HCG and Learning

I am hesitant to write about this. About a year ago on CNN there was a girl who had lost her job due to the economy and decided to take the opportunity to get healthy and freelance write about it as well. She wasn't successful and I don't want others to share in my failure if I fail. I am trying the HCG diet. I heard about this diet over a year ago when I was pregnant with Gideon. My sister was going on the diet and she said since I was pregnant I should do it (it uses the hormone your body makes when you are pregnant). I was too sick to even think about it. There was nothing about pregnancy that I wanted to inject into my body. Pregnancy has never been fun for me. The only time that I choose to do something pregnancy related when I wasn't pregnant was when I was on my mission. I took prenatal vitamins to try to help my hair grow out faster from a bad haircut. (I wonder what the clerk thought who sold me the prenatal vitamins and KY Jelly [to help with chronic bloody noses] as a missionary). I digress. Anyway, here I am a year later. I am not nursing Gideon because the Dr. told me to stop. He wasn’t gaining weight when I was. I would normally still be semi okay with my post pregnancy body, but since I am not nursing him I am feeling a push to get things moving in the right direction faster than usual. I have tried many diets and have exercised my body to extremes without weight loss. So here I am trying something I wasn’t even willing to consider a year ago. The science behind it seems sound. I am nervous about two things: 1) will the 500 calorie no sugar/no fat diet (including oils in lotions and makeup) drive me crazy and 2) will I gain the weight back even if I lose it? I have to say that this will be the longest I have gone without sugar EVER in my life. I tell myself that I can do anything for 23 days. Then there is a maintenance period after the 23 days where you are off the 500 calorie diet but still without sugars and starches. That is supposed to stabilize your body’s new set point. I have to look at this one day at a time and start with tomorrow.

I am also learning more about the Atonement which excites me. Elder Scott’s talk last April about the Atonement got me studying and trying to learn more. I was able to start to get some answers last week and it is exciting to me. The Lord always seems to take time to teach us things. Corban is complaining that learning in school is hard. We tell him it takes work. The Lord is the same way. It takes work for us to learn things. But at the same time, when we live in a world where we point and click on a computer (and that is still mortal, take it to an immortal level and it would be even faster) and can find almost anything, it is painstakingly slow to learn in the Lord’s infinite time frame. Luckily, it always seems worth it in the end. Hopefully, Corban will find that out about 5th grade as well.