Flexible menu planning

Last Sunday, I wrote out a menu plan for this week.  This kind of thing never helped me before when I tried it, because I'd throw the whole plan away once I deviated from it, or I'd make it ridiculously detailed and rigid and full of labor-intensive dishes that required me to follow a recipe.

This time, I approached it differently in several ways.

1.  I told myself I could deviate from the written menu as needed; that the plan was merely a suggestion of meals I could make with the things I had on hand.  And I didn't care about switching Monday's dinner with Wednesday's lunch, or flipping the order of breakfasts around, or any of that.  I was totally flexible.

2.  I was realistic about the fact my husband and I would end up eating out a couple of times during the week, and that at least one day could be taken care with leftovers, so I didn't plan a dinner for every night of the week.  I planned 4 dinners and it worked out well. 

3.  I kept the food simple.  I accepted that I have limited patience, energy, and enthusiasm for sophisticated cooking.  I can try my hand at something new, or follow a recipe, or make something that requires me to wash several tools, pots, and pans for one dish...about once a week.  Beyond that, I feel hassled.

4.  I didn't worry about perfect balance or healthfulness.  I wanted to encourage myself to eat some good vegetables, fruits, and proteins, to eat at home a bit more, to throw together something more wholesome than buttered toast and milk for breakfast.  And I accomplished that!

I had some junky things this week, like flavored yogurts, french fries, buttered French bread, and a cheeseburger from Dairy Queen. But thanks mostly to my flexible menu planning, I also ate:

spinach

purple cabbage

carrots

red peppers

onions

tomatoes

green beans

zucchini

potatoes

broccoli with loads of fresh garlic

tangerines

strawberries

blueberries

an apple

cherries

orange juice

almonds

salmon

chicken 

eggs

lean Canadian bacon

turkey breast

All in all, not a bad week.  I like this system!

I recorded what I ate each day and I also jotted down what challenged me each day.  I'm starting to accept that every day, I will be challenged by cravings for crappy food.  It's predictable, it's not going anywhere, and I no longer see the point in getting so upset over it.  Sometimes I am going to give in to the cravings; more often, I am not.  None of the cravings lasted as long as I feared they would, and they usually occur in the afternoon or evening--I'm not being tortured from sunrise to sunset with these food thoughts.  The most irritating thing is when I crave the same item for many days in a row.  This is what I craved this week (I did not give in to any of these cravings, by the way):

Monday: craved McDonald's fries and hot fudge sundae

Tuesday: craved McDonald's milkshake or vanilla cone

Wednesday: craved chocolate chip cookie dough blizzard from Dairy Queen

Thursday: craved sugary kid's cereal. wanted to chow down on a whole box.

Friday: tempted to order cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, where we ate dinner

Saturday: felt like eating a pastry from the Starbucks inside my favorite Barnes & Noble

Sunday: considered making a fruit cobbler and smothering it in vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

These thoughts are ANNOYING, but they don't have to be my undoing.  There's something about accepting that my brain is going to come up with these ridiculous ideas every day that helps me stay a bit detached and calm.  It's kind of like "oh, what is it going to be today?"  Then it pops up as I'm going about my day, and I think "Yep, there it is.  Predictable."

I wrote out a new menu plan for this upcoming week and look forward to seeing how it plays out.  I turn 30 this week and know there will be some special treats thrown in there, and I'm fine with that.  I also have my long-awaited 20 week ultrasound on Tuesday and will hopefully learn the gender of the baby!  Weight continues to bounce around between 245 and 250--never lower or higher than that.

Time management=weight management?

I want to find a lifelong solution to my eating and weight problems.  I want this to be the last time I have to lose a significant amount of weight.  Yet I know that it’s always going to take time and effort to maintain whatever lower weight I stabilize at.

If this is going to be a part of my life forever, I think I should get clear on HOW MUCH time and effort it takes to maintain a healthier lifestyle and reasonable weight.  I can then plan other parts of my life with this reality in mind.  If I don’t keep enough time free for maintaining my health (taking care of such things as meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and kitchen cleanup, exercising, and much-needed spiritual and mental health practices), there’s a high probability I will gradually pack my life with more and more activities and responsibilities and end up dropping the ball on my health and weight maintenance.  It would be very easy to do this, especially with kids and a career in the picture.  In short order, I could regain everything and more, and this will only take a greater toll on my body as it ages.

I don’t want that to happen!  I know I will not be at my best for family or work life if I’m obese, depressed, and always fatigued.  And for me, those three things are deeply intermingled.  I’d rather scale back on the scope of what I do inside and outside the home, and do those (limited) things while feeling well and taking care of myself, than sacrifice my health to take on more and more.  I don’t want to have to fight this obesity battle throughout my entire life.  I don’t want to have to lose 125 pounds in my thirties, again in my forties, again in my fifties, again in my sixties…

I am speaking from experience here.  I lost a noticeable amount of weight my sophomore year of high school and during my fourth year of college.  (Never 125 pounds, though.  I didn’t need to lose that much back then.)  In both instances, the weight loss was facilitated by having a quieter-than-normal schedule for a decent stretch of time.  And in both cases, my schedule and commitments got ramped up again and I gained back everything I had lost and then some.  Perhaps a busier schedule didn’t make the regain inevitable, but since I didn’t have a clear idea of how much time I needed to set aside to take good care of myself, I failed to block out that amount of time.  And really, it’s not just a time issue, but an energy issue as well: I filled my schedule up with other activities, and doing so left me not only with less time, but less ENERGY to devote to working out and procuring/ preparing decent meals.  Not to mention my stress levels went up with a busier schedule, and stress depletes my willpower reserves and makes me want to eat.  What a mess!

So, to increase my odds of lasting success, I am going to start paying more attention to the time commitment aspect of this lifestyle change.  I am going to start tracking the amount of time I spend on things like kitchen work and exercise.  I’m certain there is a minimum time commitment required for achieving certain results, and I’ve got to figure out what this is for me.  After awhile, I hope to discover the most efficient yet sustainable/effective way of doing things.

Any thoughts or advice out there on time-and-weight management?

18 weeks pregnant and thinking thinking thinking

There's nothing much to share right now.  I spend much of my time these days thinking about the future, including how I want to tackle weight loss, weight maintenance, household cooking duties, and so on once the baby arrives.  One thing I'm trying to come to terms with is that I will have to invest much more time into meal planning, exercising, etc. than I do now if I want to achieve the results I desire.  And by results, I don't just mean a certain pants size -- I mean providing my child with a certain example, providing my family with a certain level of care.  I'm about to have unprecedented demands on my time due to the new baby, and simultaneously realizing I need to invest more time on this other front in order to progress further with it.  It's all a bit nerve-wracking, but I have to get real.

I lost the few pounds I had gained recently, and am back to 245.  It was nothing I did on purpose; those few pounds suddenly vanished over a 2 day period, though I had not changed my eating in any way.

It was just about a year ago that I joined a gym, started experimenting with a blog (first on Tumblr, then here), and decided to try to lose weight yet again. My weight at that time was 275.  In the 12 months that I've lost 30 pounds, there were weeks and months in which I gave up trying to reform my ways.  My binge eating only calmed down in January-February 2012.  My exercising has been terribly inconsistent throughout the twelve months.  And I've been pregnant for about 4 of the 12 months!  What a strange year!  Yet here I sit, in a better physical and mental place than I was a year ago.  My takeaway from this is that the whole "progress, not perfection" mentality really does get you somewhere if you give it some time.

It might take me another year to lose another 30 pounds.  After all, the next twelve months will involve the final 20 weeks of pregnancy, it will (hopefully) involve breastfeeding, it will involve a major life adjustment.  I can't accurately predict how each of those things will affect my body and mind, but I do think that shedding 30 more pounds amid all that would be a triumph.  So here's to another good 12 months!

16 weeks pregnant and pondering spirituality

I've had lots of stress lately--plumbing problems, financial stuff, relationship stuff.  I have managed to keep abstaining from sweets during this bout of stress, but it's not easy.  The stress triggers urges to give in and have something so I can feel pleasure, escape, relax (and make the urges themselves go away--the biggest and most immediate drive behind this whole cycle).  Pleasure and comfort are in very short supply these days without my favorite junk foods.

Every option seems difficult.  I outlined it in my last post.  Eating sweets moderately is difficult and requires a lot of energy and willpower.  Abstaining from them is difficult.  Binging and overeating are difficult ways to live too, for different reasons.  All of these options are difficult, but some of them lead to worse outcomes than the others, so I have to make my choice with that in mind.

Sometimes I wish there was brain surgery available that could remove or "wipe clean" the neural pathways that make sugar, binging, and food such a big freaking deal to me.  Because rewiring my brain through hundreds of daily decisions and actions is so damn hard.  Often I feel like I'm not making any progress and then I start to doubt whether lasting change is even possible.  I believe I can change my behavior, sure, but will the incessant whining in my head for MORE MORE MORE ever cease?  I wonder if I will be white-knuckling it to the grave, alternating between sheer willpower and mindfulness practices to get through my days without overeating or eating lots of sugary junk.  Both willpower and mindfulness take a ton of energy and effort, at least for me, so I question the sustainability of that.

IF the mindfulness stuff becomes more like second nature, though, MAYBE things will get a bit easier.  I found a Thursday night insight meditation group in my area and attended the meeting last week.  I really liked it.  I've been meditating on my own (inconsistently) and reading extensively on the topic of Buddhism for months now, sorting through different schools, ideas, and practices so I can piece together something that works for me.  I think I've rejected more aspects of Buddhism  than I've embraced; I'm not one for orthodoxy or pre-scientific nonsense and feel no need to  become more aligned with irrelevant Tibetan/Japanese/Sri Lankan/(fill in the blank) cultural trappings.  I'm a secular westerner that's influenced by Buddhism rather than a Buddhist influenced by secular western thought, that much is certain.  But the parts of Buddhism that make sense to me are becoming really important to my life.

No one would be more surprised than me if my lifelong food and weight woes brought me to a satisfying spiritual life around the age of 30.  It was my search for binge eating disorder help that led me to Vipassana (insight) meditation, and Vipassana led me to consider Buddhism as a whole.  I've never HAD a spiritual life before now.

Maybe that's part of the problem.

Update on my (near-) abstinence

I've been doing ok and maintaining near-abstinence when it comes to desserts.  A few days ago, I had a weird eating day and later realized I was blowing off steam. The kind of steam that builds as a result of restriction. Everything I ate that day was sweet and rich: a bagel with flavored cream cheese from Panera's, a chocolate whey protein-banana smoothie, and a small amount of rice pudding.  I ate very little for the day, but I didn't consider it an abstinent day by any means.

Yesterday, for the 4th of July, I didn't buy any sweet drinks like soda or lemonade, any chips, any desserts.  I told our guests they were free to bring anything they liked, and let them know we would be grilling meat and veggies and serving watermelon on the side.  They didn't bring anything to supplement our meal, but then we all went out for frozen custard and I did order a kid's size vanilla custard in a cup.  I liked it, but wanted more once it was over...and then felt that old anger and exasperation at always wanting MORE.

For now, I feel fine with how I'm doing.  Abstinence isn't torture day-in and day-out, the way it was when I was trying Overeater's Anonymous.  If every now and then I blow off steam or have a treat on a holiday or special day, it's fine.  It's what I would call near-abstinence, and I'm pleased with it because it means I'm not having sweets every single day anymore.

I have experienced a lot of bored and dull feelings lately, and I think it's because I've taken away a big source of fun and pleasure from my daily routine by omitting sweets.  Even though I was no longer regularly binging on sweets, they obviously remained an important part of my day and a major source of entertainment.  But that's the point--I don't want sweets to be my daily entertainment anymore.  I don't want them to be a "necessary" part of my day in any amount or in any fashion.  It'll take awhile for something else to fill the vacuum that's been created; I'm going to let that unfold naturally.

So that's where I am: near-abstinent, mostly at peace, more bored than usual.  Also up a couple of pounds since cutting sweets, but I attribute that to the fact that I'm 15 weeks pregnant and weight gain was going to start happening at some point!