It is very important, fundamental, to control how many calories you are eating, if you want to maintain your body’s weight or lose weight. There are many ways to do that, and not all of them involve counting calories. For most of us, we want decisions about what to eat and how much to take up very little time.
I am taking a different approach. Since I want lifelong weight control and don’t want to eat the same thing every day, I accept that I will have to spend some time to do it. Time spent planning meals, cooking, measuring, packing leftovers, as well as budget planning and going shopping for food. I have observed that people who are thin and stay thin, and fit and stay fit, are completely obsessed maniacs (in a good way). They are always watching how much they are eating.
The Doctor’s approach could be summed up as paying attention and calorie counting. Pay attention to how much you are eating, have eaten, and have yet to eat today. Learn yourself and plan out your meals. Measure what you eat and drink. I accept all this as the trade off for getting thin and staying thin. What would you trade for that?
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – roasted chicken breast half (100); rice (400); Italian bread (140); and cheese (60)
- 700 calories
Lunch – Twix ice cream bar (160); oatmeal cookie (50); Kentucky Legend ham (200); Italian bread (150)
- 560 calories
Dinner – 10.4 oz red lentil curry (290); 4oz cooked rice (130)
- 420 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80); Perdue shortcut chicken (80); hummus (70)
- 230 calories
Total for the day: 1910 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)
Time well spent
Why would you spend all this time and effort keeping up with your weight? Aha, luckily for you, the Doctor has come up with an enabling lifestyle that is attractive, so one wants to stay with it. This lifestyle means making a permanent change to the way you live and elevating the value of being thin to the top of your morality, or moral hierarchy. Then you start to see everything through that moral lens and everything changes for you.
What is the attraction? It’s that you have to pay a lot of attention to yourself and aim at pleasing yourself. You want your body and subconscious impulses (mind) to be so happy with all the love you are showing yourself, that they are eager to do their part. You learn what would make you happy to stay on a restricted calorie diet and you do it. I have a system of rewards. I feed myself (measured amounts of) what I want, and in exchange my body and subconscious are satisfied with that. When I achieve a goal or milestone, I reward myself with a special food. If the way you look at food has truly been transformed, then you don’t have to worry about using food as a reward being unhealthy mentally. In the right mind frame, it makes perfect sense and I have lost 67 pounds that way. So far. 53 to go.
Showering yourself with positive attention, catering to your own desires for favorite foods, and carefully rewarding yourself with treats for each ahievement is a very attractive way to live. You get enormous satisfaction from preparing yourself for a favorite meal. You actually don’t want t overeat at the previous meal, or snack, so as not to reduce your enjoyment of your favorite. Food always tastes better when you are hungry; when it is your favorite food and you have been anticipating it all day, it really multiplies your enjoyment and your sense of fulfillment aftewards.
Learn yourself and you can achieve weight loss and weight control. But you will have to accept the price and pay it. Find a way to make paying part of the enjoyable experience!
-The Doctor