Eliminating "Guess Work" while Keeping One's Sanity

eingmund

Hello All,

I've struggled with my weight for years. I'm 6'2", presently weigh 232. My physician advised me to drop 20-30 lbs. One of my biggest struggles is that I am a stress eater. My job is very demanding (I lead a team of 150 people). I'll go through stretches where I do really well and the pounds melt away. Then I endure a rough stretch at work, stress eat and decide I'm too tired to get up and hit the gym in the morning, and the pounds just creep back.

I feel like I need to find a routine that I can follow consistently, and wanted to share an approach that I've developed.

For me, the key to successfully losing weight is being accurate. I need to accurately measure the calories I burn exercising, and I need to be meticulous with the calories that I eat.

For the exercise, I invested in a heart rate monitor, and I have to say it's one of the best purchases that I've made. I love being able to assess my progress in real time.

For the food, I bought an electronic food balance a while ago. I find that weighing my food is crucial to portion control. However, I also find it to be cumbersome at times. For breakfast, it's easy. I just weigh out my cereal portion, put the milk in a measuring cup, and I'm good to go.
Lunch is similarly easy because I keep it simple. I build my sandwich on the food scale, so I can weigh the ingredients correctly. Weighing my yogurt portion is simple enough.

It's dinner that often causes frustration.

I LOVE to cook. I trained in a gourmet restaurant, and I love doing complex recipes with lots of ingredients. Precisely measuring and weighing every single ingredient for a large recipe is just frustrating, though. Most professional cooks don't measure every ingredient - they "eyeball" things. So, I've developed a strategy that works for me.

When I pick a recipe, I study the ingredients and identify things that are calorie-dense. I'll take the time to measure / weigh those ingredients. So for example, the other night, I made quesadillas with some leftover pork tenderloin that I had roasted another night. I allowed myself one tortilla, carefully weighed the cheese, and meat. I measured the amount of oil that I put in the pan. However, I didn't bother worrying about the bell peppers, onions, jalepenos, and spices.

I find that by controlling the calorie-dense ingredients in a recipe, I can stay on track without feeling like I have to weigh out every single food item every single time. So far, so good.

StaciMarie1974

I agree w/ your approach to dinner accuracy. For low calorie items you can estimate and 'get away' with it. If you log 50g peppers and its really 25g or 75g, the difference is not significant. And if it helps to maintain your sanity, that is a good result!

When I was losing - I was also very particular about accuracy. It helped me avoid temptations. Like deep fried whatnot at a county fair. No way could I know exactly how many calories, so I didn't want it.

If you have not already, try to come up with an alternative for handling stress. Something physical if possible.

NorthCascades

eingmund wrote: »

For me, the key to successfully losing weight is being accurate. I need to accurately measure the calories I burn exercising, and I need to be meticulous with the calories that I eat.

If that's true, you need a bike and a power meter. It has to be a direct-force meter, and don't cheap out and get a one-leg-only one.

CassondraKennedy

I've been logging everything accurately for the last few weeks and it is getting quite tedious. I've noticed that spinach and other green veggies (in, say, an omelet or whatnot) contain hardly any calories. I might simply start estimating those low calorie additions to take away some of my growing resistance toward making anything with more than three ingredients! Thanks for sharing!