20190729 Daily report

Part of what makes my system of weight loss work is the system of rewards I use and give myself: daily (foods I really want to eat), weekly (Big Greek Cafe), and for reaching weight milestones like 270 and 260 pounds.  Past milestone rewards have included cake, Indian buffet, and steak burrito.  Today I thought I might make it to the Indian buffet for lunch, but couldn’t.  I was so disappointed, that I knew that I had found my next reward!  250 pounds, here I come.  

Today’s dinner was spaghetti and meatballs.  6 ounces of cooked spaghetti and 5 Costco meatballs.  That was still a reward – just not the ultimate reward. 

On top of spaghetti (six ounces) all covered with cheese (1/2 teaspoon)....

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Kirkland bratwurst (280); 1/4 wrap (22) and a few extra for mustard

  • 310 calories

Lunch – small steak and cheese sub (500)

  • 500 calories 

Dinner – 6 ounces cooked spaghetti (300); 5 Costco meatballs (230)

  • 530 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); pretzels and cheese (200); artisan bread slice (100)

  • 380 calories

Total for the day: 1720 calories (limit 1800)

To bed

I went to bed late last night and was up early this morning.  But I did get the chance to see thin people in action again today, for 8 hours. 

Nobody snacked.  Very few of them had anything like a drink on their desk, like coffee, tea, soda, or a water bottle.  Two or three of them (out of 15) did had water bottles.  The only people with flavored drinks were me (diet soda) and a non-thin woman, who had a very large container of iced tea.  People did get up and presumably had water from the fountain from time to time.  

This confirms what I have been saying: thin people have different eating goals than overweight people.  The only people with large, flavored drinks were me (overweight still) and the iced tea woman (also overweight).  I understand why I drink diet soda: it’s calorie free and I get whatever pleasure from tasting it and having it cold and bubbly and refreshing, and more or less unlimited.  You can see how that might also apply to how I was eating.  I didn’t change how I approached drinks, just food.  It’s almost like I am eating like a thin person and drinking like an overweight person.  

I am sure that thin people do have flavored drinks, like cappuccinos and so forth.  From what I have seen, they just don’t want to drink it continuously.  They have it at one time, and they are done.  It takes just a few minutes and they move on.  Is it a reward?  But there is no doubt that overweight people want to experience the taste of food or drink, and fullness, and satisfaction, all the time, while thin people don’t.  

What is the eating goal of a thin person?  My first thought was, they eat to be thin.  That is the goal.  Maybe that’s wrong, I will keep looking.  Maybe I can find a thin person to ask.  

-The Doctor

20190728 Daily report

Another day is another chance to have a daily report!  This is a lifelong endeavor lived one day at a time.  The price of being thin and staying thin, is working at being thin and staying thin.  Where do you get the willpower to do that? You don’t.  You transform yourself morally into someone whose highest good is their personal and professional appearance.  At least, being thin should be in the top three of their moral hierarchy.  

4 ounces of rice and 9 ounces of Circassian chicken

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Boar’s Head bratwurst (300); most of a yogurt (120)

  • 420 calories

Lunch – rice pudding (240); yogurt (140); potato chips (160)

  • 540 calories 

Dinner – 4 ounces cooked rice (120); 9 ounces of Circassian chicken (450); steamed mixed vegetables with butter (40)

  • 610 calories

Snacking – pretzels (170); hummus (80)

  • 250 calories

Total for the day: 1800 calories (limit 1800)

Summer complaint

I was ill a few weeks ago, which played merry hell with my diet.  For example: I ate more than usual, the types of foods I ate changed (my appetite ran to carbohydrate rich foods) and things were generally unpleasantly intestinal, mostly fluid retention and feeling bloated and full.  Recently, I threw that off and had a couple of good weeks.  Now, it seems like being ill is back in (low level intestinal things).  Take today for example.  I didn’t get hungry for breakfast until 11AM.  I had lunch at 2.30.  Then I was ravenous by 5PM.  My lunch in particular ran to carbohydrate rich foods.  There is some blockage in my system and things don’t feel normal.  Grrrr.

It’s possible that I am not really ill and I am just trying to rationalize a reduction in my weight loss progress.  If things don’t clear up soon, I may try a new strategy: increasing my daily calorie count.  Nothing drastic – up to 2000 per day instead of my standard 1800.  It could be that my body isn’t happy with 1800 and somehow that is impeding my progress.  I’m not quite ready to go there yet, but I am open to the idea.  I’ve talked about it before, in the context of reaching my goal weight.  What then?  Do I just go from eating 1800 calories per day to 3200 per day?  That’s almost double, what would that be like?

On the good side, having a lot more calories to play with will mean having cookies with my tea, eating bread, cereal, and peanut butter and jelly again.  And donuts.  (I could eat these things now, in extreme moderation, but I have chosen to cut them out of my weight loss diet planning as non-priorities.)  French fries.  Sandwiches on bread, toast with butter and jelly, pancakes and waffles.  There is a lot to look forward to!  And I am getting there, however with a few pauses for illness.  

I do enjoy 1800 calories per day.  It is so challenging to get the balance right, and I like a challenge.  The balance of course is between hunger and the sating of hunger.  If I get too hungry I lose control.  Not hungry enough and the incentive to eat less is gone (I console myself for eating less by figuring out exactly what is most appetizing for me to eat).  

So, I enjoy where I am now, and I have things to look forward to in the future.  That’s a great place to be, isn’t it?  Illness is temporary and I have a system that has worked until now.  It probably will keep on working.  I will find out, and so will you, just keep reading.

-The Doctor

20190727 Saturday weigh-in

Once a week, I weigh in to see how my calorie counting is going.  My mechanism to establish control over my body’s weight has two parts: 1. Regulate food intake and 2. get weighed once per week.  Some people weigh themselves every day.  They both work.  Having undergone a metamorphosis into a person who will sacrifice a lot to control his weight and become thin, I can act out the two parts of my mechanism and not use all my willpower on deprivation.  My goal is not to feel deprived.

Some weeks, things don’t go well.  Usually, they do.  

I woke up today and weighed myself but it was not a triumph.  My weight increased a pound since last week (now 260.4).  That isn’t possible per the number of calories I have recorded in my food journal, but it’s useful to think about what went wrong and what I can do about it next time.  Next week is a new week, after all. 

Dissection and reassembly

So what was different from other weeks where I have lost weight?  I overate on a couple of days, consequently my calorie count was higher than usual for the week by about 2500.  Also, for a few of the days my calorie count was lower than usual.  After my Wednesday late night eating fest, I only had 1000 calories the next day – I wasn’t hungry for much, and no wonder.  So my calorie intake was bunched up and not spread out as usual.  Last, I have had a bloated and full feeling in my gut all day.  

  • Calories per day: (Saturday) 2420, then 1750, 3800, 1740, 2880, 1080, and 1640 (Friday).  Total: 15,400.
  • My break even point (neither gain nor lose weight): 3200 per day or a Total of: 22,400.  
  • My usual calorie goal is about 13,000 calories per week (1850 x 7).

As you can see, even with a couple of bad diet days in there, I should be losing weight.  Why didn’t it happen?  

  1. I could be wrong about my calorie counting.  I don’t see that being right, my calorie counting has been good so far through the first 65 pounds lost.  But it’s possible.
  2. I could be retaining fluid.  I like this theory, because I feel a little bloated and blocked up today.  And it means I am not to blame!  Blame has lots of calories.
  3. The unevenness of my eating this last week (one day 1080, another day 3800) has thrown off my metabolism and given time my true weight will reveal itself.

It will be hard to tell the difference between #s 2 and 3.  They both will get fixed with time.  I don’t know if it helps, but I was sure to have a yogurt today with lots of active live cultures.  This will also not distinguish between #s 2 and 3, but will help either situation equally.  

It seems unlikely that with a maintenance level of 22,400 calories per week, that I wouldn’t lose weight by eating only 15,400 calories in a week.   The usual estimate is you lose 1 pound for every 3500 calories of deficit.  So I will forge ahead and get my routine re-established.  I have no reason to change anything, yet.  But there is still a long way to go – losing the rest of the extra weight, finding out what weight I want to maintain, and then figuring out how to maintain it.  It will take a lifetime, and I hope I can keep finding ways to make it worthwhile.

-The Doctor

20190726 Daily report

Another day, another daily report!  My food journal is kept every day, even every meal.  This blog post is written every day.  My life as someone whose eating and weight are coming under control, is lived one day at a time.  Each day is a chance to live life fully and well – through the lens of my body’s weight.  

Those of you who have read my work before know that I am not rich in sustained willpower.  I do this every day because I successfully made a one-time change.  I changed myself into someone who cared a lot about how much he weighed.  But so what?  Caring doesn’t lose any pounds.  I needed a mechanism.  How could I lose weight, having failed many times before? 

Kirkland brats! They are excellent.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – skipped (not hungry)

  • 0 calories

Lunch – 2 x bratwurst (280); half bread wrap (50)

  • 610 calories 

Dinner – 7 x pizza slices (100)

  • 700 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); half chicken sandwich (250)

  • 330 calories

Total for the day: 1640 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

What a week

A week full of struggle, failure, recovery, and triumph has just ended.  On second thought, hold the triumph.  I won’t know about triumph until Saturday morning when I weigh in.  Keeping a food journal isn’t enough, you have to check it against reality from time to time.  I weight myself every week and write that down.  Any triumph only exists on paper, or at least in my food journal, for now.  I write down what I eat, count calories, and check my weight.  The whole system works well for losing weight and gives me lots of information I can use to understand myself and enrich my life.  

I have had good weeks and bad weeks.  On a good week, I try to average 1850 calories per day.  Over seven days of the week, that comes to about 13,000 calories.  

This week, due to having a couple of days where my eating was out of control, I ate about 15,000 calories.  The good parts are (1) I recovered and am looking forward to a chance for a better week ahead, and (2) I should lose weight anyway, at 15,000 calories – just not as much as usual.  The loss will be less, or slower, than last week when it was nearly 3 pounds.  My weight loss is often between 2-3 pounds when I make my calorie targets.  

Now, this calculated loss of weight is just by the calorie numbers.  Normally, my diet is carefully spread out over the seven days and I don’t overeat due to my system of goals and rewards.  What happens when you severely overeat on two days (Monday and Wednesday)?  Would the resulting body weight be different if the whole 15,000 calories was spread out over the week?  Even after months of fairly steady weight loss, I never know what is going to happen when I get on the scale Saturday morning.  Today I was getting some mixed messages from my body (today was a swimming day).  My stride felt springy and energetic.  However, my lap times were not particularly fast.  

I skipped breakfast today.  I was not hungry for it, not even a little.  I had lunch at 11AM because by then I was hungry, with a strong adjective in front of it.  I’m not sure what to make of the fact I wasn’t hungry all morning.  Maybe it’s nothing.  I will find out tomorrow, but in any case next week is a new week.  Live it to the best you can!

-The Doctor

20190725 Daily report

This long term project has many levels.  It’s a lifelong commitment; I will keep this up for as long as I live (or as long as I want to be thin).  It’s also a daily commitment lived one day at a time.  If there is a bad day, well, tomorrow is a new day.  Same if there is a good day.  It all adds up.  A week is also an important level.  Every week I weight myself.  Because the calculation for losing a pound of weight means being 3500 calories in deficit per week, I count each week separately.  If this was a bad week, well, it’s just one week.  Next week can be better.  Each meal itself is an important event, three times per day.  Every meal goes into my food journal as I finish it.  Sometimes I put the meal into my journal as I am eating it!

So nice I had it twice?

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – skipped (not hungry)

  • 0 calories

Lunch – skipped (not hungry)

  • 0 calories 

Dinner – chicken and rice skillet dinner (700); chocolate (300)

  • 1000 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80)

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1080 calories (limit 1800)

How to recover from a bad week

As every day is a new day, diet wise, so every week is a new week.  Yesterday I ate dinner very late (10PM) and then seemed to lose control.  I had 1000 calories after dinner, at least.  Maybe more.  I had ice cream, hummus, chicken, candy, and peanut butter.  I wasn’t even really hungry, but part of me wanted to be full.  I didn’t enjoy it much, since I knew it wasn’t going to make me feel good.  And when I woke up this morning I felt awful – full and bloated, not even a little hungry.  

My usual rule when I have a bad day is to take a deep breath and treat the new day as a blank slate.  The bad day is in the past and should stay there.  I try to concentrate on the future.  But now I have had a couple of bad days this week.  It has officially become a Bad Week.  That’s pretty unusual for me, since my new lifestyle is attractive and pleasant, yet challenging and interesting.  

But there is no need to despair.  Several bad days might tempt you to drop your diet – it can be demoralizing and you might feel like you are falling behind.  But each week is a new week, just like every day is a new day.  The new lifestyle is worth coming back to.  I prefer living by my weight control rules, it has been very nice in a lot of ways.  

So the two principles of Daily and Weekly restarts can help.  Tomorrow is a new day.  Today was kind of a new day.  At least I did not overeat, though I felt terrible all day and skipped a couple of meals due to lack of appetite.  I didn’t skip them to make up for yesterday!  An I didn’t make up for yesterday mathematically anyway.  This week is shot, but since I have enjoyed living under my weight control system there is incentive to make it work better tomorrow.  Then, on Saturday, begins the new week.  It’s a new week full of new days where I can get things to go right.  I have learned a lot about myself and I have confidence in my weight control system.  It has worked well so far and will work some more.  

I’ve read a bit about a fear of failure and a fear of success. I hope I’m not getting all complicated about this.  This is a straightforward deal: weight control.  Success is measured in meals, days, weeks, and lifetimes.  It’s a long term success with lots of opportunities for short term success.  

-The Doctor

20190723 Daily report

One way to describe my effort to lose weight is that I am paying attention.  During the years that I was gaining weight, I never paid any attention at all to how much I was eating, only if I was full.  If the point of eating is to be full, then paying attention to what you are eating and how much you are eating don’t matter. 

Once you have made the mental transformation into someone who is capable of losing weight and controlling their body’s weight, you learn the importance of paying attention to what and how much you eat.

Summer grilling

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – skipped (not hungry)

  • 0 calories

Lunch – 2 x bratwurst (280); half wrap (50)

  • 610 calories 

Dinner – noodles (300); blueberries (40)

  • 340 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); chicken and hummus wraps (150); chips (160); granola bar (200) pretzels and hummus (200)

  • 790 calories

Total for the day: 1740 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

You can't make up for the past, learn and go on

Very few people can become thin (lose 120 pounds) through exercise.  However, many people have lost 100+ pounds by dieting, while not increasing exercise.  So, how much you eat is the important thing to control.  But paying attention to what you are eating enables you to control how much you eat.  Paying attention is expensive and difficult and takes a lot of effort.  Take any chance to make it easier.

In the course of a perfect week, I would be in deficit nearly 10,000 calories and might lose a little over two pounds.  The rule goes, if you are 3500 calories in deficit during a week, you will lose a pound of body weight.  But yesterday, I ate 2000 calories more than I had planned.  I have had experience trying to make up for extra calories by eating less during the rest of the week, and it has never worked.  Part of me rebels and feels like I am starving.  I would break my diet in no time and might be tempted to quit.  

Focus on learning what you can,  If you overeat one day, think about how you felt and how you ate.  For me, it can be as simple as delaying too long before lunch or dinner.  Then part of me will go into a little panic and want to eat more, and it’s hard to resist that urge.  I have learned to monitor my hunger and keep myself satisfied during each day.  (Satisfaction used to come from when I was stuffed full of food.  I had to learn new ways of being satisfied.)  

Reward yourself for all the other days during the week you did it right, and learn what you can from the days you made mistakes.  Really, you are learning about yourself, if you will listen.  Reward yourself for doing it right, for listening, for figuring out how to make it work.  I ate normally today (though I wasn’t hungry for breakfast, I still ate nearly 1800 calories today).  I accept that no matter what, I will not lose 2 pounds this week.  My calorie deficit will be 2000 calories less that it could be, or more than half a pound!  But I will still lose weight, just not as much.  It is the price of learning about yourself.  

Luckily my new lifestyle is very attractive and appealing.  I get a lot of satisfaction out of keeping my needs satisfied!  It is hard to find and keep balanced all the time, but it is possible to make it all work in the long term.  This is a long term weight control effort.  Don’t worry too much about the short term.  The goal is long term, the goal is lifetime.

-The Doctor

20190722 Daily report

The point off keeping a food journal is the consistency of the effort.  You can measure how well you are keeping to your plan, over a really long term.  If you have a good week, or a bad week, that all fits in and you can track it.  It gives you total awareness of how you are acting and how the consequences show up.

Caption

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2/3 cup yogurt (125); 2 tablespoons strawberry preserves (70); 34g waffle (100) Johnsonville bratwurst (260); flatbread piece (45)

  • 610 calories

Lunch – 8oz chili (400); 1oz chips (140); pretzels and cheese (300); Klondike bar (250)

  • 1090 calories 

Dinner – pizza (200); noodles and jambalaya (600); Snickers ice cream bar (180); Twix ice cream bar (160); 3/4 Cup ice cream (250); 1 cup cereal and milk (400)

  • 100 calories

Snacking – cookie (100); chocolate (200)

  • 300 calories

Total for the day: 3800 calories (limit 1800)

A regular occurence

Today I may have had a few more calories than was good for me.  The usual excuses apply – it was a tough day, I didn’t get a lot of sleep, a stressful 4 hour drive in the rain, and bad meal planning and management.  The point is, it happens.  The question is always, what do you do now?

You should not be mad at yourself or punish yourself.  Look at me.  I have lost 65 pounds and should be rewarded for my success, not punished for a bad day.  I have proven that I will recover, and pretty quickly.  Trying to make up the calories tomorrow would be foolish and counterproductive.  Bad days and bad weeks happen with some frequency.  I will easily reorient myself, learn and move on.  The weight loss will continue.  I have said before that I don’t have the kind of willpower that can make myself act perfectly.  But I can learn, in time.  Keep yourself focused on what you can become and what good you can do.  Nobody will do it for you, but you can get a lot of it done yourself if you figure yourself out.  

What do you do now?  Why, tomorrow is a new day.  It is a new day where you can get things to go right.  Based on past experience, I won’t be hungry tomorrow for a meal or two.  My plan is to watch myself carefully and eat when I get hungry.  That is, after all, always my plan.  

-The Doctor

20190721 Daily report

My daily reports are part of a long-term system.  The changes I have made have made me into a new person.  I am no longer the same person who gained 120 extra pounds over the last 20 years.  In the long term, I have decided that being in control of my body’s weight is a top moral priority requiring top level attention.  Almost every decision I make about food now takes my body’s weight into consideration.  

Like, what do I have for lunch?  (OK, I cook all six but then just eat one today.)

Caption

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Canadian bacon (30); 10 ounces chili (480); 1 ounce tortilla chips (140); 1.5 tablespoons sour cream (50)

  • 700 calories

Lunch – grilled bratwurst (260)

  • 260 calories 

Dinner – 10 pounces filet mignon (550); 1 cup oven roasted cauliflower (50)

  • 600 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); Nestle Li’l Drum vanilla ice cream cone (110)

  • 190 calories

Total for the day: 1750 calories (limit 1800)

More vacation posting

I am on vacation away from the heat, so I will be brief.

Every person you know who has stayed thin has made it a top priority of their own.  Being in control of your weight (staying thin) never, ever just happens.  Not for anybody.  You have to accept that to lose weight. 

Long term, there are two main phases to implementing weight control.  There is the Losing Weight phase.  Then there is the Staying Thin phase, where you learn how to maintain your body’s weight over the long term.  

In between the two phases is a period of experimentation.  I have no idea what my final chosen weight will be.  205?  190?  200?  180??  What will my clothing size be?  Will there be a period between losing weight and my body finishing changing its shape?  How many calories per day will I need to eat, to keep any of those weights?  The interesting part of this blog has barely started yet.

Strictly speaking, I still haven’t decided how to reward myself for going below 260 pounds.  Originally I was going to bake something, but not in this heat.  Maybe a restaurant meal.  I will think about it.

-The Doctor

20190720 Saturday weigh-in

Time for my weekly weighing!  This was a tense moment for me as I have not lost weight appreciably for several weeks, mostly due to illness. 

On the move again

Hooray, for two weeks in a row I have lost weight and this week it was appreciable at more than three pounds!  Since starting my weight control diet in January 2019 I have lost:

Pounds!!
0

Traveling

I am away from home for the next few days and will be brief.  

My historical pattern (all six months of it) is that during illness, my weight loss slows or halts, sometimes I even go up a pound, probably due to fluid retention.  The first full week after recovery, I usually lose three pounds.  That’s what happened this time!  Last week I weighed in at 262.4 pounds. 

Even though I had made this observation and told myself to expect it, it was still a very emotional experience.  I was starting to worry that I had run into some kind of intractable plateau.  No, I was just ill the last few weeks, and my weight is unreliable when I am ill.  From fairly early in my food journal, I kept a column I color coded for illness (a lovely shade of green) and I was easily able to identify periods of illness and see what happened.  I predicted last week that this would happen (losing three pounds after recovery), and it did.  Next time I will be stronger in my faith. 

Now it is time to think about rewards.  How would you reward yourself after going from 320… 310… 300… 290… 280… 270… to below 260?  Whatever I decide, I plan to be really, really nice to myself for my accomplishment.  It’s amazing how well one responds to rewards and recognition, even from the self.  

-The Doctor

20190719 Daily report

Every day is another day to get my balance right.  Since I am losing weight and therefore counting everything I eat, the way I have found to make that work for me is to balance hunger and reward.  I want to eat enough food to be happy (and it has to be very good food to do that), then let myself feel hunger just before it’s time for my next meal.  Then I reward myself with another very tasty meal, small but enough.  Satisfying hunger with something I really desire, makes up for the effort and stress of getting hungry.  It’s a pleasant hunger, one that knows there will be food soon.

Sausage section circle

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 10 ounces of jambalaya (350), 5 ounces of rice (160)

  • 510 calories

Lunch – one Boar’s Head bratwurst (300); one Johnsonville bratwurst (260)

  • 560 calories 

Dinner – Mama Lucia’s restaurant Meat Mayhem with roasted chicken, sausage, meatball and roasted vegetables (650); garlic bread (100)

  • 750 calories

Total for the day: 1820 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

Push and Pull

Every day, I let myself get hungry just in time to eat a rewarding meal.  Hunger is the push.  It tells me whether I am eating too much or not enough.  It pushes me to think about my next meal – what will it be?  Will it be worth the wait?  Shouldn’t I get it ready?

Reward is the pull.  It pulls me into the future.  I have small and large rewards.  Small rewards are every day, every meal if possible.  I really enjoyed breakfast and lunch, but dinner was an exceptional experience.  It’s in the upper 90s of temperature and I wasn’t going to cook, so I went to a restaurant.  I swam today, so I was extra motivated and hungry.  The food was wonderful, and enormous.  I ate about half, plus all the vegetables. 

The calorie count is probably a good estimate.  I know from my food journal that sausages are about 250 calories each, chicken breast about 250, and meatballs about 230 per five small ones.  I had one large meatball, half a sausage, and an entire chicken breast.  I feel so full and satisfied that I am a little worried about my calorie estimate!  But the scale doesn’t lie and tomorrow I will find out.  

I have an early day tomorrow, so it’s bedtime.  How are you rewarding yourself for a job well done?

-The Doctor

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