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?

Weigh-In, New Challenges and Changes

Good evening! 

First, here’s the weekly weigh-in:

	6/8/2014	8/19/2014	9/3/2014	9/30/2014	10/15/2014	10/22/2014	10/29/2014
Weight	191.2	182.6	182.8	181	181.6	181.6	181.4
Pounds Fat	82.7	72.5	73	70.3	70.8	71.3	70.8
Pounds Muscle	67.3	66.8	67.2	65.2	67	65.4	67.3

Essentially the same number as the previous three weeks - a bit annoying since this was the first week “back” after all the Jewish holidays, and I was hoping to lose a bit.  Overall I’m considering October a maintenance month - not ideal, but pretty good considering the challenges.

Speaking of challenges, while I’m not a huge fan of the aforementioned weight-loss related ones that life craps out, I do like making little challenges or goals for myself. In fact, I’m so committed that I’ve been trying to break into the 170s since August.

Challenges keep me accountable, keep me focused, and make things interesting. When I did the low/no sugar month, I stopped eating office food, something that had definitely been stalling my weight or at the very least, slowing it. 

I was able to do it for the month because I knew it was temporary, and then I was able to keep it going after the time ended because I realized it was a good idea, and not as impossible as I’d assumed it would be. Just today our boss brought in delicious apple fritters for everyone and put them on my desk since that was the central location at the moment, and I didn’t eat any. And it was fine, and nobody cared. So I’m going to consider October not as the month I maintained, but rather the month in which I broke a bad habit.

New challenge: starting today and through November, I want to try and stop picking at food in other setting - that piece of pasta out of the strainer, that bite of leftovers, you know what I mean. I track it, but it’s really mindless, pointless calories that I barely remember and definitely are not satisfying. Maybe there are food issues at hand, but part of the reason I do this is plain old habit. And habits can be broken.

If I can work on issues one at a time, I think I could make real long-term progress.

I’m also going to change up how I count calories so that it works better for my style and can help incorporate those “picking at food” slip-ups into the week instead of wrecking the day. 

Since March, when I started diligently tracking my food, I’ve had a daily calorie goal. It’s on the lower end of the expected range, but I ended up averaging a bit higher because of occasional high-calorie days. Sunday through Thursday, I can usually hit that target number without too much effort. I slip up some days, of course, and go over my calorie goals, but for the most part these days have routines and I often “earn” more calories by working out.

However, I didn't give myself any flexibility. This Sunday I burned 700 calories from Zumba and walking to/from the gym, and felt like I had more calories available than I really needed or wanted. And then on Tuesday, I was weirdly hungry, even after my normal breakfast. So why not take the calories I don’t need from Sunday, within reason, and save them for the rest of the week? Why not count calories weekly instead of daily? I think as long as I’m eating a healthy amount each day and have an weekly average deficit of, say, 4000-4500 calories, the daily breakdowns don’t matter as much and my weight will go down.

I’m going to copy part of the Weight Watchers plan, specifically the idea of having both daily and weekly calorie goals. Weight Watchers managed to be be flexible but stringent, if that even makes sense. Essentially there were flexible rules, and flexibility built into the plan, and if you were careful to stay (rigidly) within those flexibilities, you’d lose weight. There was a daily minimum of “food points,” and a weekly allowance that could be used at any time - all in one day or split over different days. 

So I will start giving myself weekly calories, two thousand of them, available anytime from Wednesday through Tuesday, started today. Based on my patterns, I expect to use most of them on the weekend, but again, it’s all about flexibility.

I’ll keep this up for the next four weeks, and see how I feel. I’m thinking of October as the month I stopped eating office junk, instead of the month where I struggled through holidays and barely maintained. So maybe November could be the month that I get a handle on nibbling at foods and having unplanned higher calorie days.

On an unrelated note, you might have noticed that goodnightcheese.blogspot.com is now redirecting to goodnightcheese.com, of which I am now the proud owner. Did you know they'll let anybody buy a domain?

Results of My Eight Week Reboot - Weigh In

My self-imposed eight week challenge is over. And I’m really, really glad I did it. I was stuck in a serious rut for a while - working out, eating right “most” of the time, and getting more and more pissed off that the scale wasn’t moving. I wasted a lot of mental energy being annoyed before realizing that I was eating more calories overall than I realized, despite tracking and doing okay from day to day.

Equal parts chocolate and asparagus.

I set my caloric goals to lose 1.5 lb/week which gave me 1000-1100 calories per day plus whatever I burned off in the gym. My actual daily calories came out to 1350. It’s higher than I wanted, but still translates to a pound a week, so I expected to lose at least eight pounds over these two months.

On June 9, I weighed 191.2. At the time, I thought some of that was bloat since it was a couple of pounds higher than the usual range. But, no matter. Yesterday, I weighed in at 184 even. Or to put it in chart form with fat and muscle numbers:

Measurements	6/8/2014	8/4/2014
Weight	191.2	184
Pounds Fat	82.7	74.5
Pounds Muscle	67.3	68.2

I definitely haven’t seen numbers close to that this entire year, so I’m happy to have some concrete progress. A little over seven total pounds in eight weeks, and eight pounds of fat gone from that. The scale isn’t infallible, I know. I weighed 185 in my kitchen and 184 in my bathroom, but it’s the best I can do. Time will tell where and how I’m really doing, but at this weight, where five or ten pounds lost doesn’t show, I want to know I’m making progress. And I've NEVER seen less than 40% body fat on the scale before.

Though my last official weigh-in was in the beginning of June, I’ve definitely sneaked a few peaks on the scale. It was hard not to look when I wanted so badly to see some validation of my efforts. Now I realize that I need to either get rid of the scale and bring it out once a month just to track long-term progress, or weigh myself regularly and learn to accept normal fluctuations. Standing on the scale while my husband wrote down the numbers did not work out, but it was an idea worth trying.

Good Changes and Improvements:

• Tracking my food and exercise honestly every single day for the last eight weeks
• Saying “no” more often to treats I didn’t need and didn’t even want - office cake, alcohol at cocktail hour, candy, french fries, second and third helpings
• Eating more consciously, even with junk food
• Going to the gym and pushing myself on the weight machines and the elliptical 4-5 times a week

Things I Should Work On:

• Bringing lunch to work - I would do this for two weeks, and then get lazy for another. Rinse and repeat
• Not weighing myself or at least not letting the number on the scale dictate my feelings
• Patience
• Ending sentences with prepositions

For now, I’m going to keep going the way I’ve been doing, but just try to push a little bit harder to lower my average calories. Those extra hundred or so came from two or three higher calories days, but mostly from little but completely unnecessary extra treats that added up to the difference between a pound loss a week and a pound and a half.

In other fun news, there's now a headless "before" shot of me on the About Me page.

My next mini goal is to be in the 170s by Labor Day, which give me about a month. For now, I’ll weigh in and report each week but there may be a bra/scale freedom burning in the future.

This is exactly how cool I am.

A Super Awesome Weekend

Well, that was fun.

I took my lunch really late on Thursday because of a weird morning schedule at work, but then didn't feel like eating anything. I started feeling ill. Then it got worse, and then it got horrible and I wanted to die. I took off work Friday and spent the next several days alternating between sleeping and vomiting.

So to recap, I wrote about how I was so excited to be back to a routine and then immediately proceeded to get violently ill. My best guess is food poisoning, maybe made worse by little/no sleep, but I can't even think what could have caused it. Whatever, I'm glad it's over.

Yesterday, J and I took a long walk along the Hudson River Greenway, which is a beautiful biking/walking pathway along the Manhattan side of the Hudson River. I was giddy at the wonderful weather and also because I hadn't been outside since Thursday.

In the midst of the fun jogger/biker/walker watching, we saw a girl taking multiple selfies while riding on the back of a tandem bicycle. She was not pedaling, but was adjusting her hair for the photos and giving the peace sign. I love people with no selfie shame.

It felt odd to take a photo of a selfie, so here is the pretty view.

I'm assuming the numbers this week will be skewed from being sick and eating very little for a few days, so I'm (again) kind of writing off this week of measurements. However, I'm still recording all the weights, and I'm definitely not writing off the week itself. Now is finally back to normal, and I will continue the progress I had finally started to make.

My goals for the week are just to get back into the habits - working out, tracking, making and bringing lunches. The 3.5-mile walk yesterday was a good start, but I will be getting back into the gym tonight.

I hope you had a wonderful weekend!