My metabolism has not been cooperating lately. It's been doing this wierd thing where I'll hover on the same weight for 5 or more days and then
blamo drop by more than a pound overnight. The sudden drops are nice, but a steady loss, say two tenths of a pound a day, would be more reinforcing. I do
try to take small victories while I wait for the scale to catch up with me, but it's not as fun.
So, that's a new picture. When you're as big as I am, 5 pounds, meh, drop in the bucket. It's important psycologically, better down than up, but it doesn't exactly show up in pictures. This week I have been making a concerted effort to eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day (two of fruit, three of veggies). This is hard! A whole lot harder than I thought it would be. I mentioned before that I've cut my daily calorie consumption about in half. While I believe that overall calorie consumption is fundamentally the way you lose weight, I do think that better quality calories enable you to stick with a diet. Sure, I bet I could eat 4 or 5 candy bars every day, nothing else, and lose weight. However, I don't think that I would last on that diet very long. For one thing it would not be a very large volume of food, and my empty tummy would be yelling at me to get some McDonalds. Now, let’s say that I eat my same 4 to 5 candy bars plus lots and lots of diet soda to fill my tummy. I still don't think I would be able to stay on that diet very long, because my body would have me craving other foods to fill in nutrient gaps.
I know that left to my own devices I eat mostly carbs. Rice, pasta, bread, this is what I eat when I'm cooking only for me. However, I notice that after two to three days of this I begin craving a hamburger. If I think about it I realize I haven't had much protein and then I try to make a lean protein choice. The problem is if I *don't* think about it. For some reason I never have a craving for a lean chicken breast. I want a juicy (read fatty) hamburger. The chicken breast is satisfying, but I have to plan.
So, fruits and vegetables have two virtues. First, they put bulk in your tummy for comparatively few calories. Second, they give you nutrients that are hard to get other ways and fill your body’s nutrient cravings.
With both of these wonderful qualities why is it so hard for me to eat them? Most days I have one serving of fruit and one serving of vegetables, but I am improving. That's up from rarely just a few weeks ago. Soon, I hope these servings of fresh food will come as naturally as breathing.
I don't know very many fat people who can claim to like the idea of diet and exercise. If I liked eating less and moving lots, I wouldn't be fat, now would I? They're just nasty words for lots of people, including me, most of the time. However, since I want to change the way I look and feel, something in my life is going to have to change. Because I want to make a dramatic change in my energy levels and clothing size, this is, inevitably going to mean a big change in what I eat and how many calories I burn in a day. The debate is how big a change, how fast?
Big dramatic changes have their pros and cons: On the pro side, I am more likely to see positive results in a shorter time, keeping me motivated. Of course, dramatic changes are also harder to keep up, so will my results and other enforcers be enough to keep me motivated through painful changes?
On the flip side, small changes are easier to maintain, not so painful. However, the results don't come as fast, so it's easy to slowly slip that couple of inches back into old habits. Can I maintain a small change that I know will eventually yield results?
Of course, just to be contrary, I'm starting out doing a little of both!
On the big change side is my diet, my food plan, my eating plan, whatever words make you feel good. When I'm eating with in a careless way, I estimate that I can easily eat up to 4,000 calories in a day, especially on vacation, and maybe 3,000 calories while at home. For that last couple of weeks I've been eating about half of that. On WW, 28 points, what I'm eating now, is more or less 1400 calories a day. That is a big change! However, that number is not likely go very much lower. I will gradually go further down, but have a hard time imagining myself at 1000 calories a day. We'll see as we go. (More about what exactly I'm eating in future blog posts)
On the small change side, is my level of movement, exercise, whatever. For the last couple of weeks I've been going around the lake once or twice a week. For me that's 85 to 170 minutes of exercise a week, and only at a moderate pace at that. (I’m out of breath, but not really that sweaty) This week, so far I’ve only walked on Wednesday. Maybe I’ll get out later today and/or on Saturday. In that last three weeks, as I've been going around the lake, my time hasn't gotten any lower; I'm not getting any faster, at least not so far. That's discouraging. As I keep going along this journey, my exercise frequency and intensity level is going to have to change dramatically. I do believe that I could get to my weight goal by only controlling what I eat, but that'd only be half of the results I want, with very little added energy. I would also have to continue to reduce my diet severely as I continue, if I don't add in exercise, an option that just sounds too scary.
The truly scary part is, that if I want the changes to my body to permanent, these life style changes will have to be permanent too. hmmm....
