It is best to track your food intake daily. Really, you track it by the meal, but a day is flexible. You can have a small lunch and a large breakfast. But the calorie total is a daily matter. For me, 1850 calories per day, 13,300 calories per week, is the aim. So you pay attention to the meal, the day, and the week. If you have a good day, you can use it for momentum and keep having a good day tomorrow. If you have a bad day, well, that day is gone. There’s no point in starving yourself tomorrow to make up for your mistakes today. Losing weight is a long term game and you win by keeping your average calories per day as close to your aim as possible.
You can console yourself (since you are, while controlling your weight, depriving yourself of the feeling of being full) by making sure you have something to look forward to all the time. Then you get the feeling of reward instead of deprivation.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – granola (200)
- 200 calories
Lunch – pot luck, estimated (600);
- 700 calories
Dinner – 8oz pork vindaloo (350); 5oz rice (160)
- 510 calories
Snacking – Reese’s peanut butter cup (80); chocolate (80); noodles (300);
- 460 calories
Total for the day: 1870 calories (limit 1800)
Emotional eating
It’s hard to describe, but one of the dangers of my old way of living and eating was to eat for reasons other than physical hunger. I usually call it emotional hunger, but which emotion?
Another (thin) coworker approached me today to compliment my weight loss. I have noticed that people who are thin themselves, and work at keeping their weight under control, notice and appreciate this kind of effort in other people. This supports my observation that for the vast majority of people, weight control is achieved by constant effort. Anyway, what he (my coworker) said was much appreciated. Like other people who have approached me, he talked about his own efforts, and asked me what I had changed in my own life to achieve results so far. Luckily, this is something I think about every day, and write about here, so I have an elevator speech ready all the time.
It’s very obvious, when you think about it, why thin people notice you losing weight and are willing to bring it up, while heavier people are less interested (or are more shy). It’s because to become thin, and stay that way, it has to be high up on your list of values and you almost have to live your life thinking about it and maintaining your weight. An overweight person is usually not thinking about that and is much less interested. That was me, so I understand the thinking.
Anyway, after I had eaten my food today and written everything down, I felt compelled to eat another 600 odd calories for emotional reasons. I didn’t record that above, but it’s in my calorie count spreadsheet! So my calorie count today was actually 2400. That’s not good for my daily count or weekly calorie average! But as I find myself saying a lot, tomorrow is a new day. Things can go better on the new day.
-The Doctor