Daily tracking

20191110 Daily report

Thank goodness for the ability to live life on two levels.  One level is day by day.  The other level is long term: week by week, month by month, year by year.  I have been living a weight control lifestyle for nearly 11 months, and I have been totally committed and dedicated to he goal.  It shows, but there has been a price (which I have been willing to pay).  The price is that everything else comes second.  

Now I am trying to find a new balance, and it is demanding.  Work, family, career, hobbies, and other things have all been neglected correspondingly and need energy and attention.  Luckily, I have 11 months of knowledge and data to help me do this.  What have I learned?  First, I am willing to eat less food if every meal is a reward.

My idea of a good time: bratwurst

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – steel cut oats (100)

  • 100 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst (260); 1/2 whole wheat wrap (55); onions and mustard

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 10oz Hopping John (240); 5oz cooked rice (160)

  • 400 calories

Snacking – Baklava and cookies (300); tea with half and half (80); more cookies and candy (500); chocolate almonds (160); cheese and pretzels (300);

  • 1340 calories

Total for the day: 2440 calories (limit 1800)

Time of change

For some reason I don’t yet understand, the last two days I have been more out-of-control than usual.  My mealtimes have been all over the place, I have not paid attention to the cycle of anticipation and reward, and my calorie counts and eating habits over the last two days have been way off.  Thank goodness that tomorrow is a new day.  I don’t try to eat fewer calories tomorrow to make up for eating more today.  That has never worked.  But tomorrow can be a new day where I get it right.  And next week can likewise be a good week. 

Tonight, I need some rest.  Tomorrow, after all, is a new day.  

-The Doctor

20191108 Daily report

Thank goodness that the weight control lifestyle is a long game.  If I was focused on short term ups and downs I’m not sure I could lose weight successsfully.  I have had weeks where I controlled eating well but didn’t lose much weight, and a few times I have had bad days but still lost weight overall.  Of course, I have learned a lot about myself in the last 10 1/2 months, which explains some of the ups and downs.

It’s a long game because if you have a bad day, or a bad week, you can try again next time.  Eventually, enough goes right so that you lose weight.  Keeping off the weight you have lost is actually easier in some respects.  Losing weight is a careful balance and it is somewhat difficult and stressful to be in calorie deficit.  It’s also a long game because it’s self reinforcing.  The weight control lifestly is very rewarding and living it is attractive.  

Last, I have learned that most of the time, having a bad diet day or week is entirely my fault.  That kind of self knowledge comes slowly and learning to apply it even slower.  It’s a long game too.  But the reward is a better life, plus you control your weight better, too.  Part of a better life is learning what foods are your favorites that you can look forward to.

Prepare to assemble the BLT!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – BLT wrap (220); chicken sandwich wrap (180)

  • 400 calories

Lunch – chicken fajitas (500); baklava (200);

  • 700 calories 

Dinner – meatball, hummus, red cabbage slaw, and pickle wraps (500)

  • 500 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); chocolate almonds (160)

  • 240 calories

Total for the day: 1840 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

The season has found his overcoat of wind, cold, and rain

This week it was really cold for the first time.  I know what that means!  Because I keep careful records and a food journal, I know that when it is cold outside I feel a need for food.  Maybe I’m actually hungry, maybe it’s comforting, maybe there is some primal move towards making sure you have enough food when the weather really starts to get cold for the winter.   I’m not going to question it.  I just know that it is coming.

Today, I had breakfast and lunch both in the morning, and I was very, very hungry for lunch – before 11AM.  I was also hungry for dinner, but that doesn’t mean much – it was dinner time, and I exercised today.  

I have said before how surprising it is that I don’t feel a lot of change in my body, considering I have lost a fair amount of weight.  My exercise of choice is swimming, and it’s not like losing 87 pounds has increased my lap times.  The difference is more subtle.  I also haven’t noticed that it is much easier to walk, stand up, or go up stairs.  I have noticed that I am a bit smaller when it comes to squeezing through small spaces.  I can fit into smaller clothes, and am within range of buying clothes for average-weight people.  As for that, I am finding my size 46 pants too big, and size 44 just right.  I bought a new swimsuit, and it was 2X, down from 3X size.  

So what I have I noticed in terms of physical change?  It used to be that swimming was harder on me.  When I was done, my wrists would be sore, or my legs would get injured more easily when I pushed away from the wall of the pool.  Now, I don’t get that.  I can do my swimming and not feel any aches.  Also, I feel more bouncy when I walk.  But I think your body adjusts quickly to change.  Maybe the effects will get more drastic and noticeable when I am merely 20 pounds overweight, instead of 40.  And won’t that be a strange feeling?

Recently, other people have started noticing that I have lost weight.  About 20 people have mentioned it to me directly in the last few weeks.  And every one of them has also asked what I did differently, and almost all of them have a theory!  One neighbor just asked me today if I had increased my exercising schedule to lose weight.  I love people’s theories of weight loss, it tells you all about how they approach the problem themselves.  They are looking for common ground with you.

At a lunch for my work group this week, people asked and then the group expressed a lot of support.  They are nice people, and most of them are average weight to thin.  When they asked what I was doing differently, I started off talking about my lack of willpower.  That method of explaining weight control does seem to flow well.  Based on that, they seemed to follow how I constructed an attractive lifestyle based on rewarding myself for eating controlled amounts.  If you are doing that, willpower is not such an expense as on a regular diet.  Of course, that lunch was at the Indian buffet and I didn’t show a lot of restraint after I talked about eating less!  I have decided, though, that the Indian buffet lunch was my reward for getting under 240 pounds.  I like rewards.   The next one is 230 pounds.  After that is quite a special one – 225 pounds.  When I weight less than 225 pounds, I will have lost 100 pounds.

First things first.

-The Doctor

20191107 Daily report

Every day, the weight control lifestyle requires that I keep a food journal.  Doing it with willpower won’t work, I don’t have that kind of willpower.  But I can make staying on a weight control lifestyle attractive and fulfilling and interesting and worthwhile.  Then I am looking for reasons to make it work.  Setbacks are not calamities but speed bumps.  I don’t get resentful or unhappy – instead, I am the most engaged I have ever been.  My life has new evels of meaning from the way all the parts of myself come together around the goal of living a better life.  

One way to make the lifestyle attractive is to make sure every meal is rewarding.  Once a milestone is achieved, I also reward myself with a special meal – all within the calorie budget.

Indian buffet is a special meal for me! Hard to count calories, though.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – BLT wraps (430)

  • 430 calories

Lunch – Minerva Indian buffet (1200);

  • 1200 calories 

Dinner – crackers (200); chocolate (150)

  • 350 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80)

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 2060 calories (limit 1800)

Balance is getting tricky

A person can only pay attention to so many things.  Juggling other obligations, family, work, household, etc., can take your attention away.  I have kept weight control at the front of my mind for 11 months and I have to learn to find some balance.  

On the good side, I have finally gotten my reward for bringing my weight below 240 pounds!  Indian food, and Indian buffet food, are some of my favorites.  My Indian friends say it’s all kind of tarted up with food coloring in those buffets, but I don’t mind.  It tastes good AND looks good.  I feel rewarded.

On the bad side, given my calorie record this week, I won’t have much to celebrate come Saturday.  That’s all right – next week is a chance to do better.  It’s all part of finding balance.  I have been paying more attention to work, and it’s difficult to also prioritize weight control.  But it’s not impossible. It will just take some planning and better preparation on the weekends.

Tonight I have to rush off to do other things.  Remember to think about balance in your life.  

-The Doctor

20191106 Daily report

The job seems simple – lose weight by eating less food!

Amazingly, that doesn’t work with actual people.  Part of the problem is the word “less”.  Do you know how much you are eating?  How many calories did you have today, yesterday, last week, last month?  How many calories does you body need to gain weight?  Lose weight?  Stay the same?

If you can’t answer those questions, then you can’t eat “less” food.  You can only guess, and measure by how deprived you feel.  Keep a food journal instead, and write in it everything you eat, with a calorie count.  After a while you will know exactly how much you are eating and when you eat it.

Then you can talk about less.

Big Greek Cafe Famous $5 Gyro Wednesday!!!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2T peanut butter (190); 2T jelly (100); toasted bread (150);

  • 440 calories

Lunch – Big Greek Cafe Gyros sandwich (600); 

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 10oz sausage chili (420); chicken (150); noodles (100);

  • 670 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); pretzels (50); baklava (200); Fun Size Snickers (80); granola bar (100)

  • 510 calories

Total for the day: 2220 calories (limit 1800)

Now I've done it!

I didn’t do a good job today of focusing on weight control and putting those needs first.  Instead, I was so distracted with my day job that I first delayed breakfast (and was too hungry in consequence) and then lunch.  Now that I think about it, I was pretty late to have dinner, too.  After that kind of treatment, it’s no wonder that my body took over.  After dinner, I found I was still emotionally hungry and craving more food.  I call it food insecurity – after letting myself get too hungry three times in one day, it’s no surprise that I am getting a reaction.  

The temptation is to blame primal drives, or complain that dieting is hard, or Big Sugar or whatever.  But the truth is I did this to myself and I have no-one to blame but myself.  Based on all my past experience and my keeping a food journal, I know what I did to cause this and I have to take the consequences.

When I fail myself like this and then get emotionally hungry (not physically hungry) I don’t try to use force to suppress the urge.  That would make things even worse.  Look at it from the point of view of my body or subconscious.  It suffered all day because I didn’t feed it on time, then when it justifiably complained, I used punishment (denying the urge and trying to not eat).  Would that help?  I don’t think so.  So I had various foods and now I feel too full.  I accept the consequences of how I behaved and I will have to do better tomorrow.  Tomorrow is a new day.  

There has to be a balance in your life.  Frankly, weight control has to be pretty high up in your list of values for it to work consistently.  It takes a high precedence but it’s not difficult.  Just make sure you eat on time and don’t stress your body out.  Maybe I will start setting an alarm – Time to Eat!

Pay attention and you can control your weight.  Don’t ask too much of yourself and don’t punish your body for failure.  It will work out.  Put the blame where it should be.  

-The Doctor

20191105 Daily report

Staying on a diet is really hard.  I never could do it for long.  It was too hard to work against my needs and desires all the time.  That kind of thing takes a lot of willpower.  I have never had that.

So I don’t do that any more.  Instead, I figure out how to get things I really want that can be part of a weight control lifestyle.  An example is swimming.  I picked an exercise I really like.  I like swimming so much, that I happily go twice a week and look forward to it every time.  I like swimming so much that I can use it as a reward.  It’s something to look forward to, and enjoying your lifestyle is a way to keep it going without needing all your willpower.  

A new treat!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2x muffins (90); toast (130); and 2x Muenster cheese (70);

  • 440 calories

Lunch – Aldi pizza half (570); 

  • 570 calories 

Dinner – Fajitas: flour tortilla shell (140); marinated chicken breast (100); peppers and onions in cream sauce (80); muffin (90);

  • 410 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (120); 8x Baklava cookies (260)

  • 380 calories

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

DIET and EXERCISE

The two most dreaded parts of losing weight must be diet and exercise.  Who wants to do those?  If you don’t want to do it, it takes limitless willpower to make yourself – you have to force yourself to do what you’d rather not and eat what you don’t like.

Except for swimming.  I like to do that.  I like riding my bike, but I haven’t done that in a few years.  I am not a “ride 50 miles” kind of bike rider, anyway.  15 miles is plenty for me.  So I guess I could exercise.  (See what I’m getting at?  Don’t start by running marathons or going to aerobics classes, or even swimming, if you dislike them.  Pick one you have always liked.)

DIETING is the same.  It’s a terrible word that people hate.  Why do people hate to diet?  Because you have to force deprivation on yourself. You feel deprived.  Why?  Because you are withholding what you want from yourself.  Something it would be easy to give yourself.  Do that for a while and you will be searching for reasons to break the diet and give up.  So don’t do that.

Aim higher.  What are your reasons for eating?  How does it make you feel?  Feeling full was always my goal before.  It’s not a high goal, though.  When I thought about it, I didn’t feel proud of that goal.  And I could see how fulfilling that goal was resulting in overeating and weight gain.  Eating until full at every meal?  That couldn’t be right.  The amount of comfort and satisfaction you get from that diminishes if it’s your only aim.

What is a higher aim?  I talked about fulfilling your goal, and that is part of the answer.  Change your goals.  Change your mind.  Choose goals that you can be proud of.  Make them goals that are harder to reach than being full.  Then meeting those higher and more challenging goals will be more difficult, but much more satisfying and meaningful to you.  

LAST, I bought baklava today to try.  It’s ok, but baked desserts bought in the store are never, ever as good as you can make yourself.  I may have to make my own baklava in the future, though I never have before.  On the other hand, I do like the tea cookies from Costco.  But after I eat them all (and it’s Costco and that will take some doing) I will be cured for a long while.  I will make my own desserts and enjoy them.  

If fulfillment is your aim, what would fulfill you completely? 

-The Doctor

20191104 Daily report

When I started thinking about losing weight in late 2018, I knew one thing very quickly.  Whatever I was going to do, it had to be long term.  Not only did I have a lot of weight to lose, which would take a long time.  But also, having lost any significant amount of weight, I didn’t want to gain it back afterwards.  That’s why I threw out the word “diet” immediately.  In long-term thinking, dieting is a temporary condition where you eat things you don’t want, and never enough to feel satisfied.  You are going against your own desires and your own goals for eating and happiness, as far as those go together.  

Weight control was the way I came up with.  Mrs. Doctor of Things says Weight Management would be less intimidating for people than weight control.  But I think that it is too bland, and also feels like you are giving up.  You manage things you can’t change, after all.  Control sounds more like you should be in charge, which I think you have to be.

So many kinds of chocolate!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Spanish tortilla (333); 1/2 flatbread wrap (55); mayo (30)

  • 415 calories

Lunch – 7 ounces rice (220); 8oz chicken curry (240);

  • 460 calories 

Dinner – 2x pancakes (65); sandwich bread (130); 2oz ham (90) 1.5 slices swiss cheese (75); pickles mustard and horseradish (20); 

  • 450 calories

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

  • 290 calories

Total for the day: 1615 calories (limit 1800)

Thinking for the long term

That is how I came up with weight control as a system.  It is accurate and puts the responsibility right on you, where it belongs.  Dieting, though, is a problem for the long term.  Are you going to live on your diet forever?  

Every successful diet is about restricting the amount of food you eat.  Low carbohydrate diets, for example.  In that system, you are actually giving up a lot of calories and you will lose weight that way.  Think about it – no chips, no fries, no rice, pasta, pizza, bagels, toast, cereal, cake, cookies, or sugar.  No pancakes.  Eat all the peanut butter you want, but you have to eat it with a spoon (or a celery stick).  Eat all the hamburger you want, but no bun.  All the cheese you like, without crackers.  And so on. 

There are two ways you are cutting calories in the low carb system.  The first is, you are giving up a lot of foods, which have calories.  The second way is balance, or the lack of it.  You get tired of eating peanut butter by the spoonful.  There are only so many chicken breasts you can eat without potatoes.  You can never have a sandwich, unless you try diet bread, which is not as nice.  Plain meatballs without pasta or bread are tiring.  

It’s the same for other diets.  Paleo – you are giving up a lot of oils as well as processed carbohydrates.  Keto – basically low carb.  Bariatric surgery – you are putting a physical limit on your stomach to make yourself feel full faster, so you (in theory) eat fewer calories.  But bariatric surgery comes with a lot of restrictions you have to live with forever.  And so forth.  

There have been some attempts to get around this problem (Diet vs. lifestyle).  Think of The Mediterranean Diet, for example.  But in general, dieting is for losing weight, not for living.  I don’t think many people would be interested in keto, low carb, or atkins….forever.  Weight control, on the other hand, means you can eat anything you want as long as it fits into the calorie goal.  You have to pay attention and plan ahead.  It has a price in time and energy you will spend.  But it is very nice and you can live this way forever – I have been doing it for 10 months now and I have no desire to stop.  This is just how I will live now.

Tying this to yesterday’s thoughts, a long term diet is possible if it is so attractive and worthwhile that it doesn’t require constant force and isn’t a constant drain on your will power.  There is some discipline involved in recording all the foods and calories in a food journal, but the return on the effort is very worthwhile.  Will is involved, but the aim is high – a better and more satisfying life, that gives me a tremendous sense of meaning.  The meaning and purpose in this lifestyle come from the feeling that all the parts of my being – body, mind and soul – are coming together for this.  I have successfully negotiated with myself and gotten the cooperation of all my competing parts and their different wants and needs.  And I lose weight, too.

Who needs to force themself to do that?

-The Doctor

20191103 Daily report

Someone asked me yesterday (Saturday) how I was losing weight.  We had met before, but I weighed 87 more pounds then.  Really, he asked what I was doing differently.  Like other people who ask me about my weight loss, he had a theory: was I cutting carbohydrates out of my diet?  

I have been thinking about what to tell people when they ask me about weight loss.  I decided to tell him about paying attention.  The biggest change I made in my mind was to make weight control one of the top values I live by.  I don’t eat a thing without considering what effect it will have on the day’s calorie count.  So I told him about that.  When it is at the top of your mind, and you see everything through that interpretation, the act of paying attention by, for example, recording all the calories you eat, results in controlling your food intake.  Even if all you are doing is recording your calorie count, you are in fact controlling it just by knowing what it is.

It doesn’t mean you have to give up any food in particular.  

My precious!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – one-skillet chicken breast (210) and 6 oz. rice and peas (140)

  • 350 calories

Lunch – 5 oz. white rice (160); 12oz chicken curry with cauliflower (340)

  • 500 calories 

Dinner – pretzels and hummus (200); chicken fajitas with peppers and onions cooked in cream (150) in a flour tortilla (150)

  • 500 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 5x Kirkland tea cookies (210); 2x Reese’s peanut butter cups (160) graham crackers (100)

  • 550calories

Total for the day: 1900 calories (limit 1800)

A rich vein: willpower

I have been searching for what to tell people when they ask me about how I lost weight.  I have tried telling people about keeping a food journal.  That has not been well received.   I have tried telling people about rewarding myself with foods I like, but I think that can sound flippant.  Talking about paying attention seemed to work well as a narrative, though.  

Yesterday, when I was asked, I started out talking about promoting weight control, as something I value, to the top value I live by, and seeing everything I eat through the question: how will this affect weight control?  When you come to it, all diets are about restricting calories, in various ways and disguises.  Talking about what I value led easily to a calorie count.  At that point, he asked if I was using willpower to do this.  So this approach may not be the best after all.

I am now thinking about willpower.  If I start out answering this question by admitting I don’t have the willpower to force myself to eat less, then I can talk about persuading myself to eat less, by adopting a lifestyle I like, and finding the deeper meaning that I have been telling you about on this blog.  Also, I think it is disarming to say your willpower is inadequate.  Many people feel that way about themselves, too.  Hearing you say (having dramatically lost 87 pounds) that willpower wasn’t a big factor will intrigue people.  

Only then can you bring up the idea of paying attention, values, rewards, and persuasion.  So much of my new lifestyle is finding ways to please myself that aren’t about having a full stomach.  There are a lot of substitutes for that.  Finding the ones you like is self-knowledge you can’t do without.

Should I call it the Persuasion Diet?

-The Doctor

20191101 Daily report

To lose weight, you have to get your mind right.  Once your mind is right, then your brain is on your side.  Your body will follow.  How is this mind-miracle achieved?

On one level, it’s your brain.  You have to figure some of it out.  But I can show you some good ideas.  First, be willing to admit that everything you think about weight loss might be wrong.  A common way to approach a diet is to try to will yourself thin .  Don’t force yourself to eat and do things you aren’t happy about.  That brings us to punishment and resentment.  Through force and punishment, you can actually come to resent yourself.  It is easy to resent the part of you that is saying “eat less!”  and insisting that you eat things you don’t want, and making you go hungry and unsatisfied.

Instead, think of it as a negotiation between equal partners.  No force is allowed.  Get your mind right first – you want to lose weight and eat less.  How do you do that and still have a satisfying and happy life experience?

Pizza, again!!?!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2x pieces Spanish tortilla (333); Kirkland whole wheat wrap (110); 1tsp Duke’s mayo (30);

  • 470 calories

Lunch – noodles (250); toast (130); hummus (80); Swiss cheese (50);

  • 510 calories 

Dinner – Aldi sausage and pepperoni pizza half (570);

  • 570 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 2x Aldi peanut butter cups (120); 1 bag chips (150);

  • 350 calories

Total for the day: 1900 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

Spooky creepy spectacular!

OK, that was one last salute to Halloween.  I have nothing spooky, though if my scale is possessed tomorrow, I will let you know.  

Every week, I spend some time reading articles and blog posts about weight loss to try and understand what ideas are working for people.  Usually I focus on stories about people who have lost 100+ pounds.  First, that includes me (though I haven’t lost that much yet).  Second, those are people who have had to develop a good system and work at it.  Third, these are people who are able to keep their weight under control afterwards.  That means they have built new lives that work for them.  

Today’s article: What Women Who’ve Lost 100 Pounds Eat Every Day

The article profiles five women, very briefly presenting a table of their food choices.  I’m not sure about the premise of the article.  Maybe eating what these women eat wouldn’t work for you, and maybe it would.  There’s no mention of a food diary or a calorie count, just a list of foods and a bit of narrative color.  I have pulled out some interesting pieces from each profile.

  1. TK’s food choices are not that interesting to me, but she mentions that she snacks whenever she needs it.  That is great – don’t try to tough out being hungry.  Part of you will resent going without and feel deprived.  That kind of thing can lead to breaking your diet discipline.  Get some snack packs and learn to recognize when you need one.  I have little packs of beef jerky, 90 calories each.  I’m still not that good about knowing when to open one, though.
  2. SK has an interesting food list.  She learned that her body does well when she avoids dairy and carbohydrates.  She has a fair amount of meat and protein in her diet, and then she rewards herself with measured amounts of chocolate.  That kind of self-knowledge is wonderful.  She has built a diet that she likes and her body likes too.  That kind of thing will make it easier for her to stay thin.
  3. JJH incorporates several ideas into her diet that the Doctor has mentioned before.  She pre-prepares a lot of meals on the weekends and portions them.  She eats a lot of meat and vegetables, and her top breakfast choice is bacon and eggs.  I am getting hungry for that right now, just reading about it.  Reading her bio, she also mentions failing on a lot of previous attempts at dieting.  Like me, she admits she stopped paying any attention to weight control and gained a lot of weight over time.  For her, a supportive social network and strength training were also important.  
  4. For CG, I see a trick I have seen elsewhere – raw vegetables and hummus as the snack.  She also seems to avoid breads and simple carbohydrates.  That’s true for a lot of people, I notice.  When you are restricting your calorie intake, you have to be very aware of what foods will make you feel satisfied and not mind eating controlled amounts.  Looking at her bio, she is also someone who had bariatric surgery, which restricts your stomach size.  That helped her feel full while eating less.  I would be concerned about what happens when the surgery is reversed, because she talks about wanting to feel full.  But for her it seemed to work.
  5. Last, it’s CP.  I am predisposed to this one because she is a fan of flatbread sandwiches for lunch.  I love those!  It’s a great way to have a sandwich without hundreds of calories of bread.  Also, I see a lot of themes I know and love in her bio.  She does a lot of pre planning of her meals – check!  She found some supportive friends – check!  And she makes a thing about not punishing herself, but being kind – which I totally agree with.  Use rewards to keep yourself happy and satisfied.  It works for a lot of things.  

The Doctor is a big proponent of a food journal, counting calories and weighing yourself often.  This article doesn’t mention any of that, but it does say that it’s about what people eat – not how much.  I don’t think there is any magic about what you eat, but it pays to look and see what other successful people are doing.  Maybe you will learn something.   Don’t be too proud to learn!  

-The Doctor

20191031 Daily report

My weight control-focused lifestyle is lived one day at a time.  Almost, one meal at a time.  But really, every day is a new day.  My calorie count is for the day.  My food journal is set up for daily entries.  It is not always easy to live while focused on high quality experience, since I am asking a lot of myself.  There is a lot of effort, planning, and execution of plans.  I am taking it one day at a time, in more ways than one.  One day at a time is something ex-alcoholics or ex-smokers might say in group meetings.  But yes, it is one day at a time.  It is not easy.  But there are compensations.  

Chicken and....basically a risotto.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2x Spanish tortilla (166); whole wheat wrap (110); tsp mayonnaise (30)

  • 470 calories

Lunch – steak and cheese sandwich (500)

  • 500 calories 

Dinner – chicken breast (220); 10 ounces rice casserole and peas (230)

  • 450 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (120); 3 pieces candy (150);

  • 270 calories

Total for the day: 1690 calories (limit 1800)

Halloween!

The Doctor is taking tonight off in honor of the holiday (and because there is a lot to do tonight: costumes, trick or treating, candy sorting, candy eating…).

I will say: I have been spending time in my office recently.  It’s amazing how supportive people are about weight loss, but it’s always people who are thin themselves who comment and give encouragement.  I recognize now that people who are thin work at it constantly with various degrees of success.  So they recognize that you are working at it too.  Maybe they appreciate it.  

But wanting to be thinner is not the same as making the mental changes necessary to bring it about.  Even working at it does not guarantee any success, as I found out over the years.  You have to have a good system that you like and are willing to live out.  That means promoting new values to the top of your hierarchy of rules you live by.  Changing your mind is actually the tricky part.

Do it and your body will follow.  That part will take time.

-The Doctor

20191030 Daily report

Every day, my job is to live in the world as if I was in control of my weight, and as if that was a good thing.  I want that life to be both very practical and of high quality, because that’s the kind of life I find worth living.  On the practical level, I maintain weight control by planning meals and counting calories, and recording what I eat in a food journal.  Also, I weigh myself every Saturday, with few exceptions.  

On the quality of life side, it is important to most of us to be living a life one can be proud of.  That is part of the meaning of quality.  If your standards are low, quality can mean anything.  For years, the idea of quality that I lived was to eat whatever I felt like, and not pay any attention to how much.  Now I do things differently.  Quality now means successfully negotiating with myself, to engage as many layers and parts of my being as possible towards my goal.  The feeling that so many parts of my life and of myself are coming together and working together gives me a strong sense of meaning.  It is very fulfilling to make progress and achieve goals while living in harmony with all your contradictory parts.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissantwich, oven-toasted (400)

  • 400 calories

Lunch – Roasted chicken breast (220); with 10 ounces of rice and peas cooked in wine, broth, and spices (230)

  • 450 calories 

Dinner – 12 ounces chicken curry (335); 5 ounces cooked white jasmine rice (160)

  • 500 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (120); 

  • 120 calories

Total for the day: 1470 calories (limit 1800)

Self regulating - the pendulum swings again

Yesterday, when I wrote my food journal in the blog post, it was accurate.  However, that didn’t last.  I had another 500 calories last night, late.  When I have that kind of feeling, like I need to eat, I don’t try to fight it anymore.  I recognize that I haven’t met my own needs somehow.  There are two problems that follow on from this initial failure.

First, there is the temptation to make up for the calorie overage the next day.  I have learned (through this happening before)  that you have to let it go.  Accept that you failed, at least in part, to keep up your end of the bargain.  The bargain is, my subconscious being will be happy eating controlled amounts of food, so long as it doesn’t feel deprived.  That means the food has to be very appealing, it has to be planned well, and I have to take care that I eat at the right times, before I get too hungry and deprived.  Remember I am in deficit as much as 1000 calories per day.  To be that far under what your body needs to keep its weight, a lot of care and attention is required to make the food you do eat seem like enough.  It HAS to be on time, and it HAS to be meeting the need for food that is worth the wait and the effort.  I ate fewer calories today, but that’s because I honestly didn’t want them.  This is because of the second problem.  

The second problem with overeating is that it throws off your digestion, your metabolism, your appetite, for the whole next day.  Sure enough, that was my day today.  I just felt terrible, and while I got hungry and ate food, it just didn’t feel satisfying and I didn’t feel properly hungry.  I was carrying around the imbalance from last night.  Thank goodness, the pendulum will swing back to normal soon.  

Anyway, I have learned that if I try to hurry the pendulum along by skipping a meal, it just makes the problem worse.  I make myself feel deprived again, and that could lead to even more overeating later.  The balance I am trying to maintain would be thrown off even further.  Then the next day’s recovery would be even harder.  That kind of cycle can get really bad.  So my advice is just wait it out.  If you don’t feel better tomorrow, then you will the next day.  Just give your body time to reset.

Today I made a chicken curry for dinner.  You can see the ingredients laid out above, ready for cooking, and then the finished portion plated below that.  I will put the recipe in the Recipes tab at the top of the blog, as soon as I can get around to it.  The point is, when you add up everything in the dish, it comes to 2000 calories.  When I finished cooking, I weighed the entirety in a bowl on the scale: 4 pounds, 11 ounces.  That’s near enough 75 ounces.  One-sixth of that would be 12.5 ounces and 2000/6 portions is 333 calories.  So the whole thing, divided in six portions of 12 ounces each, with 5 ounces of cooked rice per portion (160 calories) is just about 500 calories per portion.  And in my experience,  1.5 cups of raw rice makes 30 ounces of cooked rice.  That’s six portions, five ounces each.  There are six meals, delicious and ready to go.  And curry and rice are easy to reheat.  

What a week!  And still only half done.  Don’t worry about today – it’s gone.  Plan how you can make tomorrow a good day. 

-The Doctor

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