Quote:
Originally Posted by Koshka
...I thought about finding an exchange plan and using it but none of the ones I could find then had those components so I just rejected them.
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I often found myself in this position too - rejecting a food plan because I wanted to make a modification (rather than just making the modification that I wanted). Instead, I would spend crazy amounts of time looking for a plan that would fit my needs or preferencess, rather than simply creating the components I wanted.
I think we're almost "trained" to do this, and it's just so silly.
When we're "not dieting" we're perfectly find with eating whatever we want, whether it's "balanced" or not, but we're reluctant to modify an "existing" diet because it "might not work" if we "mess with it."
I think it's because we're taught to associate dieting with "magical thinking"... One false move and "poof" the spell won't work.
We're not taught that tweaking and modifications are ok... in fact the diet plan creators almost always encourage this thinking... because it keeps you emotionally dependent on them. You NEED their plan, because nothing else will work. You can't modify the plan, or something terrible will happen to you (you might get sick from malnourishment, or you wont' lose any weight even on starvation calories because you didn't do it "their" way).
We're not afraid of eating an unhealthy, unbalanced diet when we eat whatever we want, but when it comes to weight loss, we're afraid to create the modifications we would like to see, and hunt for an "existing plan" (not even caring if the creator of the plan has credentials superior to our own) that matches our needs, instead of giving ourselves permission to create it.
I don't know when I had the "light switch" moment in which I realized that I had as much knowledge (or more) than many of the popular diet creators, so that I could trust myself to create my own program. If I wanted "optional calories," or "flexible exchanges" or anything else, I could choose that.
In the past, I would often quit diets that were working for me, because I had "drifted" too far from the prescribed plan. I saw it as "cheating," and I felt so bad for "cheating" (even though I was succeeding at the weight loss) that I would go looking for a different plan, so that I wouldn't feel the food guilt. Ironically, I could have just decided not to feel guilty. I could have trusted my tweaking ability and just run with it... Instead, I went looking for a plan I could be perfect on (even if that meant going perfectly off-plan and returning to the "eat whatever I want, and accept the weight gain" plan).
Something "clicked" when I realized that I could adapt virtually any food plan into exchange plans. I could even "do Atkins" on an exchange plan.
Now purists will argue, but that's what I'm personally very passionate about fighting... the concept and call to dieting "purism," which I believe is responsible for more weight loss failures than anything else. We're taught that having no plan at all, is better than following any plan imperfectly. We're essentially taught to choose between "perfect success" and "perfect failure."
Sadly, I often chose perfect failure.
I've changed my motto from "anything worth doing is worth doing well," to "anything worth doing is worth doing poorly when you don't have the resources (time, energy, patience, skill) to do it well."
If I want to eat 4,000 calories a day, I can do so with an exchange plan. If I want to diet without calorie limits, I can even use an exchange plan.
For example (and this shouldn't work, but it does), on some days I don't set a limit at all - but I do draw my food chart. In fact, I just bought a "grid stamp" (used for math) at a dollar store.
It's a grid of 100 boxes 10 rows and 10 coumns
I dip my stamp in ink, and stamp it into my food journal centered vertically on the page.
I write
Veggies
Protein
Fat
Fruit
Dairy
Bread
Water
directly left of the boxes (that means of the 10 rows, I only use 7 of them - I've thought of using the other empty rows of boxes to check off things like 10 minute increments of exercise).
Now to follow an established plan, I highlight the squares I intend to use (for example 6 boxes in the veggie row, 10 boxes in the protein row, 6 boxes in the fat row....
But on a day I'm not going to limit, but I am going to count, I just put x's or checkmarks in the boxes as I make my food choices.
Doing this encourages me to eat foods that are easy to count. I can count anything (and can usually even look up the food values online). Or I can use the nutrition label to calculate the exchanges (as the book, Exchanges for All Occasions, 4th edition explains how to do).
That way, even if I don't limit my food, I have counted it, and can determine what my approximate calorie count for the day was.
This is handy for "cheat meals" or "cheat days." In the past, when I would have "off plan days" I never knew whether my calorie intake for the off days were a little higher than on plan days, or whether they were 30,000 calorie days. By "counting" exchanges, I had a way to estimate calorie intake even on off days.
Counting calories would be just as useful, but I've had so much experience with exchange plans, that determining the exchange values for foods is so autommatic, that it's almost instinctive.
I was virtually raised on Weight Watchers' exchange plans, and I formally joined at 8 years old with my mother (it was the youngest age a person could join, and only with a parent who was also a member. So in theory, an overweight child couldn't join if neither parent was overweight enough to be a member. Now maybe there was a loophole, and the parent could join even if they weren't overweight as long as they paid the membership fees. I don't know. I was always the only kid in the meetings).
I do remember looking forward to becoming eligible to become a WW member, and I do remember reading Mom's WW materials before I was eligible to join myself.
I taught myself to read before kindergarten, and in my town, I was the only 7 year old allowed to browse and check out books from the adult sections of the library without a parent and I remember being so little that my feet didn't touch the floor, reading adult diet books.
I think one of the reasons I learned to read so early was my motivation to read "diet books." I was the only person in the family to have ever been overweight as a child, or to exceed 300 lbs (The second largest person in the family was my mother, and her highest weight was 280 and that was during her second pregnancy and included not only the pregnancy weight, but also severe edema from complications during the pregnancy. My highest weight was nearly 120 lbs higher, and I couldn't blame pregnancy or illness).
I'm starting to drift far off topic here, but my main point is that we're not taught to lose weight with logic. We're taught to "do" weight loss by means of very illogical and even outright ineffective methods. We make weight loss so much more complicated (and unpleasant) than it has to be, and then "wonder" why the success rates are so dismal. There are so many illogical and counterproductive traditions and rituals that logic gets thrown out the window.
It amazes me that it took me nearly 35 years to realize and decide that I could use an exchange plan any way I wanted to, or that I could even invent any plan I wanted to... and that a "bad plan" was usually better than "no plan."
Cc and low carb?
.124- that's great! Wonderful losing the 5 lbs!! Keep it up 
