Every day, my job is to live in the world as if I was in control of my weight, and as if that was a good thing. I want that life to be both very practical and of high quality, because that’s the kind of life I find worth living. On the practical level, I maintain weight control by planning meals and counting calories, and recording what I eat in a food journal. Also, I weigh myself every Saturday, with few exceptions.
On the quality of life side, it is important to most of us to be living a life one can be proud of. That is part of the meaning of quality. If your standards are low, quality can mean anything. For years, the idea of quality that I lived was to eat whatever I felt like, and not pay any attention to how much. Now I do things differently. Quality now means successfully negotiating with myself, to engage as many layers and parts of my being as possible towards my goal. The feeling that so many parts of my life and of myself are coming together and working together gives me a strong sense of meaning. It is very fulfilling to make progress and achieve goals while living in harmony with all your contradictory parts.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissantwich, oven-toasted (400)
- 400 calories
Lunch – Roasted chicken breast (220); with 10 ounces of rice and peas cooked in wine, broth, and spices (230)
- 450 calories
Dinner – 12 ounces chicken curry (335); 5 ounces cooked white jasmine rice (160)
- 500 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (120);
- 120 calories
Total for the day: 1470 calories (limit 1800)
Self regulating - the pendulum swings again
Yesterday, when I wrote my food journal in the blog post, it was accurate. However, that didn’t last. I had another 500 calories last night, late. When I have that kind of feeling, like I need to eat, I don’t try to fight it anymore. I recognize that I haven’t met my own needs somehow. There are two problems that follow on from this initial failure.
First, there is the temptation to make up for the calorie overage the next day. I have learned (through this happening before) that you have to let it go. Accept that you failed, at least in part, to keep up your end of the bargain. The bargain is, my subconscious being will be happy eating controlled amounts of food, so long as it doesn’t feel deprived. That means the food has to be very appealing, it has to be planned well, and I have to take care that I eat at the right times, before I get too hungry and deprived. Remember I am in deficit as much as 1000 calories per day. To be that far under what your body needs to keep its weight, a lot of care and attention is required to make the food you do eat seem like enough. It HAS to be on time, and it HAS to be meeting the need for food that is worth the wait and the effort. I ate fewer calories today, but that’s because I honestly didn’t want them. This is because of the second problem.
The second problem with overeating is that it throws off your digestion, your metabolism, your appetite, for the whole next day. Sure enough, that was my day today. I just felt terrible, and while I got hungry and ate food, it just didn’t feel satisfying and I didn’t feel properly hungry. I was carrying around the imbalance from last night. Thank goodness, the pendulum will swing back to normal soon.
Anyway, I have learned that if I try to hurry the pendulum along by skipping a meal, it just makes the problem worse. I make myself feel deprived again, and that could lead to even more overeating later. The balance I am trying to maintain would be thrown off even further. Then the next day’s recovery would be even harder. That kind of cycle can get really bad. So my advice is just wait it out. If you don’t feel better tomorrow, then you will the next day. Just give your body time to reset.
Today I made a chicken curry for dinner. You can see the ingredients laid out above, ready for cooking, and then the finished portion plated below that. I will put the recipe in the Recipes tab at the top of the blog, as soon as I can get around to it. The point is, when you add up everything in the dish, it comes to 2000 calories. When I finished cooking, I weighed the entirety in a bowl on the scale: 4 pounds, 11 ounces. That’s near enough 75 ounces. One-sixth of that would be 12.5 ounces and 2000/6 portions is 333 calories. So the whole thing, divided in six portions of 12 ounces each, with 5 ounces of cooked rice per portion (160 calories) is just about 500 calories per portion. And in my experience, 1.5 cups of raw rice makes 30 ounces of cooked rice. That’s six portions, five ounces each. There are six meals, delicious and ready to go. And curry and rice are easy to reheat.
What a week! And still only half done. Don’t worry about today – it’s gone. Plan how you can make tomorrow a good day.
-The Doctor