Eat real food....

Saw a blog post this morning advising to eat "real food".  Boxed foods are not "real" foods.  Cheerios aren't good for you because, even though those little O's have "whole grains", they aren't natural.  They've been mushed and squashed into a tan goo.  Then they're extruded into those little O's that we even feed to our babies as first finger food.  

These foods, in this picture, are all processed and are not "real" foods.  Dammit.  This is pretty much the only kind of food I have in my house. 

"Real" food evidently doesn't come from a box or a can...  it's only found in the produce aisle.

Week 1 of the 12-Week Challenge

Well, weighed in today.  Jeanine fiddled with the scale until it appeared that I had lost a pound.  I didn't do very well for the first week, even though I have been walking for a half an hour every day before work.  Katie and I took McKenna and Dawson to the water park at French Lick over the weekend and we just ate carbs to beat the band!  I had a hotdog in a bun for lunch on Sunday, plus a root beer and a bag of baked Lay's.  We went to Chicago Pizza for supper and shared a pizza.  Had another root beer.  We had a salad, but I ate WAY TOO MUCH.  Breakfast on Monday was biscuits and gravy, French toast sticks, etc., from the breakfast buffet that was included with the room.  Another root beer while at the water park.  Then a Subway meatball sub for lunch with a cup of water.  UGH.  TOO MUCH FOOD.  I'll see what happens this week.  It's my PLAN to try to stick to a plan.        

Hmmm... more evidence that carbs are the culprits

Well, today was the first weigh-in for our at-work-12-week-challenge.  While I was in line, one of the ladies from another office was talking.  She had lap-band surgery in July and has lost 60+ pounds so far.  But before she could even HAVE the surgery, she had to "de-fat her liver" and lose at least 10 pounds.  They told her to go on a protein diet.  She did, and not only lost the 10 pounds in the time-frame they gave her, but lost another 14 as well.  She eats protein and vegetables.  Protein. Vegetables.  Hmmm.....  Does THAT sound familiar?  And now she only eats about a cup of food at each meal.  Hmmm... what have I been saying (if only to myself) about the capacity of the human stomach per meal?  A cup.  Hmmmm.... seems I was on to something and I didn't fully realize it.

Let's see what I can do with THIS little tidbit of information.    

I have always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I have to be more specific. ~Lily Tomlin

From SparkPeople's Healthy Reflections today:

Getting specific about your goals

Are your goals detailed enough for you to reach them?  We all have aspirations and we are better off for having made them.  But if your goals are too vague or unstructured, you'll find that attaining them is difficult.  Wanting to lose 30 pounds is a wonderful goal, but you need a plan to get you on the right track.  These things don't happen overnight.  Today, think about your goals and form a plan to achieve them.  Write them down, chart your progress, refer to them as often as you need to stay on track, and most importantly, hold yourself accountable. 

A ha!  The beginnings of a PLAN.... 

Ever the Optimist?

Oh for Pete's sake... here we go AGAIN. It's the beginning of 2012 and I STILL weigh over 200 pounds. 204, yesterday morning, to be exact. Naked. Ugh.

I know people... Debbie... Erma... Tammy... who have lost lots of weight and kept it off, but I just can't stick to anything for longer than a couple of months. Why the heck can't I do do it too?!

Well, here's the beginning of ANOTHER try.

I've been getting up a half an hour early, driving to town, and walking before work. At work, Jeanine et al have issued a 12-week challenge. Weigh-ins every Wednesday. The nursing department has been doing "walkabouts" every hour. Walking from the top floor of the building to the bottom, up to the 2nd floor, across, then down and back up the other side. It takes them about 3 minutes to do a trip. Multiply that by eight times a day and you've done almost a half an hour of exercise at work.

We'll see what happens at the end of the 12 weeks...

On the road again...

I have to practically start again at Ground Zero. I'm back up to 205. I got tired of going to WW back in October... tired of paying $40 a month and not losing any more weight. So I stopped going to the meetings and let my membership lapse. Then came The Holidays -- days of eating seasonal goodies that you won't get again for a whole year. And after eating all those goodies, I just couldn't stop. One thing leads to another, and before you know it, 15 pounds are back on. Depressing.

I ran into a girl I went to school with the other day. I see her from time to time, and I know she's been going to the Y several days a week for over a year. This photo is from 2006. (BTW -- I think I bought that shirt at the Goodwill!) Anyway, she is mere shadow of her former self. She said she's lost 75 pounds, and she just looks great.

We started a "WW" thing here at work three weeks ago. Buffy, Carrie, Jeanine, Jennifer and I all put $1 a week in an envelope and get on the scales. The first two weeks I gained 0.6. This week, finally, I lost 2.4. The reason? I started doing the low carb diet again.

I have no doubt that low carb is the way to go. The amount of carbohydrates Americans eat is just downright hideous. Jeanine went to a meeting yesterday and said she had a bagel, 2 cookies, some Triscuits, and numerous other carb-heavy foods all through the day. No wonder we don't lose weight, I thought.

Even when I was going to WW, the WW program didn't work for me. The only thing that DID work was cutting the carbs. That's another reason I quit WW; it's ridiculous to pay them $10 a week just to weigh me, and one of their main pushes at those meetings is to sell their WW foods and snacks. Crazy!

And on the low carb diet, I can eat salads until I'm just stuffed, and I will still lose weight. Lettuce just doesn't have that many calories! :-) I think that's one of my problems -- I must like to be full. Full on salads is good. Full on potato chips and ice cream is not.

Oh well, we'll see what happens next week. But I gotta stay on this horse and try to get a new snapshot of my former classmate. She's done an awesome job and is a real inspiration to me.

It's Been a Long Time

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted anything here, and my weight loss efforts are worse for it. Not because I quit posting, but the not posting was a symptom of the boredom with the diet and the whole weight loss 'thang'.

I quit going to WW sometime in September, 2009. I went for about 6 months, but the last 6 weeks or so, my heart just wasn't in it. I really get tired of all that darn tracking, even though I'm sure it helps. I got down, reliably, to 191. I was even 189 for about a half an hour. I've been creeping up ever since Christmas, and this morning the scales tipped in at a half pound over 200. Ick. I hate having fat genes, fat taste buds and a fat disposition. Damn.

So here I am, vowing to work at it again. I walked for half an hour yesterday, and am going to try to eat no sugary foods or snacks. I've been reading again, because that's the only thing that can make me realize that all the foods I crave are nothing but poison.

I've been reading Michael Pollan's 'Food Rules'. The rules are pretty simple and can be boiled down to seven words: Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. By "food" he means real food, not the stuff he calls "edible foodlike substances". If it's made by a food scientist in a lab, don't eat it. Stick to the periphery of the grocery store. Hang out with the vegetables. You know the one about not eating white stuff (not a Pollan rule BTW).

There was a new show on TV last night about an English chef, Jamie Oliver, who is trying make us realize that we eat too much crap and processed foods. I also watched King Corn last week, a movie about how we're killing ourselves with cheap food. This Iowa corn grown with government subsidies, is just about the cheapest of the cheap. (Is the government trying to kill us?) We can't eat it, so we grind it, feed to cattle, and it makes them sick. We have to give the cattle tons of antibiotics to keep them healthy enough so we can kill them (before they die of acidosis from their crappy-ass corn diet) and make them into more cheap food. This crappy corn is also made into high fructose corn syrup and added to practically every food manufactured. It has zero nutrition, but we swig it down by the thousands of gallons every day in sodas and a jillion other products. Sickening. I have another movie to watch, Food, Inc., and I'm hoping it influences me to stop eating so much crap, too.

So, anyway, the name my tune is Try, try again....