The Learning Curve

I guess I am a slow learner.

Having finally realized there is a learning curve for everything, I am free from the bondage of perfection.

Looking back I can see now that I gave up too quickly on many things.

Things that I've since returned to and found to be wonderful.

I missed out on them all these years.

The upside to my perfection is that I didn't continue to struggle with things for the wrong reason.

Sometimes the wisest thing you can do is 'give up'.

Having the wisdom to discern is key.

So treat yourself like a well loved friend or child.

I am often a cheerleader or offer the figurative cup of cold water to people in my life or who cross my path.

Giving myself the same kind treatment is a positive thing.

Give it a try.  You just might be amazed in the difference it can make in your life.

Sprinkles Are Pretty

But they can make you feel like swearing.

Even if you are not a person who typically uses swearing words.

I warn you.  Do not eat sprinkles over or near your computer keyboard.

Especially the large hard round ones.

Why?

Well, they can wreck havoc when they bounce from your mouth and under a key.

The key, you see, won't work.  It can't go down.

To get your stuck key to work you must dislodged the sprinkle.

The round hard ones won't be smashed by forcing the key down.  

This I know this for a fact.

They are that hard.

They must be blown out.  Preferably with canned air.

But first, you might have to dislodged them with dental floss.

Once out from under the key, they tend to migrate to other keys.

So just when you think you are home free you find another key is stuck.

By one single solitary rock hard sprinkle. 


Which is no longer an object of fun and delight, as sprinkles tend to be. 

But one you want to cuss.

Eventually, in my case, I got the sprinkle out.

After much frustration.

And a lot of googling which yielded information on how to remove the key from the keyboard.

With the dire warning to not break it in the process.

Which would necessitate buying a new key board.

No prettily sprinkled food is worth the cost of a new keyboard.

 I vowed to never again eat a dipped and sprinkled pretzel while keyboarding.

At least not close to my keyboard.

I lean far away from it and hope the little balls don't bounce THAT far.

Update

Not much to say here.  Still eating healthy and losing, albeit slowly.  Had some special eating including Mother's Day.  But the scale is going down, down, down, in two tenths increments...I don't count it though until it is a full pound, so I'm still at 11 pounds though I've lost more than 11...should be at 12 soon.

The thing that surprises me most is that the scale is down each time I weigh.  For the past 7 years it was down, then up considerably, then down, then up.  I kept losing the same pound or two over and over never making any progress.  There was no incentive to continue dieting.

My biggest change this time compared to the recent past is lower caloric intake overall, lots of fiber and trading out some foods for fat free foods.  Guessing my body is burning my fat since I'm cutting out some of the fat.  I still eat good fat, but small portions. 

I've learned to like mustard on my sandwiches as much as I like mayonnaise.  I haven't found a reduced or low fat mayo that is worth eating to me, so I go for the mustard.  Today I had a delicious sandwich for lunch--what could be simpler?--of 2 slices of 50 calorie high fiber bread, an ounce and a half of smoked turkey breast, a wedge of LCL cheese, lettuce, a sprinkling of dill weed and a smear of mustard.  All for 200 calories. 

Planning to report 12 pounds lost very soon.

I CAN'T GET NO........

m o t i v a t i o n!!!!

Having read Lyn's blog Escape From Obesity for a long time, I've seen her go from feeling like she was the 'only one' with a tough time with weight loss, to being very successful in her efforts. She has discovered a lot in her journey and I love her honesty...I love that she doesn't make it sound easy or perfect. She shares her struggles.

After reading about her current frustration with binge eating I got to thinking about my situation. Binge eating is a problem I have too. When I'm hungry due to under eating because I'm on a diet, the physical need to eat is relentless. Sort of like an asthmatic dying for oxygen but can't take any into the lungs, I'm starving and trying desperately to keep food out of my mouth and stomach.

While my binges are small in size compared to Lyn’s, they are binges none the less and destroy all my good efforts. I feel like I can't stop myself, though I honestly know I could if I wanted to badly enough. I just don't want to at the time. How do I change that--how do I change my will? It's like fighting an enemy and knowing you could win the immediate battle but no way will you ever win the war. You know you will have that same battle over and over and over. It is exhausting. It gets old. You figure you might as well toss up the white flag of surrender.

Twice I've lost 50 pounds. I find myself, once again, needing to re-lose some of the last 50. But one thing is lacking: motivation. Both times, and even now, I had an extreme, intense desire to lose my excess weight. But the first two times that desire was partnered with strong motivation to succeed. That motivation is totally absent now. Desire, no matter how intense, without motivation won't go anywhere. Why, I ask myself, can't I muster up some motivation?

The only answer I can come up with is: belief. Because I've lost, but can't maintain my loss for more than 5 years, I no longer believe there is any point in trying. Deep down, I honestly believe that permanent weight loss is extremely rare and next to impossible. That is my dilemma. And I conclude, to keep dieting, to keep trying to lose-- knowing what my previous efforts ultimately yielded-- seems like a waste of time and energy. To repeat the same behavior with the expectation of a different outcome is an exercise in futility and will drive you to intense frustration if not insanity.

I don't want to gain more, but I almost feel like it is inevitable. I gained before in spite of my tremendous desire and effort. My motivation now is nada...this lack is the huge roadblock in my path. Where and how do I get motivated to do again and again and again what I must do in order to achieve success?

So, I have no motivation and don't know how to get any.

Another stumbling block is this: volume of food issues.

Given: it takes me a specific volume of food to be filled, hunger satisfied. Given: I can replace calorie dense foods with low calorie, high fiber filling foods. But how, and when, do I learn to be satisfied on a smaller amount of food?

How does one do that? How does one eat just a little food and not be hungry?

I can employ willpower and limit my intake, quit even though I am hungry..but I can't do that forever. Eventually, hunger is going to win.

On my first diet the main reason I was able to limit my food volume for the year it took me to lose 50 pounds was that I was on a decongestant for allergies that had an anorexic side effect. I was never hungry, so it was much easier to eat a small amount of food --there was no hunger to satisfy. I mainly ate because I knew I must. Some days lunch was a single cup of fat free sugar free yogurt.

When I was taking that drug, I didn't need any motivation. No appetite, no hunger, equals no desire to eat. The result? weight loss. If you're not hungry you don't need any motivation to not eat.

Since I no longer need that drug and don't want to take pills the rest of my life, the only way I can exercise my will and not eat would require that I be highly motivated. Believing that permanent weight loss is next to impossible destroys my motivation to exercise my will to do what it takes to lose my regain and maintain a stable desirable weight.

My take on my situation is this: until I can learn to live with being hungry all the time I'm not going to succeed. I already know this: living the rest of my life with calorie dense food off limit and eating only low calorie high fiber filling foods isn't an option for me. Restrict a food, and I desire it all the more. And I’ve tried a combination of calorie dense foods plus large amounts of low calorie foods. Those low calorie foods just don’t stay with me. They fill me for about an hour, then I find myself hungry, looking for something to eat, trying not to eat, in another battle.

Minus motivation, intense desire is useless. I guess my only option is to try and satisfy my hunger with huge volumes of low calorie food. But how can I learn to be satisfied on less food overall? Some people exercise one and two hours a day so they can eat, satisfy hunger and lose or stay trim. For me that is not an option. To my way of thinking I would be replacing one disorder for another--trading my bondage to food for bondage to exercise, knowing that if I didn't exercise I'd balloon up again. Though, realistically, exercise is probably the better option.

Not only does it burn calories it promotes health. Our bodies were made to move, and movement stimulates the immune system. Exercising daily outside in the sunshine gives us a good healthy dose of sunshine that our bodies need to make vitamin D which is being touted now for its role in cancer prevention.

But one to two hours a day?..hmmm...can't think of anything I enjoy doing that much to do it religiously every day without fail. I wanted to be a runner. I liked it because you could burn a lot of calories in a short time. But, alas, I got shin splints and had to give it up.

Perhaps it is my lot in life, my destiny, to weigh more than conventional wisdom dictates.

So here’s the deal. I've been frustrated with my stalled weight loss and recent gain. I’ve been gaining weight even though I’m eating the same amount of food.

Before I actually weighed myself, I noted that I felt bloated--that my clothes felt tighter. That was what tipped me off that I needed to check in at the scale. I wasn’t surprised to see it ‘up’. With the way my clothes were fitting and my past history it was to be expected--par for the course.

In my frustration I didn’t really know what to do--I’ve been at this bend in the road many times. What I do know is that I can’t give up. I don’t want to regain the whole 50 pounds I lost back in 2002. But where to go from here--what is the answer?

Help came from an unexpected source: Eater’s Digest Monday--this issue: December 8, 2008

The issue contained several articles that caught my eye and shed some light on what might be my problem. It wasn't new to me information--but I have failed to incorporate it into my eating habits with any regularity. I slip back into old habits.

I got some insight as to what may explain my weight gain and inability to lose even though eating in a range that should cause weight loss.

One of the articles made this summation and in a nutshell it explains what I think is going on with my stalled weight loss:

“someone could be eating a relatively small amount of calories daily but at the same time be promoting a great deal of fat storage by: 1) making poor food choices; 2) combining macro-nutrients in a nonproductive fashion and 3) consuming food infrequently at inopportune times”.

Bingo.

You can read the articles in their entirety. Here they are with their links:

***Overlooked Fat Loss Factor

***High Protein Meals May Help Overweight Burn Fat

***Secrets of Health Conscious Foodies

Who’s to say if the research is right or not? Most of the statements “suggest” a reason for the outcome, so it‘s not necessarily hard core fact. At any rate--I’m taking them to heart. Why?

Number one, I’ve got nothing to lose if they don’t work and number two, because it dawned on me that while my food volume/caloric intake had not really changed, the make up of it had… I resemble the examples given in the articles--so maybe there is an application for me.

I’ve been eating lots of crackers, cookies, bread--simple carby stuff--and very little protein. I've never been a big meat eater and it's hard for me to eat enough protein to promote weight loss. And I've been pretty much skipping the dairy too.

Also I’ve taken to ‘needing’ a night time snack every night without fail (too many carbs and not enough protein during the day?).

Those nighttime snacks have been the carby stuff. I'll feel hungry--get out something low cal but high carb and before you know it I've scarfed down a lot of carbs.

As I mentioned, my protein intake has fallen way off . By days end my protein intake was really low. And that, I think, may explain the weight gain. More carbs mean our bodies store more fluid by volume to metabolize those carbs. Hence the bloated puffed up me. And according to the research a big carb loaded meal causes a rise in insulin which promotes fat storage.

To give you an idea, here are some initial changes I’m putting into place.

--Swap out my one egg and two pieces of toast for 2 eggs and one piece of toast . This changes the protein/carb calorie ratio.

--Eat better during the day (as in more protein) so I don’t ‘need’ the night time snack--but should I indulge in a night time snack, I’ll change it up--no crackers, cookies, dark chocolate chips. Instead --a cup of milk..or some plain yogurt. The milk/carb ratio in dairy is almost perfect. If I ‘give in’ and eat crackers I’ll be sure to accompany them with a low fat string cheese and limit the crackers to a few.

Here are some of the points that jumped jumped out at me:

“the actual number of calories you consume is not the only factor that affects your fat-loss efforts.”

“protein carries the highest thermic effect. Eat more protein; burn more calories.”

"people with higher body fat burn fat better after a high protein meal"

“fiber, as an indigestible nutrient, will not be absorbed…will pass through your intestinal tact undigested” (Key: eat fiber, it fills you up but not out)

“when high levels of insulin are present within the blood, fat burning is brought to a screeching halt” (Key: eat low glycemic foods for fat loss)

“carbohydrate ingestion stimulates a large insulin response and fat ingestion give rise to blood lipid levels--when the two are consumed together, they promote the greatest fat storage.” (Key: eat fat or carbs, add protein)

“large infrequent meals tend to promote storage of the ingested nutrients” (key: eat small meals frequently)

“ingesting a large amount of carbohydrates before bed spikes insulin, deters nocturnal thermogenesis and increases fat storage during sleep....whereas consuming a great deal of calories early in the day does not bring about this problem--these calories are likely to be used as energy to support daily activities”

Fat loss isn't just a matter of calories in, calories out--it's more complex than that.

Picture Me Shouting

What and at whom am I shouting? I'm shouting at myself and this is what I'm screaming: "CUT THE CRAP!!!"
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Before you read any further I want to insert here: I'd decided not to post this--because it is so negative, and Lord knows, we all have enough negativity--we certainly don't need more. But...since I've written this I've gotten some new insight--which I'll share later, along with that veggie rice recipe I mentioned a while back--so I'm feeling better about it all. Read on.
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I'm really stalled with the weight loss...in fact according to the scale I've gained an additional 2-3 pounds...making me a total of approximately 7 pounds above my pre-vacation/Labor day weight.

To give you some insight to what I'm feeling I'm posting the comment I was going to leave in answer to a question Lyn posed on her blog recently. Click here to read Lyn's whole post.

Lyn asked this: Which camp do you fall into?

a) I will stick to healthy eating, work hard, and try to lose weight in December

b)I will make a half hearted attempt to control myself and hope to maintain or not gain too much

c) The heck with it, I give up, I am eating everything in sight and then I will begin fresh with renewed vigor on January first.

This is the comment I was going to leave but it was so lengthy I decided to publish it here instead. Here goes:

I'm a 'B'. I have dieted and lost through too many holidays to only gain it back at some point. I know I could stick it out (as in stay on a diet/plan through the holidays) and lose some weight, but right now my mindset is "why bother" when my history for the past 20 years is the regain always happens.. five years out, two years out.

It just feels like I'm fighting a battle that can't ever really be won. And everywhere I look-- for the most part-- I see the same result with everyone else...they regain too. The only exception might be those who exercise to the point of almost being what seems obsessive to me. I'm betting if they ever stop exercising they will balloon up too. Mind you, I'm not criticizing you if you exercise a lot--in fact I envy your determination and dedication. And I'm becoming a firm believer that regular exercise is key to weight loss and maintenance. So, I'm saying, you're likely not obsessive--but wise.

For me to exercise an hour every day I would have to be obsessive about it. I'd have to take the stance that nothing and nobody is going to hinder me. But that's not me. Could it ever become me? That--I don't know. Every time I get 'set' into a regular exercise routine something out of my control comes along and sabotages it.

So I guess it boils down to being me or being a person who is totally not someone I've ever been. And I'm thinking it is too late and I'm too old to change.

Sorry to be so negative but it's what I'm thinking and feeling. I know weight loss is not hopeless, but short of (it seems to me) being vigilant 24/7 for life there's no real fix. And I don't know anyone who can be 'on' for 24/7/life.

I've invested more hours than I care to add up tracking every morsel I put into my mouth. And for what? I'm no healthier for it. I feel doomed to be 'fat'. I mainly feel frustration over it all.

Fat seems to be my story, my life, my destiny. And lest you think I'm huge, I'm not. But I might as well be.

If I lost 10 pounds it would be great. Another 10 would be perfect...I'd be right where I need to be.

You'd think a person could lose 10 pounds or even 20--but it's just not that easy. I've lost 50 pounds twice, so what gives?

My greater dilemma is that I can't quit for fear of getting bigger--I've been bigger. But I just get tired of losing the same pounds over and over.

Is there anyone else out there that feels as dismal as I do? What have you done, what are you doing to deal with it?

This lose, maintain, regain repeat process is getting real old. I feel like my whole life revolves around what I will eat, what I won't eat, what I can eat. But there is so much more to life than eating. It seems I can't get past that as the focus of my life.

Sad isn't it? A whole life spent examining the how/what/when/where/why of eating as it pertains to weight loss.

I guess I'm just the spirit of "bah humbug".

Hopefully I'll get a new attitude and soon.

Post 'post' comment: I have a better attitude since I wrote this--will share more later.