Stay on a diet

20200206 Daily report

Tracking your calorie intake is best done right away, or as soon as possible after eating.  It’s a way of paying attention.  You also get used to the act of entering the calories as the last thing you do when eating.  Like Pavlov’s dog, only in reverse, when you open your spreadsheet you stop salivating and remind yourself that you are eating as part of a weight control lifestyle.  You can connect the individual meal to the larger purpose of goal-oriented eating, and see eating a measured portion as an expression of your values.  That all makes it more satisfying.

Costco pizza can be cruchy after all!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – BLT (400)

  • 400 calories

Lunch – Costco pepperoni pizza (710)

  • 710 calories 

Dinner – 11 ounces Shepherd’s pie (550); ccc (00)

  • 550 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); chicken (100); hummus (70)

  • 250 calories

Total for the day: 1910 calories (limit 1800)

Overcaloried!

I had a bad diet day Saturday – nearly 3000 calories.  That’s put me over the top for the week, as I have found I can’t make up for overeating one day with starvation the next.  No, it’s slow and steady achievement, day by day, for a week, that makes progress.  While I like losing weight, my goal is to have each day go well.  So if the week is shot in terms of calories and losing weight (I might lose a little, yet), I can still have 6 good days in the week, which at least feels good and sets me up for a perfect week next time.  Enough perfect weeks together means good and sustained weight loss (someday, weight maintenance).

So I don’t get too discouraged about a bad day, even if it has a bad effect on the week’s weight loss or calorie total.  As it happens, this time my overeating day was the first day of the week, so the extra food has had a good chance to work through my system.  That’s what I’m telling myself!  The truth will come out Saturday.  In the weight control lifestyle, that’s what Saturday is for.

-The Doctor

20200205 Daily report

Staying on your diet is, like I said yesterday, dependent on keeping your vision on your highest goals, and your moral compass fixed on weight control.  That helps you to pay attention to physical hunger, and to refuse to allow emotional hunger to get confused in with it.   If you don’t pay attention, you lose that focus and you won’t stay in control of what you eat….and what you weigh.

If you do pay attention, and keep your focus on being prepared for the next meal, you can use that to reward yourself for sacrificing having a full belly.  

Gyro to go! Hold the fries.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Costco pepperoni pizza half slice (355); chicken strips (100)

  • 450 calories

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

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – taco pizza: one flour tortilla (140); refried beans (100); ground beef (200); shredded cheese (50); sour cream (30)

  • 520 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (120); half a wheat beer (70); chocolate cookie (95);

  • 285 calories

Total for the day: 1855 calories (limit 1800)

Food security

A large part of success in weight control is to have your menu planned out in such a way that you have something to look forward to at every point during the day.  Each meal doesn’t have to be *more* exciting than the last, but each has to be legitimately interesting to you.  Your last bite of gyro for lunch might trigger the thought: I hope I enjoy dinner this much!  And that means not just eating whatever you have in a drawer or in the fridge, but deciding on something that is worth waiting for.  It does mean cooking ahead and portioning your meals.  You have more control that way than over most restaurant meals, anyway.  

For example, for tomorrow’s breakfast, I am going to have bacon.  I don’t want to ruin my appetite for that!

-The Doctor

20200204 Daily report

The goal of eating for my weight control lifestyle is constant: never eat so much at one meal, that you are not hungry for your next meal.   It takes a lot of paying attention to make that happen.  But it is very powerful as a goal.  The promise of the next meal pulls you forward.  Eating too much is sabotage!  So it’s important to pay attention and tend to yourself, since you are giving up the comfort that eating just a little more would bring you.  Have your next meal ready to pull you forward, which means planning and cooking ahead.  It means figuring out what you really want and getting yourself ready to properly enjoy it.  

Wright's bacon today. Thick sliced!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – BLT wraps (400)

  • 400 calories

Lunch – chips (300); pretzels and cheese (300)

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – Costco pepperoni pizza (710)

  • 710 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1790 calories (limit 1800)

Tomorrow is a chance at a perfect day

Not only does the promise of the next meal pull you forward, but so does the promise of tomorrow.  Tomorrow is a chance to do everything right.  Get enough days right, and your weight and eating will slowly come under control.  But what holds it together?  Why do these things?

It starts at the top, with a decision to put weight control at the top of your mind, the highest of your moral values, your dearest hobby and almost the reason you are living!  One you have done that, then the mechanism you use comes more easily and it is possible to find a way that doesn’t rely on force and willpower.  If you are forcing yourself, you will fail as soon as you run out of will.  So don’t.  Find out what you want and make sure you get some – use it to reward yourself and keep yourself on track.  Pay attention to your needs and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t.  I can’t let myself be late for meals without paying a price later. 

Learn yourself.  The saying goes: know your enemy and know yourself, and you will always be victorious.  In this case, the enemy is also you, which makes it easier.

-The Doctor  

20200203 Daily report

Weight control is the ultimate long term project.  It lasts as long as you want to maintain your weight.  Do you want to be in control of your body’s weight as long as you are alive?  Then that’s how long you will have to work at it.  It’s probably true.  I have seen thin people eat, and they are very careful.  

Controlling your weight is mostly mental.  Once you get your food intake under control, your body will follow along and your weight will decrease.  That’s what has happened for me so far.  

Steak umm

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2 cups Cheerios (200) and 1 cup whole milk (150)

  • 350 calories

Lunch – steak and cheese sandwich (500); 

  • 500 calories 

Dinner – bread and butter (300); ice cream (300)

  • 600 calories

Snacking – dessert bread (400)

  • 400 calories

Total for the day: 1850 calories (limit 1800)

Roller coaster days

The weight control game is almost 100% mental, and to me that includes having a well regulated emotional response. I completed last week under good control of my food intake, for the first time in a while, and reduced my weight a bit.  It might have been a bit too much pressure for me though, because I had a roller coaster weekend, eating nearly 3000 calories Saturday and then 1500 Sunday.  That kind of thing really plays havoc with my internal workings.  My stomach still doesn’t feel normal, and I got so hungry by 4PM today that I ate my whole dinner and snack before 5.  Hopefully tomorrow will be back to normal.  

I am still figuring all this out, but my guess right now is that if I can keep my focus on my higher eating goals and values, it will be possible to counter any need for eating for emotional reasons.  Basically, I have learned to couple emotional hunger and the comfort of eating and food.  I want to uncouple them, and have physical and emotional hungers separate and to develop a system for keeping both of those hungers satisfied, in the most practical yet highest quality ways I can.  That has worked well for me so far, on the physical side of things.  

One other thing keeps coming up – I have to take better care of my rest and sleep needs.  I’ve let myself get tired and not go to bed on time, night after night.  That’s not good for various reasons.  I wonder if that’s emotional too, or coupled to something else.  I will continue to think about it.  Maybe I can try finding a rewarding way to develop some regular habits.  It will be good for me.

-The Doctor

20200201 Saturday weigh-in

Today is weighing day, and I do that every Saturday.  That is the plan.  Some people weigh daily.  (Mr. Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood weighed himself every day.  So did my one grandfather.)  I find once per week is generally enough.  It shows that the work I did during the rest of the week – counting calories and portioning – was true and accurate, or at least reasonably true and accurate.  This week, I did weigh myself every day in the morning, just because it has been a while since I have seen my weight go down.

Good news!  My weight this morning was 243.6 pounds.

Since I weighed myself several times this week, my only real question going on to the scale this morning was: exactly how much would I have lost?  I knew I had lost more than two pounds from last week’s 246 pounds.  That’s unusual that I know I have lost weight and have a good idea how much – most of the time I get on the scale 7 days from the last time and I never know for sure what’s going to happen.  

Also, I normally make more of a bigger deal out of it if my weight is lower than my previous total, but I know that right now, my weight is higher than my lowest ever.  My lowest ever weight was 237.4 pounds.  So I am happy because it looks like my weight is under control again, but not quite happy all the way, since I will spend February getting back to my lowest ever.  Still, this is very positive news: I am capable of continuing my weight control system.   

Responsibility and relief

In January, while I was agonizing about how to restart the weight control system (I stopped doing it in early December), it was tempting to blame my inability on outside issues: it was winter outside!  Genetically, I was predisposed to gaining weight to last through the winter!  The days were shorter!  Eating more was a natural reaction to the stresses of winter cold and darkness! 

Ultimately, those were not satisfying explanations.  Being on a weight control system, losing weight, and maintaining weight, are difficult.  It is doable but you have to accept it is a values question, rather than an impersonal one.  If you do all the things that dieting people do, you still won’t lose weight over the long term, because you have to force yourself to maintain those behaviors.  Your old values are waiting for you and you will fall back into them the second you stop applying force.  You must adopt new values and one of the top values in your life has to be: I will be in control of my weight.  

I’ve talked before about what living out that value means in many different contexts.  But part of my success has been to recognize that I can’t force or order my body to do the dieting for me.  (Eat less!  Go on a budget!  Stop smoking/drinking etc!  It never works.)  That’s another form of pushing off the responsibility to someone “else”. If my conscious mind wants this and values it, then my conscious mind has to put in the work: all the planning, shopping, cooking, portioning, and balancing I do, is done using the time and energy of my life, and limited amount of consciousness, which takes a lot of effort and discipline.  So I try hard to make it worth my while.  That’s a good trade.  

(I think this is why so many diets work for so many people, at least in the short or middle term.  All the mechanisms work because our bodies work the same way.  The difference is what’s in your mind.)

It’s the same for anything in your life.  If you want it, you have to act it out in your life as if it’s the only thing that matters.  

-The Doctor

20200131 Daily report

Part of my daily job – what I try to accomplish in a day – is to keep a contemporaneous written record of my food intake and calorie count.  I also work to keep my calorie count under 13,300 for the week – that’s less than 1900 per day.  The two are related, but just keeping an accurate count of calories eaten is important.  I am able to do this by keeping my focus on a worthwhile goal.  What is your goal for eating?  I can express mine in two ways:

  1. Maximize the satisfaction and joy from eating your meal
  2. Prepare for the next meal (don’t eat so much that you won’t be hungry next time)

Both are really the same idea – think about it.  If you eat too much for breakfast, you can’t properly enjoy lunch.  Food always tastes best just when you become physically hungry for it.  And if you eat too much breakfast, you won’t enjoy breakfast as much either – after the first serving, you will find (if you pay attention) that you’re not as hungry and the taste is not as vivid, strong, or compelling.  

Out to dinner!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – red beans and rice (200); slice of Spanish tortilla and 1/2 whole wheat wrap with 1 teaspoon mayonnaise (250)

  • 450 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst (260); 1/2 whole wheat wrap (50); onions and mustard

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – Pork tacos at Chuy’s Mexican restaurant (600); chips, salsa, and dip (200)

  • 800 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80)

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1930 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

A good week is a good start

With my eating goals properly set, and my aim as high as I can make it (making control of my body’s weight one of my chief aims in life), it has been a good diet week after several failed weeks.  (Weak weeks?)  At my lowest recorded weight of 237.4 pounds (November 2019) I was sure I was going to keep losing as much weight as I wanted – I was in control.  I had lost over 85 pounds!  It’s strange that two months later, I will have a month of good dieting in front of me to beat that low number.  I weighed 246 pounds last week.

I think a lot of that disruption came from letting my aims wander.  I let other things become more important for a while.  It’s still important self knowledge: I will gain 8-9 pounds in 2 months if I stop making weight control important!  And I tried through most of January to start controlling my weight again, but I couldn’t do it.  I hadn’t figured out the problem.

I went out with a friend for lunch this week – it was her birthday.  We hadn’t seen each other since October.  Her comment – you’ve lost a lot of weight!  That was funny, because the last time she saw me I weighed about the same.  But she clarified that over the last few months, my face had gotten thinner.  That’s interesting.  Body weight is more than just a number, and it might be true that your body continues to change for weeks after you have lost the weight! 

Another friend lost nearly a hundred pounds, recently.  When I saw him, I wondered why his head and body seemed out of proportion (the head seemed too big).  Probably his face has continued to change and he looks much more proportional now.  You’d probably have to keep at your goal weight for quite a while before all the remodeling took place.  I have read discussions on Reddit about your body taking some time to remodel your skin around your middle following weight loss.  I am not looking forward to that!

Controlled weight loss is good enough for now.

-The Doctor

20200130 Daily report

Staying with a weight control lifestyle for the long term is a challenge to live up to – for me.  There are people who have learned to do this much earlier in life.  It so happens I have two challenges, and both are long term: (1) lose 120 pounds and find a weight I like, and (2) find a way to stay at that body weight.  I have been doing #1 for a full year now.  I am still not done.  246 pounds (my last recorded weight) is about 40 pounds away from my 120 pound weight loss goal.  When I started, I weighed about 325 pounds.  Luckily #2 has a lot in common with #1.  I can still use most of the weight control strategy and mindset.  Can I do that for a long time?  5 years?  More?  

I must weigh everything, I have no reliable sense of portion size

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – banana (50); pretzels (160); hummus (70)

  • 280 calories

Lunch – Mama Lucia’s stromboli (600)

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 3oz rice (100); 8 ounces New Orleans red beans and andouille (250); guacamole and chips (100)

  • 450 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); milk (100); black bread (300); chocolate almonds (75);

  • 555 calories

Total for the day: 1885 calories (limit 1800)

Adjusting the plan

My plan today was to have a small breakfast, a big restaurant lunch, and a medium dinner.  It didn’t work out quite that way.  For one thing, lunch and dinner were delayed past the usual times.  I find when I am in a severe calorie deficit, mealtimes should be punctual.  My body doesn’t react well to getting too hungry and there is an urge for food security if things are delayed.  Food security, for me, means part of me is convinced it is starving and makes a serious effort to eat all the food I can find.  It takes serious willpower to hold that back.  

A snack is not an ideal solution, but a snack at the right time means at least I don’t go into food security mode.  It’s not the best solution because it’s not a full meal and it’s not as satisfying (it’s not what I planned, or am looking forward to), and also I don’t get the rewarding feeling of having my meal with an empty stomach.  I have really learned to associate that feeling – satisfying an empty stomach that is just getting really hungry – with reward, satisfaction, even joy and exhilaration.  It’s much better than my old way.  Then, I was eating because it was mealtime, and eating until I felt full every time.  I’ve learned to see that as a poor goal and shallow.  

Anyway, tomorrow is a new day when everything can go right.  Enough went right today that I didn’t have any problems.  That’s kind of a success. Tomorrow will be the last day of this week for my food journal andthe first full week of this year I have kept up the weight control lifestyle.  After a few weeks of that, I will belive my head is in the right place at last.

-The Doctor

20200129 Daily report

Staying on a weight control system takes a lot of paying attention.  It becomes routine, so it’s doable, but you have to keep your focus on on it all the time.  Today, I paid attention to my system.  Today is my favorite lunch day: $5 Famous Gyro Wednesday at the Big Greek Cafe.  When you keep your mind right, so your focus is on your highest eating goals, you can use food as a reward.  To use food as a reward, you have to allow yourself to become physically hungry.  Satisfying that hunger with your favorite food is actually exhilarating.  The woman at the cash register in the cafe asked me twice why I was so happy.  

The truth is, I was happy because my mind was in the right place and I had paid attention to my needs and carefully built up to the moment of reward.  I was in calorie deficit but it was worthwhile.  

They folded the wrapper inside out!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – bratwurst (260) and 1/4 whole wheat wrap (25)

  • 285 calories

Lunch – Big Greek Cafe Famous $5 Gyro (600)

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 1/4 Spanish tortilla (525); mayonnaise (75); ham (100);

  • 700 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (120); 2x Reese’s peanut butter cups (160)

  • 280 calories

Total for the day: 1865 calories (limit 1800)

Start with your goal

In December, I didn’t try hard to stay with the weight control lifestyle, and it showed – I have gained (at least weighing) almost nine pounds since my lowest weight of 237.4.  I tried several times in January to start again, but couldn’t get it going.  I found myself eating between and after meals.  The hunger I was feeling wasn’t physical, because my eating goals had regressed to an unproductive place. 

About a week ago I decided to change my mind, to enshrine weight control back at the top of my moral hierarchy.  It’s been very fruitful so far, to focus on why I am eating.  When the goal is “full belly” then you gain weight.  When the goal is “be hungry for the next meal” then you have reasons to stop eating.  Then you are not focused on depriving yourself, but rewarding yourself for your work and achieving your goals.  

Reward is the best way.  Losing weight is then incidental; you are just setting up a system of happiness and reward.  That is the only way I have ever found to successfully lose weight.

There is that trade off – you have to pay attention a lot.  And I believe that the thinner you want to be, the more attention you have to put in.  But that’s for another time.

Set yourself up for reward and you can achieve weight control.

-The Doctor

20200128 Daily report

I have been paying attention to what I eat since January, 2019.  So it has been a year.  This is a long term weight control lifestyle, and it’s safe to say this is just the beginning.  There’s no point in doing this and letting all the weight come back.  That is, my old lifestyle (carefree eating and consequent weight gain) will always welcome me back. I won’t even have to think about it.  So living a weight control lifestlye takes discipline.  But I have set it up so that it is rewarding.  I can eat what I like, and that’s a reward.

It took some experimenting to get the onions cooked right

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2x bratwurst (260) and 1/2 whole wheat wrap (100) with onions and mustard

  • 570 calories

Lunch – leftover carbonnade stew (200) pretzels and hummus and cheese (400)

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 12 ounces New Orleans red beans (375); 5 ounces cooked rice (160)

  • 535 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (120); chocolate (55)

  • 175 calories

Total for the day: 1880 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

Three days down

…four days to go, for the week.  I’ve been finding it difficult to keep my goals and values in focus.  I have a lot of practice over the last year thinking productively, so I am making it work, but it feels a little forced.  Hopefully that will change with time.  I didn’t keep records of how I felt during the time when I was just starting the weight control lifestyle.  My blogging only started in April.  I kept records of what I was eating, but not that kind of detail.  It could be that this kind of transition is to be expected.  

The crucial part of the mental change is to promote the value of weight control to the top of my morality, at least as I live it from day to day.  Giving it that kind of attention and putting that much effort into maintaining my vision is essential.  In December and part of January, I had let that slip away and was trying to motivate myself using tools rather than ideas.  That is, I would try to eat the favorite meals and foods that worked for me before, but since my food value had become “find satisfaction in being full,” it din’t help and I would just keep eating.  No, you have to put this right at the top of your daily life and it has to be your most important hobby.  

Once weight control is the king value, it takes much less effort to keep it there.  That helps.  

Today was a swimming day.  I keep wondering if I will get tired of it, but I don’t.  That’s another 600 calories burned, doing something I like.   That’s the best way to keep your weight under control and the best way to work out.  Save your willpower for something else!

-The Doctor

20200127 Daily report

Daily tracking of food intake is the mechanism I use to control my body’s weight.  It’s not a moral imperative that keeps me going.  It’s just a method.  What keeps me going is what I value.  People who stay thin through their adult lives recognize this.  If they see you getting thin, they know you value what they value.  They reach out to you.  Any number of thin people have asked me how I am able to lose weight.  I have had exactly one overweight person ask me about it.  

If you don’t keep track of how much you are eating, you are left with guessing.  Calorie counting is one way to keep track.  Eating an invariant diet is one way.  I know some people use volume based techniques, like a special bowl or cup to measure how much they can eat.  I think people do a fair amount of guessing.  That means people’s weight probably fluctuates a bit.  

My routine is building!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2 cups Cheerios (200); 1 cup whole milk (150)

  • 350 calories

Lunch – cheese steak sandwich (500); few french fries (50)

  • 550 calories 

Dinner – 10oz beef carbonnade (600); 2.5 ounces cooked rice (80)

  • 680 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); chocolate (115); grilled chicken strips (100)

  • 295 calories

Total for the day: 1875 calories (limit 1800)

More of a struggle than I would like

Wednesdays, I have gyros.  It is starting to look like on Mondays I have cheese steak sandwiches.  Over time, maybe I will develop a rigid routine for every meal, every day!  

Keeping my aim high is currently more work than I would like.  During most of 2019, I had a feeling of exultation, reward, and satisfaction, when I would successfully complete a day or a week of calorie controlled eating.  Right now, I am not feeling that.  Hopefully that will build with time.  I don’t remember it being this hard when I first started.  But so far this week, it has been possible to generally follow my calorie restrictions.  That is hopeful.

I was reading Scott Adams’ new book Loserthink.  He makes the point that your hierarchy of values should start close to you and then move outward in importance.  You, your family, your house, your home, your work, your country, your world, and your universe.  You have to take care of yourself first so that taking care of the rest is possible.  It’s a useful way to think.

That’s another moral imperative, then.  Take care of yourself!

-The Doctor

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