Phoebe jumps on the bandwagon

Hi Phoebe

I have been pondering more about that trend weight concept. I dont think that I would gain anything from using it at the minute because my spreadsheet gives me a good idea of what is going on while I am losing looking at scale weight alone. I do however think that the concept comes into it's own as goal weight is approached, reached and for maintenance.

I imagine that if you have water fluctuations smoothed out you will be left with an absolute constant during maintenance which should be easy to check and increase confidence that things are ok. We dont want to be panicking all the time - but we dont want to let things get out of hand and have to do another weight loss project to sort it out.

Take care
Love
Margaret
 
Hi Phoebe!

Congratulations on your normal BMI and your wonderful achievements this year. I doubt I can wish you anything better than that for 2008 - but I hope it's another great success!!
 
I have clothes that fit again!

I was over at my mom's house today, and commented that I had virtually no clothes that fit, but was unwilling to buy more until I was done losing. Silly me - I forgot that she'd loaned me a pair of pants on vacation, and they fit fine. Since she and I work together, and mostly wear jeans to the office (which is in her house), and then change into nicer clothes when we go out to see a client, I can borrow her clothes until I'm at goal.

So we had a big clothes-trying-on afternoon. Highlights include:
- Land's End size 10 khaki pants are big on me. Probably not big enough that I could look good in an 8, but they fit loose. So I've lost 4 sizes now (started in 18s that fit a bit snugger than these 10s do, 16, 14, 12)! And I have many, many pairs of pants that fit well enough to wear to a client's, but they're all at least a little big.

- I've got 4 dresses that fit me now. Three of them I bought them probably 10 years ago, and haven't been able to wear them for at least 8 years. Thank goodness for liking conservative styles that don't go out of fashion. One is a 12, one is an 8, and one is a 6. (I carry my weight in my thighs, not in my waist or even hips, so a skirt with a tight waist and full skirt conceals many pounds.) The fourth dress was my mom's, and she cuts all the labels out, so I have no clue of the size, but it was another tight waisted, full-skirted one.

When I started thinking about what size I'd like to be when I was ready to maintain, an 8 was the impossible target I had in mind. Almost there. (And I may end up more of a 6/8. I still have the "not there yet" feeling.)
 
You know, that's interesting about your daughter. When I was younger an grew up as the only Asian kid (until I moved to a majority Asian town in 4th grade) I wanted to badly to be like Barbie. You know, blonde hair, blue eyes, etc. My mother wanted to slap me when I mentioned that I might want blue contacts.

You and your partner must definitely be doing something right for her to want to be more in touch with her heritage. Good work!
 
She may want to speak Chinese, and she may be proud of being half-Chinese, but she still wants to color her hair red. Usually not blonde, though. (If we pass by the haircolor aisle at the store, she always wants to go look at the boxes, to pick out the color hair she's going to have when she's a grownup. They don't carry Manic Panic, or she'd be picking hot pink.) :)
 
Must get more sawdust-and-guar-gum tortillas

Having a hard time getting all my fiber in. Plenty of protein (a bit more than I ought - I'm running right around 40%), plenty of fruits and veggies, the right amount of fat, but not enough fiber. Hmm. Now that I look at it, not really enough fruits and veggies today, although yesterday I had 6 or 7 servings.

But the sawdust-and-guar-gum tortillas give you a lot of fiber for very little effort.

Off to raid the cupboard - with luck, I'll have a can of beans in there.
 
Ooh, fiber is really hard! There's this cereal I sometimes eat when I know there's no other way to meet my fiber goals, it's called Simply Fiber. It's over 50% of your daily fiber for about 100 calories. I have to warn you though, it's pretty bad. I sometimes sprinkle splenda on it or cut some fruit into it to help it go down.

Otherwise, those tortillas you were talking about are great, as are 100 calorie thomas's light english muffins. They're pretty delicious and they have about a third of your daily recommended fiber.

My last resort is this psyllium husk stuff, which is just pure insoluble fiber. You mix it in with some water and chug it as fast as you can. It has almost no calories but it's more of a colon cleanser than a food source anyway. Lol.

Hope that helps!
 
Usually I'm pretty good with fiber, but my protein has been way high recently, and my carbs are way down, which makes it hard to get the fiber in. I'm not a cereal fan (although I will admit to being insatiably curious about which cereal you'd been talking about over in your diary - now I know), so I mostly stick to tortillas. I don't care about the fiber enough to do a supplement (even though the tortillas are pretty equivalent to a supplement, at least they look vaguely foodlike).

Ah, well. Tomorrow will be another day. :)
 
Which tortillas are you talking about? I found a brand called the tortilla factory, the small ones have 50 calories and 8 grams of fiber, the larger ones have 80 cals and 14g. I think they are quite tasty.

I don't know if they have them everywhere, I live in Iowa and they are only in the "Healthfood" (ha ha!) section in my grocery store.
 
I like the Mission Carb Balance Whole Wheat tortillas. I've tried La Tortilla ones, which are marginally healthier (no saturated fats) but I think they taste soggy and icky.
 
Bah. Got my cholesterol test results back.
Total cholesterol is 163, which is normal. Total LDL (bad) cholesterol 110, which is normal but close to the top of the range. (130 is where it starts getting bad, but under 70 would be better.) Total HDL (good) cholesterol is 38, which is low. (Under 40 is bad, over 60 is best.) Not terrible, but not great, either. Particularly since my cholesterol intake per Fitday is averaging under 300mg/day, and I'm a premenopausal woman.

Double bah. Doctor Google says that the best way to get the HDL up is by walking. Every day. The more, the better. To the tune of 3+ miles a day as a minimum. (The same isn't true for men, apparently - men need high intensity, so running rather than walking. Women need high quantity and moderate intensity.)

I ended up walking 6 miles today - 4 while I was waiting for the 20k maintenance to be done on my car, and another two at lunch. Plus normal going-about-the-day walking. And that was before I got the test results back. So at least I *like* walking.

That probably also explains why I am ravenously hungry. Although I suspect I'm grumpy about my test results more than I am truly hungry.

On the plus side, should I decide to give up butter, Smart Balance margarine tastes almost exactly the same, even if you eat it on plain noodles with nothing but a little salt and pepper.

Bah.
 
allyphoe said:
She may want to speak Chinese, and she may be proud of being half-Chinese, but she still wants to color her hair red. Usually not blonde, though. (If we pass by the haircolor aisle at the store, she always wants to go look at the boxes, to pick out the color hair she's going to have when she's a grownup. They don't carry Manic Panic, or she'd be picking hot pink.) :)
Click to expand...

Hey Phoebe. Giggle giggle. I had stopped in your diary a few days ago and thought I had read something about you wanting to go to the church where "everyone looks like you" rather than the Asian church and I didn't get it, must've been reading way too quickly, so I got a bit insulted (even though I'm white ha ha) cuz I thought it sounded a little racist. Ha ha, not realizing you're clearly not racist against Asians or probably anyone else for that matter. I was like, OK?, she seems bright and nice so how can she be so blunt about this not wanting to go where others look different? I was like, I love diversity, what's wrong with her? Ha ha. Then I happened to click in here and see I got this wrong. I can be such a ditz sometimes but thought it was silly enough to tell you about it (since its got me cracking up over here).
 
LOL. I do try to at least be less-bigoted. Honestly, I don't know anyone who doesn't have *any* prejudicial tendencies. I try to do better than I was raised, and I try to keep educating myself, but (for me at least), it's not easy to be aware of subtle racism when you're a white person. Seeing how people react to my kid has been a big eye-opener for me.

My discomfort with Chinese church is mostly theological. The "I don't like being conspicuous" wears off after a couple weeks - and I've had that problem going to any smallish new congregation.
 
My fiance is Irish and I'm Chinese and I wonder if our children will end up looking more Chinese than Irish. Until you brought it up, I didn't think him being white being seen with an asian child would cause some odd stares but it might.

Then again, I never really experience the open level of bigotry as when I got engaged to my fiance. For some reason, people I didn't even know, like strangers at our local bar, would say things to me that they obviously felt they could because I was going to marry a white guy. Or they would feel the need to say something to my fiance, especially old WWII veterans. (For the record, I'm Chinese not Japanese. Not that it ever seems to matter. Lol.)

Despite all that, I have the utmost respect for the people who have served in our armed forces. I'm relatively conservative and very patriotic. But as a result of being with someone who is white I also know that some people in the armed forces don't feel the same way about me.

So I suppose that it's only natural for a young child who has probably been more exposed to that kind of prejudice to want to be with other people who have the smallest chance of being prejudice against them and have been in the same boat.
 
We live in the midwest, which isn't the most open-minded part of the country. When DD was a baby, anyone who saw her immediately assumed she was adopted - I got comments like "Where did you get her from?" and "I always wanted one of those Chinese babies" all the time. Now that she's old enough to participate in conversations, people still assume she's adopted, but the comments tend to be more along the lines of "Isn't she beautiful / exotic." Although the other day, in response to DD's comment that she thought she looked like Dora the Explorer (which she actually does), the cashier replied that she had the right hair, but the wrong eyes.

My half-Chinese niece and nephew look more Hispanic to me; I've got some friends with mixed kids, and their kids look very Chinese. So it could go either way. My partner says she thinks kids with Chinese moms and white dads look more Chinese than kids who are mixed the other way, but I haven't seen enough mixed kids to draw that kind of conclusion.
 
Three miles walked today. Two miles with DD in the jogging stroller (man, pushing that thing is like pushing nothing, but it steers like a boat), almost one mile of which the stroller was empty and she was walking / running along with us. 33 minutes for those miles. Then another mile, just me and my dad going as fast as we could - and we finished in 14 minutes. I can't maintain that pace for longer than a mile, though - I was surprised I maintained it that long.

I put some grape juice (rather than orange) in my post-walk smoothie, grape juice being good for your cholesterol.
 
I did not get a Wii last night, because that was just the kind of week I've been having. Bah.

I did get out to walk today. The park I like to walk at is still closed due to downed tree limbs from the ice storm 3 weeks ago. The walking trail by the school was closed because the parking lot near me was where they were clearing all the debris from the trail to. The next-closest park with a walking trail was an official tree-damage dump site, and completely covered with mountains of debris. So I ended up driving all the way into Tulsa, but I did end up with a park to walk at.

I walked opposite my normal direction this time, and discovered that the walking path is actually longer than 3 miles - the zero point is nearly a quarter mile from the 3 mile marker. (Neither are at the entrance points I use.) So my pedometer doesn't actually measure long - or not significantly long.

Started off jogging, because I've really felt a desire to run, and just jogged as far as I could before I needed a break, which turned out to be a bit more than a mile. Walked for a bit and then tried to jog some more, but was too miserable to keep it up. Spent a few seconds feeling bad that I couldn't jog anymore, and redirected that thought to "You just jogged without stopping farther than you have in at least 8 years, which is great. Walk the rest of the way, and see if you can finish in 45 minutes." Which I did, despite the path turning out to be longer than the 3 miles I'd thought.

Still wasn't at 10,000 steps (I'm *really* sedentary on the weekend), so I walked down one side of the path (it goes in a big rectangle) and back to get all my steps in. That was almost another mile, so probably 4 miles in 61 minutes. I could have gone another lap around, but I needed to get back home.
 
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