Sunday Weigh In March 1, 2020

[Barb135]

Good morning - how is everything this morning?  It started off cold here this morning... 34° cold to be exact.  The sun is shining and it looks like it's going to warm up nicely though.  I thought we were done with the cold, but it doesn't look like it, just yet.

Anyway, I've had another pretty quiet week.  The past few days have been started off cold and since my walking partner and I have become sort wimpy, we skipped a couple of days walking and yesterday, we waited until later in the day to walk, after it had warmed up.  We did the same for today.

Health-wise, nothing has changed on my end because I haven't steeled myself to call any of my doctors to begin the struggle of getting them to do anything.  So far I've just been trying to deal with things on my own, which isn't really working all that great.  

Weight-wise, I've managed to drop 0.6 lb.  I'm not sure how that happened, but I'll take it.  I'm exactly 5 lbs heavier than I was when my MIL died at the end of May last year, which is when everything started really going haywire for me (again).  That was the lowest I've been since my thyroid whacked 12 yrs ago and I'd had high hopes of getting back to some semblance of the old me.  A lot has happened since last May and I don't have so much hope of that now, but I'll keep trying... :-)

Anyway, this month, I'll probably start tackling the issues again and see if I can start getting back on the road to feeling better and losing some more weight.  Spring should definitely help as I can get outside and get some work done sprucing things up, which always makes me feel better.

So that's me - down 0.6 lbs - not a lot, but I'll take it. It's warmed up from our beginning 34° to 55° so it looks like it's going to be a beautiful day.  I'm off for my daily walk.

How about you?  I hope your week was a good one and you reached whatever goal(s) you set...

~~Wishing everyone a wonderful, successful week~~

[AnnieBrooke]

A food diary isn't a bad idea, though how I would work out the food values of, for example, a bowl of homemade tabouli or a sandwich made with corned beef cooked at home, I am not at all sure! (I'd have to do it ingredient by ingredient, and then divide. By then I would have burned off all the calories gained from eating the food! lol) Have you ever tried to write down every penny you spend for a certain period of time, like a month? It can get pretty frustrating! I assume a food diary would be similar. Easier just to stop doing the activity that you're trying to record. :)

[Barb135]

There are programs/apps you can use to figure out serving calories for dishes you commonly make, such as your homemade tabouli or corned beef, then simply provide the calories in the bread used for the sandwich and whatever condiments you use (many are considered "free") and you have it.  I make a homemade veggie soup and I used one of these apps to calculate the calories/serving in it.  Then whenever I ate that soup, all I had to do was pull that up and put in how many servings I ate to get the number of calories.  I ended up using the app for several different recipes I have.

I'm not sure what you put in your tabouli, but the vegetables have so few calories, they would be considered "free".  You'd count the calories in the oil and other ingredients.  At any rate, you list the recipe ingredients into the app and tell it the size of a serving and it comes up with the appropriate serving calories.  In fact, MH's diet diary might do that now.  

But - you really don't have to even list all the calories in your food diary - to get a pretty good idea of what you're eating simply write down what you eat during the day, including each time you eat a snack or take a sip of soda or drink, other than water.  At the end of the day, it's pretty easy to make a quick mental calculation of what your overall calorie count might have been... For instance, if you had a couple of servings of tabouli, snacked on 3 candy bars (most have about 240 calories), drank a couple of Dr Peppers, ate a corned beef sandwich, then snacked on a few of your son's lunch cookies (usually 70-80 calories each?)... it's pretty easy to see that you might have over-snacked and maybe you could replace some of those empty calories with some that have some nutrients like a piece of fruit.  :-)

I did this a couple of times for about a week each.  One time I was appalled to see that I was eating as much junk as I was.  The other time, I was appalled to see how little I was actually eating and not losing any weight.  It can work both ways.

[AnnieBrooke]

OMG, if I snacked on three candy bars in one day, my waistline would reach from Oregon to Florida. I don't think I have a lot of margin for snacks -- too much and I do instantly see it on the scale. Besides, though I tend to want something sweet in the morning, that does it for the day ... if I snack later, it's all savory and fatty, like chips.

In fact, I do know my snack sins -- the good doctor, for one, though he is losing ground, cookies I've bought for my son that I also like (haven't done that lately on purpose), if rushed and busy and hungry, a small order of fries from the drive-up window at McDonalds (or if I'm feeling more classy, a croissant from the drive-up window at Starbucks), sometimes Ruffles potato chips, and occasionally a single candy bar. (It's halvah, lately -- the bars Joyva makes are about 225 calories I think, but at least they are made of tahini, so I can con myself into thinking it's better for me because "it's protein!"). Any of those, I could probably sneak in one serving per day without it showing up on the scale. But I think probably only one. And I'll bet that to lose weight, I have to go about half of my days with no snack at all.

I found that substituting helps. I like to give my son something little and sweet at the end of the meal, but cookies are really too much. So I have a package of Hershey's kisses (boring to me), and some Rolos (a candy he just loves but I think is gross, so it's perfect), and a package of chocolate-covered filberts that I'm indifferent to. I'll put one or two of those in his lunch, and he feels like he got a dessert, and I don't snarf them down at home. (The halvah, on the other hand ... he asked for halvah as dessert after dinner last night and I snarled at him like a dog guarding a bone. And the irony is that Joyva is nowhere near as delicious as the halvah we used to buy at our local Jewish deli when I was a kid.)

The other good substituting news is that San Pellegrino, whose orange and grapefruit sodas we have drunk a lot over the years, also has a chinotto. It's made from a very bitter small orange (which of course means it takes at least a certain amount of sugar to bring it up to drinkability), but even then it is still delightfully bitter, and it comes in a tiny bottle and is fewer grams of sugar than Dr. Pepper. I think Italians do drink it without diluting it, but I can't -- because of the strong flavor and the sweetness I have to cut it in half with sparkling water. I love its interesting bittersweet flavor more (shut your ears, Dr. Pepper bottling company) than the good doctor, and realize from drinking chinotto that one of the things that did hook me on D.P. is that it has a bit of a bitter edge along with its sweets. Chinotto just does it way better, and of course has the added advantage that I absolutely have no choice but to dilute it. Also if I have one, that's it for the day. No more needed. My husband proudly brought me a Dr. Pepper the other day, thinking he was doing so well by me, and I actually looked at it with almost total indifference. The only problem with the chinotto is that I have to go to a specialty shop to get it, so like the halvah, I snarl at my son if he wants one, and dole them out slowly to me or to him. This is not all bad, since they do contain calories. Anyway, the upshot is I'm drinking way less sugared stuff whether it's D.P. or chinotto. That may be where the pound and a half went last week. I'm delighted to have found it locally -- there aren't many Italian groceries around here -- but they restock really slowly, so there is an added brake to my consumption.

Sorry for such a long tale! I feel like I'm just figuring out the psychological complexities of diet -- how to find ways to understand the social aspects of food and ways to walk back from the cliff of certain foods that can take you down. At first for me what I did was be more conscious of a balanced diet, and that took me a ways, and now it's down to the social or emotional aspects of how we eat at home, and finally I'm learning to manipulate myself off stuck points where I'm habitual with a certain food. I will gladly buy myself off Dr. P. with chinotto, and Snickers with halvah, with the idea that some day my cravings will be changed, and in the meantime it reduces the intake.

Oh, and the tabouli -- tons of chopped parsley and chopped mint, some boiled and cooled bulgar wheat, chopped tomatoes, chopped green onions, sometimes a few cooked navy beans if I'm feeling like it has to be a balanced protein (like, if it's for dinner) but not too many. Sometimes little ham bits and sometimes cucumber but not always. Oil and vinegar dressing done with olive oil, lemon and apple-cider vinegar. Garlic if my son isn't going to be eating it. I just love it. Roughage, filling, and not high calorie at all.

[Barb135]

Have you thought about keeping a food diary that includes all those little morsels you snack and sip on?  I did that once and it's mind boggling, she says as she polishes off the last of a salted nut roll... Yep, husband wanted pizza tonight and that never sits well with me, so I always have to eat something behind it, but then peanuts done sit well either, so what's going in after the peanuts??  Fortunately, most nights aren't like tonight...  :-)

I'm off to have a cup of ginger tea to settle my acid reflux because the prescribed PPI's don't do it.  All they do is cause brittle bones so my doctor wants to start me on even more medications that come with even more side effects... no, no and no!!!

[AnnieBrooke]

Oh, I'm certain I can't lose like my husband can, he just thinks "I'd like to lose 15 pounds," and does it. That isn't the way with me. But it seems important for me to realize that the little snacks I will grab when hungry instead of eating anything balanced, probably add up to more than I think. And I'm impressed by his not putting one bite in his mouth when he is dieting if it is not part of a meal. It does fly in the face of sociability to turn down a little taste that someone offers in a friendly way, but that is how he managed to drop a whole size in the waistline. Incidentally, he says he refuses even when I say "It's just one bite," not because he's worried about one bite, but because he will then eat another and another and another, so he has his willpower struggles, too. Anyway, I wonder how many extra calories I pack on in an average day when I snack when hungry. Probably more than I think. :)

[AnnieBrooke]

Hi, that's good news about the .6 of a pound, at least it's going the right direction! I ignore the many .2's and .4's I've been getting but at .6, now you're getting somewhere! :)

In my case, also good news this morning -- I'm down 1.6 on my scale and am very pleased. This week I didn't eat any big meals, and it seems to have paid off. We had homemade split pea soup two nights for dinner, and one night just a big bowl of tabouli (again, homemade) and especially the tabouli meal was great for results. I even ate some halvah and it didn't take me back up (or, I had lost even more weight and the sweet halvah didn't replace all of what I had lost).

This takes me nearly three pounds into that last stubborn ten I've been working on for a year. When we began these challenges I was 15 pounds higher than I like to be and have never been that high before. The first five pounds went away with basic dietary rules and common sense, but the rest, probably since it has been there the longest, evidently has no intention of going without a fight. Doubtless my metabolism isn't what it used to be. So there is nothing for it but facing that I have to reduce my intake to come up with the same result. I've heard that as we age we should adjust our diet not only to meet health challenges but also just because we need less food. You could prove it by me.

I saw my doctor last week, and she ran a lot of tests, all of which came in at "normal." My HMO is such that if you get normal tests, they don't pay any attention to you again. But my legs are still hurting, and now a specific left-leg and lower back pain (that I suspect might be sciatica) that I've had off and on for months is coming on even more strongly. It's no fun to be told you are normal when you hurt and can't run more than a half a block. I'm going to work on the suspected sciatica by looking for exercises on the Internet, but I'm also going to call my doc back and explain that no matter what the tests say about how I should be feeling, I'm not feeling normal. My legs are like lead when walking up the stairs. (She did rule out peripheral neuropathy, whew!, but something more closely resembling a diagnosis would be nice, not just ruling things out.)

Anyway, that's my week. I think I'll go have some more of that great tabouli.  lol

[Barb135]

First off - congratulations on the 1.6 lbs down... that's awesome.  If I could do that, I'd consider it real progress.  I haven't done 1.6 lbs down in one week in years.  If I could do that, I'd probably think I was ill.  :-)

You're right that our metabolism changes as we get older, but there are other things that cause it to change, besides age - such as thyroid (which actually controls metabolism), insulin resistance, etc.   It's good that your doctor did a lot of tests - the unfortunate thing about blood work is that it can all come back within "normal" ranges even when we have problems, whether it be with the thyroid or another part of the body.  We see this happen all too often in the thyroid community, with results in "low normal" range that can cause symptoms but because of the way ranges are determined, they're too low for a single individual... i.e. what's good for you might not be good for me and what's good for me might not be good for my neighbor, but we all get shoved into the same big range.

It's extremely frustrating to be told you're normal and there's nothing wrong with you, based on some blood tests and maybe a quick exam, when you know that, clearly, something isn't right.

My doctor gave me some good exercises for lower back pain a few years ago, that actually worked.  It involved lying on a mat on the floor and drawing the knees up toward the chin.  You might also consider yoga - there are yoga poses for, literally, everything, including weight loss.  I keep saying I have to get back to my yoga and one of these days, I'm going to surprise everyone and actually do it... :-)

[AnnieBrooke]

I'll try the exercise. It would be easier if the problem were just lower back pain, it's up and down the whole leg to the back of the hip, at night when I lie down, as though any position other than lying on my stomach inflames a leg nerve. That doesn't fit the usual description of sciatica (which is more the back and I think more symmetrical, not just affecting one side), but nobody can suggest anything that fits better.

I'm on the verge with yoga, the "hot yoga" place near me hints that they have some non-hot classes, I might just stroll in one day and see what they do. (The hot classes got a very negative review from a friend or I might even consider them.) The walking I'm doing with my son has gotten me in the mood to do more. :)

I think to chip away at the long-held fat I have to use gritted-teeth determination and have active awareness all the time. My husband is good at this when he is dieting (which he is now) -- I'll offer him something I'm cooking or eating so he can have a taste, and he'll just say a flat no. It's not particularly social but it is definitely improving his physique. (In fact, he just bought a new suit and was down a size in the jacket and pants both.) It takes a constant and conscious effort, and I also need to be totally aware that those little snacks and bites and tastes do still have fats and calories. I tend to think that if I'm hungry, there is room to sneak in a quick bite of something. Maybe not, maybe I should just have a light meal if I'm hungry, and not sneak in a quick snack.

[Barb135]

No, your description doesn't really fit the typical sciatica, but then a pinched nerve can cause pain in different places other than where the nerve is actually located, too.  It's hard to tell without it actually being officially diagnosed.

I've never been to a yoga class.  I've done all my yoga on my own, either watching online or with DVD, etc.  I used to have Wii - well, I still have it, just don't use it - that has yoga.  My favorite yoga DVD was "Yoga for Weight Loss" that I started doing just after I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism.  I couldn't lose weight on it because my hormone dosage wasn't adequate, which has basically been my problem all along, but it did help stop the gain.  I went from that DVD to others.  Yoga, basically, works on the core, breathing, etc.  But it is good for weight loss and it helps open up the body.  When I'm doing it regularly, it makes me feel like I'm "long and lean" when I'm really only 5' tall... lol

I think a big mistake that women make is thinking we can lose weight like our husbands can.  Our metabolism isn't like theirs - no matter what we eat/don't eat.   All my husband has to do is look in the mirror and decide he's gained a pound or two, stop snacking and he drops it in a matter of days.  I've gained and lost the same 5 lbs at least 20 times over the past 12 yrs...  Of course, that doesn't mean he's any healthier than I am because he isn't; in fact, he's probably not as healthy because he eats a lot more fried and junk food than I do.  I always have to remind myself that "thinner isn't always healthier... "

I do agree though that sometimes it's better to sit down and eat a small meal than it is to snack because if we eat an actual meal, it's bound to be more healthful than most of the things we'll grab to snack on.  One problem I have is that I tend to follow my husband's lead when it comes to eating meals... he only eats one, maybe 2 meals/day.  I have reactive hypoglycemia and am supposed to eat several small meals/day but I tend to eat when he does - that means I eat less times/day, but more each time I eat.  I think, overall, I eat more calories than if I'd eat multiple meals instead of the one or two because when my blood glucose crashes, I end up snacking on things that will bring it up quickly, like candy bars, a sandwich, etc - all things that go straight to fat if not used for energy.