2019 Weight Loss Group


SpiritDragon
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31 minutes ago, unixknight said:

Learned this morning that one of my uncles died.  My wife wants to make me a comforting dinner tonight and I'm requesting an Ecuadorian dish involving rice, lentils and sausage.  (My uncle lived there.)  I was tempted to choose something really unhealthy (because being unhealthy actually feels like one of the defining characteristics of comfort food) but to be honest, I really like it AND it's healthy-ish.  

Sorry to hear about your uncle, Unix.

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1 minute ago, zil said:

Sorry to hear about your uncle, Unix.

Appreciated.  It's one of those weird situations.  I knew him, I liked him, but I hadn't seen him in 20 years (My last trip to Ecuador) and even though I remember him fondly, we weren't close.  I am sad, not broken up, but it's impacting more than I expected.  It's good that it's a light work day today.

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24 minutes ago, zil said:

I'm not sure whether this means the desserts themselves are stressed, or whether one should have desserts while stressed, or if desserts make one stressed, but clearly there's a link between being stressed and having multiple desserts.  For the purposes of this thread, I'm thinking alphabetically - desserts followed by stressed, so avoid the desserts! ;)

That's a lot of words.  When you dumb it down to what applies in my life, it looks like this:

 

MarriageFatAndSad.png.956e1d1fca63bd9dcfac4fd769064bab.png

Edited by NeuroTypical
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I lost 15 pounds since the beginning of the year.

Unfortunately, this wasn't because of healthy habits.  I've simply been sick for most of this year.  But I'm feeling better today.  Hoping to get even better tomorrow.  I've been concentrating on getting as much lemon-water into my system as I can manage.

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6 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

That's a lot of words.  When you dumb it down to what applies in my life, it looks like this:

 

MarriageFatAndSad.png.956e1d1fca63bd9dcfac4fd769064bab.png

I am a sucker for good shoes.  And that's because, when I'm sad, shoes always picks me up.  Because it doesn't matter how much ice-cream I eat, all my shoes still fit.

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31 minutes ago, anatess2 said:

I am a sucker for good shoes.  And that's because, when I'm sad, shoes always picks me up.  Because it doesn't matter how much ice-cream I eat, all my shoes still fit.

I lost nearly 50# in the last year. One thing that surprised me the most was that my shoe size went down. I went from an 8.5 to 7.5 and in some shoes I even fit into a 6.5! I've never, ever been able to wear anything less than a 7.5! Sadly, I had to get rid of some of my shoes since I was literally walking out of them.

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49 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I'm back down to 173 now.  Yeah.  Don't know how I gained so much and lost it in just a few days.

I had my first cheat day on Saturday; although I held nothing back and just stuffed my face, I gained less than 1 lb and have already lost it again.  I am only 9 lbs away from my goal, but it is slow going at this point.  I will be having another cheat day this Thursday, but after that I won't have one for a while.  Not sure how the gain/lose works in the short term like yours, but I'll take it!  🙂

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1 hour ago, Carborendum said:

I'm back down to 173 now.  Yeah.  Don't know how I gained so much and lost it in just a few days.

This is why I see value in tracking trends and looking at graphs.  Sometimes, my scale just doesn't make sense.  But overall, the trend does.

Edited by NeuroTypical
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Ugh.  Vent time!  I am still on track to hit a new low tomorrow AM.  Even though:

Last night I dreamed about yearning to eat food and didn't sleep well and woke up at 4:30 am and just lay there trying to go back to sleep and being miserable and a dog attacked our poultry and killed three birds including our world's best turkey who did three years as 4H mascot and won Best Turkey at the county fair and I'm getting him cremated because that's what my daughters and wife want and I'm a big sucker and my strained calf muscle is now in its third week of hurting and waking me up at night and making it so I can't do half my exercises and it hurts to walk anywhere so I've been bringing a a crutch to work and church and stuff and now I have to tell the same story to every single person who cares enough to ask, which is actually quite a lot, so I guess things aren't that bad.

[Giant inhale]

Ok then.  I feel better.  Anyway, looking forward to cheat day tomorrow.  Gonna eat a whole pizza.

Edited by NeuroTypical
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On 1/7/2019 at 6:41 PM, SpiritDragon said:
  • Pick one meal to eat at a consistent time. If a set time is just not going to fly aim for a two hour window to start by.
  • Find and try one new recipe that is mainly vegetables every week until you find at least five that you enjoy enough to alternate
  • Replace chips with carrot sticks on all but one day of the week
  • Replace juice, pop, punch or any drink that has calories, or would have calories if it wasn't a diet version with good old H2O. You can keep the lemon or lime wedges if you like for a little flavour. Aim to do this 5-6 days per week to start as well

Remember to just pick one for now and stay committed to it. If you like the idea of one of these, but find it too challenging, let's work to make it easier to start with and then we can always increase the challenge later as you have built up your success implementing it.

Hi SD, 

My report card.

1.)  So far so good.  Been eating breakfast everyday at 9AM since 2 Mondays ago.

2.)  Failed.  Can't bring myself to eat the thing.

3.)  Needs improvement.  Hasn't eaten chips since 2 Mondays ago.  I ate grapes/berries instead when the desire to munch pops up.  I need to wean because I can eat a boatload of fruit.

4.)  Needs improvement.  Only drank water with lemon drops since 2 Mondays ago.  Need to increase this intake.

 

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I'm doing well so far. Not perfect by any way, but better. I've had a truckload of stress this month and haven't gone too nutso except for a couple of days. I really am trying to focus one day at a time. We are going out for pizza tomorrow night so that has helped me to focus on eating healthy in the days leading up to pizza night. My struggle will be to go right back to healthy eating and not use this as an excuse to choose more unhealthy foods. 

One thing I've been doing to help is watching youtube videos on making healthy choices. Not only are these videos giving me knowledge and tools, they are inspiring and keeps me focused on my goals and WHY I want to choose health. 

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3 hours ago, anatess2 said:

Hi SD, 

My report card.

1.)  So far so good.  Been eating breakfast everyday at 9AM since 2 Mondays ago.

2.)  Failed.  Can't bring myself to eat the thing.

3.)  Needs improvement.  Hasn't eaten chips since 2 Mondays ago.  I ate grapes/berries instead when the desire to munch pops up.  I need to wean because I can eat a boatload of fruit.

4.)  Needs improvement.  Only drank water with lemon drops since 2 Mondays ago.  Need to increase this intake.

 

Great job with breakfast. I'm going to make the assumption this is your focused behaviour and the following ones are for bonus points. Keep up the good work.

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1 hour ago, SpiritDragon said:

Great job with breakfast. I'm going to make the assumption this is your focused behaviour and the following ones are for bonus points. Keep up the good work.

Yes.  It's what I'm focusing on.  It comes with waking up at a specific time everyday as well.  I still can't quite get my sleep time consistent so I've been going on less than 5 hours sleep a day for most of that time.

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1 minute ago, anatess2 said:

Yes.  It's what I'm focusing on.  It comes with waking up at a specific time everyday as well.  I still can't quite get my sleep time consistent so I've been going on less than 5 hours sleep a day for most of that time.

I'm sorry to hear that. Less than 8 isn't ideal, less than 7 is noticeable, less than six is unpleasant, and less than five sound like being being a parent with young children or teens who stay out late :)

I'm glad your other gut issue seems to be tamed down for now.

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One thing I'd like to share with everybody:  If you're a sugar addict and you quit cold turkey, be very careful to keep your blood sugar where it needs to be by eating regularly.  Yesterday, my wife skipped breakfast and just before lunch she nearly fainted.  After having an apple she was fine.  

On another note, I'd strongly encourage everybody to listen to the podcast episodes that @NeuroTypical and I posted.  There are a lot of great insights in the one he posted about picking a diet you can live with.  Short term diets fail, and overly ambitious ones fail.   The diet that works is the diet you can live with.  

The one I posted is about the physiological benefits of old exposure (among other things), which include better cardiovascular health, weight loss and a reduction in insulin resistance.  I tried cold training about a year ago and lost 12 lbs in about a month doing just that and nothing else.  I didn't stick with it because, well, I suck... But I'm going to try again after having listened to that podcast episode again. 

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53 minutes ago, unixknight said:

One thing I'd like to share with everybody:  If you're a sugar addict and you quit cold turkey, be very careful to keep your blood sugar where it needs to be by eating regularly.  Yesterday, my wife skipped breakfast and just before lunch she nearly fainted.  After having an apple she was fine.  

On another note, I'd strongly encourage everybody to listen to the podcast episodes that @NeuroTypical and I posted.  There are a lot of great insights in the one he posted about picking a diet you can live with.  Short term diets fail, and overly ambitious ones fail.   The diet that works is the diet you can live with.  

The one I posted is about the physiological benefits of old exposure (among other things), which include better cardiovascular health, weight loss and a reduction in insulin resistance.  I tried cold training about a year ago and lost 12 lbs in about a month doing just that and nothing else.  I didn't stick with it because, well, I suck... But I'm going to try again after having listened to that podcast episode again. 

If anybody's interested, my husband got his health back using a simple diet - stay in the outside sections of the grocery store.  Deli, Meat, Produce section with a bit of Bakery and Dairy.  They have the rice in the middle aisles of the store which is a bummer for me.

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So I forgot to tell you guys... on Monday I went to the food court to get a supplement to lunch in the form of an Arby's salad.

Don't.   Just don't.  I bought this thing and here's what you get:  Some iceberg lettuce, a few bits of tomato, a sprinkling of shredded cheese, about a half of a strip of bacon (shredded) and two slices of deli turkey (shredded) and a big back of dressing.

For $6.

A salad I could have made at home for about 80 cents' worth of ingredients cost $6.  Now, yes, I'm perfectly well aware that eating out is always more expensive than making it yourself.  The complaint here is that it wasn't a good salad at all, it wasn't like there was any variety of quality ingredients, and it didn't even have  that mystique of being food from eating out that makes us not really mind the extra cost.  It's like buying a cup of chili at a restaurant and realizing it's just supermarket canned Hormel.  

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@SpiritDragon,  

I decided to up my game on the breakfast goal.  Now that I have breakfast time fairly consistent for almost 2 weeks, I'm going to go ahead and add lunch.

So here's how the plan is looking like:  Wake up at 8am. Breakfast at 9am.  Lunch at 1PM.  Dinner is going to be difficult because it's dependent on kids' activities which is different everyday.  So, what I'm thinking is that I'm going to not have dinner.  Rather, I'm gonna use dinner as a light snack. 

So, to make breakfast and lunch easier for me, I'm going to see if I can pre-package them over the weekend.  This makes it so I don't have to think about what I'm going to eat, procrastinating about making it, or skipping it when having to do errands/work during mealtime.

I'm gonna draft a plan for the pre-packaged meals.  Boiled egg, deli-meat cups are easy ones for breakfast.  Lunch is rice and some kind of grilled meat.  I can eat canned peas, carrots, and green beans without gagging, so I can add this to the lunchbox.  The flex dinner I'm gonna save for fresh salads, fruit, and soups.

Friday is our traditional Subway day - which is seafood sub and it's at 3PM.  I'll make Friday a flex day.  If cheat day is allowed here, I'll add my chips and coke back in (I did not have chips and a coke last Friday and it made me very sad... it's Tradition!  So I'm thinking of letting up and rewarding me with chips and coke today).

How does this look?  I'm prepared for you to be brutally honest.  Like, no no no... no chips and coke for you lady!

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8 hours ago, anatess2 said:

@SpiritDragon,  

I decided to up my game on the breakfast goal.  Now that I have breakfast time fairly consistent for almost 2 weeks, I'm going to go ahead and add lunch.

So here's how the plan is looking like:  Wake up at 8am. Breakfast at 9am.  Lunch at 1PM.  Dinner is going to be difficult because it's dependent on kids' activities which is different everyday.  So, what I'm thinking is that I'm going to not have dinner.  Rather, I'm gonna use dinner as a light snack. 

So, to make breakfast and lunch easier for me, I'm going to see if I can pre-package them over the weekend.  This makes it so I don't have to think about what I'm going to eat, procrastinating about making it, or skipping it when having to do errands/work during mealtime.

I'm gonna draft a plan for the pre-packaged meals.  Boiled egg, deli-meat cups are easy ones for breakfast.  Lunch is rice and some kind of grilled meat.  I can eat canned peas, carrots, and green beans without gagging, so I can add this to the lunchbox.  The flex dinner I'm gonna save for fresh salads, fruit, and soups.

Friday is our traditional Subway day - which is seafood sub and it's at 3PM.  I'll make Friday a flex day.  If cheat day is allowed here, I'll add my chips and coke back in (I did not have chips and a coke last Friday and it made me very sad... it's Tradition!  So I'm thinking of letting up and rewarding me with chips and coke today).

How does this look?  I'm prepared for you to be brutally honest.  Like, no no no... no chips and coke for you lady!

My brutal honesty is to say congratulations on making a plan. Let's give it a chance and see how it goes. Your increased consistency could outweigh the damage of a reward meal. Stick to it for a couple weeks to give it a fair shake. If it is working - great. If not we may to look at limiting the cheats or possibly just fine tuning the rest of the time and having epic cheats. There is more than one way to skin the proverbial fat cat. The trick is finding the way that you can enjoy long term. This sounds reasonable enough to me - I mean you know I'm going to suggest more veggies, and I know you just don't like 'em. Even so, your soups, salads and fruit should help keep your micronutrients up where they need to be for reasonable health and help keep calories low in the process. Don't be afraid to increase fruit and veggie servings at the expense of meat and pasta or traditional entree type foods.

The true harsh judge will be your body's response - if it gets healthier and sheds weight in the process it is telling you that you're on the right track. If your weight doesn't budge, you'll need to make some changes. If your weight goes up... well that's a give away, right. It is possible to lose weight, but also lose health -if this happens I would also urge you to reevaluate. From my perspective your health is the most important metric of lifestyle modification success - it's just not the easiest to always tell, but nevertheless important to always pay attention to. If your energy is consistently down, your bowel habits slow, your breath is always bad, your hair starts falling out - pay attention.

I'm optimistic your plan of attack could really pay off. I don't expect it to yield amazing results as a stand alone, but I think as a next step it's absolutely worth a go.

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