Long term dieting

20200722 Daily report with blueberries

It has been a great year overall…..for blueberries.  Fairly terrible for a lot of other things.  But for blueberries, I don’t remember a better year.  They have been cheap and ranged from pretty good to very good.  

Eating the blueberries plain is good.  Putting them in pancakes…..also good.  Making blueberry cobbler, Texas style was very, very good.  I have done all those things this year.  But I haven’t made a pie.  If I can stop eating them long enough to have any left over for pie, I will do that.  It’s been awfully hot for baking, though.  I will hope for a cool day.

I like to focus on creating a world I want to live in.  That means letting out my desires and creativity in cooking and food in general.  The portion has to be controlled, but the kind of food is up to me.  

Not as seasonal as blueberry pie, but worth waiting for

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – burrito bowl with 100g meat (250); 30g cheese (110); 130g refried beans (110); 2T sour cream (60);

  • 530 calories

Lunch – Big Greek Cafe $5 Gyro Wednesday!!!! (600);

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 13 ounces of ziti, sausage, and cheese slow cooker bake (520);

  • 520 calories

Snacking – blueberries (50)

  • 50 calories

Total for the day: 1700 calories (limit 1850)

It's always up to you

I have been paying more attention to my body.  That isn’t all good.  I am still 34 pounds away from my initial goal – to lose 125 pounds.  (Wow, though, 100 pounds lost may not be far off.)  I am still 50 pounds away from a more final goal of 185 pounds.  Nobody will look at me (unless they know me) and recognize I have lost a lot of weight.  They just see someone who is 35-50 pounds overweight!  Well, as long as I am losing weight I can tell myself that I am thinking like a thin person on the inside.  My body is just the lagging indicator.  And things are going well this week for weight control.  I even have blueberries.

You must always keep in mind that your goal is to build the life you want and live it.  If you don’t then your life is just the things that happen to you.  Being in control of my weight is only part of the life I want for myself.  Right now, it is taking a lot of my runtime, but it is also rewarding.  You can set up your life so that the accomplishments are rewarded.  That’s partly why I focus so hard on rewards.  They are rewards for achievement and they are meant to help create the life I want.  Achieving is better than accepting and should be rewarded.

Encourage yourself with rewards, it’s much better than punishment.  The beatings will continue until morale improves, right?

-The Doctor

20200721 Daily report: on top of Spaghetti

The author Terry Pratchett says, when life hands you a plate of spaghetti, just grab a strand and keep pulling until you find the meatball.  That could mean anything, but it works today because there was spaghetti for dinner.  And meatballs.  No pulling was required.  

Our hot weather may be ending soon.  We are predicted to have high temperatures in the 80s by the end of the week – still low 90s this weekend, but there is a sense we are off the sun’s anvil.  And we are starting to get some strong thunderstorms.  

Nice and simple

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bagel (330); salami (110); olive tapenade (30); cheese (50);

  • 520 calories

Lunch – 2x pork burgers (300); wheat wrap (50)

  • 650 calories 

Dinner – 6oz Rotini (300); 5x Costco meatballs (235)

  • 535 calories

Snacking – 96g ice cream (240)

  • 240 calories

Total for the day: 1885 calories (limit 1850)

Deprivation and punishment avoidance

My interest this week is to reset my brain so that I am in better alignment with my weight control goals.  My real goal is to create a life that is very enjoyable; my second goal is to be in control of my body’s weight.  The life I am creating is the life of a thin person.  My body will catch up over time.  What I am fighting is the wrong mindset.  In that wrong mindset, eating less is deprivation and withholding extra food is a kind of punishment.  That will never work as a life anybody wants to have.

It’s an exciting challenge to build a life you like.  You learn about yourself, you find out your limits, you see what you can do in support of your goals.  There’s no waiting for anybody to do things for you.  You are the only person who can make your life work.

Today was not a home run in terms of every meal being exciting, but one of them was, and they all worked for me.  I like my sandwiches, such as the BLT wrap, the hummus and meatball, the Cuban sandwich wrap, the Middle East chicken wrap, and now my Mufaletta bagel with olive tapenade.  Did I mention my Reuben grill wrap?  One of the newer additions to my list of favorites is the pork burger.  It’s a great recipe and has lots of flavor enhancers: soy sauce, Worcestershire, thyme, black pepper, salt, and panade with a bit of milk.  I had pork burgers for lunch with onion, pickle and horseradish sauce on a wrap.  I don’t know if there is a name for pork burger with horseradish sauce and I don’t care.  Fabulous!  It was worth all the trouble of getting hungry and preparing it.  

How have you learned to motivate yourself?  I hope it’s positive.  Don’t punish your way to success!

-The Doctor

20200720 Daily report: the struggle continues

I am talking about the struggle to get the mind right.  Once you have your mind right, you can transform yourself.  But what does that mean?  Your mind is in the wrong place if you can’t get yourself to lose weight.  I couldn’t do that for years.  I found it difficult and punishing.  It required attention and discipline and energy I preferred using elsewhere.  During that time, when I couldn’t lose wight, I would sometimes say that I must want to lose weight, or it must not be that important to me.  That’s also a sign that your mind is wrong; it’s passive.  If you aren’t in charge of your body, then who?

It’s not enough to WANT to.  You have to imagine a world where you are eating, and behaving, like a thin person whose weight is under control.  Your body will catch up.  What would that world be like?  It has to be attractive and worth the struggle.

That's not a salad. There's layers of meat and cheese and beans in there.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bagel (330): ham (50): olive tapenade (20);

  • 400 calories

Lunch – 7.5oz ziti sausage and cheese bake (300); 5oz slow cooker tortilla (280);

  • 580 calories 

Dinner – taco salad, with 90g meat (220); 110g beans (85); 30g cheese (110); tortilla (130); sour cream (60);

  • 605 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 80g ice cream (200)

  • 280 calories

Total for the day: 1865 calories (limit 1850)

Pitfalls in your head

I am working on getting my head right. Recently it’s been hard to get excited about the fantastic new world I created for myself.  You know, the one where I am in control of my body’s weight and keep rewarding myself for doing that by creating and eating portioned but fantastic meals. 

There are so many competing thoughts and wishes and desires and interests in someone’s head.  One of my strongly held values is …well, value – getting my money’s worth.  It’s made it hard to throw away food , even if I don’t want it.  Today, when I went for breakfast I was very interested in a ham bagel.  When I saw the jar of tapenade I was pretty excited!  Then I saw there were leftover pancakes in the fridge that need to be eaten.  I picked them up and was about to have them.  But then, I remembered how excited I was about the sandwich.  To each their own.  I put down the pancakes and made my sandwich.  This was not the provident course, but if your lodestone is weight control, then good value and providence are #2.

For lunch, I thought I should eat up the slow cooker Spanish tortilla, even though I don’t like it very much (not compared to the regular Spanish tortilla).  But this time I was wiser and had ziti sausage and cheese bake instead, which I really, really wanted.  Those were two very satisfying meals.  My created world was looking better and more exciting and rewarding.

At dinnertime I made a very well balanced taco salad.  By themselves lettuce and tomato are not rewarding for me, but when combined with meat, cheese, beans, sour cream, olives, jalapeno slices, and salsa, it was perfect.  It felt so good I had no need for seconds.  Three fantastic meals in one day!  

That’s how you get your mind right.  Reprioritize your values and get #1 straight.  Enact that in your life and you can enjoy the results.  Now that’s a world you want to live in.

-The Doctor

20200719 Daily report

Welcome to super hot Sunday edition!  101 degrees outside and everybody is inside.  I mean everybody – Disney Plus and other streaming services are very slow, which I think means everyone is using them and not going outside.  The pool across from me has “opened” but only a few people are there, or allowed there, because everyone still has to keep a distance, all the water features for kids are shut down, and it sounds like you can either swim laps, by appointment, or bob up and down a bit with your household.  It sounds sad that the kids can’t run and play and splash and talk to each other.  All the social distancing means half the fun of a pool is gone.  The hot tubs are also closed – all that is left is lap swimming for exercise and bobbing up and down.  This corona stuff can’t end soon enough.

But this blog is about a weight control journey.  What does all that mean for weight control?  Well, it means that for the last several months I haven’t been able to swim laps for exercise.  Has it affected my ability to lose weight?  I’m not sure.  It has made me change my routine, and I liked swimming.  I liked my old life, but things change.

The Doctor's Middle Eastern chicken wrap. Hummus, cucumber, tomato, chicken, Tobasco!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 8oz slow cooker Spanish tortilla (450); wheat wrap (110); mayonnaise (70);

  • 630 calories

Lunch – Burrito bowl with 130g refried beans (100); 100g Mexican ground beef (280); 30g cheese (110); 2Tbsp sour cream (50);

  • 510 calories 

Dinner – 1/6 serving of slow cooker ziti, sausage, and cheese bake (520)

  • 520 calories

Snacking – pretzels (50)

  • 50 calories

Total for the day: 1710 calories (limit 1850)

That's not all

Probably I’ll have something later that will bring me closer to the daily limit of 1850 calories.  A cold dessert?  I do have some lovely Tilamook ice cream and some Snickers ice cream bars.  We shall see.  I do have some watermelon in the refrigerator.  But the ice cream is very tempting.  I like Tilamook’s vanilla flavors the best, especially toffee, but also their chocolate chip cookie dough.  The cookies and cream was a bit dull.  

It’s been a pretty good year for watermelon.  I’ve bought five, and four of them were good to great.  One was disappointing, no flavor or sweetness to it.  I mostly buy the seedless ones, which are the most common now.  I also bought cherries from Washington state, which were the best cherries I have had in a long time.  All in all, it has been a good summer for every fruit I have tried, except strawberries.  Blueberries in particular were cheap, abundant, and very good this year.    

The hot week continues.  I have planned to do slow cooker and outdoor cooking this week for dinners, with mostly cold breakfasts and lunches.  It’s not as much fun and I don’t look forward to it as much as when I do more elaborate cooking, but things change.  And it’s not forever.  

This week I will have to put in some thought about what I want my life to look like.  A large part of my weight control lifestyle is the vision and reality of the life I want to create.  It can be a challenge.  I lke a challenge.

-The Doctor

20200718 weekly weighin’ slow n’ steady

It’s the Saturday weigh-in ,weighing, and a-weighin’.  To weigh in also means to say an opinion.  Plus the weighing part.  Let me weigh in!  Like I do every Saturday.  Saturday is the reset day.  I weigh myself in the morning, before breakfast, every week.  People who stay thin by choice, check their weight all the time.  In a prosperous society, staying thin takes work, and don’t forget it.  Most of all, pay attention.  

But your mind has to be in the right place so you can motivate yourself.  You can’t force yourself thin.  That comes slow and steady, once your mind is right.

Only victories in my battle-gallery

It’s not a lot of weight lost since last week, but it is still the lowest number ever.  Hooray!  Since I started working on controlling my weight, I have lost:

Pounds!!
0

Slowing pains

When I woke up this morning and got on the scale, I wasn’t optimistic.  It has been a hard week and weight loss has been slow.  But amazingly, the reading was 233.0.  But when I went to get my camera, I couldn’t get that number back, even not holding the camera.  That’s unusual, my scale usually replicates well.  I’ve had this happen before, though.  One Saturday a few months ago, I weighed myself, took a shower, dried off and got on the scale again. I was up a whole pound!  So there is some drift.  Would I weigh the same at the doctor’s office?  Well, I am confident that the trend is down.

This brings me to pants.  With all the teleworking, I have been wearing pants less often and since my weight has paused around 240 for the first 6 months of the year, I have kept wearing pants in the 44-46 waist size.  Yesterday, I tried on some 42 size pants as a clue to myself – have I really been losing weight?  My body doesn’t look and feel that different to me at 233 (point 4?) than it did at 243.  But the pants: I put them on and they closed without compression.  They were snug, not loose, but they did fit.  So change is occurring.  

It’s hard to keep perspective.  Having lost 91.6 pounds doesn’t make me thin.  I still want to lose more weight – my original idea of a healthy weight for my body was 200 pounds.  Now I am wondering if 185 is a better goal.  But first things first.  200 pounds is the target, and I will be happy to get there.  

There’s still the issue of headspace.  The author Terry Pratchett talked about getting your head right before making things happen.  Where is my head?  All this emphasis on a weight goal isn’t where I want to be.  I want to be creating a life I enjoy and will be motivated to work to keep.  I’m going to have to think about that some more.  

But still, this is my lowest weight ever (going down, anyway, I weighed this much once going the other direction).  Hooray for the weight control lifestyle and the food journal!  

-The Doctor

20200717 Daily report with finality

Why finality?  You shall see.  Today was a mixed day.  Part of my job is to pay attention to my body, like when I am hungry, and I missed the cues for that, twice.  Luckily the consequences were small.  Another part of my job is to make sure I am creating a lifestyle I want to live with.  The third job?  It’s become a hobby now, it’s to track my food intake every day – write it down in my food journal.  Part of the job is to keep a record, but the other part is to plan ahead.  That ties back to creating a lifestyle I am eager to be part of.  Last, and this is a bit subtle, I have to consider the long term, or the rest of my life.  It’s like creating a lifestyle I can live with, but it is more sustaining.  The lifestyle has to be self-reinforcing, in case I have a bad day, week, or month.  How can I keep coming back?

Pizza Friday. I know what I like!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Slow-cooker spanish tortilla, 4 oz. (250); half a wheat wrap (55); 1 tsp mayonnaise (35);

  • 340 calories

Lunch – bagel (330) ham (100) salami (90) cheese (50) olive tapenade (30);

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – half Aldi pizza (585); 

  • 585 calories

Snacking – chicken (100); pretzels (170); cheese (100);

  • 370 calories

Total for the day: 1870 calories (limit 1850)

The finality

I will explain.  It’s the end of the week and I have eaten my last for the day and the week.  So it’s the end of the food week, too.  It’s also finals in the sense that the final exam is tomorrow – the weighing.  This week has been a bit hard because I was coming off a bad week (probably illness-related) and started the week off wrong, with a 2400+ calorie day.  Even maintaining discipline the rest of the week, my average calories per day were about 1871.  So it’s drawing the line under a hard week.  Final.

It was also hard because I found myself without any energy or enthusiasm last weekend to do anything creative in the kitchen.  OK, it was also a bit hot outside.  But still.  

One last thing.  It’s been hard because I am getting impatient to break out of my current weight decade and get moving again.  I don’t enjoy thinking that way, because it’s not productive.  The goal is to make a lifestyle I enjoy living so that I will do anything to stay there.  If instead I am focused on weight loss, it seems like the wrong life goal, it’s less rewarding.  Weight loss should be a side effect of the improved lifestyle, not its main feature.  So it means my head is in the wrong place.  That’s no good.  

Create a world you want to live in.  Then live there.

-The Doctor.

20200716 daily report nice and slow…cooker

Slow cooking and quick typing.  That’s how we roll at the Doctor of Things.  It’s been hot weather this summer, every day predicted to be over 90 degrees for a couple of weeks now.  Since I don’t want to heat up the house, it’s been outdoor cooking, toaster oven, and slow cooker during this time.  Today I had lots of eggs and wanted o make a Spanish tortilla, but that calls for baking at 450 degrees!  No thanks.  But I found there is a variation that uses the slow cooker.  That worked!  I looked forward to that.  The calorie count was tricky though.

Spanish tortilla: eggs, potatoes, onions, chorizo sausage. The yellow is Bell pepper.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – burrito with 80g meat (200); 80g beans (60); 30g cheese (110); tortilla shell (130); sour cream (20);

  • 560 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst (260); half a wheat wrap (55); onion (10);

  • 585 calories 

Dinner – 8oz slow cooker Spanish tortilla (450);

  • 410 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (40); 100g ice cream and a little chocolate syrup (280);

  • 320 calories

Total for the day: 1835 calories (limit 1850)

Who knew - unless you pay attention

How many calories in Spanish tortilla, slow cooker version?  3300.  That’s adding up the eggs, potatoes, olive oil, chorizo, and onion.  (Chorizo sausage has more calories than you would think.)  It made a 4-pound tortilla, and I had 1/8 serving or 8 ounces.  That rounded to 450 calories!  It’s a bit more than the piece you see in the picture, which weighed 6 ounces.  And it was difficult stopping at 8 ounces, because it seemed like it wasn’t that much bulk.  But because I knew how many calories were in it, I stopped myself there.  When I was gaining weight and not paying attention, I might have had several pieces of that tortilla for a meal.  That might have been 1200-1500 calories just for dinner.  Now I don’t eat much more than that in a whole day.  

I traded my reason for eating.  Now, I am eating for a much more simple and direct reason: to satisfy physical hunger in the most rewarding way I can.  Eating until you are full doesn’t satisfy your physical needs any better than a measured portion would.  

Part of it is priorities.  I wanted to get my weight under control.  This was a way to do it that worked, considering my personality.  I changed my thinking and rewarded myself for a job well done.  Quality of the food matters more than it did; I will now ignore or throw away bad cake or cookies bought from a store rather than eat them.  What did I give up?  Why, the feeling of a full stomach, which never lasted very long anyway,  

Always trade up!  What is your reason for eating?

-The Doctor

20200715 Daily report with bettering

Today better than yesterday.  That’s a good motto.  Something to work towards.  Is your life terrible?  That’s too much to fix, let’s aim lower.  Today sucked?  Make tomorrow better.  Doesn’t seem like that will happen?  Make it a tiny bit better.  Then keep doing that, every day a tiny bit.  After long enough the bettering will be fully realized.  What are you making things better for?  Well, your life being good is better than it being bad.  This brings us to vision.  I sometimes ask, why are you eating?  What is your reason for eating food?  But the more important question is always, why are you living towards?  What are you hoping and wishing for?

Because hoping and wishing won’t get you there, but you need hope, wishes, and dreams, just so you know where you are going.

Caption

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – sandwich with bread (140); ham (100); cheese (50); olive tapenade (30); and pickles

  • 320 calories

Lunch – Big Greek Cafe $5 Gyro Wednesdays!!!! (600);

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – taco salad with 80g meat (200); 80g beans (70); 30g cheese (110); tortilla (130); sour cream (50);

  • 560 calories

Snacking – ice cream (250);

  • 250 calories

Total for the day: 1730 calories (limit 1850)

1730 and not feeling deprived

1730 calories is not a lot for me.  My target is about 1850 calories per day, or 13,000 per week.  When things are going well I lose just about 2 pounds a week that way.  The usual rule is that you have to be 3500 calories in deficit to lose one pound, so I must be about 6 or 7000 calories in deficit for the week, nearly 1000 per day.  That doesn’t seem right! I feel like if I was eating 1000 more calories a day I would be gaining weight.  (This will all be fun to figure out when I reach my weight target.  That’s about 45 pounds away.) 

My point is that I had 1730 calories and I don’t feel any need to eat more tonight.  I know that I could  eat more, up to 1850.  But it can be hard to stop, and if you’re not eating because you’re hungry, you are being counter productive.  So I won’t eat any more.  Tomorrow is a new day and I say that often.  But part of the meaning is that I can’t eat those foregone calories tomorrow.  Just like if I have overeaten and that doesn’t carry over to tomorrow, under eating today doesn’t translate to extra calories tomorrow.  For my body, weight loss seems bound up with a measured, slow and steady approach.  I think of it as a zone of weight loss.  

It is crucial to pay attention to your body and be sure why you are eating.  If the reason is not physical hunger, then you might be going wrong.  Tonight, 1730 is enough.  Tomorrow, maybe 1850 will be enough.  The other side is deprivation.  You don’t want to feel like you are punishing yourself or get to a place where you are “withholding” from yourself.  So while it is good to ask if you really are hungry before you eat to the max of your allowance, it’s not good to let yourself get resentful about it either.  It’s a balancing act.

I will keep thinking about that balance.

-The Doctor

20200714 Daily report with snack

Today, let’s talk about paying attention.  I decided to pay attention to the times of day when I get hungry.  It’s a balancing act.  I WANT to get hungry, because (1) it means I have not been overeating and (2) eating when you are starting to get physically hungry is the best kind of eating.  You can reward yourself for getting properly hungry.

One of the problems people have when they are gaining weight is they lose that connection.  They start eating for reasons other than hunger, and are eating for some emotional purpose.  Emotional needs can never be satisfied that way!  Think of it as self-medicating for your emotional needs.  It’s much better to pay attention to WHY you are eating.  Then weight control is possible.

Snacktime! Chicken wrap with lettuce and tomato.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bratwurst (260); 1/4 wheat wrap (25); onions (10);

  • 295 calories

Lunch – half Aldi pizza (585); 

  • 585 calories 

Dinner – 6oz Spaghetti (300); 6 meatballs (47); cauliflower (25)

  • 605 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); chicken wrap (155); Bluebird ice cream cone (130)

  • 365 calories

Total for the day: 1850 calories (limit 1850)

The wages of paying attention

Just recording your weight is a step in a good direction, as far as weight control is concerned.  It’s absolutely true that people who stay thin throughout their lives weigh themselves regularly.  Just that amount of paying attention is enough to change your behavior.  Do you know how much you weigh?  I do, within a few pounds.  I didn’t used to be able to say that.  But I have more than a year of weight data written down, along with a complete food journal.  That’s some good paying attention!

There’s more to it than that.  You have to pay attention to why you are eating, how much, and how much you weigh.  I also pay attention to which foods I find rewarding, and how much of them I have in the house.  I even pay attention to which foods I have available for tomorrow and next week.  I buy ahead, cook and prepare menus ahead.  I do a lot of paying attention.  

I didn’t lose any weight between November last year and June this year; my weight stayed between 240-246.  Even so, I (mostly) kept weighing myself.  A few weeks ago, I felt able to start losing weight again.  Now I am paying attention again to all the other things I mentioned.  In a few weeks I hope to weigh less than 230 pounds.  I haven’t had that weight in a long time.  And I will still weigh more than I really want.  But let’s leave that aside.  Attention is more properly paid to the job right in front of me.  

Why are you eating?  What are you paying attention to?

-The Doctor

20200713 Daily report and fresh start

Monday is the first day of the rest of your life.  Haha, every day is the first day of the rest of your life.  The author Terry Pratchett created a monk (called Wen the Eternally Surprised) who developed the theory that the only appropriate attitude towards the world was pleased surprise, which is mostly the same thing.  Another of Pratchett’s characters had a sign saying, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, today is the first day of the rest of your life,” which is a bit less relevant to this blog (unless you like eating alligators).  

Classic bratwurst and onions. The wraps are my idea. Hold the alligator.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bread toast (140); ham (100); cheese (50); 

  • 290 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst (260); half a wheat wrap (55); onions (10); 

  • 585 calories 

Dinner – 2x French toast (250); maple syrup (100)

  • 600 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (40); Cheetos (150); nectarines (100);

  • 290 calories

Total for the day: 1760 calories (limit 1850)

The long game

Losing weight is a long game.  To be fair, gaining weight is a long game too, but it takes a lot less paying attention…and discipline.

Paying attention is hard.  By nature, the Doctor likes to set up systems that do most of the work automatically, to save his attention for other things.  This does have advantages, but also drawbacks.  

But so far Sunday and today, I have returned to my normal eating habits and not felt any deprivation or had to recover from illness or anything.  It may take me a week, but I will get myself back to normal and get on with the business of lowering my body’s weight.  I am focused on the number 230.  It’s my next milestone goal.  It may take a couple of weeks, but it will happen.  

The discipline part comes from resetting my mind.  I have to make sure I am thinking like a person who is in control of their body’s weight.  It’s easy to fall back into your old habits.  You know, the ones you had when you were gaining weight.  The thoughts that you used to live by.  They say things like, “have some more food, don’t worry about it” and “you’ll feel better if you feel nice and full.”   You have to get around those thoughts and get some new ones.  “Put it off until you’re actually hungry, it will taste better,” is one.  Another is “let’s eat when we’re physically hungry, and not for other reasons.”  That’s a good one.  

Having told yourself this, it helps to put in some work.  This is the discipline part.  My subconscious is happy when I plan ahead, cook and have food in the house that I want to eat, and enjoy regular meals.  That planning and cooking ahead is something I had trouble doing this weekend, but I managed it by planning a very simple menu.  So far, it’s working.

Do the work and control your body’s weight.

-The Doctor

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