Losing weight in spite of myself.

I began this blog in February 2011 as a way to help me not quit trying to lose weight, and to learn a few things. It's been an interesting and powerful experience. It certainly confirms what I've long suspected--that although I am a genuinely happy cheery person in the main, I am NOT a happy cheery dieter. I DETEST losing weight. I resent being overweight in the first place and I am a virtuoso in the art of self-sabotage. And YET--I'm doing it! I'm fighting and kicking and EATING all the way down, but the weight is finally going down. The plan I was following in February was a half-baked one largely based on wishful thinking. I gained a little weight and decided to get real. I knew I couldn't just join weightwatchers or count calories or do any one plan and expect to be successful. I decided if I was going to bother to make the effort to lose weight I was going to throw everything I could think of at the problem. And so I do. My real "Day One" for this blog is April 1, 2011. I joined weight watchers, I joined caloriecount.com (awesome website), I read the blog losingweighteveryday.blogspot.com religiously, I keep this blog faithfully, I joined the health programs sponsored by my insurance, I use the principles from overeater's anonymous, I use my church's 12 step program as well, I subscribe--and use--Healthy Cooking Magazine.



The result of all this? Painfully slow progress (About 20 lbs in 10 months). But it IS progress and like the little engine that could I keep on trying in my rebellious way. I have no intention of quitting. This is by far the longest sustained weight loss effort I've ever made in my life. Successful I think, because for the first in my life I've done this MY way--which I've discovered, involves a lot of pizza and restaraunt food. I'm convinced this is the only way to lose weight. For me it must be MY way. For you it MUST be YOUR way. Not weight watcher's way, not your doctor's way, but YOUR way. Any plan or idea I use is only a tool.

The latest plan to lose weight my way began on Oct 29, 2013. It really is my own crazy plan. As you'll see if you read that post. I've implemented the best ideas of all sorts of eating plans and thrown out the scale. A couple of months in and I'm definitely healthier. I'm actually enjoying myself. I won't weigh until April 1, 2014, so I'll see then if this works the way I hope it will.

There is no magic weight loss bullet. But there IS a great deal of magic in the discovery of what I can happily live with (very different from what weight watchers tells me I can happily live with) and still have the body and health I want.

Good luck to all of us on this journey. It's quite a trip!







Monday, January 27, 2014

No star

Today I'm back on track with Lemon Day. Blech, fish for dinner, but with oven fries so that makes up for a lot. Best of all, it's only flavor point for today. Tomorrow is back to calorie counting, which is good because I want some more Hungry Girl buffalo wings.

Yesterday was disappointing. Hopefully I didn't go too far off the rails. I don't think I did, but I didn't get a star because in the end I just didn't count the calories.  The night before I went out of my way to figure out all the calories in the Domincian dinner. Ugh! Way too many calories for mediocre food, but the real problem was that not only were the calories high, they were hard to estimate.  I really hate figuring out the calories in soup. I can figure out how much the entire batch is, but how much is a 10th of that?  I suppose I can pour the soup into a big measuring cup and then into a big bowl and figure out just how many cups of soup the recipe made, but I'm balking at doing that.  Then there were the pork chops--with a bone so it's hard to weigh, then there was bacon wrapped bananas--again, not impossible but annoying to figure---about 1/8 of a banana with about 1/3 of a strip of bacon is about...?  I did a rough guesstimate, but wasn't too happy. It was a 2100 cal day, but my mind was still thinking 1900 and although I wasn't very hungry I didn't feel like having a miniscule dinner to make up for a weird lunch which was somewhere withing a very wide guess range.  So I said forget it and had a reasonable size bowl of Catherine's taco soup (very healthy), 2 slices of her declicious homemade sour dough bread with cheese broiled on top (one slice would have been better).  Had I stopped there I would have at least given myself a red star because I did at least sort of try to work out the calories, but by this time I was tired, cranky and annoyed at the food part of the day.  We finally made the frozen pumpkin white chocolate chip halloween cookies that had been sitting in the freezer.  I had three with some almond milk.

Overeating is a funny experience.  The first cookie actually seemed to last a long time, I was interrupted by the cat and was surprised to see how much of it was left. I would have been perfectly fine with just that which I savored and enjoyed. But since I was in "what the hell" mode, I ate the other two also. The other two went down much more quickly and easily than the first. After that I was all set up to eat five more, but some common sense kicked in and I called it a night and went to bed.

Oh well. I'll have a very good food and exercise day today. I'm also inclined to count my blessings. I'm following another wonderful blog--300 pounds down. This amazing lady posted the most detailed, heartbreaking authentic description of her food (specifically sugar) addiction. Her food problems are MUCH more difficult to deal with than mine.

No comments:

Post a Comment