Stay on a diet

20191002 Daily report

I write a post every day.  Each day is a new day.  If I eat too few calories today, I don’t get extra calories tomorrow.  If I eat too many calories today, I don’t deprive myself tomorrow.  That feels like punishment, and you can’t get cooperation from your body if you are punishing it.  So every day, I get 1800 calories.   To make that work, I try for each meal to be 400-600 calories.  I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I usually have tea too, either morning or evening.  It depends.  

My goal is to get physically hungry in the few minutes before mealtime.  It’s tricky, because if you get too hungry, a different part of yourself might take over and eat a lot!  And if you don’t get hungry, then it ruins the meal.  (If you are used to eating only when physically hungry, it becomes an important part of the experience.)  So: guard your hunger and use it to enhance your enjoyment.  You really feel like you are taking care of yourself and catering to your needs, if you pay so much attention to your own enjoyment.  Then body and mind can work together to achieve weight control.  It’s working for me.

My first Filipino food experience!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – 2oz ham (100); Muenster cheese (100); toasted bread (160); sandwich with pickles and mustard and horseradish

  • 360 calories

Lunch – KC Filipino restaurant pork estofado (120); chicken adobo (120); 5oz rice (160); miscellaneous appetizers (50)

  • 450 calories 

Dinner – Costco pizza (750);

  • 750 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 5 cookies (200)

  • 280 calories

Total for the day: 1840 calories (limit 1800)

Well, this is awkward

It says above that my daily limit is 1800 calories, but I have been having closer to 1850 most days.  What gives?  

When I first started the weight control lifestyle, I was convinced that on days I exercised (I like to swim) I would get hungry and that would ruin my ability to stay on a diet.  So I calculated that I burned 600 calories on my swimming routine, and added 500 extra to those two days per week.  That way, the exercise would be calorie neutral, but it would provide an incentive to exercise.  You get extra calories those days!  Then it turned out that the fancy diet people had already been doing that and calling it Cheat Days or Intermittent Fasting.  

“Cheat Days” means you allow yourself some extra calories a few times per week.  This is planned and part of your calorie total.  The idea is that it feels exciting to have extra calories.  It’s something to look forward to, which can be nice.

The other idea is Intermittent Fasting.  This means that if your weight loss inexplicably halts for a week or three, you try to shock your body back into weight loss by skipping meals and then making up the calories during the remaining meals.  So you might have a normal breakfast, skip lunch, then a larger dinner.  

The Doctor of Things is hardheaded about this kind of thing.  In my experience, there are sometimes hard-to-explain slowdowns in weight loss, and I have had my share of them.  But I have never done any intermittent fasting, because weight loss resumes some days or weeks later.  Looking back through my journal (it has a lot of uses because I record lots of things), weight loss halts or slowdowns can last 1-4 weeks.  They are almost always associated with illness or travel.  I have even been able to predict getting sick because my weight loss slows down, or I even gain a pound or two from the previous week.  Travel also plays hell with my weight loss.  It just seems like those are lost weeks, although I don’t usually eat any more when I am traveling.  When I am really sick, I don’t always keep to my calorie limits, though I try to write everything down.  

Back to my point – I used to have Cheat Days, and now I am trying not having them.  Each day, I am trying for 1850 calories, maximum.  I’ll see how that works out when I weigh myself this week and next week.  

Strangely, twice this week, I have eaten under 1700 calories for the day.  I’m not sure why that is, but since I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t eat.  I have learned that eating without hunger is a big letdown.  The experience of eating becomes very high quality through slight deprivation (hunger at the right time) and anticipation (satisfying hunger with the food you really want).  High quality experience is great, because it makes the low quality experience (eating until totally full) seem not worthwhile and undesirable.  

Try it!  You can use that kind of knowledge to achieve weight control in your mind, which is the important place.  Your body will follow.

-The Doctor

20191001 Daily report

Keeping a food journal is an essential step towards weight control.  If you don’t know what you’ve eaten, and how much, how can you control your intake?  Rule #1: Regulate your food intake. 

Keeping track of your weight is also essential for weight control.  How do you know your calorie counting is effective and honest?  The proof is your weight.  Rule #2: Weigh yourself regularly.

This could be called the well-regulated approach to weight control: Regulate your food intake and weigh yourself regularly.  

There is also a transformation: start seeing the world like a thin person.  Everyone who is thin and stays thin is putting a lot of work into it.  They absolutely weight themselves, check the fit of their clothes, count the notches in their belts, and have a hundred ways of making sure their body is under control.  It is so important to them that they spend a lot of time doing it.  On the eating side, people who are thin eat just enough to avoid hunger.  That’s the main reason they eat.  To the dedicated thin person, eating enough to be stuffed full feels like failure.  For an overweight person, feeling full is associated with comfort and happiness.  Not being full causes anxiety.  

Aldi makes a very nice pizza for $2.19

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – oven toasted Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissantwich (400); with Tobasco

  • 400 calories

Lunch – Aldi frozen pizza half (600); 

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 12oz homemade lentil soup (230); 1 Tyson panko chicken breast filet (200); 4 oven roasted Brussels sprouts (60)

  • 490 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); beef jerky (90); 

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1660 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

History and transformation

I used to think that atkins and low carb and keto diets meant you could eat just as much as you wanted, as long as you restricted what kinds of foods you could eat.  Bacon?  Have a pound!  Bread?  Not a wafer!  But I tried it.  Amazingly, it was my most successful attempt ever.  I didn’t have to change a thing about my eating behavior, except I made sure not to exceed 30g of carbs per day.  That’s about the same carbs as an English muffin.  I actually lost about 20 pounds while eating as much low carb food as I wanted (such as: meatballs, bacon, peanut butter, cheese).  But then I hit a wall and didn’t lose any more. 

It turns out that I was probably eating fewer calories by skipping bread, chips, pizza, ice cream, candy, and other sugar rich foods.  There’s only so much peanut butter a person can eat from a spoon.  It was the most I ever lost, but it relied on magic: I didn’t have to change myself.  I only had to eat the Right Magic Foods.  That was not a helpful lesson for me.  And I gained all that weight back.  Now, while living a weight control lifestyle, I eat anything I like and I lose weight.  Take that, magic diets! 

Today I was talking to a lady about weight loss – she noticed I had lost weight.  She was complaining that she was having trouble losing 20 pounds.  Interestingly, she was sure I was skipping meals, and that was my secret to weight loss.  It’s terrible how people try to lose weight by punishing themselves, being hungry, deprivation, and not changing their minds instead.  

I couldn’t and didn’t condense the whole Doctor of Things lifestyle into the 10 minute we had to talk, but I did get across two ideas.  The first is that keeping a food journal is essential.  You don’t even have to restrict what you are eating.  Just keep the journal, weigh and measure everything you eat.  Then at least you will know.  You will know why you are not losing weight. 

Spoiler: it’s because you are eating too much.  Your goal is to be full.  And you have no idea how much you are eating.  If she starts keeping a journal, she will be surprised at just how much she is eating.  I was.  But I learned a lot about myself that way.  It’s important.  Keep the journal!  

Change your mind and your body will follow.  How would you change your mind?

-The Doctor

20190930 Daily report

When you are living a weight control lifestyle like the one explained in this blog, staying on the diet is easier than you would think.  First, I came into this with the understanding that weight control is a life long endeavor.  Think of it as a hobby, bordering on obsession.  The thinner you want to be, and the thinner you want to stay, the more attention you have to pay.  The food journal is a large part of the mechanism for weight control.  Thin people who stay thin, pay a lot of attention to how much they eat and how much they weigh.  

Stay on the diet (1) because it is your hobby and obsession.  You accept “paying attention” as the price for getting thin and staying thin.  Watch thin people sometimes.  Throughout this blog I talk about how the thin people are eating.  It’s not just behaving like them – that might mean forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do.  And nobody can keep that up and enjoy life.  It’s learning how they view eating and food.  That is one of the biggest differences between people who maintain their weight and those who lose control.  

Oven roasted Brussels sprouts are sweet and delicious. And that's a half pound of chili.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – toasted ham and cheese sandwich: 2 ounces ham (100); 1.5 slices Muenster cheese (100); toasted Italian bread (160); with pickles and mustard and horseradish (negligible);

  • 360 calories

Lunch – 12oz New Orleans red beans and andouille sausage stew (375); 5oz cooked rice (160)

  • 535 calories 

Dinner – 8oz homemade sausage chili (320); 8x halved and oven roasted Brussels sprouts (135) 1T sour cream (30); 4oz rice pudding (130)

  • 615 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 3x chocolate wafer cookies (190); 5x chocolate almonds (50)

  • 320 calories

Total for the day: 1830 calories (limit 1800)

Staying with it

So: (1) make weight control your interest, your hobby and (2) learn to think like a thin person.  I don’t mean the classic “think thin” meaning visualizing yourself being thin, but instead, observe and learn how thin people see the world.  Why do they eat?  How can they know how to eat just enough?  [Don’t think that thin people can eat what they like and not pay attention to how much.  Show me a skinny 40 year old and I will show you a weight obsessed person.]

Part (3) of staying on a diet is to make sure the food you eat is attractive.  Today I had three well prepared homemade meals that were delicious and worth getting hungry for.  Which leads to part (4), which is to prepare yourself for the delicious food.  You must realize that food tastes best when you let yourself get hungry just in time to eat it.  Ask anyone.  Poor Richard said “Hunger is the best pickle.”  And Mark Twain advised never to eat unless your stomach calls “vigorously, with a shout.”  Don’t get too hungry, because if that happens you will never stop eating until you are stuffed full.  It’s like a panic reaction buried down in the bottom of your brain stem.  But a little hunger at the right time, satisfied with one of your favorite foods, is the most satisfying food experience you will ever have.  

Why stay with your weight control lifestyle, which is really for the rest of your life?  Because you have decided that weight control is more important to you than almost anything else.  Because you realize that every thin person has to work hard to maintain their weight, and you are no exception.  And because living this way is exciting and fulfilling.  After trying this life, soon you will realize that your old life had shallow goals that were not worthwhile.  

What is the weight control lifestyle’s goal?  To eat just enough so that you will be hungry in time for the next meal.  To serve yourself with love and consideration.  In a way, you are loving the excess weight off.  You do that by making sure you are getting the foods you love best, when you will get the most enjoyment from them.  Who wouldn’t want to be served like that?  I was willing to sacrifice being stuffed full, in order to get that experience.  

What would you sacrifice, to live a better life?

-The Doctor

20190929 Daily report

My new lifestyle, which I have been living since January 2019, is a weight control lifestyle.  It’s not a punishing lifestyle, but a rewarding and fulfilling one.  I use rewards at every level I can think of, instead of force.  After all, most diets are about forcing yourself to eat things you don’t want, or at best, forcing yourself to eat less than you want.  Look how much force is required!  Most of us can’t keep that up for long, and after a while you give up dieting.  Constant force, hunger, dissatisfaction and unhappiness are too heavy a price to pay for being thin. 

This is a long term dieting project.  The term is life.  But truly, I am sentencing myself to a life of reward and fulfillment.  I figure out what foods would make me happy and make sure that I am hungry for them.  It becomes very satisfying to eat them after all that buildup.  

MIddle Eastern style hummus wraps, delicious.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Pretzels and cheese (300)

  • 300 calories

Lunch – 6x Kirkland meatballs (45); hummus (100); whole wheat wrap (110); with red cabbage kraut (minimal) and horseradish (minimal); 

  • 525 calories 

Dinner – 15 ounces homemade lentil soup (300); 2.8 ounces toasted Italian bread (200); butter (80)

  • 580 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); 0.5 ounce of ham (25)

  • 105 calories

Total for the day: 1510 calories (limit 1800)

Preparation

Like the Meal Prep King I talked about last week, I spent part of Sunday planning out my menu for the next week, and doing the heavy cooking.  This week’s dinners are now planned and ready for portioning.  This way, I can pick the foods I want to eat ahead of time, have them ready to go, and have figured out how much of each I can eat.  The portion size is meant to be just enough so that I will get hungry again just in time for the next meal.  Generally I want my meals to be about 400-600 calories each.  It took some experimentation and learning some hard lessons to figure that out.  The total for the day should be just under 1800.  For some reason today I only ate 1510 calories, which is unusual.  But I guarantee I will be hungry for breakfast.  

My preferred sequence is: figure out what I want, make sure I have it in the house, prepare the food, then prepare myself.  Preparing myself means that my stomach is empty and I am properly hungry just in time to eat.  If I get too hungry, well, look out.  That’s when one is going to overeat!  Being too hungry for too long presses a button in part of my hindbrain that says PANIC and that’s it,  I lose control.  Figuring that out took some time.  But it’s a great incentive to not overeat, since you will be only ruining the next meal.  It’s indescribably rewarding to get hungry and then satisfy the hunger with something you really are looking forward to eating. Once you are used to it, it’s hard to go back to your old ways.  They just seem so shallow!  

Anyway, how am I prepared for this week?  For breakfasts and lunches, I have a variety of my favorites ready to cook, especially bacon, lettuce, and tomatoes for BLTs.  Some of my favorites are already cooked and portioned, while others are in the house and ready to be cooked on demand.  I cook 95% of my food myself.  I don’t like instant meals, they don’t satisfy me.  If I am going to do all this anticipating and put in all the effort of getting hungry and prepared for a meal, it’s not going to be for some indifferent diet food.  It had better be rewarding.   Take the picture above.  It’s my own invention but is reminiscent of Middle Eastern meat and hummus pita sandwiches.  I look forward to it.

Anyway, I made lentil soup using the Silver Palate cookbook recipe, and had it for dinner tonight.  I can have it during the week, too.  I also made sausage chili.  Another night I will have spaghetti and meatballs, and another night I will have dinner at Costco, and then make pizza another night.  It’s all food I will look forward to, and I have developed techniques for counting out all the calories.  Most people who lose large amount of weight successfully (I am planning to lose at least 120 pounds) count their calories.  

Recognize that this is a life long task.  Make it rewarding.  I only eat the foods I like, just at the moment when they will be the most satisfying.  I never overeat or even have a second helping, because it just isn’t satisfying.  (Try it sometime!  Get hungry, then have a single serving of your favorite food.  You will notice that as great as the food is, a second helping just isn’t fulfilling.) 

Is your current life rewarding and satisfying? ? What would that take? 

20190928 Saturday weigh-in

In my week, Saturday is different from the other days.  During the week, I concentrate on writing my food journal and making sure my food intake is balanced with my goals.  I have a numeric goal (averaging 1850 calories per day) and an eating goal (maximize the pleasure of eating).  While I was gaining weight, for the last 20 years, my goal was to feel full, and I learned to associate that feeling with comfort and satisfaction.  Now, I see that as a shallow goal without a lot of meaning.  Now, I desire to be hungry.  Not hungry all the time!  Just when it’s time to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  When you are physically hungry, and eat a measured portion of a special food you have been anticipating and are looking forward to, it tastes better than anything else.  A second helping, viewed this way, isn’t nearly as tasty.  Also, if you get too full you won’t be hungry for your next meal and you will ruin the pleasure of it.

So how is this lifestyle working for me?

Caption

My highest weight was 325 pounds.  Since starting this new weight control lifestyle in January, 2019, I have lost a fraction under:

Pounds!!
0

From hobby to obsession

Talk to any person who is thin and who has stayed thin as an adult, and you are talking to someone who works hard at it.  Nobody gets to be thin for free.  The idea that some people are naturally thin is a comforting lie.  (Of course some people burn calories at a higher rate than others, but the differences are pretty slight.)  Go check out some of the calculators online that will take your sex, weight, and age and predict how many calories you need per day.  For me, my body requires 3200 per day, just to stay the weight I am.  Just sitting in a chair all day (called the basic metabolic rate), my body burns 2260 calories per day.  The rest of the calories are burned by moving about.  

Let’s analyze this.  I am having 1850 measured calories per day, times seven days per week = 13,000 calories per week.  Using the calculator linked in the last paragraph, my body needs 3200 calories per day to break even, times seven days per week = 22,400.  

22,400-13,000 = 9400 calorie deficit this week.

It’s practically universal that it takes 3500 calories of deficit per week to lose a pound of body weight.  In theory, I’ve lost 2.7 pounds this week.  Certainly, 246.2 pounds is the least I have weighed since…..the year 2003?

People sometimes ask how I have the willpower to do this: keep the daily food journal, keep my food intake under control, and win the fight to assert my values, every day.  The answer is Willpower!!!  Ha, no way.  I have very little sustained willpower and have failed on countless diet attempts.  So, what’s different this time?  This time I have built a weight control lifestyle that is attractive.  It is so compelling and rewarding that I want to live it.  Then I don’t have to use willpower to force myself to go against my nature.  

It is my belief that weight control has to be your obsession if you want to become thin and stay thin.  At least it has to be your favorite hobby.  That means it has to be important to you, more important than practically anything.  What would you give up to be in control of your body’s weight?  I have given up a lot of free time, and my old lifestyle, my old goals, and my whole old self.  I’ve had to rebuild my relationships with my family, even.  I’m a new person who cares a lot about how much his body weighs.  

Weight control is a lifetime goal.  It will never be done.  I have learned that anyone who stays thin is working hard to stay thin.  And it’s appreciated.  Several people who are thin  were the first to notice that I was losing weight.  They pay attention to that kind of thing. 

What are you paying attention to?

-The Doctor

20190927 Daily report

One reason I write every day is that I need an outlet for all this paying attention.  The way I have set up my weight control lifestyle, I pay a lot of attention to how I am feeling and what I am eating and how the two are related!  Instead of trying to force myself to eat less using my willpower, I put all the burden on my conscious will.  Its job is to make it easy and rewarding for the rest of me to eat a measured portion of food.  That way, my lifestyle is attractive and I want to live it. 

What are you talking about, your will…and the rest of you?  Isn’t that all you? 

Well, I am a complicated person.  So are we all.  What is the part of you that says You Will Eat Less Food?  That’s the will.  What’s the part of you standing in front of the refrigerator at 2AM eating leftover pizza?  That’s the rest of you.  I’ve decided that is the part that should be in charge.  You will is good at being bossy, but I am making it do all the work instead.  It’s like a negotiation between different parts of myself that want different things.  My will can serve the others, instead of bossing them all around and getting nowhere.  This is much more productive.

While losing weight, I make sure to eat foods I find special and rewarding.  Losing weight is hard enough already.  Make it easy and satisfying by planning ahead.  That way you will look forward to it. 

Breakfast worth getting out of bed for.

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissantwich (400); with an extra fried egg (80);

  • 480 calories

Lunch – Bratwrust (280); 1/4 whole wheat wrap (25); cheese crackers (190); Snickers ice cream bar (180);

  • 675 calories 

Dinner – 6x pizza slices (100);

  • 600 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80);

  • 80 calories

Total for the day: 1835 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

Complaining can be fun

One thing I have found about myself is, if I have time and energy to complain, things are going well. 

During the last couple of weeks I have had to do a lot of travel and I have had family obligations – which I am not complaining about.  I didn’t get to exercise (I swim) for a week, and I don’t want to complain about that either.  That happens, sometimes.  Today was my third workout following that break, though.  I will complain about that!  My body was fine for the first workout, and ok for the second.  But now I am really feeling it.  I feel creaky.  Normally I feel energized, and a little sore in a positive way – stretching feels good.  But now I feel like if I stretch, something might drop off.  The next workout will be much better though, based on past experience.  

If you decide to exercise as part of your lifestyle, make sure you pick something that you really like doing.  Otherwise you will eventually run out of willpower.  I like to swim, so I don’t have to force myself to go.  

Back to food.  I always look forward to certain foods.  Everyone will be different, but I always look forward to Friday pizza night, and Wednesday gyro lunch, no matter what else is going on.  For breakfast, I am really into my improved breakfast sandwich.  These have the potential to be terrible.  The package instructions for the Jimmy Dean breakfast croissantwich say to microwave it, which is a sure way to get a soggy and bland sandwich.  Where’s the texture?  I bake it in my toaster oven in foil instead, though it takes a while (20 minutes).  During part of that time, I fry an extra egg and season it with salt and pepper.  Between the fresh egg and the toasted, crispy sandwich, I feel happy and satisfied with breakfast.  

What food would make your morning?

-The Doctor

20190926 Daily report

My success in losing weight (75 pounds so far) has come largely from promoting weight control to one of my most ardent desires and highest values.  Once weight control was established as the lens through which I viewed all my choices, willpower left center stage as the most critical part of the effort.  Every time I dieted in the past, I forced myself to go against my established habits and patterns and values, using pure strength of will.  Did that work out?  Nooooooot so much.  

Instead, I found a way to transform who I was and how I saw the world.  My transformation was mental, and my body is catching up to the consequences.  The author Terry Pratchett said that inside every fat person is a thin person (and a lot of chocolate).  Now, I am that thin person.  I have consciously tried to adopt the life-view of a person who is in control of their body’s weight.  

Sure, there are still 50+ pounds to go.  I didn’t say it was easy.  But instead of willpower, I use rewards to motivate myself.  I feed myself carefully and reward myself by increasing the pleasure I get from eating.  It might sound backwards but it works well.

Red beans and ricely yours!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Jimmy Dean sausage egg and cheese croissantwich (400) with extra egg (80);

  • 480 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst wraps (300); 

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 12 ounces homemade New Orleans red beans and andouille (375); 5oz cooked jasmine rice (160)

  • 535 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); Aldi chocolate wafer cookies (125)

  • 205 calories

Total for the day: 1820 calories (limit 1800)

They get it!

There is a man called John.  John is more than a hundred pounds overweight.  We don’t know why it happens, but one day John realizes just how big he is.  It’s intolerable.  He goes to visit the doctor for advice, and gets a bunch of pamphlets instead.  The pamphlets, and the medical advice, are useless.  It’s very disappointing and disheartening.  But John knows that he is the one who has to live with his body, and he knows his choices have resulted in his overweight state.   Somehow, John discerns that he can sacrifice his old self and adopt new values that will help him control his weight.  

John decides to sacrifice some leisure time.  He starts working out every day, but hates it.  Then he discovers that he can make even a larger sacrifice.  By giving up his Sundays, he can prepare his meals for the whole week and portion them out ahead of time.  That way, he can regulate how many calories he is eating during the week.  He sacrifices his trips to restaurants, and gives up casually filling himself with food on the spur of the moment.  It’s all planned and under control now.  

Through his sacrifices, John loses weight.  He loses a lot of weight.  People are impressed.  He meets a young woman who is rather overweight and she is inspired by his achievements.  She joins him.  To keep her interest, he makes further sacrifices.  He gives up the foods he is used to making, and together they find ways to make foods that are exciting and interesting, not only to themselves, but also to a growing audience of internet fans.  They are by now a couple.  Together, they lose all their excess weight and now weight 187 and 136 pounds, respectively.  Isn’t that a nice story?  Click to see their pictures and read the whole thing.  

Important insights from them: 

“It can be hard work. I do it on a Sunday and spend hours doing it. But I don’t cook in the week at all. It’s all done in one go,” John said. “It’s all about making sure your diet is balanced and sustainable. I cook really tasty food, even things that people usually think are unhealthy.

“It’s a diet plan that allows you to eat whatever you want. What I cook are really nice meals. I’d say it’s the best diet in the world,” he said.

Deniz [his partner], who now weighs 136 pounds, added: “The way we eat is amazing. It’s a way of life that I couldn’t live without now.”

One of the Doctor’s key insights is that when you decide to control your weight, you are adopting a new life.  You have to create a lifestyle that is very attractive to you to keep it up (and lose over 100 pounds).  John knows that.  Deniz also gets it – it’s amazing and she wouldn’t go back to her old self, life, and values.  Those guys are a success.  They sacrificed a lot and were responsible for their own transformations.  That’s very inspiring.  

But look how they succeeded against most dietary advice!  Truly, what you have to do is give up what you valued before and launch out into the unknown, and find new values that will serve you better.  It’s no good to keep you old life and try to force yourself to act against your…self.  

-The Doctor

20190925 Daily report

The purpose of posting daily is that something happens every day: I check in to my limit of 1800 calories per day!  It’s not enough for me to say, “I didn’t have much for breakfast so I can have more lunch.”  By keeping track of the calories and the amounts of food I am eating at each meal, I can spread out my eating throughout one day.  My total calories will be under control and each meal will be under control.  If my food intake is under control, so is my body’s weight. 

Eating several times a day is important for me, especially when I am in calorie deficit – eating less than I need to keep my current weight.  For others, like Mark Twain, it might be different.  He wrote a whole essay about preferring a “meal and a half” per day.  As he described it, a roll and coffee for breakfast, and then the evening meal – dinner.  He allowed that his dinner was very large.  My three meals are, well, measured.  

I hope they are measuring this Gyros!

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Ham (150) and cheese (70) toast (160); tea with half and half (80); 2 cookies (35 each)

  • 530 calories

Lunch – Big Greek Cafe Famous $4 Gyros Wednesday!!!! (600)

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 9 ounces cooked spaghetti (450); 6.5 ounces jambalaya (220)

  • 670 calories

Snacking – tea with milk (50)

  • 50 calories

Total for the day: 1850 calories (limit 1800)

Close to the limit

Today, I found myself very hungry starting at 3.30PM.  I still waited until 5.30PM to eat, and maybe that was a mistake.  Maybe I got too hungry.  I wolfed down my dinner and found myself feeling like I needed more, and needed to feel full, even after a fairly sizable dinner for me (670 calories).  Luckily, I had to leave the house soon after dinner and didn’t get the chance to eat a lot more!  By the time I got back home at 10PM, I no longer had the feeling of wanting to eat.  That could be a lesson for me – the urge to eat and be full can be distracted until reality can re-assert itself (I had eaten enough).  Someday I will see if I can use that new knowledge.  

This week, I had planned to be back on my winning plan – 1800 calories per day (or a few less), and a couple of cheat days where I was allowed extra calories, with an average of 1850-1900 calories per day for the week.  It hasn’t worked out that way!  For this week I have been over 1800 almost every day.  On the good side, my daily average is still 1850 per day.  There haven’t been any cheat days, or they all have been little cheat days.  On the bad side, it feels slightly out of control.  Can’t I stop at 1800?  

Luckily I use a reality measurement device every week.  The scale.  My weekly weighing will tell me if I have really lost anything.  That will help me refine my self knowledge.  Maybe I need to be on 1800 calories per day with a couple of cheat days.  Maybe having 1850 per day is acceptable, with no extra cheat days.  Think of the fun I will have finding out on Saturday.  As I have said many times, I never know when I get on the scale, if I have lost weight that week.  I have been surprised before.  But there has been enough progress over the months that I am hopeful.  If my system of food intake control is followed, I have lost weight – up till now.  

What will you find out this week?

-The Doctor

20190924 Daily report

When you are recording every meal and what you are doing every day, you are paying a lot of attention to yourself and your life (and your body).  Things slow down and you live more intensely than you have before.  This last 9 months has been amazing.  I’ve lost 75 pounds, for one thing.  And I have records of it happening, and pictures of the scale, and every day I have recorded what I ate and how many calories I ate.  I have all those records too, plus pictures of a lot of foods!  

Oven grilling - not as colorful

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – Jimmy Dean sausage egg and cheese croissantwich (400) with extra egg (80)

  • 480 calories

Lunch – 2x bratwurst wraps (300);

  • 600 calories 

Dinner – 6oz cooked spaghetti (300); 5 Costco meatballs (235 for 5)

  • 535 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); Goldfish crackers and cheddar cheese (125); chips (50)

  • 255 calories

Total for the day: 1865 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)

Re-establishing the routine

I have had a few weeks away from home, traveling, not eating according to my routine, where I can carefully monitor and restrain and reward myself, as needed.  So this week is about getting back my weight control lifestyle.  I’ve tried to do that by planning ahead and revisiting some of my favorite foods.  Thinking about it, I should also go over all my notes from the first part of the year and see what I was eating and what I was doing.  That could keep me on the successful path, because you will stray without thinking about it.  Anyway, my favorite foods are used as a reward for eating less.  They keep my body happy, so far.  

I am also using exercise to reset my weight control clock.  Today I went swimming, and I went swimming Friday last week too.  Before that, I hadn’t been able to go for at least a week.  I paid for that today!  My routine was harder to do.  On top of that I have never gone out to get a new swimsuit, and my old one is getting pretty hard to cinch up successfully – it’s from nine months ago, you see.  I used to weigh more then.  Anyway, I am planning to do some walking, more than usual.  

Last, I need to figure out sleep.  The last couple of months I have really gone out of control.  I am finding it impossible to get to bed before midnight and impossible to try sleeping before 1AM.  That makes it harder to do anything.  I am feeling like I am losing control over everything as a consequence.  

Good night!  It’s 11.30.

-The Doctor

20190923 Daily report

My food journal is a simple document but it has several levels of meaning.  Each meal is described, sometimes days in advance, sometimes just before I eat.  The calories are entered, ideally a few minutes after they are eaten.  I never count my calories before they are hatched, er, eaten.  The calorie total is kept daily.  I decided many months ago that 1800 calories per day was the right amount.  Sometimes I allow a few extra calories, up to an average of 1850 per day.  

How do I keep on doing it?  Well, I don’t rely on my willpower.  It would only be two weeks before I stopped tracking food, with my weak willpower!  It does take discipline, as my late grandmother would say.  Discipline, I have.  Discipline means I can persuade myself to follow the rules that I negotiate with myself.  That’s right, I have to negotiate with myself.  And I am not more mentally ill than you would think.  

Sausage Jambalaya

My food intake and calorie count

Breakfast – ham (100) cheese (70) toasted bread (160) sandwich with horseradish, mustard, and pickles

  • 330 calories

Lunch – meatball (275) wrap (110) with red cabbage and pickles and tabbouleh (25) and horseradish and Thousand Island dressing (50)

  • 465 calories 

Dinner –10.5 oz jambalaya (360); 5oz rice (160)

  • 510 calories

Snacking – tea with half and half (80); Perdue chicken strips (200); Aldi chocolate coated wafer cookies (120)

  • 400 calories

Total for the day: 1715 calories (limit 1800)

Controlling calories for home cooking

Because I negotiated rules with myself, and didn’t dictate them, I find I can live with them.  What does that mean?  It means that if I told myself to eat less food, I wouldn’t obey.  Or I would try, but only for a short time.  Then I would be disappointed in myself and feel weak.

By negotiating the rules, I managed to get them the right way around.  The rules, instead of orders to the parts of me that are built in deep, are instead obligations on my conscious will.  Basically, they are a set of promises I made to myself.  “If you agree to eat less food, I will do X for you.”  Those promises must be kept.  (I am thinking about writing up those promises as a separate post in the How to Start a Diet series.) 

My body’s weight is now a major interest in my life, and I think in terms of my food rules all the time.  I accept this as the price of controlling my body’s weight.  I make it worthwhile because I make sure to reward myself at every level for following the rules.  It is amazingly satisfying to plan a favorite meal, allow yourself to start getting hungry for it, and then eat it.  That sequence is so satisfying in practice, that you are willing to eat a measured amount of that food.  Because you anticipate it so much and because it tastes so good when you are hungry for it, it becomes easy to put down the fork when the portion is done.

That’s partly because if you pay attention to how you are feeling, you will notice that a second helping just doesn’t taste as good.  It kind of ruins the experience of the first portion.  Then it also ruins the next meal, because instead of being hungry for it, you will feel ambiguous about it.  That feedback is an important part of this system. 

Measuring how much you eat only takes a few simple tools.  A kitchen scale, some measuring cups and spoons.  And of course the package information.  Let’s look at my jambalaya.  The whole sausage had 1020 calories, the tomatoes 200, the oil 150, and the onion 44.  The other vegetables (celery and bell pepper) and spices didn’t add much more.  Let’s call the whole dish 1440 calories and a 1/4 portion 360 calories.  How do I make sure I am really having a 1/4 portion?  I weighed the entire thing on my kitchen scale.  It made 2 pounds and 10 ounces of jambalaya – 42 ounces.  My quarter portion was 10.5 ounces.  

Because I was hungry for dinner, because I wanted Jambalaya and knew it would be a good meal, that portion was enough.  And now there are leftovers! That’s another meal to look forward to.

How do you reward yourself?  What obligations are you willing to put on your conscious will?

-The Doctor

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