Back from Vacation

I have been totally neglecting this blog lately, but I'm back now and resolved to update more often. I just got back from a 3 week vacation - most of which was a "staycation" - but, I live in San Diego, so that wasn't so bad. This whole lifestyle change thing that was necessary to lose weight isn't so bad. In fact, I love it. My husband and I keep kicking ourselves for not getting out sooner. We live in a beautiful city and a beautiful area.

We got a LOT of exercise on our vacation - not just exercise for the sake of exercise - but a lot of the activities we discovered when we were trying to spice up our physical activity ("PA," otherwise known as exercise) - we found that we really enjoyed. And we are still exploring, which is fun. We went paddleboarding off the coast of Santa Barbara, hiking in the hills surrounding Santa Barbara (Montecito), we went on a beautiful, long (for us) bike ride along Silver Strand Beach in Coranado, a long walk from Mission Bay to Mission Beach to Ocean Beach to Pacific Beach and around the bay. We went Kayaking several times out into Mission Bay in San Diego, including once out to see the fireworks on the fourth of July.  We had a so much fun exploring our beautiful city - I really wish we had done it before.

We also went out to eat a lot - not as much as we would have a year or so ago, but we did go out more than usual, it was our anniversary and we were visiting friends and family. Two things helped us to maintain our weight: (1) we were careful to order low calorie items from the menu and avoid bread, chips, etc. and (2) we were very active over most of our vacation. Both my husband and I maintained our weight loss. I didn't lose any more, but given that we were on vacation, I'm proud of myself for maintaining.

Now back to reality, less eating out, and back to my usual eating and exercise routine.

Good start, Disney

I just wanted to take a moment to recognize the responsible corporate decision that the Walt Disney Company made to stop airing ads for junk food aimed at kids during kid-focused programming. This will potentially lose Disney revenue, so good for them for opting to do it anyway. Of course, I'm curious to see what their definition of "junk food" is - and what nutritional standards they are applying - and I'm not saying that this is the solution to all of our problems around childhood nutrition - but it is certainly a start.

Excerpt:
"By 2015, all food and beverage products that are advertised, promoted or sponsored on the Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior, Radio Disney, Disney.com and Saturday morning programming for kids on ABC-owned stations (Disney owns ABC) will have to meet the company's nutrition criteria for limiting calories and reducing saturated fat, sodium and sugar."
Here is a link to the story.

Unpleasant reminder

As a rule, I do not step on the scale during my time of the month. It's just a horrible idea. Women can tend to gain a lot of weight during this particular time frame. I have read other blogs that have said the same thing, they are all quite correct and I know better.

That said, I was feeling pretty cocky and confident this morning because I kicked ass this weekend. I kept my calories under control, succeeded in my goal of adding more fruits and lots of veggies back into my daily eating and I got a ton of exercise. Friday, I did water aerobics for an hour, then I made sure to get my lunch walk in - a good 30 minutes of brisk walking, then I went dancing for about an hour and a half with my husband Friday night. Saturday, I walked for about 13 miles around Mission Bay. Sunday, I had a good 45 minute workout on the elliptical and then I went dancing again for about an hour and a half on Sunday night (fun and great exercise). So, I rocked. Like I said, I was feeling pretty confident and cocky this morning - I was sure, despite the fact of the time of the month, that I would step on the scale and be down. I stepped on and waited for the beautiful numbers. Up 3 pounds. Argh! Okay, lesson learned and confirmed. Do not step on the scale - no matter what - during that time of the month! Terrible, discouraging thing to do!

Troubling Trend

I love to pontificate about everything that I am doing to lose weight - particularly when I am doing really well and have all kinds of brilliant tips and wisdom to share. When I slip, I don't feel nearly as brilliant and it's not quite as much fun to pontificate. That said, this is one of those posts where I'm going to share something about which I'm a bit worried.

I track everything I eat. It isn't very difficult now that I'm in the habit, and it really keeps me on track.  Because I track everything I eat on an app, I can go back and look at my net calories for the week over the past few weeks - I've noticed that this has been trending up. I'm still netting between 1200 and 1400 calories a day - but my overall calories consumed (not net calories)  for the week and my daily calories are trending up slightly from a few weeks ago and from a few weeks before that. Only slightly, but it makes me nervous.

The reason this makes me nervous is because I can see this trend continuing until I am eating way too many calories again. The gradual increase could very well sneak up on me and become a bad habit, and bad habits are incredibly difficult to break.

Therefore, I need to be more mindful and re-evaluate what I am eating. I see right away that I have been adding a lot of breads into my diet (I really like pita bread with my hummus, for example) - so I need to reduce the breads again and pick up more veggies with (or without) the hummus when I want a small snack. The other problem I can see is that I have been snacking more. It isn't out of control, but I need to watch it and limit when I snack and on what I am snacking. Like I said, I'm still keeping my net calories fairly low because I am pretty active, but I can see these creeping calorie increases causing a problem and becoming a hard to break habit.  I'm going to watch them and I'll start by reducing the breads and increasing the veggies.

Planning to Avoid Catastrophe

Okay, so maybe I'm being a little overly-hyperbolic calling getting a few too many calories in a day a catastrophe...but these things can add up.  Anyway, I had lunch with a colleague and a former colleague yesterday.  To prepare for this, I planned my entire day and entered it into MyFitnessPal.  I knew what I was going to eat for breakfast and for dinner and my morning snack, and I knew what exercise I was getting.  After I entered all my information, I could see that I had 900 calories left for lunch and other snacks.

Prior to going out to lunch, I looked at the menus for our first choice and second choice of restaurants (if one was too busy, we were going to go to the other one to avoid a long wait over our lunch hour). I chose what I would order in each restaurant, so that I had a plan no matter where we went. My lunch would end up totaling 600 - 800 calories. This was more than I usually have for lunch, but given how I structured my day knowing that I needed to make room for lunch, it worked nicely. Ultimately, lunch was 650 calories. Not bad. This left me an additional 250 with which to play for snacks - and 250 can go a long way with fruits and veggies.  I spaced out my snacks and my dinner for the remainder of the day and finished with about 100 calories left in my budget at the end of the day. (I ate about 1600 calories total and did 500 calories of exercise - so my net calories were 1100 / 1200 in my budget)

I have to say it again, planning is very important to weight loss and weight management. It allows me to have days where I go out to the restaurant with friends and colleagues without overdoing the calories and without going hungry for the rest of the day. It takes some practice to develop the habit - but in my opinion, it is just as important as diet and exercise.

The Challenges of Travel

I just got back from a 2-day conference out of town. These trips are always challenging, and, to be honest, I allowed for a few more calories than I'm comfortable with this time.  That said, I'm happy overall with how I handled it - excess calories notwithstanding.

Here is what I did to keep it under control:

1. Snacks: I packed some of my own snacks on which to munch should I get hungry between workshops. A couple pieces of portable fruit (apples and oranges), a couple of bars (HMR), and three low-calorie muffins that I made at home (blueberry yogurt).
   
2. Breakfast: I packed my own breakfast. I packed the muffins for breakfast on day 2, because I'm always a sucker for the breakfast at these things. Usually, they offer bagels, cream cheese, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, sometimes waffles, pastries and fruit. Simply eating the fruit will not satisfy me, and I'll be snacking at the first break on whatever bread product they offer. So, I used to just eat what they put out - a bagel, maybe some eggs and a sausage with fruit. The food isn't great at these things (bagels are generally dry, eggs are pretty gross, particularly when they cool off, sausage is greasy...) so that is lots of calories for no good reason (lots of calories I don't love).  This time, I ate my muffin in the room (about 150 calories, and relatively filling) and then I filled my plate with fruit at the buffet table (another 120 - 150 calories). Not bad. I avoided the juices offered, but I did have coffee with a little cream (about a tablespoon of half and half - 20-30 calories).  This breakfast did the trick.
   
3. Breaks: I avoided the snacks at break.  First, there were no fruit and veggies involved in these break snacks at all (not that I saw). Second, most of the snacks were bread / fat. They had fried hush puppies (or something similar and fried, I saw floating around on plates), warm pretzels with cheese, popcorn, cookies...and soda. I grabbed a water and made my way into the next room to chat with others. At one point, I went up to my room for a couple of minutes at the break (and ate some of my cheerios), just to avoid the snacks - which looked and smelled great.
   
4. Lunch: The lunches at this particular function were buffet-style, which made it a lot easier for me. I loaded my plate up with a lot of salad, put a small amount (about 2-3 Tbsp) of balsamic vinaigrette dressing on my salad. I usually like dressing on the side, but that wasn't possible here. Then, I took a very small piece of roasted chicken (about 2 oz), a slice of roasted potato, and a cup of minestrone soup.  I avoided the gravy, the breads, the red meat, and the desserts. All in all, more calories than I would have liked, but not so bad, considering that I was at a conference.
   
5. Exercise: I arrived a couple of hours before the conference began, so I made sure to look at the hotel information book in my room to find the fitness center. I then went down and found it prior to my first meeting. After all my meetings, I made sure to visit the fitness center for 30 minutes on the elliptical. It's less time than I usually exercise, but it's better than nothing. Then next morning, I made sure to wake up on time to put in another 30 minutes before breakfast because I knew that with travel and meetings, I wouldn't have any more time to exercise and I knew I would be so wiped out when I arrived at home that I wouldn't want to exercise.
   
6. Travel snacks: I packed a couple of cups of cheerios, some extra muffins, and HMR bars to eat on the train on the way up and back. In business class, Amtrak offers muffins, apple juice, coffee and other snacks for your trip, none of which are really very diet friendly. Therefore, on the way up, I had two of my muffins and a coffee for breakfast, that worked really well. And on the way back, I had an HMR bar and a diet soda. This helped to satiate me and to avoid the snacks that Amtrak provides, which, again, aren't that great and just add a lot of unnecessary calories.

My slip up: I am certainly not perfect, and I did have 2 meatball sliders (those small hamburger-type appetizers) and one chicken slider at the reception on the first night. I was hungry and this was what the conference organizers offered up for dinner. I figured it was the sliders or room service, which really didn't offer any very low-calorie options. Still, I probably should have stopped at two and a salad from room service would have likely been a better choice.

So, all in all, I think the trip went pretty well - and there you have my travel tips :-) 

Recognizing the Value in Everyone

I think it is important to recognize the value in everyone. This may see a bit off-topic, or cheesy for a weight loss blog, but hear me out, it is very relevant to weight loss in particular.

It is still difficult for me to talk about how being overweight made me feel.  While watching the HBO documentary mini-series, I could relate with quite a few of the people who spoke. One of the individuals was a judge who talked about his feelings about being overweight and his inability to solve the problem. He said that he was successful and smart and could do anything else he put his mind to, but he could not solve his weight problem, no matter how hard he tried. I can totally relate to that sentiment. I felt exactly the same way. I'm fairly accomplished, and I have always been able to accomplish anything to which I put my mind, almost to a fault. My husband teases me about how I "stick onto things," my parents say that I was "strong-willed" as a child, and I've been told on more than one occasion how "hard-headed" or stubborn I am. It's true, once I decide to do something, I do it. Except to lose weight. I tried and tried and tried and failed and failed and failed. I knew what to do, I just could not motivate myself to do what I needed to do. I finally did it, but only after well over a decade of being obese. I finally figured it out and now I'm well on my way to my goal and I know I'll reach it. But, I didn't do it alone. It was not by sheer force of my own willpower or my strength of character or my intelligence that got me through. I did it, make no mistake, and I am incredibly proud of myself. However, I did have help and support and I cannot forget that. Everyone from my husband, my friends, my family, and my co-workers, to the teachers and participants in the exercise classes at the gym, the instructors at the weight loss clinic, and my doctors helped me. I have a couple of family members who should get prizes for how wonderfully inspiring and encouraging they are. And I am grateful to each one of these people for the part they played.

So, there are two lessons here:

1.  As people, whether we are of a healthy weight, overweight, obese, healthy, unhealthy, exercise fanatics, or not - we need to appreciate the position of others. I would never wish the way that I felt, physically or -  probably more importantly - emotionally, on anyone else. It was awful. Believe me, overweight people know they are overweight. Generally, they do not like it. If one of them shows up in your exercise class, if you see someone running, biking, swimming, skating...smile, welcome that person, know that they are likely outside of their comfort zone and they are making an effort. I was intimidated when I started this process. I was intimidated every time I tried something new. I still am, to a certain extent, though my confidence is much higher than it was and it is much easier than it was. Your encouragement will help, even if you don't say anything. Even if all you do is smile and be courteous. Recognize the value in the person, this could be someone you love who is trying to get healthy.  On the other hand, if you are overweight, don't assume that someone who is fit and healthy got that way purely through the blessings of genetics. It's true, that plays a role, but generally, there is a lot of hard work involved. So, there should be no judging on either "side."
2. As someone who had a horrible weight problem and will have to work to manage my weight for the rest of my life, I have to appreciate those people who accepted me when I was overweight, did not judge me (or at least not in any obvious way) and encouraged and helped me when I was finally in a place to lose weight.  Some of these people may simply have been doing their jobs or behaving like family and friends are "supposed to" behave, but it made all the difference to me. I am a pretty strong person, and in the end, I did this for myself.  I would never have admitted it - but looking back - I needed the support and the encouragement. It was nice to hear it at work when people could see my progress. It was very encouraging to hear my husband to tell me how proud of me he was / is.  It was incredibly motivating to feel welcome and comfortable in exercise classes with a bunch of people who were in far better shape than I. So, thank you to those people - and I'll tell them in person wherever I can. I think it is important for people to understand their impact and the value of what they do in their work and in their lives.