Doing it my way - a breakthrough

Diets aren’t real life. I usually go total nazi and won’t deviate a single bit or if I do deviate I figure the whole thing is blown and quit. Not this time.

Spring is here and Chuck can’t sit still. He likes to get away on the weekends. This past weekend we went to Williamsburg. I started my deviation on Wed. night - I totally wanted chicken teriyaki and had a bento box for dinner - it was quite a bit of food. I didn’t eat all of the chicken or the rice, but ate all of the sushi. Thursday afternoon we headed out. He was jonesin’ for Outback - so I shared a filet with Vivi and ate all of my loaded potato myself. You can imagine how the rest of the trip went. I indulged. It was a choice and I was in control. Sat. night on the way home we stopped at Maggiano’s for dinner - that place could add 20lbs in one meal!

I’m choosing to live my real life and work it all out and not be a slave to the diet. I will lose weight more slowly, but this is a lifetime change, not a quick diet and back to eating “normal”. I will continue to input my food and watch the calories. I’m learning and not making myself wrong as I so often do. I was hungry today and had a snack - the rest of the gnocchi from Maggiano’s. It didn’t put me over the edge - I”ll just have to watch what I eat for dinner. I know I can’t let myself get hungry or let my blood sugar drop - then it is all over. Allowing myself to choose instead of feeling confined and making myself wrong is so freeing and allows me to go with my day and not constantly focus on food and my next meal.

I have also noticed how much more energy I have when I’m eating healthy. It’s ironic, the more fat and sugar I eat and the fuller I feel, the more I want to keep stuffing my face. The veggies make me feel so much better and no cravings. I have this thing - when I eat cheese, I want chocolate. Weird.

My little graph showing my progress will be a zig zag up and down instead of a nice slope downward. That’s ok. As long as the trend is down. I backtracked 2 lbs. and now I’m sliding down a little more slowly, but it’s only been 2 weeks.

The rain seems to have stopped, maybe I can get a good walk in this afternoon.

Reality Sets In

I guess I was just floating around on wishful thinking. I kept thinking that my weight would just level out. I would stop gaining and stay at some weight and learn to live with it. What that weight was I had no idea, but I kept on eating, waiting. After 7 days of keeping track of my calories I realized (duh) that I would just keep gaining weight until my gigantic body mass required the same number of calories that I ate every day to sustain itself. Wow - I could have grown really huge - probably well over 300 lbs.

I didn’t actually ever bother to count the calories I was eating, but I’m guessing they were somewhere between 3000 - 4000 calories per day. How do I know? Well, for one thing, I’m eating under 2000 calories on NutriSystem - about 1700 - 1800 calories per day. I can guess the calories because the food I eat is about 25% - 50% of what I normally eat. I keep track in a widget I have on my google home page. I have no idea if it’s scientific and correct, (fatsecret.com) but I like it and it works for me - it has everything already in there with all the nutritional info. It calculates how many calories I burn each day - I supposed based on body weight. It counts sleeping and resting and I add in my walks. I burn about 2800 calories per day just existing - according to the widget.

This is a life long change if I want to keep the weight off. I guess I was hoping for some magic pill, miracle cure for obesity. I worry about doing this all over again and again. It was pretty easy to lose 50 lbs last time - the phenteramine helped quite a bit. Keeping it off was out of my reach. This time, I need to change permanently. Does that mean I can never eat yummy stuff again? No. Does it mean I can never pig out and eat so much I can’t move? No. It means that every day is a new day. And it’s the long rung that counts - just like the stock market - peaks and valleys.

Losing the weight is just the beginning, keeping it off will be the journey. I am making a weightloss journal this time - with photos and measurements. I was inspired by Cathy Zielske and her journal. I’ll post some pages in a few months when I’ve made some progress, the first photo is very unflattering.

Here is a dorky photo of me sitting here writing my blog with my new glasses…

new glasses

Day 3 - yummy cinnamon bun and a power walk and 2.7lbs lost

I slept in this morning - didn’t get up ’til 10am. I watched Battle Star Galactica The Plan last night. Chuck left after 10 minutes, I suffered through it. It was as bad as the series was great. What were they thinking? I stepped in the scale - 2.7 lbs down - I know it doesn’t really mean much yet, but down is better than nothing! For breakfast I had Stonyfield Farms organic raspberry yogurt - yuck. Wegman’s is way better, a banana and a NutriSystem cinnamon bun. The cinnamon bun was very good. It was small but it had 8g of fiber in it. Why can’t real food have all that fiber?

I grabbed our old little iPod and went for a walk. It’s amazing how music can get my butt moving much faster than I ever thought possible. I walked for 34 minutes, out of breath and sweating for a good chunk of it. I felt good while I was doing it, but I can feel everything starting to stiffen up on me. Why does my body punish me for doing something good for it???

I am thinking Weight Watchers might be a good way to go after this 35 days of NutriSystem is over. I found some local meetings and I am going to check out a center later today, before my massage appt. Maybe I’ll feel better after a little pounding - I have shin splints from walking.

Chemically engineered muffins - Yucky

The NutriSystem blueberry muffin I had for breakfast was gross. It had that weird diet food manufactured taste. It’s chemical, I don’t know any other way to describe it. I choked it down. Thankfully, I think the blueberries were real and I could actually taste those in the mix.

I was a little hungry yesterday, but nothing I couldn’t live with. I had a giant salad for lunch and three cheese chicken and pasta for lunch. The 3 cheese was good - not a lot of food, but tasty. I made sure I shook it up good like the instructions said - I think it could be gross and lumpy if you don’t mix it well.

I had swedish meatballs for dinner. It was also good. Next time I think I’ll add some cauliflower to it. It had lots of gravy. I also had 15 peanuts (only supposed to have 10), a cup of rasberries and some baby carrots. I wasn’t interested in any other veggies or another salad, so I didn’t eat everything I was supposed to.

I had the pound cake for dessert. It was good - I wanted another piece - mostly because I was still hungry.

So far, I’m liking this diet better than others I’ve tried. Atkins was great and it worked, but after a while you miss bread and pasta. No bread on this diet, but there was pasta in 2 of my meals yesterday and the desserts and stuff make up for the lack of bread. I get a wide variety of foods and textures that will keep me going.

Headed out for a walk, need to throw in some movement to speed up the process a little!

I have been ignoring my blog…

I have not been keeping up with my blog. I don’t think anyone reads it anymore so why bother. I am embarking on a new journey - NutriSystem. So, I’ll blog about it! Last week I went to costco.com and bought the NutriSystem for woman package - 35 days of food for $259. Costco sent me a card with number and a pin. I used it to log into the NutriSystem website and order the food. You can choose what you want and they have lots of stuff to pick from. A window popped up for a little live chat and she was very helpful telling me what customers prefer and best sellers. It didn’t take long, then I just had to wait a few days for the food to come.

I got home from work yesterday to a giant box of food. It was quite a bit of stuff. My lazy susan in the corner was empty so I filled it with lunch and dinner, stuck breakfast in a big drawer and dessert in a box in the pantry. They sent a little booklet with instructions and daily check off lists. We went to Wegmans last night to stock up on the fruit, veggies and dairy I need to include in the plan.

This morning I weighed myself (very, very fat) and reached in the breakfast drawer and pulled out a chocolate scone. It’s nothing like a scone. It’s totally like lembas bread from Lord of the Rings. Very small, but very dense. It took me a while to eat. I ate some, took the kids to school, ate some more, went for a 25 minute walk, then ate the last bit. It didn’t taste like much, so not good but not bad.

I had some questions - do I need to eat all the stuff in one meal at once and can I save something for later in the day - like my breakfast fruit for an extra fruit in my afternoon snack so I can make a smoothie. I called them - counselors are available 27/7 - very nice. The nice counselor I spoke to said it’s all OK but at the end of the day everything must be eaten and checked off.

I was worried that I was going to starve - but now that I see the whole plan, it actually looks like a lot of food. I want to lose 50lbs. I’m tired of the plantar fasciitis and arthritis in my hips. My knees bother me sometimes, too. My face is fat and so are my fingers. It’s gross. It’s all gotta go. So - I’m off to the races with my first meal (I only ate 1/3 of it so far) down.

Tags: nutrisystem