Great scale news Dagmar!

Well, one week down of my 12-week program, 11 to go! I lost 2lbs this week so that's good, although I had just gained them the week before so they were probably transient anyway. I am getting back in the swing of eating less food more comfortably.

However, I'm remembering why I can't stand counting calories for too long. Entering in straight foods (e.g. fruit, eggs) is fine, but entering recipes is a giant disaster and I refuse to eat the same foods day in and day out, so recipes are a must for me. I'm now remembering that last time I lost a regain I ended up doing something like 3 weeks track & lose followed by 1-2 weeks no track and maintain. We'll see how it goes this time.

In any case, I've been keeping to more or less under 1800 cals and actually made it down around 1500 one day. Limited myself to one cheat meal at our family picnic during which I ended up not actually eating a huge number of calories, because while I did eat cupcakes, I didn't eat much else since the babies were too much of a handful.

I've been doing the daily outdoor walk required for the program even though I've had to go out in the rain a few times. We are getting use out of the rain cover for the stroller though! Week two of the same set of daily core exercises today. I can feel my muscles working. No intensives for another week but this week they started with the alignment stuff -- basically instructions on how to work on improving your posture. Proper posture and a strong core go hand in hand and I've heard that before from many different places so I'm inclined to believe it.

Dagmar!

Jessica!

Not sure what I think about the article; still noodling on it. I guess as someone who realized very early in life that "skinny" was never going to be an adjective applied to me (perhaps "fit" and maybe "lean" could be achievable), I don't get the mindset and don't really want to. If the price of a few more sizes down is to lose vitality (by the dictionary definition of vitality, which I just learned two days ago), I'm not willing to make the tradeoff.

And that being said, I jumped on board the 5:2 plan as of Saturday to see if I can take advantage of some of my natural appetite tendencies instead of all the logging and calculating. I haven't had much luck budging the muffin top, and I guess I'm saving calorie-counting for a last resort. This means that today and Thursday, my only meal will be dinner. So far it hasn't been too bad - the next 6 hours will tell the tale!

5:2 is when you eat 500 calories two days a week and eat maintenance or more the other five, right? Good luck!

Over the weekend I grossly overate on Friday and Saturday, and blew up to 123 Sunday AM. Was 119.8 this morning and feel normal again.

I had so many feelings and emotions about that scale blip - almost like I literally wanted to crawl out of my skin. Much can be chalked up to TOM-related anxiety/too many feelings, and a 2 hour trip to the gym calmed me down for a few hours.

The article about the thin woman was a little sad, because I saw a picture of her and she seemed to be about my age, a cool person to hang out with, and blogs on Catster which is a big plus That level of restriction just seems like it would suck all the spontaneity out of life and create anxiety where none is needed.

Krampus, yep, that's the one. I've got a good grip on what level of eating keeps the scale stable; I'm way too good at that. I just don't want it to be stable at *this* spot any longer.

Glad you were able to pull out the hormone-induced tailspin. Been there; they suck even when you know that's what's going on.

ICU, good luck with 5:2. I hope it works well for you!

I notice a lot of ppl avoiding CC now and I wonder if I'm just noticing it more (because I am avoiding it) or if it's a real trend (possibly bc of the uptick in IF). I know that when I chose my current approach of non-CC, I felt like I just could not do CC this time round, with the extra stress of DD's junior year and my project at work. I wasn't sure if I could manage to restrict myself to a short eating window or that I would succeed at losing weight with one, but I felt I had to try something different.

Anyhoo, I'm taking ownership of 139 on my ticker today (I've weighed in below there for 3 days straight; that's my rule). I want to lose a few more to have some slack for vacation, so for now I'm just keeping everything the same.

My DD is doing something akin to 5:2 and loves it. She's trying to talk me into it. I could (as I have done it before) but it'd be hard to skip lunch with DH (we eat together in the office M-T and go out Friday). Weekend would be even more difficult with DS and DH with me.

Gotta say, the first single-meal day was easy. I'm rarely hungry for breakfast anyway. I'll admit I had some trouble maintaining my focus while my coworkers were microwaving lunches and creating waves of food smells, but once I made it to about 1pm, it was fine from there. No symptoms of blood sugar gone haywire or anything else. I expected to be starving at dinner and that turned out not to be the case. If anything, I was hungry enough that I was more aware of the point where I wasn't hungry any more as I was eating (good new thing). This morning, yes, hungry when I woke up, but not unreasonably so. I'm opening this experiment at 155.0 and will give it a few weeks to see what happens. I'll go with dinner only on Monday and Thursday.

Yoyo, I feel like calorie counting is what you make of it. You can certainly count calories while doing 5:2 or an eating window or South Beach or whatever other plan. "Calorie counting" doesn't have to mean "eat fewer than X calories every day." I think there has been a push over the years toward methods that have less burdensome tracking required though -- that's why Weight Watchers uses "points." A WW "point" is really just a unit of measure of calories.

I'm finding tracking my calories much easier with MyFitnessPal mobile app than tracking used to be, because I always have my phone with me so I can enter things as I'm eating them, and it can scan barcodes and pull up the nutrition info which saves a LOT of time in data entry. Also, it can attempt to import a recipe from a website, which saves some time although it doesn't always work that well.

In any case, my calorie counting method has always been "eat X or less 6 days per week, and 1 day a week have two standard meals and one meal of whatever the heck I want and don't worry about the calories." Over time I have had to adjust the value of X based on my changing metabolism but it's generally worked for me. The on/off lose/maintain cycle has also been effective for me to kind of give my body and mind a break from losing every so often with a week or two of maintaining.

Anyway, I'm just rambling at this point. The idea of only one meal a couple days a week is interesting to me, but this morning I felt like I was going to pass out in the shower because I was so hungry for breakfast, so I don't think I could make it work.

I too have to spread my calories out over the day because I am not sitting at all except for 5-10 minute intervals in the car. if I don't eat 2 meals and a snack during the day I'm so hungry by afternoon and dinner that I overeat then and sometimes keep on going until bedtime.

I don't really count calories any more (logging/counting made me after a couple of months) but I tend to eat the same things and know how much of what I can eat every day and maintain. When I try something new I look up the cals in the book I have in my kitchen.

We are all different. We all have to find what works for us.

Dagmar

So my mom is going to be in town this coming week, which means that we'll have a built-in babysitter so DH and I can go out to dinner this weekend. We've only gone out for a date night maybe three times in the past year. Now I need to figure out what I want to eat the most. Since it will be my cheat meal for the week it had better be good!

Yep, I'm with Dagmar on this; I can easily eat 2000+ calories between dinner and bedtime, and if I fast all day I feel as though I've "earned it" because I'm so ravenous by then. Of course, 2000 cals is 500 more than I need so I invariably end up gaining weight on the one-meal-a-day system, even if it's only 5 days of the week.

I'm on vacation this week in Michigan's Upper Penninsula. Writing this in Newbery's only cafe, which fortunately has wi-fi. This has not been my favorite vacation; full of biting mosquitoes and whining children (or vice-versa). Food was tolerable until today when we hit the most rural outposts. Now nothing but supermarket (my choice) or burger/pasty/fried fish shops until we head back over the Mackinaw Bridge in 2 more days. I DID try a pasty today- 600 calories (?more?) of shortening-laden crust filled with a mountain of potato and a few stray pieces of carrot and chicken, very little seasoning. UGH.

I am sure that if I didn't have a pure desk job, there'd be issues. Given what I'm reading about fasting and longer telomeres and other general health advantages, I am willing to give it a shot. It certainly will not hurt me, and it has not made me miserable. Worth a try.

Andrea, if there was chicken in it, it ain't a pasty. And that should have been lard and not shortening. Says somebody who spent a "whole" 4 years in the UP. I will agree with you, they are not a preferred food unless you are slaving in the mines 12 hours a day! We've made them at home with some of our own tweaks - mostly to add some kicked-up flavor and to get the grease out of the crust. As "hand pies" go, there are lots of options for, dare I say it, healthy options with great flavor.

Hey, Andrea, I'll be in the UP in August. I also choose the non-traditional chicken pasty over beef-- I just like it better. I don't love pasties in general either, but I have to make a lot of food choice concessions when we are visiting relatives.

CC might be easier for me if I joined the 21st century and carried a cell phone with me (I keep my palm pixie charging in the car mostly for emergencies and try to remember to take it with me on my walks in the woods in case I get lost). But even without the drudgery of doing the tally, I found it mentally enervating to constantly make caloric trade-off decisions about what to eat throughout the day. I've tried pre-planning and that didn't work well for me either, as I often wouldn't feel like eating what I've planned. Anyway, I'm not trying to proselytize. People who have good results with CC should definitely stick with it!

ICU, I agree that key to eating just in the evening is having a lifestyle that doesn't put any major drains on blood sugar. Walking is fine and some days I walk literally for hours. But if I tried running or lifting (which I know from experience that I detest even when I used to eat throughout the day), it would probably lead to a low blood sugar episode.

DH and DD are home and my weight is back up a smidge (cooking for real again), but still below 139, so I'm happy.

All this talk about pasties is making me hungry! But help me, is a pastie the same as a meat pie or empanada or even calzone? Just the country of origin and perhaps an ingredient or two being different?