What my weight is doing

While I think the "sugar pass" was a good idea while on vacation, it doesn't work now that I'm home. I've trended upward, as the moving average shows, and its time to take serious measures if I want to actually lose weight (versus maintain).




- iPhone uPdate

Back From the Brink

It's been a tough month. Both personally, and collectively, work has sucked in a major way.  Teen drama has reached new heights. Family health issues on all sides. The dog is old and has big and expensive issues which can only lead to one conclusion.  My head cold morphed into spring allergies.

So I went to Disney World!  If ever there was a time for the happiest place on earth, this was it.

First, my girl and I went to a celebration of internet culture, PlayList Live.  I sat at the pool with a virtual stack of trash books while my girl, the total fan girl, stood in lines over and over to have her picture taken by some of her heroes.

Then two days at Disney. I think Disney was way ahead of the airlines in segmenting their costs and creating add-ons for extra value for extra cost.  Luckily for me, I went ahead and bought their "sugar pass" add on, which guarantees no calories from any sweets eaten in their parks. Also luckily for me, the parks involve lots of walking.

So the head cold is gone, I'm back, work still sucks, but everything is better for a few days of sun. Someday we'll get sunshine and warmth here too.

I just can't wait to be king!

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!

Going the Distance

I have successfully lost a modest amount of weight in the past few weeks. I notice it in how I feel, and in how my clothes fit. This weight loss has been because of focus and dedication - it didn't just happen. Never-the-less, the first few pounds are easy, relatively speaking.

I am basically following an Atkins diet - lots of (non-starchy) vegetables, a fair amount of meat and eggs, and some cheese. No grains or starches in any form. When switching to that diet from a high carbohydrate diet (which I did NOT do), it's not unusual for the scale to drop by eight pounds in a week! I eased into this Atkins induction phase from New Year's till the last week of January, but I've still seen quite a bit of success. I've successfully beat down cravings, and now am not inappropriately hungry. Only if it's been hours and it's time to eat, do I feel my stomach rumble.

So this is the moment. This is where the difference will emerge. I've shown this is something I can do. Is this something I will do? How much do I want to do this?

It's a lot of work. I am cooking a lot, because hidden sugars are everywhere. I am reading labels like a fiend, and many of my convenience foods, bottled sauces and such, have sugars or starches in them, and so have to be put aside. Weeknights are of course the worst, because I get home tired and want to offer something healthy to the kids. But I need to make sure beforehand I have all the necessary ingredients because there isn't time to make a trip to the store and then cook from scratch. But I need to make something that has meat and at least one, preferably two, vegetables in it. No take and bake pizza for me.  Eating out is difficult. Even fancy salads at restaurants are likely to have sweet dressings.  But I really have to work to try to eat what are the minimum vegetables - the Atkins book urges at least six cups of raw, or 2 cups cooked, vegetables a day. That is a lot of vegetables, which have to be bought and prepared from scratch.  Once I get the meat and vegetables sorted out, it's easy enough to make rice or pasta for the rest of the family (who are less likely to eat much of the vegetables). The plain starch side does not tempt me at all.

Since the blood sugar seems tamed, I don't have uncontrollable physical urges and cravings. Apple strudel made an appearance in the office, and I could feel the emotional tug, but it wasn't physical and it was easily suppressed. My girl made heart cookies for Valentine's Day, and I put them out of sight, mostly. Last night, the leftovers were there on the dining room table, and out of pure intellectual curiosity I tasted one. (Yeah, right.) But it was one small heart, and I walked away.

I've started doing some evening treats, because I seem to have a psychological urge to feel indulged. I'm re-discovering the joys of ricotta or mascarpone, and blueberries. This is a slippery slope, as low carb as I'm trying to go. A quarter cup of blueberries is considered about the limit. Other fruits - apples, oranges, etc., are still off the table for now.

On the other hand, there are non-sweet indulgences that really work. Olives. Guacamole. Bacon. Macadamia nuts. Today, I am going to try a recipe for creamed spinach that features mascarpone and butter. This would be a great side dish for broiled steak tonight, with asparagus on the side. Yum!

I'm doing a bunch of stuff to keep myself motivated. I'm tracking all my food. I'm sharing socially in a number of different places, including here. I'm printing out my graphs, and hanging them up. Of course, I've got another book I'm reading on the subject, of which more anon. But all of this is time. And emotional effort. Am I willing to keep putting in the time and effort?

It seems I should be able to answer this question of my own free will, but history and experience says the way to sustain a weight loss and maintain it is to find something that is not a daily struggle. I'm still questing around to see if what I am doing is sustainable, but it feels for now like I'm on the right track.

I find I am enjoying the cooking, once I get over the fact it's required. I enjoy the food. I enjoy the lack of evening struggle against the chocolate calling from the kitchen. Hopefully, life won't come roaring at me in a way that makes the time or emotional energy more difficult.

Resolutions check-in. I am 100% on my daily mile. I made my January challenge of writing every day, I signed up to do it again in February. But I had a business trip where I was off the internet for a day. I wrote my words on the plane, but I failed to upload them to the website before midnight, so was scored for a miss. Having lost my streak, I fell off the wagon and stopped writing. I miss it, but I've got a half hour back in my day now.

Resolutions Checkin

My two very specific and measurable resolutions are absolutely on track.  They were to walk at least an extra mile every day, and to write at least 750 words every day, using the 750 words website.

The walking is very nearly reaching the level of a religious practice for me. As stress comes at me, unexpectedly and out of the blue often, I am aware that the small amount of time to think while moving is helping the same way meditation or yoga might help.  And, my activity level over all is down quite a bit. I don't know entirely why. One of the insights from my arm band that calculates each day's calories is just that - I am burning fewer calories most days than I did when I started this process. Of course, I'm twenty pounds lighter, and just that has an impact on daily calories. But also my over all energy is down. I fidget less, and I sleep more. Perhaps that is because of my restricted calorie diet, seasonal affects from the dark and cold or something else.  But, if I were not walking, I would be burning about 100 calories less each and every day. (One hundred calories per mile is a standard rule of thumb for women, whether walking or running.) So that doesn't really matter much in the scheme of the physics school of weight loss but it does make a difference in my overall health.

Clearly, making it a commitment makes a difference. There have been some days - and yesterday is one - where without the commitment: 365 days of the extra mile - I simply wouldn't have done it. I was tired and doing other things, but I took my book down to the treadmill and strolled my mile at 3 mph while reading, and 20 minutes later I had my check in the box.

I am addicted to the writing as well, though again the commitment is vital to actually carrying it out. The website is very simple and straightforward, to just go in and write. But in the background, it is timing you, and keeping track of how often and when you are writing, and it is game-ified to give badges as rewards for various things, like how many days in a row you write. And this information, just the badges, is shared on the website for all to see, using whatever user name you pick (after I figured this out, I deleted my original registration using my real name and generated a nom de plume). They store your words, tightly secured they say, and have some basic text analysis tools to generate info about your content if you care. Who knew such computer tools exist? Today, for example, they say my main topics are eating and drinking, family, and relationships (well duh). A single day doesn't give insight, but looking at the tools applied to a longer period of time is interesting, because really, what is more interesting than me?

You can also export your words for other uses.  One of the fun things I did was export all of January, then load it into the wordle website to make a graphic of my most used words.  I had to do a couple of manipulations to save it so that I could show it here, but this is fun.

One of the things I wondered about, would writing privately make me blog less? There is only so much time in a day, and walking takes about half an hour, and writing 750 words stream of consciousness takes about half an hour. So during the week, when time is very very precious, the private writing simply pushes aside the time I might possibly spend blogging.  Except, I have very few blog posts on weekdays anyway.  And, it certainly stimulates my thinking, gets the wordy juices flowing, so perhaps it is actually helping. I had six posts this January, compared to 20 last January, but that was all about the running last year, they were not all  that interesting, just stats. I moved the stats this year over to my Quick Log, where I had seven posts, so maybe it is comparable. Anyway, I like writing here.

What Works?

Something works. This is good news. I'm honing in on what works, for weight loss specifically. I may not always be willing to do what it takes, but I'm more and more facing the facts of what it takes. Here's a hint: It's not hoping. It's not wanting.

Here's the results from this week:

I am down significantly.

You will note, looking at last year, I had another period where I went down significantly, last May.

So what works?

Tracking works.

Atkins works.

I went back and looked at my posts from last May. What was going on that allowed me to lose? I started tracking in earnest, using Weight Watchers online. Every mouthful. I actually burned many fewer calories in May than in April last year, and yet I lost weight. Sadly, I don't have access to my actual food diaries, because I am no longer using Weight Watchers to track, I'm using My Fitness Pal.  But I know that along with the tracking, especially at the beginning, goes the planning.  The mindfulness. The being prepared. The knowing how you stand for the day and for the week, and therefore what you need to do now to get to where you want to be.

I started tracking in earnest in My Fitness Pal in October, and it automatically shares some the data both ways from my movement tracking armband device (BodyMedia), and with BodyMedia, you can export to your own datafiles to explore to your (my) numbers-geek heart's delight.  So I know I was on a relatively calorie restricted diet except for specific holiday days, and during the Christmas-New Year's week.  Letting off the brakes for a week made me shoot up in weight, but I was drifting up anyway, in spite of fairly diligent tracking.

I cut calories starting New Years, and I cut carbs way down. I managed at less than 100 grams of carbs a day - that is 2-3 times less than the typical American diet, I'm told. While I got the sudden peak off, I was not actually going back down to the maintenance weight level I've been at for a couple of years. So a week ago, I decided to go full Atkins. Their induction period is 20 grams of net carbs a day (subtract grams of fiber from total carbs) and as a general rule, I have a really hard time staying in that cap - I am more often in the 20-30 grams of carbs a day.

But here's the thing on very low carbs: I am less hungry during the day. If I start out at the very low carb level, I eat less all day. I do get hungry - like stomach rumbling actually hungry - but I am not fighting off cravings and urges all day. So perhaps the weight loss is driven by lower total calories, but who cares? If it's easier to stay at lower calories by eating this way, then its the way I should do it.

Also, there is little doubt that there is a big water impact. On Monday, I dropped 1.1 pound. Tuesday, another 1.4 pounds. Wednesday, I stayed the same as Tuesday. But Thursday, I popped back up 1.8 pounds! Then Friday, 2.6 pounds back down, to lower than Tuesday-Wednesday. And today, another massive drop, 1.8 pounds, to the lowest weight the scale has shown since last September! This is 5.1 pounds lower than Sunday! Clearly there are water effects going on here, but this is very typical of what happens on Atkins. If it stays off, it may have been water but it was long-term water, weighing me down and slowing me down.

With my daily weighing and weekly averaging, I manage to stay not too impressed with a daily value, but the weekly value is also down 1.5 pounds. Hooray!  And, I feel good, and can manage for a while at least the planning and cooking required to do this. And it is not a matter of fighting off cravings all day, though I certainly am thinking about food a lot, to keep the planning piece going.

I know, if I decide food is taking too big a piece of my attention, I'll back off, and there will be consequences.I believe it is much harder for me to lose the weight now than it was during the Big Loss. I am older, and also we know that your body remembers being fat and it wants to retain that. This magic number of 150 pounds has been crossed in a downward direction at least seven times before in the last 25 years. Studies say it will get harder each time.

Fat Chance

If you want to skip to the specific recommendations out of the book, scroll down to the section in purple below.

Part of what I do to motivate myself is read books about diet and exercise and health. The topic interests me, and it affects what I actually do and eat.  So the latest one, picked from hearing interviews with the author on the radio book tour circuit, is Fat Chance, by Robert Lustig. This is much more about health than about diet, and has added to my understanding of what is going on inside me and everybody else.  I've read a lot about how we metabolize fat and sugar and this book didn't contradict what I thought I knew, but adds depth to this in a very relevant way for me.

Dr. Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist, where for decades he has worked with children that have extraordinary weight problems, sometimes as incidental to much more serious problems.  Here, in the order I happen to remember them, are some of the observations in this book.

He starts from the premise that Gary Taubes introduced me to:  we don't grow fat through sloth and gluttony, ie not through eating too much and moving too little. Turn that upside down: we eat too much and move too little because of genetically and environmentally driven imperatives.  When a teen age boy eats his way through the whole refrigerator in a few hours during his growth spurt, we don't say he grows tall because he eats. We say he eats because he is growing tall. So it is with our body shape and our weight: how much we are driven to eat and how much or little we move is a result, not a cause, of our body chemistry.  Why our body chemistry is driving these imperatives is not necessarily (yet) well understood and agreed to, but never-the-less this point is critical:  it is not just a matter of will power.  Not only is it not our fault for being a slothful glutton, but even if we exercise more and eat less we might not lose weight. Taubes cites research on squirrels that are genetically driven to add weight in the fall - they can literally starve to death from organ failure while their body chemistry is diverting food energy to fat deposits.  Lustig has plenty of examples as well of abnormal children whose bodies are driven to add fat. He has to change something in their interior chemistry for them to be able to lose weight.

Lustig also distinguishes between health and fat.  Part of it is by distinguishing between types of fat: subcutaneous fat (big butt fat) and visceral fat (beer belly fat). It is the second that is unhealthy, and it is the fat that coats your internal organs. You can be skinny to the outside eye but be coated with visceral fat inside. He notes that a significant portion of "normal weight" people have unhealthy diets and internal fat. A significant portion of overweight people are quite fit, though they may have big butts. You might be better off being slightly overweight than underweight, at least in terms of how long you live.  But being morbidly obese certainly drives many major health issues. It is the collection of symptoms known as metabolic syndrome that comes from being obese that he is targeting his effects at.

Sad news: Lustig says pretty much no one will lose weight from exercise. Your body will compensate, and you will burn less calories when you sit and and sleep, and your appetite will increase. However, exercise is still the magic bullet for health.  You are probably swapping bad visceral fat for muscle or better (if unsightly) big butt fat, and there a gazillion other benefits.

Lustig also distinguishes between carbs, going much deeper than Taubes. He goes down to the molecular level of different sugars to discuss how they impact our health. His conclusion as I understand it: fructose is the worst for us, whether it comes from cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Anything that tastes sweet is bad.  But fiber offsets the bad impacts of fructose. This is why fiber-rich starchy foods can be fine for us (including whole fruit, but not fruit juice or even smoothies). He goes deep into the hormonal system (makes sense, he's an endocrinologist), and frankly I decided not to try to follow it all.

This was the first explanation about how both meat-centric low carb diets and bean and whole grain vegan diets can be equally healthy that made any sense to me.  Being a bread-itarian won't work - white rice and white bread, even without sugar, are calories that will drive fat storage. He also notes that processed food almost always has eliminated fiber and added sugar, and explains why that makes perfect sense from the producer's point of view: it actually makes it last longer. Our industrial food system requires us to make, package, and ship food over long distances and times. Grocery store bread will last on the counter for up to a couple of weeks, in contrast to home made bread which goes bad in a day or two.

Lustig is careful not to paint anything with too broad a brush. He distinguishes between ethnic populations, nations, and specific genetic conditions. He has a sweeping survey of environmental things that might be bad for us. We can't change our genetics, but we can change our environment and what we eat, and thus change our biochemistry.

So what does he recommend we actually do as individuals?  First, he says he really doesn't care much about weight, only health.  But we can do three things:  eliminate the poison, and take the two antidotes.

The poison is sugar, and it is insidiously everywhere.  Almost everything that has a bar code on it has sugar added to it. He sees no reason to ever drink any sugar.  Soda, frappuccinos, and fruit smoothies are almost equally bad for you, according to Lustig. He also condemns artificial sweeteners, for driving certain chemistries or responses. He actually recommends a national level public health intervention to counteract sugar's pervasiveness in our food, and in the meantime, he notes that only Americans above a certain income level or in a certain environment can afford the time and money to find, cook and eat foods without sugar.

The two antidotes:  fiber and exercise.  He makes a persuasive case that fiber causes our bodies to process sugar differently and better. He notes that the new Atkins prescription aims at many grams of fiber from vegetables, but few people achieve those levels (me included). Meat is so much easier to prepare, and it lasts longer and can be frozen and defrosted more easily.

I won't go into the benefits of exercise, which we all believe. It adds muscle, and it lowers insulin resistance, and it counteracts depression. We should all do more of it. Yes of course.

So what does this mean for me? I have not lost any weight this week, according to my weekly averaging. My body seems to be stabilizing a few pounds above where it was before the holidays. No. I can't allow this. I have tracked my food faithfully for the past few weeks, and my carbs have been around 100 grams a day, (this is about a half to a third of a normal American's diet, according to Atkins) with 10-20 grams of fiber (about average for Americans, but less than recommended). Yesterday's food was crazy, with grazing all evening while home alone. I'm going to go purely Atkins for a couple of weeks, and see if I can blast through this plateau.  I am also going to up the exercise, only to try to keep the body from shutting down. I'm going to hunt for fiber, and fill up on hunks of meat (not sausages or meatballs). I'll try to erradicate sugar, including no nightly treat - only a weekly one. We'll see how it goes, because I don't control my life completely but I've been at this long enough to know some of the things I need to do.