Month: January 2010

I’d Go for the Cake

I’ve been way busy with work – and my commitment to losing weight has suffered for it.

I have long work-days filled with an extraordinary amount of details to remember – and often need to improv on what I know as meetings are called on a whim and I have to go in cold without prep – sometimes talking to ideas that are not mine that I only saw when the Powerpoint slide was shown in the meeting.

This is all day, every day. While I don’t consider myself a genius, somehow I seem to act like a savant and the words just come from somewhere. I walk out of these meetings and colleagues tell me I did great, while I thought I babbled nonsense.

My mind is shot in the evening – and my hour commute does nothing to clear my head. It keeps firing and knocking about like some old cars that I had where you’d turn the thing off and it would continue to fire and cough for as long as it felt like it.

These kind of days don’t help a diet – especially when you live in a house where people love their carbs. I come home, and the diet goes out the window, as it’s easier to grab the available crap food than it is to start cooking. Continue reading “I’d Go for the Cake” →

The Incredible Roasted Kale Recipe

Kale?!?

This green, leafy vegetable appears at the top of the list for nutrient density – calorie for calorie, it packs the more nutrients than nearly any other food you can buy. As part of my project to eat less of better foods, I decided to try it – but I don’t know how to eat the stuff.

I had it once, stir-fried. It was really tough and somewhat bitter, if I recall correctly. I could understand why it has so many nutrients – it lies on that same moral continuum of ‘the better it tastes the worse it is for you’ – which is why deep-fried french fries taste so good. Continue reading “The Incredible Roasted Kale Recipe” →

The Food Monotony Project – Day 6 Update

A screenshot from the iPhone app ‘Lose It’

I started what I’m calling the Food Monotony Project on Tuesday, Jan 19, and since that day I’ve eaten mostly to plan. The thinking behind this goes back to a blog post I wrote in July of 2008. I forget a lot of my posts, but the points in this one kept rattling about in my head -I kept thinking: maybe I should try out these ideas for real.

Only took me like a year and a half to get around to it.

This past week, eating during the day was some combo of Atkins shakes and bars. The evenings were mostly bologna on a slice of low carb bread. The calories from Tuesday through Thursday were below my budget of 1,683 (more on that number in a minute). Monday through Thursday worked because I ate my evening ration (hard to call it a ‘meal’) and took a nicotine lozenge right after. Friday was a blowout – way too much food in the evening – simply because I forgot the ‘lozenge after eating in the evening’ rule.

No matter – Saturday morning showed me 6 lbs down since Tuesday – and the application I am using to count calories – Lose It (see screenshot above) – tracks calories by the day and week – which put Friday night into perspective by showing me that – for the week, I was right on track – the previous few days of being below my calorie budget added up to the amount I overate on Friday.

I’m not exactly thrilled to count calories, but eating fewer foods, and foods that are easier to measure, make the task suck less. In reality I am counting carbs first, but watching my calories as well. And – except for Friday, I’ve been able to keep those carbs, on average, in the low 20s. Continue reading “The Food Monotony Project – Day 6 Update” →

The Food Monotony Project

Earlier in the year, I bemoaned my lack of weight loss and set a goal for the year of losing 40 lbs. – then did nothing to try to reach that goal. There’s been a number of life changes at work and at home that have put the pressure on and lately, I’ve felt that actually just getting through the day is achievement enough. This happens to all of us – it’s nothing to feel sorry for yourself about, or to dwell on unnecessarily, but instead you brace oneself for a bumpy ride, hold on to your seat, and wait till things smooth out, which they usually do eventually.

During this time, the thoughts about what to do different this time led me back to something I rejected long ago, as well as something I wrote on 2 years ago. The first thought was on a post about food monotony, that is, food as a utility. It’s a notion I had that part of the problem about dieting is that you replace one food obsession – eating too much – with another type – eating the correct types and quantities. I speculated that just thinking about food less might be many naturally thin people’s way of keeping slim. Continue reading “The Food Monotony Project” →