12/23/12: Reflections - What Has Been Different This Time?

Morning Weight:  152.8
This Morning's Exercise: Not yet - planning on swimming today
Yesterday's Exercise:  Cardio at the gym.  It was warm enough to run, but with the melting snow everywhere the sidewalks and streets were a mess.  I pushed the cardio hard yesterday and it felt pretty good.  30 minutes on the elliptical, 24 minutes on the stairmaster (level 9 - 120 floors), 1500 meters rowing, and 6 minutes of ab work.  It was a good workout!
Yesterday's Calories: 1469
Vitamins:  1-A-Day, D, B-Complex, Calcium, Glucosamine

I was much better yesterday about recording every single calorie as I ate it.  The discipline felt good.  It is so much easier to record it as it is happening than it is to try to remember later what I ate.

This is the third weekend in a row that I cooked two meals to get Jack and I through the week and it is making a huge difference.  The first week I cooked a tofu, mushroom, collard green and peanut stew (It is excellent - don't judge without trying it.  Let me know if you want the recipe!) and spinach tofu burgers.  Last week I made spaghetti sauce with chicken sausage and mushroom, black bean and quinoa stuffed peppers, and this week I made vegan chili and leek, fennel, and tofu stuffed portabella mushrooms.  I also bake a couple of sweet potatoes and keep them in the fridge so all I have to do is cut off a portion of the sweet potato and heat it up with whatever else I am having.  Today I am going to cook a bunch of broccoli.  I hope that will make it easier for me to add a green veggie, too.  It helps that everything I cook is predominantly made of vegetables, but I'd like to get the broccoli in, too.  The My Fitness Pal app on my iPhone works great for recipes.  I just put in all of the ingredients (I scan the label on anything I buy from the store like beans, tomatoes, tofu, etc...) and enter how many portions I am making.  It calculates the calories per serving for me and then it is stored in my phone.  The hardest part is measuring all of the soup or chili once it's done, so I know how much 1 serving is, but I just measure it all into a big bowl and then put the serving size into the name of the recipe.  When I want some chili, I just find the recipe in my phone, it tells me that 1 cup is 266 calories, and I decide how many calories of chili I want for dinner.  It works great!!

2.8 Pounds left to go...this is getting exciting.  The closer I get to goal the more I reflect on the last 10 months and what has been so different about this time around than every other time I have set out to lose weight.  Several notable things come to mind:

• Binges or "cheat moments" were very short lived.  During previous weight loss attempts, if I went off track I would go off track for an entire day or several days.  In fact, it was not unusual for me to build cheat days into my routine, justifying it as a way to keep my metabolism from slowing down or to keep me from feeling deprived and sabotaging myself later.  Unfortunately, more often than not it was one of those cheat days, a particularly bad binge, or a special event that would stretch into days instead of hours and would become the beginning of the end of my weight loss attempt that time around. 
  
  This time was different in that regard.  There have been special events in the last 10 months at which I made the decision to not count calories.  Three come to mind off the top of my head; my 50th birthday party, Pat's wedding, and Steve's wedding.  I think there were more, but I can't recall them at the moment.  What I do know, though, is that event related eating was isolated to the actual event and those events lasted for a matter of hours, not days.  So for four or five hours I didn't count calories.  I didn't gorge myself, either, but I pretty much ate what I wanted without worrying about entering it into my phone or what it would do on the scale.  Before the event, I counted every calorie and once the event was over, I counted every calorie.  Even when I was on the road.  The event would end, I had fun, and then I was right back on my program.  This might not seem like a big deal, but I think it was huge.  I never got into the mentality that I could "take a break" from my Get Fit Initiative. 
  
  I think the tool that really kept me on track, at least in the first few months, was my chart.  I mark my chart twice a week, on Thursdays and Mondays.  I do not like my red line to go up and there is no room in a 3 or 4 day window to take a day or two off and then "catch up" by severely cutting calories for the next couple of days.  By weighing in twice a week, I kept myself accountable for every day, not every week.  It helped a lot.  After a while I realized what I was doing and I realized that it made sense.  It is nice, once in a while, to let my guard down.  But it doesn't need to be for a whole day or a number of days.  A few hours is plenty of time to enjoy myself and I like the feeling of getting right back on track.  I controlled the eating, it didn't control me.
  
  I also didn't allow major life events like changing jobs, going on vacation, or going to China for work, to derail me.  Prior to each of these events I came up with a plan on how I was going to tackle them.  Prior to each of these events I recommitted to my plan and made the conscious decision to stay on plan in spite of stress or lack of routine caused by the event.  I never used a life event as an excuse to go off plan.  Each one of these events was different and required a different kind of planning.  Thinking about changing jobs kind of freaked me out because I have had a bad habit of eating my way through big life transitions.  After blogging about my concerns, my sister responded with a 30 day, double-down plan.  I liked it and I went with it.  I managed the transition without a snag. 
  
  Planning for vacation was a different story.  We've all done it.  We've all said, "I'm on vacation, I can eat or drink whatever I want.  I'll go back on my diet when I get home."  And then many of us didn't go back on our diets when we got home.  I thought about it a lot, prior to going on vacation.  What was I going to do?  Was I going to stay on plan and try to continue to lose while on vacation, was I going to try to maintain my weight while on vacation, or was I going to say, "To hell with it," while on vacation?  After giving it a lot of thought, I decided to stay on plan for one very simple reason.  I felt great.  I mean I was feeling strong, energetic, happy, comfortable in my clothes, and enthused about life.  I knew if I ate too much, ate crap, drank alcohol, and didn't exercise on vacation (in other words, got lazy), I would feel crummy.  My brain wouldn't be as sharp, my body would get sluggish, and in general I wouldn't be on the top of my game.  And when I looked at it that way, I knew I would be crazy to go off plan just because I was on vacation.  I was planning on enjoying every moment of this vacation and getting every little bit out of it that I could.  Why would I want to compromise my body and my brain in any way that would take away from that.  Of any two weeks of the year that I wanted to feel my best, vacation was it!  How silly, I suddenly realized, it would be to work hard to feel great on days I have to go to work just to feel crappy and sluggish on days that I am doing exactly what I want to do.  That made the decision to stay on plan - both food and exercise - an absolute no brainer.  Yes, I lost weight while I was on vacation this year, and it felt good!
  
  The China travel took two tries to get it right and I have to admit that I find it incredibly difficult to manage the food on travel days.  24 hours of travel, with two flights (one of them 13 - 16 hours, depending on whether we fly out of San Francisco of Chicago), a ferry ride, and a long car ride, is too much.  I eat what they put in front of me.  Period and end of conversation.  But aside from the actual travel days, I did my best to maintain my exercise routine and manage my food.  The food was difficult because of the weird meal times.  The second time I went I solved that problem by packing a lot of healthy snacks.  That way I could eat when I wanted to eat, without having to wait for others to be ready for a meal.  Then when others were eating meals I could pass if they were casual, in the office meals (like the 5pm lunch usually was) or I could eat lightly.  Planning for it helped a lot.
• I count calories.  As amazing as it seems, counting calories is new to me.  I have dieted many, many times in my life and never counted calories until last year.  I did many other things.  I'd let other people moderate my food intake for me by buying their food (Jenny Craig or Nutrisystem), I'd count "points" (Weight Watchers), or I'd count blocks (the Zone).  I'd eliminate certain foods (Atkins) or abstain from sugar (Overeaters Anonymous).  I'd create a super restrictive diet and eat the same thing every day.  But I never seriously counted calories.  The first time I counted calories was the last diet I was on before I started my Get Fit Initiative.  I was going to Curves and decided to try their weight loss plan.  It was a "point" plan, kind of like Weight Watchers, but it was based on achieving caloric goals.  So I bought a calorie counting book for the first time.  I think it is called, "Carbs Count, but Calories are King," or something like that.  I started looking up the calories on everything I was eating and I was shocked by how surprised I was about some of the things that I ate.  I mean, I thought I had a pretty good grip on what was high calorie and what wasn't.  But I missed a lot.  I knew muffins weren't great, for example, but have you calculated that calories in the last carrot-bran muffin you ate?  You may be surprised.  Or those tortilla chips?  You can bet I don't eat a chip now, without being very aware of exactly how many calories I am consuming. 
  
  That experience was unsettling.  I realized then that I could not be successful at any long-term weight loss/maintenance plan without counting calories.  It was sometime during that Curves attempt that I discovered the iPhone app and started using it.  I quit using it when I quit that particular diet, of course.  But I knew it was there.  On February 26th of this year, the day I made my chart (I started my initiative the next day, on February 27th, 2012), I knew that I would count calories and use my iPhone app to do it.  There was no question about that.  The only question was how many calories per day and that did change over the course of the last 10 months.  I started out by "netting" 1200 calories a day, which is what the app recommended.  The app would calculate the calories burned through exercise and subtract those from the calories consumed for a net calorie count for the day.  That didn't turn out to work so great for me because it was to easy to figure out that if I wanted to eat more candy all I had to do was walk another couple of miles.  I did that a few times.  I felt like eating something and I would look up how many miles I had to walk so that I would still net 1200 calories for the day.  I found that by allowing myself to net my calories I was not being very disciplined.  I then decided I would eat a maximum of 1500 calories a day, no matter what exercise I did.  This worked a lot better for me, except I had a tendency to super-restrict my calories over the weekend for my Monday weigh-ins.  As my exercise became more intense and more frequent (twice a day, many days) my sister chastised me for not eating enough.  She was right.  So then I settled on a range of 1500 - 1600 calories a day.  Some days, like yesterday, I may be just shy of 1500 and other days, like Friday, I may go over, but my target range for the last several months has been 1500 - 1600 with most days ending up somewhere between 1575 - 1625  or something like that.  That has worked pretty well.  It's enough food that I don't feel deprived, but it is little enough that I have lost weight steadily.  It's also enough that I don't think I am whacking out my metabolism and going into "starvation mode."  But it is important that I count my calories as I eat them, every single day.  When I get lazy and enter in my calories at the end of the day or decide I can eye-ball my portions instead of weighing them, I see the effects on the scale immediately.  I am reminded again and again and again that I need to count calories.  It is easy to do with my iPhone app and I will count calories for the rest of my life.  I am looking forward to being able to count more calories in a day, but I will not stop counting.
• Food is fuel:  with all of the talk about food I would be negligent not to talk about one of the most important changes that has occurred within me with regard to food.  All my life food has been something that I enjoyed.  I liked eating.  It made me feel good.  I like feeding other people.  It made me happy to bake and cook delicious food for family and friends.  I loved getting complimented on my cooking and watching people enjoy what I have prepared.  Somehow it fed some need that I had.  I see food very differently, now.  I now think of food as fuel.  I think of food the same way I think about putting gasoline in my car.  Without gas, my car won't go.  Without food, I won't go, either.  But I never put too much gas in my car.  Can you imagine that?  Can you imagine pumping gasoline into your car and then, after the dispenser clicks off, forcing more gas into your car until gasoline starts pouring down the side of your car and all over the pavement?  That would clearly be a waste.  That would clearly be stupid.  The analogy works.  When food = calories it is easy to see that calories = fuel and, therefore; logic dictates that food = fuel.  Gasoline...fuel...yep, they are the same thing.  If it is stupid for me to put too much gas in my car it is just as stupid for me to put too many calories in my body.  Unfortunately, those calories don't end up spilled on the pavement, they end up spilled into my thighs, heaped onto my gut, and hanging from my chin.  Not an attractive visual, is it?  When I made that connection in my mind, food = fuel, it took the fun out of it.  I realized then that food cannot be a source of enjoyment for me.  I don't have fun pumping gas in my car, in fact, it's kind of a pain in the ass.  I'm always heading somewhere to do something when I realize I am short on gas and need to fill up.  Grudgingly, I find a gas station and re-fuel.  Eating needs to have that same sort feeling.  It is something I need to do so I can do all of those other things I want to do.  There are so many ways to enjoy and get satisfaction from life.  Food, I realized, is a cop-out.  It's too easy.  It takes no effort or creativity to eat.  You just open your mouth and shovel it in.  You can pretend it takes effort and creativity when you spend a lot of time cooking fancy things or spend a lot of money at a restaurant, but really, it's too easy.  And really, it's not that fun.  It feels good in the moment, but there is never any lasting satisfaction, other than it is the fuel you need to do all of the other things you want to do.  I don't own a car so I can put gas in it.  I own a car to take me places.  I don't have a body to put food in it, I have a body to take me places.  It's really is that simple.  Food = Fuel.
  
  The natural extension of food = fuel is that getting and being fit cannot focus on food.  You may have noticed in my blog that my discussion about food is generally limited to the # of calories I ate in a day.  The only other times I talk about food is when I had trouble staying on track (and I need to work through whatever mental thing made me want to self-medicate with food) or when I realize I need to make a big change (like being lazy about not cooking meals).  Other than that, I spend very little time actually thinking about food.  It's just not very important to me anymore.  I have come to the conclusion that if someone really wants to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of their lives, they must give up on their obsession with food.  You must focus on other things.
• I am serious about exercise.  If you are 40 or older, "Younger Next Year" should be your next read, if you have not read it already.  Every single time that I think, "Ugh, I don't feel like exercising today," my very next thought is, "Do you want to decay a little today, or grow a little today?"  Then I get up, change my clothes, and head out the door.  Well, sometimes I whine a little more and try to garner some sympathy from Jack (never works), but I always put on my sneakers and start moving.  Nothing I've read or nothing anyone has ever said to me has gotten into my head the way that book and those words have.  Decay or Grow.  I get to pick.  Every.  Single.  Day.  Today, I am going to grow a little.  I'm going to go swim for an hour.  Sometimes exercise is still a chore.  But most of the time my dread of exercising stops within minutes of starting it.  Once I'm moving and my legs are going and my blood is pumping, the hour flies by and I kind-of-sort-of enjoy it.  There are days when the whole hour is a slog and I am glad when it is over.  And then there are other days when I actually have fun doing it.  But most days it's just part of the routine.  I may need to push myself a little to get started, but once I've started it's a relatively pleasant way to spend an hour of my day. 
• I've been cleaning out my closet as I go along.  I now have two completely empty closets that were once full of clothes ranging from a size 10 to a size 18 or 2X.  With the exception of a very few tops that were on the small size of that range, all of those clothes have been donated to charity.  It started right away.  It was the strangest thing.  As I started losing weight and my clothes started getting too big, rather than hanging them back up in the back of my closet, I'd throw them in a pile on the floor.  After a few pairs of pants started to accumulate I'd realize that a certain size was now too big for me and I'd go through my closet, try everything on, and if I did not like the way it looked I added it to the pile.  I had never done that before.  With previous weight loss attempts I'd just push those clothes to the back of the closet, "just in case."  Apparently, there is no "just in case" anymore.  Because those clothes are gone.  This was not a conscious decision that I made one day.  It was more like an instinct.  At the beginning of this initiative I knew this was it.  I knew this was the last and final time that I would need to lose weight.  I knew that this was for life.  It was a hard and fast decision that I made on February 26th, 2012.  In fact, the title of my chart (which you can't really read anymore because it is covered up with photos) is something like, "My Final for the Rest of my Life Weight Loss Chart - Starting in 2013 Healthy Living Will Maintain a Healthy Weight."  Giving away clothes as they get too big is a huge affirmation of that statement.  I can't gain weight.  I will have nothing to wear.  I own 3 pairs of size 8 jeans and one size 8 skirt (and some pajama pants/sweat pants for wearing around the house, of course) and that's it.  The jeans will be the judge!  If my pants get tight, I'll be the first one to know!!!!  I am building a new wardrobe and enjoying every minute of it.  But it will be all one size!!!

Those are my reflections for the moment...I am sure there will be more.  I am very satisfied with the changes in my body and my mind.  This has truly been a life altering 10 months.