Okay. It’s now clear to me beyond a shadow of a doubt. I am terrible at not dieting. Great at going full steam. Awful at easing off on the pedal.
This week? I’m now at 192.6 pounds. That’s up another 2.2 pounds since last week. And this time I have no excuses. No weddings. No parties. Just me and some good old fashioned EATING.
It’s been hot, so I haven’t exercised as much as I ought to. I’ve done a great job at breakfast and lunch, for the most part. Pretty much the same as I’ve been doing all along. Where I get into trouble is dinner. I somehow assumed if I ate sparsely for the first two meals each day, then I’d be able to eat “normally” for the last one.
Whoops.
I clearly need practice at what “normal eating” is. Of course, some of this weight gain was to be expected. That’s why my original plan had been to get down to 178, so that I could gain 7 pounds and be right where I wanted to be.
I’m starting to think I need to go back to that original plan. But there But I’m going to Chicago this week for a conference. I’ll be gone 6 days, eating out all of those days. This isn’t the formula for successful weight loss. I’ll try to be good, but I have no idea where I’ll be. Weighing food is totally out the window until next week. I’m hoping I’ll be able to walk enough to offset the food. We shall see.
I guess for now I’ll try to keep being good, and then I’ll go back hardcore on the diet when I get back from my conference. That seems like a good enough plan for now.
Sigh. This is depressing.
Everyone has their ideas on how to diet and so on, but I just wanted to share how I’ve been having some pretty painless success. If you’ve never heard of the My Fitness Pal app, it’s a pretty powerful tool for tracking the food you eat. I’ve just been using it to make sure I stay in my normal calorie intake each week, nothing crazy. I’ve lost about 19 pounds so far in the last month and a half just by being aware of how much I’m actually eating. I don’t even modify the foods I eat, just the amounts. Maybe something like that could help you attain that “in-between” stage you’re looking for.
Yeah. I think I need to be tracking how much I’m eating even when I’m not dieting–just so I can recalibrate just what a “normal” amount of eating really is.
This is what I meant when I asked how you keep the weight off. Are you really planning to count calories forever? I know I wouldn’t be able to keep that up.
Not forever, no. I think my problem is that I now have a lot of practice eating too much, and eating too little. I need practice at eating the right amount. So count calories until I have that down, and then stay there.
Ah. That makes sense.