Freakin' Lot of Work

Success continues, but my, it's a lot of work to eat this way. It takes constant focus and attention. It takes more than psychic energy, though. It takes actual time and effort, to shop and cook and plan out the day.

The Good News

So yay, I'm losing weight!!! Finally, after two years, what I am doing is actually helping me lose weight. The past two weeks its been less than a pound a week, more than half a pound, a trend that without daily weighing and weekly averaging would be harder to discern. I think this is the rate of loss I sustained for a year during the Big Loss, without any real plateaus.  I'm older and more sedentary now and so I feel like its harder to do this than before.

But much of my life right now is focused on food, in the midst of many other work and personal crises. I'm finding some things to fall back on when the tight planning and control slip, but it is far from natural or an easy rhythm for me. The focus is on meat and vegetables. It would be easy to do just meat and most of my energy is focused on getting tasty vegetables into every meal. What I'm doing:

Making breakfast food on Sunday for the whole week. I've done that for four weeks in a row, and it has been key to my success so far. I have been making an egg-veggie bake, like a crustless quiche, and it really starts the day right with protein and fiber. I have some in the fridge right now for the first three days of the coming week, so I'm going to skip doing that this weekend.  Fallback for when I run out: I have chicken breakfast sausages in the freezer - not quite as filling but with fruit (sugary) carbs, so maybe wrap them in lettuce to eat with my fingers, to up the veggie side?

Bringing lunch from leftover dinners at home.  I continue to be crazy busy and stressed at work, and having a really good and entirely fitting-my-diet needs lunch to pop in the microwave has also been key to success.  I do have an easy fallback at work - the salad bar at work has somewhat tired spinach and lettuce, other fresh cut-up veggies in various states of decomposition, and cut up chicken breast and hard boiled eggs. I keep a small bottle of salad dressing in the fridge in the office since I don't know what is in theirs. It's clear by my description I consider this substandard, and so I have only done it once a week at most. It is entirely fitting on the diet (with my salad dressing) but not something I look forward to. Part of it is compromising my principles: the chicken and eggs are certainly not meeting my ethical meat standards. So an intermediate position I've done is my meat (usually re-heated) and their vegetables, with my dressing of course.

With more work, I can go to Cosi, where their Tandoori chicken salad is something that gets me excited, and from the office it also gets my mile walk in to go fetch it. But that takes time and decent weather, so I can't count on it in advance as a lunch.  There is an excellent food-bar in another near-by government building, but I'm a little skittish of doing the food-bar thing in a place where I actually like the food. No automatic portion control.

Dinners get sketchily planned in advance, but every evening is different at home, and so the menus diverge a lot in practice from what I've planned. We're eating out some - "upscale" fast food only, as in Chipotle and Panera.  Fancy salads can carry a lot of carbs - tortilla strips, sugary dressings - so I have to be careful. At home, stir-frys and other meat plus veggie dishes. Usually I do rice as a side for the family, and it doesn't temp me at all as I fill my plate with something green.  But cooking from scratch if it takes more than half an hour just doesn't cut it on a week night. I do have some backup prepared meats in the freezer - Aidell's sausages, Ikea meatballs - that could be turned into a meal with a salad or cooked vegetable side, but so far I haven't used that. It helps keep me on course to know there is something to grab if I'm just too pooped to cope. I'm going to cook a main dish this afternoon and serve it tomorrow or Tuesday for the family, to jump start the week.

I have embarked in the last couple of weeks on a slippery slope: evening snacks. I'm using ricotta, mascarpone, or creme fraiche as the base. Flavorings such as cinnamon and lemon peel work. Cocoa is dangerous. Blueberries are terrific, but no more than a quarter cup in a day. I'm less thrilled with other berries. Whole Foods is also selling fresh pomegranate seeds - pulled out of the fruit - for an insane amount of money. That is my indulgence - almost pure sugar, but I'm keeping the portions very very small. So far so good. I 'm also having nuts - again, no more than a quarter cup a day. It seems to help me with the late afternoon, before dinner blahs - not so much that I'm hungry but more that I'm psychically low by then. We know that willpower is an actual, physical, draw on your body, and actual, physical food can help replenish it.

I am striving for fewer than 35 net carbs a day - that is total carbs minus fiber grams. That generally translates into fewer than 50 total carb grams a day, a number that is easier for me to pull in summary from my meticulous food logs. I'm over that target some days, generally when I've gone for some packaged meal rather than cooking from scratch. But sauteed onions are also adding a lot of sweetness to my meals - I love them, but probably can get a lot of the same taste benefit with slightly lower amounts added.  I'm having to be hyper conscious - it is so very easy to start creeping up in what I'm actually doing while keeping a mental list of what I think I'm mostly doing. I need the discipline of looking back over what I've actually done, to help keep me moving forward on plans for the week that will come within targets.

I'm still on my walking streak!  This week, it has been almost entirely at night, which is not a good place for it, but better than not doing it.  Absolutely, if I was not going for the 100%, 365 days this year, I would have blown it off last week. Not because I couldn't, just because I didn't feel like it.  Last night I was getting ready for bed when I remembered I hadn't done the walk at all, despite a low key day. The treadmill seemed not so interesting to me, so I put the leash on my feeble old dog and took her around the neighborhood for the first time since her affliction. We ambled, but we ambled for over a mile. And I know she really liked it a lot despite some stumbles, and it made me feel good both to get some fresh air and to let her have a good time.

Excelsior!