Monthly Archives: May 2011

Bread

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Everyday, it is said, you have to write a little something to get the creative juices flowing.

Here is it s about 9:05pm and I haven’t written a thing and, more that that, I don’t have much to write about.

I guess my big revelation today is about bread.  I love the stuff.  And there’s a great bread place right across the street from where I ‘m going to a chiropractor for my neck which, for some reason, has decided to really start to hurt.  But that’s another story.

The Great Harvest Bread Company is a national chain that bakes some really nice bread. They change it up from month to month and from week to week in order to keep things interesting I guess.  Last week I had their challah bread which was very nice – eggy, chewy and a little sweet. Today, I’m trying their caraway rye bread.  Also delish.

Of course they give you a little free sample to reel you in but it’s still great bread. And that’s the problem.  It’s great bread. So I like to eat it and bread, as we all know, is high in calories. Boooooo. Even the whole wheat, “natural” stuff is high in calories.

But, hey, ya gotta live a little, huh?

This is Day 11 of my 30 day challenge to myself.

 

I Guess The Gym Helps A Little

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I went back to the gym today.

Yeah. Big Announcement.

It was a little crowded when I got there but had thinned out by the time I was ready to leave which was, believe it or not, just about 40 minutes later.

I did my treadmill thing.  Still not very fast and not for a huge amount of time (30 minutes) but I’m need to get back do pick up my speed and maybe a little bit more time, too.  I also tried an elliptical type machine but I couldn’t quite get the hang of it and I was a little nervous about going gangbusters because of a) my knee and b) my neck and c) I had never used the machine before.  I can see, though, that I really should try to switch up a little.

Needless to say even 30 minutes at 2.6 mph only burns about enough calories to cover a hard pretzel or two and I still went over my calorie limit for the day.  I am starting to log in everything, though.  I used to “cheat” and just not add stuff in.  My Fitness Pal was pretty forgiving like that,  Each day was a new day.  Lose It! is a little different.  They send yo a spreadsheet at the end of the week with your daily totals and then a weekly net.  So, if I don’t add in everything it thinks I was way under and gives me the high five I don’t really deserve.

I’ve been kind of edge today, for some reason, and the exercise didn’t “help” the way exercise is supposed to.  I guess when people talk about exercise pumping out the endorphins, they mean regular exercise over a sustained period of time.  Something I have a hard time doing…the sustained period of time thing.

Tomorrow, I give it another go.  Maybe I can make a habit of this or something…..  Hope springs eternal.

Day 10 of my 30 day challenge to myself

 

 

Exercise. I Get It!

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The last couple of days I’ve been eating “over” the calorie limit imposed on me by Lose It! which is more than the calorie limit that is being imposed on me by My Fitness Pal in order to achieve the same goal. Lose 1½ per week.  Of course, My Fitness Pal has also asked me how many calories I plan to burn off with exercise. LoseIt! does not.  In fact, Lose It! doesn’t say anything about exercise.  It does have a way to enter it into the scheme of things.

I’ve never used it.

I realize that there are two parts of the weight loss equation. One is eat less. The other is exercise more. I haven’t been doing the second  part.

Sure.  I have the excuses.  My neck has been killing me.  I’ve been going to a chiropractor who told me that the treadmill wasn’t the wisest thing and I should try the machine that is sort of like cross country skiing. Yeah. Right. I’m on it.

Then there’s the timing.  I want to go but I just can’t seem to find the right time.  I get caught up in things and then things pop up.  I guess the work around for that is to go first thing in the morning.  Bed head hair and all.  That’s what Tyler Weeks of 344 Pounds preaches on a regular basis. His hair is really short, though.  Can’t hardly mess that stuff up.

The it’s getting in the car to go to the gym.  That should be the easy part but it’s not.

Needless to say,though, exercise really, really needs to get integrated into my daily routine or ain’t nothing going to happen – new scale or no new scale.

By the way, I ordered the new scale.  It should be here June 1st.  If that’s as volatile as the old one(s), I won’t have technology to blame.

 

This is Day 9 of my 30 day challenge to myself.

The Deal With Water

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Everyone who is worth their salt (which you should definitely moderate) says that drinking water is a key factor in weight loss.  There are a lot of reasons and, I’ve recently discovered, a lot of different formulas for the amount of water I should drink and when.

There’s the old stand-by: 8- 8 oz glasses of water per day.  This formula doesn’t say when.  It just says drink it.  So, in theory, I could swill down my 64 ozs or 2 quarts in one sitting (try it, I dare you).

There are a couple of others I’ve found.  One says I should swill down 1 oz of water for every pound of weight.  In my case, that’s 280 ozs or 2.2 gallons (that’s gallons) of water a day.  Then I heard of a slightly more benign formula which is to drink a  ½ oz. of water for every pound.  That’s only 1.04 gallons or 4 quarts. Roughly double the old stand-by of 8-8 oz glasses.

Now, anyone who’s tried to consume a lot of water knows that what goes in must come out and with that much water I’m making a lot of trips down the hall. This also makes me think of the water being used to flush which makes me think that flushing every time is a terrible waste of water and an environmental no-no. Even with my low-water per flush, high efficiency toilets.

When to Drink Your Water?

Now as to when.  Some say first thing in the morning is a good time since you tend to dehydrate over night.  Others say before every meal to “fill you up” so you don’t eat as much (this has never worked for me, by the way).

However, with even one gallon on the water menu it probably means swilling the stuff down at every opportunity. Followed ten minutes later by the trip down the hall.  At least there is an exercise component to this as well.

In any case, I’ve been trying to drink more water in the hopes that it will, in fact, help with the weight loss.  But, truth be told, I’m not convinced. We’ll see.

This is Day 8 of my 30 day challenge to myself

Back On Track?

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Well, I’m still not happy with how weird the scale works but I weighed myself this morning — 280.4 lbs.  I’ll take it.

Week 23 — 284.0 lbs
Week 24 — 280.4 lbs
Decrease —3.6 lbs
Total Decrease Year to Date — 22 lbs or .91 lbs per week

That’s still not s sterling track record. The worst part is that by starving myself the past few days (on and off). I reflexively bought some bad stuff today.  Challah bread and huge chocolate chip cookies both from a gourmet bakery called the Great Harvest Bread Company. Cute t-shirt slogan: “It’s nice to be kneaded”. Get it?

Anyway, my pattern seems to be that I follow the straight and narrow for awhile and then backslide.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m heading back to the gym for my on/off exercise routine.  It’s just really, really tough to establish this “new lifestyle” habit.

Day 7 of my 30 day challenge to myself

 

Weekly Weigh In … Week 24 (Delayed)

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Normally this would be the day to weigh-in and report.  The idea is to keep myself accountable. Yeah.  I look at my weight every day and see what it is but if I put it here maybe it’ll make it stronger.

However, this week, I’m putting it off.

Here’s why.

I can’t freakin’ trust the scale I’ve been using.

Check this out:

5/22 — 282.4 lbs
5/23 — 281.30 lbs
5/24 — 280.2 lbs
5/25 — 278.8 lbs

In the space of 4 days I dropped 3.6 lbs and, for the first time in memory got below 280 lbs.  Sounds pretty good, huh?  I was doing the end zone happy dance and thinking I finally broke through the plateau.

I weighed myself today (the official day) and I was at 282 something.  Wait!  That can’t be right.  I really didn’t do anything different.  I stepped off the scale, reset it (it’s a fancy schmancy Sater that tells you everything about yourself that you never wanted to know) and then stepped back on.

I was up a pound.  In the space of two minutes.  Ok.  Time to let the scale “cool off” or something.  So, I have my morning cereal and toast and check e-mail and then weigh myself again.  Now I was up to 284 something!  So I had gained two pounds in 35 minutes.

No way.

I have been going over my calorie limit the past couple of days but not by the amount necessary to pile back all that weight and surely my weight didn’t fluctuate 2 pounds in less than an hour.

I guess it’s time for another scale.  I watched what I ate today and I’m 267 calories under my limit.  I’m also a little hungry.  That’s OK.  Let’s see what this wacko scale says tomorrow morning.

I’m getting a new scale, though.

This is what I have in mind…

 

This is Day 6 of a 30 day challenge to myself

Anticipation

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Over the past couple of days I’ve been dropping some weight.  Enough to make me say, “Hmmm.  I wonder why?”  I want to attribute it to really watching my calories, logging them in, ending my eating for the day at a relatively early house (before 6:00) and drinking lots of water.  But, I don’t know for sure.

Tomorrow is weigh-in day and I ate kinda late this evening and I also went way over my calorie limit. I’m trying to suck down lots of water so maybe that’ll help.

The anticipation is a killer.  Up? Down? How much?

Day 5 of my personal 30 day challenge to myself.

 

The Eating At Meetings

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I’ve written about this before.  It’s a terrible weakness of mine and I’m not quite sure how to beat it.

Today, two meetings provided food.  One was my local Rotary Club which provides breakfast every Tuesday.  It’s pretty much the same. Scrambled eggs, some kind of meat – bacon or sausage or ham – some bread of some kind – biscuit, bagel or silver dollar pancakes.  Yeah.  There’s fruit and I’m always surprised at how many people eat it.

My other meeting was a local Association of Realtors Task Force. It’s not a regular type meeting so there was lunch served to accommodate the fact that many of the Task Force members had come from some distance. Pasta, a sauce (today with chicken), a salad and dessert.

It’s the dessert-y stuff that gets to me.  The other stuff I try to take it easy on because I know I’m a spiller.  I always manage to drop a little something from my fork or spoon and because my stomach’s in the way, it never makes it to the floor or table.  It makes it to the front of my shirt. So I try to avoid things I can spill in public.  It’s really bad form to spill.

Dessert is another story.  It’s usually cookies.  Today it was these cute little chocolate cannoli things, cute little macaroon and chocolate cookie things and this baklava-like thing that was verrrry tasty.  Too damn tasty.

So I came home and instead of dinner, I tried to cut back by having a couple of hard pretzels and a banana. And I’m drinking lots of water.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.  I really hate meetings.

Day 4 of my personal 30 day challenge to myself.

Dieting and Hunger

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One of the biggest challenges I have is staving off hunger while keeping track of the calories I eat.

Both My Fitness Pal and Lose It! give you a baseline (although it’s slightly different on each one) that you shouldn’t go over. They assign calories to virtually everything that goes into my mouth.  Normally, this would be a good thing.

Yet, I found that to really make the scale move, I have to go way under the calories threshhold and, as a result, spend some or all of the day in a state of hunger.

I know it’s not the “starving children in Africa” type of hunger.  It’s the gnawing hunger that causes me to be a little on the irritable side.  It’s also they type of hunger that, when I do sit down in front of some food, I never want to stop…almost.

A Quick Anecdote

Yesterday, I had a fairly light breakfast and just a snack for lunch.  Then I had to go and sit in an Open House for four hours.  Just hanging out.  No food, nothing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that it wasn’t very busy.  I started to feel a little “peckish” around 3:00 but I still had to run out the clock on the Open House.  To make a long story, short, by the time I got home I was famished.  I could have eaten the entire pantry, refrigerator and more.  Or so it seemed.

Anyway, I cooked dinner – nothing fancy – and enjoyed it and was done eating about 5:30pm.  I drank some water during the evening and … wham! … this morning I got up and lost some pounds.  Not ounces. Pounds.

Now, I know a lot of it was probably water weight.  It seemed for every quart I took in about a ½ gallon went out.  Part of it was probably eating early, too.  I truly think (no studies or stats to back this up) that eating much after 6:00 just adds weight.

I was really glad to see the scale dip but I was hungry most of the day before and I wasn’t in a very pleasant mood.  Today, I was back to my “normal” (in quotes) eating habits of meal…snack…snack…meal…etc.  Last time I checked I was about 111 calories over limit.  I am drinking water and it’ll be interesting to see if the scale goes up and, if so, how much.

Obviously, I know that day-to-day weight fluctuations are like the stock market (and what’s up with that, lately??).  I just wish I could start on the steady downward trend, again.  That, I’m afraid may mean some feelings of hunger.

Bah. Humbug.

Day 3 of my personal 30 day challenge to myself.

Lose It! – Another Calorie and Exercise Log

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A good colleague of mine, Rob McCance, was telling me about an app he’s been using to lose some weight. Something called Lose It! I had actually heard about the app before from another source but never really gave it any serious consideration.  After all, I had started using My Fitness Pal and that seemed to be working out fine.  Except that I wasn’t using it each and every day.

So, I downloaded Lose It! onto my iPhone and started to look at it a little.  Then I went to the website and started to look at that a little.  Then I signed up and added my profile and a starting weight just to see what it’s like.

As with most of these app things, the website is a whole lot more robust and easier to use than the app. In fact, if I put Lose it! and My Fitness Pal next to each other, I have to say I like the Lose It! website a bit better.  I may even do a side by side comparison in a week or two.  I think I know My Fitness Pal well enough.  Now, I have to get used to Lose It! and see how that does.

Losing the Weight

Rationally, I know that by simply having an app or a website to log things into will not cause me to lose weight.  Both sites can offer statistics abot how their users lose weight but here’s the deal.  Losing weight requires eating less and exercising more.  If it were as easy as putting stuff into an app, I’d be kinda like Arnold Schwarzenegger without the love child.

OK, maybe without the ripped look, either.

Still, the conventional wisdom is that if you keep track of the stuff you put in your mouth and the exercise you do, the “new lifestyle” will eventually become a habit and the body will follow.

So, we’ll see. Stay tuned

Day 2 of my personal 30 day challenge to myself.