Patty Melt Diet

I lost four and a half pounds in one night! 

It's true.  But it's not the way to do it.  I ate a bad burger.  It was most unpleasant for 24 hours, and kind of gross for another 24.  I'm feeling much better now, but wow.  Not good.

Mostly I'm mad because I couldn't go to the gym.  (Trust me.  I couldn't go.)

As you may recall, gentle reader, my wife and I had twins eight months ago.  Everything is going well, and it's all been fun and interesting (and exhausting).  My wife and I have made a commitment to ourselves, each other, and the babies, to drop some more weight.  Aside from the obvious life-insurance type issues, we really don't want to be the girls' fat parents. 

Part of this is that we want to blend into the background when the kids' friends think about parents.  We don't want to be the twins' fat mom and fat dad.  Being a kid is bad enough.  People will find lovely ways to mock them, I have no doubt.  But we don't want to give ammunition to jerky kids. 

We also want to be able to do things with the kids--things involving movement.  My wife and I are not naturally athletic types, but we wish we were.  Plus, chasing the kids around is not going to be easy while carrying a bunch of extra weight.  I want to play with them without being too winded or worn out to be a fun dad.

Finally, we want the kids to like to move.  I work with a guy who is in great shape and always has been.  Genes are what they are, but he likes to move.  I saw him one Monday and asked him what he did over the weekend.  He told me that on Sunday, he'd gone for a run in the morning and then surfed all afternoon.  He's just gone running for fun.  Seriously.  I would love to feel like that about exercise.  I'm to the point where I miss exercise when I don't do it.  But I'm not to "fun" yet.  Maybe someday.  And I'll absolutely fake it to get my girls interested.

Here they are:

The girls have some strikes against them:  fat parents and fat genes.  But we're doing what we can to eat right and teach them to, and we're going to get out and have fun.

Checking in

I know it's been a while.  It's been a hard few months.  Since the twins came home, I've been unable to hit the gym (and I'm not going to go into why), and I've been eating stuff I shouldn't (because I don't do heroin), and I've put on some weight.  Not tons.  Maybe nine pounds since last summer.  But it's disappointing.

I've hit the gym now three days in a row though (yay me!), and I've been working hard not to eat my feelings.  I've had middling success, but I think I can do almost anything a day at a time, so that's what I'm doing.

[Ginger, if you read this, would you invite me to your blog?]

Hope everyone is well.

Skip

Well, shit.

So, over the last several months, I haven't been to the gym much.  New babies, etc., you know the deal.

My clothes have been feeling kind of snug lately, but I was able to convince myself that it was lack of muscle tone, not weight gain, that was making everything hang differently.  For a while, the scale backed me up.  I hadn't gained.

But today, the scale betrayed me.  Which is to say, it paid me back for ignoring it and for the mindless eating I have engaged in lately.  I'm a big guy, and I can eat a lot.  My BMR is high.  Apparently, however, I've exceeded it quite a bit lately.

You can slack in certain areas and never be found out.  If you take a longish lunch, no one may notice.  Hell, if you cheat on your taxes, you might be just fine.

But you can't fool the scale.  Or your waistband. 

The biggest difference for me lately is that I have been eating when not hungry.  To the normal folk out there in the world--the ones who don't do that--eating when not hungry makes no sense.  But I don't smoke, drink to excess, or do drugs.  So I eat, because I haven't yet figured out how to manage my anxiety. 

I know this is it.  I'm working on the learning part.  And now, I'm recommitted to listening to my body.  To remembering that food is fuel (and that that's all it is).

Whew.

Hi.  I've been out of the box for a while.  Babies, you know.  And my wife had surgery unrelated to the babies, which makes it impossible for her to pick them up (or do diapers, hmmmm).  So there you are.  I've been kind of busy.

How's the weight loss, Skip?  Well, there hasn't been any.  Happily, I haven't gained, either.  What's annoying, though, is that I have not been to the gym in a long time.  Thus, my body feels fatter and more gelatinous than it did.  I mean, it probably is.  The good news is that my body responds pretty well to exercise.  I'll go back and I'll trim down pretty easily.  What I want to do is go back.  When things settle down at home (and they will), I will.  (I've gone a few times.  It's nice to go, and I'll be back.  I actually miss it.  That's a relatively new thing in my life.)  Given the past year, it's a miracle I'm not back up.  Seriously.  I tend to gain weight in times of stress (eating my feelings!).

Lately, though, I've been feeling the effects of food creep, and I've been all too happy to eat when I'm agitated.  I would like to stop both.  Today, I started tracking again at livestrong.com.  Tracking is good for me.  It's pretty easy for me to forget what I've eaten and go overboard.  Of course, I remember everything about 2:00 a.m.  That's pretty much when I reflect on all my failings.  If I can make it to 4:00, I can sleep through the night.  Call it a renewed commitment.

When I lost 40 pounds in 2010, I was amazed at how much of a difference it made in my life.  Forty is a lot.  It doesn't alway feel like a lot, because I could lose another 100 and still be thick.  But forty took me down almost three sizes in pants.  That's pretty cool.  Another forty or fifty would be even better.  That's the goal.

Slow and steady will work, I think.  I'm going to get back to the gym (three times a week should be effective and doable), and I'm going to stop eating crappy food (delish though it might be--and some of it is).  Nothing fancy.  But I'm ready for the next fifty.  Wish me luck.

Non-scale victory

Despite the title, this actually involves the scale. 

I gained something like 8 1/2 pounds the other day.  I mean in one day.  That's not really possible, even for me.  I fluctuate, but not like that.

Then I realized that the scale was not where it usually was in the bathroom.  So I moved it a couple of feet.  Down about six.  I moved it again.  Up a few.

Apparently, the curvature of the floor in my (very old) house matters to the scale.  I had no idea.  I also am not really sure where the scale is accurate. 

I know I haven't lost much (if any) weight in the last year.  I'm also beginning to doubt the "eat your BMR and lose weight" concept.  But I have also figured out that scale placement matters.  It has to be consistent.

I feel a tiny bit as if I'm starting over.

I'm not the only one

So, I just got a heart rate monitor.  I didn't want one that had a chest band thingy because, honestly, I wasn't sure it fit.  I read a list of reviews of a promising one, however, and a big guy said it fit him, so I tumbled.

What I thought was this--a gadget might make working out more interesting.  I don't mind working out.  Really.  I love having worked out.  What I hate is getting off the couch to go.  The promise of a toy might help.  It really might.

So I have used it twice.  I like that it talks to the machine I'm on, and I like that it gives me numbers consistent with what the exercise machines themselves have given me over the last few years.  It also confirms that it's easy for me to be complacent.  I'd like to get my heart rate between, say 137 and 158.  But the elliptical is pretty easy for me to do for a long time at 125.  I mean, I'd have to go faster to get my heart going harder, and I don't wanna.  (Four years ago, I did the elliptical for five minutes and had to get off.  I thought it might kill me.)

Yesterday I did 15 on an elliptical to warm up.  Then I got on the rotating staircase thing.  For six minutes.  Then I had to change.  I could barely breathe.  My heart rate was up to 151.  I believed it.  I tried to make a note of what that felt like.

I did another 9 minutes on a different elliptical, and that was it.  My heart rate, once over 140 never dropped below it until I went to stretch and do abs.

Now, here is the question.  My monitor calculates calories spent based on "total body stress" and the weight I entered when I set it up.  For a total of 43 minutes (including stretching), it said I burned 937 calories.  And I don't believe it.  I don't.  I mean, I am a big guy and all, and I was working hard.  But that's a lot of calories. 

I googled the topic and it seems that a lot of people think the monitors give too high a calculation.  I'm going to figure on half the number being true, and use whatever it gives me as a kind of benchmark.  But I don't think 937 is accurate.  Anyone else?

Progress

The Anti-Jared has a good post right now.  His point is that you can't cheat your body.  It knows if you have been treating it well or not.  You can eat badly for a few days and not gain, but if you do it all the time, you will.  At a minimum, you will feel less well.  Have a look:  http://theantijared.com/2011/07/the-house-always-wins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAnti-jared+%28The+Anti-Jared%29

To that end, I'm down to about where I was pre-hospital weight.  Mostly, I have been watching portion sizes and eating good food.  Real food.  No doughnuts.  If you look at www.refusetoregain.com (at the right side of this page), you will see that the writer emphasizes the importance of the quality of the calories one ingests, not just the number.  Her theory is based on insulin load in response to certain foods.  She does not believe it's a zero sum game.  I 'm not sure I do, either.

When I was in my recent doughnut phase, I don't think I ate an extra 10,500-14,000 calories in a couple of weeks (3-4 pounds).  I really don't.  But I do think that the fried, carbo-goodness of doughnuts wrecked havoc on my body's blood sugar.  (Note:  I am not diabetic, knock wood.)  In less than a month, I was up a solid six pounds.  I started eating better (not really much less, either), drinking more water, too, and I'm back down.  (I guess it's possible that I was just "impacted," if you know what I mean.  It's possible that dehydration was making me retain water.  Either way, it was a decent reminder that eating good food is a reward in itself.

I have been frustrated at the stagnancy of my loss.  But staying the same doesn't suck, given my history.  So I'll keep doing what I'm doing, and I'll get back to the gym.

Speaking of, I haven't been to the gym much in the last seven weeks or so.  One baby came home from the hospital last Wednesday, and I think the other one will come home tomorrow or Tuesday.  It's made for a crazy sleep schedule, and it's hard for me to get to the gym when I can barely see straight.  But I'll get back.  Everything I read says you can't exercise away a bad diet, so I'm going to focus on eating in a healthy way for now and hit the gym when I can.