Getting back on the downward path

For one week now, my daily weights were below the limit of obesity again, and my weight curve pointing downward again. So I am confident to be able to get below that ten-kilo mark down to the next decade again before christmas.
I have found that every time I allowed a regain to happen, it was slower to come off than when losing that span of weight for the first time around. Whether that is due to metabolic changes associated with aging or to the effects of weightloss as such, I don't know, but in any case if I want to have a chance at getting to goal, i.e. BMI 25 or below, within the next 15 months, that means I have no wiggle room whatsoever for any dietary indiscretions during said 15 months. I still have about thirty pounds to get rid of before I may call myself normal-weighted again, and long-time losses, for me, have been happening at a rate of two pounds per month on average. Anything higher would thus not be realistic to expect.
Which means that I might be setting myself up for failing my goal if I allowed any regains to happen until then.
Which means sticking to my diet over Christmas, sticking to my diet during any holiday in-between, and knowing that every single off-plan splurge might spell failure for my greatest wish I have for that big five-oh day.
Knowing that, it ought to be easier to tell that piece of stollen or chocolate or that potato dumpling or whatever to get off my plate and away from my body, because there is just no way I would wish to have one of them as much as I want to be normal-weighted again.


Julia

Office meals

As I mentioned before, I work extremely irregular hours, sometimes with little opportunity to get in some nourishment in-between what turns up on my calendar.
Breakfast is at 8 a.m., consisting of two eggs fried on two strips of bacon, and that will usually tide me over until noon. But, as I'm usually not home before six p.m., I still need something to eat in between if I don't want to become all grumpy by midafternoon.
I tried different things. Pasta, made in the microwave, left me becoming fatigued after eating it, even if the calories were right. The offerings of nearby eateries were all too greasy or too carby. Anything that was already prepared, like the day before's leftovers, was inconvenient to bring to work and besides, as I never know when I will have time to eat, and the office fridge is in an unguarded room where there have been instances of food theft more than once, I can't bring food that needs to be kept cool, either, so no salads, yoghurt, or sandwiches, either, apart the fact that the latter would also provoke fatigue due to their high carb content.
What I do now is keep a can of protein powder in my office, and a plastic shaker. One, or two if the day is a long one, protein shakes keep me full without too many calories.
On the meal planning side, having the same thing every morning and noon makes it a lot easier for me to stick to my caloric limit for the day.
And I can be certain of having had enough protein, no matter what dinner will be.


Julia

Diet saboteurs

They are your friends, your family, your colleagues at work.
They mean well, mostly.
They are social because they want to share.

And they have no idea what they are doing.

Around christmas, they arrive in full force.
Food pushers.

Freshly baked or store-bought cookies. Chocolates. Offered with the conviction that the offerer is about to give the recipient something really good.
Which is true, if one takes a high calorie count to be a sign of goodness.

For someone who needs to lose weight, these offers are sheer poison.
Even when you have just one, the amount of sugar and fat in most christmas "goodies" will mess up your food intake. And who has just one? Or who doesn't want more after eating just one?

I have decided for this year to abstain from those offers.

No, thanks.
I'm sure they are delicious, but no, thanks.
I'm not trying just one, thanks.

These will be my security lines, along with my food journalling app.

If those food pushers realized what they are really doing, they might stop pushing. But knowing they are not likely to get it anytime soon, what I can do in the meantime is stop being a pushover.
Just because it's christmas doesn't mean I have to throw away everything I have achieved until now. The last months were a dire warning for me about how fast that could happen.

So, for christmas, I do not want cookies. I do not want chocolate.
What I want is my body to continue the journey to the land of Normal Weight.

And if I have to offend anybody by saying No to their food offers, so be it.

Everybody who really means well ought to understand that.


Julia

Crossing the river

It's just one month till christmas, and I am determined to be out of morbid obesity again before having to face those opulent dinners that invariably come with that holiday. So, I have been sticking to below 1500 calories a day for about a week now, and I am beginning to see results. This morning, the scale showed me a weight below that dreaded point of obesity for the first time in several months. What with the wild fluctuations I had lately, that doesn't mean I am out of obesity yet, but it does at least indicate that what I am doing is beginning to work.
Norma has been posting about FOMO and YOLO as obstacles to weight loss. I had to think hard at first what these might mean.
Fear Of Missing Out. You Only Live Once.
I, too, have been guilty of turning these into excuses for overeating.
But what do they really amount to?
There may be situations where FOMO might even be justified.
For me, one such situation came last year when DH took me to the town where he had been studying. They have a cafe there that sells what just might be the best cakes ever. DH had been rhapsodizing them ever since we met, so, visiting that town meant visiting that cafe. We haven't been to that place together before, and we are not likely to get back there within the next, say, twenty years. In that case, I would have missed out on my only chance of tasting those cakes.So, I did indulge myself, and that indulgence had little effect on my overall weight because it happened only once.
But if, say, DH were buying himself a box of frosted donuts at the supermarket, FOMO would in no way be justified. They sold those things yesterday, they will sell them tomorrow, so I would be able to eat some as often as I wished.
And that is the point where the line must be drawn. Only if it is really something that you will never again be able to eat if you don't eat it right now, can FOMO be a valid reason to eat something that would be off-limits otherwise. The point being the word never. If it is something that comes around every year, like stollen for christmas, I can either plan for it, or feel secure in the knowledge that if I decide to forgo it this year, there'll be another one just like it next year. Either way, FOMO should not be the reason behind the decision made about eating or not eating something that is not on your plan.
Most of all, even if I am deciding not to miss out on a particulat taste experience right now, that must not mean letting go of all the brakes. Two pieces of stollen happen to taste exactly like one piece of stollen, so all you could possibly miss out on by having just one is the feeling of an overstuffed stomach and the calories in that second piece.

And YOLO? I don't ever again want to be third-degree morbidly obese, because I have just that one life to live and that one body I am stuck with.And I know by now that I have been missing out on plenty of things when obese that would have been a lot more enjoyable than anything I might eat.
If I think of that, FOMO and YOLO could just be the reasons I need to stick to my plan this time.



Julia

That dangerous hour

Since returning to religiously journalling what I eat, I have once again noticed an annoying pattern. In short, if the hour right after coming home from work didn't exist, I'd have no problem at all staying within my calories. I'm good at breakfast, good at lunch, good at dinner. What does me in regularly is that single hour when I arrive home, tired and famished, kick off my business shoes and head for the kitchen to prepare dinner. Which in and of itself is a wise decision when you're famished. But cooking dinner takes time, and meanwhile, there is the fridge with the small cabanossi sausages and the block of cheese, or the cookie tin, or the container with the salted peanuts.
I have tried to keep the amounts of such things I eat small. Before writing down everything and evaluating it for content, I would have guesstimated those "first aids' to amount to just a fraction of my total daily intake. What harm can there be in something that fits in the palm of my hand?
As it turns out, plenty. Even in the reduced portions I had lately, when weighing them and calculating their caloric values they all turned out to be, for that day, the most caloric foods I had eaten. Those little nibbles had as many calories as a regular breakfast and lunch, and half as many as my regular dinner- which I ate after ingesting them.
So, I am once more faced with a dilemma. Even if I pre-cooked dinner it would mean waiting for it to heat up. Whatever I do to quench my hunger on arriving home would have to be ready-to-eat, or almost. It would also have to be something that won't spoil fast, because my working hours are so irregular that I cannot even count on being there to eat it, and I hate to spend money on buying food for the trashcan. Fruit, for that reason, is out of the question, because it spoils. The only fruit I buy is frozen, but you cannot just grab and eat that. Anything with lots of carbs won't do, either, so no bread, crackers, or such. Taking another protein shake after a mostly protein breakfast and lunch would probably put my protein consumption too high. And fresh veggies, too, have in my household been known to spoil faster than I would get around to eating them.

Perhaps the place to start is by asking myself why I am so ravenous when coming home. After all, even when I'm working late I usually don't begin to feel hungry until after I leave the office. The connection between relaxing and eating, it seems, is still strong in my brain. Let's relax= let's eat.
The best thing for me to eat between coming home and dinner would be...
nothing.
After all, there's dinner ahead, and it's not as if I were in danger of dying from hunger until then.
What I have to do is find a different way of relaxing into my evenings.
I'll see if a cup of herbal tea will do instead of solid food. That's also quick to prepare and has no calories at all.
Maybe I'll be finally getting back off this plateau then.

Julia

On the wrong side of the river

I had believed I'd never come back here, standing on the wrong side of BMI 30. And then life happened, with my workload exploding, and diverse stressors in the private sector I won't delve into here.
And I stopped being watchful, for just one month. I should have known better. One month of eating ready-bought foodstuffs and not logging what I ate. One month of fighting exhaustion with the help of a bag of nuts. One month of avoiding the scales.
And there goes all the progress I made at the beginning of the year. Yes, I am back to the weight I had before my b- day in March, and back into morbid obesity.
By less than two pounds, yet those two pounds bring me back to this place I had so hoped to have left forever.
And the holidays are drawing nearer. One week of celebratory meals I cannot opt out of. In the past, that meant about four to six pounds up.
I have a choice of either resigning myself to entering yet another year morbidly obese, or fighting to get out of this upward spiral.
Fighting will mean being selective about what I eat.
As I am the one who does the holiday cooking, that should be easy, shouldn't it?
Except for the fact that we will be spending part of the holidays with DMIL. She's old and frail, and tends to eat way too little when we're not there to encourage her.
So every visit with her means trying to make her eat more and refeeding her. My problem in that context is that she will invariably stop eating as soon as anybody else at the table does, or decide early during the meal that she is full and then proceed to divide the remains of her meal between DH and myself. Either way, I end up eating more than I intended.

My defense plan, this year, goes like this:
I must not eat bread or potatoes during the holidays. Of lebkuchen and stollen no more than one piece. Hands off the chocolate. And halve the portions I serve myself. I will have to explain to her why I do this, and hope for the best, because she keeps insisting that I do not need to lose any more weight.
Which is wrong. I am still 32 pounds above what is for me the limit of a normal weight, so, only two thirds of the way down from my highest weight. The fact that I do not look obese any more won't change that. And I am still determined to be normal-weighted before the big five-oh in 2014.
Even if I effed up like that in 2012.
It may well take me all the determination I have at my command.
I sometimes wish I had as much of it as Norma.



Julia

Let the madness end

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is madness. I disremember who said this first, but it is rarely more true than during those frantic, food-loaden last two months of the year.
There we are, having spent ten months of the year (hopefully) watching our budgets and our food intake. Our waists have shrunk, our bank accounts have, while not fattened up, at least recovered a bit from last December's low. Toys, gadgets and trinkets bought last Black Friday have, predictably, given up the ghost simultaneously with the expiration of their warranties and gone on (again, hopefully) to cease cluttering our lives.
And then come along...The Holidays.
And with them that heady mixture of "I was so good all year, I deserve a reward" and "it's a holiday, and on holidays one does eat certain foods, and gives each other lots of presents".
So we find ourselves in the middle of the Black Friday melee again, clutching our shopping-bags full of loot that was payed for with our credit cards, or sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table having to open our belts and grabbing for the Maalox (tm).
Of course, it doesn't stop there. We go on like that all the way through Christmas, gorging ourselves and shopping as if stores went out of business, without a thought about our scales or bank balances.
Six weeks of free-for-all.
Except it isn't free.
Do you remember what it felt like last January? Going on the scales for the first post-holiday weigh-in? Opening that horrifying credit card bill?
Feel that pain now. Remember it as vividly as you can.
Remember how long it has taken you to undo the damages, if you even managed to undo them at all.
And then decide if you want that again.
Remember- the holidays are not about consumption. They are about people.
When you look back at your childhood, what do you remember about Christmases past? What presents you got? Or do you remember going sleighing with your parents, or sitting in front of the open fireplace playing Scrabble (tm) with your siblings?
What do you want your kids to remember, or yourself if you don't have any?

You decide.
Decide wisely.


Julia

Big bird landing-are you prepared?

It's always slightly amusing to watch the hubbub about turkeys before and after Thanksgiving, from Germany where that holiday is not celebrated. And then Christmas comes around. The standard fare for that holiday in Germany? a whole roasted goose, with stuffing, gravy, potato dumplings...the works. Not so amusing if you try to watch your weight.
Especially when you end up eating three or four consecutive days off that bird and the trappings.
For all those whose homes will in the next month be the place where the big birds come to roast- are you prepared?

Tip one: Think about how big a bird you want to serve. It's absolutely unnecessary to prepare more food than the whole family can eat in at most two sittings. For me, that meant downgrading the goose to a duck, which is as tasty but half as heavy. If you absolutely have to have a certain species of bird, look for the smaller ones. Geese, for example, come in calibers between three and ten pounds, so if you have just four people don't take the biggest ones.
Tip two: Usually, there are some side dishes that are eaten by everybody. Others are the last dish standing on the dinner table. You know which ones they are. You may as well not prepare them at all this year. I bet no one will miss them. But we always have...with our bird is not a valid reason to put something on the table nobody wants to eat. Reduce the amount of the other recipes, too. If it's gone it's gone. As long as there has been enough for everyone to have a taste of their favorites, there has been enough- period.
Tip three: Be prepared for leftovers. The best thing to do with them is freeze them at once and spread the enjoyment over several widely- apart meals instead of serving the same thing day after day until it has to be tossed, or your family goes on strike, whichever comes first. If you bought your bird frozen and didn't thaw it at once, there's a space in your freezer where that bird was kept. Use it to freeze the leftovers. Have suitable containers prepared when clearing off the table, and freeze the leftovers at once while they are fresh. For one, that prevents after-meal refrigerator raids, and it also minimizes any risk of food poisoning.

Wishing all of you a not-so-gainful holiday,


Julia

Chocolate

Sometimes, it just has to be...chocolate. I guess most of us know that feeling. Unfortunately, that means sugar, too, if you go for the usual sources, and fat. And calories.
I have been bitten by the chocolate bug several times, lately, too, which used to eff up my daily stats quite spectacularly.
Until...
I discovered that you can make tea from cocoa nibs, and they also sell it in ready-to-infuse teabags.
So, when the itch for chocolate strikes... I'll have a nice cup of hot cocoa tea, no milk added, and satisfy the itch at zero calories and eight ounces of water.
And for those chocolate dessert attacks...in the shelf with baking ingredients you'll most likely find unsweetened cocoa powder. That and a tablespoon of ground almonds mixed with unsweetened greek youghourt makes for a fully satisfying, low-carb and high-protein treat that I can easily work into my daily plan.
I know, some people claim that thinking of any food as a treat is a sign of a fat mindset, but I, for one, believe the Creator equipped us with taste buds for a reason. Besides, I might lose weight eating tasteless food, but to me, the good taste of a well-seasoned food is an integral part of quality of life. And calling it a treat just means that it is something that has to stay a rare event, because what I have every day is no longer special.
Picking the best choices and eating in moderation. That's the key to losing, not going all food puritan only to spend too much willpower on avoiding a binge.


Julia

Recondensing is frugal!

Ever so often, there's another flurry of articles published about how obesity is rampant in the poorer segments of society.
Regardless of the veracity of such statements, what irks me about that kind of story is that many people will automatically jump to the conclusion that losing weight has to be an expensive undertaking. And those who are in a financial pinch already could go on to resign themselves to the conclusion that they cannot financially afford to try to lose their excess weight.
Guess what, they are wrong. Completely wrong.
Let's start with food.
Yes, most fattening foods are cheap, while the things touted as " healthy" often come with a heftier price tag.
But an obese person has a much higher basal metabolic rate than a slim one. To put it simply, maintaining twice the weight requires twice as much calories.
Allan of Almost Gastric Bypass has in the past given several vivid accounts of what amounts of food it took to maintain his former girth.
Which means that if you chose to buy non-fattening foods such as vegetables or lean meat, and buy only as much of them in terms of calories as your basal metabolic rate as a slim person would require, you will, for one, lose weight until you are that slim person. And from a point of frugality- you will probably end up spending a lot less on food if you prepare your own nutritious meals from scratch from quality ingredients than if you feed at Mickey D's regularly.
All bets are off, of course, if you go for these ready-to-eat Lean cuisine (tm) meal trays or their ilk. That stuff is expensive. But it's expensive because you pay for the preparation and for the profits of the producers who know that they have an audience of people who are desperate and would pay anything to get rid of their excess weight. While their products, if the nutritional values are right, are not scams, you still end up paying a lot of money for the convenience of using them. So, if money's tight, don't use those products. Find out what healthy nutrition is (shouldn't be too difficult since you obviously have internet access if you read this) and prepare your own food.

Savings potential: From my own experience, by conscious shopping and sticking to the portions slim me would need, about fifty percent of my former food budget. YMMV, of course.

Another place to save is your wardrobe. As a fat person, I was forced to buy new pants about every two months because the material between my legs rubbed through that fast. I also had to keep replacing blouses, shirts, and coats that got torn because they had become too small,or because they got caught on some obstacle course (as in restaurant or even shop) that I was too fat to navigate without bumping into things. Shoes bore my weight only for a short time before giving out. When I started recondensing, of course, there was the initial investment in a set of smaller clothes. But, for one, they came a lot cheaper at a standard clothes store than what the same garments would have cost me in a plus size, and for seconds- I have, in over one year, not have had to retire a single garment due to being worn out, so, I get several times the wear out of a garment, too.

Savings potential:May depend on whether your taste in clothes changes when you become slimmer. If you keep wearing similar garments in your smaller size to what you wore when big, halving your clothes budget is entirely possible ( don't forget the cost of the retail therapy you probably won't need any more when you're more satisfied with your body).

And for the rest? Don't get me started on the extra gasoline you need to move a bigger body, or about the price of things that need replacing when there is an obese person in the house (toilet seats, anyone?).The part about the medical costs has been brought up too often already.

Losing excess body weight isn't expensive. Being fat and staying that way is.



Julia

Think first, eat later

It is not by journalling alone that I will get rid of that excess baggage. This simple fact has been dawning on me fast since I acquired the ability to record my food consumption in real time, so to speak. Picking up my tablet, opening that journalling app and recording what I just ate takes less than a minute, in contrast to doing it on my old PC that took ages just to boot and besides, stayed in the living room while a lot of impromptu eating is done in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, recording my intake after the fact might have given me some insights about why I was plateauing or regaining on a given day, but those insights did not use up the excess calories already consumed.
My tablet is, by now, a constant companion in the kitchen, recording what I consume.
And for the first time, I'm doing trial runs before scarfing down something. You know, actually calculating what I want to eat, before I eat it.
That's a big DUH, I know. But preplanning my meals was always something that scared me.
At my first bout with binge eating, I tried to keep myself from bingeing by not buying food to keep at home. Of course, that just led to my becoming a regular at the local drive-thru, going there and pretending the food I was buying was supposed to feed a family. Of at least four.
Recovery, for me, meant stopping to try to keep myself from eating anything at all. Only when I allowed myself a well-stocked pantry was I able to stop bingeing. But planning my meals farther in advance than for today has still been too close to that overcontrolling mindset to me, so I didn't.With most of my pantry consisting of frozen or dry goods, I didn't have to. There is always something I can put together from my stores.
But this is the first time I have been actually, you know, thinking first and eating later. During the better part of my weight loss, I stuck to a very limited number of staples so as to not have to make too many food decisions. That worked, sort of.
But this is better.


Julia

Back to the grindstone

Having a new tablet means finally having access to all those nifty apps they have. Aftr seeing it mentioned on a blog, I decided to try out the My fitness pal app. It's basically the same thing as Sparkpeople, but I think it's less complicated to use.
The only hitch with those US apps, for someone who lives in metric country, is that most measurements are non-metric. The effort needed to convert grams to ounces has been putting me off journaling a bit. And then I took a look at the workings of my digital food scales and found out that by simply hitting a button I can effortlessly switch from grams to ounces and back. So there's no excuse any more for not keeping track of what I eat.
One extra the app has is a weight projection feature, as in "if every day were like today, in five weeks you'd weigh...". It's a real waker-upper on days when food intake was less than optimal. Seeing how a single day of unrestrained eating, if it became habit, would make my weight skyrocket again, is quite educational. Now if I manage to transform that into getting back to recondensing...


Julia

Powdered madness

I had some free time over lunch last week, so I decided to go and inform myself about the most recent developments in protein drinks. The drugstore I usually get my protein powder from has been sprouting some new shelves with "protein diet" cans in a multitude of flavors, and I wanted to know if any of these might be useful for me, too.
Which meant looking for the nutritional information.
The results left me absolutely horrified.
In ten out of ten so-called protein drinks, the main ingredient was... sugar. Up to forty per cent of the total weight of what was in those cans.
So, if I used these products, not only would I ingest about one and a half tablespoon of sugar with each protein shake, I would also pay that sugar with the same amount of money I'd pay for protein powder, which is about ten times the asking price of sugar.
Talk about maximizing one's profits.
Mind you, these were products that were expressly tagged "diet" shakes, so, recommended for people who want to lose weight. Now if I were to consume five helpings of the stuff a day, that would make 75 grams of sugar. That is decidedly more than I may eat if I want my weight to go down.
As these are marketed as protein drinks, there is a strong possibility that people who want to lower their carb intake would try them, thereby probably even raising their total amount of carbohydrates consumed.

Besides, in my experience, the chance of really losing weight on something that's more than a third of it's weight pure sugar is... zero.

I don't want to know just how many people spend half a fortune on those mock protein drinks and give up, seeing no results and blaming themselves for it.

There should be a law against selling something like that.

And until there is, we have to keep looking at ingredient lists and nutrition facts.


Julia

Tubby revelation

It's been cold and wet over here during the last days, which meant a flare-up of my back and leg pain, probably from my muscles cramping up with the cold. So I decided to do something unusual and take a hot bath yesterday.
Now this is unusual because I had stopped bathing several years ago. Not what you think, I do of course shower daily, but that bathtub.... I had stopped using it after a particularly humiliating experience of being wedged in there so tightly that I had to call for DH to help extract me from it. Plain and simple, I had become too fat to use that tub. So I didn't.
Those sore muscles yesterday made me rethink that decision. After all, I'm down five clothes sizes from that day of humiliation.
Guess what, I'm also down one bathtub size- not only did I fit in there, I had several inches of wiggle room on either side. Comparing that to the memory of that beached whale stuck in the same tub fighting to extract myself from it sure brought home how far I have come since that day.
So it wasn't just the hot, fragrant water I enjoyed, but also a major NSV.
Which helped the soreness and upped the motivation.



Julia