The other night I wrote that I love good food. I should have said as a dear friend said about herself, I didn't get this fat on junk food. These pounds are good food pounds. And now I am taking these pounds off with good food. That is so much more difficult. But to do this I have enlisted the help of two web sites: Livestrong.com/thedailyplate/ and Realage.com. These two sites have given me what I needed to lose my good food weight.
For a long time, I had known that something other than just food was involved in my weight gain. Finally, I found the answer only AFTER I began to lose. You see, after my husband, who had been so very ill, died and after I had moved back to Fort Worth and settled in, I found that I was losing weight for no particular reason. I was just losing weight. And my blood pressure which had spiked the winter of 1980 (when I taught one particular class) returned to normal, actually low normal. Something was going on.
And then I saw an advertisement for some miracle pill that was going to help everyone lose weight. I was not as interested in the pill as I was in their comment that stress causes women to produce more cortisol (a hormone produced by the adrenal gland) and that cortisol caused women to add fat around the middle and to gain weight rapidly. Well, I thought if stress causes cortisol that causes weight gain, then a lack of stress must act in reverse. I knew that I wasn't eating enough to gain weight before and that I wasn't eating enough now to retain the fat I had. Finally, something was going on. For the first time in many, many years, what I was eating was allowing me to lose weight.
I knew that probably wouldn't last forever because the body sometimes thinks it is going to starve, particularly those of us with bodies with a Northern European heritage. My ancestors lived in an area where food was extremely scarce throughout the winter months and my inheritance from them is a body which, if it thinks it isn't going to be fed, holds on to every ounce of fat that it can. And so I had to do more than depend on lack of stress to lose the rest of the weight.
I'm not sure how I found it, but I did find the My Plate website, which is a part of Lance Armstrong's Livestrong.com website. His site is a source of all kinds of health and fitness information and is a place where everyone can find whatever they need that has to do with these two topics. At the My Plate site, a person wanting to lose, gain, or stay at their weight can find all of the tools he might want or need.
First of all, he can go in and set up a daily calorie goal that suits his individual situation. For example, I put in my height, weight, activity level, and desired goal. The site quickly determined the number of calories I should consume each day and sent me to a MYPLATE page all my own where I entered whatever food I had eaten.
There I found a box into which I typed the each food I had eaten. From there, I went to a page where I could narrow down that food in exact terms, including brand names and restaurant names. When I prepared my own food, I entered the recipe and the site treated it as any other food, coming up with the calories, the grams of fat, carbohydrate, protein, fiber, salt, cholesterol, almost anything anyone might want to count. That information was then entered on a chart on my myplate page; and I was on my way.
As I charted each food, the page told me how many more calories I could eat that day; and if I didn't plan ahead, I did have a warning ahead of time about what I could eat yet during the day. After I had been charting my food for a week or so, a list was added to the page that contained those foods I seemed to list the most, so that rather than typing in the same food every day, I only had to click on the food in the list and it was entered into my chart. At the end of each day, I had the totals of all I had eaten that day as well as the totals for the last seven days.
But that is not all. I could also chart all of the activities during that day that were above my usual day's work. For example, I listed my activity level as sedentary, meaning that although I do get up and walk around, mostly I sit and read or type, or watch TV. That means that whenever I have done something else, I entered that as an activity. The site calculated the calories burned during 30 minutes of that particular activity, prorated it to the number of minutes I did the activity, and subtracted that number of calories from the total number of calories I had eaten that day.
For me, that means that if I go to the Fitness Center and work or if I do laundry or iron or vacuum or clean the kitchen, the number of calories burned in those activities is virtually added to the number of calories I can have that day. That's good! And so after every meal, I come to the computer and enter the food I have eaten. By now, most of the things I regularly eat are on my list and it goes fast. If I do eat something new and it does not have a listing, I can add it to the list. If it is some product I have here at home, I add it from the back of the package. If I eat out, which I seldom do, most of the time, that restaurant's foods are listed; and if not, there are several things I can do. I can go to the restaurant's website and add the foods from there. I have found very few foods that do not have nutritional facts listed somewhere. All of those daily charts are kept on site on a page called Food Diary. I can go back and check what I ate a year ago or last week if I wonder why the scale doesn't read the way I wish it did.
And so, for all those who have asked, this is how I am continuing to lose weight: I write down everything. I always knew that was important; but before, writing down the food did little unless I knew what was in it. Now, all of us have a resource which knows it all and I gladly use it every day. Come on in and join me.
