This morning I did some baking and then some stovetop cooking, even though it was going to get to 96 degrees outside today. More on the cooking later – it was my first time pressure cooking. On to the baking. It was Texas blueberry cobbler, which I have never made before but was recommended by one of my throngs of devoted readers. The chief benefit is that it’s easier than making a pie. It’s not your typical cobbler but turns out like a cake with pockets of blueberries and blueberry-soaked….cake. So it is no runny at all, like a pie or cobbler would be. It also has a stick and a half of butter in the recipe, which is an America’s Test Kitchen adaptation. So even if the blueberries are marginal in terms of flavor, it’s still a nice lemon butter cake. I cut it into 10 pieces of 280 calories each.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – 1/10 serving Texas Blueberry Cobbler (280);
- 280 calories
Lunch – 4oz chili (170); toasted bread (100); ham (100); salami (130); provolone cheese (70);
- 570 calories
Dinner – 5oz rice (160); 8oz pork vindaloo (350)
- 510 calories
Snacking – none so far!
- 0 calories
Total for the day: 1360 calories (limit 1850)
Yes, I will have a few more calories
1360 calories for the day is pretty low for me. I will be having something else. On the other hand, I do have a weighing day tomorrow so not too much! Part of weight control is being careful about rewards. You accomplished something – you kept your mind in the right place and kept your calorie intake where you wanted. You can’t then punish yourself by getting hungry and resentful. When you are restricting your calorie intake you have to pay a lot attention to your subconscious and its needs.
I’ve said this before, but there’s a part of you – call it the subconscious – that has to be treated like someone you care about. You can’t force that part of you to do things you want, like lose weight, exercise, stop smoking, or improve whatever vice you have. What works is to stand that relationship on its head. Normally the conscious willing part of you says something like “eat less!” and the burden falls on your subconscious self to carry that out. That part gets resentful fast. Better for the conscious part to take up the burden and do most of the work. After all, it is giving the orders! Using this trick, I have managed to lose a lot of weight and not feel resentful or deprived. It does take work and discipline. But the kind of work and discipline is not intuitive or obvious to those of us in an uncontrolled/weight gain mindset.
There is a thin way of thinking. Wach people who have stayed thin and you will see how they do it but not what they get out of it – why they are doing it and how they are thinking about it. That takes a bit more work. But if you talk to them, you will get important clues. A thin person is often quite proud of their weight discipline, though I have found many of them are shy/modest or pretend that what they are doing is no big deal. The best person to talk to is someone who has struggled with their weight and managed to keep it under control. They know how to think about it and are successful.
You can be successful with weight control too. Just work out how. It won’t just happen by itself!
-The Doctor