The mechanism I am using to control my body’s weight has two parts. (1) Regulate your food intake and (2) weigh yourself regularly. The first, I accomplish through counting calories and writing everything I eat in a food journal I keep online. The second I keep by weighing myself every Saturday.
I call this “the mechanism” because it wouldn’t work if I hadn’t changed my thinking first. Having become a new person capable of successfully losing weight, I use this mechanism to do it. I am sure it wouldn’t have worked on me before I changed. I changed my mind. My body came along for the ride.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – 2 x Pork loin wraps (200); Twix ice cream bar (160)
- 560 calories
Lunch – Boar’s head bratwurst (300); Boar’s head knockwurst (310)
- 610 calories
Dinner – 2 x pork tenderloin wraps (300); baked chicken breast tender (200); coleslaw (45)
- 540 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80)
- 80 calories
Total for the day: 1790 calories (limit 1800)
More success stories
Today I found the webpage of a dieter who claimed to get her weight loss model from Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. the Dilbert cartoonist. I’ve read his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. There is some weight loss advice in there; Adams says you have to….wait for it….change how you think to lose weight! He was talking in the context of a systems approach, which he favors over a goal-based approach. He points out that the goal of losing weight is demoralizing. Everything you eat goes against the goal! (I mean, when your only goal is to lose weight, everything you eat is a betrayal of that goal. Strange but logically true.)
The systems approach says you pick a different method. Adopt a system – for example, your system might be to eat a healthy diet. That way every time you eat, you can reinforce the system. Every meal adds to your success. Even if you have a lapse and eat too much, you can still keep the system going at the next meal.
Anyway, this weight loss success calls herself Keto Kelly. She says she has lost 100 pounds using the ketogenic diet method paired with the systems approach. One of the Doctor’s observations is that nothing succeeds like success! I have written before about the keto diet and its potential pitfalls in my How to Start a Diet 120 Pounds Overweight series. But there is no denying that it is a method many people have used to successfully lose large amounts of weight. Let’s look at her ideas.
- Create a new lifestyle she could live with. Great idea!
- Forced her husband to diet with her. Er, good for them both! More seriously, she created social pressure to keep herself on her diet. It also helped her husband lose 75 pounds. So she helped others, too.
- Jump into her new life. This sounds like she was able to reinvent herself as a new person capable of new things. Also good! She began her new lifestyle with fasting. Again, who argues with success?
- Discovered that she liked her new lifestyle. She liked it better than her old one, where she gained weight. That is terrific!
- She says, I have never been this well fed in my life. That is like something I say all the time. It means she is really treating herself like someone she is responsible for helping. She treats herself well, and is therefore able to lose weight. Compare this to my advice to never punish yourself while trying to lose weight.
- She took a break. In the middle of her diet, she stopped counting calories for three months. She didn’t gain or lose any weight during that time, but still observed the keto rules. It gave her a feeling of rest, like it was a lifestyle she could maintain. Good thinking!
I have commented on her post asking some follow up questions. Maybe she will answer. I am very interested in this idea of the transition from weight loss to weight maintenance.
But first, comes the weight loss! 60 pounds to go. My food journal is complete for today.
-The Doctor