I write a post every day. Each day is a new day. If I eat too few calories today, I don’t get extra calories tomorrow. If I eat too many calories today, I don’t deprive myself tomorrow. That feels like punishment, and you can’t get cooperation from your body if you are punishing it. So every day, I get 1800 calories. To make that work, I try for each meal to be 400-600 calories. I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I usually have tea too, either morning or evening. It depends.
My goal is to get physically hungry in the few minutes before mealtime. It’s tricky, because if you get too hungry, a different part of yourself might take over and eat a lot! And if you don’t get hungry, then it ruins the meal. (If you are used to eating only when physically hungry, it becomes an important part of the experience.) So: guard your hunger and use it to enhance your enjoyment. You really feel like you are taking care of yourself and catering to your needs, if you pay so much attention to your own enjoyment. Then body and mind can work together to achieve weight control. It’s working for me.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – 2oz ham (100); Muenster cheese (100); toasted bread (160); sandwich with pickles and mustard and horseradish
- 360 calories
Lunch – KC Filipino restaurant pork estofado (120); chicken adobo (120); 5oz rice (160); miscellaneous appetizers (50)
- 450 calories
Dinner – Costco pizza (750);
- 750 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 5 cookies (200)
- 280 calories
Total for the day: 1840 calories (limit 1800)
Well, this is awkward
It says above that my daily limit is 1800 calories, but I have been having closer to 1850 most days. What gives?
When I first started the weight control lifestyle, I was convinced that on days I exercised (I like to swim) I would get hungry and that would ruin my ability to stay on a diet. So I calculated that I burned 600 calories on my swimming routine, and added 500 extra to those two days per week. That way, the exercise would be calorie neutral, but it would provide an incentive to exercise. You get extra calories those days! Then it turned out that the fancy diet people had already been doing that and calling it Cheat Days or Intermittent Fasting.
“Cheat Days” means you allow yourself some extra calories a few times per week. This is planned and part of your calorie total. The idea is that it feels exciting to have extra calories. It’s something to look forward to, which can be nice.
The other idea is Intermittent Fasting. This means that if your weight loss inexplicably halts for a week or three, you try to shock your body back into weight loss by skipping meals and then making up the calories during the remaining meals. So you might have a normal breakfast, skip lunch, then a larger dinner.
The Doctor of Things is hardheaded about this kind of thing. In my experience, there are sometimes hard-to-explain slowdowns in weight loss, and I have had my share of them. But I have never done any intermittent fasting, because weight loss resumes some days or weeks later. Looking back through my journal (it has a lot of uses because I record lots of things), weight loss halts or slowdowns can last 1-4 weeks. They are almost always associated with illness or travel. I have even been able to predict getting sick because my weight loss slows down, or I even gain a pound or two from the previous week. Travel also plays hell with my weight loss. It just seems like those are lost weeks, although I don’t usually eat any more when I am traveling. When I am really sick, I don’t always keep to my calorie limits, though I try to write everything down.
Back to my point – I used to have Cheat Days, and now I am trying not having them. Each day, I am trying for 1850 calories, maximum. I’ll see how that works out when I weigh myself this week and next week.
Strangely, twice this week, I have eaten under 1700 calories for the day. I’m not sure why that is, but since I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t eat. I have learned that eating without hunger is a big letdown. The experience of eating becomes very high quality through slight deprivation (hunger at the right time) and anticipation (satisfying hunger with the food you really want). High quality experience is great, because it makes the low quality experience (eating until totally full) seem not worthwhile and undesirable.
Try it! You can use that kind of knowledge to achieve weight control in your mind, which is the important place. Your body will follow.
-The Doctor