Diet Update

It occurs to me that I haven’t told you anything about my diet recently.

Early in April, on a Monday, I received a call from the clinic saying that Multi-Care had cancelled their supervised diet program. I had appointments scheduled every Tuesday through the end of June – so it was like a punch in the stomach! At that point I had lost 22.5 pounds, and was a little discouraged from a plateau. I REALLY needed the dietician and doctor to tell me I was doing the right things and to keep it up.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. But rather than destroy all the good I had done, I soldiered on alone, sticking to the same principles that had brought me along so far. The next week the plateau was crossed, and I again started losing. Last weekend, I realized I had lost 28 pounds, and I had been sticking to the diet obsessively for over 100 days. So I made a conscious decision to go off the strict rules of the diet for one week only.

Last week I kept my calories around 1600 a day (not excessive), but I loosened up on the kinds of food and the amount of exercise I was doing.

I satisfied my craving for Japanese food,

barbecue, corn on the cob (the first of the season), green beans cooked with bacon, pizza,

Olive Garden zuppa Toscana,

and apples with peanut butter!

And I only did my Tai Chi class for exercise. It was a lot of fun, and I didn’t do any damage to the weight already lost.

Today, I climbed back on the wagon and hit the gym to burn 200 calories on the recumbent cross trainer, and do my weight work. I’m also only eating 1300 calories, and I’m sticking to low carbohydrates.

I plan to give myself permission to have another week’s eating vacation after another 100 days. That should be about the time of my birthday, so I might even have a small piece of birthday cake. 🙂

Lent 2014

I haven’t decided on any one particular Lenten discipline for this year. I’ve seen many ideas in the blogs I read on a daily basis and all of them seem good, but none has really “grabbed” me. Probably because I’m already so focused on deliberate eating with my weight-loss diet. I am, quite frankly, almost overwhelmed with the mental energy, as well as the physical energy, it is taking to avoid certain foods and to be sure to eat other foods. Not to mention the 50 minutes (minimum) of exercise required at least 5 days a week.

From time to time, I will be pointing out some of the especially convicting blog posts I run across.

Like today, at 40 Days to Food Justice (you can sign up at the site to get their devotional sent to you daily by email or RSS feed) – the post really rang true for me, because I’ve found that the most difficult part of my diet is the TIME it takes – planning menus and snacks, shopping for fresh food, and preparing the meals. Since I’ve not been allowed to “grab an Atkins Bar” if it’s time to eat, I really have to think about what, and when I’m eating. Even something as simple as remembering to get something out of the freezer in time to cook it can be a mental strain.

And, back to the exercise, this blog is suffering because the hour to hour and a half I spend at the Wellness Center is the time I used to spend writing for you, my faithful readers.

So, I suppose my Lenten discipline for this year will be to concentrate on my diet, and to be thankful I have the money to spend on healthy food, wonderful health insurance that allows me to visit a doctor and dietician weekly, and enough TIME to properly shop for and prepare the healthy food that is so necessary in this quest.

photo credit: Flickr creative commons