PonderEthereal

Here’s the step in my diet when I tell people to heighten accountability, responsibility and encouragement. I’m on a diet again. I need to lose weight somethin’ FIERCE.

Three weeks ago, I weighed 172 lbs. That is 22 lbs over the highest end of my recommended weight range and 32 lbs heavier than I am accustomed to being. It is also 4 pants sizes bigger than my favorite pants. And as I sucked my stomach in to squeeze into my Jeans Formerly Known as Baggy, I got really angry and ready to change.

I’ve dieted many times over the last 7 years with varying success. In the past two years, although I’ve learned a lot about nutrition, exercise and health, I have been less successful losing weight. Invariably, I have always gained it back. Sometimes, doubly. So it was time to cut the crap with myself.

• You cannot lose 30 lbs without being hungry sometimes.
• Diet pills do not work.
• Fad diets don’t work for the long term. That’s why they are fads.

So this time, I went with something really simple and logical that agreed with everything I’ve learned about myself and diet and nutrition. The Hacker’s Diet aka How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition. So far, after 3 weeks, I’ve lost 12 lbs and I’m about to break a plateau that I’ve been at for about a week.

Reading the e-book is a must, first of all. You can skip the book if you WANT and just go straight to the spreadsheets but it’s his logic and reason that actually put the power in it for me. It made sense to me and I was able to convince myself and that’s important in self discipline.

Here are the things I am learning that I hope will make this diet a successful jumping off place for me :

• Not all of us have a working Eat Clock that tells us when we should eat and when we should stop eating. It’s possible to reprogram it or compensate for it.
• Rubber bag analogy. What goes in compared to what you burn dictates how much fat you have hanging off your bones. It’s that simple. Carbs might complicate blood sugar, meats might make you feel bloated - but all your body cares about is how much energy it’s getting out of the food and how much it will have to get from burning fat.
• No pain, no gain. You’re going to have to cut back on what you put in your mouth. That means you will be hungry. The newness wears off after a week and then you are hungry. Then it comes down to self discipline. And lets face it. If we had that much self discipline, we wouldn’t be overweight to begin with.

  We are intelligent beings and need a logical reason to convince ourselves that it’s worth it to be hungry. If your diet is telling you ‘you dont ever have to be hungry’, you have no logical reason to be hungry and you thus have an excuse to eat when you DO fee hungry which leaves it wide open for going right back to your old habits.

  I’m a little hungry here and there but rationing snacks and drinking lots of water curbs that and when it can’t be curbed, I know that I’m not starving. I have plenty of fat to burn. :) I remind myself of the years I’ve spent overeating and of the years I will have at a more ideal weight. It will only take 4 months of pain and I will adjust to eating less. 4 months of pain for the 4 years I’ve spent packing on the pounds and an all around heightened awareness of what I’m eating and how to keep the weight off is a very small price to pay.

• Recording my weight every day. The weigh myself once a week thing wasn’t working for me because I couldn’t catch myself in a cycle before it became detrimental. One of the down sides of weighing every day though is the wild ups and downs from water weight and winding up with only a vague concept of how much I weigh. When your’e on and off the scale and you have water weight and the scale fairies jump on behind you when you aren’t looking, the scale starts to get frustrating. That’s why, on this diet, learning to record my weight every day and find the average trend of weight loss or gain has helped an awful lot.
• Graph it. Graphing your weight shows you the overall trend. It also, in my case, gives me a visual goal to shoot for. It’s almost a reward for me to see that little blue line dip below the next goal point on the graph. I can shoot for pushing it down a little faster for a couple of days and it’s kind of a challenge.
• I don’t have to kill myself with exercising. An hour of very strenuous exercise only burns minimal calories, all things considered. I’ll do better doing a small amount of exercise each day to get my metabolism burning harder than I will by trying to sweat off the pounds with hard exercise. And let’s be realistic, when do I have the time, energy or patience to do hours of exercise? I use my stepper 4 times a week for 20 minutes while I’m watching a show on television and it’s working. The only time in the last month that I’ve sat down to watch a favorite show without exercising was this week while I’ve been sick.

The really important stuff I’ve learned that has kept me gaining weight up until now :

• Wiggle Room - and not just in my jeans! I have wiggle room in what I eat! I can eat a snack here or there without worrying that I’m going to weigh 5 extra pounds the next day. On the other hand, I know that once those snacks get to 3500 calories (that’s a lot of snacks), I’ve gained a pound so I am able to resist the urge when it’s not something I truely want to indulge in.
• I don’t have to eat everything I have access to that I like. I can have it anytime. It’s not going anywhere. I dont need to eat for the sake of being afraid I wont have a chance to eat it again.