- Still monitoring the calorie intake, aiming to average 1600 daily.
- Moving more--goal is 5 days per week.
- Doing "exercise" that is appealing in the given moment and deciding on the length accordingly. Mainly--just doing it--in some form and fashion.
- Trying to have more on target days--so they are the rule and not the exception.
- And focusing on Lyn's challenge--(water, fiber, veg/fruits, moving and eating slowly to date).
The new thing? Watching my total fat intake. Fat is necessary and it is satiating. And most importantly for health, good fat--monounsaturated --should be the primary choice. But...my doctor pointed out a couple of things to me.
He said for cholesterol I need to watch the kind of fat I eat, and for weight loss I need to watch how much fat I eat.
Hmmm...I'd been making a point to eat good fat, but I hadn't been watching the percentage of my calories coming from fat. I figured for weight loss the gold standard was calories, calories, calories.
So...I'm eating more fat free foods, so I can be sure to get the best fats and still stay within my desired calorie and fat percentage range.
- Example: I use fat free dairy--which eliminates the undesirable kind of fat and reduces the fat from calories to zero for this food. Then..... I can add some olive oil or almond butter to my meal or snack, enabling me to get in the good fat I need for my cholesterol issues and not exceed my desired percentage of calories from fat for the day.
My personal fat percentage goal is to not exceed 20% of my calories from fat. At 1600 calories that would be 320 calories from fat, or 35.5 grams of fat a day (320 calories/9 calories ). Note: One gram of fat is 9 calories.
This change seems to be working!! The scale is moving in the right direction: DOWN. I've lost one pound since implementing this change last Thursday. Hopefully this trend will continue and I'll soon be back to my pre-vacation weight.
If you're stuck you might try checking your total fat intake. It's likely that though I was in range with my calorie totals I may have been eating a 50% fat diet. I wasn't tracking how many of my calories were coming from fat.
And in the interest of improving my lipid profile I was eating lots of good healthy nut butters --among other things--which are almost 100% fat. That one tablespoon of almond butter which is 90 calories has 8.5 grams of fat..meaning that 76.5 of its calories are from fat! Translation: that almond butter is 85% fat!! Mayonnaise, which is 100 calories a tablespoon with 12 grams of fat, is 100% fat!! So...get this...that one tablespoon of almond butter, which is 8.5 grams of fat is almost 1/4 of my 20% fat allowance for the day!! And the mayo---it would be 1/3 though it's only 100 calories!!!
I'd given up most fat free foods because I don't like the taste, but I'm rethinking how I can use some of them in order to get in the good fats--the ones that will raise my HDL and lower my LDL--and still stay in that 20% of calories coming from fat range.