So I've been back on a controlled carbohydrate diet for a week and lost 6.8 pounds. I always lose a lot the first week and then it settles down to about 2 to 3 pounds a week if I stay on the diet and don't cheat. I am not eating anything processed at all except for organic soy sauce, tomato sauce, and organic condiments, mostly our homegrown rabbit and chicken or the organic, sustainable beef and pork from the farm we go to, and a lot of vegetables and a balanced amount of fruit, corn, or potatoes at one meal a day. It is nice to be able to go outside and pick my salad daily. The freshness makes the lettuce so good.

If I have any bread products, which so far I have not, I will bake them from scratch. I might make my own noodles if I decide later on to have pasta, but I do have a few boxes of organic kicking around, so may not.

According to the x-rays I got on the 22nd I have degenerative bone loss in my knee, which I think is another way of saying osteoarthritis. For every pound of weight I lose, it will take 6 pounds of pressure off my knee. So to begin with I am aiming for a 50 pound weight loss. That seems doable to me, especially considering I am 14.7% of the way to that goal. 85.3% or 43.2 pounds to go. If I can lose 2 pounds a week, which I have done in the past on this diet, I should have lost 50 pounds by the 21st of December. After that I will set a new goal.

Next week after I've done their course of treatment for a week, which is hydrocodone, ibuprofen, and elevate and ice the knee, I can get an MRI to make sure there isn't more going on like the doctor and I both think there is. This is just what we have to do to make the insurance company happy. We have met our deductible now so the insurance company will be paying the majority of this bill, thank goodness.

I don't like the course of treatment as the hydrocodone makes me spacy and queasy, but it does help some with the pain. Not enough to be worth the symptoms on a long term basis, though. And I don't want to go on any of the arthritis drugs as they have nastier side effects than that.

I am using my knee brace a lot and that helps a bit. I've been able to hobble around the last couple of days and get a small amount of outdoor work done. Not much, mostly picking veggies. And I was able to do the grocery shopping. Most of that was at Joe's Garden and Goode's produce stand, with just a quick run to the store for our glass bottled milk and a few odds and ends.

We are meal planning quite closely now and trying to do a lot of prep work on the weekend. While the others are not dieting, they have all gone non-processed with me, since it is easier not to have junk in the house. I am hoping that the grocery budget will go down now that I am not buying TV dinners and chips and $5 loaves of bread for the others. If I could save $100 a month off the grocery budget, that would be really nice.