Day #9 - My Rules of Weight Loss

Looking back, it's difficult to pinpoint just when I started putting on excess weight. I know it was sometime in my early thirties, perhaps right around the time that I became pregnant. Two things changed about that time: first, I became more sendentary. Not just with the four months of bed rest, but after delivery as well. Sure, with a baby (who quickly became a toddler) I seemed to be running around constantly--to the point of exhaustion--but it wasn't an active running around...it was more overwhelming than anything. My focus turned to my child and his needs and away from my earlier activities of bike riding, dancing, and hiking. Second, I developed a fondness for sweets during my pregnancy. Prior to that, I was never much of a sweet-lover. But during my pregnancy I craved mud pies, chocolate, ice cream, etc. I thought the craving would go away after the baby was born, but that never happened. I still prefer a really good ice cream or gelato over just about anything else. And I guess there truly is a third thing involved: I was aging. And with age, my metabolism slowed.

The days of being called a beanpole, a skinny-belink (my dad's favorite term), are long over, and now I have to work at keeping the weight in check. But there are so many "diets" on the market, so many different theories about what to eat and when to eat it, so many gimmicks that promise easy weight loss, that it's difficult to know what to do. Am I doing things right? I don't know. But I do know that drastic changes in my diet and lifestyle, things that restrict me, will not give me the results I'm seeking. And so I'm attempting a hybrid of things based on the teachings of various diet gurus, the ones that make sense to me. And so I am going to:

• Minimize my sugar intake and eat every 3-4 hours to eliminate spikes in blood sugar (Jorge Cruise)
• Limit my fat intake and keep my calorie count below 1200 calories a day (Weight Watchers)
• Cut out processed foods wherever possible, limit dairy and gluten. (I found that last year when I cut all dairy and gluten from my diet for a month, I lost 11 pounds and felt great. But it was just too difficult to sustain a diet that limits these completely. So this time I'm just avoiding them as I can.)
• Do my best to walk 10,000 steps per day. (I'm still working up to this. It's amazing just how little I walk. I knew I was fairly sendentary in my job, but when I put the pedometer on I was shocked to see just how little I move in a day.)

That's pretty much the gist of it. We'll see how I do and whether or not it works. I'll keep you posted.

Today's damage:

Breakfast:  (37g carbs / 7g sugar / 204 calories)

• Erewhon Crispy Brown Rice cereal (25/0/110)
• with blueberries (10/7/39)
• with almond milk (rather than dairy) (2/0/20)
• Coffee with half & half (0/0/35)

Snack:  (7g carbs / 6g sugar / 52 calories)

• 5 mint M&Ms (I'm bad! They were in a bowl on the counter and I scooped them up and put them in my mouth before thinking.) (7/6/52)

Lunch:  (11g carbs / 4g sugar / 233 calories)

• 3 oz hanger steak (left over from Sunday's dinner out) (0/0/174)
• Peas (left over from Saturday) (11/4/59)

Dinner:  (31.5g carbs / 2.5g sugar / 262 calories)

• Cheesy Beefy Supreme (left over from last night) (31.5/2.5/262)

Snack:  (11g carbs / 5g sugar / 82 calories)

• Sleepytime tea (0/0/2)
• 2 Girl Scout Thin Mints (11/5/80)

Daily Totals:  97.5 carbs / 24.5g sugar / 833 calories

Steps: Pedometer stopped working at 2013 steps. Time to buy a new one.