30 Days Challenge: Day Four

Day Four, so far so (pretty good). I didn’t have any of the office cake at the latest farewell, and I also successfully avoided the bagels and muffins in the kitchen this morning. I haven’t been at 100% like I’d like - I did have a little candy from the bowl - but overall I’ve faithfully followed my eating plan, packing salads for lunch and avoiding snacking. I know that a piece of candy is far from the end of the world, and far from derailing a diet, but the point of this was to be stricter, knowing that it was just for 30 days, so I’m going to keep working on that part. But the big picture is looking good.

Tonight, of course, starts the weekend, when I’m the worst at eating. Maybe it’s the free time, or lack of structure, or just that there’s bigger chance of there being lots of food around in a way I’m not able to control like I can during the week. I have my plan - to give myself a reasonable calorie allotment for the meal - and if that doesn’t help, I’ll think of a new strategy. However, I do think that just being mindful of what and how much I’m eating can help me stay on track.

I’m going to try to post here more over the next month, because I naval-grazingly want to keep track of how well I do, and these posts will be the only “data” I have to work with. I’m not tracking, so I can’t go back to my food diaries and (over)analyze what and how much I ate.

It’s feels odd not to track my food. For the last year, if I haven't been tracking, then it's because I've been eating like crap. I am weighing and measuring everything that I eat, just not tracking it. Instead, with this new plan, I know that I can have 1/4-1/3 pound of lean ground beef, and then 1/2-1 cup of black beans, etc, and that it all works out to a good calorie deficit for the day. It's like I've pretracked the whole month.

On the one hand, tracking forces me to remember that piece or bite or bit of whatever. On the other hand, I want to get into the mentality that I shouldn’t be having those little things because I can’t track it, because I could easily forget about it and have another bit a few hours later. The only accountability is in my own mind.

Is it weird that I really like doing stuff like this, that I like giving myself little challenges with food plans? Does that make my weight loss more or less sustainable? I have no idea, but I do think it keeps me going.

xkcd.com

Another No-Sugar Challenge and Marching On

This has been a tough couple of weeks. It started with my impending birthday, and (hopefully) ended yesterday with a family friend’s wedding. The not caring, or the unable to care, the not thinking about what I was eating before I did the eating. It was just one bad day on top of another. I also spent too much time feeling sorry for myself, in a fun little bubble of self-pity and “whoa is me.” I think some of it stemmed from feeling that this weight has been coming off so excruciatingly slowly, slower than I think it should be based on calories and exercise.

This has to stop, right now. Today. Now. Because I know all too well what happens if I let this continue. And it rhymes with “blain a brother lenty tounds.”

New (Old) Challenge

So starting today, now, I’m cutting way, way, down on sugar. For now I’m just looking at the next month, so until March 23. I need to get rid of it to get back to moderation. I did it before, and it was actually easier than I had anticipated. I had a bit in my coffee, sometimes a teaspoon or two with my oatmeal or yogurt breakfasts, and a very occasional weekend treat. But I took it out of the other day to day stuff, the places where it was taking over too much - the work food, the mid-week evening treats. It didn’t matter that I was tracking the treats, they were inhibiting my weight loss. 

When I did it last time, I didn’t have the level of left out/deprivation feelings that I assumed would occur. It actually made me feel good, and in control, and strong. So I can do it again.

As for the last couple of weeks, the upside is that I kept up the tracking and working out. After tracking everything as best as possible, I am at a half-pound gain from last week (which I already mentioned in my previous post), and so far am at close to even/slight gain for this week. If I can shape up over the next couple of days, I can pull off about a 1200-calorie deficit for this week. Not too bad, considering.

I remind myself this is the bump - what I do right now, when things got a bit more difficult, is the difference between eventually succeeding or perpetually coming close and then failing. Weight loss isn’t about “if” you screw up, but what you do after it happens. Right now this is a little bump, and if I can refocus and move on from the past couple of weeks, that’s all it will be. Right?

Weekly Weigh-In and Cutting Out Sugar

I can’t believe it’s Saturday; this week has definitely flown by. Partially motivated by my sister-in-law’s visit and wanting to actually feed her, I made dinners during this past week and had leftovers every day. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were all the same leftovers for lunch - One-Pot Chicken Lo Mein. Easy and delicious. Thankfully, she doesn’t care about junk food, so she didn’t mind that we didn’t have any.

This week’s weigh-in, from Wednesday.

	June 8th	August 4th	August 12th	August 19th	August 26th	September 3rd	September 10th
Weight	191.2	184	183	182.6	181.4	182.8	182
Pounds of Fat	82.7	74.5	70.4	72.5	71.8	73	71.7
Pounds of Muscle	67.3	68.2	66.4	66.8	67.3	67.2	67.5

I was somewhat surprised and disappointed at this, since my tracking indicates I should be in the 170s already, but it is what it is.

Not at all mad.

Right now, I’m twenty pounds below my highest weight, but I don’t feel much different. Last time - on the way up and the way down - the difference between 170 pounds and 180 pounds was somehow much more noticeable than the first twenty pound loss, which took me from the original 200 down to 180. At 170 pounds, I could wear my fall/winter sweaters comfortably, my face didn’t look bloated, and my dimples were visible.

I am really impatient to get to that point, and even though I’m making progress, I feel like little things along the way have been slowing me down. Those little treats have been making the difference between a three-pound loss every month and a six-pound one: the candies at work, and most frustratingly, a few licks of batter from what I bake each week for our friends.

The last time I felt like this, like I was doing the weight loss 80%, was back in June. Then at 190 pounds, my little extra treats ended up causing my weight to stay the same week after week. Frustrated and realizing that I was doing enough of the work to feel like I was making an effort, but not enough to actually get results, I plunged in, lowered my daily calorie goal, and lost an average of a pound a week for ten or so weeks. Now I feel like I’m stagnating again, letting little treats add up. This time, it’s slowing the weight loss, not preventing it, but still frustrating.

I want to fix that. As an experiment, I’m going to cut out most of the sugar from my diet. I will still have eight grams of sugar in my coffee each morning, and one treat on Sundays with J, but that will be it. I don’t have any interest in cutting food groups out of my life because it’s not realistic, at least for me.

Butter and I hang like, all the time. 

This is similar to when I went on a whole schpiel about default settings - those automatic answers and reactions that we all have for certain questions or situations. My default answer to an offer of food - especially office treats - has been too much “yes” lately. Sure, I track it, but it still affects my day and possibly the changes I'll say "yes" to other temptations.

It’s time to get back. I’ll take this one week at a time. Assuming we go to the gym and I have the calories to spare, I’ll enjoy a 150-400 calorie treat tomorrow. And then it will just be “No, thanks” for the rest of the week. Maybe next week I’ll keep going, maybe I won’t. But that mentality of “I can stop doing this anytime I want” will help me to not feel like I’m being deprived or punished, and that’s not what this is. In fact, it’s the opposite: I’m trying to take the control from the food, and return it to where it belongs.

When Motivation Fades

I'm glad August is over. Some happy-but-food-challenging events happened this week, like the birthday of a good friend who has been away for the summer, whose celebration involved three giant pizzas for ten people. Then there were some stressful things, like someone close to me going through some crappy stuff, and storing 20 boxes of our friend’s random crap in our tiny apartment. Apologies for the vague-blogging, I’m mostly just trying to get across that this week was hard, and I let worrying about food and calories fall to the bottom of the list. I was trying to track, went to the gym a few times, but couldn’t get myself to feel motivated.

I did end up tracking everything as best I could, and it seems I came out about even, and maybe even a thousand calories or so under. So maybe I’m actually getting better at this, at least a little? That a crappy week which followed an indulgent weekend, where I’m trying to track but all I really want is a vanilla twist on a cone with rainbow sprinkles, doesn’t have to set me back totally? (Chocolate sprinkles are for people who hate joy.) Perhaps I’m getting better at having a crappy week?

Right now, even for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to push through, trying to keep going, waiting and hoping for some of that motivation to come back better. You know the cliches about how “The days when it’s most important to exercise are usually the days you most need it” or "if you wait for your perfect conditions to start, you never will"? They feel true. It’s not about what I did in June and July, when I had a whole “eight week reboot”, all energetic, tracking, motivated, feeling excited for the start of something.

But I joined in February!

Rather, it’s what I do now, when the newness (of another restart) has faded, when the weight loss slows, when life happens - that’s what matters. When I lost those fifty pounds, I certainly wasn’t feeling all go-getter and motivated during the entire process, because that’s impossible. But I still tried and still did it, even when I wanted to do anything else but. I kept trying, and all those little days added up (or rather, down) to a weight loss of fifty pounds.

Yesterday, I was trying to get right back into it.  I went to Zumba with my new workout friend and we walked to and from the gym. I still dance like a drunken zebra and can’t figure out how some of these people manage to move their feet, hips, and arms in different but synchronized ways, but it’s fun and burns 500 calories a class. It was a good day; we did some apartment organization and I made us gnocchi with marinara, and roasted asparagus, for dinner.

Today, we went to my parent’s house to celebrate Labor Day and my grandmother’s birthday. I made a chocolate cake for the occasion. I managed to have a good lunch and not eat 2/5 of the frosting. I wouldn’t call my food at dinner a success, but it wasn’t a total fail either. I’m still plugging along, trying to at least eat mindfully and decide if something is worth it.

Moving on - Despite the fact that the last couple of weeks weren’t too bad, I did not make my goal of getting into the 170’s by September. That kind of sucks, since it was well within my reach and I just want to get out of the 180s already. Thus I have an obvious goal for September. Begone 180s, and your little dog too! Beyond that, 175 is my next small goal, mostly because it’s a round number and solidly in the 170s.

This month is going to be hard. There are some Jewish holidays, one of which will involve a long weekend in Michigan, away from habits and routines. Work is going to start getting busy again, as all the attorneys come back from their summer vacations and realize how much shit they need to get done. But I’m going to remember that cliche that is so right, that my weight loss will not be accomplished on those few days when everything is right and I feel great, but rather on the normal, mundane days, where I try to eat right, to shape my habits and reshape my relationship with food.

Minor motivation: I got to see a friend of mine who just had a baby and meet her teeny, beautiful, week-old son. We took a photo together and I looked more like I had given birth a week ago than she did. I still forget that I weigh 180-185 pounds, despite seeing it on the scale.

Week 5 Done, and Week 6 Plan: The Gods of Smug

This was a great weekend. We did ALL the laundry, and I mean that quite literally. I realized, after someone told me, that there are actually three steps to dishes and laundry: Wash, dry, put away, dammit.  If the clean laundry lives in a hamper for a week or two, and it only moved when I rummage through it to find specific things, and then eventually gets washed again because we can’t remember if it was clean or dirty, then it was not done. So I’m disproportionately proud to say that the laundry is DONE. This has nothing to do with weight loss, I'm just that proud.

Food-wise, this past week (week 5) averaged out to good, though not as good as it could have been. The weekdays were great and I ate and felt good and went to the gym. But I let myself go a little too much on the weekend. Ironically, the main culprit was cookie dough that I ate in my apartment. I who, of course, just wrote about how locations can make it easier or harder to resist junk food I don’t need, and how I was eating too much cookie dough at a friend’s house and thinking how I probably wouldn’t be eating like this in my own house. 

The gods of smug or philosophy or something reminded me that the food itself matters too, and there I was, Friday afternoon, baking delicious chocolate fudge zebra cookies for a potluck, and snacking on the dough. Some of that I’ll happily blame on PMS and the aforementioned gods, the rest is all me. Between that, the potluck, and cheerios eaten with granola and milk, Friday and Saturday were maintenance-type days instead of loss ones. The good news is that I tracked it all and my average daily caloric intake for the week (Sunday to Saturday) was 1450 - still a damn good number.

Last week, we left my in-law's and arrived in New York late Sunday night and I didn’t even bother trying to put together a meal plan for that week. It was harder and I got lazy. I can make dinner for J and myself no problem, but I’m unmotivated to plan, prepare, or make work lunches. So I end up buying lunch, either a giant salad, soup and half sandwich, or a slice of pizza. It fits into the meal plan, but it’s expensive and repetitive.

$3.50 for a yogurt?

This week I was ready to actually make lunch and save some money, so yesterday I made a bunch of stuffed peppers with turkey, kidney beans, and rice. Easy and a one-dish meal. There are so many other things I want to make over the coming weeks, especially with how cheap some things are in the summer. I’m also planning pesto with sole, frittatas, and maybe see how far I can get before ruining a souffle.

Here’s the tentative Week Six menu, though Sunday is already gone.

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Breakfast	Coffee	Coffee, yogurt	Coffee, yogurt	Coffee, oatmeal	Coffee, oatmeal	Coffee, yogurt	Coffee
Lunch	Pizza on easy homemade crust	Stuffed peppers: turkey & rice	Veggie burger	Stuffed peppers: turkey & rice	Stuffed peppers: turkey & rice	Stuffed peppers: turkey & rice	TBD
Dinner	Loaded baked potato	Burrito or taco salad	TBD	Pizza, broccoli	TBD	Chicken, potatoes, Brussels sprouts
Snacks	Cereal, cherries, turkey	Cherries	Strawberries, cheese	Strawberries, cheese

Dinners are mostly left blank because I usually make whatever I'm in the mood for. Rest assured, I eat healthy and blog-worthy dinners such as hot dogs and baked potatoes. I’m aiming to cook vegetables more often.

Just a couple more weeks until I can officially look at the numbers. I’m hoping to be out of the 180s when August 5th arrives, but we’ll see. Generally, my first big along-the-way-goal is 170 - that’s when my face looked "normal," and many of my now too-tight clothing items are from that weight. One-seventy is also only about thirty or forty pounds above my goal weight, which somehow manages to feel infinitely closer than the current (at last look) fifty or sixty I have left to go.

Office Cake vs. Home Cake

Alright, moving on. Fine, those were a couple of harder weeks. While I did much better than I would have normally, I still didn’t do as well as I wanted. This has been a new week, a normal week, and I’ve dived right back into our gym/food tracking routine. Maybe some habits are getting more ingrained. We’re now in week five, steadily plugging along.

But I did realize some interesting things as I was shoving cookie dough in my mouth this past Saturday night. There is another dimension, so to speak, about the default settings I’m trying so hard to change - where I am.

Part of the reason this past week or two was a bit more challenging in terms of food is that we spent over half of it out of the house - first at my parent’s place, then at my MIL’s in Michigan. All of the not-as-great days happened there. It goes without saying that whatever I ate was my choice and I cannot blame anyone else for the occasions I ate too much.

I’m still working on leaning towards saying no when food is offered. In terms of work treats, I’ve made great progress - no bagels at the office breakfast, no cake at the farewell parties (except for that chocolate cake), none of the treats that co-workers randomly bring in. And it really is true that nobody cares whether or not I eat it or why, so I’ve stopped feeling self-conscious.

Oh no, it's fine. Come on in!

As I was eating that cookie dough and vaguely thinking how perhaps I should stop, I realize I probably wouldn't be doing this at home. It’s the setting as much as the actual treat that influences how good I am at turning it down (or, alternatively, deciding that the treat is worth it and enjoying some).

I’ve been able to make progress with ignoring office treats partially because the office is part of my normal routine. Even if the treat itself is special or new, the fact that I’m in the office setting makes it fairly easy to turn it down because I’m used to turning down things in the office, used to passing by the kitchen without peeking at whatever delectable has been placed out. However, that same habit doesn’t really work in new settings, places out of my routine. Turning down cake at work? No problem, I don’t even like cake that much. Turning down cake sitting on the counter at my parent’s house? Gimme.

Somehow I’m still fighting that childhood mentality, which said that parties and basically anywhere that wasn’t my house necessitated some kind of FOMO free-for-all. Treats were a rare commodity in my house, saved for once a week. No cookie jars or ice cream in the freezer. Being a little girl with a lot of issues, I sought the food that thought I was being deprived of elsewhere, anywhere. 

While I’m really proud that I’ve still eaten at “weight loss” levels for almost every day, it’s still a little frustrating that I let a new setting get the best of me. But now I know that new places, even with the same foods, can make it just a little bit harder.

Week 4: Almost Halfway

Week three, which ended last Sunday, was the definition of “good, but not great.” I ate at my calorie deficit, just not the 1.5 lb/week one I was aiming. I exercised, but not as much as I’d like. It was a reasonably successful week but not as good as it should have been.

This week has been harder, the first “hard” week since I restarted. I am glad it’s almost over and look forward to getting back to normal, boring life on Monday. I can get food-challenged when (pretty normal) life stressors happen.With the exception of Wednesday, it hasn’t been that bad a week with food, it was more challenging and with lower than goal calorie deficits.

This week, J spent most of his time helping his dad with moving-type projects and we’re still not done. Altogether we spent a lot of time out of the house on various errands, and then stayed a few extra nights at my parent’s house because of all there was to do. While I could have packed lunches and cooked from there, I just… didn’t.

As for Wednesday, I ate some of the chocolate mousse cake at a farewell office party, plus a bit of picking at the leftovers that were in the kitchen. It was delicious, but not worth it. I also ended up eating Chinese food for dinner. Not close to a binge, but too much nonetheless and possibly into gain territory for the day. The cake did not lead to the chicken moo-shu in a guilty, who-cares-I-already-messed-up kind of way; it was more I’m-really-stressed-out eating with a side of sticky rice.

While I was eating, I was also thinking how I was most definitely using the food to comfort myself from the week and working so hard to stay positive because J was quite stressed. Yet my reaction to these thoughts was along the lines of “It’s working. I kind of feel better.” Maybe as long as this is a very rare occurrence and I really do follow my eating plan the rest of the time, it’s okay.

I know the most important thing is to not allow an imperfect day to make a crappy week. I’m almost halfway through this eight-week crunch time, four weeks from actually knowing my weight and if I lost body fat. It’s good to remember that even if I’m can’t always control where I am or what food is put in front of me, I do control whether I eat it. It’s obviously easier to eat food that someone put in front of me, and harder to resist, it’s still my choice. So far I’ve been really proud of my progress, I’m not going to stop now.

Last night we flew to Michigan to visit J’s mother and her husband. His mom had told us that they recently adopted a second cat, but I didn’t realize until we arrived that it’s a tiny, pure black, mewing little kitten, who currently spends most of her time on my father-in-law’s shoulder.

She fits inside a shoe.

Adorable kittens aside, J’s mom is throwing an Independence Day party today and I’m about to go help her set up. She invited a ton of people and bought 3 tons of food, but (at least right now) I’m feeling confident that I can be in control and not let “it’s just sitting there” wear me down.

Happy July 4th to all! It's July 4th everywhere.