Chestnutlass's Journal, 17 January 2011

I see you haven't made a journal entry in a while now, so I guess you are not following closely with your past intentions... Anyway I thought I'd live my 2 cents anyway. I think (and this is only my opinion) you are approaching loosing weight from the wrong perspective. You classify food as good or bad for dieting and (maybe unconsciously) you associate the foods you like with bad for dieting and the ones you don't with good dieting. Let me tell you that with that kind of thinking you would never loose weight because trying is a very big effort. You have eat things you don't like or keep from eating the ones you do. But you are wrong. There is no such thing as bad or good food. The perfect diet is the one that doesn't forbid any ingredient. That way you don't get urges and you don't leave the diet in frustration when you think you don't have enough power of will. I know what you are thinking. Here it is another smart-ass thin person telling me how easy it is to eat correctly. You couldn't be more wrong. I'm fat. I've always been fat... but not for much longer. I finally understood why I could never keep on with the diets I tried in the past. It's the forbidden foods or fixed diet calendars. If you have a craving for something, but your diet says that in that day you have to eat 1 egg, and you don't want an egg!, then you are getting closer to failing. Since this January I studied a little about how the human body works and I learned two very important things: 1. Loosing weight is a natural process (as well as gaining it). Through evolution the human race (among many other mammals) learned to store energy reserves for the winter (when there was less food available) and how to use them when needed. Of course that mechanism is, more or less, useless in the modern world where we get lots of food (and very energetic ones by the way) in all seasons. So our trained body keeps storing energy even when it will never be needed. Maybe future humans will evolve into something with a storage full flag built in ;). 2. Loosing weight always occur when you enter less energy that the body burns. Just living makes your body need a certain amount of energy (and I'm not talking about energy to exercise. Only to live). A generic formula that can approximate the amount of energy your body needs is 1 Kcal per Kilo per Hour (sorry I don't know the formula in pounds, but I'm sure there is one). So for a gal with the weight in this journal entry this means your body burns 111.6x24 = 2678 KCals/day. So loosing weight is simply a matter of eating less energy every day. Another generic rule (this is different from person to person, but is a good enough approximation) says that to loose 1 Kg you need to have a deficit of 8000 Kcal (it is actually 9000 Kcal but the body needs 1000 Kcal to convert that fat into usable energy). So with a diet about 1700 Kcals/day you would loose 1 Kg every eight days. Now to the explanation on how a "not forbidding" diet works. The first rule is clear: 1. There are no forbidden foods. But you have to control the calories of your food intake to achieve your goals. I don't know your eating habits so I'll tell you about mine. Maybe you can extrapolate from that. When I started dieting (counting calories to know my daily intake) I realized 2 things: 1. My receipts weren't bad "per se" (that's latin for "by itself". I don't know if you use that expression in your country). The problem was the abuse of some ingredients that, not being key for the receipt, were making the whole meal very high caloric. The best example that comes to mind is the oil. No matter what I was cooking I always started with Oil and frying in it the vegetables and meat ingredients. The other problem was the quantities. You see, I got divorced and I was used to cook for 2 or more people. So when I split I kept cooking the same way. Than means that I started eating bigger rations... and that lead to taking much more energy that my body needed. I won 15 Kgs. in the last 2 years! When this problems were clear it was very easy to adapt my usual receipts to ones with the right quantities and reducing the more caloric ingredients. It's just a matter of being informed. For example you can be eating the healthiest of the salads but if you add just 4 table spoons of olive oil you will be adding nearly 400 KCals to that meal. So I use Balsamic vinegar instead... I started adapting my food and I realized that: 1. I can get the same flavor with less or no oils in my meals.2 2. Eating a correct amount didn't leave me hungry. It just made me stop having those stomach aches for being "too full". Of course there are things it is better to avoid entirely, but they are not forbidden if you want some. For example I'm not eating fried food anymore, because the amount of oil it attaches to the food you fry. I also avoid eating out as much as I can because I can't control how they cook the food or how good the ingredients are. But again. This is just common sense since you are trying to loose weight by controlling the amount of calories you eat. It's difficult to do that if you can't measure it. At this moment I've been dieting this way for nearly 7 weeks and I have lost more that 11 Kgs (you can see it in my profile). And the best things: 1. I'm not dieting. I'm eating normal, just with controlled receipts. If I want rice, I have rice. If I want pasta, I have pasta. So no urges go unsatisfied. 2. This means that, after I've achieved my goal weight I know I won't be getting it back, because now I understand how to eat. I'm not special. I'm just like you or anybody else. I just came to learn the right way to eat. That's all. If I can, I'm sure you can too. I hope this message doesn't make you hate me for providing a comment you didn't ask for. I just wanted to tell you my experience in the hope that it can be of help to you. Someone did the same for me and I'm very grateful he did... Good luck. jur.