Food Journal, Day One

I don't intend to post my food journal every day, but since this is the first day I thought "What the Hell?" Actually in any given day I think "What the Hell?" quite a bit, usually in reaction to other people's bonehead driving, weird hairstyles, rude behavior, and moronic things they say. But in this case, this rather utilitarian phrase, for which I've just gained a great deal of respect, is used in it's role of "Why the hell not?"

So for my Brunch I had a six-inch Subway Tuna sandwich, which breaks down as follows:

Total carbs: 45 g
Total fat: 30 g
Total fiber: 5 g
Total protein: 20 g
Total Calories: 530

I also had a cup of coffee with 1/4 cup of skim milk: 50 calories

1 Bag of Baked Lays Potato Chips

Total carbs 26 g

Total fat 1.5 g

Total protein: 2.5 g

Total fiber: 2.5 g

Total Calories: 130

Which isn't bad for two meals combined. It leaves me with 1300 calories for the day. I have another half of that sandwich in the refrigerator I can finish off for dinner.

I also intend to have a Cliff bar for a snack in a little while, which breaks down as follows:

Total carbs: 21 g
Total fat 9g
Total fiber 2 g
Total protein: 10 g
Total Calories: 200

Total for the midday 1090 Calories.

So sticking to my goal of 2,000 calories per day, I'll have +- 1000 calories for dinner. Properly planned, that's quite a bit.

Dinner turned out to be a bag of beef jerky--vegetarian style, made of seitan.

Total cals=260

And an apple:

Total cals= 180

Total for the day: =- 1, 500 calories. Not a bad start.

The Food Journal

I'm going to set my initial goal for 2,000 calories a day, with a 'treat day' every Wednesday where I can have a piece of cake or something. At one time I had completely weaned myself from sweets; Ill have to start all over and do this again.

I just looked up and saw an old tool in my my weight reduction battle--my Richard Simmons Food Mover. Say what you will about the man himself, this was a handy tool to keep up with food exchanges. There are these little windows with shades, you see, and you shut the shades for every food exchange you complete. Food exchanges, by the way, are used in the Diabetic Exchange program, which I'm familiar, having taken a course back when I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes.

So with the Food Mover, you decide your target calories from a series of available cards, and insert one into the unit. Then after each meal, you close the windows. When all the windows are closed--you're done for the day.

With the Food Mover and a notebook--and my own compulsive nature--I'm ready to go for this leg of the trip.

Initial Strategies And Promises to Myself

It's always good to start with simple things. About a year ago I kept a promise to myself and began taking piano lessons. I kept taking them, too, to the surprise of some people who, I'm certain, thought it was a phase I was going through. Today I'm working on some fairly advanced pieces of music. So I know when I set my mind on a goal, I will achieve it. At one time I dropped a significant amount of weight. The amount I want to drop now is a small fraction of what I dropped before. I will do this.

Weight reduction is seldom, if ever, about weight. There are emotional and spiritual factors behind it. In my case, I learned grief and depression often trigger the food comfort response. I've noticed my mind dwelling on loss a great deal over the past couple of years, and I've had a number of friends and pets pass away, so I feel for me this has absolutely been a trigger for seeking comfort in food.

I've learned my wife seems to have little idea how to comfort me when I'm grieving. When my best friend died, she said nothing to me about it. When one of my pets died and I was mourning, she seemed awkward and almost embarrassed. She didn't comfort me at all. However, she bought me a pint of ice cream. When I told my son about this, he asked me if she thought I was a woman. On the other hand, if she observed me soothting myself with food, perhaps it was the only way she knew how to comfort me.

So one of my strategies is to clear my heart and mind of grief by finding a better way to cope with it. A second strategy is to reinstate my Anapa.anasati meditation practice, a third is to exercise four days a week, and a fifth is to keep a food journal.

I've been going to the Allergist every day for my allergy shots. if this seems excessive, it's only until I build up to my maintenance dose, then I'll be going once a week. Since I have to wait in the office twenty minutes to make sure I don't have an allergic reaction to the shot, I've been reading in one of my Buddhism books; a collection of suttas from the Pali Canon, in fact, with commentary by Bhikkhu Bhodhi. This has helped ease my mind as reading the suttas has always calmed me.

At one time I used to go to the fitness center five times a week and work out for one hour, thirty minutes on the treadmill and thirty minutes weight lifting. As my breathing became gradually more compromised, I felt gradually more tired, and I kept catching respiratory infections, so I fell out of the habit of going. Now I'll reestablish the habit of working out again, which I found helps elevate my mood more than anything else. There's something about lifting weights which works better than any antidepressant.

Weight Reduction is Never About Weight

When I was forty years old in the year 2000, I weighed over 300 pounds. i realized I was going to die if I didn't drop a significant amount of weight.

Over the period of the next two years, I dropped around 100 pounds. My lowest weight was 202 pounds. I looked and felt great.

I moved to Indiana and remarried. I have had emotional and personal problems which has caused me to put on around twenty five pounds, as I've experienced stress and depression, and have turned to food for comfort. When I dropped weight before, I had many friends and a number of strategies to rely on. Most of these strategies involved ways of coming to terms with long-buried emotional issues which caused me to eat when I wasn't hungry. I kept a weight-loss blog on my website, and over the course of the two years I kept the blog up, I posted pictures of myself as I became smaller and smaller. I recieved e-mails from all over the world encouraging me to continue, and many telling me I was an inspiration.

The strategies that worked for me before need modification, as they'll no longer work. My wife, overwhelmed by the demands of her job and personal issues of her own, has no time to help me deal with my emotional needs, and I've moved away from my friends and family. Furthermore, many of my friends have died recently from old age and disease. I realize this is going to become a more frequent issue as time passes. I'm at the age where I'll more frequency hear news of illness and death than I will of marriages and births.

In a nutshell, I'm pretty much on my own this time.

For the past year I've been rather seriously ill with a recurrence of asthmatic problems, so my exercise regime was impossible to maintain. There were times I was so short of breath I literally couldn't walk upstairs to my bedroom. I spent long hours sleeping from sheer exhaustion. My "oomph" was gone. Many intersecting conditions caught up with me to put on these extra pounds. Not the least of these conditions was denial. I looked the other way as I gained five, ten, twenty pounds. My new family I married into didn't help; nice as they are, they're also habitual over-eaters and love to encourage the same eating patterns in me. A celebration isn't complete without rich and caloric foods, and without eating until you're about to pop. The problem with me is that if there is enabling, I will happily allow myself to be enabled.

However, enough is enough. Recently I've taken care of some of the factors contributing to my problem. After two trips to the emergency room due to severe asthma attacks, I finally realized the severity of my situation and went to an Asthma and Allergy specialist. Now I'm receiving treatment and am already breathing better, and am planning my new exercise regime. I'm also refining my vegetarian diet and will record my daily caloric intake for accountability. I found these strategies, more than anything else, worked for both mood elevation and weight reduction.

There's nothing I can do about the world around me. But I can change me.