Diet success

20201017 Saturday weighing

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

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

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

0
Pounds!!

Closer to the target

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll pretend I was building muscle, ok?

-The Doctor

20201010 Saturday weigh-in and in-sight

1661 is a magic number this week.  It’s a palindrome, it’s the average number of calories I had per day this week, and the “16” has an echo of what I weighed last week, 216 pounds. 

There’s another interesting number, which is today’s date, 20201010.  Two times 1010 is 2020!  This is a data blog and a numbers blog, in its way.  I have decided I want to be in control of my body and my body’s weight. That is best done with numbers: calories, clothing sizes, weights and measures (of food portions and the body).  There was a time when I tried magic diets and that didn’t work well for the most part.  

What has worked well?  Let’s see how well I did this week:

Are my toes thinner?

Since I began my weight control project in January 2019, I have lost:

0
Pounds!!

When can I stop dieting?

That is the wrong question. A bad question.  That is a question asked by someone who is living a “diet” lifestyle they don’t like.  I am having a great time, eating whatever I like.  I am enjoying eating more than I ever did when I was out of control and gaining weight uncontrollably.  That’s the real reason this is working so well.  And all I had to do was change my mind.

Magic diet is my term for diets that substitute magic for thinking.  I tried a diet that claimed that you had to eat foods in a certain order, to lose weight.  Another type of diet I tried that said certain foods should be avoided.  This includes the keto, or low carb, or low fat, and similar exclusion diets.  Another popular one was to substitute a low calorie milkshake for 1 or meals per day.  The only one that worked (a little) for me was the low carbohydrate diet.  The claim is that if you follow these diets you will lose weight.  But they all have the same problem.  You can do these things and they may work for a while, but you are still the same person with the same thinking who became overweight in the first place.  That is what you have to change.

You become overweight not because you are eating sugar or fats or carbs or grapefruit or drinking juice, coffee, or soda.  You become overweight because of your mindset, your way of looking at the world, experiencing the world.  Your values and thoughts are resulting in overweight.  That is what must change.  Your food choices and your body’s weight will catch up to your thinking, if you improve it.

The single biggest difference between people who are gaining weight and those who maintain a thin weight throughout their adult life is in values and how you live them out.  I don’t even value being thin very highly.  I decided that I needed to value being in control of my weight, more than almost anything else.  Then, I could pick the weight I wanted.  That attitude feeds into other parts of you life too; if you are responsible for your weight, why not your house, your yard, your community, your day job?  Thin people have decided that being in control of their weight matters to them more than anything else.  

I will talk about achieving that control another time, but for now I will say you have to develop the correct reasons for eating and ways to measure your control.  

Have a good week!

-The Doctor

20201003 Saturday way in

To my surprise, though I started the week off badly, I managed to have a reasonably good week controlling my weight.  That’s the goal: being in control of my body’s weight.  I could pick a weight number as my goal, but weight control is better.  Then I can pick any weight I want and go in that direction.  Being in control takes a lot of attention, and some hard work and some time.  But it has its rewards.  I am wearing and buying size 40 pants these days.  It was only in 2019 January I was wearing size 52.  OK, the size 40s are not exactly relaxed-fit, but neither are they ridiculous.  I can wear them around.

I know what I weigh, because I weigh myself every week. I can go to the store and be pleasantly surprised with what I am fitting into, instead of a bit shocked and dismayed.  

And no backsliding.  Having established control over my weight, I don’t want to be gaining it all back again.  I control my weight by becoming a new person who values weight control, and make sure my old lifestyle is unrewarding.

Caption

This is a new low weight for me, and I am getting closer and closer to having a normal-sized body.  Since I started controlling my weight in January 2019, I have lost:

0
Pounds!!

Closer and closer

My original goal was to reach a target of 205 pounds.  This was arbitrary, and I never expected to reach it.  I have started dieting before and never made it anywhere.  But this time was different.  I left behind my old thinking and my old way of life, and started living according to a new set of values.  But I am making great progress this time!  Soon I will have lost 111 pounds from my starting weight of 325.  That’s only nine pounds away from the target: 205.

I don’t believe I will stop for long at 205 pounds.  I want to see what 185-190 looks like.  But still, reaching that target of 205 pounds will be a big accomplishment.  It’s one that people who stay thin, perform all the time, but it is new to me.  I have learned that people who stay thin have to work at it, and the thinner they are, the harder they must work.  I appreciate that.  I have learned a lot from thin people.  

Of course there is more to do.  I would also like to exercise more, but my preferred exercise is swimming and that is difficult right now, all the Coronavirus lockdowns have made a lot of the pools hard to use.  But some light exercise like walking will make a difference, as I get closer and closer to my targets.

What will I do when I want to stay at a weight?  When I want to stop losing or gaining?  That will take some figuring out and it will be odd to eat more calories than I have been for the last two years.  Weight control demanded I eat less and then it will demand I eat more.  But I have learned it takes constant attention.  You can’t park at a weight and stay there without any effort.  (Well, actually you can, but it takes some pretty strong routinizing – I mean, eating the exact same meals and portions every day.)

Breakfast time.  I am hungry and I will enjoy it.  Have a good week,

-The Doctor

20200926 Saturday weigh-in: and??

Saturday morning (before breakfast) is the end of my food week, the culmination or result of a week of work.  Controlling my weight does take work and discipline.  It does not take deprivation or suffering.  Otherwise I couldn’t do it.  Anyway, I weigh myself Saturday morning before breakfast.   

There is a little pressure to make sure Saturday turns out well.  I am careful not to overeat Thursday and Friday.  Not that it matters, I work on portion control throughout the week.  But I have found my body does have short term reactions to a bad diet day late in the week – before weighing.

Last weekend I had a bad couple of diet days.  I have been predicting it would take me a week just to recover!  My previous low weight was 217 pounds.

…and my current weight is 217.4.  That’s pretty much the same as two weeks ago and I haven’t lost any weight in two weeks.  That’s the price of bad diet days!  Anyway, I didn’t take a picture since it’s not a triumph.  But neither is it worse than expected.  I have still lost a lot of weight starting almost two years ago:

0
Pounds!!

A perfect week

Next week I have a chance to have a good week.  Every week I get that chance.  While nobody keeps their discipline all the time, I have had a pretty good record of keeping going.  How is that done?

Willpower! 

Ha, ha, ha.  The Doctor has no willpower.  I think of willpower as the application of force.  You are forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do.  That’s sometimes because you are seeing the world in a bad or non productive way.  I decided I needed to change, to see my body as something under my control, something I should be in charge of.  How it looks is partly up to me.  

And that brought me to an important question.  What did I get out of eating food?  Clearly I was eating way too much, though I wasn’t keeping a food journal at that time and had no idea just how much I was eating.  If I was eating more than I should, why was I doing that?  

My answer was I had created a link in my mind between eating, pleasure, and comfort.  The reason I was eating was shallow and unworthy: I associated eating food with being comfortably full and with enjoying the taste.  The more I ate, the more comfortable I was and the greater the pleasure from tasting.  But that wasn’t true, it was just a decision I had made.  You can change your mind about that.  What is a better goal for eating than comfort and pleasure?  I would try physical need, and a higher order of pleasure.

For now, have a good diet week.

-The Doctor

20200912 Saturday weigh-in

When you decide to take control of your body’s weight, you have a mental change to make – even more than the physical one.  I call it “thinking like a thin person” and it is a little different than the usual diet advice.  Normally you are told to ACT like a thin person.  For example I often see the advice that you should take half of your lunch and put it away for dinner or another meal.  That could be a sensible thing to do, but WHY are you doing that?  I never see a thin person doing that, either.  Usually they throw away what they don’t eat (say at a restaurant).  Thin people also don’t usually order diet soda.  Watch them and learn how to think about food and eating.  WHAT to do will then come natural.

Actually it varied a bit today

When I got on the scale this morning I was 217.4 and after I went for a walk and did a little yard work it was 216.4  So I will split the difference and say 217 even.  Since starting my weight control lifestyle in January 2019 I have lost:

0
Pounds!!

TrY EaTIng LeSS fOOD!!!!

Controlling your weight amounts to eating less food, yes.  But that is the least important part and the least helpful way to look at the issue.  But hey – did I say eating less food was the Least Important Part?  Doctor, are you MAD??

Mad like a fox who has lost 108 pounds.  (That was a mighty big fox.)  The most important thing to change is your mind.  Change your mind.  There’s a saying: some people would rather die than think.  Don’t be those people.  Thinking as you have and living as you have has resulted in weight gain and overweight.  You can’t do those things any more.  The decision has to be made: I am going to control my body and its weight.  That means I have to give up or sacrifice something.  I will give up my old values, life, and habits that resulted in overweight.  I need new values and a new way of thinking about food and eating.

Why is eating less food not a helpful way to look at controlling your weight?  Isn’t that the reality?

We don’t live in reality and our brains aren’t about reality.  You are an actor on the stage and the stage is the world and the play is your life.  “Eat less food” is commonly used to mean “have some willpower,” like that is the difference between thin and overweight people.  Do you think that is true?  It isn’t.  I don’t have any more willpower after 108 pounds lost than I did when I weighed 108 pounds more.  

If you try to force yourself to eat less, you might succeed for a while.  Maybe you have more willpower than you think you do.  But the old you is still in there and has the same values, priorities, and habits.  When you stop dieting (usually when you run out of willpower) then the old you will step right back in and you will gain all the weight again.  Who wants that?

Change your mind instead.  Then the new you can be a person who is in control of their weight and thinks like a thin person.

-The Doctor

20200905 Saturday weigh-in

Dear reader, while living out my new values I have lost more than 100 pounds.  This took surprisingly little willpower, once I had my head straight.  It’s a lifestyle I like.  That means I can do it forever, or at least until I find something even better.  My previous attempts to control my weight (readers will know that I dislike the term “diet”) hardly ever went anywhere because I couldn’t keep forcing myself to go against my values at that time.

A surprising clue came when I tried a low carbohydrate diet.  I did lose some weight, and many people have had the same thing happen.  But it stopped due to math.  I will explain.  For now, the math I want to talk about is subtraction:  

Down we go!

Since I started my weight control lifestyle in January 2019 I have lost:

0
Pounds!!

125 pounds was my original aim

My weight control lifestyle was built around the idea that I can choose the values I want to live by.  My success is proof that once you pick values you like and start living them out in your life, your weight will come under control – slowly, because bodies don’t gain or lose 125 pounds overnight.

My original starting weight was 325 pounds.  Losing 125 seemed like an ambitious goal.  However in my new value system, it is merely an aiming point.  It can be changed.  My goal is to live well and control my weight while enjoying the eating experience.  I don’t eat any diet foods, load up on vegetables for bulk, or avoid carbohydrates.  I eat what I like, but I am careful about how much.  

My values new include weight control, and quality eating.  I don’t mean that I buy organic or expensive foods, because I don’t do that.  The quality comes from finding foods I really like and are worth waiting for.  This is because I wait to eat until I am hungry.  That lets me maximize the enjoyment I get from eating (measured portions of) my favorite foods.  In a nutshell, that’s how I lost 106 pounds and still going.

That reminds me about the low carb diet or keto diets. They aren’t magic but they gave me a clue.  If you want to lose 10-20 pounds and you have generally been good about controlling your weight during your lifetime, switch to low carb and you will lose that much.  I think it’s because your calories are restricted a bit (no bread, chips, cereals).  To lose a lot of weight, you need a lifestyle change too.  There is just no magic answer, so pick a lifestyle you like a lot.  That means, pick your values.  You will fight to live them out and the weight will come off almost as a side effect.

What values would you choose?  Which do you have now?  Which are not helping you?

-The Doctor

20200822 Saturday weigh-in less and less

Saturday!  Saturday is the first day of my food week.  It’s the day I weigh myself.  And I give myself every advantage.  I didn’t overeat on Friday, I weighed myself before breakfast, AND I went for a walk yesterday.  Saturday is a day when I look ahead and know that I have a new week where I can get everything right.

But this week didn’t go badly either.

Actually, that's down a lot!

222 pounds!  The last time I weighed that was 20 years ago.  It’s about time I started to get it together.  But for now, I am happy because it means since January 2019 I have lost:

0
Pounds!!

Still Not Thin

Weighing over 220 pounds does not get me into the thin club.  I am overweight still and anyone meeting me the first time doesn’t know I have lost 103 pounds.  Still, most people I have met would notice the difference, if we weren’t all socially distant all the time.  Anyway, that is a bit frustrating if you look at it that way.  So I won’t.  I have lost 103 pounds and my original plan – I don’t say goal – was to lose 120 pounds.  I am starting to close in on that number.  I have lost almost 86% of 120 pounds.  I wonder what size pants I will fit into now?  (OK, I checked.  I can comfortably fit into size 42 pants.  For size 40s I can close them but they are a bit tight to wear.)

For my body, the extra weight is around my middle mostly, as a lot of the rest of my body has been thinning out.  My face and neck and hands and feet are noticeably thinner than when I started weight control.

The reason I don’t call 120 pounds a goal is because that’s not how I have trained myself to see the world.  My goal is weight control and that is really a lifestyle that I have developed and that I like.  I want to do it because it is rewarding to me, so it is a lot easier than if I was forcing myself.  You want to avoid any kind of diet where you are forcing yourself to eat less using willpower.  My successful approach takes discipline and work, but a lot less willpower is needed to resist eating extra food.  Anyway, 120 is just a number.  When I have lost 120 pounds I will weigh 205.  Will I stop there?  Probably not.  But we shall see.  I have found that you have to work harder as you get closer and closer to a more normal weight.  

Set up a life you want to live and you will work hard to get there and stay there!

-The Doctor

20200815 Saturday weighing

I weigh myself once a week.  It’s a habit now.  There are times when I am embarrassed to get on the scale – if I had a bad week or couple of days just be fore weighing.  But it is better to see what the effect of a bad week is, then to not know.  And your body may surprise you.  But knowing is better than not knowing.  Ignorance kills, after all.  

Anyway, I have about a year and a half of my body weight written down.  It’s mostly decreased though there have been pauses and backslidings here and there.  This week I hardly budged:

Caption

Last week I weighed 225, a big dip.  But I went down again very slightly this week, so it looks like the weight loss was real.  Since January 2019, I have lost:

0
Pounds!!

What a milestone!

Strange to think every time I walk up the stairs that I used to be carrying an extra 100 pounds up with me.  If my skeleton is discovered millions of years from now I wonder what they will make of mine!  “He was probably a slave who carried heavy boulders to build the Pyramids!”  I suppose I was a slave, to my lack of responsibility.  I shouldn’t be too hard on myself, but I didn’t have the kind of thinking that would get me out of the trap of eating for the wrong reasons.

Mostly what got me out of that old thinking was reading about responsibility.  It was very inspiring and I can’t think why I never caught on to the idea before.  It also helped to think of myself as two people: the articulate will (hi, that’s me writing right now) and the deeper, animal self that might actually be in charge, who knows.  Both parts had to be negotiated with and aligned for me to be successful in this weight control lifestyle.  I’ve talked about that a lot over the last year and a half.

It’s also interesting that the first 90 pounds of loss all came steadily over about a year.  Then I had a big pause for six months, then I have lost the next 10 pounds in fits and starts.  I read today about a man who weighed 425 pounds.  He lost over 220 (wow!) mostly by changing his reason for eating.  He decided that food was fuel and not for pleasure, and then he lived that out.  He also mentioned that a lot of the weight came off in one long steady effort, then he had a pause and had to work hard to lose the last 30-40 pounds.  Maybe that’s a common theme.  

Don’t get discouraged!  You can go a long way and then find you have a little more ways to go.

…and when you are concentrating on your weight, don’t forget you have a lot of responsibilities to take care of!  Don’t slack off in other important areas, you only live once.

-The Doctor

20200808 Saturday weighing less

Every Saturday, I weigh myself in the morning, before breakfast.  It is important to know how much you weigh.  The lifestyle I am building is an information-based way of life.  I count calories and keep a food journal and weigh myself.  Even if you had a bad diet week, or a bad day Friday, you should still get on the scale because you need to know the effects of a bad week or a bad day.  It’s taken me a while to figure that out.  I have been too embarrassed or too ashamed to get on the scale before.  But it’s just between you and the scale.  Not everyone is putting the results up on the internet!  Talking of which, I did weigh myself.  How did that go?

Red toe from walking so much! Good number though.

I forget, how much weight have I lost since I started living the weight control lifestyle in January 2019?  Oh yes, it was…

0
Pounds!!

Hooray!

I have to admit I thought I would first get below 330 pounds and then a week or two later get to this level.  This is amazing and a bit weird.  Losing 5 pounds in one week?  That can’t be real or healthy, right?

Ordinarily I would just say no, it’s not real.  But I have data from my food journal and I have been walking a bit more, about three miles a day most days.  According to my food journal this week I averaged 1444 calories per day.  That’s pretty low. Under normal conditions I aim for 1850 per day and expect to lose 1-2 pounds, so in deficit between 3500-7000 calories.  But this week I was in deficit a bit more.  About 400 calories per day more!  2800 calories more is just about a pound.  Maybe the walking made a difference?  I won’t know until next week.

Interestingly weighing myself with clothes on put me up about 1.5 pounds.  That’s good to know, too.  

And from an online calculator I see that walking doesn’t burn that many calories. Maybe 110 per mile, so if I walked 10 miles we can estimate a further 1100 calories were burned.  That’s just not enough to lose 5 pounds.  So there is something unusual going on with my body.  That’s ok, I will find oud out next week when I get on the scale again.  That’s the beauty of the system – there is always more data.

As a reward, the Olive Garden is out, due to Corona Virus.  What kind of reward should I have?  Today’s dinner is a top candidate.  I had home-grilled steak, potato, and salad.  Nearly 900 calories just for dinner!  I haven’t done that in forever.

Have a good week!  

-The Doctor

20200801 Saturday way in

Today is Saturday and that means it’s weighing time.  When I was gaining weight and not paying attention to controlling my body, I practically never got on the scale.  Partly, I didn’t want to know.  Now, I have promoted weight control to the top of my list of values that I live by.  So I weigh myself weekly.  There are people who weigh themselves every day and I have tried it.  But seeing the number change once a week is much more dramatic.  It’s hard to get excited about losing 0.2-0.3 pounds, and my lifestyle has some excitement built-in.  So I don’t even get on a scale, usually, until Saturday morning and so I never know if I have lost weight until then.  

That's close to the line!

I am at a different location this week so the scale is different.  I am pretty sure 230.0 pounds is accurate because I got on this scale last week too, just to check.  And it had run out of battery.  But once that was fixed, my weight was pretty close to what I get at home.  So I trust this number pretty well.  

Since starting to control my weight in January, 2019 I have lost:

0
Pounds!!

Double milestones on the horizon

I don’t like to brag about what I will do in the future because it may never happen.  But I always plan ahead for success.  I always reward myself for achieving milestones, because I want to persuade all the parts of my being that living this way is better.  Let me explain: I have forcing myself to eat less food and that doesn’t work for very long.  It takes continual application of force.  And if I did manage to lose weight that way, I would pretty quickly gain it back again.  I would be the same person, after all, and you can’t force yourself forever.  

However you can discipline yourself.  You, the conscious willing part, can take on doing all the work, and create a new person who will be living the life you want.  The new life has to be attractive and it can’t use force.  But you can make sure that you are eating for the right reasons; that you can make the trade of quantity of food for quality; you can plan ahead and cook ahead so that the foods you want to eat are always there when you need them and in the right portions; and you can learn to see hunger as a positive force that enhances your joy in life.  This is a hopeful lifestyle.

The milestones I use are decades.  When I move from the 230s to the 220s, that is a milestone and I will prepare a favorite meal or food as a reward.  Food as a reward??!?!  All the diet experts say don’t do that!  And I say that I have done it and lost 95 pounds.  Questions?

The other milestone is 100 pounds lost.  My original goal when I started was to lose 125 pounds and see how that looked.  So 100 pounds is not the end.  When I weigh 200 pounds (!) I will see if there is more that should be lost.  But I will be pretty happy about weighing only 200 pounds for a while.  That will be a big, big milestone.

But the weight control will continue.  It’s no good losing weight to put it back on again.  But I won’t stop being the Doctor – weight maintenance is a lifetime job.

-The Doctor

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