weight loss Archives

It’s been more than two months since I hard reset my eating habits and started teaching myself to cook. Some friends have started asking me about my diet, and while I am not a nutritionist and this is not meant to be a plan for you to follow. I’m happy to share what’s working for me.

I started writing down everything I ate

Some people can’t stand this part, and I don’t blame them, but for me it was the only way to figure out what I needed to change. In the process of simply recording what I was eating I found I was less likely to eat junk food, because I didn’t want to have to log it. I focus mostly on staying withing my my macronutrient balance (carbs vs fat vs protein vs sugar) than counting calories.

I logged pretty religiously for about a month. Yes, it was tedious. I entered in recipes to calculate the nutritional information, pulled it up from restaurant websites when I ate out, and estimated when I had to. Now that I’ve developed better habits I don’t log as much, but I still track my eating 3-4 days per week.

What I’m not eating (and drinking)

In a lot of ways, this is more important than the stuff I am eating.

I cut way down on sugar, both added sugar and the stuff that occurs in fruits and veggies. After the first phase of “cut out junk food” I started tracking my sugar intake and even then I was still getting more than 100 grams of sugar each day. I don’t really want to think about how much I was getting before. Now I try to stay under 50g.

I eat out a lot less. Before I started this process, I was eating out or getting takeout 5+ times per week. Now I cook fresh meals for dinner and eat leftovers for lunch. I try to limit my meals out to one dinner and one lunch per week.

I don’t drink my calories. One can of coke has 33g of sugar (out of my daily 50). Not worth it. This goes double for most of the drinks at Starbucks. I’m trying to wean myself off of Diet Coke, because I don’t think the artificial sweeteners are doing me any favors either, but that one is going to be a longer battle.

I curbed my drinking. Aside from the large amounts of calories and sugar in many alcoholic drinks, there is some evidence that alcohol inhibits muscle growth. I now limit myself to 1-2 drinks per week, and drink mostly hard liquor on the rocks (which doesn’t come swimming in sugar and I tend to drink it more slowly than beer).

So what does that leave?

For breakfast, which I eat after my workout, I try to get in a good amount of protein and fiber. I keep a bowl full of hard boiled eggs in the fridge, and might pair that with half a cup of high fiber cereal for a quick breakfast. I also cook quinoa and keep it in the fridge, it can be mixed with fruit if I want something sweet, and is also delicious with a soft boiled egg. If we have egg whites handy I might make a big batch of egg white muffins and grab a few of those.

Lunch is almost exclusively leftovers from another night’s dinner, although occasionally I’ll make myself a salad if I happen to have spinach on hand. Every few weeks I’ll make a big batch of kale minestrone or sad vegetable soup and freeze it in individual portions for a lunch I can grab on the way out the door.

For dinner, I cook from scratch 3 days a week, eat leftovers two more days, and then on weekends we usually eat out on Saturday and have pizza at grandmom’s on Sunday. I plan my meals on the weekend and try to have a good balance of lean meats and vegetarian dishes. I look at the recipe nutrition information and look for meals that are well balanced rather than overloaded with any one macronutrient (e.g. fat, sugar, carbs). Some of my standby recipes include:

I try to keep at least 2 meals worth of ready-to-bake food in the freezer at all times. I follow the guidelines in the book Don’t Panic, Dinner’s In the Freezer, although I usually modify the recipes as they tend to be very heavy as written. These meals are prepared and then frozen (uncooked or partially cooked) and just need to be popped in the oven for a brain dead meal. This has rescued me from a night of “I’m tired, let’s just order in” on many occasions.

The turkey chili recipe is great because aside from the ground turkey, which can be frozen, all the ingredients are canned / nonperishable. I keep one recipe’s worth on hand for weeks when I don’t get to the grocery store. In general, my diet strategy involves a lot of planning ahead when I have time so that I don’t make unhealthy choices when I don’t.

Snacktime

I avoid snacking between meals unless I’m absolutely starving. Most of the time when I want a snack I’m really just bored, and I’ll make myself some tea if I just need an excuse to get up and move around. I know I’m really hungry when I feel my energy levels plummet, or when even a handful of raw cabbage sounds delicious. Favorite snacks include the low sugar flavors of KIND bars, greek yogurt (none of the high sugar fruit flavors though), raw veggies, or a hard boiled egg. Mostly though I try to eat enough at meals that I don’t feel the need to snack.

Junk Food and Dining Out

There is, and always will be, a special place in my heart for sugary carbs like cupcakes, brownies, ice cream, and candy bars. I have by no means completely eliminated these from my diet, but I do pay a lot more attention to how much I’m eating and when. On days when I know I’ll be indulging in some cake (say, every Sunday at grandmom’s because it is always someone’s birthday) I am careful to avoid junk food and sugar at other meals.

At restaurants I steer towards lighter fare, but don’t go too nuts with restrictions. Limiting the frequency of meals out goes a long way here. If I’m being good I’ll skip the appetizer, order a salad, and try to eat a reasonable amount of food regardless of the restaurant portion size. But sometimes it is just worth it to eat a burrito the size of my head, and that’s why I eat carefully the rest of the week.

Eating healthy is great but this burrito makes life worth living.

When I plan in advance I don’t find it hard to stick within my daily allotment of calories, fat, and sugar while enjoying a slice of cake or a burrito the size of my head.

Room for Improvement

I’m still working to develop good habits, and probably always will be. I need to work to incorporate more fresh veggies, and learn to navigate appetizers and cocktail parties a little better. I will destroy a cheese plate if given half the chance. While I’m good about not drinking at home or when we go out, I am practically incapable of turning down a craft beer or nice glass of wine when offered. By eating healthy at home I can enjoy this stuff without completely blowing my plan, but I would like to feel a little more in control of these situations going forward.

Following my miscarriage I did a lot of loafing and moping. With said loafing and moping I also did a lot of eating and drinking. In the last two months I’ve gained more than 15 pounds and my body fat has shot up, while my strength has deteriorated to the point I can no longer do a pull up, much less the two I could do this past summer. So it’s time to crack down on both my eating and my exercise habits.

Track My Weight on Fitbit

First up is my diet. I did Weight Watchers for a while a few years ago, and had a lot of success with it. I know what I should and should not be eating (as well as how much). While I may decide to go the tedious account-for-every-bite route later on, for now I want to focus on simply eating healthy food. A nutritionist friend of mine pointed out that small, incremental change is easier to maintain so I’m starting with dinner. I’m planning a week’s worth of meals at a time, aiming to cook fresh food 4 days a week. By planning dinner ahead, I can avoid a lot of the last minute “I don’t want to cook* so let’s order in / eat out.”

I also joined a cheap gym. I do have a treadmill and pull up bar at home, which I haven’t been using enough, but since I work from home there’s a psychological advantage to going to an actual gym. Mine is on the way to/from my daughter’s day care, so I can easily stop there on the way home from dropping her off. It helps to go to the gym before I check my email and start getting into “work mode.” I find that if I can force myself to go, I work out longer at a gym. But mostly I joined it for access to weights and dumbbells, which are both too expensive and large for me to want to invest in for home. It does, however, mean I need to get up earlier and go to bed at a reasonable hour. No more playing video games until 1am.

I’m not expecting any dramatic Biggest Loser style transformations. I know how to lose weight, and that’s not my goal here. Instead I’m hoping to break out of the habit of eating mostly junk food and then loafing around because I feel too tired / lazy to exercise. I have a feeling I’ll slim down a bit in the process, but this is for the long game.

* Full disclosure: RD does almost all of the cooking around our house, so this is a big change on that front too.

Tag: weight loss

What I’m Eating Now