20191006 Daily report

The purpose of the daily report is well expressed in the tags to this post: Daily report, Long term dieting, Paying attention, and Stay on a diet.  I am no longer the man I was prior to 2019.  Now, I see the world in a new way and I live according to a new set of values.  One of those new values is to care a lot about how much I weigh.

Terry Pratchett said (paraphrasing) that the essence of magic was to describe the world in a way it couldn’t ignore.  Well, I have transformed myself using the power of magic.  In these posts, I am describing a new way of living – the way I am living now.  I have lost more than 80 pounds by just adopting a new and appealing lifestyle.  I plan to lose at least 40 more pounds.  That seems possible, considering I am two-thirds of the way along.  

Not bad, but needs more browning

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – ham (100); Swiss cheese (120); toasted bread (160); horseradish and mustard and pickle sandwich; 8 oven roasted Brussels sprouts (60)

  • 440 calories

Lunch – 8oz nacho topping (390); 1oz nacho chips (160); 2 Tbsp sour cream (60)

  • 610 calories 

Dinner – 11.25 ounces beef stew (475); ccc (00)

  • 475 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (120); 5x Kirkland tea cookies (210)

  • 330 calories

Total for the day: 1855 calories (limit 1800)

Don't crowd the pan

The total recipe of beef stew, cooked, weighed 7 pounds and contained 4750 calories.  So I had a tenth of it for dinner (7 pounds is 112 ounces, so the portion was 11.25 ounces, nearly three-quarters of a pound), which makes 475 calories.  It didn’t look like a lot in the bowl, but really it was very filling.  Three quarters of a pound is a fair amount of beef stew!

The only problem was browning the beef.  I tried doing it outside, since that kind of thing is hard on the kitchen surfaces.  It was going well with my electric skillet, until the last batch.  I crowded the pan and so the meat didn’t brown well in that batch.  Darn!  The stew was really good but I had this feeling that it could have been better, with more browning of the meat.   Anyway, an extra glass of wine (in me) solved that problem.  

I literally had a comment from a reader regarding willpower.  To clarify: it’s true, I am not using willpower to eat less food.  I have tried and tried that, and all it does is frustrate me, make me resentful, and then feel disappointed when I fail and give up.  Instead, I changed my mind.  Now, I use my willpower to pay attention to my needs and try to meet them.  I spent a good part of the weekend shopping and cooking to prepare for the week.  I have homemade beef stew and a baked Mexican nacho casserole, for dinners.  For lunches, I have ham, chicken, hummus, meatballs, and low calorie bread wraps ready to go.  There is bacon ready to reheat.  Actually, that sounds like the perfect breakfast.  

I negotiated with myself, built trust, and established a system of rewards.  In exchange for the food being satisfying and delivered with care and attention to when I am most hungry, I have found my body and subconscious parts are willing to eat controlled amounts of food.  If I slack off, look out!  I may have a bad diet day.  So willpower is involved, but not in the way people think.  For me, living this way, there is no need to use willpower or force, to eat less food.  I am as happy as I have ever been, living this way.  I feel like all my parts are working together and achieving remarkable results.

Fine, I caused the problem (overweight) myself, by not paying attention, by having short term and shallow goals, by being stubborn and set in my ways.  But addressing it so dramatically and successfully so far, is remarkable anyway.  It does take discipline.  But I don’t have to force myself to eat things I don’t want, and I don’t have to force myself away from the table hungry and resentful.  That used to be me.

What parts of your thinking are due for a redo?

-The Doctor

20191005 Saturday weigh-in

There are two essential parts to the mechanism for controlling your weight.  (This is after you have given up on your old life and your old ways of thinking about food.  If you haven’t changed your mind, then this approach won’t help you either.)  1. Regulate your food intake and 2. Weigh yourself regularly.  I thought about calling it the Well Regulated Diet, but the name lacks drama.  And it’s only the mechanism.  What’s truly important is your mental transformation.

Having transformed, you need a mechanism to control your weight, though.  Ultimately it’s all about the scale.  Weigh yourself periodically and regularly.  Some people weigh themselves every day.  I prefer once a week, at this time.  It may change.  I think the thinner you want to be, the more effort (attention) it takes.  

Not thin yet, but this is a reward based system!

I started in January 2019 at 325 pounds.  Alas, I didn’t take a picture at that time.  I just have a spreadsheet entry.But this is an improvement from last week of nearly three pounds!  My original goal was 205 pounds, and now I am less than 40 pounds away from that.  And that means since starting in January I have lost:

Pounds!!
0

Reward, reward, reward. Put the duty on your conscious will.

The conscious ego “I” is very good at issuing orders.  If you have ever been on a diet (and you know you have), you know that you can tell yourself to eat less, lose weight, eat different foods, stop drinking, exercise more, stop smoking, and (my favorite) stop procrastinating, if you get around to it.  None of that works.  Your body and your subconscious parts might try to play along for a while, but you can’t even order yourself around successfully, not for more than a few days or weeks.  You will build up resentment against even yourself.  Soon you will be looking for excuses, reasons, rationalizations, to explain breaking your diet, just this one time.  Game over.  Then you will be disappointed in yourself.  Welcome to competing resentments in one body, where each part of your being is angry and resentful against the other parts!  Good luck getting anything done.  

A more successful approach is to treat yourself respectfully, as someone you should negotiate with, to benefit all.  That means give and take.  That means figuring yourself out.  It means paying attention to what your body wants.  That means satisfying many different parts or layers of yourself, with their competing desires, priorities, and interests, and harmonizing those wants and needs with your conscious desire to be in control of your body’s weight.

You can profitably invert the system I described above.  Your conscious will can do the work, for a change, instead of just issuing futile orders.  Use your will to serve yourself with care and attention.  You will love it.  For that kind of love, your mind and body will do anything for you.  Use your willpower to reward yourself for a job well done.  Don’t use your willpower to force yourself to go against your nature.  Each meal can be a reward, and you can use your willpower to make sure your body and soul get exactly what they want to eat, just when it will be most fulfilling.  In return, they will be willing to eat less food.  

The rewards exist any many levels.  Each meal is a reward.  I only eat things I love.  When I reach a weigh milestone, I get a reward.  Every 10 pounds I have lost, so far, has resulted in a new reward.  You’d think I would run out of rewards, but apparently I have a limitless appetite for reward.  And I use my willpower to figure all that out, plan meals ahead, shop, and prepare food ahead of time.  I cater to myself and reward myself using willpower.  I will always have enough will for that. 

I’ve enjoyed this lifestyle (so fulfilling and satisfying) more than I have enjoyed any part of my post-childhood.  And I only started living it in January, 2019.  On top of that, I have lost 82 pounds.  It’s almost been a side benefit of enjoying life more.

If you can’t say that, maybe you should allow yourself to think about what that would be like.

-The Doctor

20191004 Daily report

Writing a food journal means paying a lot of attention.  There’s more to it than just sitting down at the end of the day, or the end of the week(!) and trying to remember what you ate.  A food journal is kept right at the time you eat.  I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Today, I had a tea break at 3.30 PM.  With cookies.  That means I wrote in my food journal four times today.  It takes a lot of time and attention to control your body’s weight.  Don’t think you can do it just when you have spare time.  You get spare time when your food journal is done!

Also, you should be paying attention to a lot more than just what you ate.  If you are in control, then you are paying attention to what you are going to eat next, too.  Next meal, next day, next week….it shuld be food that makes you happy to think about it and want to eat it.  Then it is worth getting a little hungry for.

Admit it, you like the look of my homemade sausage chili.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2oz ham (100); Swiss cheese (90); toasted bread (160); sandwich with pickles and mustard and horseradish (negligible calories)

  • 350 calories

Lunch – 8oz homemade sausage chili (330); 1oz tortilla chips (160); 2T sour cream (60)

  • 550 calories 

Dinner – 1/2 slice Costco pizza (355); 10 ounces homemade Lentil soup (190); toasted bread and butter (150);

  • 695 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 5 Kirkland Euro chocolate cookies (210)

  • 290 calories

Total for the day: 1885 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

I never know

I only weigh myself once a week (usually), on Saturday mornings.  I never know until I read the scale, whether I have lost weight that week.  It is always, even after months of weight loss, a happy surprise when I have lost.  It has gotten so reliable that keeping the same weight (or even gaining a pound, which happened one or two times) is strange and requires explanation.  I have learned, though data in my food journal, that slowdowns, halts, and reversals in weight loss (which can last weeks!) are almost always illness or travel related.  When I get better, weight loss resumes.

Part of the reason I don’t know before I get on the scale, is that I don’t understand and have no experience with my body at this weight.  The last time I weighted 246 (apart from last week), was 15 or 20 years ago.  When I go swimming and look in the mirror, it’s not like I can see that I have lost a pound or two since last time.  The weight around my middle doesn’t seems to change very drastically week to week.  I do know that the size 46 pants I have been wearing since early July are pretty loose now, but they might have stretched a bit.  My size 44 new pants are a bit snug, honestly.  (Yes, I know when I started wearing size 46 pants because that’s in my food journal.  It has a lot of uses.  Keep a food journal!)

Amazingly, because of my food journal, I know that in early July I weighed 264 pounds.  That’s a loss of almost 20 pounds and I am in the same pants!  Honestly, they are a bit loose.  But there is such a thing as stretching the waist out.  I just can’t be sure using any other way but the scale.  

I have had to get rid of some dress shirts.  My neck is smaller now, even if my waist has only shrunk a bit.  So that’s goodbye to anything with a size 18 neck.  The problem is that a dress shirt with a size 17 neck has a smaller body too….so my neck is shrinking quicker than my waist.  That’s awkward.  It sounds like I need to lose more and hope it comes off at the waist!  Classically, men gain weight first around their middle and then it spreads to other areas.  Logically, that means I will lose the weight around my waist….last.  But by that logic, at some point it will take less than 20 pounds to lose a pants size.  There won’t be anywhere else to lose from.  

Paying proper attention is a lot of work.  Pay attention to important things and it will help you a lot.  

-The Doctor

20191003 Daily report

I am in a weight control lifestyle for the long haul.  The rest of my life, anyway.  I can do that because I’ve made the lifestyle attractive.  I want to live this way because I enjoy it more than how I used to be.  Not just because I am thinner, but because my quality of life, my enjoyment, and sense of fulfillment, are all increased.  Notice, it is not being thinner that makes me enjoy things more.  The lifestyle is the attraction.  Will I be counting calories and keeping a food journal for the rest of my life?  Maybe.  It takes effort and it takes a lot of attention to keep yourself balanced that way.

Several old men I know, who were thin and stayed thin throughout their lives, had a different approach.  They didn’t keep food journals.  They just ate the same thing every week and knew exactly how much of that they could have in a week.  They didn’t get a lot of variety, but they stayed thin.  It didn’t hold up when their routines were disrupted, like during the holidays.  Then your normal food gets disrupted and there are lots of fun new things to eat.  A calorie counter has the advantage there.

Right now, I like the freedom to eat whatever I want.  I just count the calories.  

210 calories of cookies. Tea with half-and-half, 40 calories per cup

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 6 ounces cookied rice (200); 8oz New Orleans red beans and andouille sausage (250);

  • 250 calories

Lunch – Costco half slice pizza (375); 12 ounces homemade  lentil soup (230); 

  • 605 calories 

Dinner – 12 ounces sausage chili (500)

  • 500 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 5 Kirkland tea cookies (210)

  • 290 calories

Total for the day: 1845 calories (limit 1800)

Think it through

Remember, the lifestyle is the goal, and not a target weight.  Let’s think that through.  If I was obsessed with hitting a certain weight number, that could be a problem.  For most of us who are overweight and gaining weight, the hardest thing to change is your mind.  Dieting without changing your mind means you are doing it wrong.  Your old life is just waiting to re-emerge and then your old weight will come back as soon as you let it.  You need to be a new person who sees the world in a new way.  Your old self is sacrificed to the new one.  That is very liberating.  But consider what you need to change.

When I was gaining weight, I didn’t pay any attention to the amount of food I was eating.  Food tasted good, and more food tasted good even longer.  Being full was very satisfying, or so it seemed.  I just let the good food roll on in until I was full.  But you don’t stay full for long.  And if satisfaction comes from things tasting good and your stomach being full, well, the result would be weight gain, if you are in a position to indulge that.  

Dieting was 100% against everything I enjoyed, when I thought that way.  Eating less food meant less enjoyment, and not getting full meant never being satisfied.  I was resentful and unsatisfied, even as I tried to force myself to eat less.  Giving up the sources of pleasure and satisfaction in your life is no way to get your body to cooperate.  So I was making the wrong sacrifice.  And I was asking the sacrifice from the wrong part of myself.  

I sacrificed my old values and my old way of thinking.  I gave up being full as a source of fulfillment (ha) and I gave up eating more food as a source of pleasure.  I replaced them with dramatizing my food, an old technique.  Basically, you appreciate your food more, and it tastes better, when you let yourself get a little hungry.  So you make sure you build up the meal and make it more dramatic.  Plan out the food you really want to eat, let yourself get hungry for it, anticipate it, prepare the food well, and then enjoy a measured portion of it.  That sequence is actually hugely satisfying.  More food actually ruins the drama, because you’re not hungry any more.  There’s no anticipation.  

You can see how the rest goes.  The anticipation becomes something you look forward to.  You come to value it more than you value having a full stomach.  At that point, you would rather be hungry than full, just so you can have the pleasure of satisfying your hunger.  And now you are thinking like someone new.  That new person is capable of controlling their body’s weight, because they are increasing their enjoyment of life while eating controlled amounts.  They are no longer fighting themselves and hating it, resenting it.

Could you change your mind?

-The Doctor

20191002 Daily report

I write a post every day.  Each day is a new day.  If I eat too few calories today, I don’t get extra calories tomorrow.  If I eat too many calories today, I don’t deprive myself tomorrow.  That feels like punishment, and you can’t get cooperation from your body if you are punishing it.  So every day, I get 1800 calories.   To make that work, I try for each meal to be 400-600 calories.  I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I usually have tea too, either morning or evening.  It depends.  

My goal is to get physically hungry in the few minutes before mealtime.  It’s tricky, because if you get too hungry, a different part of yourself might take over and eat a lot!  And if you don’t get hungry, then it ruins the meal.  (If you are used to eating only when physically hungry, it becomes an important part of the experience.)  So: guard your hunger and use it to enhance your enjoyment.  You really feel like you are taking care of yourself and catering to your needs, if you pay so much attention to your own enjoyment.  Then body and mind can work together to achieve weight control.  It’s working for me.

My first Filipino food experience!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2oz ham (100); Muenster cheese (100); toasted bread (160); sandwich with pickles and mustard and horseradish

  • 360 calories

Lunch – KC Filipino restaurant pork estofado (120); chicken adobo (120); 5oz rice (160); miscellaneous appetizers (50)

  • 450 calories 

Dinner – Costco pizza (750);

  • 750 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 5 cookies (200)

  • 280 calories

Total for the day: 1840 calories (limit 1800)

Well, this is awkward

It says above that my daily limit is 1800 calories, but I have been having closer to 1850 most days.  What gives?  

When I first started the weight control lifestyle, I was convinced that on days I exercised (I like to swim) I would get hungry and that would ruin my ability to stay on a diet.  So I calculated that I burned 600 calories on my swimming routine, and added 500 extra to those two days per week.  That way, the exercise would be calorie neutral, but it would provide an incentive to exercise.  You get extra calories those days!  Then it turned out that the fancy diet people had already been doing that and calling it Cheat Days or Intermittent Fasting.  

“Cheat Days” means you allow yourself some extra calories a few times per week.  This is planned and part of your calorie total.  The idea is that it feels exciting to have extra calories.  It’s something to look forward to, which can be nice.

The other idea is Intermittent Fasting.  This means that if your weight loss inexplicably halts for a week or three, you try to shock your body back into weight loss by skipping meals and then making up the calories during the remaining meals.  So you might have a normal breakfast, skip lunch, then a larger dinner.  

The Doctor of Things is hardheaded about this kind of thing.  In my experience, there are sometimes hard-to-explain slowdowns in weight loss, and I have had my share of them.  But I have never done any intermittent fasting, because weight loss resumes some days or weeks later.  Looking back through my journal (it has a lot of uses because I record lots of things), weight loss halts or slowdowns can last 1-4 weeks.  They are almost always associated with illness or travel.  I have even been able to predict getting sick because my weight loss slows down, or I even gain a pound or two from the previous week.  Travel also plays hell with my weight loss.  It just seems like those are lost weeks, although I don’t usually eat any more when I am traveling.  When I am really sick, I don’t always keep to my calorie limits, though I try to write everything down.  

Back to my point – I used to have Cheat Days, and now I am trying not having them.  Each day, I am trying for 1850 calories, maximum.  I’ll see how that works out when I weigh myself this week and next week.  

Strangely, twice this week, I have eaten under 1700 calories for the day.  I’m not sure why that is, but since I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t eat.  I have learned that eating without hunger is a big letdown.  The experience of eating becomes very high quality through slight deprivation (hunger at the right time) and anticipation (satisfying hunger with the food you really want).  High quality experience is great, because it makes the low quality experience (eating until totally full) seem not worthwhile and undesirable.  

Try it!  You can use that kind of knowledge to achieve weight control in your mind, which is the important place.  Your body will follow.

-The Doctor

20191001 Daily report

Keeping a food journal is an essential step towards weight control.  If you don’t know what you’ve eaten, and how much, how can you control your intake?  Rule #1: Regulate your food intake. 

Keeping track of your weight is also essential for weight control.  How do you know your calorie counting is effective and honest?  The proof is your weight.  Rule #2: Weigh yourself regularly.

This could be called the well-regulated approach to weight control: Regulate your food intake and weigh yourself regularly.  

There is also a transformation: start seeing the world like a thin person.  Everyone who is thin and stays thin is putting a lot of work into it.  They absolutely weight themselves, check the fit of their clothes, count the notches in their belts, and have a hundred ways of making sure their body is under control.  It is so important to them that they spend a lot of time doing it.  On the eating side, people who are thin eat just enough to avoid hunger.  That’s the main reason they eat.  To the dedicated thin person, eating enough to be stuffed full feels like failure.  For an overweight person, feeling full is associated with comfort and happiness.  Not being full causes anxiety.  

Aldi makes a very nice pizza for $2.19

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – oven toasted Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissantwich (400); with Tobasco

  • 400 calories

Lunch – Aldi frozen pizza half (600); 

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 12oz homemade lentil soup (230); 1 Tyson panko chicken breast filet (200); 4 oven roasted Brussels sprouts (60)

  • 490 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); beef jerky (90); 

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1660 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

History and transformation

I used to think that atkins and low carb and keto diets meant you could eat just as much as you wanted, as long as you restricted what kinds of foods you could eat.  Bacon?  Have a pound!  Bread?  Not a wafer!  But I tried it.  Amazingly, it was my most successful attempt ever.  I didn’t have to change a thing about my eating behavior, except I made sure not to exceed 30g of carbs per day.  That’s about the same carbs as an English muffin.  I actually lost about 20 pounds while eating as much low carb food as I wanted (such as: meatballs, bacon, peanut butter, cheese).  But then I hit a wall and didn’t lose any more. 

It turns out that I was probably eating fewer calories by skipping bread, chips, pizza, ice cream, candy, and other sugar rich foods.  There’s only so much peanut butter a person can eat from a spoon.  It was the most I ever lost, but it relied on magic: I didn’t have to change myself.  I only had to eat the Right Magic Foods.  That was not a helpful lesson for me.  And I gained all that weight back.  Now, while living a weight control lifestyle, I eat anything I like and I lose weight.  Take that, magic diets! 

Today I was talking to a lady about weight loss – she noticed I had lost weight.  She was complaining that she was having trouble losing 20 pounds.  Interestingly, she was sure I was skipping meals, and that was my secret to weight loss.  It’s terrible how people try to lose weight by punishing themselves, being hungry, deprivation, and not changing their minds instead.  

I couldn’t and didn’t condense the whole Doctor of Things lifestyle into the 10 minute we had to talk, but I did get across two ideas.  The first is that keeping a food journal is essential.  You don’t even have to restrict what you are eating.  Just keep the journal, weigh and measure everything you eat.  Then at least you will know.  You will know why you are not losing weight. 

Spoiler: it’s because you are eating too much.  Your goal is to be full.  And you have no idea how much you are eating.  If she starts keeping a journal, she will be surprised at just how much she is eating.  I was.  But I learned a lot about myself that way.  It’s important.  Keep the journal!  

Change your mind and your body will follow.  How would you change your mind?

-The Doctor

20190930 Daily report

When you are living a weight control lifestyle like the one explained in this blog, staying on the diet is easier than you would think.  First, I came into this with the understanding that weight control is a life long endeavor.  Think of it as a hobby, bordering on obsession.  The thinner you want to be, and the thinner you want to stay, the more attention you have to pay.  The food journal is a large part of the mechanism for weight control.  Thin people who stay thin, pay a lot of attention to how much they eat and how much they weigh.  

Stay on the diet (1) because it is your hobby and obsession.  You accept “paying attention” as the price for getting thin and staying thin.  Watch thin people sometimes.  Throughout this blog I talk about how the thin people are eating.  It’s not just behaving like them – that might mean forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do.  And nobody can keep that up and enjoy life.  It’s learning how they view eating and food.  That is one of the biggest differences between people who maintain their weight and those who lose control.  

Oven roasted Brussels sprouts are sweet and delicious. And that's a half pound of chili.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – toasted ham and cheese sandwich: 2 ounces ham (100); 1.5 slices Muenster cheese (100); toasted Italian bread (160); with pickles and mustard and horseradish (negligible);

  • 360 calories

Lunch – 12oz New Orleans red beans and andouille sausage stew (375); 5oz cooked rice (160)

  • 535 calories 

Dinner – 8oz homemade sausage chili (320); 8x halved and oven roasted Brussels sprouts (135) 1T sour cream (30); 4oz rice pudding (130)

  • 615 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 3x chocolate wafer cookies (190); 5x chocolate almonds (50)

  • 320 calories

Total for the day: 1830 calories (limit 1800)

Staying with it

So: (1) make weight control your interest, your hobby and (2) learn to think like a thin person.  I don’t mean the classic “think thin” meaning visualizing yourself being thin, but instead, observe and learn how thin people see the world.  Why do they eat?  How can they know how to eat just enough?  [Don’t think that thin people can eat what they like and not pay attention to how much.  Show me a skinny 40 year old and I will show you a weight obsessed person.]

Part (3) of staying on a diet is to make sure the food you eat is attractive.  Today I had three well prepared homemade meals that were delicious and worth getting hungry for.  Which leads to part (4), which is to prepare yourself for the delicious food.  You must realize that food tastes best when you let yourself get hungry just in time to eat it.  Ask anyone.  Poor Richard said “Hunger is the best pickle.”  And Mark Twain advised never to eat unless your stomach calls “vigorously, with a shout.”  Don’t get too hungry, because if that happens you will never stop eating until you are stuffed full.  It’s like a panic reaction buried down in the bottom of your brain stem.  But a little hunger at the right time, satisfied with one of your favorite foods, is the most satisfying food experience you will ever have.  

Why stay with your weight control lifestyle, which is really for the rest of your life?  Because you have decided that weight control is more important to you than almost anything else.  Because you realize that every thin person has to work hard to maintain their weight, and you are no exception.  And because living this way is exciting and fulfilling.  After trying this life, soon you will realize that your old life had shallow goals that were not worthwhile.  

What is the weight control lifestyle’s goal?  To eat just enough so that you will be hungry in time for the next meal.  To serve yourself with love and consideration.  In a way, you are loving the excess weight off.  You do that by making sure you are getting the foods you love best, when you will get the most enjoyment from them.  Who wouldn’t want to be served like that?  I was willing to sacrifice being stuffed full, in order to get that experience.  

What would you sacrifice, to live a better life?

-The Doctor

20190929 Daily report

My new lifestyle, which I have been living since January 2019, is a weight control lifestyle.  It’s not a punishing lifestyle, but a rewarding and fulfilling one.  I use rewards at every level I can think of, instead of force.  After all, most diets are about forcing yourself to eat things you don’t want, or at best, forcing yourself to eat less than you want.  Look how much force is required!  Most of us can’t keep that up for long, and after a while you give up dieting.  Constant force, hunger, dissatisfaction and unhappiness are too heavy a price to pay for being thin. 

This is a long term dieting project.  The term is life.  But truly, I am sentencing myself to a life of reward and fulfillment.  I figure out what foods would make me happy and make sure that I am hungry for them.  It becomes very satisfying to eat them after all that buildup.  

MIddle Eastern style hummus wraps, delicious.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Pretzels and cheese (300)

  • 300 calories

Lunch – 6x Kirkland meatballs (45); hummus (100); whole wheat wrap (110); with red cabbage kraut (minimal) and horseradish (minimal); 

  • 525 calories 

Dinner – 15 ounces homemade lentil soup (300); 2.8 ounces toasted Italian bread (200); butter (80)

  • 580 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 0.5 ounce of ham (25)

  • 105 calories

Total for the day: 1510 calories (limit 1800)

Preparation

Like the Meal Prep King I talked about last week, I spent part of Sunday planning out my menu for the next week, and doing the heavy cooking.  This week’s dinners are now planned and ready for portioning.  This way, I can pick the foods I want to eat ahead of time, have them ready to go, and have figured out how much of each I can eat.  The portion size is meant to be just enough so that I will get hungry again just in time for the next meal.  Generally I want my meals to be about 400-600 calories each.  It took some experimentation and learning some hard lessons to figure that out.  The total for the day should be just under 1800.  For some reason today I only ate 1510 calories, which is unusual.  But I guarantee I will be hungry for breakfast.  

My preferred sequence is: figure out what I want, make sure I have it in the house, prepare the food, then prepare myself.  Preparing myself means that my stomach is empty and I am properly hungry just in time to eat.  If I get too hungry, well, look out.  That’s when one is going to overeat!  Being too hungry for too long presses a button in part of my hindbrain that says PANIC and that’s it,  I lose control.  Figuring that out took some time.  But it’s a great incentive to not overeat, since you will be only ruining the next meal.  It’s indescribably rewarding to get hungry and then satisfy the hunger with something you really are looking forward to eating. Once you are used to it, it’s hard to go back to your old ways.  They just seem so shallow!  

Anyway, how am I prepared for this week?  For breakfasts and lunches, I have a variety of my favorites ready to cook, especially bacon, lettuce, and tomatoes for BLTs.  Some of my favorites are already cooked and portioned, while others are in the house and ready to be cooked on demand.  I cook 95% of my food myself.  I don’t like instant meals, they don’t satisfy me.  If I am going to do all this anticipating and put in all the effort of getting hungry and prepared for a meal, it’s not going to be for some indifferent diet food.  It had better be rewarding.   Take the picture above.  It’s my own invention but is reminiscent of Middle Eastern meat and hummus pita sandwiches.  I look forward to it.

Anyway, I made lentil soup using the Silver Palate cookbook recipe, and had it for dinner tonight.  I can have it during the week, too.  I also made sausage chili.  Another night I will have spaghetti and meatballs, and another night I will have dinner at Costco, and then make pizza another night.  It’s all food I will look forward to, and I have developed techniques for counting out all the calories.  Most people who lose large amount of weight successfully (I am planning to lose at least 120 pounds) count their calories.  

Recognize that this is a life long task.  Make it rewarding.  I only eat the foods I like, just at the moment when they will be the most satisfying.  I never overeat or even have a second helping, because it just isn’t satisfying.  (Try it sometime!  Get hungry, then have a single serving of your favorite food.  You will notice that as great as the food is, a second helping just isn’t fulfilling.) 

Is your current life rewarding and satisfying? ? What would that take? 

20190928 Saturday weigh-in

In my week, Saturday is different from the other days.  During the week, I concentrate on writing my food journal and making sure my food intake is balanced with my goals.  I have a numeric goal (averaging 1850 calories per day) and an eating goal (maximize the pleasure of eating).  While I was gaining weight, for the last 20 years, my goal was to feel full, and I learned to associate that feeling with comfort and satisfaction.  Now, I see that as a shallow goal without a lot of meaning.  Now, I desire to be hungry.  Not hungry all the time!  Just when it’s time to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  When you are physically hungry, and eat a measured portion of a special food you have been anticipating and are looking forward to, it tastes better than anything else.  A second helping, viewed this way, isn’t nearly as tasty.  Also, if you get too full you won’t be hungry for your next meal and you will ruin the pleasure of it.

So how is this lifestyle working for me?

Caption

My highest weight was 325 pounds.  Since starting this new weight control lifestyle in January, 2019, I have lost a fraction under:

Pounds!!
0

From hobby to obsession

Talk to any person who is thin and who has stayed thin as an adult, and you are talking to someone who works hard at it.  Nobody gets to be thin for free.  The idea that some people are naturally thin is a comforting lie.  (Of course some people burn calories at a higher rate than others, but the differences are pretty slight.)  Go check out some of the calculators online that will take your sex, weight, and age and predict how many calories you need per day.  For me, my body requires 3200 per day, just to stay the weight I am.  Just sitting in a chair all day (called the basic metabolic rate), my body burns 2260 calories per day.  The rest of the calories are burned by moving about.  

Let’s analyze this.  I am having 1850 measured calories per day, times seven days per week = 13,000 calories per week.  Using the calculator linked in the last paragraph, my body needs 3200 calories per day to break even, times seven days per week = 22,400.  

22,400-13,000 = 9400 calorie deficit this week.

It’s practically universal that it takes 3500 calories of deficit per week to lose a pound of body weight.  In theory, I’ve lost 2.7 pounds this week.  Certainly, 246.2 pounds is the least I have weighed since…..the year 2003?

People sometimes ask how I have the willpower to do this: keep the daily food journal, keep my food intake under control, and win the fight to assert my values, every day.  The answer is Willpower!!!  Ha, no way.  I have very little sustained willpower and have failed on countless diet attempts.  So, what’s different this time?  This time I have built a weight control lifestyle that is attractive.  It is so compelling and rewarding that I want to live it.  Then I don’t have to use willpower to force myself to go against my nature.  

It is my belief that weight control has to be your obsession if you want to become thin and stay thin.  At least it has to be your favorite hobby.  That means it has to be important to you, more important than practically anything.  What would you give up to be in control of your body’s weight?  I have given up a lot of free time, and my old lifestyle, my old goals, and my whole old self.  I’ve had to rebuild my relationships with my family, even.  I’m a new person who cares a lot about how much his body weighs.  

Weight control is a lifetime goal.  It will never be done.  I have learned that anyone who stays thin is working hard to stay thin.  And it’s appreciated.  Several people who are thin  were the first to notice that I was losing weight.  They pay attention to that kind of thing. 

What are you paying attention to?

-The Doctor

20190927 Daily report

One reason I write every day is that I need an outlet for all this paying attention.  The way I have set up my weight control lifestyle, I pay a lot of attention to how I am feeling and what I am eating and how the two are related!  Instead of trying to force myself to eat less using my willpower, I put all the burden on my conscious will.  Its job is to make it easy and rewarding for the rest of me to eat a measured portion of food.  That way, my lifestyle is attractive and I want to live it. 

What are you talking about, your will…and the rest of you?  Isn’t that all you? 

Well, I am a complicated person.  So are we all.  What is the part of you that says You Will Eat Less Food?  That’s the will.  What’s the part of you standing in front of the refrigerator at 2AM eating leftover pizza?  That’s the rest of you.  I’ve decided that is the part that should be in charge.  You will is good at being bossy, but I am making it do all the work instead.  It’s like a negotiation between different parts of myself that want different things.  My will can serve the others, instead of bossing them all around and getting nowhere.  This is much more productive.

While losing weight, I make sure to eat foods I find special and rewarding.  Losing weight is hard enough already.  Make it easy and satisfying by planning ahead.  That way you will look forward to it. 

Breakfast worth getting out of bed for.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissantwich (400); with an extra fried egg (80);

  • 480 calories

Lunch – Bratwrust (280); 1/4 whole wheat wrap (25); cheese crackers (190); Snickers ice cream bar (180);

  • 675 calories 

Dinner – 6x pizza slices (100);

  • 600 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80);

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1835 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

Complaining can be fun

One thing I have found about myself is, if I have time and energy to complain, things are going well. 

During the last couple of weeks I have had to do a lot of travel and I have had family obligations – which I am not complaining about.  I didn’t get to exercise (I swim) for a week, and I don’t want to complain about that either.  That happens, sometimes.  Today was my third workout following that break, though.  I will complain about that!  My body was fine for the first workout, and ok for the second.  But now I am really feeling it.  I feel creaky.  Normally I feel energized, and a little sore in a positive way – stretching feels good.  But now I feel like if I stretch, something might drop off.  The next workout will be much better though, based on past experience.  

If you decide to exercise as part of your lifestyle, make sure you pick something that you really like doing.  Otherwise you will eventually run out of willpower.  I like to swim, so I don’t have to force myself to go.  

Back to food.  I always look forward to certain foods.  Everyone will be different, but I always look forward to Friday pizza night, and Wednesday gyro lunch, no matter what else is going on.  For breakfast, I am really into my improved breakfast sandwich.  These have the potential to be terrible.  The package instructions for the Jimmy Dean breakfast croissantwich say to microwave it, which is a sure way to get a soggy and bland sandwich.  Where’s the texture?  I bake it in my toaster oven in foil instead, though it takes a while (20 minutes).  During part of that time, I fry an extra egg and season it with salt and pepper.  Between the fresh egg and the toasted, crispy sandwich, I feel happy and satisfied with breakfast.  

What food would make your morning?

-The Doctor

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