Selfish Mom

Weight Loss 4.0

Sep 27, 2012 Weight Loss

I feel like I’m in the fourth (and final) stage of my weight loss. That might seem weird since I still have more than 30 pounds to go until I reach my goal, but I’m in a comfortable routine that is working – I don’t feel like I’m looking for “the best way” to lose weight any more.

1.0 was when I started this whole thing just under a year ago. Slim-Fast sent me some shakes and bars, and I took off the first ten pounds pretty easily. But it was really just a kick start. As delicious as the Slim-Fast stuff was, I knew I could never do it long term – I like “food” more than I like eating sweet, sugary things 4-5 times a day. I happened to interview Dr. Oz ten days in to my Slim-Fast plan, and he had some good advice for me. It would get me going, but I would need to have something else waiting in the wings for when I got tired of it. I started looking for a new plan.

2.0 was when DietBet.com offered up a big prize to me and some other bloggers for losing 4% of our body weights in 4 weeks. I did (all seven of us did, actually) and won over $700 – half of it going to a great charity, The Fistula Foundation. My method for those four weeks was simple: 1,400 calories four times a week, 700 calories/60 grams of carbs twice a week, and one day a week where I could eat anything, no calorie counting. It was based on some interesting studies, and worked really well for me. Since I largely live on carbs, two days a week of deprivation was just about the most I could do, but it was all I needed to do.

3.0 was the time between the first Diet Bet, and now. I tried a few other things. I tried dessert for breakfast, which was also based on an interesting study. I think it’s something that I’ll probably go back to if and when I ever try to just eat like a normal person, without counting calories. The science behind having something sweet with breakfast is strong. But combined with calorie counting, I found it unnecessary, and just used too many calories early in the day – the opposite of what my body wants to do.

I also tried massive amounts of exercise alongside massive amounts of eating. I actually took off five pounds this summer, while enjoying way too many meals out with my husband (the kids were at summer camp). I usually gain in the summer even without the restaurants, so I’d call that a success. But most days I simply don’t have time to exercise for two or more hours, so that’s done until the kids go away again.

Mostly, I just tried to maintain my weight loss, with little bursts of losing. But then, as I got closer to forty (it’s now four weeks away!) I got very motivated. Which brings us to…

4.0. It’s really just my 2.0 method, with a few small changes. I’m doing two days a week of low-carb/low-cal, with 800 calories this time, but only 40 grams of carbs. Four days a week of 1,200 calories, no carb counting (fewer calories than last time, because I just want to get this shit over with already!). And one day a week of whatever, although this time I’m attempting to keep it at 2,000 calories, if I’m home or easily able to count them. Not always possible, like last Saturday night in Boston when I pretty much ate myself sick at Maggiano’s. Oops. (But oh so tasty!)

I’ve also been doing a more moderate amount of exercise. Usually a six mile walk-jog once a week, a bike ride or jog here and there, some 5K training with the kids. Nothing massive or all that consistent. But I have been making a big effort to bike where I would usually take the subway. It really only works if I can show up a little sweaty. Lunch with a friend in lower Manhattan? Fine. Laser hair removal appointment near Central Park where my nether-regions will be worked on? Nope.

If I feel like I need to “eat” those exercise calories on a given day, I do. But if I’m having one of those days where I’m out of calories and just need to eat more, I put my sneakers on, log some more exercise calories, and then eat some potato chips. But when I can, I just let those exercise calories sit in the “bank.” Hopefully it’s making me lose a little faster.

It’s nice to be in a routine that I feel good about. I don’t exactly look forward to these super-low-cal days, but I don’t dread them. I’ve done them enough times that I know I won’t be screaming with hunger pains. I just eat nine or ten very small meals and look forward to the next day.

A few people have asked me why I’m torturing myself like this. If they knew me, they’d know that if it were torture, I wouldn’t do it. I like to be comfortable. But I also like not stressing out when it’s time to pack for a trip or go clothes shopping. That’s my motivation, and it’s working.

So here you go: me pointing at my shrinking belly, no constricting undergarments, four weeks to go until my birthday, 30 some odd pounds to go until my goal. Feeling great.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1 (Slim-Fast). Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Dessert for Breakfast, Dr. Oz, exercise, Food, Slim-Fast, Weight Loss

Today’s Agenda: on the clock edition

Dec 12, 2011 Today's Agenda

I love Mondays. I get the house to myself once again.

Of course, I didn’t realize that the weather program on my phone was set to Celsius. I bundled the kids up like they were summiting Everest and shoved them out the door.

So I haven’t been talking about weight loss for a few weeks. I haven’t given up on Slim-Fast, but I have fallen into the habit of doing it for only four days a week. After about a month of going strong, that seems to be all I can muster. Which was totally predictable. Even Dr. Oz knew that would happen, after knowing me for all of thirty seconds. He thought it was a good way to kick-start my weight loss, but warned me that I’d better have a back-up plan for when I lost steam.

So, I’d been thinking a lot about what the next stage would be. And I think I’ve found it – but I’m not going to tell you what it is until I’ve seen if I can stick with it for a couple of weeks. Because it’s a little weird, and some people would probably yell at me and tell me it won’t work and blah blah blah so I’d rather say what I did after I’m able to follow it with “And it totally worked!”

The other new thing for me this week is trying to keep my OSS (“Ooh, something shiny!”) brain from flitting from thing to thing. No more running to check an email if I”m folding laundry. No more putting a few things in the dishwasher in the middle of writing a post. Part of my new plan is admitting that I will not get everything done, no matter what it is. So instead of saying “OK, I’m going to put away ALL of the laundry!” and then being pissed when six hours later it’s not done and my day is over, I will simply set a timer for one hour and whatever I get done in that hour, I get done, and then I leave it for the next thing. I’m hoping this will keep me more focused, and also keep me from letting certain things go for too long. We’ll see how it goes.

And last, it just hit me that I’m “running” (walking, crawling) the Disney Princess Half Marathon again, and it’s in eleven weeks. And all I want is to get my time down to a still-pathetic 3:15. Which would actually be an awesome time for a full marathon. Maybe I should just accidentally on purpose forget to mention the “half” part when I tell people my time. So after I hit publish, it’s down to the treadmill I go. I’m already wearing a sports bra and everything.

Here I am crossing the finish line last year:

I can’t even describe how that felt. I’m actually looking forward to it again this year!

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 16 (Disney Princess Half Marathon). Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Disney Princess Half Marathon, Dr. Oz, exercise, Slim-Fast

Carbs, sleep, dieting, & more: my interview with Dr. Oz

Nov 7, 2011 Weight Loss

A couple weeks ago I had an amazing opportunity to sit down with Dr. Oz and a fabulous group of bloggers. He gave us about forty-five minutes to pick his brain, and pick it we did. The topics were varied, but since I’ve been on a weight-loss kick lately (ten pounds gone!) I was most interested in what he had to say about that subject.

The show that he had taped before meeting with us was about his Transformation Nation initiative (this episode is airing today – check your local listings for when). He had forty middle-aged women there who were all looking to lose at least forty pounds. He’s teamed up with Weight Watchers to help not just those women but also his viewers take control of their bodies and take off the extra weight. He’s even dangling a million dollar prize for one of the “losers.”

For me, he hit on four key points that are going to help me lose – and keep off – my extra weight.

Find A Plan You Love

I was dying to ask him about what I’m doing (Slim-Fast) because it seems to run counter to what he talks about on today’s episode. He talks about moderation, and my year-long attempt at moderation has resulted in an extra twenty-five pounds. But I don’t want to do something that will be damaging to my body. My goal is to lose two pounds per week. If I don’t see those kinds of results I know that I’ll lose interest and go back to my old habits. So, I asked him:

Me: How to stay motivated when you don’t have a moderation button? I have an on and an off button and I don’t seem to be able to do things moderately, not just with diet but with everything. Ten days ago I started a very severe diet, and I’m loving it. I’m loving the strictness, and the rules…is that bad to do it that strictly, and what do I do when I’m done to be moderate and keep it off? 

Dr. Oz: You said one thing that was really important to me, that you love it. If you don’t adore the program you’re on, it doesn’t matter what program you’re on. You have to adore it. You have to want that to be the rest of your life. So the challenge I ask you back is if the program you’re on now is one you can stay on for the rest of your life, then stay on it. If not, then think of it as a jumpstart then get off it quickly before you get bored of it and revolt against it, because that’s your natural instinct. Just from asking the question I can feel that in you.

Ding ding ding! In a couple of sentences he really got me, and the problems I face when trying to lose weight. My husband, for the past six months or so, has been doing what just about every reputable weight-loss authority recommends. He has mostly cut out white flour and sugar, and red meat, and cheese (ouch!) and walks home from work or goes to the gym two or three times a week. He’s lost thirteen or fourteen pounds (and honestly I think he should stop, but he’s still going).

If I were only losing at a rate of a little more than half a pound a week, I would lose interest super fast. However, I’m trying to lose about four times as much weight as my husband is. If I can’t simply eat whatever I want while lying on the couch, then I need to see solid results fast to stay motivated.

But what to do next? I don’t think I could stay on Slim-Fast forever. But I don’t have to. After I’ve used it to lose the weight, I don’t know what I’m going to do, so that’s my challenge from Dr. Oz. I’ve lost weight before, and if I don’t have a post-diet plan it will just come back.

What he said next said a lot to me about why Slim-Fast is working for me.

And I also think that people who go to extremes do better with automation. I have the same darn breakfast every morning. [2% Fage Greek Yogurt with blueberries mixed in, Ezekiel cereal, and a green drink that he swears by.] People think I’m boring. But I always get it, and I know what I’m going to feel like a couple hours later.

I totally get that. I’ve fallen into a pattern that gets me to about 2pm on 500 calories, and I feel fine. I know how I’m going to feel all morning eating and drinking what I am – there are no surprises.

Keep Some Fat

Dr. Oz had some very interesting things to say about skim milk, things that I haven’t heard doctors say before. This really surprised me, but made total sense. The rest I’d heard, about fat-free and sugar-free products. But what he said about milk caused me to switch from 1% to 2%, just to be safe.

By the way, skim milk puts weight on you. You take the fat out of milk, what’s left? Sugar. Eat 2% milk or put some fat in the milk, and you’ve got staying power. I don’t like fat free/sugar free foods because in order to adulterate the food they did something else to it, I guarantee you. And it’s not just chemicals. They often add sugar to the fat-free products to make it palatable. The benefit you get is trivial. The most important thing I’ll ever say about dieting is the brain is smart. It wants nutrients. If you don’t give it the nutrients it craves it’s going to force you to eat more calories.

For the first half of the day, I’m eating (mostly drinking) Slim-Fast. But after that, I eat all of the foods I normally would, but in much smaller amounts. I count calories, something I hate doing, but when I don’t I go completely overboard. And only having to count those calories for part of the day helps a lot.

In the past three weeks, while I’ve lost ten pounds, I’ve eaten pizza, Kraft Mac & Cheese, pasta, chocolate, bread, potato chips…my normal foods. But I’m no longer pigging out on them. I’m eating enough of the stuff that makes my brain happy (carbs! cheese!) and bulking the rest up with lots of vegetables so that my stomach feels full.

Make Lifestyle Changes

Isabel Kallman from Alphamom asked Dr. Oz to clarify his hope that the women on his show will lose forty pounds by spring. (If we’re counting all of spring, and I think he must be, that’s about 35 weeks from when he taped this episode.)

Isabel: At the top of the show today you mentioned that this is a marathon and not a sprint. 40 pounds by spring seems like a lot. Isn’t that more like a sprint number than a marathon number?

Dr. Oz: If I look around this room no one here needs to lose forty pounds, with two exceptions. [Yes, one of them was me.] But if you look at our viewer, and where they live, and the struggles they face in their life, they need to have that long-term aspiration. Now, the most that I really think most people should lose is one pound a week, which is 3500 calories, which means basically every day of the week you’re shaving 500 calories off of what you would normally eat, which is a lot to ask. And I don’t think you can do that through food. You have to do that in exercise as well. The issue that most people struggle with is they try to shave off 800 calories, a thousand calories, and they try to do it repeatedly, and it’s not doable. So as fast as you lose it you gain it back again. And losing forty pounds in six months can also put you in that predicament, if you haven’t adapted to lifestyle changes to go along with that.

That’s going to be the key for me, I think. I’m glad that I’ve added exercise to my routine, so that I’m not losing even more muscle as I’m losing weight. Having that muscle and having exercise in my routine will, I think, be my key to keeping the weight off.

Get Some Sleep!

Dina Freeman from BabyCenter asked Dr. Oz about the tie between sleep and weight loss:

The brain craves four things: it craves sleep, it craves sex, it craves water, and it craves food. If you don’t get enough of one you will make it up with more of the other. When you don’t get sleep, you will crave carbohydrates. There’s tons of literature on this. It is what your body naturally will do. The average American sleeps 6.9 hours, and needs closer to 8 hours of sleep. The sleep that we give up causes much of the problems that we see. You also lose growth hormone, because the major thing sleep offers you is growth hormone, and without growth hormone you can’t build muscle mass. Without muscle mass you lose the metabolic furnace to burn through calories. The biology of blubber is not subtle.

I do not set my alarm to wake up, I set my alarm to go to sleep.

OK, it’s unfortunate that I’m putting this post together after 2am, because it’s going to sound like complete BS when I say that I’ve transformed my sleeping habits since talking with Dr. Oz. But this is not normal for me anymore, it’s an exception, and is driven partly by the fact that I took a three-hour nap today.

In the past two weeks I’ve gotten more sleep than I probably did in the month before that. Between sleeping several more hours a night and exercising six days a week, it has been harder to fit some things in, but on the other hand I’ve been more productive. When I’m not exhausted I can stay on task better and, simply, get shit done faster and better. It’s a good trade-off.

Today’s Episode

I really hope you’ll watch today’s episode. It’s full of so much common sense about weight loss and health. It’s crammed full of practical advice, not gimmicks. Dr. Oz is sincerely trying to give us the tools with which we can solve our weight problems long-term, and I’m very grateful to him for that. I’ve heard too many people be dismissive about people like me who struggle with food, who toss off comments like “Just have a banana!” instead of trying to understand what it’s like when you don’t want a banana, you want an entire banana cream pie. Or why what you ate when you were twenty is now making you fat a forty.

This clip from today’s show is great. I mean, it’s depressing, but it explains a lot.

Thanks so much to Dr. Oz for letting us sit down with you and for giving us such thoughtful advice.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Dr. Oz, exercise, Slim-Fast, Weight Loss

Sitting down with Dr. Oz

Oct 26, 2011 What's Going On

So we’re right in the middle of our discussion with Dr. Oz. I’m here at his show with a fantastic group of bloggers (gathered by Barbara Jones of the One2One Network) talking about nutrition, weight loss, legislation, and other topics and I just have to say that he’s awesome. Friendly, open, helpful, and passionate.

The show that taped today won’t air for a couple of weeks, but it’s a good one – he’s really interested in making lives better, and he really seems to get the issues and hurdles that we face trying to get healthy and stay that way.

I’ll keep you posted on when that will air. Now, to get back to Dr. Oz!

Originally posted on Selfish Mom, from Amy’s cell phone (so please excuse any weird formatting). All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Dr. Oz, health, Weight Loss

Today’s Agenda: Dr. Oz edition

Oct 26, 2011 Posted From My Phone, Today's Agenda

So I’m on my way to Rockefeller Center to attend a roundtable discussion with some fabulous bloggers and Oz the Great and Terrible. No, wait, wrong Oz. I’ll be meeting Dr. Oz, the one who rose to fame on Oprah and keeps making me look up the word “omentum.” (Many thanks to Barbara Jones and the One2One Network for this opportunity!)

I’m very excited. Dr. Oz is Turkish, as is my husband (which, incidentally, is why half of the gmail spam I get is in Turkish; if I were paying attention I’d probably know how to say “penis enlargement” in Turkish by now).

The Ass begged me not to try out the one Turkish phrase he taught me years ago. He says I’m pronouncing it all wrong and Dr. Oz won’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But I don’t think he understands how much I enjoy making a fool out of myself.

That, coffee with a couple of PR friends to talk about the upcoming start of round two of the Hidden Valley Moms Panel, and a PTA meeting will round out my day. Did I mention I’m doing all of this on 3.5 hours of sleep? Not cool. If I can work in a nap somewhere I will, but I don’t see how that will be possible.

I spent about ten minutes this morning shortening a pair of jeans with Style Snaps, one of those “As Seen On TV” products. They’re these little adhesive snaps that are supposed to let you snap your pant legs shorter for wearing with flats. I wanted to wear my favorite jeans (a gorgeous dark pair that Not Your Daughter’s Jeans gave me) with comfy shoes because today will be a long day. I got them onto my pants no problem, and I think they look good. But the real tests will be if they show at all when unsnapped, and if they stay on in the washing machine.

Have a great day!

Originally posted on Selfish Mom, from Amy’s cell phone (so please excuse any weird formatting). All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.