Pigs just don't sing, just so ya know!

- Three hot dogs on oopsie rolls with onions, mustard and low carb ketchup
- Unpotato salad
- Atkins cheesecake
- Appetizer meatballs an an oopsie roll with mozzarella cheese and onions
- Pistachios (maybe a quarter cup or less)
- Bacon with a protein pancake

I have the best gf ever and not just because she cooks for me... but cooking healthy food for somebody is sooo the best gift you can give them, especially when they are in recovery-mode.

The last relationship I was in, when I lived down in Florida was horrific in terms of him understanding my needs to eat low carb. I took a one-way trip down there on a plane, shipped my stuff down there and he did not even have eggs for me to eat when I got there. Like, nothing low carb whatsoever. From the door, he didn't' really have respect for my eating plan. Looking back, I can't blame him completely because we have to tell people what we need. The gf's grand daddy says that we can't expect other people to know what we want, so we need to let them know.

To get on with it, I gained a ton of weight living with him, basically because he was not on-board with low carb, but also because I let him dictate what we would eat. Plus, there was a lot of emotional sneak-eating on my end down there due to my unhappiness and me wanting to say "fuck you" to him by giving him a fat girlfriend. So, me being extremely overweight was my own decision that I have to take responsibility for.

To get on with it, we have been business associates for about seven years and we dated for part of those years and he has eaten countless low carb meals that I have prepared. For some reason, it bothers me that he still does not understand the science about low carb or have any respect for the diet. He always would tell me that eating low carb WAS eating low calorie and that was why I was losing weight. The other day, when my ninety-or-more pound weight loss came up in conversation when he said he wanted to cut back on sugar, and I could not have been more supportive about him doing this, but of course, I went on my low carb tirade.

It just makes me feel like a failure in some way because he does not and will not give any merit to the low carb diet. I asked him that if he really thinks it's possible that we have it all figured out.

While his opinion of me is no longer important, I just feel like if I have been friends and once-lovers with somebody for years, then they should at least understand why I choose to eat low carb.

"At one point, everybody thought the world was flat," I reminded him, which is actually how I view the calories in, calories out myth. It's what we once thought, but now we can do better. He absolutely scoffed at me saying that and basically laughed about it.

I even leveled with him and told him that the reason it hurt me so bad about him thinking that it is only calories that make people fat and them being lazy because they are not exerting too much, he said that I was right and that is what happens. Part of him is right, it is overeating that causes the majority of people to be fat, but it's more than that, I argued. I told him that it's more of a hormonal imbalance in the core of the problem.

When I use terms like fat-burning mode, he says that that is not even a medical term, but something somebody made up. He has never had much of a weight problem even though he eats mostly processed foods. However, he is substantially bigger than he was in high school, where he was just a scrawny kid, so in his own mind, he is too big, but he only has about ten or twenty pounds to lose, I'm guessing.

I think what drives me nuts about him is he is educated. He has his BA in pre-med and he has worked full time in a hospital for over ten years, performing various tasks. Everybody who goes in for bariatric surgery has to go through him to get their sleep study and he is very unsympathetic to their weight. Judging by our conversations, he thinks that fat people are gluttonous and lazy, which I just do not think is the case.

Ultimately, what bothers me is I wonder if I can make a difference in people's thinking if I haven't even made a dent in his thought process.

Understanding why low carb works is purely scientific if we think of our bodies as a closed system. Fat is a stored carbohydrate and when carbohydrate intake is limited, our body goes to the stored carbs for fuel instead of the ones we eat... This is called fat-burning mode. (Well, that is my Barney version of it, anyway!)

In short, it's not about the amount of what we eat, but the quality of the nutrients that we are putting in our bodies. (Read: whole, low carb foods).

I rarely speak to him and we hardly even have what anybody would refer to as a friendship, nor do I want one, but the fact that I could not even penetrate his thinking about carbs and calories kind of saddens me and makes me feel like some kind of failure, but at the end of the day, his validation would be appreciated but is definitely not required.

I realize that it is not about him because I did not even care enough to argue with him much about it, but lots of people in my life feel this way... In fact, most of America will still argue that it's all about eating low-fat (gasp!!!) foods. WHY do we think that when we eat fat, it will become fat? So many people are so afraid of fat, which is so unhealthy. We need fat, in my opinion. It keeps me fuller longer and the more I eat of it, the more I seem to burn.

When we are retaining water, our doctor tells us to drink more water to "push" the water, and for us to ultimately excrete the excess. What about when we are retaining excess fat? I think that if we eat fat, we burn fat in our bodies. The fear of eating fat is just sooo ingrained in our culture and I think that it hinders so many people.

I read on one low carb blog and I can't remember which one, but it said that preaching low carb to somebody is kind of like trying to teach a pig to sing. It annoys you and it annoys the pig.

However, for me, the person I choose to spend my life with had better respect my eating plan, and boy, does she ever! The gf has not only switched to a low carb way of eating herself, but she always makes sure that we have good, low carb fare for me to nosh on... especially since I'm in a wheel chair for the time being, healing from the reconstructive knee surgery.

I went to my surgeon yesterday as my three-and-a-half week checkup. He told me that I now can take off my immobilizer to shower, which is great news. He also gave me an Rx for a Bledsoe brace, which is basically a brace that limits the range of motion of my knee. I am going to call around on Monday and do a couple of price checks for the brace in my area.

He also took more x-rays, and they were so awesome! my knee still looks incredibly straight and the one area that was pretty much bone-on-bone is now nice and spaced out, due to his little carpentry tricks, as he calls it.

They removed a wedge of bone from my iliac crest, which is the big bone that holds your hip sockets in place. It's kind of shaped like a pair of granny panties and its the big bone that holds our hip sockets. It like a little dice on the x-ray, like a cube inserted into one side of the wedge. Well, part of the wedge is being filled in with bone growth, which is exciting. Our bodies are so amazing.

"Everything is exactly as it should be," he told me before I left.

I'm still non-weight-bearing on it because there is just not enough new bone growth, but this is exactly where it should be.

Even six months ago, I had such a distrust for the medical community and especially surgeons in general, but this one really changed my views on that... and changed my life.

Just wondering, how do you all deal with the non-believers of low carb? Do you even let it phase you?