Here's how. I'm back in the W8 Watching swing of things and feeling very good about that. It took me several weeks to decide to do it again (whilst I tried to eat healthier without writing it down and counting points) and then a week of doing pretty well but still grabbing the occasional jelly bean or potato chip (although I would write those down and count them.) But now I'm really on track, everything is counted and recorded and if I need to snack -- I snack a lot -- it's something good for me and well under my points limit. I figure I'm eating about 1200 calories a day.The point of all this -- there is a point -- is that I am eating a remarkably healthy, balanced diet that doesn't leave me hungry and that has all the components of what anyone's daily diet should have, but it's just not enough. I don't mean it's not enough to lose weight, although I haven't, but that, I suppose, will happen within the next week or so. I read a fair amount ... okay, an obsessive amount ... about healthy eating, and I can tell you that I don't eat enough fiber, or enough fruit, or enough vegetables. Certainly, I don't drink enough water because I don't drink any water at all, except with my pills in the morning. I hate drinking water; it has no taste. I have one cup of decaf coffee in the morning (which I'm not supposed to have, acid, you know) and maybe 30 ounces a day of decaf iced tea, a combination of black and green teas. No sugar for me, not for two years, only Sweet 'n' Low (because that Splenda is the suck.) In fact, I eat vegetables and fruit all day long, and everything I eat is as full of fiber as I can get it, but it's not enough. It's not enough for the government, it's not enough for every magazine article I read, it's never as many servings of anything as I'm supposed to have.
Whatever supposed to have means. You know, this is not easy for me; I have never understood nutrition and how to eat healthy, and although I do eat very healthy now, it's only because I have to write down and look up and read labels for every scrap of food I put in my mouth. Clearly, I was not able to eat properly without doing all this crap, so that's what I have to do. It's not that I mind doing it; now that I'm into it, it's just the way I live. I mind doing it and feeling like I'm still not doing it right, even though I'm sure there's no other way to do it.
In the months leading up to my going back on the plan, I read three books. Okay, I read parts of three books. They are:
- The American Heart Association's No-Fad Diet
- Small Changes, Big Results by Ellie Krieger
- The Volumterics Weight Control Plan by Barbara Rolls
In fact, I would recommend all of these, if you have no idea what you're doing, because they are all very common sense. In fact, they are so common sense that they are exactly what I already knew. But where did they all get me?
- I eat a very balanced, but low calorie diet.
- I am not losing weight.
- According to everything I read, I am not eating enough servings of the right things, but to really lose weight, I should eat 100 to 200 calories less every day, which is a terrible idea and since I'm not Lindsey Lohan, I'm not going to do it.
I am not doing this to be "skinny" by the way, because that ship sailed far, far away in the summer of 1980, as soon as the rabbit died. (They probably didn't really kill a rabbit, but we still used that expression then to mean a positive pregnancy test.) But because I lost weight before (last year), I know that I feel better when I weigh less. I've gained back 15 of the 20 pounds I lost, but at this point I'd be happy just to lose 10. I think the change in hormones last winter put the first 5 back on fast, and I'm not losing them until or unless I have an actual organs removed. (You know who you are.) I'd be real happy with 10. I'd be real happy at this point to have a flabby tummy instead of a bulging one.
I'm sorry, nobody wants to read this shit, but it seemed I had to write it. I didn't even go into all the food I'm bringing with me on my trip next week because I'm afraid if I don't, I'll just fill up on snack food and other crap, and then all this work will be for shit. But you can be sure that I will write it, and then you can all get together and call the men in the padded truck for me.
*sigh*
