A New Weigh to Eat

My name is Susan. I am losing weight each day. It’s rather simple, actually once you learn a few things and decide that you will change your way of life. I didn’t decide to ‘diet’ but rather I decided to completely change all my eating habits. I think I can help you do the same, so let me put some things together for you.

First, and most importantly you need to decide this isn’t a ‘diet’. Diets fail, every time. You may lose weight on a diet but as soon as you stop dieting and go back to your regular way of eating, you will gain weight again. I’ve done so many ‘diets’ that I can tell you with experience they just don’t work. Until you decide that you want to change the WAY you eat, and for the rest of your life you will not succeed long term. So, you need to put it in your mind that this will be a change of life; that you will do what you need to do to be healthy. For myself, I don’t want to live longer. I do, however, want to make the years I do have left more comfortable and more pleasant to live.

If you are reading this, hoping to gain some information on how to lose weight, become a healthier person, there is a good chance you are overweight. Maybe you’ve always had a problem with your weight, or you are now dealing with ‘baby weight’. It’s also possible that you’ve become of a certain age and you have to now deal with what is so charmingly called ‘middle-age spread.’ Whatever the reason realize now that it is possible to lose weight and become healthier if you put your mind to it. IT IS POSSIBLE!

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of how to start. First things first…..you need to weigh yourself. Yep, you’re going to willingly step on a pair of scales and read that number down there. You may not have been on scales for a long, long time, afraid of what you’ll see. Well, you will need to do it now. Look at that number, yep that’s all you. Keep it in your mind; you’ll need it in a bit. This may seem harsh, but you won’t have any success if you don’t face reality. I’ve heard many people say, “I don’t weigh myself; I use my clothes to judge my success.” That is a very good way to track some success, but there isn’t a better way than actually knowing what you weigh, and what you lose each time you weigh yourself. Plus, you’ll be happier when you see those numbers decrease each time.

So, now that we have that out of the way (pun intended, get it? Way/Weigh), let’s move on. The next step is to decide how you will keep track of your food and weight loss. You could use a notebook, a PDA (Personal Data Assistant) or find a website. A great and free website to do this is www.MyFitnessPal.com. This website is great in that it will keep track of your current weight; all weight loss entered and even posts it on your page or Facebook and/or Twitter pages as well. This can be very encouraging from your friends who see the postings of all the weight you’re losing, or even if you slip and gain once in a while your friends can be an immense source of encouragement. I find that being accountable to my friends makes me not want to gain anything so that it’s not posted on my wall! My Fitness Pal also has a very extensive database of foods so just about everything you would eat is there with calorie amounts. Using My Fitness Pal as your food diary is very easy and accessible.

So, if you’ve joined MFP, got yourself a notebook, or whatever way you’ve decided to keep track of things, put in that weight that you were remembering from before and if you’re using MFP the site has given you a daily caloric intake amount that you can follow. This is just your starting point because as you lose weight your calorie per day amount will decrease as you will not need that many calories each day. If you are doing this without MFP you’ll need to find an acceptable calorie intake per day that you can follow. (See why using MFP is so easy? They do all the hard work for you!)

Now, what are you going to eat? Well let’s see, what do YOU think you should eat? Lots of vegetables, rabbit food, right? NO WAY! You need real food to live, right? Well you will eat real food. What you won’t eat is trashy food, junk food and food that is just plain no good for you. One of the key components to eating the real food is PORTION CONTROL. You can’t fill your plates up with food anymore. Don’t look like that; I know you do it….I did it. I would just fill my plate full of food and then fill compelled to eat it all. You remember….be a member of the “Clean Plate Club”, as mom used to say.

You should know right now that I am going to pretty much tell you to go through your cabinets, pantries and refrigerators and sort all your food; to get rid of all the foods you shouldn’t eat. Why get rid of them? Well, less of a temptation if the food isn’t there, sitting in front of you, taunting you. Those cookies at midnight will call you; taunt you, saying, “Oh Susan, I’m in here all alone. Won’t you come in here and get me, eat me with a tall glass of cold milk?” And believe me, they will along with their buddies Cake, Pie and Little Debbie’s. So get them out of the house; give them to someone or take them to a soup kitchen, community pantry or if you’re brave, just throw them in the garbage. Go do that, then come back and finish reading.

OK, you’re back. You know I’m going to ask this: Is it all gone? Truthfully; be honest. Great, you’ve got will power already! Next thing we’re going to go over is just exactly what types of foods you do need to have in the house to eat. I’ll forewarn you though; eating healthier is going to cost a little more than eating junk. Junk food is cheap, that’s why so many people buy it! But we’re not going to break the bank. You can do this on a budget, I do! So, you’ve no doubt seen the Food Pyramid in your lifetime, yes? Here is a picture of it in case you haven’t:



That is the OLD WAY to look at the foods you should eat.

Here is a picture of the NEW Food Pyramid that we’re going to follow:



It’s different, and much more colorful in my opinion! You can see here that it’s important to eat a variety of foods from several different groups. I follow this as well. I’ll start now detailing what types of foods I eat from each group. You don’t have to eat the same thing, but just know that it’s the type, quantity and amount that are important.

Grains

For grains I suggest whole grain for everything. I buy whole grain breads, rice’s and pastas. Whole wheat isn’t quite the same as whole grain, but you can now see that many breads and pastas that are whole wheat also will be very high in whole grains. Just be aware of what you are purchasing and read the labels. For my household I buy Nature’s Own Whole Wheat bread, Nature’s Own Multi-Grain Sandwich Thins, Wal-Mart Great Value brand Instant Brown Rice, and Wal-Mart Great Value brand whole wheat pasta (for like spaghetti). Don’t like wheat bread you say? They also make Whole Wheat White bread you can get.

Cereals are grains also. Sugary, empty calorie cereals are not good for your waistline or your teeth. Find yourself a good Whole Grain, High Fiber cereal that you will enjoy eating every day. I started buying the Fiber One cereals, about mid-level in the fiber content. Remember FIBER is your friend! Not only will it aid in proper digestion and elimination, but it will make you feel full, and for a longer period of time. I also found that Kellogg’s is now making some really good Fiber Plus cereal in two flavors that are really good. This was really important to me as I needed something that would carry me through the morning and help my poor digestive system. With all the medications I take, it was REALLY important to me!

For things like crackers we buy Lance Whole Grain Peanut Butter or Whole Grain Cheese crackers, to snack on when we need a little something. We also purchase A LOT of microwave popcorn (and when I say A LOT, you really have no idea how much) only I get the Butter kind. It’s around mid-level in calories and takes great. Get yourself some WASA brand crackers as well. You can eat them by themselves and I use them to bread tons of stuff too.

Vegetables

Yum, veggies are wonderful! You can get fresh, frozen, or canned. But you will need to have plenty of them. Vary your veggies or you’ll get really tired of them. When preparing your meals, let’s say you put three items on the plate: a meat, a starch, and a veggie. Now let’s get out of that pattern. It’s ok to do this once in a while, but it’s important to vary your meals. Your vegetable content should be the biggest portion on your plates. Gone are the days when meat was the biggest portion. Meats should only be a small portion, and we’ll discuss that in a bit. I’ll buy frozen veggies, without sauces that steam in their own bags in the microwave. There’s enough in the bags for three very nice portions for my family. Be aware that corn, peas, and potatoes are veggies, but they are also starches. Although starch is an important ingredient for a well balanced diet, too much starch will have many ill effects. In my completely non-nutritionist, non-chemist words, starch when taken into the body will turn to sugar. Too much sugar will cause too much insulin and too much insulin will cause your body to not lose weight. If you want to know more about this, please research this for yourself. I also buy fresh veggies like bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, zucchini and squash and stir fry them or roast them in the oven. These are SOO good and good for you as well!

Fruits

I’ll be honest in saying fruits are not my favorite foods. They may be yours and that is great! Just be aware that fruits also contain natural sugars so too many of them will hinder in your weight loss. Stay away from fruit juices that also contain sugars and fruits that are premade in other applications that have added other sugars. Fresh fruit such as apples, oranges, bananas, cantaloupe, and watermelon are indeed the best! And remember: melon fruits such as watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew contain a LOT of water! Water is good, water is your friend! These fruits will take a small amount to make you fill full because of the water! And just to dispel the mystery TOMATOES ARE FRUITS! There, I said it. Yes, anything with SEEDS is considered fruits.




Milk/Dairy Products

Very important in aiding your weight loss is milk. It’s said that 24/24 is a good rule for dairy products. That is 24 ounces in 24 hours. See what I did there with the 24/24? That’s easy to remember, I hope (I’m getting old and the brain doesn’t work like it used to).
So, here’s the skinny on milk (I’m full of the puns today!). I drink 0% milk. Yes I do. It’s really only milk flavored water and so translucent that you can see the bottom of the bowl of cereal through the milk. But I decided that being healthier and thinner was more important to me than milk. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE whole milk…..yes I do. But I gave it up. You can too! I did find a very good alternative with a great taste; Almond Milk. SILK and BLUE DIAMOND make Almond milk in three flavors: Plain, Vanilla and Dark Chocolate (only Silk makes the chocolate). So can you guess which one I drink? Regardless of the flavor the statistics are there; Plain has 60 calories per serving, Vanilla has 90 calories per serving and the Chocolate has 130 calories per serving. I drink the chocolate, about a glass a day. And yes it has the most calories but I account for those calories and I use it as a treat. Soy milk is also a very good way to get the calcium and other nutrients needed from dairy. I also eat yogurts and cheeses, but in moderation.

Meats/Proteins

These are last because although they are important, they are the least important component of what you need to eat. I totally went off eating red meat. That was a choice I made. I started buying ground turkey and ground chicken and chicken breasts as my meat choices. I also found that I felt better not eating the red meat. I even tried to eat some ground beef about two months without it and I just couldn’t eat it. It just tasted icky to me. But I’m not telling you to stop eating red meat. That is a choice you would make yourself. But try to incorporate say ground chicken in a recipe that you would normally eat ground beef in and see if you like it. You can shave some calories off by doing this. I tried ground chicken in spaghetti and YUM! I also tried ground chicken in hamburgers and double YUM! I am not much of a fish eater but I do try to eat fish once in a while, mostly Tilapia. I’ll bread it with WASA crackers and bake it, or marinate it and bake it. I do love tuna so I’ll use tuna about once a week in tuna patties. Eggs, beans and peanut butter are proteins as well so remember that. If you want to go meatless you’ll need to put in some protein to stay healthy. Soy products are also becoming widely available and portabella mushrooms are the closest taste and texture to meat there is being a vegetable.

Oils/Fats

You need some oils and fats in your diet to remain healthy. I used to use EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil) only in my cooking but I recently found a wonderful product. Pompeian Brand Oils make a new oil called OlivExtra Plus. It’s canola oil and first pressed extra virgin olive oil with Omega-3 DHA (which is really good for your brain). I love this oil because olive oil has such a low smoke temperature that when I fry something on the stove it will burn very easily before it’s done. So using this oil I can stir fry very easily and also roast with it in the oven and the taste is AWESOME! You can get a coupon from their website if you want to try it. I use butter in my foods but I don’t fry in it and I’ll use it sparingly or spray it on my veggies and rice. EVERYTHING IN MODERATION!


Alright, with the foods out of the way you have to know that’s only part of good nutrition. How you eat is just as important as what you eat. Honestly, this is the tricky part; the trial and error part. There are some hard and fast rules but some things you will have to try and adjust to you, your body, your schedule, and plainly your life.

Some rules to try to remember:
1. You need to eat your allotted calories each day. No more, no less than what is being allowed to you.
2. You should break these calories into 4 to 6 meals a day.
a. Breakfast
b. Mid-Morning Snack
c. Lunch
d. Mid-Afternoon Snack
e. Dinner
f. Evening Snack
3. With your 4 to 6 meals per day, the biggest caloric meals should be breakfast and lunch with dinner and snacks being the lowest in calories. This is because it will be much easier to burn off the calories during the day while you’re active rather than while you’re asleep. (Just makes sense right? You don’t burn many calories sleeping unless you’re a REALLY restless sleeper)
4. You should drink 6 to 8 8-ounce glasses of water a day. You should not drink soda or tea loaded with sugars now either. They are just plain not good for you. Also, I started to drink diet soda but realized the aspartame in them was giving me and my family really bad headaches. So now I found that the Food Lion here makes 2 diet sodas with Splenda so I’ll drink one can a day and the rest water. Water is so good for you. It helps you feel full, hydrates you and helps with digestion and elimination and makes your skin so much better and glowy!
5. Portion control, portion control, portion control!!!!! You really have got to watch the amount of a portion you choose for your foods. A general rule I follow is I’ll eat the amount the product says is a serving. Like every morning when I eat my cereal I will measure out 1 cup of cereal and 1 cup of 0% milk. That’s it, it’s that simple. When we eat salad I will measure out what 1 serving is of salad mix and 1 serving of salad dressing. Even though those are low calorie or fat free, I still stick with 1 serving of each. This also makes it really easy to add the calories because the package already has the calories calculated for 1 serving.
6. You really should be taking a multi-vitamin each day. Just through general living, environment and such you lose important vitamins and minerals that you need each day. You can’t always get these from the foods you eat either.
7. Diet pills don’t work. Appetite suppressants aren’t good for you because you need to EAT to lose weight. So don’t even bother. They may start working with a little progress but they will stop and you’ll gain all that weight back, and then some.
8. You should only weigh yourself once a week. Your weight will fluctuate each day so if you weigh yourself every day you may find yourself frustrated and try to adjust your eating to compensate. If you’re following these patterns of eating you’ll lose weight too.

The Dreaded ‘P’

What is the Dreaded ‘P’? It is called Plateau. This is the stage of your weight loss when you will seem to have stopped losing weight all together. It’s as if you’re body has said, “This is a good place; I think I’ll stop here.” There are a couple of things you can do to get over this hump and resume losing weight. One thing is to mix up what you are eating. If you are eating the same thing day in and day out, you will get tired of it as will your body. We need variety in our lives! Your body needs a variety of foods each day so that it stays mixed up. Your body will work to digest each food a different way. So when you keep it at attention, not sure what it will have to do to burn off the food you give it, you can stay away from it getting comfortable and therefore hitting the plateau. Another way to get over this hump is by increasing your caloric intake for a couple of days. This works very much like the variety step in that your body will have to work a little harder to compensate for the increased calories. This doesn’t mean I want you to go hog wild, eating everything in sight! Just increase your calories a little bit over a couple of days. Then return to your normal calorie amount and you should see results the next weigh in. It may take a week or two to get moving, but you’ll do it.

Some Last Words from Me

I have struggled with my weight most all of my adult life. I love food, I love to eat. I am addicted to food. I love all kinds of food. I had to break this love affair in order to have any success at all. I now look at those foods that I love so much and say, “Is it worth it? Is it worth my hard work and health to eat that? Is the momentary satisfaction I get from that food really worth it?” Most of the time I will say no, but sometimes the craving is just too big. So instead of eating an extremely high calorie food, packed with sugars or fats I’ll compromise. For instance I love sweets. So instead of eating a piece of cake or several cookies I buy a low calorie ice cream bar. Breyers makes this double chocolate ice cream bar that is to die for! It’s only 130 calories per bar and it is SOOOO GOOD! We also will buy Yoplait Whipped yogurt in the chocolate flavor and freeze them. They are about 160 calories and really fulfill my sweet tooth. And I have been known to eat half of a Hershey’s Special Dark candy bar, half of a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup or even I’ve bought 1 Ferrero Rocher individual chocolate piece. They key was I really didn’t go overboard but I fulfilled that craving. I didn’t then punish myself for falling off the wagon, I just ate my usual foods and I found I lost weight that week as well.

I started this eating plan with gusto! I also thought I had to exercise intensely in order to lose any weight. I did that, walking and exercising every day. But I have health problems and that has caused me to not be able to do any exercise at all. And I was surprised to see that I have lost weight anyway! The key is to stick to my calorie intake and not overdo myself eating. I will get back to exercising in due time and then I know my weight loss will be bigger each week. But as of right now I’m losing around a pound a week, maybe a little more and maybe a little less. The important thing to me is I am LOSING every week. It’s a truth that lean muscle will burn more fat, and burn it longer such as when you are at rest. But remember that muscle weighs more than fat so if you put on lean muscle you may initially gain weight, but will burn fat far better and quicker. This is a case when you’ll see more results in your clothes than on the scale so don’t get discouraged.

I also realized that eating ALL my calories a day was truly important. Your body needs calories to burn calories. It’s true. When you skimp on your daily calories your body will go into emergency salvation mode and will slow your metabolism in order to save calories. It will think simply, “I’m not sure when I’ll get nutrition again, so I better hang onto some I already have, just in case.” So eating less food in a day will NOT cause you to lose weight permanently or be healthy. It will only cause frustration and heartache because you will think you cannot do this, and therefore you’ll quit. I speak from research and experience here.

This whole lifestyle change works so much better with support. If your entire household can support this change then you’ll all succeed in immeasurable ways. I can control what my son eats, for the most part but I cannot control what my hubby eats. But I didn’t let this deter me in any way. I fix my foods, measuring and counting each thing and I don’t for hubby. He likes his higher fat foods, but I stay away from them. This was really hard to do as he is my ‘eating buddy’. We have always loved food and we have a great time eating together. I had to change this in my life and although he may not be happy about it, he understands and supports my decision. You can do this, either with your spouse or without. You are strong and beautiful and are capable of anything you set your mind and heart to do!

So that’s all I can think of right now. One last word and this is completely my own opinion and I am not trying to get anyone to follow this at all. But, I had a complete loss of hormones in my body coming from a complete hysterectomy a few years ago. It was explained to me how estrogen affects the body and weight-gain/weight-loss. So I started taking estrogen again as part of an HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy). When I did that, the weight just started melting off of me! If you’re interested in this, please talk to your doctor before taking things into your own hands with medicines.
And as always, please check with your doctor before starting any weight-loss plans or exercise regimens.


*These words are completely my opinions and not backed by any physician, nutritionist or any one else for that matter. The results I have received may not be the same for you so I can’t be responsible for any results different than the ones I have gotten for myself. I do hope this can help every one who reads it.


As I write this and prepare to post it on my MFP blog I can’t help but explain to you the reader that this is the second time I’ve published this. The first time I was 40 years old and I had lost 62.4 pounds and over 30 total inches since in less than 8 months or so. I went on to lose a total of 75 pounds in that year. But I injured myself and was laid up and as my fibromyalgia took over my life my husband took over some of my duties, namely cooking. I am forever grateful for his willingness to do this but he was only able to cook premade meals, frozen meals or boxed meals. I let myself give in, and I went back to my old eating habits with my ‘eating buddy’ at my side. I gained everything back, all of it. And what’s more I felt like crap, guilty and worse than that…I threw all my ‘fat’ clothes out when I lost the weight, vowing never to return to that size. But I did, and I outgrew all my ‘lost weight’ clothes and couldn’t fit anything. Blech. I felt miserable. I refused to purchase new clothes to fit my fatter self. So I searched for this document and reread each word. I’ve re-inspired myself and am now back to my eating plan I’ve laid out here.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this. I hope I am able to inspire or encourage you on your journey. I am currently on My Fitness Pal (again) and feel free to add me. My user name there is SusanMPreston43.