My constant declarations of "I'm SO SICK OF BEING THIS FAT!" must have somehow seeped their way into my brain at last, because I have to say, this past week, I have been a dieting MACHINE.
I'm motivated. (How? Why now?) I'm determined. (Me? HUH???) I'm focused. (The most surprising of all.) I'm on a @#$*^ MISSION. This week I have managed what I sarcastically refer to as a more "anorexic outlook" to the whole dieting thing. All this means is, I have noticed myself thinking things like, "Well, one pound lost is GOOD, but you can do BETTER." Or "Yeah, you just went an hour without a bite of something, so why can't you go another hour?"
From everything I've read, this is how people with anorexia think all the time. Anorexia is terrible, and it kills people, but the basic behaviors that cause it all center around self-control. And let's face it, a total lack of self-control is the real reason most Americans are so damn fat. So, I have borrowed a few of these self-control-inducing mantras to help me survive mid-day cravings and avoid late-night cheats. And by God if this cuckoo psycho-crap doesn't work!
I know that if anyone reads this blog, I'll inevitably get a few comments about this. Nobody need worry; I love food too much to ever starve myself to death. I couldn't survive without great food. I also don't have it in me to be so disciplined all the time that I end up being underweight. As far as I'm concerned, my use of any little self-control mantra is simply a means to an end. I'm fat. I don't wanna be. So I will do what I must to facilitate the process of shedding the fat, and right now, that requires a hefty dose of me messing with my own head.
(In other words, never fear...this would never be me):
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| Disgusting. |
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| WTF?! |
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| Sad. |
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| Photoshopped, but still scary. |
Basically, I see a little extra mental self-control as my own way of talking myself out of eating what I shouldn't, when I shouldn't, and also a way of keeping me from screwing up an otherwise awesome day of dieting with 15 minutes of random, uncontrolled snarfing. Hey, I can admit it. I am a known expert snarfer. I had it down to a science, too. I could make half a cheese pizza disappear before I even realized where it went, and the fact that I barely tasted it going down was irrelevant. My stomach got what it wanted, and thus was satisfied for a little while. But as we all know, the guilt afterwards hardly makes the binge worth it. I can't believe how many times I did this. I say "did," past tense, because my new mantras prevent such snarfing, and this is simply one HUGE problem solved.
This was one of my biggest unsolved dilemmas, in fact. "How do I stop myself from eating crap once I start?" I have NO "off button" when it comes to certain foods. Specifically, buttered popcorn, anything on the menu at India Palace, Coke Classic, any pasta with butter and parmesan, Big Apple Bagels, Chex Party Mix, Guadalajara chips and cheese dip, Cadbury Creme Eggs, Red Lobster's Cheddar Bay Biscuits, Cold Stone Creamery's cake batter ice cream, Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, Starburst Gummies, Junior Mints, Hacienda del Sol margaritas, Cruz Garcia Real Sangria, and so so SO many others. <sigh>
Ah, enough with the drooling on my keyboard. I'll get to eat all of those foods again someday, in definite moderation, but for now, they're OFF LIMITS. I can't go near them. I have to drive a wide circuit around our favorite restaurants now, because I'm currently depriving myself so much, and I crave diet-unfriendly food even more because of that. (DUH!!!) However, I've been doing a lot better with this. A couple weeks back, I was whining about how restaurants were single-handedly derailing me every week. And it's true; they were. But I was also not exercising even the tiniest bit of control when we'd visit them. My past two restaurant outings were turnaround experiences for me. An omelette and fruit last week for lunch at Perkins, and then Monday this week I had a big fresh shrimp and spinach salad at J.B.Schneider's in West Duluth, with a little olive oil and a lot of vinegar drizzled over it, and a diet Pepsi. The "old me" would have never done this. SHE would have ordered creamy, gooey pasta alfredo, garlic breadsticks, and a margarita.
So here's the reason I'm all charged up, in a nutshell. I made a little chart, after doing some more math. The math says that I am 61 days away from June 1st, which is just under 9 weeks. I know that seems like gobs of time, but it's not. The weeks fly by way too @#$*^ fast, and I know this. I discovered after doing the number-crunching that I only have to lose 3.0 pounds per week to reach my goal by the first week in June (125 pounds, or "pre-pregnant weight"). Three pounds per week for me is ABSOLUTELY do-able!!!!!!! Here's my little chart.
Monday, 3/28/11 - Weight: 153.0
Subtracting 3.0 pounds each week, here's how it would/should (WILL!) look:
Monday, 4/4/11 - 150.0
Monday, 4/11/11 - 147.0
Monday, 4/18/11 - 144.0
Monday, 4/25/11 - 141.0
Monday, 5/2/11 - 138.0
Monday, 5/9/11 - 135.0
Monday, 5/16/11 - 132.0
Monday, 5/23/11 - 129.0
Monday, 5/30/11 - 126.0
Monday, 6/6/11 - 123.0
EASY-PEASY!!!
Ha.
But I AM completely on-track to do this. My last 6 days of eating and exercising looked like this:
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Saturday, 3/26/11 - weight: 152.5 / ate 1050 calories / burned 325 calories on the elliptical.
Sunday, 3/27/11 - weight: 155.0 / ate 1205 calories / burned 400 calories on the elliptical.
Monday, 3/28/11 - weight: 153.0 / ate about 1330 calories (not sure how much my shrimp salad had in it...) / No exercise.
Tuesday, 3/29/11 - weight: 153.5 / ate 1100 calories / did 20-minute Tae Bo Basic workout plus burned 125 calories on the treadmill.
Wednesday, 3/30/11 - weight: 152.5 / ate 1100 calories / burned 400 calories on the elliptical.
Thursday, 3/31/11 - weight: 152.0 / ate 1100 calories / burned 400 calories on the elliptical.
Friday, 4/1/11 - weight: 151.5
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I'm completely focused now, and kinda excited to see how I do this weekend. I've lost a total of 14.0 pounds as of this morning, since February 7th. I don't want to screw this progress up!!! Normally, the upcoming weekend would terrify me, and I'd already be anticipating how many different ways I was going to blow it all to hell. But today, I am seeing the weekend in a whole new light. We're taking my mom-in-law out for a birthday-lunch tomorrow to Guadalajara, and I'm not worried (much)! I am not going to have a margarita; it'll be diet-something instead. I'm also not going to eat fajitas or liquid-ecstasy cheese on ANYTHING. Those two things alone will help me a lot. I'm thinking a big salad with salsa instead of cheese, and NO chips! It'll taste (almost) as amazing, I'm sure.
I'm actually more worried about Saturday evening. I'm going to the Ziigwan Pow Wow at 5:00 p.m. for a couple hours, and for me, pow wows always mean one thing: FRY BREAD.
Pray for me, people.
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| Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. |
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| EXTREME DELICIOUS-NESS. |
HA.
ReplyDeleteSaturday at Guadalajara: Drank the medium margarita. Ate the chips and liquid ecstasy cheese dip. Inhaled the garlic-butter-drenched tilapia with Spanish rice and salad. AND - to top the entire fiesta off - FRIED ICE CREAM.
Yeah. I have SELF-CONTROL.
And the Pow Wow...ah, the FRY BREAD. I don't want to talk about the fry bread. But I will, for the sake of this being an honest documentation of my diet struggles.
The fry bread was disgusting. Normally, I can eat a slab of fry bread regardless of how heavy or grease-laden it is. I waited in the feast line for an hour for my one smallish piece of fry bread. I didn't get any other feast food. It was very, VERY greasy. Fry bread is almost always cold, because to get it at its best and freshest requires you be standing right there when it comes out of the grease. So this fry bread was really, REALLY greasy. Greasier than usual. Greasier than it's supposed to be, I think. It's made just like a fried cake doughnut, but without as much sweetness in the dough. Needless to say... I felt like a had a ball of lard in my gut until about 2:00 a.m.
And I did.
I was sick enough that I didn't eat or drink another thing after being at the Pow Wow at 6:00 p.m.
Did I learn any lesson here? Maybe.
Will I still eat fry bread every chance I get?
Yup.