20201106 Daily report: slog on

It has been five days.  Five days since I ended my temporary insanity.  For two weeks before that, I found myself unable to live the weight control lifestyle, and instead let some non-healthy needs for food (as a stress relief and general comfort) take control.  It’s a terrible thing, to realize you aren’t in control as much as you think you are.  

It was a bit of a setback, too.  I had gotten down to 212.8 pounds at one point.  I haven’t dared to weigh myself in a few weeks.  When I get on the scale tomorrow, I will be very proud if I only weigh 215.  That’s the price I am paying for those two weeks: two further weeks of making good. 

More homemade than usual!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Tortilla piece (166); wheat wrap half (35); mayonnaise (20); bagel (300); plum jam (70);

  • 590 calories

Lunch – ham (200); pretzels (150); cheese (50);

  • 400 calories 

Dinner – pizza (400); soup (130)

  • 530 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); crackers  (50)

  • 130 calories

Total for the day: 1650 calories (limit 1700).  Fitbit: 24,868 steps and an estimated 4451 calories burned.

You can do it

I get a  strong impulse to medicate myself with food in extremely stressful situations.  I call this concept my reason for eating.  In the best of times, my reason for eating is physical need.  I use hunger to tell me both that I have a physical need, and that I am not eating too much.  I mean that if I get hungry at lunchtime, it means it’s a good reason to eat lunch.  Also, it means that I haven’t overloaded my system with too much breakfast.  (If I overeat at breakfast I won’t be physically hungry at lunch.)  Eating, hunger, and physical need are linked, which is the best.

When I eat for other reasons, I lose the link between physical need and eating.  If I am eating to feel better, or to deal with stress, then I am in danger.  Eating more means feeling even better.  After a while, you don’t feel good unless you are eating and feel full.  And that way madness lies.  

What is your reason for eating?

-The Doctor

20201105 Daily soup report

Thank goodness for soup.  It’s perfect for fall, it doesn’t take long to make (lentil soup anyway), and it doesn’t have a lot of calories.  The soup base is bacon, and chicken stock.  The vegetables: onion, celery, and carrot.  The seasonings include thyme, garlic, balsamic vinegar and bay leaves.  Finally, a pound of lentils.  It all took about an hour.  Pairing is easy too – warm baguette.  A meal worth anticipating.  

Much better when homemade.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – sausage (230); wrap (70); peppers and onions (15);

  • 315 calories

Lunch – meatballs (235); wraps (140); hummus (100); olives (25); potatoes (75);

  • 575 calories 

Dinner – lentil soup (300); bread (160);

  • 460 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); Twix bar (250);

  • 330 calories

Total for the day: 1670 calories (limit 1700).  Fitbit says I have taken 21,178 steps and burned 4137 calories.  I did take an exercise walk today.  

What do you want? Make sure you get it...

One of the tricks that has worked for me is to embrace hunger.  It’s a different way of looking at things than I had when I was gaining weight.  Now, I make sure I have something to look forward to at every meal.  It makes controlling my food portions possible.  I balance hunger and eating.  

By possible, I mean it’s possible to keep on doing it, day after day and month by month.  It’s no good forcing myself to eat less food, I just get resentful and don’t stay on the diet.  But I can maintain a balance, for most of the time.  

What makes it all possible is making weight control one of my top priorities.  What would you give up in order to lose 100 pounds?  I gave up being the person who gained 100 extra pounds.  It was harder than it sounds.  I had to question my own priorities, my old existence, and turn away, and find a new set of values to live by, to see by, to aim by.  The person I was, is mostly submerged now.  That person will gain 100 pounds, if he is in control of my life.  I decided I didn’t want that anymore.

What would you give up?

-The Doctor  

20201104 Daily report and run

Today, I didn’t exercise – only took 17,000 steps.  Seriously – I didn’t go for a walk or anything, I just took that many steps today.  It’s not unusual.  When I do go for a walk, it’s usually about 4500 steps.  I am just that kind of person, I guess.  It doesn’t prevent me from gaining weight, though.  

Every day, my job is to manage hunger and how I satisfy it.  I do that with a food journal.  I am trying to be responsible for my body’s weight, and that means I can control how much I weigh.  The trick is: I have come up with a lifestyle I like.  I don’t have to use willpower to stay on it, I have found other ways of rewarding myself. 

Saturday Evening Supper, on Wednesday

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – pizza (100); wrap (70); tortilla (330); mayo (25);

  • 525 calories

Lunch – ham (200); Italian bread (120); olive tapenade (30);

  • 350 calories 

Dinner – Saturday evening supper with noodles (200); sausage (300); peppers and onions (25); cheese (100);

  • 625 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); cookie (50)

  • 130 calories

Total for the day: 1630 calories (limit 1700); Fitbit says I walked 17,548 steps and estimates I burned 3789 calories today.

The job

I can insist on being responsible for how much I weigh.  I don’t do that with willpower, I don’t have that ability.  I have changed my goals for eating, and living, so that I can be successful every day.  Recently I had a stressful couple of weeks and found myself reacting with my old pattern: eating for comfort and stress relief.  However, once I got hold of myself (or things got less stressful, I haven’t decided) I was easily able to start controlling my weight again.  I have had several successful days now (at least, I recorded less than 1700 calories for those days) and don’t feel any deprivation.

The whole system is built around making sure I don’t feel deprived.  I make sure that I am looking forward to each meal and that it will be worth the wait.  It means some extra work – cooking, preparation, shopping, portioning, even cleaning.  But that is a price I am willing to pay.  I enjoy eating measured portions more than I ever enjoyed eating huge ones.  

You see, when your aims and goals and values are set up right, you are able to control your weight using any tools that work for you.  It all serves the goal. 

What is your goal for eating?  Try to answer that honestly and you are halfway there.

-The Doctor

20201103 Daily report: plug away

It’s day 2 of the great re-normalizing.  After two weeks of having trouble keeping myself in the weight control zone, it feels good (so far) to be taking control again.  I have been keeping my food journal, managing hunger, and trying to find productive and responsible ways to deal with stress.  

Little springs and San Marizano sauce

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 1/12 Spanish tortilla (166); mayo (30); wrap (70); beef and broccoli (140);

  • 370 calories

Lunch – chicken and hummus wraps with tapenade (250); snacks (100);

  • 350 calories 

Dinner – 4oz noodles (200); 8 meatballs (375); brussels sprouts (25);

  • 600 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); chocolate (100); crackers (150)

  • 330 calories

Total for the day: 1650 calories (limit 1700).  Fitbit says 3750 calories burned and 18,000 steps today.  

It's too late?

I won’t say much tonight, I have a lot of work to do.  But I have been amazed how simple it was to pull myself together and have a couple of good days, following a couple of bad weeks.  It was almost a relief.  It suggests that getting my mind right was the key ingredient here.  

What I asked myself: was eating al the extra food really comforting?  Did it actually make anything about my life better? 

Does being in control of my weight make life better?  

Overeating for a few weeks was a bit depressing, but not terrible.  That’s because I know I can lose the weight again, as long as I have my head right.  

Goodnight, keep your head right!

-The Doctor

20201102 Daily report: the rebeginning, again

I have been unable to continue my weight control lifestyle for nearly two weeks.  So I haven’t been posting, either.  I am blaming stresses in my personal life for this lapse.  For whatever reasons, I have a habit of medicating those kinds of stresses with food.  It’s pretty amazing watching it happen from inside your own head.  I’m not as much in control as I like to think!

That also means I haven’t been weighing myself for the last two weeks.  It’s just too frustrating, when you know you have been overeating and letting yourself down.  I will probably have to pay for all this, with another two weeks of  successful weight control, before I come back to normal.  You can see why people gain weight over the winter holidays!  

Spanish tortilla works for winter or summer

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – tea (80)

  • 80 calories

Lunch – white rice (100); beef and broccoli (150); chicken (100); hummus (70); wheat wrap (50); olive spread (30);

  • 500 calories 

Dinner – 1/4 Spanish Tortilla (500); mayo (100); vegetables (25);

  • 625 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); crackers (170)

  • 250 calories

Total for the day: 1455 calories (limit 1700).  Walked today, Fitbit predicts 3660 calories burned and recorded over 20,000 steps!

Sleep score

Last night was daylight savings time.  I was careful to take it seriously and went to bed a little early.  Maybe because of that, my sleep score was 84.  That’s better than usual, my sleep score is usually in the 70s.  I did feel well rested.

Anyway, as I was saying.  I just had two out-of-control weeks and now I have to pay for them.  Did I enjoy the two week indulge-fest?  Well, not as much as you might think.  There was a lot of candy involved (thanks Costco!).  But there was a thought in the back of my mind that I would have to pay for all the overeating.  I don’t dare get on the scale even today.  I’m not looking forward to Saturday!  And my pants started to feel tight.  I’ve noticed before that you get important feedback from your clothes.  Amazingly, when your clothes are close fitting, even eating one big meal provides instant feedback.  

Anyway, I am ready to start being responsible for my body again.  That means paying the price: two good weeks to make up for two bad weeks.  Is that a waste of four weeks?  Hard question.  I’m just glad the way forward is clear.  I’m glad I have a system that works and that I want to come back to.  

Step one: I don’t like the way things are going and I can  change that.  What is my reason for eating?

Answering honestly is steps 2 through 99.

-The Doctor

20201020 Daily report: how it’s done

The daily report is where I talk about my daily experiences trying to live the weight control lifestyle.  Every day is its own new day: yesterday’s mistakes don’t carry over or become today’s problem.  I can’t eat less today so that I can eat more tomorrow.  Each day stands alone.

Which can make things tricky.  Yesterday I had a bad diet day and overate after dinner.  I used to do that every day, but it is unusual now.  In the days when my body’s weight wasn’t that important to me, I wouldn’t have even noticed that I did it.  Now I count my calories and stick to regular meals.  That’s all in service of my desire to be in control of my body’s weight.

Spanish tortilla with red peppers and peas.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – tea (80)

  • 80 calories

Lunch – tea (80);

  • 80 calories 

Dinner – Spanish tortilla (500); 1T mayonnaise (100)

  • 600 calories

Snacking – not today

  • 0 calories

Total for the day: 760 calories (limit 1700)

Recovery

I don’t punish myself for overeating: what’s done is done, and also I want recovery to be easy.  Today I was willing to eat my daily target of 1700 calories, even though I had about 1200 calories last night after dinner.  It’s a new day, so the calorie clock resets.  

However, as you can imagine I wasn’t very hungry for most of the day.  I had a relatively big dinner today (600 calories) because I started to feel hungry again.  I wasn’t sure I would!  But it feels restrictive if you tell yourself “No, you can’t eat today because you ate so much yesterday.”  I gave myself permission to eat what I needed today, and paid a lot of attention to my physical need, today.  

It’s amazing that I can still switch between eating only when I am physically hungry – my new weight control method – and eating for non physical (emotional) reasons. Today I paid strict attention to whether I was physically hungry.  Yesterday, I didn’t do that.  My eating yesterday had nothing to do with physical hunger, and I can admit that.  Stress and emotion affect us in strange ways and I took the easy way out last night.  

I have allowed bad diet days before.  The nice thing about resetting each day is that each day is another chance to do it right.  Next week is a chance to do things right and have a perfect week.  This week may be shot, though.  

-The Doctor

20201019 Daily report with attention

Your old thinking is what got you into this mess, isn’t it?  The life you are living and the way you are thinking are the reason your body is heavier than you would really like it to be.  In my case, eventually, 120 pounds heavier than I really wanted it to be.  But I never did much about it.  I got a bit fatalistic about it.  Clearly, it was not a priority for me at that time.  

Eventually I realized that my thinking had to change.  I could pick what I valued in life and accomplish what I wanted.  But in that process I would have to sacrifice my old self, my old life.  And what values would I pick?  What could I value that would transform me into a man who controlled his body’s weight?

A sprig of parsely would have been a good idea.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 11oz nacho topping (500); Ole wraps (100); sour cream (50);

  • 650 calories

Lunch – apple pie (350); sausage wrap (230);

  • 580 calories 

Dinner – 9oz Hoppin John (230); 5oz rice (160); Brussels sprouts (25);

  • 415 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1725 calories (limit 1700)

What to value, what to discard

From my past dieting failures I knew I shouldn’t value a goal weight.  That’s just a personal discovery, there are people who do value being a certain numerical weight (I still weigh the same as I weighed in high school!) and that works for them.  I needed something that would take advantage of my particular self: my habits, my inclinations, my motivations.  

I decided I had been taking the easy way out in my life.  Eating had become the answer to  everything that wasn’t going the way I wanted.  It was time to make things happen.  I decided to value control over my body’s weight.  That’s a bit different than valuing some particular number.  If I have control, I could gain or lose, whichever I wanted.  That control could be exerted in other parts of my life, too.  But for now, I would make weight control a top value and live that out every day.  Once I valued weight control, I found myself able to develop and live out the behaviors and tools I needed to make that happen.

When I was living my old life, eating less food was hard because I learned to associate eating with comfort and soothing feelings.  Eating less was like a punishment!  So my attempts to diet failed: it was straight use of willpower to deny myself love and comfort.  Who would want that?  

Change your thinking.  Identify what you are thinking thta has gotten you into trouble.  In my case, it was the reason for eating that had become incorrect and needed to be changed.  Why are you eating?

-The Doctor

20201018 Daily report: stepping out

I have made it my job to control my body’s weight every day, one day at a time.  That’s recent.  Two years ago that wasn’t on my list of priorities.  By deciding to value taking responsibility for my body’s weight so highly, I effectively became a new person with a new way of living.  I have been living those choices out ever since.

The old me is still there.  If I stop paying attention to my body’s weight, I will fall back in to my old habits.  That means I could easily gain the weight back.  I have been working hard to make sure my new way of life and new way of seeing the world, are just superior and worth fighting for.

Autumn dinner: chili, cornbread, salad

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – pancakes (300); Splenda syrup (25); butter (50);

  • 375 calories

Lunch – 10oz nacho topping (450); Ole wraps (100); sour cream (25);

  • 575 calories 

Dinner – 8oz chili (350); cornbread (100); sour cream (50); chips (140); salad (25);

  • 665 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80);

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1695 calories (limit 1700)

Yard work

I’m not the first to notice this, but yard work burns a lot of calories.  According to my Fit Bit, I spent 2 hours blowing and raking leaves, and walked just as much as a typical 3-mile walk and burned even more calories.  Not bad for slowly walking around with a leaf-blower backpack on my back.  The raking itself was probably more strenuous, but even so I was amazed how much energy goes into just blowing leaves. 

And the great (?) thing about yardwork is that it doesn’t end.  I will be blowing and raking more leaves next weekend.  Then comes the point where the leaves have all fallen.  Then it’s time to spend hours picking leaves out of all the shrubbery.  I wonder how many calories that burns?  Probably not a lot.

Tonight I have to head to bed early.  Monday is going to be a busy day in what will be a busy week for me.  I am hoping to keep my vision where it needs to be: food is for satisfying physical hunger and no thing more.  I haven’t been totally successful with that in times of busyness or stress.    I may have to do some more thinking.

Good night,

-The Doctor

20201017 Saturday weighing

Weight control is mostly mental.  Your body follows along behind, a lagging indicator.  What makes the difference, mentally?

  1. Your body’s weight has to be one of the most important parts of your life.  If anything else is at the top of your value structure, you will probably be out of control and gain weight. 
  2. Weight “control” partly means that you know your body’s weight.  I know mine (now) but for many years I only had a vague idea.  During that time I went from 240 to 320+ pounds.  Now I weigh weekly.
  3. Eating and food have to be connected to physical need.  If you honestly think about why you are eating and challenge yourself, you will find most of us have gotten into the habit of eating for other reasons.  
Down we go, slow, slow

Last week I weighed 214.2 pounds, and this is 1.4 pounds less!  That is progress, and I won’t complain that losing 2 pounds would have been better.  Since starting weight control as a lifestyle I have lost:

Pounds!!
0

Closer to the target

I originally said I wanted to lose 120 pounds, which would take me to a body weight of 205 pounds.  I’m not so sure about that target now that I am closer.  Maybe I want to weigh a bit less than 205.  I’ve looked in the mirror at 212.8 pounds and am not satisfied!  But before I move the goalposts, I have to note that I am less than 10 pounds away from that goal of 205 pounds.  It’s 7.8 pounds away.  That’s just 5-6 weeks at the current rate.  

According to my calorie log, this week I ate 11,452 calories and had a daily average of 1,636 calories.  According to my FitBit pedometer, this week I burned 27,818 calories for a daily average of 3,974 calories.  The difference is 16,366 calories.  By the strict rules of 3500 calories of deficit for one pound, I should have lost 4 pounds this week!  So it is not straightforward.  At this point I am just happy to be down over a pound.  Once I have more data I can start looking at the link between exercise and weight loss more carefully.

I do have one more week of data.  Last week I lost 2 pounds, burned 25,718 calories and ate 11,627 calories.  You see the problem: fewer calories burned, slightly more calories eaten, but more weight loss.  I am not sure what to make of that, but I guess there is some variation in how the body works from week to week.  

Week one: 11,627 calories in; 25,718 calories out.  Loss: 2 pounds.

Week two:  11,452 calories in; 27,818 calories out.  Loss: 1.4 pounds.

We’ll pretend I was building muscle, ok?

-The Doctor

20201016 Daily report: walka walka

I walked 20,000 steps today, according to my Fitbit pedometer.  That’s a bit unusually high.  Normally I do 15,000 or so.  But every little bit helps.  When you are asserting your control over your body, you take advantage of any natural help you can get, and I like to walk and pace a lot.  That helps in losing weight: more activity, more calories burned, the more weight I will lose.  

Homemade pizza: still the best

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Italian bread (120); salami (160); relish and horseradish sauce (20); 

  • 300 calories

Lunch – 10oz nachos (450); Ole wraps (100); sour cream (30);

  • 580 calories 

Dinner – pizza (600); Brussels sprouts (25)

  • 625 calories

Snacking – 100g ice cream (200)

  • 200 calories

Total for the day: 1705 calories (limit 1700).  Fitbit says I burned 4218 calories today.

Burn baby burn

It will be very interesting to watch what happens to my body between now and my target weights.  My initial target was 205 pounds and oh my goodness, I am less than 10 pounds away from that.  That’s  just a month’s work for the Doctor of Things.

I want to see what 190 pounds looks like, so I will probably set that new target for myself just to see what happens.  What will my waist size be at 190 pounds?  I have no idea, because I have been overweight so long.  Will I start getting cold more easily in the winter?  Will it feel different moving around?  It has started to feel easier getting up, squatting down, and similar.  I have talked before about how I am a bit more resistant to summer heat, even at 230-140 pounds.  It will also be fun to go into stores and know that stuff on the regular shelves will fit me.  

This is all very optimistic talk, but my record is good.  It’s important to remember the fundamentals: eat only when physically hungry.  I keep myself on that goal by insisting I have total responsibility for my body and how much it weighs.  And setting up goals and rewards!  

Let’s see what happens tomorrow.  Good night!

-The Doctor

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