Goals for February

A blogger I like used to post monthy goals for herself, and I like the idea of that. I’ve made plenty of short term goals, like my original “Weight loss reboot” or when I stopped eating sugar for a month. It’s good to focus on the short term because my goal weight is likely a year away at least.

February Goals:

• Get to a New Weight Decade
• My original goal was to get into the 160’s by my 26th birthday, but I’m not sure I’ll make that. So while I’d still love to make that, my next “deadline” is to get to this place by the end of the month, two weeks later. Just 4.6 pounds...
• Increase Strength Training
• I’ve been going to the gym, and even pushing myself, consistently 4-5 times a week. However, I only strength train once a week, sometimes only a few times a month. For this month, I’m aiming to do weights 6 times at least, and hopefully 8 or 10.
• Probably not 10, since this is a short month.
• Get a New Weekend Strategy
• Or, something. Every week I overdo it on Friday and Saturday, and it turns my pound loss into two-thirds or half a pound. Still progress and great and all that, but I need to be better at this.
• Possible strategy: stop making desserts for potlucks, dammit Leah. People will still like you when you don’t bring them sugar.

• Get Creative with Breakfast
• I literally eat oatmeal or Greek yogurt for breakfast every day. I want to try at least one new work-friendly breakfast (so probably no eggs).
• One option: I’ve always liked that if it’s food and you have it for breakfast, then it’s breakfast food. Stew, beans, chicken, why not?
• Bring Lunch
• Bring lunch at least 4 days a week. Laziness if the only thing stopping me. Even if it’s an Amy’s meal, it’s still cheaper than buying, and still better because it takes away the necessity of a decision.
• Remember that it’s a birthDAY, not a birthWEEK
• My mother was not in labor for a week; in fact, she was barely in labor for an afternoon. Celebrate/eat accordingly.
• Call my mother on my birthday, to thank her. She did all the work that day.
• Cook on Sundays
• It helps so much for the week. I cooked a couple of dishes over the last two Sundays that were good for lunch - mainly fish chowder and balsamic chicken with fajita vegetables - and I need to keep this up. Today will be a challenge since we’re going to a Superbowl party so I shouldn't procrastinate like I usually do.

Alright, February. Here we go.

Who else has goals, weight-related or other, for this month?

What are they?

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.

Holiday Fun

Why am I taking off five of the next ten work days?

Why, for the delightful holiday of Passover. I write about it here because it will impact my weight loss journey in a random array of challenges for the next week, and also because I can.

The explanation for Passover is long, but it basically is a Jewish holiday that celebrates and remembers how the Jewish people were rescued from slavery in Egypt 3,500 years ago by God working through Moses and Aaron. Part of the commemoration involves not eating any leavened (risen) bread and instead eating matzoh, which consists of only water and flour and is made from start to finish in under eighteen minutes, because the Jews left Egypt in such a hurry that the not-yet-risen bread dough baked on their backs in the hot sun.

Seders can be long.

The point of this is that starting today and ending next Tuesday night, eating well and exercising will be challenging. I won't have access to our normal gym, won't be able to track my food for several days, and will be presented with a lot of delicious food for which I have no idea of the calories or ingredients. I'll be away from home, surrounded by family who will have rare "Let's indulge in slow-cooked meats, fried things, and flour-less chocolate cake" attitudes.

 
Diet: The main rule is "no unleavened bread," but the no-nos for this culinarily challenging Holiday include: breads, pastries, rice, oats, soy, barley and most other grains, beans, peanuts and corn. The corn restriction means no cornstarch or high-fructose corn syrup, which is why you may have noticed special Heinz ketchup and Coke bottles with yellow tops, both of which are made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

What is allowed? Matzoh, meat, eggs, coffee, dairy products, and most vegetables and fruits are permitted.

We manage.

My Strategy

My goal is basically just not to go crazy - be aware of what I'm eating, if I want to be eating it, and how much I'm consuming. Mindless eating, or worse, eating because there's so much food and I feel like I need to have ALL of it because otherwise I'm missing out on something, is what I'm trying hard to avoid. This is especially important when I can't track and it will be easy to forget little mindless indulgences.


That's the best advice I have for myself, or for anyone else looking for tips: not to just take a bit of everything because it's there. Rather, I will try to look at the options and decide what I would really like to enjoy, and what, upon a little hesitation, I realize I don't actually care that much about. Also, I will try to remember that this is the holiday of leftovers, so chances are that the dish I don't have tonight will make a great lunch tomorrow.

I will estimate and count calories as much as possible with the aide of my husband/human calculator, and try to take long walks in the (hopefully) nice weather. I can do this. While losing a bit of weight over Passover would be wonderful, I will be very happy to just have stayed the same.

Day six.

A couple of our friends are staying at our apartment while we're gone - they were coming to New York City for Passover and needed a place, and since we'll be gone the whole time, it worked out well!

However, it also means that we needed to leave the apartment in a state where they don't need to maneuver around the clean laundry that's been sitting in the living room for three days or the long-dead flowers on the table. So yesterday it was clean, clean, clean and now we're going to eat, eat, eat.

At worst, it's only one week and I'm determined to get right back to our healthier habits after it's over.

For anyone celebrating, Happy Passover!


(Flour-less chocolate torte photo: oneforthetable.com)

No Lightbulb Moments: How I Gained, Lost, and Gained Almost 50 pounds

My high school weight pattern was pretty straightforward.  I'd maintain or slowly creep up for a while, then start some diet or health plan (usually the latest fad) with tremendous motivation and lose 10-15 pounds. Within a couple of months, I would get sick of dieting and slowly regress back to old habits. I'd start gaining slowly again, sometimes as little as a pound a month. During high school I tried Atkins, South Beach, and calorie counting, all with some degree of success.

 Because of this gain-lose-gain cycle, I usually stayed somewhere around 160, so about 30 pounds overweight. What's funny looking back is that I hated my figure so much as a teenager and was always trying to lose weight, but 30 extra pounds doesn't seem like too much right now. I guess it's all about perspective.

I never got to a healthy weight, but I also never got to an extremely unhealthy weight. I just wandered somewhere in the middle, too large to even consider feeling good in a bikini or buying single-digit sizes, but not big enough for any plus-sized clothing or major interventions.

After high school graduation, my unintentional pattern stopped - so I just started gaining and gaining. I took a gap year abroad before starting college, and while I had an amazing experience, I struggled to eat well and didn’t really exercise. I was also having too much fun to realize that I was gaining weight.

However, it was freshman year of college that took me to my highest weight ever. During this time, I was trying to figure out how to manage a schedule, and generally stressing out at the progression of life. My university was not one to stray from societal demands, so we students had easy access to lots of (often free) junk food all over campus.

I made some good friends and spent time with them, went to class, and studied, but there was still way too much time left for ... nothing. I treated my boredom with food, as well as my desire to have something to do with my hands while I watched every episode of Friends. There were no binges or secret donut boxes under my bed; I gained weight by eating "normal" but oversized (for my height and gender) portions at meals, and 400-calorie muffins or the endless supply of free college candy as desserts.

xkcd.com

By the beginning of sophomore year, I had hit my highest ever weight of 200 pounds. But that wasn't a wake-up call. When I saw that number flashing up at me from the scale, my thoughts went something like, Hmm, that is a new number. Okay. Better not gain any more weight now, I think 200 is as high as I should go.

It’s obvious now, but I managed to be blissfully unaware. In some vague part of my mind, I knew that this was bad, I knew that my size 16s were getting snug and in reality I could probably fit into 18s, but I just didn’t want to face dealing with it. I was passively avoiding it and delicately skirting around things that might make me face it, like shopping or trying an athletic class. It's the easiest trap to fall into. My parents weren't saying anything, my friends weren't expressing their concerns about my size, I didn't get comments from passing cars - it was pretty easy to live in my little world where there was no need to consider my growing size.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care at all about the extra weight, I just had no idea where to start and was in denial of how unhealthy I’d become. I got pains in my calves from walking around too much, and somehow never connected that to the extra weight. Thirty pounds was one thing, I was used to it, but I could not expect to be seventy pounds overweight without consequences.

Giant hipster glasses or Minnie Mouse lingerie?

Finally, my parents sat me down one weekend during sophomore year when I was home for a holiday, and told me that they were scared for my health and for my life. That they had waited, hoping I would take some action to lose weight, but after six months it was clear that I was not dealing with this problem. So now they were talking to me because they were terrified. They, very kindly, told me that they would not let me go abroad for a semester if I didn't lose some weight. 

So I started, just like that. Maybe I was waiting for someone to call me out on my bullshit, or a threat I could understand, or a good kick in my oversized ass. There was no revelation, I just started keeping track.

This was during a "eat small meals throughout the day" fad, so I carefully consumed six 200-250 calories snacks/meals each day. It was a pretty good time - I didn't feel hungry or deprived, and I lost 20 pounds that semester without exercising. The calf pain disappeared, and I finally connected that the pain had had to do with my weight. 


Part Two: How I Lost Fifty Pounds, and then Gained Most of it Back will be coming soon. 

Weekly Weight Update and Goals for the Month

I'm so excited! I weigh exactly the same as I did last week!

Seriously though, why do they put up with Sheldon?

 
For the record, that means my weight is still 187.4. Frustrating numbers are the reasons I took measurements last week, so I'm glad to have those even though it's too soon to compare.

While we're still regulars at the gym, and I'm logging my food most of the time, Fridays and Saturdays are still a struggle tracking-wise. In the end, I can't expect to lose weight if there are these days on which I'm not as careful. Even if I don't "feel" like I overate, if I'm not actually logging my meals, I can't be so sure that I didn't.

Sometimes when I don't bother tracking on those days, it's because I've gotten lazy. However, some of that stems from the actual frustration of trying to estimate the meals cooked in part or full by other people. Our friends get together potluck style twice a week (which is awesome), but of course I can't measure anything during these gatherings, and there's no way to know exactly what's in each dish.

 However, I need to get over myself and just do it, even if it's an estimate. I'm just waiting for when they invent a device that can test a food and generate its nutrition facts.

Give it 10 years.

After all, quitting or even pausing is not an option. I'm less than 15 pounds below my highest ever weight, and am all too aware of how easy it would be to reach that again.


Goals for the Next Month:

• Keep going to the gym 3-4 times a week
• Make sure to go on Sundays when it's empty, and Tuesdays when USA has a Law and Order: SVU marathon

•  Keep tracking everything, work on tracking on weekends
•  I use the free MyFitnessPal app on my phone, and love it. I'll probably write more about this at some point, but the bottom line is that this works for me

•  Cook more dishes for lunches and to stock freezer
•  Most weeks I bring in lunch 2-3 times, but I would like to turn that into an everyday thing since laziness is the only thing stopping me

Almost Thursday already...The weeks get so much shorter when you're weighing in, don't they?

The Million Dollar, or Seventy Pound Question: Why Did I Get Fat?

Why did I get fat? I started gaining extra weight in kindergarten, and reached what would be a healthy weight for my current height by age twelve. If only I could have just stopped there.

Nope.

This is a topic to which I've given a lot of thought. Childhood obesity is a highly debated and heavily researched area, with sciencey people looking at factors such as my family and my environment, citing fun things like easy access to junk food, no access to healthy food, and too much television with too little exercise. And of course, my genetics. It's mostly experiments on mice and a lot of correlational studies (let's link video games to obesity!), because we can't go experimenting on children.

I don't know how much I fit into those risk factors - I was really lucky. During my childhood, there were always fresh fruits to snack on, and vegetables with every meal. Dessert was reserved for Friday night and special occasions, and my parents only ever bought soda or white bread for guests. Most meals were homemade and eaten at home.

Except when we had wax.

My family was and is healthy. But I was still a chubby 10-year-old who was jealous of her friends in their cute pre-teen bikinis, but who still sneaked extra Oreos at school parties and didn't understand why she couldn't just make herself skinny by wishing hard enough.

It was probably more emotional. I suffered from depression and had low self-esteem as a kid. My parents are wonderful, and did all they could. But I was still an unhappy child. Science says that could have contributed to weight gain.

My current hypothesis is that the initial chubbiness was a fairly standard weight gain, the result of a few overindulgences and being so excited by the junk food that came my way at school or friends' houses that I overdid it and ignored my hunger or fullness signals. This happens to plenty of children, and they often grow into their weights (less so these days, but it used to be more common).

But being a little overweight helped create that classic cycle. I felt badly about myself, so I ate more. My parents wanted to help me lose weight, but they didn't really know how. I didn't know how myself. Food could be both a reward and punishment. I could eat to spite their attempts and punish myself, or I could eat to feel better, or feel in control. Eating felt guilty and great. Or maybe it's a little of all of that.

High school was much better - I slowly got out of feeling depressed and generally grew up a little.  I think time was the biggest factor. But food was still comforting, and while I seemed to be maintaining my weight, it was about 30 pounds too high.

College is a more complicated story, for later.

All in all, I think, I hope, that I'm at least a little more self-aware than I was as a child, and now have the tools and knowledge to get healthy.

Gung-Ho Habits

Score!

I feel a difference in my hips and waist. There's definitely less going on there than just a few weeks ago. My arms may also be slightly more toned. I'm happy to feel like I've made some progress, even if the scale isn't aware.

It's been about 3 weeks since we started working out regularly, and the difference in how my body feels is a great motivator to keep doing so. I'm generally feeling good, and maybe even a little more patient.

However, I know that we need to work on making the gym a normal part of our lives. The idea is to bank on the whole gung-ho motivation and drive right now to create good habits that can help through the rougher or lazier times.

 I know from my own experiences that's it's harder to go to the gym when you already haven't gone for three weeks - just like it's harder to put away the clean laundry that's been sitting in your basket for five days - because the urgency is gone. Putting something off one extra day is so much easier when it's piled on top of twenty others, and before I know it I haven't gone for months.

So right now I'm trying to make "going" the default for when I have too many easy excuses I can use not to go.