Long term dieting

20200824 Daily report

Why do people gain weight when they aren’t paying attention?  People seem to think that gaining weight is a default, normal, requiring no explanation.  Everybody knows that losing weight is hard and needs a special diet!  Actually, I think both gain and loss take effort.  Staying at your current weight is probably the most default and normal situation. And why not?  People get into a routine, they eat the same foods and probably the same amounts.  At the holidays, when the routine is interrupted, people always complain about gaining weight.

Fried rice - the ham makes it work.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Pizza (450)

  • 450 calories

Lunch – 4oz ham (150); Snickers ice cream bar (180); Hershey’s chocolate bar (220)

  • 550 calories 

Dinner – 12oz fried rice (400); cookie (100); chocolate (80);

  • 580 calories

Snacking – none

  • 0 calories

Total for the day: 1580 calories (limit 1700)

Facing the scale

I usually don’t get on the scale unless it’s Saturday.  This week, I got on again Sunday and my weight had gone up a bit!  I prefer a weekly trend because it can be demoralizing if I bounce around a little from day to day.  But last week was such a big drop to 222 pounds, that I am sure it was not 100% real.  I will be happy on Saturday if I am at 221.8!  At least it will be movement in the right direction.  

Facing the scale is easy, if you have your mind right.  You face the scale because you want the knowledge: what do you weigh?  How is that different from last week?  If you don’t measure it, you don’t know if you are gaining or losing.  You aren’t paying attention.  Paying attention is hard.  There are a lot of things you should be attending to.  But we are talking about the scale.  It’s just between you and the scale.  You don’t have to tell anybody.  It doesn’t know or care what you weighed last time.  Unless it is a scale with a memory feature, and who would want that?

Getting your mind right just means you have decided that tracking your weight is very important.  It’s more important than anything else you do Saturday morning.  It’s even more important than what you are doing on Friday.  You might be extra careful of what you are eating Friday so that the Saturday weighing shows all your progress!  And that’s not cheating.  It’s what you weigh!

It also means that your weight is so important to you that you will be getting on the scale every week for the rest of your life.  Get your mind right and everything you eat becomes part of that important job: having a good Saturday weighing.  

It’s only Monday!  Get your mind right and the scale is just a tool.

-The Doctor

20200823 Daily report with thunder

Boom!  We had thunder last night and more rain today.  It was welcome.  

Every day, I am responsible for my body’s weight.  I have successfully changed how I think about food and eating.  Mentally I am like a thin person.  My body is slowly catching up.  How does that work from day to day?  I’m glad you asked.

Homemade pizza is hard to beat!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 4oz ham (170); Muenster (70); roll (180);

  • 420 calories

Lunch – Enchilada (350); plain yogurt (50)

  • 400 calories 

Dinner – Pizza!!! (600); 

  • 600 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1500 calories (limit 1700)

Daily lifestyle changes

Anyone can make the changes needed to control your body’s weight.  The changes are mental.  You just have to stop thinking like a person who is gaining weight and start thinking another way.  Yes, people who are thin and remain thin as adults have to work at it.  I have learned about it and so can you.  

OK, it is asking a lot for you to rewire your brain.  I am asking you to give up your old self, your old values, and develop a new existence.  To reinvent yourself as a person who is in control.  You are the only one who can do it.  On an ordinary diet program, you are making temporary changes, often forcing yourself to do it.  It’s not sustainable and many people fail.  Even those with the iron willpower needed to lose weight that way (not me!) the weight often returns when they go back to their old self and lifestyle.  That is what has to change.

Daily, this comes out as a transformation in how you think and act.  You first decide that controlling your weight is more important to you than anything else in your life.  That’s right.  Nothing else takes precedence.  

You must decide to eat only for physical need and not for any other reason.  You will have to learn to be honest about that and to unlearn your old habits of eating for non-physical reasons (boredom, tiredness, emotions).  You can and should still take pleasure in eating and you can eat your favorite foods and still control your weight.  It all comes from preparing yourself (getting hungry) and then eating a measured portion (eating for the right reasons).  

I have done it and so can you!  It does take work, but less willpower than you would think.  And it is rewarding in many ways.

-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:

Pounds!!
0

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

20200821 Daily report with extra walking

The Doctor always says: pay attention.  Just paying attention makes a big difference.  Try measuring and recording everything you eat for a week and keeping a calorie count.  Don’t try to restrict your food intake.  You have to write it down right after eating, though.  Don’t try to reconstruct what you had last week or even yesterday.  If you do that, you will find you start noticing patterns in how you eat, when, and the amounts.  You will learn about yourself and that is good.  You may start to wonder about your calorie count – how much are you eating per day? 

And that’s just from paying attention.  If you don’t pay attention then you won’t know and you will never notice or ask any of that.

I learned that I like enchiladas.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bagel (330); 1oz salami (110);

  • 440 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst (260); Ole wrap (50)

  • 570 calories 

Dinner – 2x chicken, bean, and cheese enchiladas (200); sour cream (60)

  • 460 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1550 calories (limit 1700)

Keep your mind on today

Tomorrow is a new day.  But today is today and it is my job to make the most of today.  I choose to prioritize my body’s weight today.  Don’t dream about how you will start doing something tomorrow.  Dreaming doesn’t get you anywhere.  Figure out how to make it happen.

Study people who are thin and who have stayed thin for years as adults.  You will find they work at it and pay attention.  The thinner they are, the more work they are putting into the job.  What are the differences between thin people and those who are not in control of their weight?  Why does nobody ever get thinner naturally?  Why is it always in one direction?  Why does getting thin and staying thin take work????

Imagine a bicycle ride.  You notice there are lots of uphill climbs and think: “No problem.  On the way home it will all be downhill.”  Later, you ride home.  If anything, the return is more uphill than the other way!

Yes, it takes work to be thin.  Believe it or not, it also takes work to go overweight, especially very overweight.  It doesn’t happen naturally for the vast majority of people.  To get overweight, you have to learn to keep eating, to use food for treating your stress or loneliness.  It takes dedicated eating to become overweight.  According to the standard counters online, I have to eat 2800 calories per day to maintain my current weight!  A bit less now, because I am more sedentary than before with the Corona virus business.  

To eat more than 2800 calories a day, all the time, takes work.  Am I saying that being overweight is just as hard?  Well, yes.  But with a caveat – any work is hard if you don’t want to do it and your work is easy and burden light when you want to do it.  When you are gaining weight you are seeing the world a certain way and you have a lifestyle that has gotten comfortable.  When you see the world like a thin person does, you can flip that over and it becomes hard to eat and hard to gain weight!  

Think about how to see the world a new way and you will be a new person.

-The Doctor

20200820 Daily report: almost there!

Weight control is a daily job.  Day-by-day, I keep track of my calories and portions in a food journal.  Ideally, I recommend filling it in as soon as you have eaten.  That means measuring your food before you eat it!  

Chicken enchiladas. Pretty and pretty good.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Strata with eggs, bacon, cheese, and bread (300)

  • 300 calories

Lunch – Bratwurst (260); 1/4 Lavash wrap (30); Hershey’s chocolate bar (220);

  • 510 calories 

Dinner – 2x chicken cheese and bean enchiladas (200); sour cream (50); salad with dressing (75);

  • 525 calories

Snacking – pretzels (110); 

  • 110 calories

Total for the day: 1445 calories (limit 1700)

The shrinking calorie limit

When I first started on the weight control lifestyle, I was making a study of how thin people saw the world.  People who had stayed thin throughout adulthood.  I saw that they were putting a lot of effort into it.  So I developed the Doctor’s Law of Diminishing Returns:

“The thinner you want to stay, the more effort it takes.”

Is it profound, no.  But I am finding it is true.  The closer I get to a normal weight the harder it is to lose!  When I started all this, I lost about 2 pounds a week eating an average of 1850 calories per day.  Now I am finding it difficult to match that performance on an average of 1650 calories per day.  OK, there is the fact that I am not exercising as much.  But I think it will get slower and harder unless I keep up with some exercise, more often than I am doing now.  

Pay attention to how much you are eating and why you are eating and you have learned everything you need to know yourself and control your weight.

-The Doctor

20200819 Daily report zoomer

The Doctor is on a long term diet.  The term is life.  Doesn’t that sound depressing?  Diet and long term just sound so punishing, and negative.

Words matter.

The Doctor is living an exciting and fulfilling weight control lifestyle.  He is taking full responsibility for his presence in the world and his direction in life.

Punishment salad??!?

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – chicken breast (150); toast (220)

  • 370 calories

Lunch – 2x Italian sausages (230); 1/2 Lavash wrap (60);

  • 520 calories 

Dinner – Skillet strata with onions, bacon, eggs, bread, and cheese (400); salad with oil and vinegar (100)

  • 500 calories

Snacking – Snickers ice cream bar (180); 

  • 180 calories

Total for the day: 1570 calories (limit 1700)

The salad was just an appetizer

I had a nice and appealing dinner, thank you.  I don’t eat salad for dinner.  There are salads you can have for dinner – they tend to have meat, eggs, and cheese in them and they can be quite nice.  But this was a lettuce salad with a few olives and a bit of feta.  I thought it went nicely with the main course, the skillet strata.  That’s a kind of a poor man’s quiche with no crust.  It was so good, actually, that I am planning to make it again.  

That’s my way of looking at the world.  I have to eat and I want to be in control of my body’s weight.  So I make sure that I am eating for the right reasons and that the food is worth the wait.

There are people who learn to think of food as just fuel and don’t care much how it tastes.  That’s probably an advantage for weight control.  But I have trouble doing that.  I like blueberry pie too much.  And too many other things.  I have made that work for me by emphasizing the importance of physical hunger and its fulfillment.  It’s no good eating a whole pie in one go.  Instead you have one piece a day, and learn to look forward to it.  Then you will avoid other foods so that you can enjoy the pie properly.

Learn about yourself and you can achieve!

-The Doctor

20200818 Daily report

The goal of being on a weight control lifestyle is to be on a weight control lifestyle.  Don’t think that I am doing all this to lose weight.  That is not my goal.  It is a side effect, a beneficial side effect.  My goal is to change my way of thinking, so that I can live the life I want.  I have picked new values, and the first one is: if I don’t do it, nobody will do it for me.  I have to be responsible for my body.  I choose to be in control of its weight.  Mentally, my weight is 205.  Physically, it is more like 225.  My body is catching up to my mind.  I may change my mind again later.  It will do for now.

Roasted dinner! Eaten outside in late summer.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Half bagel (165); hummus (40); milk (80);

  • 285 calories

Lunch – Italian sausage (240); bratwurst (260); 1/2 Lavash wrap (60);

  • 560 calories 

Dinner – chicken breast (150); baked potato pieces (150); Brussels sprouts (30);

  • 330 calories

Snacking – chips (120); 

  • 120 calories

Total for the day: 1295 calories (limit 1700)

Physical hunger

Part of the changes I made to my thinking included new ideas on eating and hunger.  I decided that the best system was to eat at the regular mealtimes, but make sure I was good and hungry first.  I would do that with portion control and calorie planning.  I would know before I ate, how many calories I would be having.  It made food more enjoyable, really.  Food is best when you are hungry.  Amazingly, that feeling lasts (usually) for just a few bites.  Then it’s diminishing returns.  It gets less and less rewarding as you eat more.  You are no longer so eager for phyiscal satiety. 

I also went walking 3 miles today.  Exercise seems to be good for me.  That wasn’t part of the changes I made to my thinking for weight control.  Even when I was gaining weight, I liked to swim and play outside.  So I don’t think of exercise as being responsible for my body so much as something I like to do.  

No, accepting control meant, at some level, looking at myself and wondering: if I was in charge of my body, did I want it to be so overweight?  And if I didn’t, what would have to change?  The idea that you can negotiate with yourself and reward yourself for thinking the right way was new to me, but that part went well.  I found out how to reward myself for a good job controlling my food intake.  But the important part was figuring out how to see portion control correctly.  If you are using food to feed your emotional rather than physical needs, then withholding food is like punishment.  You hate it!  That’s why so many people have trouble losing weight and then gain it back again later, I am sure.  

It is more correct and useful to say, I will eat when I am physically hungry and I will make sure I am hungry for every meal.  My reward is to satisfy that hunger well.  Then, I can address those emotional needs I have been feeding with physical food!

-The Doctor

20200817 Daily report: now with BLE

…also known as Big Lunch Edition!  Normally I have three meals relatively balanced in calories.  I find that usually keeps me going.  But today, I had a very late breakfast and small.  Then I was really hungry for lunch.  There’s nothing like getting really hungry.  Not so hungry that you are suffering over it, but hungry enough that it is a physical need.  When you are controlling your body’s weight using a portion control strategy, it’s very important to keep in mind why you are eating.  Your own psychology of eating.  It’s easy to fall into a trap where you are eating for reasons other than physical need.  Then, your weight will go up.  Especially if you are not paying attention.  

Weight control doesn't have to mean taste control!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – leftover beef and broccoli stir-fry with rice (200)

  • 200 calories

Lunch – Bratwurst (260); 1/4 Lavash wrap (30); bagel (330); hummus (100);

  • 720 calories 

Dinner – 120g Tortellini (300) Italian sausage (240) Brussels sprouts (25);

  • 565 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1565 calories (limit 1700)

Running-around calories

I’m amazed how sedentary I have been for several weeks.  It feels like I haven’t even driven anywhere.  And I haven’t!  It’s starting to feel more and more like I need to eat less and less to lose any weight.  Well, I can take some time to walk tomorrow.  

It all comes from paying attention.  The Doctor is a routine-izer.  For a long while, about a year, I developed and stuck to a routine where I was losing up to 2 pounds a week.  Then, I had a long plateau of 6 months where I didn’t lose any weight, and also I didn’t try very hard to lose more.  Suddenly in July, like throwing a switch, I decided to lose weight again.  But amazingly, it came a lot harder than I remembered in 2019.  Doing the same things didn’t result in much weight loss.  I blame this partly on the lack of exercise (swimming) and general lack of running around outside.  Since I was paying attention, I learned pretty quickly from the scale and my calorie count that my old routine wasn’t going to work as well.  Either I would lose up to a pound a week, or I could try something else.  

You can see how frustrating a diet can be.  You think you are doing all the right things that worked before, and suddenly they stop working.  No wonder people get frustrated and quit!  Especially if they are forcing themselves to lose weight.  Much better, don’t you think, to set up your life so that weight loss is a side effect of a life you like to be part of.  

How could you set up your life that way?

-The Doctor

20200816 Daily report with exercise

Today was a good day for food, diet, and eating.  A good day is when you maintain your weight control lifestyle.  I have found two ways to make the lifestyle work so far!  The first is paying it a lot of attention.  It becomes a hobby and the most important thing you do all day.  That works, but the danger is that everything else in your life becomes less important.  The second way is to pick another obsession – like career – but still maintain weight control by staying minimally on top of it.  I can do that because I have developed some good habits in the last year.  Picking foods I like, measuring portions, writing down calories in a food journal, and learning the importance of at least some exercise!

I can't get enough of this!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – leftover pizza (500)

  • 500 calories

Lunch – 2x Italian sausages (240); peach (40)

  • 520 calories 

Dinner – 5oz cooked rice (160); beef and broccoli stir-fry (315)

  • 475 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80);

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1575 calories (limit 1700)

When sedentary is up!

My current lifestyle is heavy on remote work .  That means a lot of sitting in front of the computer and I am the most sedentary I have ever been.  That is not working very well with a steady and disciplined approach to weight control, and I am seeing progress but in small spurts.  It’s still progress.

Walking is now my major exercise.  I walk 3 miles at a time hopefully 3x per week.  I have discovered I like a certain amount of exercise and I miss swimming and all the running around I used to do pre-Corona virus.  But that was then and this is now.  We can find ways to cope!

It’s more important than ever to find out what thin people are doing – I mean, people who have stayed thin over the years.  It does take constant discipline and vigilance.  But if you set up your lifestyle and incentives the right way, it will result in a life you like to be living.  

Let’s talk about that lifestyle and incentives some more this week.

-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:

Pounds!!
0

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

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