Trifecta: Fiber is a beautiful thing!

What is beautiful about fiber? With Benefiber or similar, I can add a spoonful of powder to anything liquid. It becomes invisible, doesn't thicken, and has only the barest hint of taste in straight water. It disappears in my food.

Fiber in a blue glass jar.

Thermogenex: it's bonafide!

I love this photo! I feel this way for a moment every shower, when the first cold cycle hits. Ray, your Thermogenex / Hypothermics is indeed the perfect complement for my Dex+ food hack!

I've said it before; I love steamy showers. I don't like being cold. But I lost over twice as much weight last month because I tried Ray's crazy cyclic showers. Seriously. 

Of cabbages and kings... Cashews, BP, maple syrup, et all

I've been pretty busy lately, dabbling with multiple things. I've made a Dex+ ketchup, which my daughter says tastes too much like tomatoes (?!); it does need a bit more zing. Not ready for prime-time yet, but it's promising. It tasted better warm than it did after chilling down. I'm close on some other new recipes too; wish there was more time in the day!

A montage of thoughts...

Thermogenex: another thing to try

A friend recently started trying Dex+, and also mentioned adding exercise. Next thing I know, I'm telling her cold showers are probably better. That sounded kind of crazy, even to me. My husband had been telling me about this crazy self-experimentation guy has been loosing weight by taking cold showers. A crazy guy that worked for NASA, seems to have a spread-sheet and data collecting fetish, and worked on ECLSS for Space Station. Then I thought, wait, do I know him? Why have I been ignoring that guy? Just because I like hot showers? Ummm, yes, I think that's it.

Now I've been reading his Hypothermics blog, trying to catch up. It makes a lot of sense to me. Wouldn't sacrificing steamy showers be worth loosing weight a lot faster? Today the answer is yes, it's certainly worth a try! So, I've downloaded the spread sheet. I've taken measurements, and recorded all my starting data. And, I took my first Thermogenex contrast shower. Not so terribly bad... if the payoff is high, it just might be worth it. It should complement Dex+ nicely. It's free, and if it works, I'll give him a donation. And maybe once the weight is gone, I can have my hot showers back...

Trust but verify. We'll see how it goes.

Controlling Fructose: Yep, I got it! Dex+

Took me a while to notice there was a second "Bitter Truth" video: 

Fat Chance: Fructose 2.0

I watched it to see if I'd missed anything, or gotten anything wrong. There is new info, and it tracks with what I've been experiencing (happy!). TL;DR: Here's my take on it:

Lessons Learned: Dex+

Look at my beautiful weight chart!

My weight chart, starting from the beginning of Dex+; each line is a pound.

Last August, I discovered "The bitter truth" about fructose. That day, I started my mission to control fructose.  I also started telling my kids all about what I had learned. They clearly found my enthusiasm humorous, but they also appreciate my quirks and determination. And they like my cooking; if reducing fructose means more tasty food experiments, where's the down side?

Stevia: lots of baggage?

Stevia. Honestly, I didn't even consider this stuff until a co-worker mentioned it. I remember it from "Breaking Bad", too, and not in a way that made me want to try any. As I was writing about sugars, though, I wasn't sure which category to putit in. Google time!

It's not an artificial sweetener, and does not contain fructose. Turns out it's related to licorice. My next question was, what kind of effect does it have on us? After all, fructose is natural, but wreaks a lot of havoc on our bodies.

Stevia is a South American plant, from in and around Paraguay. It has been widely used there for hundreds of years, and has been in commercial use by Japan since the 1970's. Stevia also suffers from some bad science; there are some old, poorly executed studies that conclude that stevia can be harmful. Even though the studies have little validity, their flawed conclusions have lived on.