It's been a while, hasn't it?

Yeah... so, everything has been fine for the last month or so. After I hit my 5-pound goal, I basically decided I was cool with my body, cool with the number, and I wasn't going to try to change my weight anymore. For the first couple of weeks I bounced between 127-130. Then I got my period around the same time I had a wisdom tooth bothering me and dropped down to just under 125 in a few days, then hovered around 125-126 for somewhat over a week. I kept counting calories for a bit and figured that, eating intuitively, I take in about 1600 calories/day during the first half of my cycle and 1900 calories/day in the second half, and a 2500 or so day about a once a week - all averaging out to about 1850/day. Then I dropped the calorie counting, and pretty soon after that I dropped the exercise tracking because I know whether I'm doing enough exercise without looking a spreadsheet of it. The reasons I exercise have nothing to do with weight anymore and everything to do with mood regulation. Finally when I hit the middle of my cycle, I shot up to 129 in a few days, and have dropped back to 126-128. So, I guess I lost a pound or something on average during that first month "maintaining". I'm still writing down what I eat, and weighing every day - not so much because I need to monitor it that closely, but to establish a baseline and to assess when I've "really" stabilized at a static average weight, which may take a few months.

I figure as long as my weight stays below 130 it can do whatever it wants. Past 130 I'll start paying attention, 135 I think is my definite action level, and 145 should be about my max. Of course, this could change if I actually get into some strength training and it pays off, or further in the future when I get pregnant, but for now those are the graduated ceilings I see for my weight.

Anyway, I'm actually thinking of quitting this blog. Nobody's reading it, I'm doing fine, and it's been suggested I create a web-based presentation of my weight loss process, but I don't really want to just open this anonymous blog to all the people who know me. So I'm going to take the data, re-work it up, and start a new blog that will actually be associated with me and have readers. 

Adios, amigos!

Goal

At 128.8 yesterday and 127.6 today (yeah, I dunno either) I have met my goal of losing 5 pounds from the 133 range. At this point I can really say I'm totally satisfied with the number on the scale and the shape of my body. Or at least, I'm torn between thinking I could lose a few more pounds from my stomach and I ought to put a little back on my ribs. I've been eating cookies.

I want to do more strength training, and more yoga (I've hardly done any since the end of the academic year). I went and got some pants today that are long so I can wear them at work (a chemistry lab) but are flexible enough I can do yoga on my lunch break without changing clothes. Gotta find some way to motivate myself to do strength-building calisthenics, like pushups and bicycle/leglifts, on a regular basis. Also, with my full-time work, and some extra stuff I'm doing related to my work last summer, my running frequency isn't great and when I do run I feel I'm squeezing it in. I'm thinking of maybe setting my standard at fewer times a week but trying to do really good quality workouts that have a full spectrum of exercise types - a run and yoga-stretches and calisthenics.

On that note, it was nice this morning to go for a run just because I thought it would feel good, and without caring at all about how many calories it would burn. With my experience intuitive-eating in the last week or so, I'm pretty confident that the amount of exercise I need to stay mentally sane is at least as much as I need to maintain my weight given how much my body tells me to eat. What my mind nags me to eat can sometimes be another story, but there you go with the mental sanity, and also, it's much less of an issue due to my work right now, where I get very absorbed in what I'm doing and have to specifically change location from lab to office in order to eat.

Intuitive eating

I did an experiment today. I practiced intuitive eating and deliberately shut off all my quantifying and arranging mechanisms until nighttime. I refused to tally up calories in my head until I was done eating for the day. I refused to plan my food more than was necessary for practical purposes (i.e. lunch and snacks to bring to work tomorrow). I dismissed thoughts of what I could eat later in the day with "that's nice, but I'll see if it's what I want when I actually get hungry." I wrote down what I had eaten so far in the day if I was at my computer, but didn't spend much time looking at the pattern, and didn't let myself interrupt other activities to do so. Let me tell you, this food and weight-loss thing has become a great procrastination technique for me. Just plan what to eat for breakfast tomorrow, or all week, read about the USDA's new dietary recommendations and what counts as an ounce of grains and make up a day's menu that has just so many servings of each thing, think of hypothetical ways to arrange calories in the week and lose at X rate... and avoid working on that presentation I don't really want to give. Because I know "listen to your body" isn't quite THAT simple, I asked myself "am I thirsty, bored, stiff, or want a distraction?" before deciding to eat. I drank a LOT of water today because it was hot, and I also went for a run, a short 2.3-mile jaunt. Oh, and I made sure to have a treat. That's right, not just allowed, but actively attended to having a treat. I will have a treat every day until the idea gets old and I don't feel like one. Today it was a piece of lemon poppyseed cake, and some other time it could be chocolate, ice cream, a cocktail, a cookie, whatever I want that day.

The results:

Sunday 6/5

Grits with a fried egg, 1/2 orange and 1/2 banana (330)

Apple (100)

1/2 Tofurky sausage rolled in a slice of bread (210)

Lemon poppyseed cake with coffee (maybe 400)

Celery sticks and cream cheese herb dip (100)

Salt and peppered boiled potato (100)
Raspberry-redwine sorbet (50)

Ginger candy (10)

Rice and beans with tomatoes, onions, and a dollop of cream cheese (330)

Iced tea (35)

Est. 1665

I'm pretty pleased with that.

4 steps forward, 1 step back

After eating 2 half-sandwiches of mixed cheddar and mozzarella cheese, 1 half-sandwich of peanut butter and honey, and 2 bowls of cereal with milk and sugar, I'm rather astonished that I only feel full edging toward stuffed, rather than nauseatingly packed to the brim.

Also slightly astonished at my behavior. I have overeaten at dinner and events before, and I have eaten too many calories throughout too many snacks in an afternoon before, but I have never before eaten 1200 calories in one sitting in the afternoon, flagrantly disregarding the plan.

Apparently I'm at the point where pushing too hard for too long leads to binging. Apart from I'd waffle on the out of control clause, I think this fits the markers of a real binge. Well, so be it. The last 4 days were excellently on-track - I'm talking 1500 calories plus a workout kind of level - and I've been feeling great because of it. I've been at 131.2 for 2 days, which means I lost the semester-party pound and am mostly finished with the final-projects pound. Next week I'll be cutting out pot for a bit, drinking coffee, and doing (hopefully) interesting work that keeps me (hopefully) on my feet in the lab, plus being on campus with running trails and the gym available at lunch, so I would expect to do pretty well during the week, and if you think of that plan I had before where I'd restrict during the week and indulge one day out of the weekend, well, today's Friday. If I'd been thinking of it that way, though, I would have rather indulged on a pot of Annies mac and cheese or a pint of ice cream, except that I can't afford it this month anyway, so...

I'm at 2300 calories for the day now and I'm beginning to look shiftily at that number. It seems like every time I overeat in an unplanned way, it peters out around 2300. I'm pretty sure 2300 is close to what maintains 165 at my typical level of activity. Dammit setpoint, stop looking at me like that!

I get high on eating less

I could have titled this "I get high on dieting," but that would be slightly disingenuous because I don't consider what I'm doing dieting. Incidentally, when I a senior in high school and had never done anything close to a diet, I wrote in a list of 100 things to do before I die (assigned for a class, don't ask) that I'd like to follow a series of ridiculous diets, like "foods that start with vowels." I still think it would be fun to try silly diets just for the sake of trying them and being silly, but that's not what I'm talking about. I could also have titled it "I get high on restricting," but "restricting" is always the medical term used to describe what anorexics do, and I'm pretty sure a girl with a BMI of 22 who regularly eats 1800 calories a day is far from anorexic.

Nevertheless, I notice that after a week or two of undereating consistently, if not by a lot, it gets easier, and not because I'm getting used to something, but because my physiological reactions are changing. I feel a little giddy; I feel like I'm balancing on the edge of something, feeling, in fact, AMAZING as I push an interval between meals to 4 or 5 hours, but knowing I have to end it and put something in my mouth before I crash and get cranky, at which point it wouldn't taste that good anyway. I love going to the point where I'm starting to feel light and hungry, then going for a run, feeling airy, empty of matter but full of energy, flooding with adrenaline and then flooding with endorphins when I get home, take a shower, and finally eat lunch.

This works better in the summer. I don't know why, but something about either the stress of school or just my brain draining glucose too fast makes it so I don't get that far. By the time I'm hungry, I'm also tired, and I really want to just eat some damn food and get onto the next thing.

I hope this does not mean I have to always be undereating to feel amazing, or that I have to always be keeping track of what I eat to feel amazing. I hope that at some weight, it all comes together to maintain weight and feel great and be mentally sustainable all at the same time.

Status update

Well, I did okay on Monday and Tuesday of last week, but then the free food took over. I kind of forgot about some of my planned strategies (e.g. one donut only). Now I'm around 3 pounds up, which is still under 135, but I don't think it's all "real" anyhow because I don't think I overate enough to gain 2 pounds in a week.

Toward the end though, I did break through it all in a significant way, I think. During the end-of-term party, I took a certain substance that always makes me uninterested in food, resulting in my not eating for about 15 hours. The overnight fast can sometimes last that long, but usually it's around 8-12 hours, so it was a really a great break and made me feel light and "up" and on-track again. Since then, the past two days, I've gone back to counting calories and I've been doing pretty well.

I was going to try to have a cardio workout and a yoga class all five weekdays this week, but I realized there aren't as many yoga classes as I thought and some of them conflict with other things I'm doing. So I'll go to the ones I can and still try to cardio every day.

I'm looking forward to the summer because I'll be able to walk to campus/work and back, which will mean I'm walking for a little more than an hour a day, plus any real working out I do. I guess I wanted to focus on training my running, but the weather's been so sluggish at becoming summer that I haven't really thought about it yet. I actually have a lot of projects I want to work on over the summer including some writing and I'm not sure if I will have enough time for all of it. I'll be working, but I also want to continue a story I started a long time ago, and write an essay about Hobbes and Locke and Ayn Rand, and train up my running, and I need to keep working on this writeup of the work I did last summer. Hopefully it will all happen...

Go figure

So I go away for a week, have positive calorie balance most of the days, have virtually no daily activity, only do one run the whole time, eat chocolate pie with whipped cream one night, breaded chicken strips the next day, and binge on Easter candy... and come back to new lows in both weight and fat percentage. WTF body.

This morning, 132.6 (-1.0 from when I left) and 24.2% fat. If it was just weight, I'd chalk it up to my period ending or being dehydrated from travel, but then you'd expect the body fat to go up. I don't really know what's up with that seeing as I basically sat on my ass the whole time.

Still, it strikes me that it's been a month since I reached my 50-pound goal, and I've only lost 2 pounds since then. Not that it's a big deal, but I'm enthusiastic about getting back into gear this coming week, with daily exercise and low-calorie meal plans and ice cream bribes. I, or rather my boyfriend while I was on airplanes, got a box of Skinny Cow ice cream bars and my plan is that at least some days this week, if I am within my target for the day minus 100 calories by the end of dinner, then I can have a 100-calorie ice cream bar for dessert. Ice cream is one of my favorite foods, so I think this ought to be pretty motivating for being judicious about food offered to me during the day and not overeating at dinner.

So I need a plan

Yep, definitely need a plan. The last two days have been an unmitigated disaster of sitting around my dad's house doing next to nothing and eating everything tasty in his kitchen, including a lot of bread, cheese, peanut butter, and chocolate. Which, come to think of it, is what I've ALWAYS done at my dad's, and might have had something to do with the development of those eating habits that kept me around 165 for so long. But that is neither here nor there.

Two not insignificant issues are fundamentally biological and can't-do-anything-about-it. One, it's very dry here, easy to get dehydrated, which leads to low energy and empty-needy feeling in the stomach, which mimics hunger, and since it's SO much dryer than my usual environment plus the water doesn't taste very good, it's difficult to even keep up with my basic hydration needs, let alone use water as an appetite suppressant as I'm accustomed to doing. Two, I'm in a place I can't navigate where everything is very spread-out and outside is all compacted snow and ice, so the ways of getting out and active, whether for casual activity or a run, are very limited. Not being active causes one to burn fewer calories, and also to feel somewhat stiff and low-energy, and lack endorphins.

Mental issues include boredom, which is highly influenced by the middle-of-nowhere-ness of this place and the lack of exercise. The other thing is not knowing what to expect, having no structure to my day. These are somewhat intertwined issues. When I am at home and easily eat little, it's pretty much because I have an idea of what times I'm going to eat and am absorbed with other things in the betweentimes. I only think of eating at other times than I planned if my body is really insistent about it, or if I feel the need for a distraction, but my environmental conditions usually make it inconvenient to indulge the latter case.

So tomorrow, there is going to be a dinner type thing at 5:30. There might be some other stuff earlier in the day. I am planning to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast, then drink coffee (I haven't been drinking as much coffee either, which might have something to do with it) and snack on clementines, hot cocoa, and skim milk throughout the day, with a can of beans for a filling but rather low-calorie protein source to back me up if I need it. At dinner and also throughout, one thing to remember is not to give in to munchy pleasure, the swallowing and filling up your stomach kind of enjoyment. Instead focus on the taste enjoyment, pleasure at the front of your mouth, tip of your tongue. You can get by on less that way, eat slower, and wait for satiety signals.

probably gain half a pound instead of lose it

At least I got out for a walk today, even if I ate two dozen Reese's peanut butter eggs while doing so...

Adverse conditions

The conditions here are really terrible for weight loss. We have:

- Junk food readily available and visible

- Not much to do and 20 minutes' drive into town

- Dry climate that makes you constantly thirsty even if you drink a lot of water

- Icy roads that make running tough

- Unfamiliar, non-gridded roads that I might get lost on if I went running by myself

So I'm only earning a sedentary 1750 or so calories a day, and am constantly fending off the behavioral availability of eating. Well, life is life. When I get back I have low-calorie, lower-carb meal plans, careful scheduling, and environmental control strategies to lose a couple more pounds before my birthday and the end of phase 3. By the way, I'm not taking aerobics next quarter but instead pilates on Monday and Wednesday. I can keep going to yoga on Tuesday and Thursday and this will improve my evening load a bit and also spread my exercise out so there is some on all four days of the fully-booked week. My Bikram package expires soon and since we may be moving soon, I can't afford to get another one. So I'll be mostly relying on those school classes, and maybe I'll take advantage of the weekends to get back into regular running, since the weather's getting warmer. I could see doing a short run (2-3 mi) on Fridays, a little yoga at home on Saturday, and a longer run on Sunday. That would give me approximately 150 calories of lifestyle activity and 200-300 calories of exercise over my sedentary expenditure each day, so if I kept my calories down to my sedentary expenditure or less (I checked again and actually it's about 1730 right now), I'd keep losing around 3/4 pound a week. If I stayed below 1600 four days a week I could have two 2000-calorie days for the same results, in theory. I think I have 4 Bikram classes left to use up before 4/11, so I will have to either take 2 each of the coming weekends or 1 on of the 8th, 9th, and 10th, unless I'm able to make it to one on Sunday, but since I'm now staying an extra day, I will have a lot to do when I get back.

My dad's diet

My dad is such a dork. He has no milk in his fridge, only half-and-half. He puts it in his coffee and also on his cereal, which he doesn't eat in the morning, but rather at night if he gets hungry after dinner. One of his favorite ridiculous snacks is Fruity Pebbles with half-and-half.

He also revealed that his usual eating routine involves no breakfast, a constant supply of coffee all morning, then for lunch fast food, or more recently turkey and vegetable wraps that he brings from home, or on a bad day, a string of chocolate bars until the end of the workday, and finally a huge dinner. I know from experience typical dinner is pasta or frozen pizza, although I think he eats meaty, higher-protein options without me. And admittedly, there are more vegetables in his fridge now than I am accustomed to seeing.

Incidentally, he's pretty in-shape. He runs fairly long distances (5 miles easily, marathons on special occasions) He's 5'11" and has usually been between about 165-195, and he's looking like he's on the fit side right now. I don't really know how this works.

When we go into town later, I will buy myself a quart of skim or 2% and maybe some apples or lettuce. He has juice and chopped-up peppers and onions and celery, but I don't think I saw any whole fruits and I'd have to go check again to see if there's any salad greens. There was dressing, but that doesn't mean he uses it often. It might even be for the wraps.

Bad times and chocolate coping

It's been tough recently.

A loved family member died this morning. He was diagnosed with cancer only about a month and a half ago, nobody had any clue before then, and we made plans for me to go visit him over Spring Break, and guess what, today was the last day of my quarter. My flight there is on Monday. His wife's birthday is tomorrow. It just all sucks.

Having to watch this happen over phones and internet during the last two weeks of my quarter when I had all kinds of papers and midterms and play performances was pretty rough. I've eaten quite a bit of brownies, candy, nondairy ice cream the past couple of days. I sort of know this is an excuse. I'm about 60% sure I wouldn't be responding to stress/grief by eating if it weren't a total trope that I've read about so much over the course of my weight loss journey. But I don't care that much. Probably, when this Lent thing ends, I will go straight back to smoking pot and do that instead of eating. That's not a great coping strategy either and kind of kills the point of abstaining for a bit - kind of, not entirely - but I don't really care about that either. It's all about not caring. About dropping all the put-togetherness and saying fuck it, I'm just going to throw myself into something I feel like doing, something that's supposed to be comforting, because even if it's not, it's at least distracting, and it feels like... like a certain kind of power to allow myself not to worry about, not to constrain and control myself. Because shit fucking sucks and one way to reduce the stress is to not hold myself to high standards about stuff that isn't that important in the short term.

I talked to one of my classmates yesterday about it and she said that last semester she had someone important die too. I made a joke about chocolate and she said yeah, she gained about 2 pounds in brownies when that happened. That really brought me down to earth about the food thing. 2 pounds, so what if I gain 2 pounds? I've lost 50. It's not as though a week or two of throwing caution to the winds is going to ruin my whole project. It's not as if I won't be coping with this through exercise, too. It's not as if I can eat 500 calories in excess several days in a row without feeling yucky. Even if I'm logging quite a few positive calorie balances these days, it's not going to have a huge impact immediately.

So there's that. Oh, and I won't be counting calories next week because I'll be away and because fuck that and because it's another "test" although based on what I said above who cares if I "fail" it. Meh.

ideaplan

This is more of an idea than a plan. I'm not setting any goals for follow-through. But here's the idea: during the week I stay pretty strict with my diet. I aim for 1500-1600, maybe 1700 calories along with my exercise and I do not let cravings, mere opportunity, etc interfere. On the weekends, I am a little more lax, having treats or eating out and being comfortable with closer to 2000 calories a day. In addition, at some point during the weekend (end of class on Friday thru Sunday night), I am allowed one "binge", which might spike my calories. I'm not defining it very tightly, except that it should not become an all-day thing. The rest of whatever day it occurs on, the guidelines are in line with what I said above. You know what it is when you do it, but examples might be: a quart of ice cream, a huge plate of pasta with creamy cheese sauce, a package of wafer cookies and a whole bag of potato chips, a box of donuts and milk, a plate of breaded chicken strips and french fries, half a batch of chocolate chip cookies, a whole bag of individual-wrapped chocolates.

The motivation behind this idea is that as I get lighter, the calorie levels needed to create a deficit are more difficult to hit. If I don't happen to exercise on a day, I have to eat less than 1500 calories to have a pound-per-week equivalent deficit. It takes more, psychologically, to make the deficit many days in a row. Fitting in restaurant meals or indulgences isn't too hard on 1800 calories, but it is on 1500, so the idea is to simply loosen up at the time (weekends) when opportunities are most likely to arise. The allowed "binge" is just an outlet for cravings, and knowing there's a specific time for it makes it easier to wait for.

Vacation

Tomorrow I am leaving for my trip to Europe. I'll be back on the 19th which makes me gone from my spreadsheet, and regular computer access, for 15 days.

I'm  not going to count calories, however, I have decided to keep a rough record of what I eat. I'll probably look at nutrition information (which will be in kilojoules!) if I buy snacks that are labeled, but I won't record it. I won't be measuring anything. I will simply jot down what I've eaten each day, and visually/intuitively police how much. When eating in restaurants and at hosted dinners, my guideline will be: try anything that looks good or is necessary to be polite, but you don't have to finish everything that is served. Insofar as the meals are fairly high calorie anyway, I will hopefully be walking a lot, doing exciting things that will distract me from the idea of snacking, and I can do things like have a cafe-creme for a snack or a snack for lunch. I understand that the way "French women don't get fat" is they have lots of moderate daily activity and don't eat much between meals.

My grandpa is 72, but I believe he walks a couple of miles each morning at home, so hopefully I can convince him to walk most places. That will be most of my exercise, but I'm going to also bring my yoga mat and do a little yoga and strengthening routine most mornings (it probably won't happen on the days I'm flying):

10 sun salutes
Standing Bow/Dancer
Warrior II, I, and III
Pigeon, Boat, Forward Stretch, and Cobbler
Rocking, Wind Relieving, and Floor Twist

3 x 5 knee pushups or best effort
2 x 10 regular crunches
2 x 10 oblique crunches

I'm not sure how long this will end up taking, but I figure this might burn 100 or 120 calories. I'm going to go ahead and make it my goal to lose 1 pound from whatever my weight is tomorrow while on break. I think that should be possible, and if I overshoot it, I might do as much as break under 140 by the time I come back.

I'll post my leaving weight tomorrow.

Solstice dinner observations and low calorie muffins

Last night my parents hosted Solstice dinner. I had allotted 1500 calories for dinner and I'd planned out my meals in the day and gone to Bikram in the morning such that even with the big dinner I'd have a small deficit for the day.

Solstice dinner is always a root vegetable soup, lots of bread and fancy cheese, and often a dessert that varies. I also made an appetizer that was on sample at the grocery store with chocolate and sea salt melted over oiled baguette. So I had a couple pieces of chocolate bread, then sat down to dinner. Starting off with a bowl of soup, and the various cheeses made their way around the table. I took a few pieces of bread and took small samples of each cheese that was available. There was a lot of cheese, but I didn't think I'd have trouble putting it away. I certainly had less on my plate than I've eaten in previous years. But this year, I was barely halfway through my cheese when I started to get full! I slowed down, sipped some wine to cut through the fat, and had another bowl of soup for nutrients and fiber. I managed to sample each cheese without becoming uninterested in food, but I was totally stuffed (a phrase I never truly understood the meaning of before now) by the end and only had a few bites of the funny raw-food "cheesecake" that was for dessert.

So that's the downside of losing weight and the dietary changes that come with it. You get used to eating small portions, and then when you get to an event where there's lots of good food you want to eat, your body has forgotten how to take it in stride. I used to have a similar problem with Thanksgiving anyway - after having a little of everything, I was too full for seconds of the things I really loved. Anyway, it's interesting to see the internal changes as well as the external changes to my body. I'll have to come up with strategies for satisfying my mouth and my eyes without taxing my stomach too much at events like these. Fortunately (or not?) there will be plenty of practice this week.

In other news, I tweaked the muffin recipe and achieved my goal of yummy, 150 calorie muffins! Now I have to do it all over again with teff flour so I can bring something gluten free to my mom, but here is the wheat recipe:

Low-calorie multigrain wholemeal muffins:

2 Tbsp white sugar
2 Tbsp brown sugar
2 Tbsp oil
2 eggs
1 cup applesauce

1 1/4 cups whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup oatmeal, crushed
1/4 cup cornmeal (polenta)
3 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt

300 calories' worth of add-ins, for instance:
- 1/4 cup dried cranberries, 1/4 cup chopped walnuts, and zest of 1 orange
- 1 diced banana, 1/4 cup chocolate chips, and 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 3/4 cup cubed butternut squash, 1/4 cup sunflower seeds, and a few Tbsp grated ginger

Preheat oven to 375 F. Mix dry and wet ingredients separately, then add dry to wet. Fold in the add-ins. Divide into 12 muffin cups and bake for 15-25 minutes.

Notes:

* Calorie content will vary slightly depending on the add-ins and also things like the brand of flour you use. However, as written, this recipe should give 12 muffins at about 150 calories each.
* A high volume of add-ins will result in slightly bigger muffins, and high moisture add-ins will increase the cooking time. So your cranberry-walnut muffins will be smaller and cook more quickly than banana or squash muffins.
* Some possible substitutions: use skim or 2% milk instead of applesauce (approximately calorie equivalent), use another kind of vegetable or fruit puree in place of applesauce, use all-purpose flour instead of whole-wheat, use more oatmeal or less cornmeal to lower calories further (I would keep 1 cup of wheat flour), use all white/all brown/raw sugar, use honey or agave syrup instead of crystalline sugar while cutting down the applesauce/milk a little, vary spices.

Thanksgiving convos and other recent experiences

Went to my boyfriend's best friend's parent's house for dinner last night. I didn't count calories because I didn't want to be doing mental arithmetic all night, so I just gave it an upper-limit estimate of 3000 calories. There were some cheesy appetizers, a plate of actual dinner that was moderate (probably not more than 600 cals), a couple glasses of wine and 2 mugs of cider with brandy, and not even a whole piece of pie because I was too stuffed by then, but also some chocolates and caramels.

The aforementioned parents have been on a diet recently. It was actually quite strange to sit there and hear them talking about their diet. Apparently they've been doing MediFast for about a month and have lost 14 and 13 pounds respectively. I was pretty quiet through most of the discussion, but I asked a few questions, said I didn't really like the idea of prepackaged, engineered food, and volunteered that through simple calorie counting I've lost 35 pounds in 24 weeks.

It did make me think about how I need a kick start. Recently it's been hard to keep my calories down. When I exercise more I get more hungry, and I'm often hungry not long after I've eaten what has been a normal meal for the past several months. The past three days, however, have been instructive.

On Tuesday, I started off with a sensible breakfast, packed a wrap, and planned to get a coffee at school. When I went for my coffee, however, I got suckered by the donuts and got a maple bar, which turned out to have a colossal 460 calories. Eating when I'm not actually hungry screws everything up, so I ended up eating my wrap during my first class. I then had nothing else with me to eat, so I subsisted until dinnertime on more coffee. After dinner, I was still SO hungry, and also had been wanting ice cream for about a week, so I finally said fuck it and ate most of a pint of ice cream.

On Wednesday, I felt like all my bad choices had been spent the previous day, and found no difficulty in achieving a low calorie count. I had breakfast, brought two snacks to school, ate them when I was hungry, and worked out after class (usually I work out in the morning, but I switched up my schedule on account of the weather). Then I went out to dinner and had a salad. My calorie count was very low and my deficit was quite good.

Yesterday, of course, I ate tons because I wanted some of everything and I expected that. But I was reminded of how heavy and full and really not so pleasant it is to overeat.

So, the take home lessons are: I don't want to go back to overeating, I am still capable of eating low-calorie comfortably, and maybe if I have a frustrating craving, giving in really will get it out of my system. The questions are: why did I get derailed by a donut right after a perfectly good breakfast, and is it possible for me to schedule things so I work out in the afternoon?

I need to find some information on set-points and how to re-set them. I think it's pretty clear that my body is not used to weighing less than 150 pounds, it really never has since reaching my current height, and while the first 35 pounds were easy, now it's saying "hey, WTF are you doing?" It's equally clear that borderline-overweight, over 30% fat is not a state in which I'm going to just leave myself. If my set-point is between 150-165 pounds, then my set-point is screwed up, and there must be a way to fix it.

And I need to pick some kind of kick-start. One thing I can do is re-institute stricter calorie targets and try to take advantage of the good day I had this week as a model: eat breakfast, 2 snacks, workout to boost my endorphins later in the day and moderate dinner. But I'm also thinking of something that can barrel through these next, say, 5 pounds. I know low-carb diets are supposed to be a good kick-start, and I've read people who say they maintained everything they lost, despite the fact that the only theory I've heard about the quick beginning loss is glycogen depletion. MediFast is expensive as fuck, but the general idea of designer diet food is another possibility. And finally, I'm thinking about a "cleanse." Winter, admittedly, is not the easiest time to do this, but cleanses are helpful in a number of ways: they usually force low calories, they involve foods that are high in water, fiber, and antioxidants, all of which are healthy, and they supposedly clean out your system. I'm skeptical of the idea that there's anything hanging out in your colon that can be cleaned out, but that's where many of the claims lie. I am much more sympathetic to the idea that by giving your body only light, unprocessed plant foods, and also certain detoxifying herbs, metabolic processes are given a rest and made more efficient. So that's another idea.

Day 1 of reorientation

Well, on my first day of getting-my-shit-back-together, there was a bowl of Halloween candy in the Psych lounge. Then more Halloween candy was the snack in my conference class where we bring snacks. I admit, I ate quite a bit of Halloween candy. That's okay. I hadn't had any yet this year, I'm sure it was less than I've eaten in years past, and in a day or two it will all go away.

What's surprising is that after a couple tiny boxes of Milk Duds, a full-size 3 Musketeers, fun size Butterfinger and Crunch, and a Tootsie pop, I still ended up with a deficit for the day - a margin-of-error slim deficit, but still, I was expecting to go way over. I didn't count my calories until the end of the day, instead just making food that seemed good and reasonable last night and bringing it to school. If, instead of 595 calories of candy, I had eaten 200 calories of a more typical snack (sometimes cookies, but sometimes fruit and nuts or caprese crackers), my calorie count for the day would have been 1635, which is impressive to me. Actually, I might have eaten something after dinner as I'm still a little hungry, but as it is I'm inclined not to because then I WOULD have a surplus for the day. Then again, I might not have been hungry after dinner had I not eaten the candy, because we all know sugar actually makes you more hungry.

I didn't exercise, but I have a really good excuse for that. Today was actually my yoga day, but I skipped because I REALLY needed the sleep after being woken up every couple of hours by the consequences of my boyfriend's late-night Halloween party attendance. After that I basically didn't have time because of classes and reading I needed to finish. Tomorrow I'm definitely going into the gym in the morning, and I'm eagerly awaiting my Sansa. I really think that once I can pair exercise with music again this thing will just kick off and I'll hardly have to think about how much I'm eating.

Interesting thing is, while I've been struggling with my diet, my weight has looked like a sine wave but my body fat has evidently dropped. I noticed my percentages were going down much faster than they were before, and my lean mass was increasing when my weight increased, so I figured there was a water retention element but I didn't know if my fat weight was going down or not because that's not what I track in my spreadsheet. So I just changed the formula a little and looked at the past few weeks. While the net change in my weight has been very little, I've definitely lost between 2-4 pounds of fat. So that's good! I don't know what I could have been doing to promote lean mass, since I've REALLY been slacking on my strength training, but maybe it lends support to the idea that I should be eating more and exercising well at this point.

Weekly summary

156.8 and 35.5% body fat. Weight-wise, we are back to freshman and sophomore year of high school.

Sometimes I'm surprised at how easy this is. My ticker is visibly more than halfway to goal, and my goal is to lose 50 pounds! All I did was start keeping track of the numbers, and then do my datamonkey thing, and in 4 months I've lost almost twice as much as I ever did in high school (which, each time, took 3-4 months). Sometimes I do struggle with what I know to be counterproductive impulses, or find it hard to eat as few calories as I want to for the day, but even when I indulge I still usually push a deficit. It just might not be -500. It's also so strange how it wasn't hard for me to overeat in the range of 2200-2500 for years, and just a nice dinner with drinks can go over 1000 without seeming like a lot - yet in my everyday life, now, 2000 calories seems like a ton of food. I feel now like it would be hard to maintain a weight that required more than 1800 cals a day.

Quick stats: average kcals/day 1747, 1 cardio, 2 yoga, 1 CSF, average est. balance -372, -1.6 lbs.

To put this in better perspective, I've lost net 0.8 pounds in the last 2 weeks, or 4.8 pounds since the beginning of phase 2 (a little less than 4 weeks ago).

This week I did a mixed workout, where I transitioned quickly according to what I felt like between treadmill, elliptical, resistance machines, and yoga. I'm calling that a "CSF workout" for cardio-strength-flexibility. If I only did two of those things in a mixed workout, I could abbreviate it accordingly.Also, "cc" indicates "calories computed", meaning the calories the machines told me I burned, and then I estimate the rest.


I also have new notation for the food part, in connection with my "healthy diet" evaluation. V = servings of fruits and vegetables, d = servings of dairy (that are NOT empty food), M = ate meat that day, E = percent of empty calories. I will have to come up with a scale that standardizes these variables to each other if I want to do a weekly evaluation though.

Friday 10/8

Toast with peanut butter, vanilla yogurt, and 1 grapefruit with sugar (110+95+105+60+30=400)
Cheese, tomato, and avocado sandwich  and coffee with coca (220+110+20+100+45=495)
Apple and cheese (100+110=210)
Black-eyed peas & cabbage over rice, brussels sprouts, and wine (250+40+125=415)
Ice cream (450)

400+450+45+210+415+450=1970 + Mixed CSF workout (40 min, 218cc)
V=5, d=3, E=27%

Thursday 10/7

Oatmeal with cream and sugar, 1/2 grapefruit with sugar(150+40+30+30+15=265)
Peanut butter sandwich, apple, and coffee with cocoa/powdered milk (220+190+100+70+60=640)
Baby avocado (100)
Gum (5)
Chicken, potatoes, a few oil-baked asparagus and snap peas (300+150+75=525)

265+640+100+5+525=1535 + 1 hr yoga
V=4, d=1, M, E=8%

Wednesday 10/6

1 egg, 1 slice buttered toast, and 2 kiwis (70+110+100+100=380)
2 cups coffee with cocoa and/or powdered milk (90+15+60+35=200)
Tuna and cheese sandwich (110+110+75=295)
Chocolate chip cookie and apple chunks (115+25=140)
Rice and beans with corn, tomato, and avocado (230+50+20+100=400)
2 spoonfuls peanut butter (190)

380+200+295+140+400+190=1605 + Outdoor run (1.0 mi) and walk (1.0 mi) and trunc. pull-ups
V=4, d=2, M, E=18%

Tuesday 10/5

Granola and yogurt (250+105=355)
2 cups coffee with cocoa and nonfat dry milk (220)
Avocado and egg sandwich and a pluot (70+100+100+70=340)
Skim milk (110)
Matzo ball soup/5 balls, and tuna with olive oil and mustard (250+75+10=335)

355+220+340+110+335=1360 + 1 hr yoga

Monday 10/4

Egg, toast, vanilla yogurt, and 1/2 grapefruit with sugar (70+110+105+30+15=330)
TC sandwich and kiwi (430+50=480)
Tortilla chips, American cheese slices, and hot cocoa (100+100+90=290)
Caprese crackers (65+75+40=180)
Pluot, baby avocado, and a slice of bread (70+80+100=250)
Spoonful of peanut butter and chai with cream and sugar (95+50+30=175)
2 spoonfuls cream cheese (90)

330+480+290+180+250+175+90=1795 + no exercise

Sunday 10/3

Breakfast out (795)
    Potatoes and ketchup (400+45=445)
    Veggie sausage (240)
    Coffee and cream (45+30=75)
    Small almond cookie (25)
Apple and peanut butter (100+190=290)
Bean soup and cheese (300+220=520)

795+290+520=1605 + no exercise

Saturday 10/2

Bread with cream cheese (200+135=335)
Odwalla bar (210)
Piece of starfruit (10)
Quart of chocolate soymilk (600)
Mac and cheese with tuna and peas (300+50+50+75=475)
ThinkThin bar (230)
Bread and butter (100+100=200)
Ice cream (300)

335+210+10+600+475+230+200+300=2360 + no exercise

Testing

As a test of my "healthy diet" standards, I'm evaluating what I ate today and what I'm planning to eat tomorrow. Let's see how it works out.

Today:
4 fruits and veggies (not quite 5 but not bad)
Egg/toast, tuna/bread, rice/beans meal pairs (good)

2 dairy (good)
290/1605 "empty" calories = 18% (a bit high...)

Tomorrow:
4-5 fruits and veggies depending (getting there)
Oatmeal/yogurt, peanut butter/bread, chicken/potatoes meal pairs (good)
2 dairy (good)
145/1670 "empty" calories = 9% (wow nice)

Hopefully by monitoring, especially the produce and empty calories, I can get this really good and still feel alright when eating fairly low calorie. I hope I can get it so that my calorie counts are routinely in the 1500s (as they've been routinely in the 1600s for a while).

5-a-day

With my new food awareness, I've been thinking about the 5-a-day of fruits and vegetables recommendation. Sometimes I count up my fruits and vegetables and realize, damn, it's really hard to meet 5 servings a day. For instance, yesterday I ate 4 servings, and it was a pretty good day in that respect. I had a banana after my workout, tomatoes and onions in my lunch sandwich, a plum with my lunch, and broccoli with my dinner. Today I've had a nectarine after workout, carrot sticks with lunch, I have a plum for a snack later, and I'll probably have a tomato and onion salsa with dinner. Again, only 4.

Most of the time it's more like 3 - a fruit before or after my exercise, a fruit for a snack or with lunch, and a vegetable with lunch or dinner. I could try to always have vegetables with lunch AND dinner, like I did these past 2 days, but it still only makes 4. Then I could try to have fruit with breakfast, but... I don't like to eat that much for breakfast, sometimes my post-workout fruit is with breakfast anyway, and I can't just sub in the fruit for something else because then it wouldn't be substantial enough. Eat fruits or veggies for another snack? Then I'm eating a lot of snacks, and at any rate, by the afternoon they just don't cut it - I need starch or protein or I'll just be hungry again in an hour.

And y'know what? I don't eat enough servings of most anything else either. They say you can eat the minimum servings for a 1600 calorie diet but that's gotta be bullshit. Yesterday I ate 2 vegetables, 2 fruits, 4-5 grains, 3 dairy, no meat/nut/beans, 1645 calories, and the only thing I ate that doesn't satisfy these categories is the chocolate. WTF, mate.