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Results … Month #5

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Results … Month #5 (Down 33.8 lbs)Results Month 5

Is this a diet that is beginning to fail or do I have a good excuse for such a modest loss in this, the 5th month of the program?

I’m going to claim that I’ve got a good excuse! And I will use that same excuse for being almost two weeks late in posting my weight loss for the previous month. I think I’ve just come through the most harrowing couple of months of my life. I’m not talking the extreme stress that might be the consequence of the loss of a loved one here. Nor am I talking financial ruin, nor any major health issue. What I am talking about is taking one of those life-changing decisions that saw me pick up all the dominoes & just toss them in the air!

In a nutshell, we decided to move to the coast. At the 11th hour, following a vacation, we changed direction & switched coasts! Our house sold quickly. With a short closing. And the maelstrom began. I won’t bore you with all the details but let me share one anecdote from the adventure that that typifies how totally upended our lives have become. En route to our new destination, we left our hotel room to eat. When we returned, the cat was missing! We were stressed enough already, this was just too much. Had housekeeping opened the door to let our moggie escape? After half an hour of searching the room, wandering the lobby and corridors of the hotel, we finally discovered our missing pet. She had, somehow, found a hole in the fabric of the box-spring and made her way inside the box-spring base of the bed!

Amid all the turmoil of fast-closing houses, finding a replacement home with a short closing was a huge challenge. Scheduling movers, cancelling services, signing up for new services, & all the stuff of moving are challenging at the best of times. Doing all that over long distances more so. Having to do everything under the pressure of such short, & tight, deadlines gave me an enduring dose of stress the like of which I had not experienced before. And it’s not over yet.

Needless to say, eating well ceased being a priority. And yes, I’ve eaten all the bad stuff you could imagine over the course of the past six weeks. I’ve had fish ‘n’ chips, Chinese take-out, & I’ve even eaten pizza, bread base & all. I’ve munched cookies & sucked on sweets to keep me alert as I’ve driven through snow storms. I’ve fallen down so many times that I can barely recognize which way is up any more. Mea culpa.

On the bright side, since I started this whole exercise, I have learned a lot about what & how I should be eating. And I seem to have developed a penchant for doing the right thing. Even under such pressure, I have a noticeable bias towards making better food choices. While bread is so easy to eat on the road, I veered towards better eating following every bread binge. While the sugar fixes kept me going on long drives, I tended to avoid sugar the following day. The upshot of it all is that I was down two pounds in a month of some serious stress, some serious dietary abuse, along with a total lack of routine & familiar surroundings.

All in all, given the circumstances, I’d say that my two-pound loss wasn’t all bad for that particular month.

Now, in advance, I’m trying to come up with an excuse for this month’s possibly disastrous outcome! And if our new appliances aren’t delivered before Christmas, it might be a turkey sandwich picnic on the beach for Christmas dinner! 🙂

PS … I carried the scale with me on the drive to our new home. The weight recorded is the weight on December 1st. My intentions were good!

Results … Month #4

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Results … Month #4

This is big. No … it’s huge. Results Month 4

And I’m now a little less huge after 4 months of this DIY hybrid diet!

Only avid students of diet might understand how big this is but let me see if I can explain.

This past month, the 4th month of my weight loss attempt, probably qualifies as one of my top 10 more stressful months. The physiological response to stress inhibits weight loss. And as most overweight people can attest, one of our typical responses to stress is to seek comfort in food. And I did that. I lost weight while under a burden of stress, and I was stress-eating. But I still lost some weight. If I wasn’t so stressed, this would be cause for great jubilation and celebration. Instead, this morning, I am simply grateful.

The other big thing about this is that I lost weight in the 4th month of a diet. Many of my previous weight loss efforts resulted in a plateau far earlier in the attempt. More often than not, the first plateau hits after about two months. Many times, this is justification for bailing on the diet. On those fewer occasions where I successfully made it past the 2 month mark, there is less doubt that a stall would have occurred in the 3rd month. And it was pretty much guaranteed to have happened by the 4th month. But not this time. And I’m not being cocky here, quite the contrary, I’m now stressed about when that stall will finally happen!

My regular reader might attribute this month’s loss to that 4 day fast I did during the 2nd week of the month, but that’s not the case. Whether it was stress, or a reaction to the extended fast, I pretty much binged ’til I regained almost all the losses resulting from that fast. And I then spent the rest of the month getting to this morning’s weight. Which is still slightly above my post-fast weight. I’m not discounting the value of an extended fast for weight loss. But I think I’ll wait for a more serene month before attempting another!

I should also disclose that I didn’t eat particularly well this month. There were more French fry days than I would have liked. I was adding more chocolate, much of it not the dark stuff, to my home made ice cream. And there were more ice cream days than a better planned month might have had. My body was screaming out for something green and I think I had my first salad of the month yesterday! Looking for the positives in all this chaos, the program seems pretty robust. If I can lose weight during times like this, while eating that poorly, this might be a good diet for me. Real life carries on, regardless of our weight loss goals. And we need a diet that can handle real life.

I’m not taking it to the bank yet though, who knows what pitfalls lie ahead. I’m expecting November to match the past month for having to worry about things. Hopefully, some solutions will fall into to place and all will turn out well. But if not, I hope the diet continues to do its thing for the next month regardless.

Wish me luck!

Speaking of luck & diet … I don’t think I’ll go Trick-or-Treating tonight! 🙂

And a Happy Halloween to all!

Results … Month #3

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Results … Month #3After 3 Months

Well, well … another 7 lbs down for the month of September, for a total of 24 lbs for the first 3 months. I think that’s pretty good!

I’m not sure what the “perfect” rate of weight loss is but I’m guessing this is in the ballpark. I’ve been down the high-speed weight loss path before &, while it’s very rewarding to see the scale numbers drop quickly, those are tough diets to do. Even tougher to sustain over time. And all too easy to rebound from. The irony of this month’s progress is that I felt I wasn’t doing the right thing for most of the month. It was a sloppy month, during which I ate far more French fries, chocolate & ice cream than was my intent. I didn’t always choose the best ingredients for my meals so that, more often than not, sausage & hot dogs won out over wild caught fish & grass-fed beef. I was definitely way short on leafy greens. And I can’t recall successfully doing one full wake-cycle fast. I think the few times I tried, they all broke down by dinner time. And some even sooner than that. It was just that kind of crazy month.

On the bright side, I remember at least two occasions where I left food on my plate. Not because I felt I should but simply because I’d had enough. That’s new. You don’t get to my weight by leaving food on the plate! Are the natural control mechanisms starting to cut back in again? The other interesting thing is that I wasn’t hungry, between meals, during the month. Was I tempted to eat something totally off script? Of course! Watching the skinny people eat a totally synthetic sticky pudding, slathered with Baileys infused whipped cream, is torture. But my own dark cherry ice cream, (sometimes with a little hit of Baileys), is a pretty good substitute. So far though, this regimen is proving to be satisfying, quite flexible, and it seems to hold up, reasonably well, under pressure.

I don’t want to tempt fate by celebrating too much, nor too early in the process, but it is encouraging. Okay, it’s really quite (fill in the blanking adjective!) wonderful! 🙂

What’s to come for the month of October?

I wish I knew!

All at the same time I’m guardedly optimistic , yet anxious that it won’t hold up. I’m worried that I’ll fall off the wagon. Maybe I’ll come down with some awful illness. A fast food commercial will get to me. Maybe someone will hold me down & stuff candies into my face!

Or is it time to start experimenting on how to integrate the occasional glass of wine into my dietary regimen!?!?! 🙂

The 2nd Month’s Results

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The 2nd Month’s Results

That’s 17 lbs total loss since the start of this experiment on July 1st, so it’s only a 6 lbs loss for this month. It really is pretty good but I’m totally depressed about it though. Why? Because I’ve just come back from a two-week vacation in Canada’s Maritime provinces & Quebec, during which time I ate more bread than I typically would in about 6 months. Maybe even in a year.

Now I thoroughly enjoyed eating the bread. It was on my plan to do just that during vacation. But, as I’ve written about before, bread seems to depress me. So I’m depressed writing this morning! 🍞😁

Let’s be not-so-depressingly realistic here though: that’s a pretty good result for a month that was half consumed by the culinary debauchery of vacation eating. It’s still too soon to say for sure but this flexible dietary strategy seems to be working. I’ve got some work travel planned during the coming month but I continue to be intrigued by the potential.

Though feeling as I do this morning, it’s challenging to feel optimistic about the outcome!!! 😂 😭 😂

Those emoticons are a bit of depression humour right there! LOL

PS … I’ll cover the vacation eating in a little more detail, & its impact, in another post.

The First Month’s Results

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The First Month’s Results
Down 11lbs

This has been the shoddiest first month of dieting I’ve ever done. Usually, I would have a shiny new spreadsheet ready in advance of starting a new diet. Okay, I admit it, I did make a new spreadsheet but I only entered one weight, after 8 days, up until today. I’m typically obsessed with logging weight every day. My usual dietary strategy is to obsess over everything, especially food. Studying recipes & watching cooking shows makes for a hard journey so, instead, I try to force myself to focus on weights, dates, charts, graphs & making myself look skinnier with software programs!

Working on plans, schedules & lists before, & during, a diet is the usual for me. You know the old saying: plan the work & work the plan. But not this time. It was all very loose. In general, I ate more whole foods. More pastured & grass-fed meat. More vegetables & fruit than might be the norm. I made some half-hearted efforts at fasting for a few days here & there. Most of these turned into partial day fasts when I decided to eat dinner. Always with seconds. And often with dessert. All in all, this whole month was just not my usual aggressive, committed, enthusiastic start to a new diet. It was, as I said at the outset, shoddy.

The good thing about the past month is that I didn’t feel like I was on a diet for the most part. I probably should have paid a little more attention to the few rules I gave myself at the start but that’s how it goes sometimes. I’ll try to do a little better this month. It may help that I have used up one or two “bad” dessert choices. Hopefully, I won’t go out & & buy more!

In anticipation of the big “end-of-month weigh-in” this morning, I obsessed about “being good” last night. That’s the kiss of death, isn’t it! Not only did I have two very large dinner servings, but I found myself having a dessert that I never intended to have. I popped 8 of those dried fruit balls in a bowl. And covered them in heavy (35%) cream. While I wasn’t logging weight regularly, I was on the scale every day, so I had a general idea of where I was at. Ah well, it’s supposed to be a flexible program.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised …

At the end of the first month, I am … Down 11 lbs.

I’ll take it!