Journey to a Smaller Me

I posted this before but i felt it needed to be said. I was scrolling through some weight loss tags and wow….it amazes how much pain and negativity there is, seems a lot worse than when I first started this blog…

This is definitely not an extreme dieting blog. My goal isn’t to be 90 pounds. I want to be healthier and I want to be healthy in how I do it. That means eating at least 1200 calories a day and 3 meals a day.

There is so much more to life than being ruled by food and calories. I saw so many posts about girls that ate 700 calories and talking about what a failure that is……

and he seemed baffled by the concept.  The conversation ended with him saying that, to lose weight “just eat healthy food.”

*face palm*

The one that says to eat fewer calories than you burn in a day and cutting your calories by about 500 a day through diet and/or exercise

this week’s weigh in is…..155lbs!! 

weight loss for the week: -2.8lbs.

holy crap, that was surprising to see this morning @_@.  I think I might be miscalculating some of my calorie intake…might be making some adjustments.  I want to try to stick to -2lbs a week. BUT! exciting none-the-less.  

PROGRESS BABY!

need to eat more healthy foods instead of ones with empty calories…

I was watching another BBC show called Dispatches: The Truth About Your Food (I’ll make a video post to it right after this one) and it really brought me back to how I was a few years ago, when I just couldn’t seem to lose the weight.  

This episode targets the key “excuses” that people give for why they are overweight.  Slow metabolism, fat gene, thyroid condition, to sheer confusion because they didn’t eat that much.  

And at first, I was amazed.  How could they be in such denial?  Especially as the episode progresses and the doctors would flat out tell them, your metabolism is perfectly normal but they argue against it because they only eat 1500 calories a day (if you see it, you’ll know this clearly isn’t the case).  Or an overweight family that claims to only eat one meal a day and NEVER snacks and are clearly baffled by their weight only to have a hidden camera reveal constant snacking, drinking and eating? 

But then I realized, I’d just forgotten what it is like.  Because when I took a minute to really think about it, I was once those people.  

Because I was overweight and didn’t understand why.  I think that’s a concept that is difficult for people who have never battled with their weight to understand.  The fact that, people who are overweight are sometimes genuinely baffled by their weight.  Especially for people who have grown up overweight, it’s difficult to see issues in your lifestyle because it’s what you’ve grown up with and it’s really the only way you know.  

So much so that, when you think about what you eat, it doesn’t seem like it’s that much.  I know I felt this way.  I didn’t think I ate more than my skinny friends did.  We all would buy the same lunches at school.  They’d snack on junk food too.  But they stayed skinny and I stayed fat.  

Calorie counting made sense in my head, consume less than your body burns, but it seemed impossible.  Because looking at the food I ate, they were all high in calories (yeah, not a shock).  Everything I liked was high in calories.  Serving sizes looked so small (I think this was the biggest adjustment for me.  Living in a world of supersizes and large portions, this concept of a “normal” serving size felt like starving).  I was sure it couldn’t be right, that’d I had to of made some mistake.  Surely, they couldn’t expect me to live on that little scrap of food!

Anyway, the point of this post is to say that it gets easier.  Don’t get discouraged.  Changing a lifetime of habits isn’t easy.  Try not to punish yourself if you slip occasionally.  Just pick yourself up and keep moving forward.  Changing our perception of food and portion size isn’t easy.  But won’t always be a constant struggle.  Food is not your enemy.  Before you even realize it, the sides with shift.  Suddenly, you’ll find yourself looking at the portions you used to eat and wonder why/how you ever ate that much.

Stay strong, healthy and happy :).

Today wasn’t that great a day food-wise.  I was so busy that I hardly ate anything all day until I got home in the evening.  Noticing that I’d only really consumed 500 calories the whole day, I tried to add-in more calories without consuming solely empty calories.  It also meant eating when I wasn’t really hungry.  But, as I’ve already pointed out a few times in this blog, having such a calorie deficit really makes me uncomfortable so I’ll always eat to bring it back up.  Otherwise, I know I’ll probably overeat the next day because my body will feel like it’s starving.  Anyway…

- half an orange

- teriyaki turkey burger (omg it was soooo good!)

- 1 soda

- apple, walnut and chicken salad w/ raspberry vinaigrette

- 1 fun size peanut M&M’s

- water, water, water

Okay, I guess I’ll give this a try but it feels pretty weird listing the things I eat. Especially for those days when I feel like I’ve fallen off. Either by overeating or eating too little.

Note: I never eat less than 1000 calories a day, when I say “eating too little” I mean that my “food list” consists of only a few things, like 3 items. This happens when I’ve eaten junk food like chicken nuggets which, if anyone is a recovering fast food junkie like me knows, 10 piece chicken nuggets are 470 calories. Add medium fries at 380. Soda at 150. Which totals to 1000 calories right off the bat and I won’t really eat anything else for that day.

So on days like those, I tend to feel especially self conscious because those are the types of habits I am trying to break. Because, while effective, they are not sustainable.

Anyway, fair warning, I do not have the greatest eating habits and I definitely do things wrong but I am a work in progress.

- Half BBQ burger
- Some leftover fries w/ ketchup
- 2 fun size M&Ms

- Mixed salad w/ sesame vinaigrette
- Bowl of chicken tortilla soup w/ cheese
- Can of Dr. Pepper

- Water, water, water