It's difficult

No, once again, I'm not eating a lot. And still the deficit I run comes in about 300 calories a day, on good days. Way too little to make remarkable inroads into the weight that has to come off until next November. 

On the things I no longer may eat or drink list, the green peppermint or sour apple liqueurs are top contenders. Seeing how they amount to some 600-700 calories a glass, I think it is better not to have them in the house at all. Cheese, from a block or  Camembert style, and salami are next. Of cookies I dare not even think any more. And the bread or rusk with a generous pat of butter plus peanut butter habit has to go, too. 

Seeing all of these work out on my reports, the real miracle is that I did not completely balloon up when not restricting them. 

Slogging on

For the first time in ages, there's a solid downward trend in my weight curve for this month. Seems like I am doing something right. 

Then again, the hubs has been out of town for almost three weeks by now, which saved me from having to cook. 

Still, I kept going well over my allotted intake at BMR level. Seeing just how small a deviation from routine will nix all of a whole day weightloss-wise is actually quite scary. And seeing how calorie-dense all of my favorite foods are, too. As it is, the only thing I like to eat that will not have to be restricted to mini portions is yoghurt, and even there I have to cut way back on the toppings. 

All the other goodies are apt to swallow up my caloric allowance as fast as I swallow them. Salami, cheese, toast with peanut butter, butter, or even a glass of wine or two add up to way too many calories with me still saying, but I barely ate anything. 

To think that after my afternoon snack of the aforementioned goodies I would still have a whole dinner with the hubs, and dessert, too! 

The astonishing part, it seems, is not that I did not lose any weight, but rather, that I did not gain a lot more. 

And that anybody can live, eat three meals a day, and not look like a tub of lard. I will trial-run a day's worth of meals as I remeber them from Grandma's through MFP. In memory, they were not small meals, and I was not going hungry. Yet, I was not fat back then, either, except in my family's eyes. 

Weight today : 94 kilos.

It Works, But Not Miracles

Watching my Fddb weight curve, I noticed having lost about two real kilograms since I started journalling. So, it does work. 

The kicker is seeing how easily and quickly I could burn through all of my calorie allowance, and then some. 

Even looking at the worst ever weight gaining phase I had, namely, sixteen kilograms in four months on a tricyclic, that does compute to just 933 calories that I ate and drank above my needs daily. 

In other words, a bag of nuts. A single one. Of macadamias, not even the whole one. Or a bar of chocolate plus a few cookies. 

Just adding one of these regularly is enough to explain all of the gain. 

So my shitlording father was right. Objectively, that is. 

What he did not take into account was that there  was a reason why I did overeat so much more while on the meds. And the sad fact that my guesstimating skills when it comes to food are as wrecked as my optical portion gauge. Meaning I have to weigh it and measure it, whatever "it" is. 

If I continue to do so, I have a chance of getting back to normal weight somewhere around two years from now. 

Were I to maintain a 350 calories a day deficit, I would be normal-weighted (BMI 25 ) in exactly 500 days from today, mathematically. 

I will have to keep up a list of the deficits per day, and the running total. 

The fairy tale of the wrecked metabolism and the inability to correctly keep up tallying my intake have cost me enough time in obesity. 

Egging Myself On

It´s been eleven months now since the inundation and as many months of having regained. 

I am still convinced that the regain and the flooding were somehow connected, most probably via some toxins that were set free in my old office. 

In spite of being out of there for good, it wasn´t like the regain stopped immediately or the weight started to drop off from the day I changed rooms. 

What I have managed by now is slowing the regain from a rate of 270 grams a week to about 80 grams a week, on average. Which still has me at 93 kilograms and a 33.3 BMI. Actually, I might have been further down had we not been duty-bound to visit with MIL for a week twice  (she expects us down there for every bank holiday). Every time that ended with a three-pound regain that I had to try and get off before even thinking of recondensing. 

As it is, I´m sick and tired of being stuck at this weight. Sick and tired of being thick and tired. 

That´s why I have switched my breakfast from bacon and eggs to a protein shake, and I am trying to replace as many meals as possible with shakes. Otherwise, I try to halve the portions of what I eat. 

I had actually, over the years, succumbed to another case of portion creep. The smaller dinnerware we use has been limiting the damages, but still, having three instead of two eggs for breakfast means about a hundred more calories, and if I don´t cut down on my eating elsewhere it partly explains why I´m still stuck in gaining mode. 

Total weight regained: 13.8 kilograms or 30 pounds. 

Distance to goal of being normal-weighted: 23.8 kilograms or 52 pounds. 

DIstance to goal at my lowest weight reached: 10 kilograms or 22 pounds. 

So, this regaining thing more than doubled the distance to goal. 

 Or, in other words, if I were to restart recondensing at a going rate of half a pound a week, I´d take another year to get back in the vicinity of the place I had already reached. 

I´ll try to be there sooner. 

This time I won´t be doing this just for myself, DH, too, has grown quite a paunch during the last year. As DFIL was type two diabetic for many years, I am afraid DH might put himself over the edge, too. Offering healthy meals, which I had been criminally neglecting since the flood, is therefore important. 

And for myself, resisting those extra nibbles and sneaky snacks in the time between coming home and putting dinner on the table. 

I have done this before. I can do this again. 

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

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

Waste to waist to wait

For all too long, that´s what my grocery shopping went like:
Go to the closest supermarket, grab one of their oversized shopping carts, and fill it to the point of overflowing with all those delicious-looking things they had for sale.Then haul it to my car, squeezing in the four to five bags of merchandise such a cart amounted to, drive it home and drag it up the stairs to my flat. Then try to squeeze all of it into my fridge.
Most of the time, that meant removing at least one trash bag full of expired items first.
At the time, I thought that was the way things were if I wanted my pantry to be well-stocked all the time.
Well-stocked, to me, meant having any item I might wish to eat in the house all the time. So, I took home ten different kinds of cheese, because I couldn´t know which one I´d want to eat the next day, could I? Or three different loaves of bread, or five kinds of yoghourt, or six different packs of sausages.
All of these, of course, are highly perishable items, with a shelf life of sometimes less than a week. Having all of them in my fridge at once meant I could either eat them before they went bad, or I´d have to throw away what I couldn´t eat in time.
So I ate as much of them as I could and threw away the remaining packages as soon as they expired.

Just how dumb can you get? I regularly spent way too much money to buy too much food, ate too much "to keep it from going to waste" and still ended up having to throw away too much of it.
The force driving that insanity was fear. I was afraid that I might want to eat a certain food and find myself out of it. I imagined that I would, in that case, completely binge on whatever else I had on hand. The overstuffed fridge meant security. It also meant that I could make my eating decisions at the spur of a moment, eating whatever I happened to have a yen for.
It also meant I got fatter and fatter abusing my body as a bipedal waste bin gobbling down foods about to expire.

When I started out  on my weight loss journey two years ago, the first thing I decided on was a grocery shopping ban. I found out that I could live off what I already had in my fridge for several weeks before I had to go shopping again. With reducing the size of the portions I ate came the realization that I can really fit everything we need to eat in a week into just one of those reusable shopping bags.
I had to give up the idea of having everything always available for that, of course. Now, I have to decide when in front of the cheese shelf whether I want to eat gouda or emmental cheese that week, or in front of the yoghourt shelf whether I want greek or strawberry that week.
Guess what, I did not binge the first time I had a yen for camembert cheese, but only gouda in the fridge.
I just ate a piece of gouda, and - stopped eating. The world didn´t end.
And the next time I went grocery shopping, I was free to decide whether this week´s cheese selection would be camembert or something else. As far as I remember, it was something else.

It does not matter whether I have a special food on hand or not, as long as I have enough to eat.
It does not matter if the fridge appears half-empty, as long as what´s in there is enough to feed us until the next grocery shopping day.
I took a long time to arrive at those conclusions. Absurdly so. But arriving at them has meant cutting down on our grocery bills, by more than half, and cutting down on food waste, too.
What my obsession with being stocked up fully with all my favourite foods has cost the environment before I saw the light, I cannot know. What I do know is that now I buy only as much food as will be consumed, and the amount of things we have to throw out because they have spoiled has gone down to almost zero.

And I feel a lot better for it. When I am not thinking about how much food and money I wasted over the years before I realized what I was doing wrong, that is, because then I could kick myself for being stupid.


Julia

Great expectations vs.baby steps

It´s the beginning of the year again, and magazine stands are full of glossy magazines with title stories of "ultimate diets" promising losses of ten pounds or more in ten days.
If I were to bet on the outcomes of all the people who try out these, I´d probably come out on the side of a sure win were I to bet on them- not losing ten pounds to begin with, -regaining more than they had lost in the first place after going off those diets again.
Actually, the bogosity of those claims is pretty much self-evident if you do a little number-crunching first.
One pound of fat would be the equivalent of 3500 calories. Ten of them would be 35000 calories.
To lose one pound of fat a day, you would have to create a caloric deficit of 3500 calories.
Now the average daily caloric needs of us sedentary office workers are about 2200 calories a day. Less, even, if like myself you have botched your metabolism with long-term yo-yo dieting.
Which spells out plainly that in order to lose a pound of fat a day, you would have to eat nothing and expend an extra 1300 calories on top of that. Make that two hours of uninterrupted jogging.
Would you do that for ten consecutive days? Of course not, if you want to keep functioning. When you eat less than your basal metabolic rate, your body starts to digest, not the fat you want to get rid of, but instead the muscles you probably want to keep, and which you need for that two-hour run, too.
Besides, the body´s survival instincts would kick in quickly, making you think of nothing else but when you will be able to eat for the next time.
So, if those diet plans tell you you can eat anything at all and not exercise, what they will allow you to get off your body will, for the most part, be water. If you start out on an eating plan with highly diuretic properties, you may be able to see the scales go down some two or three kilos in a week. But guess what- as soon as you resume normal eating, your poor dehydrated body will quickly fill up its water stores again, bringing those same two or three kilos back within a mere matter of days. Fast loss, fast regain. That these kilos tend to bring along a couple of friends because your body is ravenous to fill its nutritient stores back up, and therefore keeps you eating until you have consumed enough of every nutritient you ran short of, is what keeps, after such a diet, the weight seesaw going in an upward direction. Not exactly what we want.
Still, those numbers on the glossies, impossible as they are, influence how we perceive our own success rates.
There was a study (I forgot where I read it, so no link, sorry) where they asked people about how much weight they expected to lose when on a diet. The average expectation, as far as I remember, was to lose at least two pounds a week.
What happens with that kind of expectations is that we believe to have failed as soon as we lose less than that. All too often, that´s what drives us to retire to the vicinity of the cookie jar and give up the hope of ever getting back to normal weight.
Been there, done that.
Now would you be satisfied to lose just seven tenths of a pound in a week?
Before you raise a wail of "but I´ll stay fat forever then", that´s exactly what I have been losing for one year and five months now, on average. And the most I ever lost in a single week was 2.46 pounds.
You still with me?
Are you ready for some more numbers?
You know what that adds up to, after 73 weeks? Fifty-five pounds, that´s what. Plus of course the nine pounds off my highest recorded weight I had already condensed before getting real serious about this. 
Or, in other numbers, BMI going down from 40 to 30.4.
Morbid obesity stage three down to almost just overweight.
A paltry 0.7 pounds a week is what got me there.
And, of course, patience.
But it can be done.
When you read up in the net about weight loss methods that work, you will probably find a lot of articles that claim that at a BMI higher than 35, or at BMI 40 or more, the only chance to get that off will be bariatric surgery of one kind or another.
To me, that never was an option. First of all, these procedures are not done as often in Europe as in the USA. Besides, they are usually not covered by health insurance, unless the patient is already in a life-threatening condition or severely crippled by that weight. Even at BMI 40, I would, by that standard, not have qualified. And, on a very personal level, the thought of having my bowels cut up and maimed just to lose weight was so revolting that, in my humble opinion, that should always be a last-ditch option. I wasn´t yet in that last ditch when I started to recondense myself.
And I succeded.
The first thing I had to toss, of course, was all those unrealistic expectations about how and how much to lose. No, you don´t need to have your stomach banded or cut up to lose weight, and no, you won´t lose those two pounds a week, much less those ten pounds in ten days. Oh, and no, you don´t have to put in two hours of jogging a day, either. If I excercise, it´s rarely more than thirty minutes at a time, and I´m not even too regular about it. Of course, regular exercise might be helpful, but it´s not the most important part of losing. Watching what you put in your mouth is. And knowing that, if you want the extra pounds to stay off, you´ll have to watch that for the rest of your life, so, the menu plan you chose to lose better be one that you know you will be able to live with for the rest of your life, too.
Which pretty much nixes those "diet" suggestions in the glossies anyway- or would you want to eat cabbage soup only for the rest of your life? Nothing against cabbage soup there, it can be delicious when well seasoned, but I for one would refuse to make that my one and only meal if I could avoid it.
Sustainability is the buzzword here. In my experience, a way of eating where you are not allowed to eat your favorite foods isn´t sustainable. What if your favorite is pizza, or chocolate cake? I have had these too, during those one and a half years. In controlled portions. And that´s what kept me from going for the whole cake at once. Plus the knowledge that, if I do slip up, I can get back on the wagon the very next day. It´s the long-time results I´m after, after all, and, if I say so myself, my long-time results show that I must have been doing something right.
Yes, it´s just baby steps of 0.7 pounds a week. But they got me where I am today, to a place I had, to tell the truth, almost given up hope I could ever return to.

And baby steps can get you  to the place you want to be. Just because one isn´t Usain Bolt doesn´t mean one won´t be able to walk, not run, those 100 meters, even if one has to use a walker to do so. For almost everybody, there is some kind of baby step you can do to deal with your biggest problem, be it weight or something else.
Just take that step, and remember that even a small step brings you closer to where you want to go.

Julia

Danger zone

Journalling what I eat on Sparkpeople is still an educating experience.
After having been off plan over the holidays and the resulting seven-pound regain, I have re-started my food journal on the weekend, only to find myself massively over my daily calorie allotment for three days in a row.
The culprits were to be found in the daily intake breakdown they give you which shows, not only the daily totals, but also the calories in each food eaten in order of decreasing amount, so, the top item in that list is what gave you most calories on that day.
In this instance, it meant finding things on top of that list which I had, when ingesting them, not even intended to be a full meal, entering them under the category "snacks".
That single slice of gouda cheese I ate when coming home. Those two handfuls of mixed nuts that I just had to have after a long workday "just to tide me over till dinner". Those were, on two respective days, the top runners for the day, giving me some 20 per cent of my total intake. The problem being that, having counted these as "just a little nibble", I still ended up having a full dinner after eating them, none of the ingredients of which came even close to the impact of the preceding "snack".
Huh? I could have stayed within my limit if I had not had those caloric bombs as a snack?
Actually, it´s more a matter of convenience than anything else. I try, for reasons of frugality as well as time constraints, to do all of my grocery shopping on one day a week. Thus, I prefer to buy my veggies frozen so I won´t have them go bad before I can eat them. Frozen veggies, in turn, mean having to heat them up, and that means cooking. Which I do every evening for dinner.
The danger zone, for me, is the time between coming home from work and starting to cook dinner.
It´s about eight to nine hours since I had breakfast then, and even with a protein shake at the office thrown in, I´m usually ravenous on coming home. I´m also quite wired usually, having a job that brings a lot of stress.
Hunger+stress=the munchies. Simple as that. And that´s when I grab things that don´t need preparing and fill me up quickly. Things like cheese or nuts. Being hungry, I usually eat these fast, being stressed, I chomp them down without pausing to taste or feel what I´m eating. Which in turn leads to the subjective feeling of not having eaten much.
The food journal is a great tool for getting out of denial on that point.
Now I have to find a way to turn that realization into something useful.
The stress I´m in at work, I can´t change.
But I could avoid becoming ravenous if I were to have, not one but two protein shakes at the office, one of them at the end of the workday so I´m not as hungry when arriving at home.
And I could try to break the connection between coming home and eating, perhaps by exchanging those nuts and cheese for a cup of tea to sit down with.
I could also try to prepare dinner an hour earlier. DH has been grumbling about our eating dinner after eight PM anyway. But that´s what happens because we eat so much upon coming home that we are just not hungry any sooner.
I could also try to have something less caloric on hand to munch on until dinner´s ready. 
No matter how I do it, I have to stop stuffing myself with calorie-dense foods when coming home. If I don´t, I have no chance of continuing to condense myself.


Julia

How much is enough?

For some weeks now, I have been faithfully journalling every bite of food that crossed my lips. I´m trying to stay below 1500 calories and 30 percent carbs a day, as I still have plenty of condensable weight to work on. Now, the journalling software I use not only allows me to write down what I ate, it also gives me an immediate running total of how much I have already eaten on that day.
And it shows me immediately which are the culprits should I go over my limits. Which considerably dampens the appeal of my old favorite, peanuts, and helps me to stick to small portions of anything carby.
You know what the kicker is? After sticking to that plan for awhile, I find myself less hungry than before. I did, actually, have to have another protein shake in the evening several times because I was too far under my calories (don´t want to go into starvation mode).
As I am the one who cooks, I have been preparing the same meals for both of us, except DH got slightly bigger portions. Guess what, he, too, has been condensing himself by a two-digit number, and he claims that he has not at all felt hungry. Besides, he keeps pointing out how good it feels not to be stuffed after dinner.
Did I mention he´s my greatest supporter?
What really starts me thinking with all this is the amount of food we have to buy these days. Or rather, the amount we don´t have to buy.
Grocery shopping for a week used to mean having at least four to five big reusable bags filled with foodstuffs to carry upstairs afterwards. Sometimes there was so much stuff that it became difficult to put all of it plus the two of us into the car.
Sadly, most of that stuff was also eaten.
Nowadays, I usually take one insulated bag for refrigerated goods, plus one normal for the things that don´t need cooling. Even when having to stock up because some things have run out, there´s rarely more to carry than these bags would hold.
And what is in there- is enough! Enough to take us through another week, or sometimes two, without feeling deprived at all.
What the other bags used to hold, then, were the things that were too much. The things which we ate, and felt stuffed afterwards. The things whose calories are now residing in those rolls of extra flesh that I am trying to recondense.
Even if I do try to make a projection of how much more food I´d need to eat in order to just maintain my present weight, the resulting difference wouldn´t fill another of those grocery bags by a long way.


While my weight gain was happening, I never even realized just how much I ate, even though I was almost constantly chewing on one thing or another. Coming home meant making a beeline for the kitchen and the refrigerator, for a big bowl of  pudding or big chunks of cheese and sausage  "to stave off the worst hunger". I had no idea  that what I thought was just a tiny snack had in reality the calories of a full meal. Actually, I didn´t want to know. The calorie listings were there, after all. Right on the packages. I avoided looking at them in those days. And I avoided measuring my portions. A portion was the amount in a package.
Of course, seeing the sky-high grocery bills we had, I blamed them on rising prices and went on to tell myself it was thrifty to buy the bigger packages. And then I downed a big package of pudding in one sitting instead of a smaller one, and since two pounds of pure vanilla cream pudding were likely to make even me feel queasy, I topped the soft stuff with chocolate drops, granola  and chopped almonds for a bit of crunch, adding even more calories.
What I had lost was the feeling of "enough".  That queasy feeling was really my body trying to tell me it had enough, my stomach trying to tell me it was full.
But I had long ago stopped listening to them. I just ate and ate. And gained and gained.
For a long time I avoided weighing myself. I knew, of course, that I was getting fatter. I knew I couldn´t walk without a crutch, I knew I could no longer reach my own feet to put on stockings.I knew that I had had to replace my clothes in a bigger size more that once. But I didn´t want to know how many kilos that meant.
When I finally revved myself up to face the music, I was devastated.
The worst part of it was not believing that I had eaten too much. I blamed the gain on quitting smoking, on an accident I had around that time that kept me from walking for several months, on medication I was on during that time. I blamed it on anything except eating too much, to the point of kicking loose a family quarrel with a relative who flat out told me I couldn´t have gained that much from the other reasons alone.
I know today that the medication was probably inhibiting my self-control when it came to food, and that quitting smoking can lower one´s metabolism. But that doesn´t mean that I had to grow all that fat in such a short time. It took another ingredient for that, namely, the amounts of food I kept ingesting.
As long as I was in denial about that crucial fact, I was absolutely helpless when it came to getting rid of that weight again. I was feeling like someone trapped on the back of an elephant that is running amok. My body kept getting fatter, I was ever more handicapped by my weight, and I was, after some time, simply scared that this weight gaining thing would never stop, that I would end up as one of those people who couldn´t leave their house any more, or who couldn´t leave their beds because their legs couldn´t support them any more.
I told the story before of how my husband kept me from that fate.
Still, it was a long way before I started to think about how much food my body really needs. And then, only then, did the pounds start to come off.

And today? I still have to weigh and measure my food, then journal it, to convince my interior glutton that these are really sufficient portions. There´s still that slight twinge of disbelief that that amount of food would be enough whenever I look at the portions I serve myself.
And after eating, the comfortable feeling of satiety. Not stuffed, not queasy, just comfortably filled.

The feeling of having had enough.


Julia

I´m astonished about myself

I have never been a fan of budgeting. In my native family, there was one person who was a veritable bookkeeping fiend, who kept tabs on everything from money spent on groceries to how much gas our car had used per kilometer. Everything was duly recorded, and woe to the perp who didn´t fill out the required lists, or whose lists didn´t add up.
It was enough to make me shy away from anything that looked even remotely like such a list. I didn´t like being made accountable, neither in the literal nor in the figurative sense.
It took me a long time to re-learn that budgeting is something that can make life easier, instead of harder.
What changed everything for me there was the realization that a budget isn´t meant to chastise you after the fact for going out of control. It´s meant to keep you from going out of control in the first place. And the control it keeps you under needn´t be something external. It can be your own.
These days I, too, am a listmaker. Not to keep tabs on anybody else, but to keep control of my life.
One place that helps immensely is my food intake. It is a really satisfying feeling to sit in front of my netbook in the evening, add up what I ate during the day, and then look what I may still eat. As I have the same thing for breakfast and lunch regularly, it´s the evening meal where I tend to get over my caloric limit. So, looking first what I may eat has been a big step forward for me.
It is actually what makes my weight, right now, go down rather steadily at a rate I haven´t seen since last year. Not grabbing that string of cheese, or "just a handful" of nuts, or "just one" chocolate bar. Not munching on peanuts all the time while preparing dinner. I had developed quite a number of self-defeating habits that I wasn´t really aware of just how bad they were, calorie-wise.
Seeing that, for example, the innocent-looking cut of cheese I ate when coming home "just to pass the time till dinner" was, on that day, what gave me the most calories, not the chicken breast that was dinner, made me realize that I was, actually, taking in a lot  more calories grazing while cooking than I was supposed to eat at all if I wanted to lose more weight.
Having to write down every morsel, every peanut and every cookie, and then seeing immediately how they affect my calorie count, is helping me to keep within my limits. And I have started to really budget, that is, think first, eat last.
That way I don´t end up wondering every morning where the (high) number on my scales came from. It´s amazing how much one can overeat without noticing it. I am, today, determined to never again become a victim of the Sneaky Peanut or the Stealth Cookie.
Being accountable to myself for every morsel I eat is the trick. Then, ther is hope for me of getting rid of the rest of my excess baggage, too.


Julia

Thinking twice- and saving!

Food labels are sometimes a most educating thing to read.
I have, for two weeks now, been using Sparkpeople to track my food intake.First of all, it´s free. I can access it from any computer that has an internet connection. And it gives you a precise rundown on the contents of what you ate.
The latter feature, to me, is the most helpful one because you cannot only look at how many carbs etc. you had but also at a number of micronutritients, like calcium. Which got me back to supplementing. It seems to be near impossible to get in the RDAs on a 1500-calorie-a-day plan otherwise. But with a few well-chosen supplements I think I´ll be fine.
What surprised me was that their food lists seem to cover most of the things I can buy here, too, even though I live in Europe and the company is US-based. (Full disclosure: I am not affiliated to them,  I just use their website for tracking).
Sometimes, though, I have to look for a close equivalent for what I want to eat, especially when I am resorting to pre-prepared meals which I sometimes have to do for convenience´s sake (I´m working full-time, after all, and get home quite late on some days).
And that, in turn, requires me to go and read the labels of some old favourites.
Like that of the frozen vegetable pizza that is a standby for those I-don´t-want-to-cook evenings in our household.
One pizza (twenty-cm diameter) for each of us.
Who eats half of what looks like exactly one dinner plate of pizza, anyway?
Me, that is, after I discovered that the nutrition information gave half a pizza as one recommended serving. So, after that discovery, I took a bread knife to the still-frozen pizza and cut it into two recommended servings, one of which went back into the freezer for next time.
Which meant that I didn´t go over my calories or carbs yesterday, and I know now that I can eat twice off one package of those pizzas. Which is, in effect, like a fifty-percent markdown per meal.
DH, who is not at present dieting, had a whole one, but then, as a male and being taller than I am, he can use the calories just fine. For me, seeing that I can have the same thing he eats if I watch my portions makes everything easier, too.
The serving size trap is something that I noticed quite frequently these days. Like the 400g- pack of greek salad that I would, formely, have divided by two and served. The recommended serving was..100 grams. Half of what I used to serve. Again, we had two meals off that salad.
What annoys me most is the packages where recommended servings and package content don´t compute. Like, when you have a 200g- pack and the recommended serving is 75 grams. You can either toss the rest, or eat it, putting you at 1.3 times the recommended serving size. Depending on what is in the pack, that can seriously impact your caloric balance.
I admit that I am not yet ready to toss those leftovers every time. But I think I should remember that the food industry doesn´t mind at all what happens to their product after we bought it. We could buy and toss whole packages for all they care.
I have been guilty of that, too, before starting to recondense myself. But first, I would stuff everything that threatened to pass the eat-by date into the bipedal bin, aka my body. Only what I didn´t manage to eat went to the trash bin.
First overbuying, then abusing my body as a receptacle for the excess food we had dragged home. Cooking way-too-big portions and eating it all because one doesn´t throw away food, or does one?
And I was wondering where the fat came from...
Of course, the excess food we dragged home was partly due to my wanting to be prepared for every eventuality. What if one of us wanted to eat, say, a piece of cake and there wasn´t any in the house?
I have, by now, found out what happens then. Nothing. If the person is really hungry, he or she will eat something else. If  it is just a yen for something that appeals to our appetites, it will pass. Not being able to act on your appetite (vs. hunger) is, actually, keeping a lot of unnecessary calories out of our bodies.
Apart from that, our grocery bills are considerably lower, too.
And not dragging home too much food means that we barely ever have to throw out food that has spoiled.

What if you have been brought up as a member of the "Clean your plate, there are children starving in Africa"-club? Guess what, if you leave the excess at the store in the first place, a lot of supermarkets donate merchandise that is close to the sell-by date to food banks, so there´s a chance that the food that would be too much for you could, if unsold to somebody else, even be used to do good to somebody in your own community. In your trashbin, it helps no one. And if you really care about the children in Africa, consider donating the money you didn´t pay for those excess goodies to a charity or a development aid project that will really help the people there. <getting off my soapbox>

We inhabitants of the so-called developed countries are living in a world that has more food choices to offer than anybody can reasonably eat. We have- most of us, at least- cars to help us bring home gigantic stashes of food, and pantries full of more food than we can hope to eat before it expires.
All of these things are making us fat.
For me, that realization was the first step in getting my weight under control. And it´s a continuing battle, one that requires planning, journalling my food and reading labels all the time.
But the result is worth it.


Julia

Freezing my bottom off

No, I have not moved to the land of the kiwis who right now have plenty of that white stuff you get in winter.
But  I have a NSV to celebrate, and it has to do with my trusty freezer.
You see, I have always loved curry dishes. The warm yellow goodness of chicken and ananas, coated with generous amounts of sauce, mixed with mounds of rice... I usually ended up stuffing myself to the point of bursting at the seams. The fact that ananas comes mostly in big cans and chicken breast filets are sold in packs of four meant having to use up all of the packages if I didn´t want to have part of it spoil in the fridge before I got around to using it up.So, there was always plenty of curry to overeat on. I had stopped making curry dishes because I deemed it too risky for me.
Yesterday, I prepared a chicken and curry dish for dinner, in the usual amounts.
And then I went on to serve it, in bowls half the size of the ones I usually take for curry dishes. With just two tablespoons of cooked rice for each bowl, and two soup ladles of the curry on top.
Guess what- both DH and I found that to be enough!
And the remaining rice and curry went into two portion-sized microwaveable containers and into the freezer, for DH to brown-bag it to work.
So, what used to be one dinner will now be one dinner for two plus two lunches for DH, thanks to being able to use the freezer.
And I have, this morning, not had to face any damages on the scales the way I was used to after having had curry.
For me, that is what it means to freeze my bottom off.
If I eat just small portions and freeze the leftovers in single portions, I will most likely be able to condense my rear end some more, and I won´t have to pay for it by not being able to eat my favourite dishes any more. The only thing it takes is the willpower to put any surplus into the freezer instead of into my mouth.


Julia

Lasagna woes

There´s a very popular comic strip kitty with a penchant for lasagna, and then there´s DH who likes to have home-made lasagna, too.
Yesterday, he did ask for it, and I did prepare some. Actually, I have been tweaking the recipe for somewhat less calories by replacing the better part of the ground meat in the bolognese sauce with cut-up vegetables.Still, I found out that there was one big impediment to keeping portions at the correct size, namely, that I do not yet have oven-proof lasagna dishes that hold single portions. I have oven-proof single-size platters that are great for putting toast on or anything else with cheese on top to melt, but they are too low at the sides so the bolognese sauce would just run out and the lasagna leaves would stay hard and dry. Nothing to say of the mess that would make in the oven.
So I took the next size rectangular oven-proof dish, which we used to take for preparing lasagna before I started to curtail our portion sizes. And, of course, I had to fill it up so that the lasagna leaves would be well immersed in sauce.
Guess what- I divided the contents by half, as I had been wont to do, and- we both didn´t finish our plates because we were feeling full much sooner than we used to. The remains, we tossed (not enough for another meal).
While that is a sort of NSV (not stuffing myself beyond capacity with a food I genuinely like because I don´t want to waste anything), the "waste" part of that is still bothering me.
Now, I prefer not to have any unitaskers in my kitchen if I can avoid it. And two portion-sized lasagna dishes would certainly fall under that heading.
Then again, I remember seeing, at the local mall, exactly these, sized just like the lasagna leaves you can buy ready-to-cook. As the bottom surface of the other dish is about three times that size, I know that using the smaller dishes would help me to prepare exactly the amount of lasagna we would really eat and not waste anything.
I think there´s a shopping expedition in my future...

Julia

Limits of the possible

Of course, I am impatient to lose that excess weight. If there were a push-button that would magically make all of the fat go away at once, I´d probably be pushing it like crazy.
But there simply is no way past it.
One pound of fat equals roundabout 3500 calories.
My body, on an average day, uses up about 1800 calories.
Therefore, the theoretical maximum I could possibly lose, if I ate nothing at all, is about half a pound a day.
I have to keep reminding myself of that.
Of course, since I am working full-time, and have a household and a husband to take care of, a complete fast is out of the question. I have to be fully functioning, after all.
What I am aiming for right now is to stay about five hundred calories below my daily requirements.
And that, in turn, is going to amount to losing one pound a week, again, maximum.
Which means that I will take at least  another month to repair the damages from the last weeks.
And three months to go below the limit of morbid obesity.
Then again, three months, as a time span, is not so terribly long, is it?
I could be no longer morbidly obese in three months.
It would be a place I haven´t been since before the end of the last millenium.
And that is something to look forward to.
Actually, for a long time, I did not believe in my own ability to lose that weight any more. I had resigned myself to being stuck in a body that was functioning way below optimum level.
What, then, is different this time around? First of all, I started moving again. Nordic walking, to be exact, which is a lot kinder to my creaking joints than jogging. So, it was easier for me to keep it up.
And the second part is having discovered just how much I had been overeating without being aware of it. And then doing the right moves to correct that. That did involve investing in smaller sized crockery and pots, and training myself to always put food I wanted to eat on a plate or into a bowl first, so as to never eat anything directly out of the package.
Move more, eat less.
It´s almost insulting in its simplicity. I, for one, know that I´d have bitten the head off (figuratively, of course) anyone who would have dared to suggest to me that it was that simple. I had to go through the experience myself.
Reading of others who went through a similar experience just did not replace seeing it for myself.
Yes, it is possible for me to lose that excess weight.
Even if it does take time.


Julia

U-turn in a container ship

Somehow, that´s what my current weight situation feels like to me.
You know those bi-i-ig container ships that take immense amounts of freight across oceans? I read somewhere that, once such a behemoth is moving into a certain direction, it takes, even at "full speed backwards", several miles to stop it, and also to turn it around.
I made the mistake of being too certain that a couple of weeks off plan wouldn´t harm my weight loss efforts too much.
And, like that container ship staying on course, for a while I maintained, or almost, and then, slowly, the direction changed, and my weight went up. Slightly, at first, and then in one-pound-a-day fluctuations, as if everything above plan I had eaten had been hovering in some fifth or sixth dimension, only to materialize on me at once.
And now I have to throw the rudder around again and get back in the other direction. The one leading to health, the one leading to feeling better.
And, like that container ship, right now it looks like the thing won´t budge off its course.
Knowing that it will eventually, if I hold the rudder tight, doesn´t make the current situation less frustrating.
What vexes me most is that I didn´t even feel like I was overeating the last days. But I had some rice and pasta and, perhaps worse, several rolls and slices of bread. Which didn´t push me over the caloric limit, but it almost looks as if my body were having an allergy to the stuff, so fast did my weight go up.
And that in spite of the fact that, with the rice and pasta at least, I cut the portions to one-fifth of what I used to believe was a portion , and did feel rather virtuous about it, too.
The reality of the scales was putting me back on the ground again fast this time.
Now, I have to complete that turnaround before I go back up even further.
So, no carbs. Absolutely none. No cookie, no bread, no rice, no pasta. No wine, either. Not until I am back at the point I had already reached.
And back to walking again. Half an hour every morning, at the very least. Preferably more. Even if it rains.
The most difficult part will be arranging this plan with the needs of DH. Last year´s weightloss was successful partly because DH was gone a lot and I felt free to not eat. Now that he is here most of the time, even if I don´t want to eat, I have to cook for him. He doesn´t know how, so cooking is my personal resposibility. But I don´t think he´d accept the kind of very-low-carb plan I need to go on for himself, in spite of being very supportive of me otherwise.
So, I´ll have to exercise my restraint muscles, too. Even if the pasta looks good.
And wait for that ole container ship Body to complete its turn.

How do you, dear readers, deal with the problem of being the family feeder while having to restrain your own consumption of food?


Julia

Danger! Holidays approaching!

There´s another of these four-day-holiday-marathons approaching, and I am somewhat nervous.
Four days in a row eating with extended family mean, usually, several meals that contain foodstuffs I would, under different conditions, not even get close to any more.
I´m talking baguettes, potato dumplings, deep-fried breaded fish, pork roast with a crispy brown crust, and I´m not even beginning to mention chocolate eggs and their ilk.
So, I have basically two choices (avoiding those family meals isn´t one of them).
I can either stick to my diet like whatnot. That would mean watching the others eat that stuff, and also acting as a spoilsport to all of them  who do not have weight issues. Or upset the senior members of the family who seem to believe that even if someone is still as heavy as I am, leaving out a meal leads to instant starvation and sickness.
The other is trying to deal with what is served responsibly. That means eating an extra slice of pork and leaving half the potato dumpling well alone. Or taking just a small portion of the deep-fried carp that will be served on Good Friday, and leave the potato salad served along with it.
I have found that for most of the food-pushers, when they see someone is eating at all, that´s enough. So, with every meal I expect to have during those days, I will try to find the ingredients I may eat freely and be very visibly eating these. Perhaps I will manage to maintain, at the very least.
And, since I will not completely  forbid myself any of the delicacies offered, I hope I won´t wind up frustrated or, worse, bingeing.
While I know I´ll probably not lose any weight over the holidays that way, I stand, in my experience, a far better chance of succeeding for the long run that way than if I forbade myself all of the tasty stuff only to have my willpower fail over some particularly calorious treat and then binge. 
I know that every day I spend in morbid obesity is one too many, but staying in place beats backsliding any time.



Julia

Taming the cookie monster

The human hand is, all in all, a wonderful instrument. Take opposable thumbs, for one. I know quite a few kitties who envy you those :).
But there is one feature that has, unfortunately for many of us, been omitted.
That feature is a measuring device.
Using the human hand as such is a step on the road to weight desaster.
You know the situation- a big tin full of cookies in front of you, and you take your hand to extract from that tin - what? The amount termed "a handful".
Depending on how far you stretch out your hand, that means anywhere between three or a dozen cookies.
Thus, the perceived "handful" may amount to two, three or more portions when you compare it to the portion sizes in the nutritional informations.
And , since you have had "just a handful", what is the damage in taking "just another"?
Or, how do you eat a handful of cookies? For me, there´s always the danger that I may stuff all of them into my mouth at once, swallowing down the lot without really taking stock of how many they are.
That´s dangerous because it maximizes my cookie intake while minimizing the pleasure I get from eating them. Ten cookies swallowed down in one big gulp are not more tasty than a single cookie eaten slowly. They are, actually, less tasty. Especially when I, out of feeling guilty at eating cookies at all, gulp them down without pausing to really taste them, which is the dumbest thing to do because in that case, I could as well chomp down on a bale of hay for all the pleasure they give me.
And, since cookies eaten by the handful do not deliver the eating pleasure they are eaten for, what does one do- raise the dosage, medically speaking. Eat more cookies, in the hope of finally getting the feeling of having enough.
Do you see the catch in that?
It´s the attempt at eating cookies to feel good while at the same time not permitting myself to really feel that feeling that I hope a cookie would produce.

Instead of savouring one single cookie mindfully.
The big surprise for me, when I first did that, was, that this single cookie gave me more pleasure to eat than stuffing myself with several hands full of cookies at once.
At a fraction of the calories.

And what applies to cookies, also applies to almost all of the other not-so-goodies that I have, for a long time, declared forbidden because I was fat. As long as I do not permit myself to really be present in the moment and be mindful when eating them, I only have a choice of not going anywhere near them, which sometimes takes a lot of willpower, or, giving in to the lure of bingeing on them.
Oh, and there´s yet another surprise.
I have discovered that some of the foodstuffs I had kept myself from with lots of willpower, or gorged myself on when willpower failed, were not even that tasty when eaten mindfully. Their allure had been kept up by me forbidding them to myself, nothing else. Eating them mindfully allowed me to find out that I didn´t even like them.

That experience has led me to adopt an entirely different policy towards culinary "sins".
To me, no food may ever be off limits any more. But neither may I chomp down my food mindlessly. Whenever I catch myself with my hand in the cookie jar, I stop myself, take just one and close the jar again.
I find it surprisingly easy to just have one cookie that way and enjoy it, knowing that two or three or four of them would taste just the same and not deliver any more pleasure in eating.
And I know that I don´t fall off the wagon completely that way. How often did I give up on ever being able to re-condense my body after a single slipup, retiring to the vicinity of that cookie jar instead, and not reemerging from it until several thousand calories and several pounds later.

The reassurance  that I may, if I really want to, have another cookie is the best way for me not to want to eat them all at once.
And not bingeing is prerequisite for me to lose weight.



Julia

Tiny pots and pans

Which things do contribute to overeating? It´s a question I have been asking myself quite often during the last couple of months.
I have, by now, lost more weight than I would have believed to be able to, and I have decluttered  the clothes I wore at the higher weight. So, I must not go back to where I am coming from.

When I gained that weight, I felt as if something uncontrollable had taken possession of my body, making it go out of control and pile on pounds without my active participation.
That was wrong, of course.

What had happened was that the amounts I had been eating had, over time, become a lot bigger without my noticing it. Much bigger  than what I needed to eat.

And the plates weren´t the only culprits.
There was also the pot collection. When my husband and I moved in together, the single-serving-size cookware I had was relegated to the back shelves and replaced by bigger pots.

The problem with pots is the same as with plates: every increase in diameter of the pot makes for square times the increase in bottom surface, and consequently, for that much more volume in the pot.
Same thing with pans.
I was using cookware to cook for the two of us that held, not twice, but three to four times as much food as my old pots.

Of course, who sits down and calculates the contents of a pot or pan before buying it?
Nobody does.
And then there´s the pot on the stove, and you put food in it, say, vegetables. If you are like me, you´re mostly too lazy to get out the kitchen scales and weigh it, so you use the good ol´ Mark one eyeball to gauge how much you need to put in.
And boom, you´ve cooked three portions, while still believing you are cooking for two people.
So, you just divide  the contents of the pot by two and believe that to be one portion each, not the one-and-a-half  portion it objectively amounts to.

Those of you, gentle readers, with Weight Watchers experience will perhaps say, what´s wrong with one-and-a-half portion of zero points veggies?
Well, they are not zero calories veggies, and outside of a diet do, of course, get a generous slathering on of sauce, or butter, or olive oil, too.
Besides, what applies to vegetables will apply to every food that is cooked in these pots, portion-wise.
And what happens then is  your weight seemingly  getting out of control.

I´ve had enough of this scenario.
As long as I have only the two of us to cook for, there are not many occasions I would need to use the big pots and pans for. Cooking a whole chicken for soup, maybe, or frying two of those delicious big schnitzels that are flattened out to the point of barely fitting on a plate.
So, I have been drawing the consequences and banished the oversized cookware to the most inaccessible part of my kitchen cabinets.
What I have up front now and use daily are several of the smallest-size (16 cm diameter) pots and pans, plus some medium (20 cm or 24 cm diameter) ones. 
The scary part of using them is that I still feel as if I should cook more than would fit in there, only to see, after ladling the food on our new smaller dishes, that the portions are completely sufficient.
I think that is scary because in spite of having cut down on portions for almost nine months now, there still is that feeling of "not enough" even though it has been amply proven by now that what fits into these pots is enough.
What that means for me is clear. I must keep using the smaller cookware and the smaller plates, to avoid slipping back to unhealthy portion sizes.
And it´s for life.
 Because the Mark one eyeball simply doesn´t work for this.



Julia

The freezer, my friend

The best investment I ever made in my kitchen?
It´s a large, upright freezer. I buy vegetables and fruit frozen and in bulk, and that way, I always have something nutritious and low in calories on hand.
Actually, using that freezer has helped me with portion control in more than one way.
First of all, I can take as much or as little as I want out of those bags of frozen produce, and leave the rest frozen.
BF (before freezer) I often took home fresh produce in packages or portions  bigger than what I actually needed, simply because there wasn´t any other size.
This led to one of two possible outcomes: either I cooked all of it because, well, wasn´t it a pity to throw it away?, or I left part of what I bought to rot in the veggie drawer of my fridge because it spoiled faster than we could eat it.
If I cooked too much food, it was very likely eaten, too. After all, one doesn´t waste good food, does one?
(You can see I was brought up as a member of the clean-plate-club).
And this, of course, added unwanted pounds and cost unnecessary expenses.Both of which were vexing and led to buying vegetables more and more infrequently.
The big freezer changed all that.
I can take out exactly measured portions of produce, and leave the rest in to use at a later time. That also means I can, on a whim, take a handful of some veggie and drop it into what I am cooking. I do that quite often when using store-bought sauces or soups, which I sometimes have to resort to for convenience´s sake, being a full-time employee with somewhat irregular hours. The addidtional produce ups the nutritional value of our meals and lowers the caloric content. So, win-win.
And I don´t have to throw away leftovers that weren´t eaten fast enough any more, but instead I just re-freeze them immediately to use at a later date.
That means having self-cooked meals ready to eat at any time, and it means not having to stuff ourselves just because it would be a pity to throw away any part of a tasty meal.

And it saves lots of money, too. Paradoxically, the frozen produce, which is pre-prepared, peeled, whatever you do to the veggie in question, and therefore one hundred percent edible, is, because it doesn´t spoil so fast, cheaper by weight than the so-called fresh stuff where you have to pay for parts of the plant that get thrown away.
So, in the contest of kitchen appliances, the prize goes to the freezer alright. It´s, apart the cooking appliances themselves, the one thing in my kitchen that I would not want to miss.


Julia