20200726 Daily report: still hot

It’s still hot, but it was a nice and cool morning.  Yes, cool!  Summer mornings where I live can be unpleasantly warm and humid during the summer.  Luckily my weight loss since last year at this time has come with some heat resistance.  I’ve talked about that before.  But it’s true.  I don’t sweat unless working hard.  Just sitting in the shade when it’s 92 out is bearable.  

Another thing that comes with hot weather is cookouts.  And eating outside can be nice.  

OK, the beans were cooked inside.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – sausage (200); wrap (140); peppers and onions (60)

  • 400 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst (260); 1/2 wrap (70)

  • 590 calories 

Dinner – 2x hot dogs (110); 2x buns (120); baked beans (160); potato pieces (40);

  • 660 calories

Snacking – fire-toasted marshmallows (75)

  • 75 calories

Total for the day: 1725 calories (limit 1750)

Yes, it's a new limit

I’m trying something new this week.  Since my weight loss has slowed down and there has been a reduction in my physical exercise regimen, I will trying lowering my daily calorie limit to 1750 for a week to make up for it.  That will be 700 calories less than usual.  My exercise regimen was actually about -1200 calories per week, but we will see what effect this has.  I would like to have a bit more exercise, but thanks to Corona virus closures I can’t go to the pool and it’s pretty hot outside for much else.  The mornings may get cooler and I can do more walking, I guess.  Online the calculator says someone like me would have to walk for 1 hour to burn 380 calories.  I do miss swimming and hope it comes back.  

There now, I have something to look forward to on Saturday.  Will I continue losing just one pound or will it be a bit more?  Always start the week off with a pull – something pulling you ahead, something to look forward to.  It’s part of setting up your life so that you are rewarded and enjoy it.  That makes it worthwhile.

-The Doctor

 

20200725 Saturday weighing or is it waiting

Ah, Saturday.  The day when you find out if your effort during the week has been applied properly.  You can work quite hard after all and find out later it was all spent in the wrong place.  That’s hard but you can correct it over time.  As Homer Simpson complained (as Henry VIII), “I eat and eat and still don’t lose weight!”  I have been having a problem that my weight loss has slowed to the speed of a sleepy snail.  On a cold day.  Is that a matter of readjusting my effort?

The lowest number yet

Progress is progress, however slow.  I have some thoughts about that.  But the iportant thing is that since starting my weight control lifestyle in January 2019, I have lost:

Pounds!!
0

Crawling towards a minor victory

I will be pretty happy when I lose 100 pounds, but at current rate that will take months.  I am leaning towards blaming the lack of exercise and activity in my life right now.  The Corona Virus is playing hell with my lifestyle and I haven’t been seriously exercising (swimming) since March.  That and staying home most of the time must be having an effect.  I am eating carefully and just the same as I always did when I was losing 2 pounds per week.  I am guessing that exercise was fueling part of my weight loss all this time.  

I don’t know that for sure and won’t know until I have evidence – that is, once I can start swimming again.  In theory the pools near me are open now with lots of restrictions and I can get appointments to swim laps.  I don’t know how that will work in practice.  Until I can get that working I will have to crawl towards success (good pun there, swimming has a crawl stroke too).  

I could try cutting calories some more with a target of 1700 calories per day.  That might make up for the lack of exercise.  Or I will have to be more systematic about walking or find other exercise, I suppose.  It’s always something, but you can redirect after you find out what is going wrong.

Put your effort in the right place.  IF you aren’t successful, your effort is in the wrong place.  Don’t waste it.

-The Doctor

20200724 Daily report and wrap-up

No more week!  My food journal is full and tomorrow I turn to a fresh page.  Every day is a new day, but every week is a new week also.  The formula is well known: if you are in deficit 3500 calories for the week, you will lose a pound of weight. How many people really know what their zero point really is?  Do you know how many calories a week your body needs?  There is a range and it changes all the time.  I used to be able to predict it well: 1850 calories per day, for a week, and I would lose about 2 pounds – maybe a little less.  1850 x 7 = 13,000 calories a week, which means I was in deficit 7000 calories, maybe a little less.  

But it’s not so simple, is it?  Do we really believe that if I ate 13,000 + 7000 calories per week or 2860 per day, I would not gain any weight?  I am not sure I believe that.  The other possibility is that my calorie counting is too strict, which I am also not sure I believe.  Actually it’s also possible that when I overeat I am not counting accurately – but rather under counting.  That one sounds most likely.  

Sausage, noodles, cheese, and tomato bake

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 10 ounces ziti, sausage, cheese, and tomato bake (390)

  • 390 calories

Lunch – 10z Beef and broccoli (315); 1.5oz rice (50)

  • 365 calories 

Dinner – chicken wrap (90); 7 ounces ziti, sausage, cheese, and tomato bake (280);

  • 370 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); banana (50); pretzels (300); 100g ice cream (250);

  • 680 calories

Total for the day: 1805 calories (limit 1850)

Not any more?

The last several weeks, though my weight has been going in the right direction, it has been slower than I expected.  1 pound per week.  Now, compared to the time I was losing 2 pounds per week, there are some changes.  I am not as active with the Corona virus business shutting everything down.  I haven’t been to exercise or even out and about as much as usual.  My swimming burned about 1200 calories per week, and also people say it raises your metabolism so you are burning more calories at rest.  Is that true?  Well, it’s true that I haven’t been swimming since March.  Or I could be losing less weight due to old age.  As they say, he who is not handsome at 30, rich at 40, or wise at 50 will never be handsome, rich, or wise.  In a way, I am trying to be handsome well after 30, when I should be going for wisdom instead.  

Well, there is no rule against being handsome AND wise.  One of my insights was that I should create the kind of life I want to live, and that does involve weight control.  Is that wise?  Well, it’s what I want.  If it is coming more slowly than before, it is still coming.  If the restrictions are lifted and I can swim again regularly, it will be a good chance to see if my weight loss jumps back to 2 pounds per week.  

Have a good end to your week.  Tomorrow is a new one.  You can make it a good one.

-The Doctor

20200723 Daily report: three squares

As in the three square meals I had today.  I have a concept of “food security” which has been working for me.  I find that if I wait to eat until I am hungry, it makes it more stressful to have to decide what I am going to eat, or to discover I don’t have anything handy that I do want.  Having lunch meat or other shortcut foods around doesn’t seem to work all the time.  Maybe they get boring!  So I make sure I have appealing foods, cooked, portioned, and ready to heat and eat.  It’s like the Doctor’s MREs.  Today I had two such meals and one fresh-cooked dinner, one of my all time favorites: Beef and Broccol stir fry.

Best homemade

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 10oz slow cooker sausage, ziti, and cheese bake (390);

  • 390 calories

Lunch – 1/2 pounds of pork burger (540); Lavash wrap (60);

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 5oz cooked rice (160); beef and broccoli stir-fry (315); 

  • 375 calories

Snacking – 110g ice cream (300); pretzels (50);

  • 350 calories

Total for the day: 1815 calories (limit 1850)

Future imperfect

When I was little, homemade beef and broccoli stir-fry was part of my favorite dinner and I asked for it every year on my birthday.  Of course back then I didn’t think about portions, but I did learn that dinner is best when you are hungry.  I remember my parents introducing the concept of measuring food on a diet they tried sometime back then.  I don’t remember what it was called, but I do recall they had a few weeks with no meat and then one day was “X ounces of meat day” and they could weigh out a certain amount.  I didn’t think about these things when I was developing my own weight control system, but they are in my mind somewhere.  

I tried reading about mindset as it relates to weight control and dieting.  Try a search on mindset and weight loss yourself and see how many results you find.  It’s a lot.  But having read about 10 pages there is a lot of bad advice out there.  Almost all of them talk about avoiding your scale as a technique.  How will you know where you are and in what direction you are going without that?  Others repeat the bad advice that you shouldn’t use food as a reward.  Of course you should definitely use food as a reward!  I’ve lost 90 pounds rewarding myself every meal of every day!  

It’s much more sensible to not use food for emotional reasons and be clear about why you are eating.  Use food as a physical reward and a sensual reward, not as medication to help your feelings.  Every person is a bottomless pit of emotional need (ok maybe that is overstating a bit) and you will eat yourself out of control in no time that way.  And the phrasing!  Don’t use food as a reward means what, use it for punishment?  That’s where my mind goes.  I guess there are people who see food only as fuel and neither reward nor punishment, but I am not sure that’s an ideal many people would seek after.  

Much better to create a world you would like to live in and then live there.  If that world involves meeting your physical need for food with carefully portioned meals that are your favorites….how many people would say no?  There is some work involved since you have to actually prepare and plan ahead a bit to make that happen.  But it is totally worth it.  

-The Doctor

20200722 Daily report with blueberries

It has been a great year overall…..for blueberries.  Fairly terrible for a lot of other things.  But for blueberries, I don’t remember a better year.  They have been cheap and ranged from pretty good to very good.  

Eating the blueberries plain is good.  Putting them in pancakes…..also good.  Making blueberry cobbler, Texas style was very, very good.  I have done all those things this year.  But I haven’t made a pie.  If I can stop eating them long enough to have any left over for pie, I will do that.  It’s been awfully hot for baking, though.  I will hope for a cool day.

I like to focus on creating a world I want to live in.  That means letting out my desires and creativity in cooking and food in general.  The portion has to be controlled, but the kind of food is up to me.  

Not as seasonal as blueberry pie, but worth waiting for

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – burrito bowl with 100g meat (250); 30g cheese (110); 130g refried beans (110); 2T sour cream (60);

  • 530 calories

Lunch – Big Greek Cafe $5 Gyro Wednesday!!!! (600);

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 13 ounces of ziti, sausage, and cheese slow cooker bake (520);

  • 520 calories

Snacking – blueberries (50)

  • 50 calories

Total for the day: 1700 calories (limit 1850)

It's always up to you

I have been paying more attention to my body.  That isn’t all good.  I am still 34 pounds away from my initial goal – to lose 125 pounds.  (Wow, though, 100 pounds lost may not be far off.)  I am still 50 pounds away from a more final goal of 185 pounds.  Nobody will look at me (unless they know me) and recognize I have lost a lot of weight.  They just see someone who is 35-50 pounds overweight!  Well, as long as I am losing weight I can tell myself that I am thinking like a thin person on the inside.  My body is just the lagging indicator.  And things are going well this week for weight control.  I even have blueberries.

You must always keep in mind that your goal is to build the life you want and live it.  If you don’t then your life is just the things that happen to you.  Being in control of my weight is only part of the life I want for myself.  Right now, it is taking a lot of my runtime, but it is also rewarding.  You can set up your life so that the accomplishments are rewarded.  That’s partly why I focus so hard on rewards.  They are rewards for achievement and they are meant to help create the life I want.  Achieving is better than accepting and should be rewarded.

Encourage yourself with rewards, it’s much better than punishment.  The beatings will continue until morale improves, right?

-The Doctor

20200721 Daily report: on top of Spaghetti

The author Terry Pratchett says, when life hands you a plate of spaghetti, just grab a strand and keep pulling until you find the meatball.  That could mean anything, but it works today because there was spaghetti for dinner.  And meatballs.  No pulling was required.  

Our hot weather may be ending soon.  We are predicted to have high temperatures in the 80s by the end of the week – still low 90s this weekend, but there is a sense we are off the sun’s anvil.  And we are starting to get some strong thunderstorms.  

Nice and simple

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bagel (330); salami (110); olive tapenade (30); cheese (50);

  • 520 calories

Lunch – 2x pork burgers (300); wheat wrap (50)

  • 650 calories 

Dinner – 6oz Rotini (300); 5x Costco meatballs (235)

  • 535 calories

Snacking – 96g ice cream (240)

  • 240 calories

Total for the day: 1885 calories (limit 1850)

Deprivation and punishment avoidance

My interest this week is to reset my brain so that I am in better alignment with my weight control goals.  My real goal is to create a life that is very enjoyable; my second goal is to be in control of my body’s weight.  The life I am creating is the life of a thin person.  My body will catch up over time.  What I am fighting is the wrong mindset.  In that wrong mindset, eating less is deprivation and withholding extra food is a kind of punishment.  That will never work as a life anybody wants to have.

It’s an exciting challenge to build a life you like.  You learn about yourself, you find out your limits, you see what you can do in support of your goals.  There’s no waiting for anybody to do things for you.  You are the only person who can make your life work.

Today was not a home run in terms of every meal being exciting, but one of them was, and they all worked for me.  I like my sandwiches, such as the BLT wrap, the hummus and meatball, the Cuban sandwich wrap, the Middle East chicken wrap, and now my Mufaletta bagel with olive tapenade.  Did I mention my Reuben grill wrap?  One of the newer additions to my list of favorites is the pork burger.  It’s a great recipe and has lots of flavor enhancers: soy sauce, Worcestershire, thyme, black pepper, salt, and panade with a bit of milk.  I had pork burgers for lunch with onion, pickle and horseradish sauce on a wrap.  I don’t know if there is a name for pork burger with horseradish sauce and I don’t care.  Fabulous!  It was worth all the trouble of getting hungry and preparing it.  

How have you learned to motivate yourself?  I hope it’s positive.  Don’t punish your way to success!

-The Doctor

20200720 Daily report: the struggle continues

I am talking about the struggle to get the mind right.  Once you have your mind right, you can transform yourself.  But what does that mean?  Your mind is in the wrong place if you can’t get yourself to lose weight.  I couldn’t do that for years.  I found it difficult and punishing.  It required attention and discipline and energy I preferred using elsewhere.  During that time, when I couldn’t lose wight, I would sometimes say that I must want to lose weight, or it must not be that important to me.  That’s also a sign that your mind is wrong; it’s passive.  If you aren’t in charge of your body, then who?

It’s not enough to WANT to.  You have to imagine a world where you are eating, and behaving, like a thin person whose weight is under control.  Your body will catch up.  What would that world be like?  It has to be attractive and worth the struggle.

That's not a salad. There's layers of meat and cheese and beans in there.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bagel (330): ham (50): olive tapenade (20);

  • 400 calories

Lunch – 7.5oz ziti sausage and cheese bake (300); 5oz slow cooker tortilla (280);

  • 580 calories 

Dinner – taco salad, with 90g meat (220); 110g beans (85); 30g cheese (110); tortilla (130); sour cream (60);

  • 605 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 80g ice cream (200)

  • 280 calories

Total for the day: 1865 calories (limit 1850)

Pitfalls in your head

I am working on getting my head right. Recently it’s been hard to get excited about the fantastic new world I created for myself.  You know, the one where I am in control of my body’s weight and keep rewarding myself for doing that by creating and eating portioned but fantastic meals. 

There are so many competing thoughts and wishes and desires and interests in someone’s head.  One of my strongly held values is …well, value – getting my money’s worth.  It’s made it hard to throw away food , even if I don’t want it.  Today, when I went for breakfast I was very interested in a ham bagel.  When I saw the jar of tapenade I was pretty excited!  Then I saw there were leftover pancakes in the fridge that need to be eaten.  I picked them up and was about to have them.  But then, I remembered how excited I was about the sandwich.  To each their own.  I put down the pancakes and made my sandwich.  This was not the provident course, but if your lodestone is weight control, then good value and providence are #2.

For lunch, I thought I should eat up the slow cooker Spanish tortilla, even though I don’t like it very much (not compared to the regular Spanish tortilla).  But this time I was wiser and had ziti sausage and cheese bake instead, which I really, really wanted.  Those were two very satisfying meals.  My created world was looking better and more exciting and rewarding.

At dinnertime I made a very well balanced taco salad.  By themselves lettuce and tomato are not rewarding for me, but when combined with meat, cheese, beans, sour cream, olives, jalapeno slices, and salsa, it was perfect.  It felt so good I had no need for seconds.  Three fantastic meals in one day!  

That’s how you get your mind right.  Reprioritize your values and get #1 straight.  Enact that in your life and you can enjoy the results.  Now that’s a world you want to live in.

-The Doctor

20200719 Daily report

Welcome to super hot Sunday edition!  101 degrees outside and everybody is inside.  I mean everybody – Disney Plus and other streaming services are very slow, which I think means everyone is using them and not going outside.  The pool across from me has “opened” but only a few people are there, or allowed there, because everyone still has to keep a distance, all the water features for kids are shut down, and it sounds like you can either swim laps, by appointment, or bob up and down a bit with your household.  It sounds sad that the kids can’t run and play and splash and talk to each other.  All the social distancing means half the fun of a pool is gone.  The hot tubs are also closed – all that is left is lap swimming for exercise and bobbing up and down.  This corona stuff can’t end soon enough.

But this blog is about a weight control journey.  What does all that mean for weight control?  Well, it means that for the last several months I haven’t been able to swim laps for exercise.  Has it affected my ability to lose weight?  I’m not sure.  It has made me change my routine, and I liked swimming.  I liked my old life, but things change.

The Doctor's Middle Eastern chicken wrap. Hummus, cucumber, tomato, chicken, Tobasco!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 8oz slow cooker Spanish tortilla (450); wheat wrap (110); mayonnaise (70);

  • 630 calories

Lunch – Burrito bowl with 130g refried beans (100); 100g Mexican ground beef (280); 30g cheese (110); 2Tbsp sour cream (50);

  • 510 calories 

Dinner – 1/6 serving of slow cooker ziti, sausage, and cheese bake (520)

  • 520 calories

Snacking – pretzels (50)

  • 50 calories

Total for the day: 1710 calories (limit 1850)

That's not all

Probably I’ll have something later that will bring me closer to the daily limit of 1850 calories.  A cold dessert?  I do have some lovely Tilamook ice cream and some Snickers ice cream bars.  We shall see.  I do have some watermelon in the refrigerator.  But the ice cream is very tempting.  I like Tilamook’s vanilla flavors the best, especially toffee, but also their chocolate chip cookie dough.  The cookies and cream was a bit dull.  

It’s been a pretty good year for watermelon.  I’ve bought five, and four of them were good to great.  One was disappointing, no flavor or sweetness to it.  I mostly buy the seedless ones, which are the most common now.  I also bought cherries from Washington state, which were the best cherries I have had in a long time.  All in all, it has been a good summer for every fruit I have tried, except strawberries.  Blueberries in particular were cheap, abundant, and very good this year.    

The hot week continues.  I have planned to do slow cooker and outdoor cooking this week for dinners, with mostly cold breakfasts and lunches.  It’s not as much fun and I don’t look forward to it as much as when I do more elaborate cooking, but things change.  And it’s not forever.  

This week I will have to put in some thought about what I want my life to look like.  A large part of my weight control lifestyle is the vision and reality of the life I want to create.  It can be a challenge.  I lke a challenge.

-The Doctor

20200718 weekly weighin’ slow n’ steady

It’s the Saturday weigh-in ,weighing, and a-weighin’.  To weigh in also means to say an opinion.  Plus the weighing part.  Let me weigh in!  Like I do every Saturday.  Saturday is the reset day.  I weigh myself in the morning, before breakfast, every week.  People who stay thin by choice, check their weight all the time.  In a prosperous society, staying thin takes work, and don’t forget it.  Most of all, pay attention.  

But your mind has to be in the right place so you can motivate yourself.  You can’t force yourself thin.  That comes slow and steady, once your mind is right.

Only victories in my battle-gallery

It’s not a lot of weight lost since last week, but it is still the lowest number ever.  Hooray!  Since I started working on controlling my weight, I have lost:

Pounds!!
0

Slowing pains

When I woke up this morning and got on the scale, I wasn’t optimistic.  It has been a hard week and weight loss has been slow.  But amazingly, the reading was 233.0.  But when I went to get my camera, I couldn’t get that number back, even not holding the camera.  That’s unusual, my scale usually replicates well.  I’ve had this happen before, though.  One Saturday a few months ago, I weighed myself, took a shower, dried off and got on the scale again. I was up a whole pound!  So there is some drift.  Would I weigh the same at the doctor’s office?  Well, I am confident that the trend is down.

This brings me to pants.  With all the teleworking, I have been wearing pants less often and since my weight has paused around 240 for the first 6 months of the year, I have kept wearing pants in the 44-46 waist size.  Yesterday, I tried on some 42 size pants as a clue to myself – have I really been losing weight?  My body doesn’t look and feel that different to me at 233 (point 4?) than it did at 243.  But the pants: I put them on and they closed without compression.  They were snug, not loose, but they did fit.  So change is occurring.  

It’s hard to keep perspective.  Having lost 91.6 pounds doesn’t make me thin.  I still want to lose more weight – my original idea of a healthy weight for my body was 200 pounds.  Now I am wondering if 185 is a better goal.  But first things first.  200 pounds is the target, and I will be happy to get there.  

There’s still the issue of headspace.  The author Terry Pratchett talked about getting your head right before making things happen.  Where is my head?  All this emphasis on a weight goal isn’t where I want to be.  I want to be creating a life I enjoy and will be motivated to work to keep.  I’m going to have to think about that some more.  

But still, this is my lowest weight ever (going down, anyway, I weighed this much once going the other direction).  Hooray for the weight control lifestyle and the food journal!  

-The Doctor

20200717 Daily report with finality

Why finality?  You shall see.  Today was a mixed day.  Part of my job is to pay attention to my body, like when I am hungry, and I missed the cues for that, twice.  Luckily the consequences were small.  Another part of my job is to make sure I am creating a lifestyle I want to live with.  The third job?  It’s become a hobby now, it’s to track my food intake every day – write it down in my food journal.  Part of the job is to keep a record, but the other part is to plan ahead.  That ties back to creating a lifestyle I am eager to be part of.  Last, and this is a bit subtle, I have to consider the long term, or the rest of my life.  It’s like creating a lifestyle I can live with, but it is more sustaining.  The lifestyle has to be self-reinforcing, in case I have a bad day, week, or month.  How can I keep coming back?

Pizza Friday. I know what I like!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Slow-cooker spanish tortilla, 4 oz. (250); half a wheat wrap (55); 1 tsp mayonnaise (35);

  • 340 calories

Lunch – bagel (330) ham (100) salami (90) cheese (50) olive tapenade (30);

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – half Aldi pizza (585); 

  • 585 calories

Snacking – chicken (100); pretzels (170); cheese (100);

  • 370 calories

Total for the day: 1870 calories (limit 1850)

The finality

I will explain.  It’s the end of the week and I have eaten my last for the day and the week.  So it’s the end of the food week, too.  It’s also finals in the sense that the final exam is tomorrow – the weighing.  This week has been a bit hard because I was coming off a bad week (probably illness-related) and started the week off wrong, with a 2400+ calorie day.  Even maintaining discipline the rest of the week, my average calories per day were about 1871.  So it’s drawing the line under a hard week.  Final.

It was also hard because I found myself without any energy or enthusiasm last weekend to do anything creative in the kitchen.  OK, it was also a bit hot outside.  But still.  

One last thing.  It’s been hard because I am getting impatient to break out of my current weight decade and get moving again.  I don’t enjoy thinking that way, because it’s not productive.  The goal is to make a lifestyle I enjoy living so that I will do anything to stay there.  If instead I am focused on weight loss, it seems like the wrong life goal, it’s less rewarding.  Weight loss should be a side effect of the improved lifestyle, not its main feature.  So it means my head is in the wrong place.  That’s no good.  

Create a world you want to live in.  Then live there.

-The Doctor.

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