I'd like to begin by saying that no single method is right for everyone, and that you have to create a plan that is realistic and fits in with your lifestyle. That being said, THERE IS NO MAGIC PILL. Losing weight requires a lot of work, sacrifice, and yes, you are going to have to eat less. The good news is that as you loose the weight, you stomach adjusts and you will be able to get by on less without feeling as though you are starving. The bad news, unlike other vices such as alcohol and cigarettes which can be quit completely, you need to eat in order to live, so you may never outgrow your urge to overeat. I never have outgrown mine.
My story begins at the age of nineteen where, after just making a Burger King run, I was sitting in my car at a red light when a car filled with teen aged boys pulled up next to me and screamed "I hope your car has good shocks!". It was at that moment that I decided to finally do something about my weight. After having traded in my the bulk of my adolescence and being miserable, unhappy, and feeling like a complete outsider, I decided I did not want to go through my early twenties being fat.
I had no idea where to begin, so I went the route of going to Lindora. HOWEVER, I would like to caution that places like Lindora, Nutri-System, Jenny Craig, etc are businesses, so first and foremost they are out to make money. Although some of their methods were highly effective, they try and sell you a multitude of things you DON'T need. I realized this after the first three months and first thirty pounds of my weight loss, and stopped going to the clinic. I lost the remaining 150+ lbs. on my own, using some of their methods and my own willpower and determination.
It is my heartfelt belief that you can achieve similar results without spending thousands of dollars of your money by changing your eating habits, getting moderate exercise and having a good relationship with your own personal physician.
So, now comes time for the good stuff. I'm going to outline everything that I did from my days at Lindora up until present day where I am maintaining my weight. This is an extremely honest account of both the positive and negative aspects of the method I used to lose weight, what has worked and what hasn't, and some of the psychological issues I have faced over the years.
It really irritates me when people say "You shouldn't call it a diet, it's a lifestyle change..." The **** it isn't a diet! Yes some aspects of your lifestyle are going to change by default, but let's call what it is - a diet. It requires giving up a lot of the things you love to eat, it requires eating a bunch of food that tastes like ****, and it is painful. However, I truly believe that healthful foods have a positive effect on your brain chemistry, and although they don't taste as good as those fries you adore, they sure make you feel a lot better, and at length you will come to crave the healthy, energetic and euphoric feeling they give you.
When I first arrived at Lindora they took my blood and performed a very basic work up that checked my cholesterol, blood count, etc. You can request the very same thing from your personal physician which will aid you in establishing a baseline and let you know if you have any health issues that will complicate your weight loss such as high-cholesterol or diabetes. When I had mine performed all of my levels were within the normal range, but my cholesterol was slightly elevated. I think that if you decide to diet and you have health insurance, you should make an appointment with your doctor and work closely with him/her. They can be an invaluable resource.
Similar to the Atkins diet, the program at Lindora stresses limiting your intake of carbs. Unlike the Atkins diet though they do not recommend you eat animal fats and stick to lean white meats and some green vegetables. The goal of their diet plan is to stay in a constant state of ketosis. At the clinic they sell these strips that you can urinate on that will detect the presence of ketones in your urine. You can also find these same testing supplies at any drug store in the diabetic testing supply area, as people who suffer from diabetes also use them.
When you begin the diet they make you spend three days eating nothing but pure protein in order to jump start your body into a state of ketosis. They recommend you eat a "last meal", almost like a prisoner on death row, with some fats like butter and/or sour cream in it in order to get your kidney to empty (whatever that means). Then onto the lovely protein. For me, this meant eating a protein shake, egg whites, and/or chicken breast. This was misery. I even gave up eating a slice of my own birthday cake and I thought at times I might commit murder to be able to eat a piece of bread. But I did it. After the initially three days were over I went on to eating some type of protein shake/egg white in the morning, a lean which meat such as chicken and a vegetable that is love in sugar content, and repeating the same for dinner. Once a week I would spend one day eating strict protein in order to keep the ketosis going strong, and I used the urine strips daily to make sure I was still burning fat.
The Lindora diet is pretty bland. They offer pre-packaged food at their clinic that, in my opinion, is pretty disgusting. You can still keep on the diet and avoid buying their pre-packaged food. The following is a list of some of the foods that I would routinely eat and those I would avoid. Although it's not a complete list, it will give you a good framework.
FOODS I ATE:
Chicken breast (roasted/baked without skin)
Tuna (I tried miracle whip with it and it was gross, so I mixed it with vinegar or mustard)
White lunch meats
Cheese in limited quantities
Plain yogurt
Vegetables with low carb/sugar counts such as lettuce, tomatoes, etc.
Fruits with lower carb/sugar counts such as watermelons, cantaloupes
Protein bars/shakes made by a fitness company called EAS
Fish (all types, baked/broiled)
Diet soda and diet drinks, such as Diet Snapple, Diet Fuze, Crystal Light (they also make a cheap Wal-Mart brand Crystal Light knock off that tastes just as good)
FOODS I AVOIDED:
Bread
Pasta
Vegetables like potatoes, carrots, peas, corn
Fruits like bananas, apples, grapes (although they allow this on the diet, these would knock me out of ketosis and make me stop losing weight).
Regular soda, juice, fruit punch, etc. ALCOHOL (I know, I know)
Mostly any carb heavy food or anything I ate that I would find would throw me out of ketosis.
And that's it. Exciting, huh? I stuck to this method of eating for a year and 1/2 and lost the weight. I hit a plateau at 230 lbs, then again at 170, and then I stayed between 140-150 for years before going back to college and having a lot of activity and stress in my life which brought me down to 113. I currently weight about 117, but this fluctuates all the time.
As far as exercise, I did not see a gym until I had hit 170 lbs. My exercise consisted of talking brisk walks around my neighborhood and that was enough. When I hit 170 lbs. I started going to the gym and doing a combination of weight training and cardio-vascular work. I was shocked at how much my body was able to do. I had never even made it past a five minute jog, and I was amazed that I could get into a treadmill and actually jog for twenty minutes without feeling a pain in my side and wanting to die. For a long time I was quite the gym bunny. I am not so much a gym bunny anymore. I simply don't have enough time in my life, but I have still be able to maintain a normal weight without being one. Exercise is good for you, it's healthy, and I recommend doing it - but you don't have to be a body builder in order to achieve positive results. I now oftentimes take yoga classes which have amazing physical and psychological benefits. ****, even if you're stuck at home and want to pop in a strip-aerobics DVD, ANYTHING is better than nothing. Do whatever works for you! A word of caution though, you can probably get away with eating more by exercising than you can without it.
On a typical day now I start my morning with a cup of coffee (I love lattes) and some a piece of toast, I drink a LOT of liquids, I'll eat a boiled egg or something quick while I'm in school running around, and I generally stick to eating a veggie and a lean protein. I splurge on the weekends by going to happy hour, I love cocktails and I usually drink a glass of white or red wine daily. If I see that I'm starting to gain an excess of three pounds I will stick to eating pure protein until I go back down.
Many people have asked me about the issue of loose/hanging skin. Although it may not seem as though I suffer from this from my photos, you had better believe I do. I have extra-skin on the lowermost portion of my stomach that is sort of apron-like. Also, the top of my stomach above the navel is loose and although it seems quite flat when I stand up, if I sit down or lay on my side, it's all over! I also could probably stand to get a boob job. I also have some on my thighs and my arms, although at this weight I have bony arms and it is somewhat unnoticeable.
After all of my hard work, it is extremely frustrating. I have focused on it a lot less though, because I have an extremely loving and supportive partner that says I am sexy and beautiful anyway and makes me feel like the most beautiful woman on earth every single day of my life. He's Latin, born and raised outside of the US, so his ideas on what a woman should look like are VERY different than what we consider beautiful in the US. He actually likes that I have some bits to grab onto
Things were not always this way, though.After I had lost weight I still was stuck in a serious rut and felt as though I didn't deserve much and that I should settle for whatever and whoever came along first. In retrospect I now believe that even when I was 300 lbs. I still deserved the world, but unfortunately there are those individuals out there that for whatever reason try to exploit your insecurities. Enter my ex-husband. He was not a very intelligent, handsome, charming or spectacular man but, although I had made a stunning accomplishment, I still felt as though I should hurry up and settle for the first man that came along because I may not find another who was interested in me. BIG MISTAKE. HUGE MISTAKE. I got caught up in a physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive marriage that changed me forever. Sometimes when you date a man you have to closely examine the type of relationship he has with his mother. Had I done this, I would never have married this man. He was a complete and utterly unmotivated individual whose mother did everything for him. I'm surprised she didn't (forgive my French) wipe his *** too. He was looking for me to do the same. There are some women who find fit into the role of domestic goddess amazingly well and who find a deep sense of fulfillment raising children and caring for their husbands and I have the greatest admiration for those women. There are some women who juggle both family and career (I think the majority of women). I, however, don't fit into either category - at least not then and certainly not now. I have always been a career-driven woman and I've been for many years been pursuing my education. He didn't like that and did everything in his power to get me to quit school and sabotage my efforts to better my life. I won't get into the gory details of all he did, but one of the main weapons in his arsenal was verbal abuse, and what he criticized most was my body. He constantly told me that I looked as though I was gaining weight and went so far as to pick up dinner for only himself because I "didn't need to eat". The craziest part of it all is that at nearly 300 lbs, he was the one with the weight problem. Of course as I swam in a sea of my own deep insecurity I never made this simple and obvious connection. One day, however, I had just cleaned the entire house on my own with no help, and as I lugged another basket of dirty clothes to the laundry I stopped and took a good look at him, sitting with a punch-bowl filled with Lucky Charms on the couch playing video games in the same spot he'd been for five hours. I snapped, took the home phone and tossed it at him, and to make a long story short within a few short weeks I packed my bags and left, and I never looked back. Since we divorced I've seen him once when he was in town over the holidays, and even then he made the comment to me: "Wow, another fifteen pounds and you'll look really good." The next day he drunk dialed me and said he wanted me back. I put him on speakerphone, and me and my current boyfriend had a good, long hearty laugh.
More than anything I want you ladies to realize that 95% of what we see on t.v. and in magazines is Photoshopped in a wind-tunnel. What always makes me feel better is looking at candid photos of celebrities without their make-up. Even the most beautiful, desirable and seemingly perfect women get used, abused, cheated on and dumped (Halle Berry, Reece Witherspoon, Jennifer Anniston, the list goes on and on). We all love companionship but a man should never be the center of your life. Love yourself, put yourself first and realize that although your size is a major issue and extremely connected to your health, it does not determine your value as a human being.
You can actually buy the book they use at Lindora at Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon.Com. It's called:
Lean for Life, by Cynthia Stamper
It outlines the entire diet in great detail.
The book that I read that helped me with my workouts that is EXTREMELY effective in helping you tone, shape and build muscle is called:
The Body Sculpting Bible for Women
by James Villepigue and Hugo A. Rivera
A book that has been helpful to me with maintaining a healthy weight is:
Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy : The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating by Walter Willett, P. J. Skerrett, Maureen Callahan, Edward L. Giovannucci, Patrick J. Skerrett
Also feel free to send me messages with any questions you have or just to say hi. I'm usually being a bad girl and playing on Myspace on the sly at work or during boring lectures. My address is as follows:
www.myspace.com/korenmichelle
GOOD LUCK AND LOTS OF LOVE TO YOU ALL
