Back again

I've been gone a few months now and it's done nothing for my health. I've gained 5 lbs which is pretty much my maintenance weight, I may drift up or down but I stay around 375. I was on vacation for two weeks and felt like I was being healthier there. At the very least I was forced to ccontrol portions as I had dinner with the family every evening. I was sneaking junk food from the 6 hour road trip there most nights and also there wasn't meat in the meals but there weren't that many veggies either, it was a lot of carbs like pasta or rice or potatoes, one meal item, no sides usually. I think I've been seeing wholefoods call that center of the plate thinking. 

Still, I feel like the vacation was kind of a detox from how I was living. In the two days I've been back I've at least made actual dinners so I wasn't just grazing all night. I still need to work on having healthy foods all day and I should start keeping the food journal again so I'll feel more accountable for the box of donuts I eat. :) I've made sure to walk some each day as well and do a little muscle work. I should probably do a routine or something like zumba but walking up hills can tire me out so I'll have to build up to better things. My sister joined Weight Watchers last month and I haven't noticed a difference in her eating or weight, but she does use their app to record what she eats. :) My brother has been trying to build muscles back that he let go during his marriage, I think it will help him regain confidence, she was his only love. 

I've got red beans and rice going in the press cooker. I hope they become something edible. I don't think they'll be as good as the Zataran ones I had on my trip but I'd like to cup out processed foods, I feel a bit like their deliciousness is killing me. 

Chocolate doesn't make you feel better

So today wasn't actually a bad day for any particular reason, but I'm hormonal and feel kind of crappy, perhaps as a result, maybe for unrelated reasons. I don't know what would make me feel better, but I can say with a pretty good conviction that chocolates/desserts will not fix anything. I feel just as bad now and also feel bad for the handful of fun size bars I ate and the piece of cake and the cookie. I fell into the free food trap with the desserts today after dinner. :)

I appreciate the suggestion to not bring in bad foods and I intend to follow that, but I can't control what others bring in the house so I've been trying to think of substitutes like apple sauce when I want something sweet. I am trying to change my shopping mindset from saving money with discounted junk to saving money by only buying healthy things that are good for me.

Food today: no breakfast, just didn't get around to eating until after 1pm. Lunch: last of the lasagna and mixed vegetables from Sunday and a romaine salad with chick peas, green olives, mushrooms, strawberries (wonderful treat in this bad weather!), and lite Asian Sesame dressing (I could have skipped it entirely, everything seemed very flavorful on its own). Snack: apple sauce, a cup of hot cocoa, a few cheddar potato chips, and a pretzel (I'm not a pretzel fan but maybe that would make them an even better substitute for chips because I won't really want them.). Dinner: Some kind of creamy pasta with stewed tomatoes mixed in, iceberg salad, garlic bread, chocolate cake, and cookie. It was a free dinner at my church before scripture study time but I should have just said no to the desserts. Late snack: handful of fun sized crunch bars, mini butterfingers, and mini baby ruths. I'd say 3-4 of each kind do way too many and they just made me feel bad. I don't usually feel any guilt about what I eat even if it's bad for me so I don't know if this is a step in the right direction or what. I may have acknowledged the junk food wasn't good for me, enough that I felt some need to hide it from others, but I didn't waste much time regretting it after it was gone either. Maybe I was beyond feeling and now I'm gaining a conscience about what I eat again.

Sunday and Monday Portion Control Fail

Saturday food

Thanks again for the comments. I don't have any particular plan yet, I think I need to work on my relationship with food or I won't be able to make long term changes. If I feel like I'm depriving myself of bad food instead of rewarding myself with better food I'm more likely to give up. The one time I made a monitored weight loss effort in college I hit a plateau around 325 (I think starting from 350s) and I got frustrated and gave up after the monitoring ended (it was a half semester program the school nurse was running). I was exercising a lot but I was using that as a justification to eat as much as I felt like. I never did a food journal or portion control, I just got rid of the junk food. So this time I think it's more important that I get used to monitoring what I eat in general and then work my way toward better choices. That may not be the fastest way to lose the weight, but I think it'll help me be happier.

Today the food journal was helpful because right now there's a lot of yummy food around the house that I would usually graze on every time I passed it. I read an entry in Helen Wheels blog about two bites being enough to get whatever you wanted from the food so I tried that with chips the first time I passed them and savoring two or three wasn't bad. I got the cheesy taste I wanted rather than focusing on the continually having something in my mouth to chew which is often what junk food ends up being about for me. I've more than once been surprised how fast a bag of candy went and it wasn't because I was that hungry, I just kept putting the M&Ms in my mouth as I was reading or whatever. Thinking about having to write things down helped me ignore the impulse to snack while reading. It's not exactly bored eating, I like to say only boring people get bored, but in certain situations my impulse is to have something in my mouth regardless of whether or not I'm hungry, it's like I just want to be doing something more with my hands and mouth.

I had an orange for breakfast around 10. Around 2 I had a tofurkey and provelone sandwich with lettuce, tomatoes, lite mayo, and mustard. I was planning to have a salad too but then decided to listen to my body rather than go with what I'd been planning. I wasn't really hungry anymore so there was no reason to finish making the salad so I just saved it for dinner time. For dinner around 6 I had a vegetable egg roll (with a packet of duck sauce and some hot mustard sauce) and the salad: romaine lettuce, tomatoes, chick peas, green olives, a mushroom, and lite Asian sesame dressing. Afterward I was hungry for something like brownies and I was trying to figure out what I could substitute instead. I ended up eating some apple sauce. I don't know when I last had apple sauce before last week but I really do enjoy it as a treat. I'd probably be better off eating an actual apple, but there's something nice about not having to chew. :) I took a very late evening nap on the couch then woke up around midnight and again was faced with the chips. I was hungry since it'd been a while since I ate but I did limit myself to just two small handfuls with the ranch dip. I'm not sure if that was a good or bad choice. At the time I thought can I substitute something else that would be better and thought eating a sandwich this late at night probably wasn't really better than a single serving of chips. I'm not so sure now because I'm kind of still hungry, or maybe just feeling the impulse to eat because that's often been something I do when awake and playing with my phone. I need to drink a lot more water still. I had a cup or two throughout the day but drinking more would probably help me feel more full and maybe I could replace the need to have food in my mouth with constantly drinking instead. I saw 80 oz daily recommended in another blog so maybe I should look into getting a really big bottle. I also read somewhere about having a carrying case of glass water bottles that she kept by her purse so she'd take it to work and drink them instead of other things. I drink out of the same plastic bottles until I lose them but people seem to say the plastic degrades and can be bad for you. Just carrying around four 20 oz bottles doesn't seem too hard, or making sure I drink a 20 oz bottle every few hours. It's getting early so I better go back to sleep already. :)

Actual starting weight and food diary

Thanks to everyone who commented, it was very encouraging to get emails telling me about your posts. :) I've been trying to figure out this site more but I think some things just work better on an actual computer while I am only accessing it on my iPhone. In particular I can't seem to figure out the food log so I decided I'd just do it in blogs until things become clearer.

Yesterday (Thursday) I ate a Little Debbie devils square for breakfast (it was before I joined the site!) a romaine salad with chick peas, green olives, and lite Asian dressing for lunch/dinner, a tofurkey and provelone sandwich with tomato, romaine, and lite mayo for a late snack, and a cup or so of cinnamon apple sauce and two bite sized butterfingers for dessert. Oh, and there was a party in there where I ate two cupcakes, a mini cupcake, some kiwi and pineapple chunks with fruit dip, and two glasses of punch (7up and fruit juice). It wasn't sounding so bad before that last sentence. :)

Today I weighed myself and was at least not unpleasantly surprised to find out I was exactly 370.0 according to my scale that only claims accuracy up to 350 (so I suppose 25 lbs is my first goal so I'll know it's working right).

Today I grabbed an orange to eat for breakfast but never got aroud to it. The first time I ate was at dinner out with my sister, a Cambodian inspired dish called crispy noodles, a kind of pan fried vegetable lo mein with a sweet sauce. I also had a vegetable curry egg roll and water. I definitely need to increase my water intake. I honestly have lost 5+ lbs in a day just by not drinking anything. I'd also like to note how easy it was for me to not eat anything all day when I didn't have anyone telling me I couldn't have something, but if I am told I can't eat, like fasting for church, I become absolutely ravenous. :p I walked around some today as well, at least a half hour, an spent over 2 hours standing at a concert. There was some swaying and head bobbing involved but I don't know that you could call it dancing. :) After I got home I discovered my dad had bought some chips so I had to have a handful or two of the ripple chips with some ranch dip (quality control, right?) and I got 4 cheese curls before I said enough already. I kind of regret that already because I'm feeling a bit uncomfortably full as I lay in bed writing this before I go to sleep. I also had a cup of orange juice (too lazy to peel that orange), two cups of milk, and some water. I think that's it for me today.

I will try to do better in the future, spread the food out throughout the day, not eat so late at night, drink much more water... I've got to stop giving food power in my life, I feel almost compelled to eat it before someone else can (a hold over from my childhood fending for food with three other siblings?), as though I couldn't just buy more of anything I'd like if it ran out. I also need to not turn to it because I'm stressed or happy or have nothing to do with myself (this is a super big problem for me, boredom eating) or in a social situation where there's free food (again, I could always buy it myself, I don't need to "get my money's worth" whenever food is offered). I hope being accountable for all I eat here will help me think before I eat an entire bag of mini candy bars or full sized bag of chips. I know I need to work on planning meals ahead of time and portion control, but I had 31 years to put on this weight, I'm going to ease my way into healthier habits so I don't feel too stressed and ruin it for myself before I even start.

Time to get started

Well 31 years of not doing much of anything about my weight has left me more than 200 lbs above my ideal body weight. I guess that method of weight control isn't working. Instead I'm going to try to use extrapounds.com to motivate and inspire me to lose weight. I hear about people losing 100 lbs in a year and I think it's just not possible for me, but the sooner I get started the sooner I can see results. There's no reason I need to be close to 400 lbs.

I was able to give up meat cold turkey almost 7 years ago (vegetarianism hasn't improved my health though, some might say I just became a sugartarian and I think the dairy without meat benefits has raised my cholesterol), so why can't I apply myself to weightloss the same way? I don't even have animal cruelty or something as a motivation for not eating meat all these years (though it was the sight of cruelty in an ethics class that made me stop), but after the first couple years of occasionally dreaming of eating chicken I haven't even had much desire to eat meat. What allowed me to make that decision but not other healthy eating choices?

I definitely have a tendency toward addiction. There are 600+ comic books from high school that testify of that. :) I think I may have a food addiction, though since food is not something I can give up entirely I don't know how to deal with it. Sales can be killers for me. Once a nurse at school told me I'd save $1 if I didn't buy the $1 discounted candy at all rather than saving an imaginary $2 because of the sale, but mostly the lure of chocolate on sale is too great. :/

I admire the idea of meal planning but I currently don't even have a table to sit and eat at so planning meals seems almost pointless. I'm hoping having accountability for what I eat each day will help me change habits for the better. I'll let you know how it goes. :)