knew I ate more carbs or food than I might usually eat.     On days like that, I tried to eat very low carb the following day, at least until dinner- just mostly grassfed beef and some yogurt with stevia for breakfast and  lunch- then dinner I might be able to eat a more regular meal.  This was just my way of trying to maintain a balance over the week.

2.  Still attended Crossfit

There are crossfits all over the country- actually all over the world- and I found one just 15 minutes from where we were staying.  I was able to attend crossfit the morning that we left on our trip, and twice while actually on vacation for the week so my level of exercise that week remained the same as usual.  If you don’t crossfit but want to be active while on vacation I’m sure there’s plenty of things to do- many vacations require a lot of walking and that in itself can easily add up to be your physical activity for the week.

3.  Mixed Eating Out with Cooking At the House Rental

We always try to stay at an actual house when we go away so that we can cook a lot of our meals at “home”.  We’ve been doing this for years now and it works well.  We ate out probably 5 or 6 times during the week, and the rest of our meals were either home cooked or berries that we picked (oregon should be called the berry state- we saw so many berries and so many types of berries it was surreal).  I believe though now that there are even a lot of hotels that have kitchenette options.

Why I Went to Oregon to Begin With- Lyme Disease Treatment

We made our trip to Oregon a family vacation, in case nothing comes of the treatment there won’t really be any true monetary loss involved, but the real reason we went there was to try out a newer treatment for Lyme Disease.

I don’t think I’ve ever even stated this on this blog, possibly because I wasn’t fully sure that I actually had it, but I can now state with much more certainty that I do have Lyme Disease.  I do not have a blood test to prove it- catching chronic lyme disease (meaning you’ve had it for a long time and got the tick bite a long time ago) is very difficult to do with current testing- there are many many false negatives.  But I have had two different naturopathic doctors now whose muscle testing has shown that I have Lyme Disease and a lot of my symptoms match up with it.

I have read very discouraging information online about people actually recovering from chronic Lyme Disease for real- I simply can’t find many- most of what I find is the blogs of many many Lymies who are still struggling, years later, to feel better.

I came across some information regarding the treatment of lyme with cold laser.  There is very little info online about it at this time, but if you search lyme disease and cold laser or laser therapy on google, you’ll find what little there is.  It was encouraging.

This is what tried when I went to see a Chiropractor who used this very treatment to help his wife whose Lyme use to be so debilitating that she was in a wheelchair.  I really didn’t have much to loser- there are no dangerous side-effects to trying the cold laser, the cost for the treatment was miniscule, and like I said, if it didn’t work, I could chalk up all the other expenses like airfare and car rental to family vacation.  For someone who doesn’t know what else to try and who is miserable, it’s good to try things that have this low risk profile.

It’s of course still very early to tell, but I can tell you that my energy and symptoms have dramatically improved since the very first treatment.  I’m not joking here.  My joint pain and stiffness has pretty much disappeared overnight for the moment, and my fatigue and energy issues are dramatically improved- such that at the moment I wouldn’t even say that I have an issue with fatigue.

I will definitely keep you updated as to whether I continue to feel well from these treatments- if I do, it will be quite amazing because the treatments involve 4 sessions, 30 seconds each.  That’s it.  Literally 2 minutes of treatment.  If that could actually reverse what has been basically a life-long battle since early adulthood with chronic illness.

Stay tuned!

PS.  Some of you like to keep up with my son’s growing up- Nolan comes on to say Hi somewhere around 21 minutes or so if you want to skip my long stories and just see him!

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