Phoebe jumps on the bandwagon

Fun with Math

I use the Hacker's Diet online stuff to track my weight by trend, and one thing you can do is run a report that estimates your caloric deficit / surplus for a given period of time. I use Fitday to track my calories and exercise. I tend to be less-diligent about recording exercise, figuring that being a bit more active on a given day probably balances any estimation error on the intake side.

For the last 28 days:
Average daily deficit, as demonstrated by downward weight trend: 87 calories
Average calories consumed: 1964
Average calories burned: 2037
Calculated daily deficit: 73

Discrepancy: 14 calories per day, in a direction that suggests I'm either not recording all my exercise or not eating as much as I record
 
Bah, another grumpy eating day.

It is hot here. So very very hot. Into the high 80s by the time I get to work in the morning, with sky-high humidity, so we don't walk outside in the morning anymore. If I Wii first thing in the morning, it blows my whole day. And then I have to leave work to pick up kidlet from summer camp at 4:15 on the dot (I was pulling out of the driveway at 4:18 this afternoon, and was the next-to-last car in car line - if you're any later, they dump your kid with campus police), so I want to get my exercise in and be done, which means I pick jog-in-place (no wasted time in transitions), which is really hard on my joints and makes me bored and grumpy. I really like the strength exercises, but can't do them every day, and they have a lot of wasted transition time. So I'm really not enjoying exercising at all.

Scale is starting to drift higher, rather than drifting lower. I've been having a hard time staying in my calorie range - every evening, I'll be at the very top or a bit over. So I thought I'd stop eating a little early tonight, and I'm finding that very very difficult. If I weren't counting calories, I'd be way, way over. And I'm not eating junk - I'm mostly eating fruit and nonstarchy veggies and lean protein. Just lots and lots of it.

Oh, and I'm exhausted. Staying up way too late at night, and not sleeping in in the morning, even on mornings when I theoretically could. Go to bed, Phoebe. Says I, with no intention of going to bed, despite having no reason at all to stay up. Grrr.
 
Business Lunch FTW

Went to lunch with a client today. I'd scoped out the menu, and decided that a grilled chicken salad was probably the way to go. Client arrives, and basically says "We eat here all the time, you're going to want to choose a club, ham, or turkey sandwich, because everything else they make sucks." (They picked the location; the owner is client of theirs.)

So I ended up with a grilled turkey & swiss on sourdough. Comes with fries or chips as a side. "No thanks. I'll take [client's unwanted] pickle, though." Ooh, they were right that the sandwiches are *good*. One of the best grilled sandwiches I've ever had. Not huge, either, but I only made it through half before I'd had enough. (Nothing like fat for satiety. My fat grams have been on the low side this past couple of days, when I've been hungry all the time.) Mmm, so so good.

Came back, plugged my guesses into FitDay. A large slice of white bread, 1/2C of shaved turkey, 2oz swiss, 2 teaspoons of butter, 2 dill pickle spears. 421 calories. A good choice. (Saturated fat is wowza high, but you only live once.)

The whole sandwich, plus fries (client's wife had fries, and their portions are huge - bigger than the biggest size McDonald's fries by maybe 50%) would not have been a good choice.

Go, me. I'm actually under calories for where I usually am this time of day.
 
Congrats on making the good choices. I need to plug things into FitDay. But I feel that I can never keep up with it. I don't know. And sometimes they don't have everything I eat. And I don't feel like putting it in. I need to start something like that. I'm aweful! Have a great weekend!
 
So not a good diarist. I mostly put day-to-day stuff on LJ, and only post here things that are so weight-specific that none of my LJ-friends would care.

Yesterday was the annual open house at the local ice cream factory. It's 5 miles from our house, which in this part of the country is virtually next door - the closest anything to us is more than a mile away. 6 hours of all the ice cream you can eat. I ended up with what I estimate was 800 calories of ice cream for breakfast. Thank goodness they don't sell super-premium - it's about 170 calories per half-cup.

Went and did some exercise to balance it out, and ended up about even for the day.
 
AmbaLove said:
Are you still maintaining your goal weight? You seem to be doing well.
Click to expand...

I'm actually a bit below what my ticker shows, but I'm only updating it every couple of weeks.

Oh, and thanks - I usually don't have any trouble maintaining if I keep paying attention. I still live in fear of the downward spiral of not paying attention, gaining 5-10 pounds, then giving up and overeating rather than getting back on track. So I'm still counting calories, hassle that it is.
 
Equilibrium

Reminded of this when responding to someone who felt done eating well short of their calorie target for the day.

Tuesday I ended the day 400-500 calories lower than I normally would, feeling absolutely stuffed.

Also on Tuesday, I had a 44oz diet cherry limeade from Sonic (a big vice of mine, but only if I drive by a Sonic between 2 and 4, when drinks are half-price - who can resist a giant limeade for $1.02?). I almost never drink sugared soda, and I can't easily tell the difference in taste between diet and regular. The calorie difference between the two is 435 calories.

One reason I don't worry about eating all my calories every single day is stuff like that. I'm 90% sure what I had was a diet drink, but there's still a decent chance I was at maintenance, not in a huge deficit.
 
Do you have before and after pictures? I am so jealous that you are 124.5!! I envy you! haha that would be amazing. I find it hard where I am at to continue losing weight..like a plateau i've hit for about a year. I am definitely going to enjoy reading your diary!
 
No pictures for internet consumption, sorry. (And no after pictures at all, but I'm 99% sure that pictures do exist of me at my heaviest.)

If you've been tracking calories for a year, are sure you have a deficit, and aren't losing weight, I'd be asking my doctor for a thyroid panel. I didn't count calories at all for the first ~4 months / ~25 pounds, but when I noticed the losses starting to slow down, counting calories is what got me back on track.
 
Week in +/-

- kidlet (age 5) has chickenpox
- despite being vaccinated
- and is covered in literally hundreds of pox
- plus she has a nasty outbreak of eczema, complicated by a bacterial infection, on top of the chickenpox, all over the back of her legs
+ she thinks her antibiotic is delicious
- because she's contagious, she's out of camp all week
- but she was also contagious before she had visible pox, so all the kids she was at camp with last week have been exposed
- troublesome stressful thing, ongoing for nearly 2 months, is going to hang over things for at least 2 more months. Lack of resolution is driving everyone crazy.
- I'm staying up way way way too late, because otherwise I lie in bed and toss and turn
- sick kid is up at the crack of dawn, meaning no sleeping in, even on weekends
- so I have way way way too much caffeine, so I can function
- which means I can't sleep the next night, either
- I read LJ at work today, and the combination of outdated browser, un-updated Windows, and lack of virus protection infected my computer with a nasty slew of spyware, because there's a meme going around with a browser exploit embedded in it, and loading an LJ page with someone's meme results was enough to infect my computer
+ scale has remained steady until this week
- despite the fact that I should be in a small deficit
- the scale has gone up this week, when my normal hormone pattern lead me to expect it to go down
- eating fewer calories than maintenance with no scale loss over several weeks makes me munchy
- lack of sleep makes me munchy
- stress makes me munchy
- Blue Bell Candy Jar ice cream is delicious
+ on a good day, I can have my half-cup serving and be done
- on a bad day, I can eat more than half of a half-gallon carton immediately after dinner and feel vaguely ill from too much sugar without ever feeling physically full
- yesterday appears to have been a bad day
+ today appears to be a better day
+ I recorded all of my calories yesterday, so I know that...
+ averaged over two weeks, I'm about break-even calorically
+ so I have a clean slate, so to speak, so ought to be able to eat a typical number of calories today, or slightly less than normal as a natural compensatory eating pattern
- instead I find myself wanting to eat little or nothing, not as a way of counteracting those calories, but more as a way to regain control. On a good day emotionally, I can forgo counting calories and eat at maintenance by paying attention to how I feel. On a good day emotionally, when I'm not paying attention to how I physically feel and not counting calories, if I go overboard and notice it, I can regroup mid-day, walk away from the junk, and be back on track. I'm having a bunch of not-good-emotionally days, and I learned yesterday that emotional upset really disrupts my ability to judge calories by how I feel physically. And it makes me not want to regroup, or walk away from the junk, or get back on track.
+ my tentative conclusion is that if I'm having a bad day, I need to go strictly by the numbers, even if there's a little voice in my head complaining I'm starving
+ I need some better long-term solution, because after a week of bad days, going by the numbers is miserable. This is a + and not a -, because identifying the problem is half the battle
+ I should go eat something nutritious and comforting, but not overwhelmingly sweet or salty, because I'm currently under 450 calories for the day, and that's not enough, no matter how many I had yesterday
+ tomorrow I must make time for exercise I enjoy, because that helped today tremendously
- kidlet is all mine during the cool part of the day tomorrow, and she can't go out in public (being still contagious and all), so I can't do what I really want to do, which is go out for a jog in the early morning. (And even if she could be around people, she couldn't sit in the car while I jogged, nor would/could she jog with me.)
+ Wii-boxing it is, then
 
Hey!! I read through a couple pages of your diary (there's 15!) and I have to commend you on your efforts to lose and your reaching of your weight goal!

Thanks for your help! :D

Annie
 
Posting primarily in hopes of getting the "explain your problem to the internet, and it will magically go away" effect, because the solution is so wildly obvious that my apparent inability to implement it must be caused by something I haven't figured out.

My weigh keeps drifting down, and I'm having a hard time stabilizing at a higher weight I'm happy with. The rate I'm losing at has picked up over the last month - over the summer, I was either break-even or trending at less than a pound down over the course of a month, but I'm down nearly 2 pounds for September. The obvious solution is "well, eat more, silly girl," but I'm not being successful at that.

My goal weight was 127, and I look and feel good at that weight. In the last two weeks, I've had 6 weights below 122; my only day above 123 was the morning after I ate a really, really salty bedtime snack. More aggravating, the body fat percentage reading on my scale (which I know isn't accurate other than for trends) has gone up about 2% as my weight has gone down; it started off at the beginning of summer in the high 24%-low 25% range, and now is consistently in the high 26%-low 27% range. So I feel like I'm losing lean mass, not fat. And the obvious solution is "add more weight-bearing exercise, because just getting sufficient protein isn't doing it for ya."

The lack of exercise is sheer laziness on my part. We've got enough financial flexibility at the moment that I could get weights or something for home (although where to put them is still an issue, if I *really* wanted to make it happen, I would).

I need to figure out what the not eating enough issue is. For the most part, on most days, I'm eating until I'm full. But for whatever reason, I'm having fewer high-calorie days, and more low-calorie days, and it's averaging out to about 250 calories a day less than I'd been eating before.

What's changed:
- I'm normally a late-night eater, so I'll only have about half of my calories for the day in before dinner time. Since my partner got a job, I've been going to bed an hour or two earlier, and I've been doing more evening chores, so haven't been doing my normal evening snacking.

- I've tried to not buy foods for which the "off switch" doesn't work. Over the summer, I'd have at least a carton of ice cream a month, but I haven't had any this month, because a carton of ice cream doesn't last me a month - sometimes it lasts me two days. Other junk food hasn't been replaced as its been eaten, and the peanut butter I have right now isn't as tempting to me.

- I've been seeing more water-weight / hormonal fluctuations, and they're hanging on for longer. So I'll see higher weights for a week or two, instead of the 3-4 days that had been typical. I find myself subconsciously eating less as a response to higher numbers on the scale, even though I'm normally hungrier than usual (and previously had been eating until I felt I'd had enough, even if that put me ~500-1,000 calories over maintenance for the day). So instead of a day or two of over-the-top eating, which corrected itself without any effort in the following days, I've got a week of intentionally-restricted eating - but I've still got a hormonal decrease in appetite that goes along with the hormonal loss of water weight.

- My carbs are down a little bit (~60g a day), but still around 200g a day, so I don't think it's low-carb water weight loss.

So it looks like the easy solution is to not mind the occasional binge day, because there's no reason to think they won't continue to balance themselves out as they've done in the past. Figure out some resistance work plan. Include in that plan eating at a surplus to gain ~5 pounds or so, to improve the chances of putting some lean mass back on.

Off to the fair, so will finish later!
 
Seems like quite a puzzler you've got there.
I can't offer any advice, because, honestly, I don't have any to give.
:(
I hope that works itself out for you.
Good luck!

<3 Annie
 
Aww, thanks! I don't really expect anyone to have useful advice, because in my experience, this is all mental. If not for the mental stuff, losing weight would be easier for a good chunk of people (obviously doesn't help for those who have weight issues because of unusually efficient / inefficient metabolisms or other physiological things going on).

I think the body fat percentage thing may be a measurement issue. I normally weigh in the morning, when I'm somewhat dehydrated (and when glycogen stores are at their lowest). Last night I tried a before-bed weighing, and that came out with 21.5% body fat, which is on the low end of average for women. And then this morning, it was 25.2%, which is about where it had been earlier this summer. (I haven't been checking it every day, because it was making me crazy.) If you apply those percentages to my change in weight between morning and evening, you get a 4-pound (12%) swing in body fat, so I think my scale is likely also wildly inaccurate.
 
haha I just don't trust all those fancy-pants scales. :conehead:
Thanks for stopping by my journal, it feels good to have a cheering section :D

Anywho, YAYYY Phoebe!!!!!! (that is your name, right?)

<3 Annie:hurray::hurray::hurray:
:willy_nilly:
 
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