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tl;dr part II! On Eating Plans and Such
Context, if you haven't read yesterday's post: someone on my f-list has an LJ friend who asked for positive experiences with exercise and diet, so I am tl;dring at great length.*
* "Too long; didn't read"
Please note that "you" here means the generic "you," not anyone specific, and that all of the things here are my opinion and what I've found that works for me. Your mileage may vary.
Part II: My Eating Plan
I'm trying to avoid the word "diet" here except in the context of "what people typically eat", such as "The typical 19th century lower-class Irish diet relied heavily on potatoes, which is why the potato blight threatened millions with famine."
The reason is that a diet, defined as a temporary change in eating habits to achieve a goal, don't work long-term, only short term. If you've got a reasonable short-term need, such as training for an athletic event or for dropping ten pounds to fit into your grandmother's wedding dress on your wedding day, sure, go for it! But if you want to lose or gain weight and have it stick in the long term, you have to make permanent changes to your eating habits.
I'm sticking with talking about weight loss, because that's what my concern has been. I don't know much about weight gain, other than if you're working on gaining muscle, you need to make sure you're getting enough protein. :)
Exercise along with eating helps with weight loss, primarily by guarding against muscle loss - as you lose weight you lose both fat and muscle, and exercising your muscles builds them and prevents too much loss of them. But I've gone on about exercise in a previous post (click on the "weight" tag to find it), so won't address it much here.
So. Eating. This is going to take a while because I need to explain some background and some science. ("Science!")
There are people out there who delight in giving advice such as "Just focus on eating healthier things, and adding them to your diet slowly. You don't need to count calories." That does not work for me. I focused on adding healthier things to my diet and not counting calories at various times for twenty years, and it was a failure. Counting calories, on the other hand, worked, and worked well.
Note: if you have any obsessive tendencies at all, I do not recommend counting calories, because it can lead to eating disordered behavior if you're susceptible to them.
I previously had also tried counting calories, and those times didn't work out as well. Why? I figured it out ... because I wasn't eating enough. Your typical weight-loss diet for a woman - even as recommended by doctors! - tend to allow you 1200 calories a day, and then encourages you to exercise, to burn a couple more hundred a day. So you end up at about 600-1000 net calories, depending on how much you exercise.
Did you know that the typical inactive adult woman needs more than that number of calories per day just to stay alive? This means for her brain to work, for her lungs to work, for her heart to pump blood through her body, to stand up and walk around from her chair to the bathroom and back? Perhaps not - in the BMC Public Health journal (2010 Vol 10, 9 March 2010) there's a paper that says 2/3 of the people they surveyed underestimated the number of calories an inactive adult needs per day ("The publics' understanding of daily caloric recommendations and their perceptions of calorie posting in chain restaurants." Bleich, S. N.; Pollack, K. M.).
I've spent some time combing the databases at work (I'm an academic librarian, in case you guys didn't know), and have found a good online calculator that will show you how many calories you need per day to just stay alive. NATURALLY the explanation and the math is behind a pay wall ("Calories for dummies." Bonnie Liebman. Nutrition Action Healthletter. Sept 2003 v30 i7 p10(3).), but the calculator itself is accessible here: http://www.cspinet.org/nah/09_03/calorie_calc.html.
Using this, I took the average size 30-year-old woman in the U.S. in 1999-2002 (the first stats I came across - 5'4", 163 lbs), plugged that into the calculator and said she was sedentary (less than 30 min brisk walking per day), and the number of calories it takes per day to maintain her current weight is:
2048
Surprised? What do you think happens if she drops the number of net calories she takes in (food calories minus exercise) to 600-1000? Surprisingly, it's not "lose weight, get skinny, and keep it off!" She screws up her metabolism, is what. She goes into the state people call "starvation mode" as her body adjusts her metabolism to live as if she were in a famine on the savannah, so her bodily processes - including, and this is scary, her brain's functions - drop, using fewer calories in an attempt to hold out through the dry season until the rains begin and food is again plentiful.
Can you lose weight on this sort of diet? Of course! But (a) bad things happen to your mood, your thinking, and your body, and (b) once you go off the diet (and you will, because it is not possible to sustain long-term without extreme eating-disordered obsessiveness), you will gain the weight you lost right back. For more on this, read about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (Wikipedia), an experiment run during WWII when a group of conscientious objectors volunteered to eat starvation rations so that scientists could learn more about what happens to the body during starvation and how best to treat the effects. (Also, Todd Tucker's The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live
- Amazon referral link).
Please note that during this experiment the men ate 1560 calories per day, and exercised by walking 22 miles per week, which works out to 3 miles per day, about an hour of activity per day at the average human walking speed of 3-3.5 mph. A man who weighed 175 pounds, who walked for 3 miles at 3mph would burn 278 calories, so he'd net 1282 calories per day.
Does that make you think? It should.
Do please note that you burn fewer calories the less you weigh, and also the more conditioned you are. And also them men require slightly higher numbers of calories per day to survive than women do, partly because they're usually bigger and partly because they tend to have more muscle mass. But when a starvation experiment has someone eat 1560 calories and exercise for an hour a day, and a diet has someone eat 1200 calories and exercise for an hour a day ... is it any wonder that diets don't fucking work?
SO, you, know, starvation behaviors? NOT NORMAL EATING.
And now we get to the meat of this tl;dr post: for me the key to curbing my out-of-control eating was to figure out what normal eating is and do it.
The way I stick to it is to log my daily food intake on CalorieKing, a for-pay website. There are free websites that do the same thing (sparkpeople.com is one, and I think fitday.com might do it also). Other people use Weight Watchers points, or follow other diets like Atkins, South Beach, eat for their blood type, whatever. The major element of all of these eating plans is that they offer a way to entertain the person following them while they eat fewer calories than usual. Now, everyone's body is different and you may respond much better to a high-protein program, or to one that cuts out refined carbohydrates while increasing complex carbs, or one that allows you to eat unlimited amounts of foods on one list, while limiting intake of those on another and cutting out those on a third. Or you may have medical conditions, allergies, or intolerances that mean you have to restrict your eating in other ways.
The bottom line is: to lose weight at a sustainable, healthy rate, you want to lose between 1/2 and 2 pounds per week. This means you curb your eating gently, not drastically. For me, this means cutting my daily intake by 500 calories. Note this is net intake, meaning my calories after eating and exercise. It seems weird to eat your exercise calories back, but it works for me. A deficit of 500 calories a day means a weekly deficit of 3500 calories, which equals one pound of body fat. (It's not all fat; sometimes it's muscle, as I said above!)
Do I hit that every time? No - I tend to average closer to 3/4 of a pound per week at the moment, although back in 2007 I was closer to 1.5 pounds a week. I'm not stressing over the slow loss, because I know it means I can maintain it more easily, and it means I don't feel deprived.
Normal Eating
Do I think counting calories is normal eating? No - we didn't evolve with spreadsheets. But it is an action that keeps me on track. When I gained the chunk of weight back? I'd fallen out of the habit of logging daily, and started eating slightly more of slightly higher-calorie foods. And I picked back up the habit of drinking 20-oz Cokes and Dr. Peppers almost daily, which added 250 calories per day back: if you chart my weight gain over the two years it took, you can see that it corresponds to ... an increase in my net calories of right about 250 calories per day. Yes, sodas are my DOWNFALL. Have I cut them out entirely now? Oh HELL no! If Id id that I'd feel deprived. Instead, I stick to having them only occasionally, and only when I go out to eat, and mostly order iced tea or diet soda. Eventually I'd like to cut out the diet soda and iced tea, because withdrawal from caffeine triggers migraines for me and I'd like not to have that threat hanging over me if I don't ingest caffeine daily.
My typical daily calorie intake is 1700-1900 calories/day, depending on how much I exercise. 1700 if I don't, up to 200 more if I do. And I'm losing weight on this: far cry from the 1200 calories that "normal" diets give you, isn't it? Now, I'm fairly big, at 253 pounds. Someone smaller than I would require fewer. Use the calculator linked above to work out what your intake should be, and what that intake minus 500 calories should be.
So what *is* normal eating? I had to consciously come up with rules:
1. Not eating until I was stuffed. In other words, redefining "full." I used to think "full" meant "uncomfortable." Now I define it as "no longer hungry." If I've gotten to a point where I can feel that my stomach is distended, I've eaten too much. Yeah, ok, I eat that much occasionally still, because occasional overeating is normal. Daily overeating, however, is not.
2. Not counting my calories on migraine days. My pain level varies according to my hunger and blood sugar levels. Getting food into my body is vastly more important than worrying about what it is and how many calories are in it.
3. Normal eating includes your favorite fatty, greasy, comfort foods. Eat Wendy's hamburgers when you're cranky like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
myrialux does? Of course! Love bean and cheese tostadas like I do? Yes! Just work out how many calories they are and fit them into your eating plan - if you indulge in Wendy's for lunch, eat more vegetables at dinner. If I feel cranky at work and want tostadas, I'll have a healthier lunch and then when I get home make mine (4 tostada shells, 1 cup Rosarita's no-fat refried beans, 3/4 cup shredded Colby-Jack = 753 calories of SHEER YUMMY FOOD FOR THE SOUL).
4. If I go to a nice restaurant, I don't count calories. That would be a crying shame. A couple of weeks ago we tookmyrialux 's parents out to Bonnell's Fine Texas Cuisine, and we shared an appetizer sampler (I had a fried quail leg and flash-fried calamari), and I had a glass of wine and the Andouille-Stuffed Bacon-Wrapped Pork Tenderloin with peach BBQ sauce and Appaloosa beans and rice, and finished it off with Black & White Chocolate Mousse Cups Served with Huckleberry Sauce and a Raspberry-Chocolate Liqueur Shooter. DAMN but that was fiiine food! (Go to the website! Jon Bonnell will give you ANY recipe you ask for and has a cookbook out
!)
5. Portion control. This is the biggie. You guys know I take bento boxes to work for lunch, and they work at controlling the size of what I eat, because they're fairly small. I rarely end up eating until my stomach is overfull at lunch, because I rarely bring too much. I also tend to pay attention to the amount of food I put on my plate now, and eat less of most things. I know that 4 ounces of meat (1 serving) looks tiny on the plate, but I know that I *can* be satisfied with that amount of food, and if I'm not ... nothing says I can't eat 2 servings of meat at a meal and eat less of something else. I don't weigh/measure my food for every meal, but I tend to do so foe new things, until I get a good idea of how much 1 cup of this food is, or how much 4 ounces of that other food is, and I have to go back every so often an recalibrate - for example, my estimation of how much of a baked potato I'm really eating tends to creep down pretty fast, so I estimate 5 ounces when it's more like 9. Weighing everything is not normal eating, but it keeps me on track. But estimates without measuring tend to be off - so I need to recalibrate every so often.
6. Indulgences! Of course! Not feeling deprived is ESSENTIAL. If you're deprived, it's too easy to fall off the plan. I can't do what others do ans make plans like "I can have a big bowl of ice cream once a month!" because I go OH HELL NO I CAN HAVE IT WHENEVER I DAMN WELL WANT. So I make it inconvenient and/or expensive to limit my intake. I can have as much chocolate as I want. Provided it's Scharffen Berger Semi-Sweet, which costs $10 for a 9 oz. bar. I can have as much popcorn as I want. Provided I pop it myself in oil in a pot on the stove and drizzle imported European butter all over it. I can have as much ice cream as I want (along with as many Lact-Aid pills as I'm going to need!), provided I get in my car and drive to Marble Slab Creamery, order it there, and take it home and eat it there.
7. Fooling myself! I tend to round my calorie target in CalorieKing down by 50-100 calories. that way my tendency to go over my target doesn't derail me, and I get to feel smug at Breaking The Rules. Feeling smug at Breaking The Rules is important to me! Because I am not Limited By The Rules! Even these Rules!
8. Because I am lactose-intolerant, I don't worry about limiting calories from dairy, because I don't get enough of it normally, and I need the calcium (see the mention of my osteoporotic mother in the previous post).
9. When out eating with friends (which we don't do very often), at conventions, or with family at holidays, I don't control my eating. These are days when indulgence is NORMAL. Amusingly, however, I tend to eat about the same amount of food per day as I do when controlling it, as I discovered by tracking. It takes a while for the average amount of food I eat to creep back up to weight-gain levels.
10. THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL. Divorcing food from morality. So I ate an entire container of Ben & Jerry's Cake Batter Ice Cream. Guess what? It was delicious! And that's all. I wasn't "bad" for eating it. I wasn't "cheating." I was EATING NORMALLY. And tomorrow I won't deprive myself by eating less or exercising more to make up for it, instead I will get back on my plan. So with that ice cream I ate 1000 calories more this week than I did last week. It means that - OMG! - I lose slightly less this week. I don't gain a billion pounds. I don't fail. I lose slightly less. That's all.
(I will get into tracking your weight and why your weight goes up and down and all over the place and makes you THINK you gained 5 pounds in one week and why you really haven't in another post. This one is too long already.)
There's probably more that I meant to say but this is TOO DAMN LONG now.
* "Too long; didn't read"
Please note that "you" here means the generic "you," not anyone specific, and that all of the things here are my opinion and what I've found that works for me. Your mileage may vary.
Part II: My Eating Plan
I'm trying to avoid the word "diet" here except in the context of "what people typically eat", such as "The typical 19th century lower-class Irish diet relied heavily on potatoes, which is why the potato blight threatened millions with famine."
The reason is that a diet, defined as a temporary change in eating habits to achieve a goal, don't work long-term, only short term. If you've got a reasonable short-term need, such as training for an athletic event or for dropping ten pounds to fit into your grandmother's wedding dress on your wedding day, sure, go for it! But if you want to lose or gain weight and have it stick in the long term, you have to make permanent changes to your eating habits.
I'm sticking with talking about weight loss, because that's what my concern has been. I don't know much about weight gain, other than if you're working on gaining muscle, you need to make sure you're getting enough protein. :)
Exercise along with eating helps with weight loss, primarily by guarding against muscle loss - as you lose weight you lose both fat and muscle, and exercising your muscles builds them and prevents too much loss of them. But I've gone on about exercise in a previous post (click on the "weight" tag to find it), so won't address it much here.
So. Eating. This is going to take a while because I need to explain some background and some science. ("Science!")
There are people out there who delight in giving advice such as "Just focus on eating healthier things, and adding them to your diet slowly. You don't need to count calories." That does not work for me. I focused on adding healthier things to my diet and not counting calories at various times for twenty years, and it was a failure. Counting calories, on the other hand, worked, and worked well.
Note: if you have any obsessive tendencies at all, I do not recommend counting calories, because it can lead to eating disordered behavior if you're susceptible to them.
I previously had also tried counting calories, and those times didn't work out as well. Why? I figured it out ... because I wasn't eating enough. Your typical weight-loss diet for a woman - even as recommended by doctors! - tend to allow you 1200 calories a day, and then encourages you to exercise, to burn a couple more hundred a day. So you end up at about 600-1000 net calories, depending on how much you exercise.
Did you know that the typical inactive adult woman needs more than that number of calories per day just to stay alive? This means for her brain to work, for her lungs to work, for her heart to pump blood through her body, to stand up and walk around from her chair to the bathroom and back? Perhaps not - in the BMC Public Health journal (2010 Vol 10, 9 March 2010) there's a paper that says 2/3 of the people they surveyed underestimated the number of calories an inactive adult needs per day ("The publics' understanding of daily caloric recommendations and their perceptions of calorie posting in chain restaurants." Bleich, S. N.; Pollack, K. M.).
I've spent some time combing the databases at work (I'm an academic librarian, in case you guys didn't know), and have found a good online calculator that will show you how many calories you need per day to just stay alive. NATURALLY the explanation and the math is behind a pay wall ("Calories for dummies." Bonnie Liebman. Nutrition Action Healthletter. Sept 2003 v30 i7 p10(3).), but the calculator itself is accessible here: http://www.cspinet.org/nah/09_03/calorie_calc.html.
Using this, I took the average size 30-year-old woman in the U.S. in 1999-2002 (the first stats I came across - 5'4", 163 lbs), plugged that into the calculator and said she was sedentary (less than 30 min brisk walking per day), and the number of calories it takes per day to maintain her current weight is:
2048
Surprised? What do you think happens if she drops the number of net calories she takes in (food calories minus exercise) to 600-1000? Surprisingly, it's not "lose weight, get skinny, and keep it off!" She screws up her metabolism, is what. She goes into the state people call "starvation mode" as her body adjusts her metabolism to live as if she were in a famine on the savannah, so her bodily processes - including, and this is scary, her brain's functions - drop, using fewer calories in an attempt to hold out through the dry season until the rains begin and food is again plentiful.
Can you lose weight on this sort of diet? Of course! But (a) bad things happen to your mood, your thinking, and your body, and (b) once you go off the diet (and you will, because it is not possible to sustain long-term without extreme eating-disordered obsessiveness), you will gain the weight you lost right back. For more on this, read about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (Wikipedia), an experiment run during WWII when a group of conscientious objectors volunteered to eat starvation rations so that scientists could learn more about what happens to the body during starvation and how best to treat the effects. (Also, Todd Tucker's The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live
- Amazon referral link). Please note that during this experiment the men ate 1560 calories per day, and exercised by walking 22 miles per week, which works out to 3 miles per day, about an hour of activity per day at the average human walking speed of 3-3.5 mph. A man who weighed 175 pounds, who walked for 3 miles at 3mph would burn 278 calories, so he'd net 1282 calories per day.
Does that make you think? It should.
Do please note that you burn fewer calories the less you weigh, and also the more conditioned you are. And also them men require slightly higher numbers of calories per day to survive than women do, partly because they're usually bigger and partly because they tend to have more muscle mass. But when a starvation experiment has someone eat 1560 calories and exercise for an hour a day, and a diet has someone eat 1200 calories and exercise for an hour a day ... is it any wonder that diets don't fucking work?
Among the many conclusions from the study was the confirmation that prolonged semi-starvation produces significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis as measured using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a standardized test administered during the experimental period. Indeed, most of the subjects experienced periods of severe emotional distress and depression. There were extreme reactions to the psychological effects during the experiment including self-mutilation (one subject amputated three fingers of his hand with an axe, though the subject was unsure if he had done so intentionally or accidentally).[1] Participants exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase. Sexual interest was drastically reduced and the volunteers showed signs of social withdrawal and isolation. The participants reported a decline in concentration, comprehension and judgment capabilities, although the standardized tests administered showed no actual signs of diminished capacity. There were marked declines in physiological processes indicative of decreases in each subject’s basal metabolic rate (the energy required by the body in a state of rest) and reflected in reduced body temperature, respiration and heart rate. Some of the subjects exhibited edema (swelling) in the extremities, presumably due to the massive quantities of water the participants consumed attempting to fill their stomachs during the starvation period.I also note, from that last sentence, that every eating plan, diet, etc I've seen tell you to drink lots of water, and claims that sometimes you mistake hunger for thirst and you should drink water instead. Which is bullshit: the hunger and thirst systems are different, and manifest their needs in different ways (cite Dr Steven Novella from one of this year's The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast). You feel less hungry after you drink not because it was thirst you were feeling but because you've distended your stomach enough to temporarily shut off the hunger signals, which is exactly what the men in the starvation experiment were doing. The simple way to check if you're drinking enough water is this: are you thirsty? If so, drink!
SO, you, know, starvation behaviors? NOT NORMAL EATING.
And now we get to the meat of this tl;dr post: for me the key to curbing my out-of-control eating was to figure out what normal eating is and do it.
The way I stick to it is to log my daily food intake on CalorieKing, a for-pay website. There are free websites that do the same thing (sparkpeople.com is one, and I think fitday.com might do it also). Other people use Weight Watchers points, or follow other diets like Atkins, South Beach, eat for their blood type, whatever. The major element of all of these eating plans is that they offer a way to entertain the person following them while they eat fewer calories than usual. Now, everyone's body is different and you may respond much better to a high-protein program, or to one that cuts out refined carbohydrates while increasing complex carbs, or one that allows you to eat unlimited amounts of foods on one list, while limiting intake of those on another and cutting out those on a third. Or you may have medical conditions, allergies, or intolerances that mean you have to restrict your eating in other ways.
The bottom line is: to lose weight at a sustainable, healthy rate, you want to lose between 1/2 and 2 pounds per week. This means you curb your eating gently, not drastically. For me, this means cutting my daily intake by 500 calories. Note this is net intake, meaning my calories after eating and exercise. It seems weird to eat your exercise calories back, but it works for me. A deficit of 500 calories a day means a weekly deficit of 3500 calories, which equals one pound of body fat. (It's not all fat; sometimes it's muscle, as I said above!)
Do I hit that every time? No - I tend to average closer to 3/4 of a pound per week at the moment, although back in 2007 I was closer to 1.5 pounds a week. I'm not stressing over the slow loss, because I know it means I can maintain it more easily, and it means I don't feel deprived.
Normal Eating
Do I think counting calories is normal eating? No - we didn't evolve with spreadsheets. But it is an action that keeps me on track. When I gained the chunk of weight back? I'd fallen out of the habit of logging daily, and started eating slightly more of slightly higher-calorie foods. And I picked back up the habit of drinking 20-oz Cokes and Dr. Peppers almost daily, which added 250 calories per day back: if you chart my weight gain over the two years it took, you can see that it corresponds to ... an increase in my net calories of right about 250 calories per day. Yes, sodas are my DOWNFALL. Have I cut them out entirely now? Oh HELL no! If Id id that I'd feel deprived. Instead, I stick to having them only occasionally, and only when I go out to eat, and mostly order iced tea or diet soda. Eventually I'd like to cut out the diet soda and iced tea, because withdrawal from caffeine triggers migraines for me and I'd like not to have that threat hanging over me if I don't ingest caffeine daily.
My typical daily calorie intake is 1700-1900 calories/day, depending on how much I exercise. 1700 if I don't, up to 200 more if I do. And I'm losing weight on this: far cry from the 1200 calories that "normal" diets give you, isn't it? Now, I'm fairly big, at 253 pounds. Someone smaller than I would require fewer. Use the calculator linked above to work out what your intake should be, and what that intake minus 500 calories should be.
So what *is* normal eating? I had to consciously come up with rules:
1. Not eating until I was stuffed. In other words, redefining "full." I used to think "full" meant "uncomfortable." Now I define it as "no longer hungry." If I've gotten to a point where I can feel that my stomach is distended, I've eaten too much. Yeah, ok, I eat that much occasionally still, because occasional overeating is normal. Daily overeating, however, is not.
2. Not counting my calories on migraine days. My pain level varies according to my hunger and blood sugar levels. Getting food into my body is vastly more important than worrying about what it is and how many calories are in it.
3. Normal eating includes your favorite fatty, greasy, comfort foods. Eat Wendy's hamburgers when you're cranky like
myrialux does? Of course! Love bean and cheese tostadas like I do? Yes! Just work out how many calories they are and fit them into your eating plan - if you indulge in Wendy's for lunch, eat more vegetables at dinner. If I feel cranky at work and want tostadas, I'll have a healthier lunch and then when I get home make mine (4 tostada shells, 1 cup Rosarita's no-fat refried beans, 3/4 cup shredded Colby-Jack = 753 calories of SHEER YUMMY FOOD FOR THE SOUL).4. If I go to a nice restaurant, I don't count calories. That would be a crying shame. A couple of weeks ago we took
myrialux 's parents out to Bonnell's Fine Texas Cuisine, and we shared an appetizer sampler (I had a fried quail leg and flash-fried calamari), and I had a glass of wine and the Andouille-Stuffed Bacon-Wrapped Pork Tenderloin with peach BBQ sauce and Appaloosa beans and rice, and finished it off with Black & White Chocolate Mousse Cups Served with Huckleberry Sauce and a Raspberry-Chocolate Liqueur Shooter. DAMN but that was fiiine food! (Go to the website! Jon Bonnell will give you ANY recipe you ask for and has a cookbook out!)5. Portion control. This is the biggie. You guys know I take bento boxes to work for lunch, and they work at controlling the size of what I eat, because they're fairly small. I rarely end up eating until my stomach is overfull at lunch, because I rarely bring too much. I also tend to pay attention to the amount of food I put on my plate now, and eat less of most things. I know that 4 ounces of meat (1 serving) looks tiny on the plate, but I know that I *can* be satisfied with that amount of food, and if I'm not ... nothing says I can't eat 2 servings of meat at a meal and eat less of something else. I don't weigh/measure my food for every meal, but I tend to do so foe new things, until I get a good idea of how much 1 cup of this food is, or how much 4 ounces of that other food is, and I have to go back every so often an recalibrate - for example, my estimation of how much of a baked potato I'm really eating tends to creep down pretty fast, so I estimate 5 ounces when it's more like 9. Weighing everything is not normal eating, but it keeps me on track. But estimates without measuring tend to be off - so I need to recalibrate every so often.
6. Indulgences! Of course! Not feeling deprived is ESSENTIAL. If you're deprived, it's too easy to fall off the plan. I can't do what others do ans make plans like "I can have a big bowl of ice cream once a month!" because I go OH HELL NO I CAN HAVE IT WHENEVER I DAMN WELL WANT. So I make it inconvenient and/or expensive to limit my intake. I can have as much chocolate as I want. Provided it's Scharffen Berger Semi-Sweet, which costs $10 for a 9 oz. bar. I can have as much popcorn as I want. Provided I pop it myself in oil in a pot on the stove and drizzle imported European butter all over it. I can have as much ice cream as I want (along with as many Lact-Aid pills as I'm going to need!), provided I get in my car and drive to Marble Slab Creamery, order it there, and take it home and eat it there.
7. Fooling myself! I tend to round my calorie target in CalorieKing down by 50-100 calories. that way my tendency to go over my target doesn't derail me, and I get to feel smug at Breaking The Rules. Feeling smug at Breaking The Rules is important to me! Because I am not Limited By The Rules! Even these Rules!
8. Because I am lactose-intolerant, I don't worry about limiting calories from dairy, because I don't get enough of it normally, and I need the calcium (see the mention of my osteoporotic mother in the previous post).
9. When out eating with friends (which we don't do very often), at conventions, or with family at holidays, I don't control my eating. These are days when indulgence is NORMAL. Amusingly, however, I tend to eat about the same amount of food per day as I do when controlling it, as I discovered by tracking. It takes a while for the average amount of food I eat to creep back up to weight-gain levels.
10. THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL. Divorcing food from morality. So I ate an entire container of Ben & Jerry's Cake Batter Ice Cream. Guess what? It was delicious! And that's all. I wasn't "bad" for eating it. I wasn't "cheating." I was EATING NORMALLY. And tomorrow I won't deprive myself by eating less or exercising more to make up for it, instead I will get back on my plan. So with that ice cream I ate 1000 calories more this week than I did last week. It means that - OMG! - I lose slightly less this week. I don't gain a billion pounds. I don't fail. I lose slightly less. That's all.
(I will get into tracking your weight and why your weight goes up and down and all over the place and makes you THINK you gained 5 pounds in one week and why you really haven't in another post. This one is too long already.)
There's probably more that I meant to say but this is TOO DAMN LONG now.