A few days into summer, and we are getting a taste of the heat. Why does that matter to a dieter? Well there are a couple of reasons. The first is that, as I am noticing, hot weather doesn’t feel as bad if your body is thinner. When I weighed over 300 pounds, hot weather was really unpleasant and doing anything at all got me sweating. Cooling down took a long time. Now, even though I am still heavier than I want (235 pounds, thank you), there is a difference and I have a bit more tolerance for heat. This is yet more support for the idea that you should put yourself in control of your body.
The second reason is that if it’s hot outside, you don’t want to heat up your house with lots of cooking inside. Yet, one of the ways I keep myself happy while in calorie deficit is to cook a lot of my favorite foods. So a dieter such as myself has to have a summer menu and a winter menu. This does mean there is less bacon in the summer. But there is more grilling, more slow cooker, more toaster oven, and more outdoor cooking. So you can make it work for you.
Another trick is to let someone else’s kitchen take the heat!
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – BLT wraps with bacon (280); whole wheat wrap (110); tomato and lettuce (round up to 400)
- 400 calories
Lunch – 100g Mexican pulled pork (156); 2x corn tortillas (80); sour cream (30);
- 280 calories
Dinner – Costco cheese pizza slices (760);
- 760 calories
Snacking – chicken wrap with deli chicken breast (90), half a whole wheat wrap (55), lettuce and tomato
- 145 calories
Total for the day SO FAR: 1585 calories (limit 1850)
More hot thoughts
Generally my standard drink during the day is diet soda. Now, many people have noticed that only overweight or out of control people tend to drink diet cola. Some even think that diet soda might cause some overweight through a mechanism we don’t understand. I wondered about that, but it didn’t seem reasonable. So, I wondered for quite a while if drinking diet soda was just a sign that you were out of control in your food. That idea comes from the theory that many of us overweight people eat and drink for emotional reasons rather than phyiscal.
Now, with the experience I have gained, I don’t believe that’s necessarily true. I have given a lot of money to Coca Cola over the last year and a half since I started losing weight consistently, and it hasn’t been holding me back. I don’t track how much diet soda I drink, but it’s daily, and for long periods I have happily been losing up to 2 pounds a week, while drinking all the 0 calorie diet soda I can drink. But still, it’s true that drinking diet soda comes with an image problem. Only overweight people drink that, you know! Plus, it is starting to feel out of control. So I have a new policy: drink a glass of water before having a diet soda.
Since I am trying to limit my calorie intake, diet soda was a good place to start. It has no calories! Once I have lost all the weight I want to lose, I wonder if I will switch only to regular soda and have one once in a while, like ice cream, if I have calories left in my daily allowance. Or, will I keep diet soda as an indulgence? There may be that social price to pay, though.
-The Doctor