Round

Gosh, I am so glad I started losing weight in 2009.  I feel huge these days and I’d be feeling even worse if I had let my weight stay up (or more likely, pile up even further).

As I’m losing weight, some clothes I’ve worn constantly for the past few years are starting to feel too baggy.  Baggy had a distinct advatage before, but now makes me feel even bigger.

Winter coats are the worst.  I have a padded long black down-filled one for really cold weather — and it’s warm and wonderful & when it’s that cold I could care less what it looks like.  But for other winter coats I’ve been looking kind of shleppy for the past few years.  I was starting to think about adding “winter coat” to my holiday wish list this year, when it occured to me that I had bought a coat my first winter in Paris, and now that I’m losing weight it might even fit again.

As I dug through the dark reaches of my closet I found TWO winter coats — one I had completely forgotten about (and NEVER worn) and the one I’d had in mind.  The never worn one is a size 12, and it buttons but doesn’t look good - need to lose another size for it to be workable - but it was a nice find (and a beautiful coat!).  The one that I had in mind, however, DOES FIT, and it is perfect for this late Fall weather.  It’s also extremely chic & Parisian looking - probably the most fashionable coat I’ve ever owned, and while it won’t look good with 3 heavy sweaters underneath, it looks just fine with one slim one (and honestly the coat isn’t very warm so if I need more than one sweater I need a different coat anyway).

How’s that for a NSV (non-scale victory)?!?!

I’m not trying to be a RockStar with my weight loss nor my exercise.

I don’t want to run a marathon, and I the idea of a “30 pounds in 30 days” challenge leaves me cold.

I want to live my life.  Enjoy it even.  And lose some weight.  Permanently.
I guess the weight loss media stuff out there is full of pressure-messages right now because either they’re selling something (most) or aware that the New Year’s resolution crowd is starting to falter.

I saw this quote today in a weight loss newsletter :

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high
and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”
- Michelangelo

Really?  For weight loss?  Seriously do you think most of us will reach that dreamed-for weight of 110 pounds or whatever it is?  If you just get out of whichever BMI category you’re in, isn’t that TERRIFIC?

I’ve always been more successful focusing on just a few pounds, and then a few more.  Taking the elephant a bite at a time, as they say.  You lose weight one SSSLLLLOOOWWW pound at a time (unfortunately, we often gain them in bunches & fast, but we almost never lose them that way).

Either way, all that “reach for the stars” stuff doesn’t speak to me at all.

I want to lose weight without losing my mind.

Yes, my weight is important to me, but frankly, so are a lot of other things, and a lot of the other things are even more important.

Am I alone in feeling this way?

Well, Planning for last week paid off big-time.
My trip to Munich (sorry folks, nowhere fancy!) was frankly rather uneventful.  I kept to my diet perfectly (although did need to dig into my planned snacks of nuts or salami a few times).  I ate the same breakfast every day, and muddled through lunches as best I could.  The hotel where I usually stay has a good restaurant & so dinners were easy - a fact that will make me continue to book into that hotel for the next few trips to Munich.

Another big success were the exercise videos on my iPhone. None of them were very advanced, but it’s been years since I’ve done yoga & it was a nice way to ease back into some stretching and very mild strength training.  Plus I’d forgotten how relaxing yoga is.  I did 3 sessions in my room which was my ‘ideal’.  The sessions are short & not calorie-torching, but good for me.  With a solid cardio session on Monday I feel good about exercise during the week.

This coming week is better because I’m mainly at home in Paris.  I have a trip to London (one night) but hopefully can arrange it to be able to hit the gym the other days, even if it looks like I’ll need several morning sessions because of my schedule.

The fridge is full of healthy good organic food, and I spent some time washing, cutting & peeling them so they’re ready to go quickly this week!  More preparation equals fewer excuses later - time well spent!

… the cranberry-applesauce cooking on the bottom right is for my husband, not me… too many apples getting too mealy around here.

“PROGRESS, not Perfection” has been my signature line for many years and what I call my Motto, at least in the domain of my weight, although honestly I wonder if it’s not my motto for Life period.

I recently was commenting to Shana who I consider to be one of my big-time inspirations.  I mean the woman’s lost a lot of weight, looks great, blogs fabulously & is one of the most consistent exercisers I’ve followed.   I’ve watched Shana struggle with the same 10 pounds or so for a year - she always seems to want to lose more, and I’m sure one day she will, but she hasn’t yet found the right mix to get her to the next level.   Like most of us, Shana found a few more pounds during the holidays, and her weight has been up about 5-7 pounds above where she usually hangs out.  Like many people, she’s had a hard time gettting back on track after being off in the food free-for-all for a while.  And like most of us blogging here, she KNOWS what to do - but hasn’t managed it, and I suspect it’s that old nemesis Perfectionism coming in again.

Ah, Perfectionism, I know you well, and I am a WAR with you.

Shana wrote about her eating one day last week.  She had what I think any of us would see as a really great dieting day.  Breakfast : On plan.  Lunch : On plan.  Dinner : On plan.  Shana snacked while making dinner.  I think a lot of us do that, especially if we had skipped a planned midafternoon snack to save on calories or because of poor planning.  Shana carefully measured and counted her snack.  She had exactly one serving (13 chips she reported) of potato chips, and a couple of tablespoons of dip.   How many of you would have been able to do that?  Carefully measure, portion control, not go back and eat the whole bag?

But was Shana proud of her control & self restraint?  No.  She was apologizing for having the chips & dip at all.  Because it wasn’t “Perfect”.

It was her first day really being in control of her eating in several weeks, but because it wasn’t “Perfect” she saw it as something negative, not the HUGE VICTORY it was.

Shana had made ENORMOUS PROGRESS in her eating that day — not just the good meals all day, but also the careful counting of a snack.

It can be frighteningly difficult to live by “PROGRESS, not Perfection” for ourselves, but somehow we’re all kinder and gentler with others.    I build my ability to live up to my motto by seeing the pattern in others, and trying to nudge them back to a more forgiving & realistic world.

Please, please, please : when you see others expecting Perfection of themselves, please call them out on it & ask them to see the PROGRESS they have made.

Well, this week I head out on a full week of travel.  It will be a Challenging Week.  Last week I had one trip (a second one got canceled) but there is a world of difference between being gone one night vs being gone 4.

I’ve made some decisions on how I’ll handle certain things.  It’s really a good thing to be starting the travel this way, because I’m in the same location all week, and in a hotel I know already.  In the future I’ll have multiple destinations during some weeks, new hotels, late arrivals, meals on planes, etc.  This week is much easier.  It really helps that I know the hotel where I’m staying — I know I can find something acceptable for dinner on the room service menu, and I know I can get the breakfast items I’ve been eating at home.

I also know where the land mines are, and I think I have a plan for most of them.

I need to be realistic that I won’t be able to have as concentrated a weight loss effort on weeks where I’m traveling a lot, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be a free-for-all either, just that it will be slower.  Hopefully I will be able to balance focus weeks & regular (travel) weeks to keep some weight-loss momentum going, because that’s about the best I can expect.

This past week was a very successful one.  I lost 2 pounds, was able to hit the gym 5 times, but largely because a planned trip late in the week got canceled.  Knowing I have this challenging week ahead of me helped keep me very focused this week, as I’ve considered the first two weeks of 2010 a kind of “breaking in” period to getting my weight loss moving forward again.

Keeping to my central beliefs of “PROGRESS, not Perfection” and “Low Stress Weight Loss” I have made the following 3 goals for this week :

1) EXERCISE : I will exercise once in my hotel room - I have downloaded some videos to my iPhone, will try yoga or abs stuff for a change from all the cardio I’ve been doing for months. Will also exercise this weekend, and I just got in a morning session today before my flight.  Bonus would be a second in-room session, but since this is new behavior the bar is set low — once will do it.

2) BE PREPARED : I am bringing nuts, sunflower seeds, 100% cocoa chocolate, mini salamis (shelf stable) with me.  I am in a hotel that I know, so breakfast & dinner should be fine, and lunch I’ll make do best I can & fill in the rest with my from-home snacks.  I also have several nice teas I’m bringing with me.

3) REDUCE CHOICES : Variety might be the spice of life, but it can be hell on a diet, especially when you add the “I’m traveling” excuse.  I’ll have eggs & tea for breakfast (maybe a slice of cheese with it) and dinner will be protein + vegetable, maybe soup to start if I’m feeling famished.  I will not have anything but drinks at coffee breaks, unless it’s something from my stash of foods I bring myself — thus no cookies, chocolates, sweet rolls, buttered pretzels, etc.

I confess to being one of those people who hold a few conflicting beliefs around exercise.

• I think exercise is really important to health
• But I think weight loss is 90% about what we eat (and how much)
• I don’t believe that weight loss is as simple as ‘calories in, calories out’, i.e. I don’t think you can really completely “burn off that donut”
• I believe exercise increases hunger
• I feel better when I exercise, and exercise is a great stress-buster for me.  Except when it becomes a SOURCE of stress, and that’s happened to me a few times.

Several years ago I sat next to a cardiologist at a dinner party who told me that he always tells his patients to separate thinking about diet & exercise.  That a healthy diet is one thing, to be followed to the best of ability, and that exercise has completely different effects and also needs to be followed to the best of ability, but for different benefits & results.

What he said really resonated for me, and since then I’ve been striving for that.  To think of exercise as something every healthy body needs, for oxygenation, muscle strength, etc.  But not specifically for losing weight or for it’s contribution to weight loss - and that’s a big change for me.  It’s also made me find peace with exercise.  Not a ‘must do it daily’ attitude, not the pushing myself so hard I broke my back my sciatica a few years ago!), not linked to my periods of weight loss off & ons.

I also see how different this attitude is from what is in the media & in common thinking today.  Everything you see mixes ‘diet and exercise’ as a single entity for weight management and sometimes health, but in fact the two are very different.  Over the years I’ve seen a lot of studies saying that the exercise component on it’s own doesn’t lead to weight loss (here’s a recent article by Time).

For myself, I know they actually ARE correlated.  Eating well & losing weight gives me more energy & makes me so much more aware of my body that I want to exercise.  Exercising requires planning & effort, skills that reinforce healthy eating, and the many many minutes it takes to burn off a few hundred calories makes you much more conscious of how many I take in in the first place.

Over the past few months I’ve become a regular exerciser again - more on that in a future post.

Well, a week after starting back into my diet, I can officially say I managed no-gain holidays.

I lost 5 pounds this week, which exactly matches the slow creep up from late November to after New Year’s Day.  I had spent a few weeks at 189 before my weight drifted up a bit for the holidays, but am really happy to have re-found 189 so quickly.

Last week of being seriously back on track was hard.  Starting a diet is always hard, and re-starting back after holiday laxness is not quite as hard as starting over after a long derailment, but it sure isn’t easy, especially those first few days.

I knew last week was a real opportunity to focus on getting some good weight loss momentum going, as I wasn’t traveling & had a lot more control over my environment.  It also helped that my husband has been extremely busy moving to a new office, so he wasn’t around to see much of “grumpy dieting” me.  As happened the last few times I went off track & headed back to dieting this carb-restricted way, the first few days were really rough, and then it smoothed out & was fine.  By Thursday I was back to normal, and yesterday even went out to lunch with my inlaws & wasn’t the least tempted by the bread, wine, dessert etc.

This week? Travel starts again.  I’ll do my best & forgive any downfalls. Will exercise on Wednesday & Friday (the days I’m in town) & again over the weekend.   New fridge is here & is stocked, even for late-night arrivals!

I made a strange soup the other day.  For once an experiment that went well (I’m rarely inspired to blog about the failures!).
As I mentioned Monday, I started back on a very focused low carb eating plan again this week, hoping to lose some of the 5 pounds I put on since November & get what looks like a long stall plateau moving down again.  I start traveling next week, so I’ve had a kind of ‘detox’ mentality that assumes that this week it was much easier to get into the weight loss swing again than if I waited any longer.

I bought a few things to keep me on track, but one of the things I decided to do was cut back carbs to very low levels for a week or so, and that meant re-thinking my veggies.  I bought watercress because I know green leafy veggies are a good choice, and I’ve always liked the peppery tang of them.  Of course, my mom’s salad recipe uses sugar in the dressing, so I went online to figure out what else to do with my bounty.  I found a decent-looking cream of watercress soup & decided to try that, but then got intrigued by several Asian watercress-and-meat salads that also used ginger.  I have a ton of fresh ginger from my DH’s over-enthusiasm (when recovering from my surgery in November I asked for one piece from the market and he bought… one KILO which 2.2 pounds!!! I try to put ginger on anything these days).  I also had organic ground beef at home.

I fried up the beef with some ginger & garlic and put a few leaves of the watercress on a plate to make a variation of the Asian salads I’d found online.  Then I made soup. It’s been really cold here this week and I love soups in general (and in Winter in particular) so I spur-of-the-moment decided to do a soup version of the watercress beef soup and added more ginger to my chicken broth, then added the watercress, mixed it with my hand mixer, added some cream & then poured in the rest of the ground beef.  I barely needed to adjust the flavors — it’s great!

It’s an unexpected taste, vaguely Asian (the ginger), quite peppery (watercress) & with some substance (the cream & beef).  It’s quite thin since I don’t use any thickeners or potatoes but it’s been nice to eat this all week.

I’m digging into the last bowl now… mmmm

I don’t know why, but I am extra hungry today.  I’ve tried more water, more tea but in the end it’s more FOOD that I am really wanting.  I am writing this just to acknowledge where I am & hopefully that will be enough for me to move on.

It’s interesting to feel real hunger.  For so many years I’ve either immediately given in to hunger with whatever is easily at hand, or have prevented it by eating on a regular schedule.  Right now I’m eating pretty much only when I’m hungry (which seems to be about every 4 hours, but it depends on how much I eat).  And I’ve also learned that being hungry won’t kill me.  It’s mildly uncomfortable, like shoes that are a bit too small, or an ankle that you turned a few days back, but it’s not excruciating & in fact it’s probably a good thing to be able to recognize it.

I’ve had an app on my iPhone for a while now called Lose It which is basically a calorie (and carbs!) counting software, like FitDay for your iPhone.  It has a good database & is pretty easy to use, having lists of favorites & the ability to copy meals from previous days (am I the only one who eats pretty much the same breakfast every day?).  I’ve played with several of these kinds of gadgets on my iPhone but this one is the one that I’ve kept.

I’m not usually very regular w using it, but since right now I’m being hard-core about my diet to try to drop these extra holiday pounds & get the weight moving down again, I’m tracking carefully to keep my carbs low.

In playing with it these past few days I’ve noticed a lot of new features, including adding your “friends”.  But I don’t share my daily weight battles with most of my friends & family (and those few who I would don’t have iPhones) so I wanted to see if anyone here in the blogosphere is using Lose It & if so maybe we could friend up on there.

If you’d be interested, leave me a comment & I’ll send you my email address which is how you sign someone up as your “friend”.