This Weigh In Brought to You by Mozzarella Sticks

Happy Friday!

I am typing this from home as I took the day off to give John and myself enough time to get to D.C. today. I think I mentioned this, but this weekend we'll be attending the wedding of one of his old friends, so I get the interesting prospect of attending a wedding where I know neither the bride nor the groom. Another perk is that I get to see some college friends over the weekend, most of whom I haven't seen in years.

The goal I set out for myself last week was to track. It was a small goal, just focusing on this week. I think it would have been too much to make a goal of "start tracking today and then continue until you die or they invent some kind of autocounter."

I'm happy to say that I have been tracking this week! Even when I ate, dear God, NINE mozzarella sticks last night at our office happy hour for a departing colleague. Aside from last night, I've been eating at a good deficit this week overall.

This week's weigh-in:

	Start	6/8	8/19	10/29	12/31	1/28	3/31	4/21	5/5	5/12	6/7	6/18	6/24
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181.4	177.2	174.6	168.4	170.4	172.4	171.8	174.4	169.8	169.8
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.8	67.1	65.3	60.3	61.3	63.4	60.9	65	60.5	61
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	67.3	63.9	64.4	61.5	65	64	64.2	65.1	62.5	59.4

Aw, man, was hoping for something better. Keep in mind this weigh-in was before my private fried cheese party. But it's exactly the same as last week, except more fat and less muscle. Fail. Maybe the weekend before I started tracking was worse than I thought, or maybe it's one of another million factors. Either way, I need to work really hard this weekend not to go overboard. 

Even though I can see and feel that my waist has gotten smaller in the last couple of months, I still feel like I haven't made progress in months. My failure is consistency. I can be great for a few days, but those one or two crappy ones really throw me off. I need to be better, or learn how, to incorporate reasonable choices into those difficult food-moments - happy hours, weddings, and parties. 

Slow and steady wins the race, right? 

Highly Exciting: The Next Thirty Days

Have you ever wished that someone would take the thought out of dieting for you? That’s the idea behind multi-million dollar programs like Jenny Craig. Simple: Just eat their food, don’t eat anything else, and you’ll lose weight. Except that you never learn how to actually eat right or how to live in the real world.

Let’s get real here. I did not eat well over the weekend, much like the last few weekends have also been. This morning I was in at 175 even, so at least five or six pounds UP. Some is bloat but some is unfortunately just gained weight. Yuck.

By about a foot.

I don't think buying all diet food is worth the cost. However, I’d like to take the thought out of losing weight, just a little bit, and just for a little while. To (for most of the time) not worry about choices. Food has been such a huge focus for so long, and not in a good way - I’m either doing great, losing weight, and spending a lot of time and energy on it, or I’m eating terribly, and still spending a lot of time and energy on it.

I am stopping starting today (well technically yesterday this point), this morning. For the next 30 days I'm going on a more restricted diet. Take away the choice and the thought. I'm also putting the scale away so I'm not focusing on my weight. These next 30 days will be hard, but  I’ll do it because I know it's temporary and also because I'm at my wits end and need to go to the other extreme. After the 30 days, I’ll decide what's next. My plan is healthy - plenty of calories, veggies, fat, etc -it's just not sustainable because it's so limiting. That’s okay, I don’t need it to be long term. What I do need is a short term plan that will let me lose a bit of weight without having to focus so much on food.

So, the plan: I’ll give myself two options for breakfast, two for lunch and two for dinner. These choices will be things that I’ve eaten over and over again and still enjoy. Coffee with breakfast, always. Then oatmeal or Greek yogurt with honey. A lettuce/random veggies salad for lunch, with either beans, feta cheese, and a salsa dressing, OR with ground turkey and beans. Dinner will always have a veggie, and then be either flatbread pizza or two all beef hot dogs on whole wheat bread. Alternate is a frozen Amy’s entree. If I’m feeling genuinely hungry, I’ll have an apple and/or a glass of milk for a snack. Most importantly - no junk food, lots of vegetables, and little to no snacking.

Hot dogs as part of a diet? Yes. I know these are not all ideal options in terms of processing or sodium level, but they are meals that are really simple, easy, and keep me full. I’ll be adding veggies so it’s not quite the dinner plans of an eleven-year-old. Overall, I’d like to give this plan a chance, at least a week, before making adjustments to portions sizes or food choices.

This plan, this making decisions now about food so that I don’t have to later, won’t work 100% of the time. I’m not going to turn down having dinner with friends, or go to a restaurant and request that they cook me a hot dog and some broccoli. So, my plan for those times, maybe one or two meals a week, is to set a high but not insane calorie limit, and just stay within that. As long as it’s not more than a couple of meals, I should still have a good calorie deficit for the week.

I can't wait until I'm feeling motivated or inspired because who knows when that will happen? Right now I just feel determined. I need to start. I need to start somewhere, even if I know it doesn’t make sense in the long term.

Day one, May 26. Day 30, June 25.

Weekly Weigh In - Getting Off the Blah Train

This week’s stats:

	Start	6/8	8/19	10/29	12/31	1/28	3/31	4/7	4/21	5/5	5/12
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181.4	177.2	174.6	168.4	170	170.4	172.4	171.8
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.8	67.1	65.3	60.3	60.8	61.3	63.4	60.9
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	67.3	63.9	64.4	61.5	61.5	65	64	64.2

So fat is way down while muscle mass maintained. Good numbers, considering. I don’t know how much of the net gain is actual weight from my time overeating, and how much is bloat, but either way I’d like it to go away.

Sunday was Mother’s Day. My mom is the best, and my siblings and I planned to make a big homemade dinner with my parents and grandparents to celebrate. Since she loves Italian, we decided to make soup, pizza with fun toppings, and some veggies. Also, mojitos because those are the best.

I’ve kept up my baking hiatus in general, and I know that making vegetables instead of desserts for social gatherings has probably saved me approximately 24329 calories in “I have to eat one to make sure it’s good.”

The siren song of miniature chocolates

But for some reason my brain went out the window and I was all, “I’m going to make lava cakes for dessert! And we’ll get some fancy $14-a-pint Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream to go with it!” My plan to not go overboard was “Don’t go overboard.”

"We need a plan of attack!"

Fail. Why do I keep doing that? Why do I forget that I need planning, and rules, or I’ll just snack/taste throughout the day and not really realize how much I must have consumed until it’s hours later? I picked at the chocolate chips, and split a “test” pizza with my brother and sister. (We used this recipe for pizza dough; it was amazing.)

I have my go-to rules - no snacking and no seconds. I wish I had just stuck to that. One small lava cake at dinner, even adding ice cream to make a 400-calorie dessert, could have been a nice treat that was part of a wonderful celebration of my mother and grandmother. Instead, I compounded that with at least three servings of chocolate chips and tastes of batter. I need to be more mindful of situations like that - I seem to be super mindful after it happens, of course. But that’s not really even mindfulness, that’s just acknowledging my mistakes. Mindfulness has to come before the food to count and to accomplish anything.

I want to start making progress again, not just stagnant at this awesome but insufficient thirty pound loss. I think a great way to do this is focus on small things, and also to remind myself of the good things I am doing, even if and when I’m not perfect. I’m still going to the gym consistently, I am doing well in not being in denial over how many calories or how much I ate, and most importantly, I’m still trying, still caring, and still pushing myself to do better.

Goals for this Week:

• Track all food and drinks, no matter what
• Go to the gym at least three more times before Sunday, ideally four
• Remember that the delicious chocolate in the office candy bowl is the result of horrible human conditions and mass environmental destruction and I don’t want it
• Don’t have cake at the office farewell on Thursday
• This is actually the first “farewell” we’ve had in at least six months. Back when we had a whole slew of farewell cakes, I got used to just not having any and not caring that I wasn’t. I know that it’s not worth it, cake is not something that excites me, so I just need to do that.

What are your strategies for being healthy or healthier this week?

February Goal Results, and Goals for March

A month ago (<-- link) I made some goals for the month of February. Let’s see how I measured, or didn’t measure, up.

Goal: Get into the 160s to reach an official 30 pound loss

• Fail, fail, fail, fail. See posts in February for my whining on this situation. I’m hoping March is the magic month. This is exactly like getting out of the 180's was

Source

Goal: Increase Strength Training to 2-3 times per week

• In hindsight, I think this goal was too lofty. Going from one to three times a week ended up being more of a challenge than I thought
• The improvement here is that I started attending Total Body Conditioning, which has much more of an impact than my 10-15 minute sessions

Goal: Improve eating habits over the weekends, when I’ve been going overboard

• With the exception of the birthday/crappy week, this has been much improved.
• I’ve made two major changes to get better about this: Stop cooking desserts for other people, and actually making a detailed plan about what I’m going to eat for group meals. Deciding how much, if any, bread to have is 100x easier before the meal than during

Goal: Make more creative breakfasts, or anything that’s not Greek Yogurt or Oatmeal

• Breakfast today was oatmeal, so I’ll let you determine this one. However, I bought a carton of egg whites, so we are well on our way here.
• Confession: I stopped caring about this one

Goal: Bring lunch to work at least 4 days a week

• Score! I’ve been bringing lunch to work very consistently. A couple of times it’s just been a frozen meal (usually Amy’s), but it counts because it’s still cheaper, and the decision part of work lunches is out of the equation  

Goal: Don’t Let My Birthday Become an Excuse to Overeat for a Week

• Another fail here. I indulged myself to a half pound gain that week, which manifested as four extra pounds, which thankfully are gone now

Goal: Be Better About Cooking/Prepping Sundays

• Meh. I’m probably about the same here.

Bottom line: Maybe this was too many goals. I was trying to improve in every weight loss-related area where I needed to work, instead of focusing on just a couple. Or I’m just making excuses.

Either way, for my March goals, I’m going to zero in much more. For example, I’ll cross the breakfast boredom bridge when I reach it.

Goals for March

• No Sugar 
• This is an obvious one since it’s already underway. I decided to cut way, way back on my sugar intake outside of work, and completely stop eating office treats. Overall this is going well! There have been many wonderful items in my office, and also lots of mini candies, and I’ve stayed far away from them all.
• I’ve even realized I don’t even taste the difference when I decrease the sugar in my coffee by 25%. (6 grams instead of 8). I’m working on eventually getting down to just taking my coffee with milk. That would save me 30 calories a day, which is 30 more calories of cheese.
• So overall my intention is just to keep this up through March at least.
• Get to the 160s
• Seriously. There’s 4.5 weeks in March. I can do this.
• According to my calorie deficits, I should be in the low 170s already. I'm not. I'm impatient.

Weigh-In: Special Events Have Diminishing Returns

This week’s weigh-in:

	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/6	11/19	12/3	12/10	12/17
Weight	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	179.6	177.6	181	179	179.2
Lbs. Fat	82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	70.3	68.1	71.4	66.9	68.4
Lbs. Muscle	67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	65	63.3	68.7	64	67.3

So we’re at basically the same as last week, which is what I was expected. This week was hard; there was the happy hour, a potluck, another party, and I had trouble staying on track. I tried, but it’s sad how quickly you (or rather, I), can eat several hundred calories worth of fries. The upside is that I tracked everything, and had some good days and great choices that balanced out the bad.

Yesterday, they had a staff appreciation events, which simply equal two giant cakes. And I kept my no office food rule and didn’t have any! I didn’t even care that I didn’t have any → even bigger victory.

This week there are more challenges: it’s a Chanukah party on Saturday night, two meals with friends before that, and probably a lot of food at the office. Awesome events with awesome people, but definitely challenging food-wise. Especially Chanukah - one of the main traditions for this holiday is to fry food and eat it.

I’m trying to remind myself that when you have four special events in one week, they’re not special anymore and I should start treating them like regular days. This is especially true for annual non-personal events like New Year’s Eve or Halloween.

And even some are really special, like a wedding, that still shouldn’t give me a reason to overeat. This is maybe an area in which I should be selfish - I’ll only indulge with food if the event is special to me personally. It’s an easy way to be discriminatory. My birthday, my wedding day, that’s about it. Not my husband’s birthday or a friend’s wedding. Not that I can’t enjoy some fancy food at a wedding. It’s more about an attitude of, “This is not that day.” Hell, maybe it will help me focus more on the happiness of the event than what I should have for dessert.

We’re going to a friend’s wedding next Sunday, and there is sure to be a ton of food. But as thrilled as I am for the bride and groom, it’s not my wedding, right? So I will enjoy some food, but (try to) focus on the dancing and fun and romance of the evening, and not on how many cookies I can fit onto a tiny dessert plate.

Weekly Weigh-In - Drunk Scale

Here are the latest numbers, straight from my unforgiving and possibly drunk bathroom scale:

	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/6	11/12	11/19	12/3	12/10
Weight	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	179.6	179.6	177.6	181	179
Lbs. Fat	82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	70.3	68.8	68.1	71.4	66.9
Lbs. Muscle	67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	65	67.7	63.3	68.7	64

The scale has been fluctuating wildly last few weeks, but at least I'm back on the right track. Plus, the fat pounds are the lowest I've had - a good sign. One of my short-term goals, besides getting into the 160s by 2/16, is to have more muscle than fat. I'm getting close, and I think it will cause a little mental shift to have a more proper ratio.

There are too many events happening this week - our company's holiday party tonight, potluck meals with friends, our department potluck on Monday, and another little work party on Tuesday. Of course it's nice to be celebrating, but it's a lot of food-events for one week.

I'm going to try to do my best tonight, but not beat myself up if I don't do well. I went to the gym, had a hearty but lighter lunch, and will be having a "mini" dinner before head out there, so I don't have the mentality of "this is my dinner" when looking at the delicious but likely deep-fried food at the bar, because that often leads to overeating.

For the work potluck I'm going to make a vegetable based dish so there's something healthier I can focus on, and probably fudge because fudge is awesome. Yesterday I slipped on my "no food at work" rule and had a chocolate-covered Oreo that someone got as a holiday gift from a vendor. How is something so simple, so delicious?

How I Stopped Eating Office Junk Food

About a month ago, I set out to have a low-sugar week. For breakfast, I traded in my sweetened yogurt for homemade oatmeal; I turned down evening treats and just said no to the delicious office sweets. My only slip up was that Friday night, where I had some meringues that one of our friends brought over.

I plan to continue limiting my sugar intake - cutting it out at work and limiting it at home. I don’t think sugar is evil or want to say goodbye to it, no doubt in a drawn-out farewell scene where I cry and the sugar strokes my cheek before sadly turning away and going off to war, but cutting it out for just a week really pinpointed the weaknesses in my food plans. I was doing pretty well, I was making progress, but not as quickly as I could have.

I’ve realized that (part of) the answer is in those little treats that I would end up eating during the day - a little chocolate from the candy bowl, a quarter of a bagel from the office breakfast, a couple of bites of something offered by a generous co-worker... They take a great day and turn it into an okay one, or they leave me with only 300 calories for dinner, so I end up going over my intended calorie allotment in order to eat a reasonable dinner. Not ideal.

Since that week, I have not had a single office treat. Not when there were chocolate croissants at breakfast, not when a colleague brought in cookies from the best place in town, still warm, not when the candy bowl was overflowing with mini Three Musketeers. There has never been a month-long period where I didn’t eat any office food - probably not even a single week where I didn’t partake in some way. (And I wonder why I gained twenty-five pounds after I started working.) 

That's... a tough one.

Before now it never seriously occurred to me that cutting out office food - all office food - was a possibility. I mean, what if there was a really good cake? What about balancing treats with eating healthy? Turns out that was bullshit - I'm not cutting out all sugar, just what's at work. Sometimes it's easier to always say no. I'm taking those automatic "no, thanks" answers to a new super-level, office edition, available in stores right now.

This is one of those things where I’m so proud I want to tell people on the subway about my accomplishment, and high school students are surprisingly good listeners.

And those dumb cliches about how "It gets easier" and "You don't even want it after a while" are completely true. That first week of my personal low-sugar party, I was heating up my oatmeal in the office kitchen and someone had put the leftovers from a “welcome to the company” breakfast in there - a plate or two of pastries, wafting up their intoxicating buttery scent. Almost every other time, even the weeks I lose weight and generally consider to be successful, I’ve had a bite or even a quarter of a muffin. But this time I ignored them until the microwave beeped. And it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. It was just something I do, and I didn’t even feel like I missed out on anything. 

It’s easier to go off previous momentum, to think “I never have those. I can, but they’re not worth it so I don’t bother” than agonize over whether I should spend one or two hundred calories on it. It turns out it’s easier to just never have it than to decide if I should.

The lesson I’ve taken from this is that it’s not worth it 99.9% of the time. Anything offered at work, I can either buy or make. So if I wouldn’t buy it or make it, why should I eat it just because it’s free and in front of me? Once an awesome colleague stood in line for three hours to bring us cronuts, those super-trendy donut/croissant hybrids, only sold at one location and limited to two per customer. That’s the only time it’s ever been worth it for me to have any of the sweets at work, because then I got to try something unique that I’ll most likely never have again. But catered chocolate croissants? Bagels? Even, I dare say it, fresh-made apple cider donuts? Still not worth it. I love that my coworkers and my company can be so generous, and it definitely contributes to our generally pleasant work environment, but I no longer want to participate.

Nobody is going to notice or care, just like they haven’t so far. If I really, really, want something, then I need to want it enough to at least go out and buy it. “Free” and “being offered to me” are not reasons to eat it.