Tag weight loss

The Chicken or the Egg?

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The Chicken or the Egg?

Stormy Weather

This is not about protein! It’s about the mental & emotional mood swings that sometimes happen during the course of our weight loss endeavours. Sometimes the diet is the downer. Other times it’s just the daily grind. Then there are those times where bad stuff is happening in our lives. Regardless of circumstances, it would be nice to think that we could have an eating strategy to help us through such times. A strategy that would help us hang in there ’til we reach calmer waters.

After a fantastic vacation, & despite trying to stay ahead of work during it, I was backlogged when I returned. Over a week later, I’m still backlogged. And I’ve got those projects that I really meant to finish before I left on vacation. But I didn’t! I developed a cold immediately after I returned & it still hasn’t quite gone away. A couple of challenging decisions have come along this past week, when I’m least ready for them, all adding to the burden. No wonder I was a bit down yesterday. The dark & stormy weather at the waterfront was the perfect accompaniment for my generally gloomy outlook.

So how is the diet holding up during this turmoil? Pretty good actually. Though I’m not in weight loss mode, I’m bouncing around at one or two pounds below my post vacation weight. I am eating a lot more than I typically might were I to be a little more focused on weight loss. And I’m eating some bad stuff along the way too.

To offset those bad impulses, I decided to make a big pot of comfort food. Something high volume, filling & very capable of giving comfort. It was a vaguely vegetarian curry. A cup of olive oil in the bottom of the pot to brown the garlic & onion. A heaping tablespoon of curry powder, along with salt & pepper, for seasoning. A litre of organic chicken broth for the fluid. To this I added three large potatoes, cubed small. These will help thicken the sauce, along with providing some much needed comfort! A full head of shredded cabbage adds some serious bulk to the pot. I do like a little meat flavour so this is where we depart to the vaguely vegetarian description. Three Octoberfest sausages, cut into quarter inch cubes, went in next. And finally, a cup, maybe a cup & a half, of whipping cream to enrich the sauce. A cup of basil leafs towards the end. Probably sounds awful but the sausage & cream overcome the veggie bias. And you can eat an awful lot without impacting the scale too much. For “normal” people, this might have made eight servings. For me, it’ll be gone in three, maybe four, sittings at most!

I wish I could say that was the worst I’d done through the past week but it wasn’t! Still, I’m surviving a little blue phase without totally destroying my program. Sometimes, just hanging in there for a little while longer is all that’s required.

The chicken & egg conundrum is based on my questioning if my mood is the result of eating poorly? Or if my downer triggered the poor eating spell? Perhaps it circular & both might be true?

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.

Disaster Management on Vacation

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Disaster Management on Vacation

I mentioned vacation eating in the 2nd month’s results post but this deserves some space of its own. It’s very important that our diets allow us the luxury of eating well, really well, while on holiday. Or is that really badly? We all need to fulfill the desire to be just a little wicked every now & again!

My recent vacation put that theory to the test.

A quick plug for Canada’s Maritime provinces & Quebec here … they are all amazing. We left Ontario, by car, with stops in Quebec City (you’d think you were in France!) & Fredericton, New Brunswick. All on the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia. We were in Nova Scotia almost a week, a stunningly beautiful place, before taking the ferry across to Prince Edward Island. Yet another gob-smacking adventure of one postcard-like scene after another. After a few days there we went back to the banks of the Saint Lawrence river, in Quebec. One last stay in Montreal was the perfect finish to a great vacation, before we reluctantly headed back home.  Amazing scenery, incredible food & great people everywhere we visited. I can’t wait to go back. The “incredible food” component is what concerns us most here, of course!

My plan was, & deliberately so, very loose. I wanted to see the impact of a pretty free flowing approach to eating while on vacation. I generally tried to avoid known bad things. For me, those include processed & packaged snacks, doughnuts & other such food-like products. Normally, I would consider bread off limits. Not only because it more closely resembles a modern snack food than it does a grain-based food, but primarily because it doesn’t agree with me. For me, it is both mood altering & gut damaging. However, I know the Maritimes are famous for their lobster rolls. And Quebec is famous for its smoked meat sandwiches. I wasn’t missing out on either, I was committed to indulging in the full experience, bread & all!

During the first week of the adventure, I generally tried to make better choices. I had my lobster but with a salad. Though I did have those breaded Digby scallops with French fries. And I seem to remember some beer battered fish & chips along the way! I’m pretty sure that I left some fries on the plate for one of those meals. Not something I’ve been know to do very often. As time progressed, I was allowing myself a little more freedom. Typically, & during times when I’m trying to lose weight, I tend to avoid eating significant amounts of starchy carbs with my proteins & fats. This strategy sometimes went out the window!

The traditional maritime “lobster supper”, for example, included the starch-laden seafood chowder, the endless bucket of mussels (for three but I was the only one eating from it & almost finished it!), the PEI potatoes swimming in butter, & the lobster (all shown in the bottom left, center, & top right pics in the collage above). I did manage to avoid the freshly baked bread, & dessert, on this occasion. Primarily because I was stuffed! The lobster roll (bottom right) was delicious. And the smoked meat & chopped liver sandwich (top left), with fries, is still a mouth-watering memory. I actually left some fries on the plate this time too. While getting fat, I was never leaving anything on the plate so this involuntary action is a pleasing outcome of the diet. Along the way, I did have one ice cream, cone & all. And a bar of chocolate that was less dark than it ought to have been. Okay, I admit it … it was a totally bad bar of milk chocolate. But it was different & it had bits of vaguely healthy ginger & fruit in it!

Ironically, one of the poorer meal choices of the trip happened when we got home. There was a big bag of frozen, & breaded, calamari in the freezer. These were even quicker than ordering in so I had I had two panfuls of those. OMG, the heartburn & indigestion! What do they put in that breading?

To counter all this, I only had breakfast on 4 or 5 occasions during our holiday. No big sacrifice this, since I almost never eat breakfast at home. And I skipped lunch, probably about 3 days a week. This was unnoticeable on driving days, when I was quite happy with my coffee. With cream, no sugar, of course.

My control “group” for this “experiment” was my skinny wife, who effortlessly maintains a BMI of 19. And she does this while eating all sorts of garbage. I know, infuriating, eh! While I was sometimes making good choices, & skipping a meal here & there, I still out-ate her by huge amounts. Yes, I’m bigger. Yes, my resting metabolism will burn more. But I still ate with the kind of freedom that I thought appropriate for a big guy on vacation. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

At the outset, we both weighed in. And at the end …

My wife had gained 5.2 lbs … while I gained 0.4 lbs!

Come on, tell me you’re not impressed! LOL

Of course she has already, without thought or effort, returned to her normal weight. While my body really has no idea what normal is any more. I should probably try to outline a more detailed vacation diet but with a result like this, who cares! Though next time, I will try to have something waiting in the freezer that doesn’t punish me like those breaded calamari did!

 

Our Friends Don’t Care if We are Fat!

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Our Friends Don’t Care if We are Fat!PEI Lobster Dinner

I’m being a little callous here but I’m guessing that more than half our friends don’t really care if we lose weight or not. Yes, they would worry if we fell ill because of it but, on a day to day basis, they probably love us for who we are. But they don’t really care much, one way of the other, about our weight. Or how we might feel about our weight. The other half, some of them may be trying to lose weight themselves, might even be hoping we fail! 🙂

Dieting is a lonely endeavour. That doesn’t mean we can’t feel empathy for each other, even if only for brief periods of time. It doesn’t mean we can’t share parts of each other’s journeys. And those things too can be valuable. But for the most part, we’re left to our own devices when it comes to weight loss.

Below is the text of a Facebook post that I shared with my friends. The pic that accompanied it is above.

Poor man’s dinner in PEI …
Endless bowl of seafood chowder.
A salad (wtf is that for? Though half the plate was potato salad, so not bad!) 
Endless bucket of mussels (ate them all but did not ask for more!)
PEI spuds swimming in half a pound of butter.
And, of course, a sea cockroach!
I didn’t eat the delicious, fresh baked little loaves of bread that sang out to me the whole time!
AND I skipped dessert.
Good boy, Paul!

Most will give it a like. Or rejoin with a little humerous comment of their own. But very few will comment on the diet & weight-loss parts of the post. Not that I would want them to do that publicly. My skinny friends might be horrified! LOL

But you’d think one or two might share a word of encouragement by personal message or something, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps they’ve seen me fail too many times before & they don’t want to embarrass me? And yes, now that I think about it, I might actually be embarrassed. Worse yet, is it possible that I might perceive the message as insincere? Supporting each other can be a complex thing sometimes. Despite the challenges, I’m grateful for the friends I have in my life anyway.

On the other hand … screw them! I’ll get my revenge when I strut into the next social gathering several pounds lighter! 🙂

PS … The funny side of dieting & life aside, I am actually a little worried at the moment. I haven’t really tested this level of looseness, of so little dietary restriction, previously. Have I been too loose over the course of this holiday? Did I go overboard a couple of times too many? When I look at that pic, & realise how much I ate at that one meal, I have to say … I’m a lot worried! The scale will tell the tale this coming weekend.

I know you don’t care all that much but please cross your fingers for me! 🙂 🙂 🙂

Gurus & Diets

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Gurus & DietsCows & Flowers

I’ve always loved modern gurus. You know the kind I’m talking about, the ones that leap & bound around the stage, exhorting us to be the best we can be. No! We can be even better than that! These days we sometimes call them life coaches. You can take courses on how to be a life coach so there are life coach coaching gurus to follow now. I’m guessing most graduates of such courses do a good job but when I spend my hard earned money, I want to see a superstar in action. I want to be entertained, motivated, exhorted to the max. There are gurus like this in every field. Promising athletic levels of fitness, bodybuilder musculature, huge wealth through investment & real estate schemes, all of which will make us rich beyond our imagination. And, of course, there are the gurus of diet.

While I am still entertained by such figures, & I continue to listen & learn from them, I’m aware that my initial enthusiasm wanes back to normal after about 3 days. Since most of us who listen to these highly motivating people are not slim & fit millionaires, I’m guessing that decline in enthusiasm happens for most people. I’m disappointed with myself when that happens, of course. I know it’s not the gurus fault, it’s mine. I didn’t do it right. I didn’t follow the rules. I didn’t step up. I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t work for some people, it certainly does. The testimonials are there to prove it. Over the long haul though, it just doesn’t seem to work for me.

This seems particularly apt when it comes to diet. Weight loss feels like it should be more of a leisurely walking marathon. Perhaps with a little jog here & there. For me, it’s certainly not an explosive, short, sharp sprint to the finish. It’s difficult to maintain such a high level of intensity all the way down to our goal weight. There is nothing wrong with an occasional sprint. But for most of us, most of the time, we need a strategy that allows us to succeed at a slower pace. One that allows us to still feel good while the finish line is out of reach. A system that, somehow, hangs in there when we’re just not feeling that super-high level of motivation. A lifestyle that doesn’t demand huge sacrifice each & every day.

We could really use an approach that is more suited to that pace of living. Not one aligned with wishful thinking. We need an approach that is flexible enough to match the realities of actually living life.

Now that’s all starting to sound quietly amazing, restful even. Despite the low key, I’m almost a believer already. And that’s without all the motivational theatrics!

But I wonder if my scale will agree with me when I return from vacation! LOL