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Hah!
Officially, as of today, forty pounds down. A lot to go: note that I am not actually giving you the numbers yet. XD Maybe I'll do that when I reach my first major goal.
And now for something I'd been threatening to write for a while, about how I'm doing this with, surprisingly, next to no pain.
There's two parts, food and exercise:
Food
First, I'm not dieting. A diet, by its very nature, is something temporary and once you go off it and back to your normal habits, the weight comes back. Diets don't work and they tend to be restrictive, which leads to feelings of deprivation, which leads to snapping and overeating.
What I'm doing is figuring out what normal eating is for me, and doing that.
I'm not giving up any of the foods I like. I'm not even forcing myself to restrict the number of times I eat them: any time I walk into the kitchen, the option is open to eat anything in there, or to get in the car and go buy anything I want. You have no idea how liberating this is.
I am watching the amounts of what I eat, and I do that by setting a calorie target and logging everything I eat. This works for me because I am not prone to eating disorders. Obsessive logging of calories is very bad if you have any tendency to an eating disorder - don't do it if you think you are. I know there's a set of people out there who oppose any sort of food logging, who say that if you listen to your body and eat what it wants, you'll eat the right amount of a variety of foods. Sorry, no. If I do that without paying attention, my body pretty much eats Chik-Fil-A for lunch and Schlotzsky's for dinner and has 2 or 3 Cokes and almost no vegetables whatsoever. I have to reset what my body thinks it wants before I can do that - and it's working, because I tend to eat smaller portions now. The days I go without logging because I'm out of town or something, and come back and fill them in, I find that I'm still fairly close to the calorie limits. I've also worked all my favorite foods into this. I'd not follow any diet that kept me from eating nachos, or Tuna Helper, orbutter-delivery systems potatoes and artichokes.
Secondly, eating has nothing to do with morality. I do not feel guilty for eating over my calorie limit. I do not say I am bad when I have chocolate or go to the snack-bar/cafe thing upstairs in the middle of the afternoon and get a snack. Doing that every so often is normal eating. Normal eating is not eating the same amount of calories every day, day in and day out. If I go over one day, I know I'll probably be under another day - it all evens out. One the forums I read on the site where I log my calories - I don't post there because I'd have to succumb to the urge to bitch-slap many of these people and that would Not Be Good - it drives me insane that people beat themselves up over eating 200 calories more than their targets. That's the diet mentality, and that's why they go back to their original habits and regain weight or never lose any. What I eat has nothing to do with how "good" or "bad" I am, or whether I'm a failure or a success.
I'm also going the gourmet path: I know people who fill their kitchens with diet foods and low-fat foods and so on, but I'd really rather eat a small amount of something excellent than a large amount of something kinda nasty. This is where I do actually do a bit of bargaining: I can eat as much dark chocolate as I want. It's just got to be the really expensive Scharffen Berger stuff that cost $9.95 for 10 ounces. I can eat as much buttered popcorn as I wish. I've just got to make it from scratch in a pan on the stove instead of using microwave popcorn.
There are times I decided not to watch what I ate at all. When I have migraines, often the amount of pain corresponds to my hunger, so I'll eat whatever I damn well want on those days, because overeating for one to three days won't do a damn thing to me in the long run. Also, when I'm out with friends or at a convention, I don't watch what I eat. I'm there to enjoy myself, and food is part of that. I don't go out with friends very often, so it works for me - if my social life were more full, I'd probably change this guideline a bit. :) At conventions, I eat a full breakfast because otherwise I have a tendency to forget to eat at all and trigger migraines - eating too much is way better than a migraine.
Family holidays, also, I refuse to watch what I eat. I'm there to enjoy the day and my family, not to worry about what I put into my mouth. I spent too many holidays with relatives worrying about what they're eating - and, I note, still steadily gaining weight each year :D - to do that. I'm not going to ruin the day for myself or anyone else by worrying about unimportant things, and one day's or even one weekend's food intake is unimportant.
I am also, at the moment, not worrying too much about the amount of fat and various nutrients I eat. This is because that's a major change, and I know I can't do more than one major change to my diet at a time without feeling stressed out and deprived. Once I get to a point where I feel I'm capable of that, I'll start paying more attention to it. Note that I also have good genes when it comes to blood pressure, cholesterol, etc., and I know that mine are all within good levels because I have to get my blood tested periodically for the meds I'm on. :) If I were on the verge of heart disease, I would be taking a very different approach.
And speaking of the meds: getting diagnosed with AD/HD and being put on medication for that did amazing things. AD/HD is, basically, a dysfunction in the area of the brain called the executive center, which controls things like long-term planning, impulse control, motivation and reward processes. (Pretty good summary.) You can see where this feeds into eating and exercising - when you can't control impulses, it's easier to eat more, grab that Coke instead of the diet soda or water, make a snap decision to say "Yes" when someone offers you food, etc. And it's much easier to say "I don't want to do this today; I'll do it tomorrow" - it's not a matter of not wanting, but more a matter of can't with this condition. When there's a hiccup in the motivation/reward process, your brain cannot tie the motivation for not eating this thing or for exercising today with the reward of feeling and looking better down the road. It's not perfect - I've desperately needed to clean the fridge out for three weeks already and still haven't made myself do it, for example, but I've been able to hit near my calorie target every day for the past three weeks, which would have been impossible to do last year.
And one more thing: I don't eat too little. And I (usually) eat back the calories I've expended in exercise. Which means that even though my calorie target is 1600, I tend to eat 1600-1800 a day, because I expend somewhere around 150-200 calories on exercise. 40 pounds in 27 weeks - that's averaging a pound and a half a week, even when eating an amount of calories that Conventional Wisdom says should make me gain weight. This is because you need a certain amount of calories just to live - to keep your brain working, to make your heart beat, to make your lungs inflate. For most women, that's somewhere around 1200/day, higher for most men. If your total intake - the food you've eaten minus your calories burned - is less than that, your body goes on alert and starts conserving energy and using fewer calories because it thinks there's a food shortage. The way to stop that happening is to eat enough, across the long term.
Exercise
A much shorter category. :D First, the AD/HD meds again: this is one of the reasons I've been able to exercise almost every day.
Secondly: not asking too much of myself. All I ask is 20 minutes on the bike, every day. That's just about the length of a half-hour TV show, minus commercials and credits, and is easy to do. I see people here and there who work out for hours a day, who put in lunch hours at the gym and who walk after work, who count the number of calories burned on gym equipment in the thousands at one session, and so on. (A) That's eating disordered behavior. (B) I got way better things to be doing with my time. I promised myself I'd never get into an exercise routine that lasted more than an hour a day unless I was training for something specific: i.e. a race, a competition, karate belt test: of course you train as much as you can, because there's a purpose beyond mere burning calories. (C) That's eating disordered behavior. Worth saying twice.
The optimum exercise recommendation for health is 30 minutes of aerobic exercise (as in brisk walking), 5 days a week, which is very close to my 20 min/7days schedule. More than that, and the results you get decline in comparison to the amount of effort you put in.
Third: toys. I can't just go out and walk, or whatever. I get bored easily (that AD/HD thing again). I need toys. The recumbent bike has been great, as has logging exercise times and distances and the LotR thing, and posting it to LJ.
Fourth: it has to be convenient for me. There's a weight room here in the apartment complex with machines, but that's not convenient, because I have to put on some sort of clothing that is fit to be seen in public (unlike at home where I just put on PJs or a stained tank top and pajama bottoms), and make sure that my hair isn't awful (which means on weekends taking a shower before I go exercise, which is Just Not Right), and so on. Having the bike at home works for me. I can't go out to a gym, either - I can have access to the campus gym for $5/month - because it's way too much effort. I'd have to bring gym clothes to work or rent a locker, then go find parking nearby (because I'm not walking back across campus when I'm tired out), and then I'd either have to take a shower there, meaning two showers in one day which I find ridiculous for daily life, or drive home all sweaty and icky.
And last but not least: another place I buck conventional wisdom is that I weigh myself several times a day. :D Again, if you're prone to eating disorders, this is BAD behavior. But with me, it means that I have a good idea of how much my weight fluctuates over a day and over a week. If I weigh 4 pounds more on Wednesday than I did on Sunday, it's not a big deal because I know I always see a drop around Friday and Saturday, no matter what I've done or eaten during the week.
Anyway, after aaaaall of that: losing weight doesn't make me a better person. It won't make me more popular (and I wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who wouldn't be friends with someone fat), it won't make me more confident (I got plenty of other insecurities, thankyouverymuch, and some of the most confident women I know are my size or larger), and it won't turn me into the Perfect Woman, because there's no such thing. All it does is make me smaller. :) I'm not interested in getting down to the weight that TV tells me I should be, or that the height/weight charts* and BMI indicators tell me I should be, I'm mostly interested in being a weight I feel comfortable with.
* Created in the 1930s and 1950s by insurance companies studying white, professional men, BTW, not women or people of color or people working lower-class jobs. The history of our obsession with weight is quite interesting and enlightening.
And now if you excuse me, I'm off to take a shower, attempt to clean out the fridge, and go to the grocery store. :)
And now for something I'd been threatening to write for a while, about how I'm doing this with, surprisingly, next to no pain.
There's two parts, food and exercise:
Food
First, I'm not dieting. A diet, by its very nature, is something temporary and once you go off it and back to your normal habits, the weight comes back. Diets don't work and they tend to be restrictive, which leads to feelings of deprivation, which leads to snapping and overeating.
What I'm doing is figuring out what normal eating is for me, and doing that.
I'm not giving up any of the foods I like. I'm not even forcing myself to restrict the number of times I eat them: any time I walk into the kitchen, the option is open to eat anything in there, or to get in the car and go buy anything I want. You have no idea how liberating this is.
I am watching the amounts of what I eat, and I do that by setting a calorie target and logging everything I eat. This works for me because I am not prone to eating disorders. Obsessive logging of calories is very bad if you have any tendency to an eating disorder - don't do it if you think you are. I know there's a set of people out there who oppose any sort of food logging, who say that if you listen to your body and eat what it wants, you'll eat the right amount of a variety of foods. Sorry, no. If I do that without paying attention, my body pretty much eats Chik-Fil-A for lunch and Schlotzsky's for dinner and has 2 or 3 Cokes and almost no vegetables whatsoever. I have to reset what my body thinks it wants before I can do that - and it's working, because I tend to eat smaller portions now. The days I go without logging because I'm out of town or something, and come back and fill them in, I find that I'm still fairly close to the calorie limits. I've also worked all my favorite foods into this. I'd not follow any diet that kept me from eating nachos, or Tuna Helper, or
Secondly, eating has nothing to do with morality. I do not feel guilty for eating over my calorie limit. I do not say I am bad when I have chocolate or go to the snack-bar/cafe thing upstairs in the middle of the afternoon and get a snack. Doing that every so often is normal eating. Normal eating is not eating the same amount of calories every day, day in and day out. If I go over one day, I know I'll probably be under another day - it all evens out. One the forums I read on the site where I log my calories - I don't post there because I'd have to succumb to the urge to bitch-slap many of these people and that would Not Be Good - it drives me insane that people beat themselves up over eating 200 calories more than their targets. That's the diet mentality, and that's why they go back to their original habits and regain weight or never lose any. What I eat has nothing to do with how "good" or "bad" I am, or whether I'm a failure or a success.
I'm also going the gourmet path: I know people who fill their kitchens with diet foods and low-fat foods and so on, but I'd really rather eat a small amount of something excellent than a large amount of something kinda nasty. This is where I do actually do a bit of bargaining: I can eat as much dark chocolate as I want. It's just got to be the really expensive Scharffen Berger stuff that cost $9.95 for 10 ounces. I can eat as much buttered popcorn as I wish. I've just got to make it from scratch in a pan on the stove instead of using microwave popcorn.
There are times I decided not to watch what I ate at all. When I have migraines, often the amount of pain corresponds to my hunger, so I'll eat whatever I damn well want on those days, because overeating for one to three days won't do a damn thing to me in the long run. Also, when I'm out with friends or at a convention, I don't watch what I eat. I'm there to enjoy myself, and food is part of that. I don't go out with friends very often, so it works for me - if my social life were more full, I'd probably change this guideline a bit. :) At conventions, I eat a full breakfast because otherwise I have a tendency to forget to eat at all and trigger migraines - eating too much is way better than a migraine.
Family holidays, also, I refuse to watch what I eat. I'm there to enjoy the day and my family, not to worry about what I put into my mouth. I spent too many holidays with relatives worrying about what they're eating - and, I note, still steadily gaining weight each year :D - to do that. I'm not going to ruin the day for myself or anyone else by worrying about unimportant things, and one day's or even one weekend's food intake is unimportant.
I am also, at the moment, not worrying too much about the amount of fat and various nutrients I eat. This is because that's a major change, and I know I can't do more than one major change to my diet at a time without feeling stressed out and deprived. Once I get to a point where I feel I'm capable of that, I'll start paying more attention to it. Note that I also have good genes when it comes to blood pressure, cholesterol, etc., and I know that mine are all within good levels because I have to get my blood tested periodically for the meds I'm on. :) If I were on the verge of heart disease, I would be taking a very different approach.
And speaking of the meds: getting diagnosed with AD/HD and being put on medication for that did amazing things. AD/HD is, basically, a dysfunction in the area of the brain called the executive center, which controls things like long-term planning, impulse control, motivation and reward processes. (Pretty good summary.) You can see where this feeds into eating and exercising - when you can't control impulses, it's easier to eat more, grab that Coke instead of the diet soda or water, make a snap decision to say "Yes" when someone offers you food, etc. And it's much easier to say "I don't want to do this today; I'll do it tomorrow" - it's not a matter of not wanting, but more a matter of can't with this condition. When there's a hiccup in the motivation/reward process, your brain cannot tie the motivation for not eating this thing or for exercising today with the reward of feeling and looking better down the road. It's not perfect - I've desperately needed to clean the fridge out for three weeks already and still haven't made myself do it, for example, but I've been able to hit near my calorie target every day for the past three weeks, which would have been impossible to do last year.
And one more thing: I don't eat too little. And I (usually) eat back the calories I've expended in exercise. Which means that even though my calorie target is 1600, I tend to eat 1600-1800 a day, because I expend somewhere around 150-200 calories on exercise. 40 pounds in 27 weeks - that's averaging a pound and a half a week, even when eating an amount of calories that Conventional Wisdom says should make me gain weight. This is because you need a certain amount of calories just to live - to keep your brain working, to make your heart beat, to make your lungs inflate. For most women, that's somewhere around 1200/day, higher for most men. If your total intake - the food you've eaten minus your calories burned - is less than that, your body goes on alert and starts conserving energy and using fewer calories because it thinks there's a food shortage. The way to stop that happening is to eat enough, across the long term.
Exercise
A much shorter category. :D First, the AD/HD meds again: this is one of the reasons I've been able to exercise almost every day.
Secondly: not asking too much of myself. All I ask is 20 minutes on the bike, every day. That's just about the length of a half-hour TV show, minus commercials and credits, and is easy to do. I see people here and there who work out for hours a day, who put in lunch hours at the gym and who walk after work, who count the number of calories burned on gym equipment in the thousands at one session, and so on. (A) That's eating disordered behavior. (B) I got way better things to be doing with my time. I promised myself I'd never get into an exercise routine that lasted more than an hour a day unless I was training for something specific: i.e. a race, a competition, karate belt test: of course you train as much as you can, because there's a purpose beyond mere burning calories. (C) That's eating disordered behavior. Worth saying twice.
The optimum exercise recommendation for health is 30 minutes of aerobic exercise (as in brisk walking), 5 days a week, which is very close to my 20 min/7days schedule. More than that, and the results you get decline in comparison to the amount of effort you put in.
Third: toys. I can't just go out and walk, or whatever. I get bored easily (that AD/HD thing again). I need toys. The recumbent bike has been great, as has logging exercise times and distances and the LotR thing, and posting it to LJ.
Fourth: it has to be convenient for me. There's a weight room here in the apartment complex with machines, but that's not convenient, because I have to put on some sort of clothing that is fit to be seen in public (unlike at home where I just put on PJs or a stained tank top and pajama bottoms), and make sure that my hair isn't awful (which means on weekends taking a shower before I go exercise, which is Just Not Right), and so on. Having the bike at home works for me. I can't go out to a gym, either - I can have access to the campus gym for $5/month - because it's way too much effort. I'd have to bring gym clothes to work or rent a locker, then go find parking nearby (because I'm not walking back across campus when I'm tired out), and then I'd either have to take a shower there, meaning two showers in one day which I find ridiculous for daily life, or drive home all sweaty and icky.
And last but not least: another place I buck conventional wisdom is that I weigh myself several times a day. :D Again, if you're prone to eating disorders, this is BAD behavior. But with me, it means that I have a good idea of how much my weight fluctuates over a day and over a week. If I weigh 4 pounds more on Wednesday than I did on Sunday, it's not a big deal because I know I always see a drop around Friday and Saturday, no matter what I've done or eaten during the week.
Anyway, after aaaaall of that: losing weight doesn't make me a better person. It won't make me more popular (and I wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who wouldn't be friends with someone fat), it won't make me more confident (I got plenty of other insecurities, thankyouverymuch, and some of the most confident women I know are my size or larger), and it won't turn me into the Perfect Woman, because there's no such thing. All it does is make me smaller. :) I'm not interested in getting down to the weight that TV tells me I should be, or that the height/weight charts* and BMI indicators tell me I should be, I'm mostly interested in being a weight I feel comfortable with.
* Created in the 1930s and 1950s by insurance companies studying white, professional men, BTW, not women or people of color or people working lower-class jobs. The history of our obsession with weight is quite interesting and enlightening.
And now if you excuse me, I'm off to take a shower, attempt to clean out the fridge, and go to the grocery store. :)
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