Tag Archives: calories

Pacing Myself With Food

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I think the biggest problem I have with food — at least, for the moment — is being able to pace myself.  I usually eat a high calorie breakfast with a lot of starch and sugar. A smaller lunch involving a sandwich and more sugar. Then depending on what’s going on for dinner I either chow down or eat a little something that is usually crap and then get hungry around 9:00.

I know I do a whole lot better if I can stay away from food after 6:00 but sometimes I just can’t seem to pull it together.  I know I shouldn’t eat a high calories breakfast that is crap but it’s a habit.

The big problem is keeping full without overdoing it and not going beyond the point where I’m famished.

Very hard to do. Very hard.

Day 14 of my 30 day challenge to myself

THE Scale

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Well, THE scale came in today. Yippee!  This is supposed to be the scale that is super accurate and doesn’t have a lot of other mumbo jumbo that you have to remember.  No “memory” about what your weight was yesterday or what your bone density is or what have you.  Just straight up pooundage.

It’s is little smaller than I expected it to be.  Maybe because it’s designed go into small-ish places.

It also does not slide.

This is a drawback. The scale I have now slides pretty easily across the laminate floor in my kitchen. I can nudge it under a counter over hang when it’s not in use and pull it out easily when I want to weigh myself.

Not so with this scale.  The feet have some kind of non-skid substance which makes it very hard to slide or move. That in and of itself would not be so bad except that you need to recalibrate it every time you move it. Step on, get the weight reading. Step off. Step back on to get the real weight reading.  Pain in the ass.

Of course, it needs to be on a “flat, hard surface”. No carpet or anything like that. Which makes it a problem in our house.  My wife’s bathroom has ceramic tile but it’s pretty small and she has it pretty well junked up with her stuff.  Not much room.  My bathroom has two parts – the sink and mirror part which has carpet and the toilet and bathtub part which has tile but is really too small to add the scale.

Bummer.  I may have just thrown $30 down the tubes.

I’m going to try and see if it works for me, though, and also see how different the reading is from the fancy schmancy scale.  Maybe I’m just whistling in the sark or pass the graveyard or whatever that saying is.

After all, the scale will read lower and lower numbers if I just stop eating crap and exercise more.

Day 13 of the 30 day challenge to myself

 

Deprivation and Binging

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A lot of diet books will tell you that deprivation only leads to binging or, at best, giving up on your “diet”.  It is so true.

Counting calories is tough because there are lots and lots of things out there that really taste good and that I’ve become accustomed to eating that have a super high calorie count.  Bread and other starches are big time offenders.  Let’s not even start on the sweet stuff – ice cream, cakes, cookies, muffins…. you get the point.

So I was out and about today and needed to wander into a mall to get a watch battery for the Missus.  The mall has a food court.  The food court has all  kinds of temptations.  Not the least of which is a Chinese place.  I like Chinese food especially when it’s sweet and comes with rice.  Love rice.

Obviously, very high calorie and very greasy, to boot.  Not only that, it really didn’t taste that good.  Barely warm and greasy tasting.  So I didn’t eat it all.  Possibly a point in my favor.  However, I compensated by eating a cinnamon sugar pretzel from Auntie Anne’s.  This is a huge mistake because it’s very high calorie and it’s also enormously expensive for what it is.

The point being is that I went a little off the deep end because, well, because I was tired of counting calories and “depriving ” myself and not losing the weight I want to lose.  Now, I realize I need to really get out there and exercise but, damn, shouldn’t some of this weight be coming off.

The freakin’ scale keeps bouncing around (maybe it has to do with my eating habits). Down to an encouraging weight one day and, whoosh, back up 2.4 lbs the next morning.  Even if I showed a small, incremental decline I could keep with it. This up and down like a see-saw just doesn’t get it.

Anyway…tomorrow I hope to get back with the program.

God, this is hard.

Day 12 of my 30 day challenge to myself.

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.

 

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

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.

Weekly Weigh In … Week 21

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This will be another quick one….

I’ve been getting lazy about posting on the actual day I weigh-in – Thursdays.  I do weigh myself.  Trust me on this.

Week 20 – 282.0 lbs
Week 21 – 282.6 lbs
Increase – .6 lb
Year to date decrease – ~20 lbs or ~.95 lb/ week

The pattern here is that my average weekly decrease is, er, decreasing which means I’m not continuing to lose weight at a pace that will get me anywhere anytime soon.

The Reasons

  1. I’ve been lax about logging in my food to My Fitness Pal and, thus, losing track of the number of calories I’m consuming.
  2. I’ve been away from the gym way too long (I went back yesterday for the first time in a long time). – No exercise.
  3. I’ve been eating stuff.  Wednesday I went to a minor league baseball game sponsored by a title company that provided lots of hamburgers and hot dogs and potato salad and…you get the point. Last night it was Cinco de Mayo sponsored by another title company and mortgage lender which included all kinds of high calories stuff.  I could go on.
  4. I started getting into pretzels, again. Bad for the blood pressure. Bad for water retention. Not high calorie but not low calorie either.

So, I just really need to get back on track. Get re-dedicated.  It’s tough.  This “lifestyle” thing is not as easy as it sounds. There is food everywhere and occasions to eat it all the time.  It’s mind boggling.