VLCD#4

2.2 lbs loss on the scale today. I was really hoping to lose a tiny bit more, as that would have put me under 210 instead of the 210.4 where I am right now. Oh, well. Guess I will have to wait one more day to get under 210 ;P Seriously though, 2.2 lbs lost is pretty darn good. I have lost 9.5 lbs since my highest weight after load, so not bad at all.

After two days of having chicken and asparagus, I decided to switch it up some, so today I am eating chicken and cabbage. Big change, huh? I am also having strawberries instead of apples as my fruit as well. I am not sure I am really allowed to use it, but I put some Frank's hot sauce on my chicken and cabbage meal. I figured a couple drops wouldn't hurt, especially since there is basically nothing in the hot sauce anyway. It made the cabbage taste way better and not so bland.

I attempted to blend my frozen strawberries into a sorbet, which was a pretty nasty reminder that I need to get a different mini blender. I had forgotten just how wimpy the Magic Bullet is when it comes to blending up chunks when there is very little liquid with it. Granted it works really well so long as you are making liquidy things or slushies with sugar. I hope to make blended slushies this summer that are mostly ice and flavoring with artificial sweeter, so I will need a better blender for that. I am not sure I want to fight with the bullet for the rest of the 40 days of the HCG Protocol though. It took me half an hour fighting with the bullet to get my strawberries to even puree this morning. Basically they only blended up nicely once they had thawed out, which meant I had to freeze them again and wait even longer before I could eat them! So frustrating!

To fix the blender issue, my husband is going to go to Sam's Club tonight and pick up a Ninja. The whole line of Ninja blenders have really excellent reviews all over the web, so we are going to try one. We will be getting the Ninja Master Prep Pro. On Amazon it sells for $70, but we will only have to pay $50 at Sam's and will be getting an extra small container as well (hence why we will be getting it from Sam's!). It sounds nice, so hopefully it works much better than the bullet and can actually puree frozen fruit like claimed. Just for comparisons sake, we paid $50 for the Magic Bullet when it was on sale.

Having a blender that works well (I hope!) will make it easier to prep foods for this diet. It would be kind of nice to have soup once in a while. Eating strawberry sorbet is much more appetizing to me than plain apples as well. Slushies with flavored Stevia drops might not be so bad either, and would actually be something I could have. Once I get off this and onto Atkins again I will be able to make blended coffee drinks. I like to use some ice, instant coffee, and about half of an Atkins shake to blend up into a drink. Using the bullet for that was difficult though, since if I didn't use crushed ice there would be huge chunks of ice in it still. This diet hasn't been too bad so far, but I am missing some of the foods I am used to eating. Last night it was hard to eat my plain chicken and asparagus while everyone else was eating cheesy sausage quiche, it looked so good, lol

VLCD#3

The scale read 212.6 lbs this morning. That is 7.4 lbs lost in just a couple days, and 2.4 lbs total progress so far. Over 2 lbs lost in one week is pretty good progress, and the week isn't even over yet! So far so good I'd say. Hunger hasn't been an issue yet and I have been losing weight faster than I had hoped for.

Thursday will be my seventh day following this diet, so that is the day I will post my weekly summary (so everything lines up neatly on my diet calendar, otherwise I would do it on the eighth day so all 7 days were actually counted for). I plan to remeasure waist and hip measurements and body fat percentage, as well as total weight lost. I won't be posting before and after pictures until day 40 when I will be switching to Atkins Induction for three weeks.

That's all for today, hopefully more good news to report tomorrow :)

"Need a Tan" Gelish polish.

Just finished my mani. I like the color, though I had to do 4 coats to get it opaque. Also, this is my first time using the "Structure Gel" on myself, so we'll see how it all works. :)

Just testing the blogger app.

I just wanted to test the blogger app that I just downloaded. This is a picture comparison between the two Gelish gel polishes. The small one on the left I bought at Sally Beauty, the big one on the right I bought on Amazon. I paid the same price for both of them; $13 with free shipping from Amazon (I used seller Quick E Shop) and the Sally purchase was made locally.

My adventures with gel polish.

I am a big DIY kind of person, in that I don't like paying other people to do things that I can do myself. I haven't paid for a hair cut in years, and I have never went to a salon to get my nails done. I have always done my own nails and spent a while doing acrylic nails at home (on myself only) but didn't care for it too much.

Recently I've been getting into the gel polish. I had bought a SensatioNails kit awhile ago and have been getting used to using it. My first application looked good, but I got it too thick near the cuticle and it started to lift after about a week's time. The next application I did better, but got it too thin on the edges and it started to lift after just a few days. I have since bought the Gelish Basix kit and prefer it to the SensatioNail brand. I goes on better and it seems to last longer. I have mixed the two products in one application and have had zero problems doing so. What I mean by mixing is that I use the SensatioNails colors with the Gelish prep, foundation and top coat. The reason for that is that I don't have many Gelish colors yet ($12 a bottle, so I plan on buying a new color every couple weeks until I have a small selection to choose from).

My most recent manicure I did on myself was a french tip using Gelish "Sleek White" and "Bashful." I really like the white color, but the base color was a little disappointing. "Bashful" is shown as a pale sheer pink that is shimmery. When I get it on though, it is very very sheer beige with golden flecks of shimmer. The end result is that my nails end up looking yellowing. In some light it looks okay, and in other light my nails look just plain fugly. I will need to find a new base color for my french tips, but won't worry about that for awhile. My bottle of "Need a Tan" should be coming in the mail today. "Need a Tan" looks like a light nude color online, we'll see what it looks like once I get it on my nails.

When I do my nails today, I will not be soaking off. I will file the gel down to a thin layer then put the new on right on top of it. I hate the soaking off process as it seems to take forever and dries my nails pretty badly (during the process anyway, as they are fine after). I may have a crappy bottle of acetone (my husband got it from Wal-Mart for me) or my technique may just suck, either way I don't feel like doing it today.

One thing I feel like I should note, is that polish performs better on the gel than it does on my natural nails. I put some glitter polish and a top coat over my gel manicure to change it up some, and it has stayed on remarkably well. I didn't rough up the top of the gel at all, so was concerned about the polish even sticking. This is nice just in case I get tired of my nails and want something different but don't want to do a full-blown gel mani.

I have started doing my girls' nails with the gel polish. I am not really in favor of little girls wearing makeup, but nails can be fun and girly. I wouldn't normally put gel polish on them, but I am trying to get my 7-year-old to stop chewing her nails and my 5-year-old to learn to take better care of her nails. When their nails are painted both girls are more careful with their hands and it helps protect their nails (not as easy to break or so likely to be damaged by chewing). I have promised them if they take good care of their nails that I will buy some fun colors for them (my oldest wants bright glittery pink and my youngest girl wants really dark red, lol they are sooooo predicable).

 Here is my mani with polish on top at 10 days of wear. Today is day 11 and I have 1mm of new growth already showing at my cuticle. I will probably never know how long the Gelish lasts before it starts to chip, as I don't think I could stand how 3mm of new growth would look.

Just another shot of my nails, this one is to better show the length they are currently at. This is the length I like the best. It is long enough it looks nice, but not so long as to interfere with daily life. I like the way long nails look, but I hate not being able to use my finger tips.

This is my seven-year-old's nails. This is two coats of SN's "Pink Chiffon" with the gel mani finished. Then I painted regular polish over the top, the color used is Nicole by O.P.I. in "Love Your Life." As you can see, she picks at her fingers a lot and chews the nails down to the quick.

 Here is my five-year-old's mani. She picked SN's "Taupe Tulip" color (this is two coats). She isn't as rough on her nails as her sister, and doesn't chew her nails (you can see how much healthier looking her finger tips are). Unfortunately she got my nails; fast growing but very thin and flexible. Her biggest problem was that her nails would get long quickly, break with jagged edges, and she would accidentally scratch herself pretty frequently. The gel should help her nails to not break, and the tips won't be sharp anymore. I will need to redo her mani every week though because of how fast her nails grow.

My new Gelish "Need a Tan" just came in the mail, and it looks really great! I will update this post with a picture of it on later tonight.

VLCD#2

So the rest of yesterday went well. I only felt a little hungry twice during the day, right before supper and right before bed. All in all, day #1 went pretty well.

I had no idea what to expect my weight to be this morning, but I was pleasantly surprised that I am down 3.6 lbs from yesterday. If I lost that much every day I'd be at my goal in no time! Seriously though, that was more lost than I was even hoping for. I expected the rest of this week to be spent on getting those two load days off, but it may just take a couple days.

As far as hunger goes this morning, it hasn't been too bad. I felt "empty" when I woke up, but there was no gnawing hunger. I used my Melba toast (my husband went shopping last night and actually found some!) for the day and one apple as my breakfast.

My meals today will be chicken and asparagus. I am not a huge fan of asparagus, but that's because I have a hard time buying and cooking it so it turns out. I am going to experiment with steaming it in the microwave. Hopefully it turns out and I don't just end up with inedible green twigs. Hopefully today goes as well as yesterday did.

VLCD#1

I am frustrated. I had a post all typed out on my Kindle, and it crashed. My entire post is now gone, and I get to start over, oh hooray (insert obvious sarcasm here).

I am partway through the day. It wasn't too weird not eating breakfast, seeing as how I usually end up doing that anyway, so not much of an adjustment there. It hasn't been too bad pushing the fluids either. I got out the tea brewer and made some iced tea. I have drank about half of my daily requirement of liquids so far.

Lunch was weird. I am so not used to eating chicken. Low-carbers typically don't eat a lot of chicken because of the low percentage of fat in it, so this is the first chicken I've had since Thanksgiving. I am using a few diet tracker apps to track my calories and nutritional intake as well as my daily weight. The one for my calories keeps reminding me that my calorie intake is way too low, lol DUH! I didn't put in 500 calories per day goal on accident. The apps are pretty convenient so far.

Speaking of apps, I am encouraging my husband to start using the Atkins app for his iPhone. He has problems tracking carbs, and having it on his phone would make it much easier for him. The reviews for the Atkins app give it a pretty bad rap, but from the little I played with it it didn't seem so bad. It seems kinda dumb that people complain about having to add some of their own custom entries, which if you are used to tracking your carbs on a piece of paper using the app seems like very little work. I hope he stays on track and uses the app to make sure he doesn't go over his carb limit. This morning he stuffed his omelet with cheddar and cream cheese, and I think he is unaware of how many carbs he added by doing that.

I did get my husband to help me with the calipers and taking a before picture (which turned out horrid since I was super bloated from the pizza we had eaten for supper yesterday). We finally settled on my body fat percentage being 30%. That isn't much higher than I had gotten on my own, but it is enough that I feel a bit better about it. I am darn certain that I am not in the normal range, given that I am obese and probably 4 jean sizes too big for my ideal weight.

I probably won't update again today. I have a few things to do that will keep me pretty busy, and there isn't a whole lot else to say. Hopefully I will have a smaller weight to report tomorrow (I am not expecting anything, but am hoping for maybe a pound this first day before things really get rolling).