It's been a while, hasn't it?
Feb. 20th, 2012 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janewilliams20Since I posted anything meaningful, that is. I was going to post when I started Weightwatchers, and that was five weeks ago, and I didn't.
OK. The news is that I've joined Weightwatchers... (grin) the online version, that is. It's going pretty well. I've done a lot of the "big name" diet schemes before, and I generally lose half a stone or so, maybe a stone, then plateau, then put it all back on again. This time, I'm making a few major changes. For one thing, I'm not letting other people tell me how my motivation works, because they get it wrong. I don't need or like "meetings". I don't need some cheerleader type treating me like an idiot. I don't need a room full of people doing mindless applause at the news that I've lost another pound. I don't need to be told not to bother my pretty little head about the scary numbers because they'll upset me. What I need is a means of tracking what I'm eating, when I'm eating it, and what the results are on weight and size.
One thing is that I'm playing mind-games with myself. One thing that's always demotivated me in the past is looking at the scales, and yes, I've lost another pound, but I'm still XX stone, where XX is a number that I register as "huge and ugly". If I'm still huge and ugly after all this effort, I might as well go and hide in bed with a box of chocolates. So, I have no idea how much I currently weigh in stones and pounds, and have no intention of finding out. I'm measuring everything in kilograms, and not doing the conversion. The absolute value of my weight has no meaning to me whatsoever, so it doesn't depress me. What I do know is how much I've lost. That, I'll happily translate into stones and pounds - and so far, it's over a stone! Whee!
The other thing is this insistance that you should only weigh once a week. Why? Because if you see the little fluctuations from day to day, they'll scare you into thinking you're putting weight on when it's only a fluctuation, apparently. That wouldn't be a valid theory even if I was an idiot who didn't understand "random fluctuation" - what if that random fluctuation hit on the weigh-in day? I'm weighing every day, at the same point in my morning routine where possible (and noting when it wasn't possible), wearing the same things (same dressing gown). I know exactly how big those fluctuations can be, and what tends to cause them, because I can correlate them to similar events on other days. I can draw nice smoothed graphs through the points, and watch them go downwards. If there's a "random" fluctuation on what WW thinks is my weigh-in day, I'm not worried by it because I know that's what it is, and probably why it is.
So far, I could do all this myself (and am - my spreadsheet is a lot more detailed than the WW tool). What it's adding is their points system. This is based roughly on calorific value, but with some other factors that mean for instance that most fruit and veg is free - the only exceptions are the big carbohydrate sources. They provide point values for a lot of things, and anything their database doesn't have, you can create as a food yourself: fill in the nutritional values, it'll point it for you. Since starting, I've found the formula they're using, and now do this myself by spreadsheet as well.
You're allowed a certain number of points per day, depending on your weight, age, height etc., plus a number to be spread across the week. No problems, as long as I'm half-way sensible. My weakness tends to be for meat and seafood rather than sweets and chocolate in any case, and that's a lot easier to accomodate.
The other new thing is a book I'm halfway through reading: "Fight Fat after Forty", by Dr Pamela Peeke. I picked it up secondhand somewhere. It totally fails to treat me as an idiot. It explains a lot of things about the way my body works that I didn't know, rather than the very obvious ones that I did. As a result, I'll be altering my eating habits again in the next few days, once I've worked out how. It seems that it matters now only how many calories I take in (obvious) and what sort of food they're from (moderately obvious), but also what time of day I take them in at, because hormones and enzymes vary throughout the day in a predictable way. Last major carb intake will be about 15:00 from now on - dinner will be meat and veg, but very few carbs. There's some very interesting reading about how stress relates to the way the body handles food and appetite, and where fat gets stored: it seems that the really dangerous stuff to health is inside the abdomen, not those obvious external rolls making my jeans not fit. So when I diet, and stay the same size, but drop pounds, that's a good thing, since health is my major objective.
Loss so far - I hit the one stone mark after just over four weeks, and after the big drop in the first week, the rate of loss has been steady at a bit over a kilogram a week - what I'd expect.
OK. The news is that I've joined Weightwatchers... (grin) the online version, that is. It's going pretty well. I've done a lot of the "big name" diet schemes before, and I generally lose half a stone or so, maybe a stone, then plateau, then put it all back on again. This time, I'm making a few major changes. For one thing, I'm not letting other people tell me how my motivation works, because they get it wrong. I don't need or like "meetings". I don't need some cheerleader type treating me like an idiot. I don't need a room full of people doing mindless applause at the news that I've lost another pound. I don't need to be told not to bother my pretty little head about the scary numbers because they'll upset me. What I need is a means of tracking what I'm eating, when I'm eating it, and what the results are on weight and size.
One thing is that I'm playing mind-games with myself. One thing that's always demotivated me in the past is looking at the scales, and yes, I've lost another pound, but I'm still XX stone, where XX is a number that I register as "huge and ugly". If I'm still huge and ugly after all this effort, I might as well go and hide in bed with a box of chocolates. So, I have no idea how much I currently weigh in stones and pounds, and have no intention of finding out. I'm measuring everything in kilograms, and not doing the conversion. The absolute value of my weight has no meaning to me whatsoever, so it doesn't depress me. What I do know is how much I've lost. That, I'll happily translate into stones and pounds - and so far, it's over a stone! Whee!
The other thing is this insistance that you should only weigh once a week. Why? Because if you see the little fluctuations from day to day, they'll scare you into thinking you're putting weight on when it's only a fluctuation, apparently. That wouldn't be a valid theory even if I was an idiot who didn't understand "random fluctuation" - what if that random fluctuation hit on the weigh-in day? I'm weighing every day, at the same point in my morning routine where possible (and noting when it wasn't possible), wearing the same things (same dressing gown). I know exactly how big those fluctuations can be, and what tends to cause them, because I can correlate them to similar events on other days. I can draw nice smoothed graphs through the points, and watch them go downwards. If there's a "random" fluctuation on what WW thinks is my weigh-in day, I'm not worried by it because I know that's what it is, and probably why it is.
So far, I could do all this myself (and am - my spreadsheet is a lot more detailed than the WW tool). What it's adding is their points system. This is based roughly on calorific value, but with some other factors that mean for instance that most fruit and veg is free - the only exceptions are the big carbohydrate sources. They provide point values for a lot of things, and anything their database doesn't have, you can create as a food yourself: fill in the nutritional values, it'll point it for you. Since starting, I've found the formula they're using, and now do this myself by spreadsheet as well.
You're allowed a certain number of points per day, depending on your weight, age, height etc., plus a number to be spread across the week. No problems, as long as I'm half-way sensible. My weakness tends to be for meat and seafood rather than sweets and chocolate in any case, and that's a lot easier to accomodate.
The other new thing is a book I'm halfway through reading: "Fight Fat after Forty", by Dr Pamela Peeke. I picked it up secondhand somewhere. It totally fails to treat me as an idiot. It explains a lot of things about the way my body works that I didn't know, rather than the very obvious ones that I did. As a result, I'll be altering my eating habits again in the next few days, once I've worked out how. It seems that it matters now only how many calories I take in (obvious) and what sort of food they're from (moderately obvious), but also what time of day I take them in at, because hormones and enzymes vary throughout the day in a predictable way. Last major carb intake will be about 15:00 from now on - dinner will be meat and veg, but very few carbs. There's some very interesting reading about how stress relates to the way the body handles food and appetite, and where fat gets stored: it seems that the really dangerous stuff to health is inside the abdomen, not those obvious external rolls making my jeans not fit. So when I diet, and stay the same size, but drop pounds, that's a good thing, since health is my major objective.
Loss so far - I hit the one stone mark after just over four weeks, and after the big drop in the first week, the rate of loss has been steady at a bit over a kilogram a week - what I'd expect.