I confess to watching Supersize vs Superskinny and I confess to almost always changing channels when the week’s worth of food comes down that tube. It just makes me feel a little queasy. But today, I wondered what my week of food looks like when I’m eating well. It’s one thing to look at a food diary broken down by day, but what about just all the things I’ve eaten in one place like…..like the food tube? So here’s the word version of that tube.

From Monday to Sunday night I ate a total of around 10,200 calories and exercised off about 2,150 calories. I ate 100% of my 5 a day and only drank 12 units of alcohol. The 2 non-scale successes were doing my belt back up to it’s normal place and having a completely sane week during what is normally a hormonal firestorm. THAT is what this is all about for me.

So here’s what a week of good eating looks like. And no, no, that’s not green tea.

18 mugs of coffee
23 mugs of tea
13 cups or 5.2 pints 1% milk
2 large cappuccinos
195 g or 1/2  lb oats with raisins, nuts & cinnamon
530g – about 1 tub greek yogurt non-fat
4 eggs
3 slices streaky bacon
1.5 cups blueberries
2 tiny bananas
9 medium clementines
20 ready to eat prunes
1.5 large tubs of low fat cottage cheese
16 slices dark rye ryvita
1 small serving tomato soup
2 Tbs peanut butter
5 decent servings of strong cheddar
mozarella & tomato panini
1 slice bread
1 tin tuna in water
6 medium carrots
1/2 cucumber
3 medium tomatoes
2 red peppers
1 green pepper
1 onion
1/4 swede
8 small new potatoes, roasted
200 grams- just under 1/2 a pound chicken breast
1 pack stir fry veg
1/2 a tin of pineapple pieces in juice
1/4 pack rice noodles
1/4 pack pesto & goat cheese tortelloni
250 grams or just over 1/2 lb extra lean turkey mince
1/2 small jar seeds of change tomato & basil sauce
1/2 tin of crushed tomatoes
1/4 pack spinach & ricotta tortelloni
6 cumberland chipolatas
2 heaped Tbs mashed potatoes
2 Yorkshire puddings
1 small slice strawberry pavlova
2 Tbs ketchup
2 Tbs olive oil
1 tsp sugar
3 tsp stock powder
2 Tbs balsamic vinegar
2 Tbs light soy sauce
1 Tbs corn starch
lots and lots of fresh basil
2 single shot gin & tonics
2/3 bottle white wine
3/4 bottle red wine

How often should you weigh yourself?

If I were starting out on this weight loss thing for the first time, I’d say never more than once a week.

However, I have a history with scale insanity – brought about by the combination of my natural fear of failure and the stressful weekly ritual of the Weight Watchers weigh-in.

What do I mean by scale insanity?

I mean wearing the lightest clothes I own – but only after the initial weigh-in – then progressing to taking off my watch then my wedding ring.

I mean not eating breakfast and taking my coffee in a travel mug so that I can drink it after stepping on the scale.

I mean seeing that weekly event as something that could make or break my day.

I mean allowing myself to be defined by a number.

That’s not sane.

So the only way I could think of breaking that was to weigh myself every day till it held no power over me.

It works but there are strict parameters:

Weigh only first thing in the morning without clothes. (wedding ring can stay!)

Weigh only once. If your scale doesn’t give the same reading when you weigh yourself 3 times in 3 minutes, get a new scale.

Practice and practice some more the skill of seeing that the scale is just measuring changes in the weight of the composition of your body. It will fluctuate all over the place and does not in any way reflect who you are as a person.

Only another sufferer of scale insanity would think that the above sentence is not crazy.

Please please please only embark on daily weighing if it makes you more sane about your body rather than less. And never ever ever step on the scale in the evening. Really. Just don’t.

If you’d like to be bored to tears by the slow progress of my own weight loss, you can keep tabs on my Daily Weigh page.

So here’s some new research that I think any long term dieter could have written – but in plainer language.

Purpose: Weight loss is critical in the fight against obesity yet only about 20% of individuals maintain weight loss long term. This review examines the psychological factors influencing weight loss maintenance….

Conclusion: Evidence indicated avoiding dichotomous thinking, eating to regulate mood, and disinhibited eating were associated with weight loss maintenance. Increased dietary restraint, perceived benefits outweighing costs, lower/stable levels of depression, and more positive body image were also associated with weight loss maintenance. …

And it all means?

If you want to maintain a weight loss (and I would add, lose it in the first place), get rid of the following behaviours:

• dichotomous thinking = All or Nothing, On or Off Programme, On or Off the Wagon

• eating to regulate mood = Ice-cream* or Cheese* Therapy (insert applicable food.)

• disinhibited eating  = “I eat because it’s there.”

And add the following behaviours:

• increased dietary restraint = too big for a one-liner. This is the whole lifelong commitment to a new and better way of eating.

• perceived benefits outweighing cost = “I’d rather wear that dress than eat that doughnut.” (I know there’s a better deeper reason but it didn’t just pop into my mind the way the dress image did.)

• lower/stable levels of depression = (in my case) keep talking it off and keep moving.

• having better body image = being motivated to make big changes out of love rather than loathing for my body.

If these really are the secrets to success  – and they ring true to me – then I’m going to work with them for a while.  I know an awful lot about dieting. I know what to eat. I know how much to move. But I’m not getting the results I want – because I’m not being consistent with the things above.

So from this point till I’m bored (can’t promise a timeline), I will notice and work through these things on a daily basis.

I need to write something here that sticks with me through the next 5 days.

• 3 days of motorways, hotels and lovely socialising.

Followed, without time for a breath, by

• 2 days of trains, long long work days and exhaustion.

Is what I’m doing right now taking me towards that feeling of being completely at ease in my body?

Yoni Freedhoff’s post in Pschology Today has caused me to look back over the history of my relationship with scales and weighing.

There was a time when the scale ruled my life. If the scale didn’t reflect what I perceived as my hard work, I would immediately quit dieting and go back to old habits. Stupid but true. But when I started getting serious about dealing with what lay behind my inability to keep weight off, this scale insanity had to be addressed.

I dealt with it by doing something that most professionals would probably advise against: daily weighing. For months on end, I weighed myself every single morning and even recorded the numbers here for the public to see. In the end, I quit because I finally understood how my weight temporarily fluctuated over weeks and months and how it responded to sensible controlled eating. Today I can hop on the scales in the morning and not have an emotional blip because I pretty much know what to expect. (Though I did have a physical blip which led to an emotional blip when I didn’t weigh myself for 6 weeks and put on 7 lbs this summer – so all is not perfect, yet.)

I also refuse to weigh myself other than at home first thing in the morning – except when I go for hospital appointments but that’s for another purpose altogether. You’ve got to love how happy everyone is because I haven’t lost any weight! Hooray me. (If only they knew……)

Here’s an excerpt from one of my old posts about Weight Watchers’ contribution to scale insanity:

So I trotted down to the (Weight Watchers) meeting and stood on the scale.

147 (with clothes, post coffee – that’s just fine)

I was yammering away as I stepped off and thought the weigher hadn’t seen the number. So I stepped back on.

146.5

Interesting. Do you see why I don’t really care what the WW scales say?

When I took my seat with some friends, they had each put on half a pound. Or had they?  Maybe we should go back to weighing in whole pounds on balance scales? I wonder if those who weigh in kilos and half kilos are less prone to this craziness. I wish I had the answer to scale insanity. I think they should have a WW topic about The Big Picture. It’s really about what happens over a month – or a season – or a year that counts.

When you’re 10 lbs lighter than you were 2 months ago, that’s weight loss.

When you’re .5 lighter than you were last week, maybe it’s a loss and maybe it isn’t.

Here’s the big issue. We get so emotionally wrapped up in what that scale says that we let it rule the following week. I’m pretty sure the women who had small gains are too sane to let half a pound influence their eating. But then people used to think I was sane too – but I really really wasn’t. Half a pound gained could lead to another pound gained which would inevitably lead to quitting WW and putting on 20 pounds.

So I’m going to keep up the daily weighing. I knew it could take away the power of my home scale but I am absolutely over the moon that it has snuffed out the power of the WW scale too.

Back in 2011, I’ll finish with a few of Dr Freedhoff’s wise words:

Remember, it isn’t really about what you weigh; it’s about what you’re doing about what you weigh. Getting sucked into using the scale as your arbiter of success is risky business.

Amen.

A post from 2010 – but I’ve been thinking a lot about this again since Twitter is delivering rather more positivity that I can take….

I’m descended, on my father’s side, from a long line of cynics. I’m pretty sure that somewhere I could find a family plaque with the motto, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

It’s not that I can’t see that the glass is half-full. I see it – I can even say it. But I’m secretly looking for the crack that going to leak out all that life-giving water. Let’s call it cynical optimism.

I truly love the research from last year that said positive thinking was bad for people with low self-esteem. However, I also know that, despite the fact that negative is funnier, I need to concentrate on the positive a little more – not because I believe in any wacky “law of attraction” (don’t get me started) but because I know that thinking positively about your achievable goals makes you more likely to achieve them.

In this case – I will never keep the weight off if I keep thinking that I’ll never keep the weight off. period.

So I’m going to get back to some good old fashioned positive thinking – and put away the “buts” for a while.
I’ve had a tough year. I will no doubt have another one. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be a healthy weight and continue to cultivate a good relationship with food and my body. It just means that I need to learn some new skills and to put away some old behaviours.

The positive thinking comes in here. I CAN put away old behaviours. I CAN develop new skills.
More positive: I AM putting away old behaviours. I AM developing new skills. (Not so hard…..)

OK – in reality – this kind of talk only works for me when it’s true. The above is true in a straight forward way and I don’t need to argue it out with myself. It will never work for me if I don’t believe it or if it’s too vague.

“I deserve to be happy and successful” begs WAY too many questions and theological discussions. (I lifted that from a real website called more self esteem or something.)

“A quick run will lift my mood” works just fine and it’s a great substitute for “I hate the gym”.

So here’s to a new day with my kind of positive thinking.

Later…..
OH! Wait! I’ve just found the best article on that research.  And, yes, it’s the best because I agree with her.

Been thinking about the positive influencers and motivators over my 30+ years of moving towards a healthy, sane relationship with food and my body. Here are six of them from the 80′s till now:

Ancient History

• Weight Watchers- gave me the first experience of actually losing weight but I never ever believed that it was anything other than a diet so I got to go through that particular mill about 10 times, always gaining it all back. Funny, (strange), but even while gaining it all back time and time again, I’d describe WW as successful because I could always lose weight. The loss was their success and the gain was my failure.  I’m no longer sure that’s true. However, it has, over time, taught me a lot about what I need to do to lose weight.

• Two girls I met in Switzerland - They were Americans who had each gained 30 pounds while living at the L’abri community where high food prices meant a very carb rich diet. I met them as I was just arriving to spend three months in the community and was so horrified by their stories that I decided that I would eat only half portions at every meal while I was there. My nickname quickly became, “Half Please!” as that’s what I called out when people were serving up in the kitchen. I forget this idea way too often, but, deep down, I know that I don’t need masses of food to thrive.

• Running – The extra bonus of that time in Switzerland was that I decided to walk as quickly as possible during my daily life but I didn’t consider that I was 4000 feet up in the Alps. When I got back to sea level I was pretty much floating. From that level of fitness, getting into running was easy and I learned that it suited both my body and my temperament. I’ve never forgotten the amazing buzz of pushing it hard up the long steep 16th Avenue hill in Vancouver four miles into my eight mile run.

• My Virtual Weight Loss Buddies - This group of women have taught me not to whine, complain or make excuses on this journey. Instead, we agree to acknowledge the difficulty, make a plan and move on. The result is that I am now very intolerant of any weight loss conversation that involves gleeful discussion of stupid eating.  Luckily I still have my buddies with the same mindset. See this page for more.

• Healthy Fats & Carbs - I have no idea who or what led to this change but becoming aware of healthy and unhealthy fats and carbs has influenced my diet more than anything/anyone else in the past 30 years. It started in the 90′s when we stopped eating fast food and continued up to a few years ago when we discovered the pure joy of olive oil. We no longer think of food as fattening and non-fattening but as healthy and unhealthy. Portion size is still an issue, (must remember Half Please!), but I’m no longer obsessed with low fat (low taste) ingredients. Freedom!
  

• Paul Plakas – He just happened to be the first person I heard use the term “functional”  in terms of fitness and I happened to hear it while home in Canada helping my increasingly immobile dad. It caused me to stop linking exercise with short term calorie expenditure (which leads to exercising only while trying to lose weight) and made me start thinking about wanting to be able to stand up from a chair and walk up stairs should I happen to live to 85. Hence the need for good short bodyweight workouts which I still haven’t made a regular feature of my life. Waiting to hear whether my PT (Hey,LixWall!) is going to be able to put those together for me.

• This post by Travis Saunders- about sedentary behaviour – is currently shaping my thinking about how I live my life every day. I work from home so there’s no commute and I work mostly sitting at a desk – as sedentary as can be. I used to think this didn’t matter because I was running 3 times a week, but reading about the research has caused me to rethink my daily energy expenditure and move much more throughout the day.

Thanks, Influencers & Motivators! (I wonder what ever happened to those girls from Switzerland.)

Yes, folks, I weighed myself for the first time in a month – and the last time for the summer – and I’ve gained a solid five pounds.  I weigh over 150 for the first time in two years and I’m not a happy bunny.

But I am a determined bunny.

I’m away for the day, travelling to and from a meeting, so I have LOTS of thinking time.

Tomorrow is the big journey with yet more thinking time.

By Thursday I will have thought myself into a healthy eating state of mind.

Yesterday, for the first time in forever, I went for a mind-clearing 5 mile walk – in under 72 minutes, I might add – and found myself thinking about where I am today with my weight/body/mind insanity sanity.

It’s almost three years since I stepped on the scale and realised that I’d put back on all the weight I’d worked so hard to lose for a big family wedding.  I’d done it many times before, but this time I also heard a voice from deep inside that said, “NO MORE”.

I didn’t feel any sense of thrill about dieting; I just knew I had to do it. Surrounded by supportive cyber-friends I decided to combine hard work with writing about the weight loss process – no “click”, no dieting euphoria.  That was the start of breaking a cycle that I had been perpetuating in my life since my teens.

So what about now?  How is it possible that the first 20 pounds has stayed off and I’m on my way to the last 10 being gone forever?  I’m not talking about losing the weight – dieting is not a problem – I’m talking about keeping it off.

• No whining.  No excuses.

Ah, BCB.  If I hadn’t learned this, I never would have learned that there was no one but MYSELF who was responsible for the amount of fat on my body and for the negative way I was feeding my body.  Years of food/body issues can make a person take on a victim role.  No excuses means the following: If there’s junk food in my cupboard, I put it there.  If there’s wine in my belly, I put it there.  If there’s fat on my body – I put it there.  There’s been lots of complicated life stuff to sort through, but in the end, if I feed my sadness/anger/boredom  (fill in your own favourite state of mind), then I will gain weight. I may not be able to fix my life, (just call me Queen of Understatement), but I CAN choose how I deal with those emotions.  I’m not a victim.

• Permanent change.

For the first time ever, I realised that this couldn’t be a “diet” followed by “normal”.  It was all a new normal.  This meant that I actually bothered to find new foods to love not just new “diet foods”.

For the years and years and years (30 plus) that I regained every pound lost through dieting, I can see now that I simply didn’t want to change.  I didn’t want a new way of eating.  I didn’t want to not eat when I wasn’t hungry.  My body proved quite dramatically that these weren’t great decisions but it took me a long long time to work out the (obvious) connection.

• Move for the sake of your health, not for weight loss.

This is a new one for me.  Years of earning “Points” have led me to equate exercise with being allowed to eat more.  This past year I’ve been learning to eat according to what by body needs – to feed my body so that it can move well.  This is quite a leap from moving so that I can drink more wine. 

• Write

For some reason, writing about this process has made it happen. Or helped it to happen. I suppose it’s a combination of my temperament and my talents but getting it all down on paper makes the process more understandable.  It’s as though, for all those years and through all those diets, I just wanted to do it without thinking about it.  I didn’t want to think about why I stuffed myself with food when I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want to think about my body shape or how to dress myself.  I didn’t want to think about how food and relationships were all tied up.

Writing has helped me to hang onto the “A-ha” moments of this process, to cement the permanent changes rather than just rushing through a diet as fast as I can so that life can get back to normal.  Writing about it all has helped to establish a new normal.

Is that really all there is to it?

• No whining, no excuses
• Make permanent changes
• Eat to move – don’t move to eat
• Write

Of course, each one of those involves a whole lot of trying and failing and figuring out and quitting for a bit then starting again where I left off.  It’s meant getting to grips with the woman in the mirror and the body in the changing room and I’m still a work in progress.

A work in progress.

You don’t use food as a drug for 30 years and “just change” over night.  If someone had told me, back in the summer of 2008, that three years from now I was still going to be working on this, I’m not sure I would have just said, “Well let’s get on with it anyway!”  I didn’t know at the time what was going to happen in my life.   But I was SO SICK of feeling like a failure over something that I knew was within my control.

And so I keep on writing and working and looking forward to the new phase ahead.

There’s still lots of discussion around how much people are loving or hating ProPoints.  I was very critical of people who complained at first – and then I became one of them!

As with all WW plans, ProPoints (Points Plus) is a great way to start re-ordering your food life if you have a very unhealthy diet.  If you eat lots of fast food and snack on chocolate, cookies and crisps, then run, don’t walk to your nearest Weight Watchers meeting.

However – if you already have a balanced and healthy diet with loads of fruit and veg, then I’m not sure ProPoints is going to work very well.

Lots of people LOVE the fact that Weight Watchers has got serious of the high protein, low carb idea.  Frankly, I just think it’s disrespectful to the poor people of this world and to the environment.

I think what I hate most about the high protein/low carb thing is that it’s about eating loads and losing weight.  My goal is to learn to eat less of all sorts of things.   I want to have a plate of rice and beans and not eat again until morning, knowing that I’ve given myself plenty of calories and nutrients.  Likewise, I want to eat a tiny portion of the best chocolate I can afford and be satisfied.  Basically, I want to get as far away as possible from the “I’m a volume eater” mentality.

I understand eating to feel full.  I understand binge eating. I understand the self-loathing that accompanies it. Eating to sooth my emotions is the “last frontier” in my journey to food/body sanity.  Therefore, I don’t want a weight loss programme that says “Eat lots and never feel hungry”.  I WANT to feel hunger.  I WANT to know that I can satisfy that hunger with a little bit of nutrition packed food.

Don’t know where all that came from.  I was going to write about the fact that, being middle aged, I can’t see the nutritional information that WW demands unless I have my reading glasses.  I can see the fat and calorie info written on the front of packaging – but not the protein, carbs and fibre written in tiny print on the back.  One more reason for me not to bother with ProPoints.

And finally – with all their billions of dollars in world wide revenue, Weight Watchers should plough something back into updating their online tools.  They should offer “Week at a Glance” views of what how many points you’ve eaten and earned.

They should track your alcohol consumption in units.  Nutracheck keeps a running total through the week and shows it as a percent of recommended weekly limits.

The same for recommended amounts of fruit and veg.

Since they’ve got all that nutritional information built into the concept of a “point” – they could certainly show us what percentage of our diet is carb, protein and fat.  You’d think.

So there you go – my last words on Weight Watchers Pro Points.

I’d love to hear from people who are enjoying the new plan.