Dukan diet Cruise Phase (Phase 2) week 12 – Vacation transgressions take their toll and I gain weight for first time

by Marshall Brain

Here is my journey so far with the Dukan Diet:

And today I am reporting on my twelfth week (days 81 through 88) on the Dukan diet. This week was not a great week – I went on vacation and actually gained a pound rather than losing weight. Or, looking at the bright side, I went on vacation and only gained a pound rather than gaining 10 pounds. Here’s how the week unfolded…

Day 81 –
– My body dumped a lot of water last night, and this morning on the scale I was rewarded for two days of decent eating with 1.6 pounds of weight loss. I weigh 192.8.
– Recall from last week that I am currently on vacation at a family reunion kind of thing in Myrtle Beach with Leigh’s family. Today started off really well with half a pound of chicken and half a pound of salmon and some yogurt for breakfast and lunch. But then it went into a steep downhill dive at dinner, because we took the entire clan (all 26 of us) to a big cookout/picnic in a local park. On the menu were hot dogs and bratwurst, plus a whole bunch of chips, salads, and so on. I ate too much (2 hot dogs, two brats (but thankfully no buns), plus some nuts, some pasta salad (because it contained a lot of broccoli and tomatoes and not much pasta), and a lot of raw carrots), and I painted outside the lines by making the fatal mistake of eating a Dorito (“would it really hurt to eat just one?”). That one led to another (“what could one more hurt?”), and so on – at this point it is obvious what happened next because it is becoming a pretty consistent theme with me at parties. I simply cannot paint outside the lines or I get into trouble, especially at picnics and parties.

Day 82 –
– Hot dogs and brats and Doritos and nuts contain a lot of salt and a lot of fat, and I gained 3.0 pounds on the scale this morning. I now weigh 195.8. Sheesh. Time to buckle down again. But unfortunately there is a lot of snack food laying about…
– Today I am taking a “vacation within a vacation”. Leigh and the kids are staying in Myrtle Beach with the rest of the clan, and I am flying off for a day. I am not taking the scale with me, so I will not be able to weigh myself on this trip. This will be the first time since starting the Dukan diet that I won’t be able to weigh myself.
– Today I ate a pound of salmon, half a pound of chicken, two or three or possible four handfuls of nuts, some Doritos (like a hangover, I had some for breakfast) and then for dinner I had a chicken breast salad at Subway at the airport. This was the only “Dukan friendly” food I could find. It actually was not a bad salad – I was surprised by how much chicken came with it.
– Today I walked for about 30 minutes.

Day 83 –
– I did not weigh myself this morning because I don’t have a scale.
– I had put some oat bran in a plastic bag and apparently left it on the counter because I don’t seem to have it with me. So I am oat bran free today – also a first.
– I skipped breakfast, and here’s why. The hotel offered a “free breakfast bar” which sounded good. So I walked in to said bar, and it really was interesting to see that there was not a single Dukan-friendly option available. Every single food was a carb. Usually at a breakfast thing like this there will be some kind of yogurt, usually sweetened but yogurt nonetheless. No yogurt. Sometimes they will have hard-boiled or scrambled eggs. There were no eggs available. Sometimes there will be cottage cheese. No cottage cheese. They had breakfast cereal, pastries, breads, muffins and even a cook-your-own waffle griddle. But not a single protein option. Somehow I think this says something about the “typical American diet”.
– For lunch I ate at one of these buy-it-by-the-pound salad bars because they had lots of Dukan-friendly options. I had cantaloupe, salmon, beef with broccoli and a little sauteed chicken. It was probably a quarter pound of beef, a quarter pound of chicken, a quarter pound of salmon and a quarter pound of cantaloupe because the whole meal was just over 1 pound. It was pretty salty. In the middle of the day I was compelled by social circumstances to eat one hot dog (with bun) from a street vendor. For a very late dinner I had a chef salad at a restaurant that was pretty salty, but the dressing was on the side so I don’t think it was terrible from a calorie standpoint (but who knows with restaurant food?). I felt pretty good about my food consumption for the day.
– I probably walked at least 3 miles today. It was a hot summer-in-the-city day. Interesting side note – I drank at least a gallon of water today and did not pee once between 8AM and 10 PM, which probably says my body retained a bunch of water today. I did sweat a lot today, but not a gallon I don’t think.

Day 84 –
– I did not weigh myself this morning, I will be very interested to see what I weigh tomorrow morning though. Even though I have been on the road eating “restaurant food,” I feel like I was able to keep a lid on calories and stay pretty true to the Dukan diet.
– Today I ate relatively well considering that I am on vacation – chicken, lunch meat, a couple handfuls of nuts, etc. – but then there was a big family party tonight. OK, I admit I had a sort of largish size piece of birthday cake and some ice cream. And maybe some Doritos. Looking up the calorie counts on these items, it was probably 1,000 to 1,200 calories. But the rest of the day was excellent and the total for the day could not have been over 2,500 or 3,000 calories. And it tasted good. But that did not prepare me for the scale…
– I got on the scale tonight, just to see. This is not so unusual – In general, if I weight myself at night I can subtract 2 or 3 pounds and estimate my morning weight. I weighed 199.2! How is that possible?

Day 85 –
– On the scale this morning I weighed 196.6. That really makes not a lot of sense to me. I thought I did so well on the trip calorie-wise. I admit that I messed up at the party, but how did it translate into that much weight gain? Or is it all water weight gained (for reasons unknown) on the trip?
– That weigh-in was a wakeup call. And today we would be driving home with the kids. So I bought a pound of lunch meat before the drive, and that was lunch/snacks in the car. I also ate a pound of chicken (breakfast) and a pound of Tilapia and a serving of asparagus (dinner) and some cottage cheese. Total calories today was 1,500? Something like that. But salt was high. The lunch meat alone had 4,000 milligrams of salt I later discovered.
– I rode the exercise bike tonight for an hour and it says I burned 400 calories.

Day 86 –
– This morning on the scale I weighed 195.8. Eating right (calorie-wise) and exercising had some effect, but not as much as I hoped.
– Except for one transgression, I had a good day with food. I ate chicken, Tilapia, cottage cheese, 3 eggs, a handful of walnuts and a serving of asparagus.
The transgression was a pancake breakfast. The kids had friends over for a sleepover, and they requested chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. So I made a big batch, and I needed to test the first one to make sure they were tasting right. Wow was it good! So good, in fact, that I needed to test 4 of them. They had about 100 calories each. Probably the best pancakes I have made in my life.
– Once again I rode for an hour on the exercise bike and burned 450 calories this time (by increasing the level). So in theory I burned off my transgression.
– As I went to bed I realized that vacation is officially over tonight. Boo. As a family, it was a great vacation. From a Dukan diet perspective, it was not the best week of my life.

Day 87 –
– On the scale this morning I weighed 194.6. Meaning that, unless there is some kind of amazing water dump today or something similar, I will actually gain weight from my week on vacation.
– I tried to eat well today. I had a pound of chicken, a pound of Tilapia, 3 turkey burger patties, 2 cups of cottage cheese, and a serving of asparagus.
– I am also trying an experiment with sesame seeds. My sister in law reports good blood pressure results from eating sesame seeds, so I am going to try eating a couple of teaspoons a day for a couple of weeks and see if I notice any effect. This article discusses potential benefits.

Day 88 –
– On the scale this morning I weigh 193.8. I gained 1.0 pounds over the last week, and have lost 33.8 pounds since starting the Dukan diet.

So… there are two ways to look at this. The positive way to look at it is that I went on vacation and gained only 1.0 pounds for the week, despite messing up many times. The negative way to look at it is that I went on vacation and committed many transgressions that were well outside the boundaries of the Dukan diet, and I paid for those transgressions with weight gain.

I think the thing I am disappointed about is the fact that I should be in the 180′s by now (say 189 or 188) and I am not because I have not been doing so well over the last three weeks. On the other hand, even though I am not doing so well, there is still some kind of lid on my weight. It would have been easy to go on vacation and gain 5 or even 10 pounds – I have seen that happen to me before.

The only thing I can see to do is take it day by day, get back on the path of Dukan righteousness and see if I can shave off 2 to 3 pounds in the coming week so that I get back within striking range of the 180′s. It is nice to know that that is actually possible, simply by using the techniques I have learned on the Dukan diet. Let’s see what happens.

[[Click here to find out what happened next…]]

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