Weight Loss Matters Posts

I wrote earlier about just how few calories are burned per hour whilst sitting at the computer. At the time, I hoped my body would comprehend the link between the minimal calories burned and the number of calories it seems to demand.

No such luck.

I’ve reached the point where even two “slimming shakes” per day and one dinner that doesn’t make my husband scream still surpass the number of calories I expend in any given day. That’s not likely to change, either, since so much of my time is spent online.

As a result, I’m giving serious thought to begging my doctor for some kind of surgery. Not the traumatic, bariatric kind. I find that too invasive and too risky. But a little rubber band that tells my stomach to stop demanding so much food that, really, I don’t need and won’t burn off?

That’s sounding awfully good to me. Better yet: I’d actually need to gain weight before qualifying.

Actually being able to eat for a few months without stressing over every calorie — just so I could get my weight up to qualify before I could get a surgery to help me lose that weight and then some — sounds kind of like heaven to me.

When my in-laws visit, as they did over the weekend, my life becomes a blur of cooking and doing dishes, with seldom an hour to rest after one meal before it’s time to start preparing the next. Sure, I could make life easier by ordering in pizza, but since they both have numerous health issues I’m a bit hesitant to feed them foods which could only exacerbate their problems and — worse yet — might prolong their stay.

Besides, all of that time spent cooking and cleaning spares me from having to endure hours of chit chat about memories they share with my husband but which I’m no part of.

My goal for the weekend (in addition to making it through without losing my temper in a psychotic rampage) was to simply maintain my weight loss from last week. Not to lose more, mind you: just to keep from packing back on the two pounds I’d recently lost.

I’d read somewhere that blue plates diminish one’s appetite, but since I don’t have any of those I opted for using a blue tablecloth instead. I’m not sure it did much to prevent overeating, but it disguised stains nicely.

I stuck with healthy meals, too, starting each meal with courses of soup and salad in the hope of having filled up on lower-calorie foods before getting to the main entree and side dishes. It worked quite well.

A little too well, as a matter of fact: I now have a refrigerator full of leftovers, but with two fewer people here to eat them. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I’d rather eat leftovers for the rest of the week than continue to have house guests.

As for the weight loss? I lost close to 300 pounds once my mother-in-law got off my back this morning and left en route to her own house.

What a great way to start a Monday!

I like weighing myself on Fridays as a means of keeping my eating in check over the weekend. I figure, if I’ve gained during the week then the weekend’s a good chance to spend time making healthier meals and exercising. If I’ve lost, then I want to keep that momentum going by avoiding opportunities to pig out.

Somehow, I managed to lose 2 pounds this week.

I’m not quite sure how it happened. I haven’t been any more active than usual: the ragweed and mold count are still high enough that outdoor activity is out of the question thanks to my severe allergies.

One thing I did do last week might have helped. I sat down and made a spreadsheet of my normal day-to-day activities, together with a running, hour-by-hour total of how many calories I burn in an ordinary day.

Thanks to that approach, I realized I’m only burning 60 calories per hour while I sleep at night, and a mere 80 calories per hour while I sit at the computer. That shed a whole new light how to make proper food choices while running a calorie deficit throughout the day.

For instance, 8 hours of sleep gives me a 480 calorie cushion by breakfast. So I’ve been opting for a 250-calorie breakfast to keep that calorie deficit going.

Between breakfast and lunch I’m mostly at the computer, burning perhaps another 320 calories. If I want to maintain a calorie deficit, I’ve got to keep my lunch choice around 300 calories.

Since I do manage a little housework between lunch and dinner, I typically burn around 500 calories by then. Even so, to keep my ratio of calories in to calories out in proper alignment, I’ve got to have a much lighter dinner than I’d grown used to having.

That hour-by-hour calorie burn is so small, in fact, that I realized I had to cut out snacking altogether if I wanted to enjoy anything large enough to be considered a true meal.

Sounds obvious, I know, but until I’d sat down and charted how very few calories I actually burn each day, I’d never really grasped just how many excess calories I was eating each day.

And in other announcements: I will be attempting to go without alcohol while my in-laws are in town this weekend. Wish me luck.

And, yes, I could increase my food intake if I’d increase my physical activity. Which I do plan to do at some point — I’m just not sure how to find the time right now. Besides, I think the best way for me to start is to first get control over the amount of food I’m consuming — and to get comfortable eating less food, less often. Which I’ve been doing, and I’ve got two missing pounds to prove it.

Earlier we were talking about the “good ol’ days,” and how people ate in the 1950s compared to how we eat these days. As a number of you noted, back when gravy-swamped Salisbury Steak and buttery mashed potatoes swam on our plates next to green beans simmered in bacon fat and a slice of pie for dessert, Americans were still more thin.

We aren’t just imagining that, either.

[T]he notion that Americans ever ate well is suspect. In 1966, when Americans were still comparatively thin, more than two billion hamburgers already had been sold in McDonald’s restaurants, noted Dr. Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California. The recent rise in obesity may have more to do with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles than with the quality of our diets.

“The meals we romanticize in the past somehow leave out the reality of what people were eating,” he said. “The average meal had whole milk and ended with pie…. The typical meal had plenty of fat and calories.”

“Nostalgia is going to get us nowhere,” he added.

No doubt, such nostalgia is part of the lure of Atkins-style diets which tell us we can enjoy that same buttery goodness (albeit with mashed cauliflower in place of the spuds). I know I, for one, find myself often growing sick of munching on celery stalks and the Styrofoam substitutes known as rice cakes and begin thinking that breakfasts of bacon and fried eggs, lunches of burger patties topped with butter pats and slices of Brie, followed by a medium-rare rib eye steak with Caesar salad and roast asparagus for dinner all sounds like a grand way to diet.

Unfortunately, my body has yet to respond well to that kind of diet. In fact, it’s that precise kind of eating — taken up right around the time I got married — that’s packed on the 40 pounds which seemed to appear on my belly, ass and thighs oh, about three days returning home from my honeymoon. (That joke about wedding bands adding 50 pounds to a woman’s body does, unfortunately, hit a bit too close to home for comfort if you ask me.)

One thing I have noticed: the size of my waistline has grown directly in proportion to the amount of time spent at my computer. And, no, that’s not all caloric-related.

I have, on and off through the past 20 years, kept food logs. Being a pack rat of sorts, I’ve also kept the majority of my logs in a huge box in our storage room. While cleaning out some of my husband’s unnecessary crap a little clutter last week, I ran across them. I couldn’t resist the chance to thumb through one or two, secretly hoping to remember just how I used to eat back when I effortlessly remained a size 4.

You can imagine my surprise when I saw, in my own handwriting no less, that I was actually eating quite a bit more back then. Oh, sure, I was also a bit more active: I walked from my parking space at university to my classes and back, and I went out dancing both weekend nights. I hauled hampers of dirty laundry up- and downstairs rather than ferry them from one room to another on the same floor. And I spent my home-bound evenings on the floor in front of the TV doing leg lifts or donkey kicks and crunches — something I don’t do much anymore thanks to all of the Cheerios, Legos and cat hair now covering our carpet wherever our home furniture and my piles of books don’t already occupy.

One thing I did not do much of: sitting behind a computer. Yes, I had one — I was online quite a bit of time, even — but with a 9600 baud modem (something that was state-of-the-art at the time but nowadays would be justifiable grounds for a homicide spree), being “online” really meant getting up and cleaning house or folding laundry whilst waiting for a web page to load.

In other words: I didn’t sit a lot back then. I was up, and I was moving, thanks to both the configuration of my apartment and the slowness of the World Wide Web. My waist was smaller then, too. When I did gain weight — and I admit to yo-yo’ing quite a few times in those years — it settled on my hips and ass but not at all on my waist. Gaining weight meant simply looking more like an hourglass — something not nearly as desirable in those pre-J.Lo days.

Sometimes I wonder if these things aren’t linked: despite the amount of calories being the same then and now (actually, in fact, a bit higher then), does sitting at a computer by necessity lead to big bellies?

Consider, for instance, the number of muffin tops you see on young girls these days. Girls with coltish legs, lithe arms and still relatively flat chests but big, bulging love handles spilling over their waistbands. They are, of course, the reason why those swing tops, Empire waistlines and baby doll cami’s have come back in style: how else to hide the flab that flops over.

It’s not just young girls who experience this, though. I, myself, have gone from the allegedly “healthier” pear-shape to what can most kindly be described as apple-esque. I see it in other women, too: ladies who are equally computer-bound and whose bodies resemble potatoes perched atop two toothpicks. I have to admit: I envy the fact that at least their legs have remained thin.

Is it our computer culture that’s causing this, and not merely our calorie consumption? One has to wonder. I know I do. But I also wonder: what if it is? Would I actually be willing to cut my time at the computer by half (or even more) in return for the effortless size 6 of my past?

Decisions, decisions.

UPDATE: I may be on to something. Bloggrrl shares my plight.

A while back I read a magazine article (which I now can’t find) about a woman who spent an entire month living in a 1950s style household, eating meals prepared precisely as called for in 1950s recipes, performing housework exactly as a housewife would have done it in the 1950s.

She lost 14 pounds in a month. It was, she said, the easiest and best diet/exercise program she’d ever been on.

Now, I’m not about to go out and replace my nice upright vacuum with one of those horrid, awkward cannister things that turn floor cleaning into a wrestling match. Nor am I going to start mopping my kitchen floor daily whilst wearing high heels and a pearl necklace.

I am, however, doing my best to remember that even if she was eating steak, home fries, creamed peas, corn bread and a glass of milk for dinner, she was still consuming fewer calories than I’m probably getting in my Cobb salad. Consider, for instance, the drastic portion size difference that’s taken place.

At what point did we begin to expect larger portions even though it means higher prices — and bigger waistlines? I really don’t remember, but it’s interesting to see that the portion size pendulum has begun to swing back to the other, smaller side.

At TGIFriday restaurants, for instance, they’re now advertising smaller menu options at prices that aren’t all that significantly smaller. Yet I’m happy to pay for them anyway because I know that such a choice won’t do as much damage to my diet as its larger counterpart on the regular menu.

Interesting, isn’t it, that as we continue to battle the bulge in America we’re starting to equate “value” not so much with serving size but with how it fits our lifestyles, instead.

(The bandwidth for this post has been compensated by this mention of Century furniture.)

Since I’ve been sick for the past three days, I didn’t bother stepping on the scale. I’d kind of hoped, as a matter of fact, that all of the soup I’ve been living on would’ve led to a little weight loss.

No such luck.

Sure, I didn’t gain an ounce but I haven’t lost any, either. I’m going to blame the sodium content. Yeah, that’s it: I must be retaining water. By the way, are you interested in buying some shore front property in Arizona? What? You’re not that gullible? Me, neither.

You know, if this keeps up I’m not going to need to rent an animal costume for Halloween this year. I’ll just need to dress in gray from head to toe and tell folks I’m going as an elephant. They won’t have a hard time believing me, I’m sure.

One month ago today my husband went out of town on business. At the time, I consoled myself with the fact that his absence would give me the opportunity to “eat like a girl” (read: salads, not steaks) and work out whenever I wanted.

And, for the most part, I did eat like a girl. I’ve had Healthy Choice or Lean Cuisine for lunch and dinner each day, and breakfast has consisted of either a Slim Fast shake or a bagel with that fake-butter spray.

Sure, I’ve had nachos twice and one day I even ate a cheeseburger — man, that was good — but for the most part I’ve been eating just a fraction of what I ordinarily do.

So, ok, I didn’t work out for an hour each day. I didn’t even work out a half hour each day, but I’ve certainly been a bit more active than when he’s home. I’ve had better sleep, too.

But does my scale show it? Does it show any loss at all?

No. No it does not.

My clothes fit the same, so I don’t even get the Fat Girl’s consolation that “Oh, but I’ve gained muscle even if I haven’t lost weight!” (a mantra which conveniently ignores that a pound is a pound the whole world ’round).

This sucks. I suck. I’m so disappointed and so sick of frozen, prepackaged meals! Tomorrow night I’m tucking in to a big, juicy rib eye and a baked potato topped with sour cream. Screw the diet. I am hungry, dammit.

Dieting will resume Monday. Honest.

I haven’t lost a single pound this week. The good news is that I also haven’t gained a single pound, either.

Anna is doing great, though: 9 pounds down. She’s going off of Alli but still following the eating plan. Way to go, girl!

Chelle dropped two pounds for a total now of forty! She credits her success to Slim-Fast and water.

How’re you doing? Are you ready to lose more this coming week?