Lifestyle Change
I have been reading a book called the Vice Busting Diet. It is very informative. The problem is that I have eliminated most of the diet vices already. That could explain why I weighed 273 this morning instead of the 365 that I weighed in January 2008.
I am sure that I have vices that still need busting. I love pizza and lasagna. However, I have switched my Medium Pizza Hut Meat Lovers pizza habit for a rare Kashi’s Mushroom and Spinach pizza that’s thin crust and healthier. I only have it once a month now, sometimes I go two months. It just depends. If I want something meaty on it, I use turkey sausage or pepperoni. I used to be able to eat a large meat lover’s pizza by myself. Now I am lucky if I can eat a serving of Kashi’s pizza, which is 3 slices.
Lasagna is my secret vice. I could eat it every day if I had to, which is why I shove it as far from me as possible these days. I try to only treat myself to its yummy goodness once a month now. Before I was eating the smaller family sized by itself, no veggies or anything, just a big huge plate of lasagna and I was happy for a couple of days. I was eating it about once or twice a week, so that is definitely a change.
Now that I have lost so much weight, I can actually cut the thing in four squares with a salad and eat it that way. Though, if I am depressed, I can still choke down the whole thing as long as the salad isn’t anywhere in sight. I try not to get depressed anymore.
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My old vices:
Soda: I used to drink anywhere from 6 to 12 regular sodas a day. I exchanged that with water, sweetened by sugar free drink mixes like Crystal Light. I only have sodas as a treat once or twice a month if I feel like it.
Over filling my plate: I used to over fill my plate all the time. I would almost always go back for seconds. Now, I can barely eat a half of a multigrain subway club and their small bag of apples without filling over full. That is the benefit of losing 92 pounds.
Fried foods: The only fried foods I eat these days, is a couple of small pieces of sweet and sour chicken at the Chinese restaurant a couple of times a month. After my last diet called First Impressions, my stomach doesn’t seem to handle fried foods well. The last time I tried to eat one, I was sick with an upset stomach for 3 days solid.
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I didn’t do all of this alone, but the recent weight loss is my own willpower. In Dec. of 2007, I let one of my co-workers Darnell talk me out of my #1 vice: Soda. The guy apparently used to be majorly overweight, and now he was trim, muscular, and was looking good. It was hard to imagine him as a fat man.
He kept talking about how bad they were for me, and made me feel really bad about myself. He actually was harassing me so much that I had to have my co-worker Lisa talk to him about it because he was coming on so strong about it that I was feeling depressed all the time.
After he backed off a bit, I started out cutting 2 of my sodas, for a bottle of water. It was a slow process, but eventually, each month, I cut a can or two of soda, and added water to my bag until all I was carrying was water. He was so proud. I am still adjusting to this over a year later. Right now, I have one as a treat once in awhile, but I am nowhere near the vice that I used to be.
My friend Lisa talked me into going to the gym, in January 2008, which never did much work for me. After several visits, she stopped going, so I was going on the days I worked by myself. After several months of going every day with hardly any results, my best friend Rob told me that I needed a vacation. So after my friend had recovered from his surgery, I went to see him. I visited Rob for a week, and came home 10 pounds lighter.
My friend had just gone through gastric bypass surgery, and he didn’t have a bunch of snack foods in the house and only had a few small things that he could eat. I didn’t have a car with me as he was in Baltimore at the time, so I had to wait until he got home from work, and we would go out and get a sandwich, which he would eat off of for days. It was then, that I learned to put away half of the foot long sandwich for another meal. If I didn’t, I may not have lunch the next day because he was at work and I had no way of doing anything unless I wanted pizza every day for that week.
After weighing myself and looking shocked at the scale, I decided to continue trying to diet again. I was encouraged. Problem was that a week away from the gym had gotten me out of the habit of going and I didn’t want to go back. The gym wasn’t helping me lose weight, even though I was spending an hour or so a day in the gym 3 to 5 times a week.
Around this time, I started having other problems though. I was having severe back aches. I had to get a stronger medication. I got frustrated again, and got depressed. I had to eventually go to the doctor, who recommended that the gym was not a good idea for me right now.
So I plodded along, trying to lose weight with a couple of fad diets and pills. By March 2009, I had finally gotten down to 338 when I hit a brick wall, hard. During this time, my feet, after just a short walk, would go totally numb and I had to stop walking or I would fall down. I was having a problem exercising, and I couldn’t figure out what to do. I was also having violent stomach aches every morning, some lasting all day. Some days I would spend the whole day wanting to throw up. I was tired, depressed, and frustrated.
In January, I also got a new doctor, who said that I could go on this diet called First Impressions. Almost every female that was overweight at my job has been on this diet at one point or another. I have seen some great results. However, I have seen some scary results too, more about them in a moment.
First Impressions is a 500 calorie diet. Boy was that hard the first couple of weeks! I could only eat mostly protein and a few veggies. I mainly ate eggs and chicken, and a smattering of beef for 4 months, before I had it. I was actually lucky that once my body adjusted to the 500 calorie diet, I didn’t have to take the appetite suppressant. The nurses that took my blood pressure and gave me Vitamin B6/B12 shots every week were so shocked that I could do the diet without the pills as no one else could.
After 4 months, I was down to 300 pounds. The problem was, with no variety, hardly any fruits, and they encouraged you not to even have a cheat meal or anything once a week as a reward. I was tired and frustrated. It was then that my best friend Rob started doing some research on this diet, and I was horrified by the results of his search.
He found out that the diet, which though says you can exercise, but tells you that you have to eat more food and didn’t recommend it, had a horrible side effect. Since you weren’t feeding your body with the healthy sugar it needs to function, instead of losing pounds of fat, I was losing pounds of MUSCLE! This means that when I didn’t exercise, the diet was eating my muscles instead of my numerous fat deposits. I was horrified that I might have lost 38lbs of muscle instead of my fat. I haven’t been back since.
It took a good 3 or 4 weeks for my body to get used to eating more than 500 calories. Luckily, whatever was causing the violent stomach aches before my “crash” diet didn’t come back. As I said, one of the side effects of this diet was my stomach doesn’t seem to handle fried foods well anymore. I went to a local buffet that my father goes to, to spend some time with my dad. I tried to eat a chicken breast. I pulled off all the skin, and ate it. It tasted just fine, but I was sick with an upset stomach for 3 days solid.
Since then, I have just tried to eat healthy and not be on a “diet”. I had a friend, who lost a bunch of weight without being on a traditional diet. I asked him to draw up a plan. It had variety, but eating every couple of hours while I was at home, just wasn’t working. I could do it fine while I was at work, but I only worked 7 days in a two week period. So that meant that for every week that I did well, I would have a week where I didn’t.
The other thing that made me quit First Impressions was the people that were on the diet. After they had lost all that weight, this one lady got extremely upset if she gained two pounds. Two Pounds! I would be excited if the only thing I had to worry about was two pounds! She didn’t understand that this may just be water weight or that perhaps they might be about to go on their monthly cycle. She started the diet AGAIN to get rid of those two pounds. This means she and the other women here are constantly going back on the diet to get those little 2 pounds off of them when they should just eat healthy and exercise.
The last week of September 2009, while half of my satellite was on vacation, (the receiver died. *sniffles*) that my now, retired TiVo, started recording this program called “I Lost It.” This was because I had favorited shows like “The Biggest Loser” and other diet shows. This particular episode featured a lady named Julia Harvey. It showed her struggle with her weight, and said that she now had written books about her weight loss.
The problem is, that it says what is your #1 vice and what will you replace it with? I don’t know of any vices now. I have gotten rid of white bread, rice all together. The last time I tried to eat brown rice I got sick for the day. I hardly eat pasta anymore, and I used to eat it all the time. I cut out most of the pizza that I ate, and only indulge in the healthier option pizzas once a other month or two.
I eat a lot of chicken and occasionally some beef and fish. I eat a lot of salad, yogurt, granola, and low fat cereal and skim milk. I love chocolate, but I get the sugar free kind. Funny thing is that I have been buying less and less of it. I haven’t eaten any in about a week or two, even though it’s sitting there waiting for me to eat it.
I still love caffeine; however I barely get any these days. At one point, I exchanged soda for one cup of coffee for a month or two. It wasn’t the same. Now I only indulge once in awhile when I am just so tired I can’t wake up.
The only thing I can say is a vice is motivation. Instead of going to exercise alone if I need to, I would rather just go home and say to myself: I will exercise on my treadmill or exercise bike, or my bean before going to bed. When I get home, and eat dinner, and get to that stage, I check my email, and the guy I am dating that lives five hours away is online and I want to talk to him and I make excuses not to exercise.
When I am on day shift, I have a walking partner when she feels like going. I was going to walk by myself, but I lost my walkman when I had a car crash in July and I still haven’t found it yet. If I have something to listen to when I walk alone, I am fine. This coming month I will be on night shift, so I can’t walk around that park because I will be getting off at 5 am. I will have to make the effort to go home and walk on the treadmill for a mile before going to bed. It’s going to be hard.
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