Weight Loss Tuesday: Eating the Wagon
Nov 25, 2009 Weight Loss
When I don’t like the way something is going, I don’t address it and try to fix it. At least not at first. I ignore it until it becomes a much bigger problem. Mature, I know. And that’s what I’ve been doing with my weight.
I’ve been good, I’ve been bad. There hasn’t been a lot of in between. I thought that I could do this the same way I did it before. The last time I lost a lot of weight – 25 pounds – I did it in two months, and honest to God it was easy. Two months, 1,200 calories a day, no cheating. So I thought I could do that again. The longest I’ve lasted this time is two weeks. Other than that it’s been 1,200 calories one day, pigging out the next. Predictable, I know, to anyone but me.
When I first started using My Food Diary, I made up a “fake” food entry for those days when I just didn’t feel like counting calories and being strict. I made it 2,500 calories and named it “Off-the-Wagon Day.” But this past summer, I had to add a new category: 3,500 calories. Almost three times what I wanted to eat each day. Those were the days when I would just eat non-stop all day, whether I was hungry or not. When I would go to Subway with the kids and eat a sub with cheese and mayo and then buy another one to take home. When I would go to Chipotle and eat an entire burrito and bag of tortilla chips with extra guacamole. When I would make a pound of pasta for the kids and eat whatever was left over. Those were the days when I hadn’t just fallen off the wagon, but had eaten my way off of it. So, I named it “Eating-the-Wagon Day.” And I’ve had way too many of those lately.
I don’t know for sure why this isn’t working this time, but if I had to guess, I’d say I just don’t want it as much as last time. I was in a size 18 and could hardly button my pants, but refused to by 20s. I was desperate to get to a more normal size. I was super motivated. This time, meh. I want to be smaller, but at size 14 I no longer feel like an elephant. And in terms of motivation, that’s a bad thing.
So, no more 1,200 calorie days. What worked before is not working this time and I’m finally admitting it. No more going to events and saying “Next time these people see me I’m going to be four sizes smaller.” No more drastic changes. I have to finally give moderation a try. I hate moderation, but maybe it’s time to grow up.
So, I’ve set My Food Diary to the much more reasonable goal of losing one pound per week. At this point that means I can eat about 1,500 calories a day. 300 more calories may not sound like much, but it’s huge. It’s 25% more than I was letting myself have on my “good” days. It will let me relax and not feel deprived.
It will let me have (a reasonable amount of) one of my all-time favorite meals, bruschetta (an appetizer for some, I know, but I make a meal out of it). Since I’ve still got tomatoes growing in my garden – in late November! – I made this a couple times this past week. It was delicious.
The way I make it, it’s mushy, which I prefer – it stays on the bread better. But if you like your tomatoes more firm, then skip the blanching and leave the skins on when you dice the tomatoes.
This is my first whrrl recipe. Let me know if you like the format.
The entire recipe, minus the bread, is about 340 calories. The bread is the real wild-card, so try to control yourself. 
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: bruschetta, My Food Diary
Weight Loss Tuesday: Find Your Own Rhythm
Jun 16, 2009 Weight Loss
The Rules
- Eat a big breakfast, or you’ll binge later in the day
- Save your calories for one big meal
- Eat 6-8 small meals spaced evenly throughout the day
- Eat three medium-sized meals with no snacking in between
- Eat a meal first thing when you wake up
- Don’t eat anything past 7pm
I have seen each of the above in advice columns, on TV, and in books talking about losing weight. Each one is presented as though it is the one-size-fits-all key to getting the weight off. Even though every person is different. Even though each day is different. I’ve tried all of them at one point or another. They didn’t work for me.
I tried eating a big breakfast every morning, even though I’m rarely very hungry early. It seemed to prime my stomach for wanting more food all day.
Saving my calories for one big meal made me spend the rest of the day thinking about food, whether I was hungry or not. And eating an entire day’s food at once made me feel terrible, bloated and heavy.
Eating 6-8 small, evenly-spaced meals left me constantly wanting more, never experiencing the nice, satisfied feeling I get from a big meal.
Eating three medium meals a day left me hungry in between.
Eating a big meal when I first woke up wasted a bunch of calories at a time when I didn’t even really want them.
Not eating past 7pm meant that I couldn’t eat dinner with my husband ever, and I had to ignore huge hunger pangs for as many as six waking hours.
Listening to my body
The thing is, any of those rules would probably work for me occasionally. But not long-term. They don’t take into account the varying schedules I keep. Some days I’m up for 18 hours and need to space my meals out more. Some days I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off and I don’t even think about food. Some days – today was one of them – I wake up knowing that I’m going to need a little extra food, and if I deny myself that, chances are good that I will give up by mid-afternoon and pig out.
But most days, I’d say 90%, I do best eating very little for breakfast, like around 100 calories or less. Two Morningstar Farms Breakfast Links (80 calories), a slice of light wheat toast with 1/2 tablespoon of peanut butter (88 calories), half of a frozen Lenders bagel with 1/4 ounce of cream cheese (100 calories), these are the kinds of tiny breakfasts that I have most days. I’m just not that hungry in the morning. I usually don’t even think about food again until about 11am. This goes against pretty much every bit of eating advice I’ve ever come across. Even my beloved My Food Diary admonishes me almost daily with a little frowny face for eating less than a 200 calorie breakfast.
I usually have a small lunch and a snack or two in the afternoon, arriving at dinner time with more than half of my calories still up for grabs. And it’s a good thing, because when the kids get home from school, that’s when I start thinking about food. I’m getting snacks and dessert for them, making dinner, and my resolve starts to crumble. Just being around food makes me want food. (It’s no wonder that I started gaining serious weight when I worked in a food-filled hotel lounge all day, left alone with steam tables of food and platters of cheeses and desserts for hours at a time.)
But that’s OK, because I usually have enough calories left to indulge a little, to have some of what the kids are having, to go to the ice cream truck with them, to share their snacks. Or to just have a big plate of food for dinner and satisfy that need I have to fill my stomach a little past the point of being full.
Do what works for you
That rhythm, starting the day without much food and ending it with lots, works for me. It satisfies me, at least as much as I can be satisfied eating only 1,200 calories per day. Some days, I swear to God, it even seems easy. One day last week, I had one single Morningstar Breakfast Link around 9am, and didn’t even think about food until noon, when I had a banana that held me over until we all got home at 4:30. I was able to cruise through the rest of the afternoon and evening eating almost constantly, happy as a clam.
But with almost 17 pounds gone in three months, people tell me that I’m doing it wrong, that this method can’t possibly work. When I protest and tell them “But it is working, right now!” they shake their heads and say it won’t last forever. Well, what does? If my body needs something different in the future, I’ll adjust. But why in the world should I change what I’m doing just because the “experts” tell me to, if what I’m doing is getting good results? I feel good. I’m happy. And while dieting can get tiresome (I’d like to be able to spread something on something else without weighing both things!), it just hasn’t been that hard. In fact it’s been so easy most days I’m kicking myself for not doing this sooner.
My point in telling you this is not that you should start eating like me, it’s that you should find your own body’s rhythm, what works for you. Experiment with eating more or less, at different times of the day. Pay attention to when those cravings hit you, and try to adjust your eating habits so that you can give in to them a little. And don’t try to shoehorn yourself into something that worked for someone else if it’s torture for you. You won’t be able to keep it up for long, and then you’ll just hate yourself for failing.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
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Tags: dieting, diets, Eating, My Food Diary, Weight Loss
A typical, 1,180 calorie day
Apr 21, 2009 Weight Loss
1,200 calories a day
It’s been almost six weeks since I started limiting myself to 1,200 calories a day in an attempt to lose some more weight. I’ve changed my mind a few times about what my latest goal is, but at the rate I’m going I could be at exactly the weight I was when I first got pregnant (more than eight years ago) sometime in July. Now, by the time I got pregnant, I was already about 20 pounds more than I wanted to be, but I was still a heck of a lot smaller than I am now. So I think that’s good for my next goal.
In this latest round of what I’ve decided to call the “Get your ass off of the couch and stop eating like a pig” plan, there were seven days when I ate more than 1,500 calories, and three of those were over 2,500. The rest of the days were very close to 1,200 calories. I’ve lost just shy of 11 pounds. I even managed to lose one pound during my recent trip to Buffalo, which has never ever happened (I usually gain a couple of pounds just by getting on the Thruway and pointing the car west).
My Food Diary
I’ve written and talked several times about a “typical” day for me food-wise, and since yesterday was in most ways a typical day, I thought I’d give you a snapshot of what yesterday was like. I keep track of what I eat with an online food diary, MyFoodDiary.com. (I have absolutely no connection to them, except that they’ve been charging $9 a month to my Visa for the past few years.) Even when I wasn’t actually limiting my calories, I swear to you that just keeping track of it all kept me from gaining more.
So here’s what yesterday looked like. The green shaded squares mean I did something good. The red shaded squares, not so much.
At the end of the day I only ended up with two red squares. One was for going under 1,200 calories. I seriously doubt that missing by 20 calories is going to damage my health. The other red square was for sodium. In all the years I’ve been using MyFoodDiary, that square has never been anything but red. I eat a lot of frozen and packaged foods, and they’re all chock full of sodium. I don’t care. I have absolutely no problem with my blood pressure. It’s in the “excellent” range, even though I’ve done nothing to earn this. I can also eat as much cholesterol as I want. The crappy genes that made me hairy threw me a bone with salt and cholesterol.
So, that’s how I do it. Yesterday’s calories were a bit heavier in the afternoon than usual (more often than not I make it to dinner with more than half of my calories still available), since I put over 100 calories worth of croutons on my salad. I was just in the mood.
The challenges ahead
This week will be hard, because I’m supposed to get my period at the end of the week, so I’ll be saving up water. (I don’t really understand why this happens. I’m guessing that eating less sodium would help the situation, but I really don’t care what my ankles look like under my jeans.) I weigh myself every morning, and I get very motivated seeing the numbers go steadily down. This week, they won’t. So I have to keep reminding myself that I’ll get a big drop towards the end of next week.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom
Tags: My Food Diary, Weight Loss
