Sandwiches

As the Onion says (and noted by my friend KCF) This Week!

We can't help but be emotionally affected by the news, even though for me it was thankfully abstract. No-one I know was in danger or hurt.

Personally, I spent the week being sandwiched between parent and teen issues, running back and forth between my mother in rehab (doing very well, thanks) and the school and home (don't ask). Plus I did my taxes from beginning to end in about four hours (80% paper and on-line record sorting and collecting, 20% clicking buttons on tax software).  My old sciatica is acting out, and the allergies are making their annual appearance, so the body is no more than a C-.  Work - oddly, kept going - no crises, even slight progress in positive directions. Hope.

So I stopped tracking my food, and even simply forgot to get on the scale one morning, nearly unheard-of for my obsessive record keeping. Results are pretty good, but there is no question in my mind I started to drift off the straight and narrow.  Though I don't have the data staring me in the face to confirm. Typically, I would expect there to be a couple of weeks lag before drifting in food starts to show up on the scale, and I need to get back to my tools of tracking, planning, and prepping in advance.  I have NO food on hand that is what I want to eat.

I didn't cook dinner once this week. This means my green leafy vegetable intake suffered mightily. I added some carb-y vegetables to my diet when eating off the rack - black and garbanzo beans, eggplant, peas. Oddly, when faced with choices to make at times I was dog tired, standing at the food bar in Whole Foods, or out on restaurant row in downtown, I craved comfort food but knew I won't find the comfort in cinnamon rolls, french fries, or ice cream. Sandwiches are so very convenient when you are on the run, but I know they will lead to cravings later. I looked over at the baked goods conveniently next to the check out lines in Whole Foods and felt an emotional tug, but it wasn't actually hard to step away. I went for comfort, soft and hot and creamy, moussaka, beef stew, cabbage, green beans, peas. At Chipotle, both guacamole and cheese on the salad. This is food that won't help me lose weight, but it keeps my insulin and blood sugar in check and thus keeps me from spiralling out of control. So this is a small victory, and it gives me the conviction to do some planning and move ahead in better form planning for this week. I do need to admit to the small pieces of chocolate at the end of the day, a very slippery slope I know.

Thank goodness I continue to follow the advice of my friends and I keep those appointments at the gym.  If it weren't for that, my calorie expenditure would have been even lower, and my body hates this level of inactivity. No chances to get outside and walk at lunch or after work, with the sandwiched double duty.

I've got the lazy gene

I've known for some time that I had the "thrifty" gene- when deprived of food, my body gets super efficient and doesn't need many calories. It's adaptive for those cold and dark and hungry northern winters, you know.

But now it's clear the Shellabargers have a lazy gene as well! I wonder how often they run together?

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/why-were-motivated-to-exercise-or-not/

Of course, as the last paragraph says, biology is not destiny. That's what makes us human, the ability to rise above genetic coding.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Reversing the Course

So yeah, one week of eating the right stuff and bumping up the activity can change things. But really? What does this mean?

First, the facts:

I did in fact reverse the upward trend, and return towards the level I was at when I stalled. This week's average is two pounds lower than last week's average. This is good. There are enough low points in there to indicate an actual downward trend.  The main things that helped that, I think, are:  good weather, always alternatives on hand that met my criteria for acceptable; and bumping up the movement (which in turn was based on the weather).

The stress level at work this week was much less than last week, but on average hard to say about stress since my mother had her long-postponed shoulder operation yesterday.  She is doing really great   - I'm pretty sure all the life-threatening phases are behind us - but she's still in the hospital and I'll be spending a lot of time with her for the next few weeks.

Contributing to the stress level is my fancy new (and big) coffee pot broke this week. I am very dependent on that first cup of coffee, and am not in the best position to trouble shoot coffee problems before that first cup of coffee. So dealing with that at 5 a.m. was tragicomic, and resulted in both scald burns for me and coffee mess all over the kitchen.

And taxes not yet finished... in contrast to my self employed friends, its comically simple, just have to find everything then it will be 45 minutes tops. But I actually have to find everything first. It's the issue of getting started at all, squeezed in between teen dramas and hospital visits this weekend. So I think I'll do it now.

On the good news front, I'll be helping pick out a tux to rent for my boy this weekend for the prom in May!  Not quite like dress shopping, but a big pleasure never-the-less!

Does Knowing the Pattern Change It?

I've been stuck in a weight pattern for more than two years now.  Here we go again:

After a few weeks of what my friend so aptly calls suckitude, interrupted with a little actual fun, do I want to take the time and make the effort to lose weight?  Look at this pattern - I knew it going into it that the odds were this would be how I'd end up. I can lose for a bit on a blitz, then my body stubbornly wants to drift back up in weight. As soon as I lose focus it happens - the weight creeps up (or, shoots up). And I do lose focus.

I have all this data: my weight, my exercise levels, my food logs, this blog. Can I mine it, get my mind around it, turn it into useful information, some magic code that will explain why I can lose weight for about a month about once a year?  Is it just motivation, or is there something physical that happens to derail me? I collected a bunch of data, and spent some time paging back through my food logs. What do I actually eat? How does it make me feel?

It is a freakin' lot of work to lose weight. It is clear to me that the secret to keeping my calorie count low, without feeling deprived all the time, requires many cooked vegetables. I can make myself eat salads, and I even enjoy salads, but nothing satisfies me so much as a nice warm full stomach. And the only way to fill my stomach without shooting the blood sugar into a frenzy craving more is to eat rich cooked vegetables, with lots of flavor. Meat too, for sure, but to lose weight I need the vegetables. This weekend, I made spinach ricotta pie (no crust), my secret to a satisfying breakfast. I cooked some asparagus, served with balsamic vinegar, and I mushed well-steamed broccoli with creme fraiche and asiago cheese.I roasted a cauliflower in pieces.  I made enough of everything to have leftovers for during the week.

I want treats. My go-to treat is blueberries and creme fraiche, which I fancy up with mini chocolate chips and  slivered almonds. A small serving is just fine. If I pig out on this, it's not the end of the world. So far, I haven't tired of it. My backup is mascarpone or ricotta with something pleasant mixed in, cinamon or cocoa. I have to be really careful to not overdo it with the sugar.

(Aside: I've wanted to post more extensively about my recent reading on food and nutrition, but I'll share one insight. How is it that eating low carb, and eating vegan, BOTH can lead to weight loss and good health? The secret is to do one-or-the-other. Eating low-carb, one learns not to be afraid of fat. Because the blood sugar is tamed, when I eat very low carb I eat fewer calories, and I will lose weight. My body is burning fat as fuel because it doesn't have new sugar coming in.  However, when I start to add back carbs, I have to cut back on the fat, because my body will burn the carbs and store the fat. It's really easy to let the total calorie count shoot through the roof as soon as the carbs come back in, as my blood sugar demands to be fed more often, and I casually add butter to everything just as I did when I was low-carb. So for me, finding treats that don't bring a lot of sugar or simple starches to the table is the trick.)

My activity levels are really down. I've really fallen into a cave at work and home, and I sit in a chair and burn no calories. Except for my quick vacation my activity level has plunged.  I broke my streak on my daily mile. I woke up one morning and realized I had simply forgotten to walk. I kept going back over the day, and my silly rules about the streak, and I realized there was no wiggle room. I had failed. So did I start over to build a new streak? No I did not. I gratefully sat down, and stayed sitting down.

At work, the pace is incredibly intense. One of my keys to success is to bring my lunch, but that also means I do not have to leave the building, or sometimes even my area. My work evenings, I make dinner - or dial it in - and then sit to read a book. Or surf on the interwebs, which sometimes leads to serendipity and more often leaves me feeling unsatisfied but wanting more, as if I had been eating cotton candy.

The past two weekends have been more active. The weather is getting nicer,and I hope my cooking this weekend will help - I know I've got spinach breakfasts for the whole week.  I want to bump my activity levels while focusing on eating more plants. This is my plan, and I think there is a good chance I can stick to it for -- a week? Maybe a month?  We'll see.

One possible bump in the road - a spectacular gelato place opened up in town. It's half an hour's walk away - which I know since I walked it last night. A small serving of gelato just about equals an hour's worth of walking, so if I keep myself from driving there I might be ok.  But it's a sugary treat, and it can't be a daily habit, even if I walk it off, because sugar leads to needing more sugar...

My goal is to create a new, lower, set point to maintain. But first I have to get there.