New blog updated: Best of Plans, Not Best of Actions

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Best of Plans, Not Best of Actions

New Blog Updated: Intuition combined with Restraint? I guess that's how I see it...

Read the new entry at the new blog:

Intuition Combined with Restraint? I guess that's how I see it...

 

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The Steak Dinner: Making Choices, Good and Bad

Five days of in-range calorie eating, five days of nearly perfect nutrition, and I got a mad craving to go out for steak. So...we did.

I sat and made concessions. None of the usual sides with steak, ie. mashed or fried potatoes or baked loaded, plus veggie souffle. Or that dreaded blue cheese and creamy dressing salad that steakhouses lure me with. :)

I started with their simplest salad and a vinaigrette (sorry, blue cheese). I had these sides: a baked sweet potato, plain, and sprinkled diet-friendly cinnamon on it ( not sugar). I had broccoli steamed, plain, no salt. I I had a couple ounces of merlot to balance its heart-healthiness against the saturated fat/cholesterol in red meat. I had unsweetened iced tea. I skipped the usual fruit tart or chocolate mousse (that I'd usually give in to at this particular eatery) and made do with a double espresso with Splenda.

That's what I did right. What I did wrong, besides eating too many ounces of NY Strip: I had not one, but two slices of French bread (it is a French restaurant, so the bread is really enticing). I used EVOO, not the butter they served with it.

What else I did right, knowing we'd be having dinner out: I had a moderate braekfast and a very light lunch that, together, totalled 650 calories. Enough to keep me from being utterly famished, but not so much that I didn't have some leeway at supper.

At the end of the day, after, yes, five days of great caloric containment, I went 500 calories over the maximum SparkPeople nutrition tracker allows me. I would have only gone 400 over, but I decided to have a coconut water to get in some potassium, and I had a fiber mix to push the meat through my system a bit faster. :)

I drank my water, good. I didn't make time to exercise, bad.

A day of good and bad choices.

After the restaurant, I asked hubby to drive to Barnes & Noble. I wanted to load up on health/fitness magazines, low-cal holilday cooking ones, too, in order to get myself motivated for the coming weeks of temptations.

It starts this week. Holiday eating. Lord, help us plan and help us make the better choices!

Tomorrow, a family birthday party will likely set all sorts of minefields. But I have set aside healthy snacks and beverages to take to minimize temptations/damages. Will I be perfect? Doubt it. But I will be...better.

Happy Weekend to all Fatfighters!

One Nice Step Forward, One Small Step Back, and Redeeming Poor Choices

Well, I had another happy weigh-in this morning: 268.0

So, about a half-pound less than the day before. I'm firmly in this "decade", hooray.

But it was a family get-together, and I had 4 hours sleep. Not a good combo. When I feel tired, my brain interprets it as: hungry.

I was in a rush (hairdresser appt way down south, a 45 min drive), so I had a small breakfast (I had to eat SOMETHING). I didn't have time to make my veggies or any other fruit than a quickly scarfed orange. I took protein mix to have mid-afternoon to ward off a binge.

Unfortunately, I made some bad choices, but not as bad as I normally would have. I only took a couple bites of the dessert, though I wanted it ALL.

When I tallied my calories (in a notebook, as I was away from a puter for tracking), I knew I only had a couple hundred calories left for dinner. Trouble.

So, I made a smart decision. Not to skip dinner, but to have a lighter one. I was afraid if I tried skipping or just having fruit or another protein mix, I'd set myself up for a late night binge.

I stopped at Chicken Kitchen and got grilled chicken breast on a garden salad. I carefully measured out 2 TBSP Italian dressing and mixed in lemon juice to expand. I used lots of pepper for flavor. And I ate that huge salad, which wasn't a lot of calories. Because I still had a yen for something sweet (due to that taste of cake), I had a sugar free vanilla Jello for 60 calories.

In the end, I went over 200 cals of my target. Not too bad, really. I stopped and made conscious choices rather than "going with the food flow" and blowing my calories all to hell. I'll pat myself on the back for that.

It's a lesson: It's never too late to stop, think, plan, and make adjustments in order to minimize damage. A day is not done until you hit the sack.

But, okay, I didn't exercise and I'm too pooped now to do it.

Tomorrow, Pilates and another day to do better with food choices and movement. :)

I still feel very good and full of hope....

Our Habitat Choices Can Work for or Against Fatfighters

Well, last night sucked. I did fine with B and L, but D got the best of me. Nothing new. My fault. Why? I bought dessert. I bought a dessert that is tempting. It was there. And I ate it. 400 calories worth.

My mistake. It's interesting that I had an opportunity to backtrack, to NOT buy this dessert--when the clerk forgot to ring it up. But no, I bought it. And because I let it enter my habitat, it entered my body.

Anyway, I was over at Sparkpeople logging the dreaded calories of last night's mess, when I came across an article.

Here, a snippet:

The researchers investigated what set the weight-losers apart from the others, and published their findings in the October issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

Those who lost weight and kept it off were about three to four times more likely to exercise than those who were obese or overweight. They were also about 1.4 to 1.6 times more likely to spend time thinking about restraining their food intake, considering things like calories.

Those who lost weight had fewer televisions in their home and less high-fat food on hand. They also had more exercise equipment in their homes, the study authors noted.

"You have to pay attention to your home environment if you want to succeed," Phelan said. "Do you have TVs in every room? When you walk into your kitchen, do you see high-fat food or healthy food?"

Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University School of Medicine's Prevention Research Center, noted in the news release that the study's findings were "common sense" and "close to self-evident."

"If you want to choose better foods, keep better foods within reach. Don't just rely on willpower. If you want to be more active, create opportunities for exercise that are always within reach. Don't just rely on motivation," he said.

Emphasis mine.

No one is responsible for my home environment but me. Sure, I live with one of the finest and sweetest men on earth, but it's really me. I do most of the food shopping. I do all of the cooking. I know what's in the fridge, freezer, and pantry--hubby is blithely unaware of stuff like what's in the fridge. Amazing how men can do that.

So, today, my goal is to go through my living room and kitchen (where I spend most of my home-time when awake) and get rid of what's not beneficial and rearrange it so that I can see encouragement (low-cal cookbooks, exercise equipment) and can't see stuff I ought not (hubby's snacks, triggers). We only have one television (I know, we're so weird, right), but I spend more time on the 'puter (which is semi on the fritz, so I'll be getting a new one soon) than watching tv. I even watch tv shows, anime, and movies on the puter at times, so really, I need to sometimes just hit the off button and go exercise.

This is my habitat. I'm it's Empress. I need to get the empire in line.

And I need to stop bringing crap in here.

^^for some home gym funnies, visit this page.

Crazy Mad At Myself

I'm still fighting off the blues, but on top of that, I'm ticked off at myself for not being fully, utterly committed. I still am stuck in that cycle of eating relatively well for two meals and then going nuts during a third.

Usually, the nuts meal is dinner. Yesterday, it was lunch.

I had gotten myself a perfectly adequate turkey and swiss on multigrain sandwich for lunch after my Pilates class--which went well, as I was breathing so much better and could fully exert myself. Here I was, driving home, sandwich in tow, and--boom!-- I get this raging craving for something madly, Chinesely salty. I'm like this possessed person. So, I take a right when I spot a local Chinese eatery and got a takeaway: the pepper steak combo--that diet-destroying thing that comes with fried rice and an egg roll and soup.

Oh, man. I ate it all.

The poor sandwich was relegated to the fridge.

I felt really not great after. I had a hard time waking up, and ended up sleeping 13 hours.

And I woke up bloated and with dark circles under my eyes. I don't normally suffer from dark circles unless I have sinusitis or other nasal allergy flare-up. But I notice that eating a lot of Chinese food (sodium, MSG?) makes me get dark circles. Hmm.

So, I look like crap, feel like crap and am very pissed off at my total lack of self-control.

I don't know what switch in me has to be pushed, but clearly, I am not committed in my will as much as I am in my mind. My mind wakes up deciding to go, my will decides to be a promiscuous food whore.

I am not giving up, but I am wishing there was an easier way to flip that switch and get going on this.

So frustrated. But not surrendering.

~

Drat--gooey setback

My breathing got worse Tuesday pm, and I got bummed, and I missed my afternoon snack (which helped so much on Monday), and went ballistic on supper.

How's that for a recap?

Anyway, at first, when I got hungry around 7pm, I was gonna just make a protein shake and be good, cause I was tired and wanted to go to bed early. So, I added a banana to my strawberry protein powder (for potassium, since I had a canned Amy's Vegetarian Chili over half a baked potato with guacamole and shredded cheese for lunch, lots of salt in canned foods and cheese) mixed with half milk, half water in blender.

As I was putting the milk back in the fridge, saw the leftover onion soup takeaway that had been there since Saturday. (When I have congestion issues, onion soup works way better for me than chicken.)

There it was--with gobs of cheese, with croutons.

Ah, damn. I heated it up and ate it.

Blew my points to hell.

Fell asleep on the couch from 10 pm to 1 am. Read a graphic novel (100 Bullets, vol 2). Am trying to get sleepy again. Am not eating. Not noshing. Not allowing self to even go in the kitchen.

I'm really disappointed about messing up what had been a sorta decent day.

Today is another day. I'll get a few hours shut-eye and then make a humongous note to EAT MY SNACKS and plan what I'll eat at suppertime and remember to accept being a little hungry (or a lot) if necessary.

Try and try again.

No wallowing in the dust.

I'm gonna have a bit of water now.

Nitey.

Bible Bite: A Be-Attitude for Dieters and Giving Yourself a Gift on Three King's Day

Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied."
~~Luke 6:21

Yeah, I know that I'm taking this famous Beatitude out of context by making it about dieting, instead of the spiritual context of the Sermon on the Mount. But I think the Lord will understand. :) After all, gluttony is a sin, and the Word is there to teach us, to help us correct ourselves, to assist us as we work to overcome our weaknesses, right?

So...back to my appropriation of the Be-Attitude:

This was part of my devotion for yesterday. And I had to stop and consider it in MY current context--which is the one where I work to beat down my gorging inner beast.

Dieters are generally hungry. Most honest diet books admit it. Anytime you go from, say, 4000 or 6000 or 3000 or 8000 calories down to 2000 or 1600 or 1200, you will be hungry. (Yeah, I know the very low carb diets have an elimination of hunger through ketosis aspect, but most of us don't or won't or can't do that sort of eating.) Some, like Dr. Beck, make it clear that being a grown-up means putting up with hunger pangs until it's time to eat according to one's meal plan. Most diets offer tricks and strategies to get us to feel full on fewer calories, on better foods, because hunger sets us up for gorging.

We dieters will face hunger. It's just how it is.

We don't like to hear this, do we? We don't like to feel deprived, hungry, peckish. And it's not just about the body (though that wars against us). We want the emotional comfort and satisfaction of eating what we want, when we want, or a reasonable facsimile.

But dieting means some acceptance of being hungry.

If we--and that means mostly ME, right now--can accept that there really is a blessing in tolerating a current and ongoing suffering of periodic levels of hunger in order to achieve ongoing and later levels of better health and mobility (the grown-up reasons) and a more attractive physique (the shallower motivation), then I--and we-- can see that the latter blessing (health, beauty) are greater than the current pseudo-blessing of eating what we want, when we want.

Whoa, that was a keyboard-full.

Result of all this pondering? I went to bed Monday a little hungry. I was at 1700 calories, and if I had a meal, even a mini-meal, I'd bust the 1800 I was shooting for. So, I sucked it up and went to bed with that little pang in me.

I've awoken with an appetite, I can tell you. And the scale showed a downward move from yesterday by -.6 lbs. So, that puts me at 276.2 today.

This is Tuesday. This is my mindset right now: Let yourself be a little hungry.

It's probably a good mental adjustment for all of us with weight issues--but how can we hold on to it, how can we live with it? I dunno. I'm just putting this out there: When the pangs start hitting, and what we plan to eat is X --which is low-cal and healthful and as filling as reasonably possible--and what we want to eat is Y--which is excessive and non-healthful and gorgeful--let's call ourselves blessed if we choose the healthful way, even if it leaves us not totally satisfied NOW. There's a greater satisfaction coming. A greater blessing.

Today is the second Christmas for us in the Latin culture. It's Three Kings Day. We celebrate the arrival of the Magi to offer gifts to the one born in Bethlehem and born to be king. (None of the gifts were cakes, cookies or sweets, I might add. All valuable and useful and symbolically significant, but not fattening. Heh.) I used to wake up to gifts under my bed on this morning when I was little. The Christmas season ends today, the Twelfth Day of Christmas. The Feast of the Epiphany.

Hunger as a blessing is my epiphany this week. I hope I can hold onto this blessing.

And this is my gift: I am giving myself today is the gift of a day of healthful eating and of accepting the occasional twinges of hunger and unsatisfied cravings, so that I, the Roly-Poly Princess may one day find satisfaction in being the Slender Queen of my empire.

Be a Magi to yourself today. Give yourself something that enriches your moment or your week or your life. Maybe an inspirational book or a calming cd or just go outside and sing a song in the sunlight. Maybe just ten minutes of positive thoughs: be grateful for the gift of life. Write a love letter to someone you haven't appreciated enough with words. Donate to a food bank in your name, and eat less so someone can eat more.

Seek an epiphany of your own. Be quiet and consider yourself and your life and your habits. Is there something you can come to realize that will be of help to you in any way, small or great?

And let me know what gift you gave yourself and what epiphany you may have had...

Happy Tuesday!

Queenly Quotes: Food Addiction--Just A Label

"A name is just a box we put ideas in. What matters is that I understand my relationship with food. Then I can start figuring out the consequences my environment, my thoughts, and my actions have on that relationship and make plans to manipulate these things to my best advantage. I don't know what the official definition of addiction is, though I could look it up on dictionary.com or the DMV-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). I don't know if what happens in my brain when there is leftover cake in the break room is the same thing that happens when an alcoholic is inside a liquor store or a smoker is inhaling second-hand smoke at a bar. It would be interesting to know, but I doubt it matters unless you're working on a cure for addiction. Right now I'm just trying to cope with the way I am. Giving my problems a name seems less relevant than managing them."

--by the Pasta Queen

~

Regain, Recommitment, and Retracing Steps to Better Habits--aka/WHERE IS MY FIRE?

The news is not good. But, hey, I knew it was coming for weigh-in day.

I've never been big on consistency when it comes to things like diet and exercise. I was always one of those, "Oh, let me go on a diet," then last no more usually than two days or two weeks or, at most, two months. Then, blam, back to old habits.

Well, I've managed to exercise regularly for nearly six months now. But the food consistency is eluding me. And for dieters, that is the NUMBER ONE issue. If the food isn't controlled, exercise away, but the loss will be negligible to nil. Eat enough, and exercising can't stop regain. We've seen that even on The Biggest Loser. It's the calories, stupid. :)

Well, I got on the scale after a month plus of just being a slacker. The result: 276.4.

Holy crap. I regained like 5 pounds. In a month. I wasn't even all-out bingeing. Just not vigilant.

Shit.

Okay, enough of the potty mou--er, keyboard.

I wish I could find the internal button one pushes to get to that BLAM moment that makes on commit intensely. I haven't. So, I've been semi-committed, half-heartedly in the fatfighting game.

And it shows. While I don't LOOK bigger, and in fact, look smaller due to the exercising, I am still firmly stuck in the 270's, which is making me a crazy woman. Really, I'm so sick of being here.

So, why don't I get out of here in the downward trajectory?

Cause I am not on fire. It's all about having this ongoing flame inside that ignites whatever is in a person that makes them consistently do something--be it pursue a career, keep a marriage going, train for a marathon, etc.

This week, I'm gonna be all about rescheduling the activities that got me down from 299 to begin with, cause these activities have gone by the wayside:

1. getting fresh groceries
2. preparing meals at home instead of getting take-out
3. keeping a food journal
4. drinking lots of water
5. praying about my weight journey

Every single one of those has gone kaput one by one over the last couple of months. And the results show it.

What works, works. When you stop working it, it stops working, and regain results.

The same sort of slack happened to Oprah:

In Oprah's case, she admits to stopping her exercise sessions, her meditations and going back to eating higher calorie foods.

Oprah regained 40 pounds.

I'm guessing the same thing happened to Kirstie Alley--stopped the Jenny Craig regimen, started adding her own comfort foods, gave up the working out, vigilance diminishes bit by bit until, what, all gone. She was looking big again this past summer. I have no idea if she's up or down as of this post. But she probably has regained as much more pounds than Oprah.

I had a setback when my organic grocer closed their business (temporarily, I hope, but who knows with this economy). I sort of just started doing delivery and takeout--which means DANGER.

So, that has to stop. Tomorrow, I have to go shopping (which I hate) and get the produce I need to make better food choices.

I have to start making meals again, the way I was when I was losing and holding on. I can control the ingredients at home. I can't in a restaurant.

I've totally slacked on water. I have actually had says when I had NO WATER AT ALL. This is bad. It's too easy to confuse thirst with hunger. Plus, not enough water contributes to bloat and makes number twos uncomfy. Ya know what I mean?

I do notice that when one domino goes, like a food journal (which is a tuchis-painer, but so necessary for me, anyway, to be accountable and aware), the others follow. It's like this cord connecting all the good strategies, and if one part topples, the pull on the others is nearly irresistible. Boom. Boom. Boom. All down.

Weight up.

I have had the BECK FOR LIFE book lying around for weeks. I was supposed to review it for amazon (got it free). So, I want to start into that and apply the system. I don't FEEL like it. I FEEL like napping rather than working out. I FEEL like shoving a pizza in my face instead of an egg white veggie omelette. But we obese folks don't do well following our feelings. They are often self-destructive.

So, here I go again. Five pounds up.

My mood is not dark. It's just a big sigh of frustration that I didn't nip this closer to the bud. So much easier catching 2 pounds than 5, right?

I really need to get my fire mojo back. Where is it? Where did it go? How do I find it again?

Ah, well. The quest starts again this week.

I'm getting to the point of trying the Portion Doctor's plates.
Although, really, how overpriced are those? And kinda homely.

Let me go find my food journal. It's buried under a pile of unfolded laundry, I think?

Royal Fatfighting Tournament Tools: #4 The Pause that Empowers

After several good eating days, I had a setback at dinner Monday. I ate decently at breakfast. I ate well at lunch. I went to town at dinner. It was a slowly progressive binge.

So, I started reading A Cyberguide To Stop Overeating and Recover from Eating Disorders by Joanna Poppink, M.F.C.C.

As we all know by now, the only way to successfully lose weight and maintain the loss is to implement strategies from the start that bring new protections and better habits into our lives. Learning these strategies is easy for some, harder for others, but we all have to learn to eat differently and how to behave when we are tempted to return to old habits of overeating or bad eating.

In my case, even though I know I should at minimum STOP and CONSIDER what I am doing or am about to do, I didn't.

And I should have gotten the warning alarm the moment I woke up:

I slept badly. I felt tired from the moment I got up. So tired, so heavy in my bones, that I almost cancelled my Pilates session. I drooped. I ate and felt no pick-me-up from the coffee. I did breathing exercises. I talked positively to myself in the shower about having energy, being energetic, being UP.

It took all my strength to get through the Pilates session, and I couldn't do one of the exercises I had done in previous sessions (the side bend on the barrel). The oomph was gone by the time we got to it. I felt like crying. I was THIS near tears, because I felt like such a failure.

So...

1. I woke up tired from a bad night's sleep.
2. I felt massively disappointed by my exercise performance (despite my trainer's great reassurances that I did great and worked hard.)
3. I came home feeling even more drained.
4. Because I was tired, I burned hubby's dinner, which I let unduly upset me, and then I had to quickly think of an alternative.

I should have said, "Princess, you are having a bad day. What do you do when you have bad, tired, draining days. You eat. And then you eat some more. Time for a strategy, like a big bowl of a lite soup and extra water. Like a fiber drink to make your tummy feel expanded. Like a nap. Ask hubby for a massage. Something..."

I didn't stop and assess my feelings about my day. I just went with every impulse except one initial thought--I shot down the persistent urge to order a pizza. But after that, I went with the impulses, which were to lay on the couch between trips to the kitchen, where I had 2 huge bowls of arugula with tomato and Annie's Goddess dressing, a cup and a half of split pea soup, three ounces of asian pork tenderloin with a cup of fruity rice, a half cup of granola with non-fat milk, a single-serve organic cherry turnover-pie with coffee, and just barely manage to fight off a baked potato chips craving. That was the second time I fought off any eating cue.

Now, a year ago plus, I would have ordered that large pizza and garlic rolls and a Caesar salad, maybe some wings or fried zucchini. The very fact that I mostly had healthful stuff on hand is a testament to better food shopping choices. (That cherry pie, organic and single-serve--was in the freezer since February! I went and dug way in the back to find it.)

But it was still bad day, a setback, because I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW that I need to use the strategies, use the tools, and it starts with: SELAH. Pause and consider. Be aware. Self-examine. So I can choose better.

Had I taken 10 to 15 minutes to think and self-talk, I could have stopped after the first bowl of salad, the small piece of roasted pork tenderloin, and the fruited rice, and had a good night. It was the chain reaction, the thoughtless one that got me.

Hence, the tool of the pause for awareness. The tool of the awareness for a better selection of course(s) of action.

The Cyberguide I linked to above has exercises for overeaters (look at the links on that page and scroll to "Exercises to Avoid Overeating" in 10 parts).

I may have to create a chart for my fridge door. I had intended to print out a STOP AND THINK poster for it, and this is something for me to do TOMORROW!

I'm gonna have bad days--little sleep, low energy, depressive episodes. I need to get the tools ingrained to handle them.

Have you used the pause/self-examination to stop binges? Are they habits yet?

I'm working on it.

~~