By MissGradStudent
So I’ve been unhappy with my weight for about a year now, but my attempts to do anything about it were halfhearted at best. But being stuck in a rural city that I don’t like and in a job I’m less than happy with has given me a new type of motivation. It’s called distraction.
Around the end December I downloaded MyFitnessPal (because it’s free) and started tracking my calories. It turns out that if I simply stopped eating the junk food I had grown to love throughout graduate school and this rural city I kind of loathe, I eat something like 1,000 calories a day.
The first step in my weight loss journey then was to replace the calories I lost through the elimination of junk food with well, something else. You see, MyFitnessPal tracks your daily intake of nutrients (i.e. Vitamin A, potassium, protein). Therefore, for the first week of my weight loss journey, I just tracked what I normally eat without making modifications and found the deficiencies. It turns out, I don’t eat nearly enough potassium or protein. So I worked to get my daily calorie intake up to at least 1,200 calories, filling the last 200 calories with snacks of cheese or the Kale and Chia flavor of Better Chip. My meals looked something like fruit or yogurt for breakfast (and coffee with cream because I’ll never give this up), salad for lunch, and cauliflower rice with seared asparagus, brussels sprouts, and avocado for dinner.
In order to diversify my meals (because I know how to make a total of five things), I briefly tried Misty Copeland’s Ballerina Body meal plan. While the food is absolutely delicious and the principles in the book (don’t shy away from eating fats) are sound, the meal plan is based on a 1,800 calorie a day diet. As I don’t normally consume that many calories (outside of shoving bags of Hershey Kisses down my throat or shoveling ice cream in my mouth), consuming that amount of calories felt unnatural and slowed down my weight loss. I was too full all the time, and it wasn’t a good feeling for me. Everyone is different. So after one and a half weeks, I abandoned her meal plan and worked her recipes into a diet I felt comfortable with. Good food at 1,200 calories a day.
I won’t sit here and write like doing this was easy, it wasn’t and it isn’t. I found myself sometimes desperately wanting to break my discipline and give in to a late night meal. So because I knew those cravings wouldn’t magically stop and that what I’m most interested in is a sustainable diet (I have 50 pounds to lose after all), I decided that sweets could be enjoyed in moderation.
Once a week, I have a cheat day to go over my calorie limit with something unhealthy like a latte. And once a month, that something unhealthy is a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I don’t feel bad about this. I figured if I denied myself, one day I’d crack and binge. I also still eat out with colleagues and friends; I found watching how much I eat is better than deprivation. A slice of pizza at a birthday party is fine, just don’t make pizza the norm, I say.
I also discovered that in the past when I dieted, I simply stopped eating junk food and ate fruits and vegetables without considering that eating too much of anything will make the calories add up. One banana has 105 calories, go figure. So I have to eat healthy, yes, but I also have to watch how much of any food I eat.
In addition to changing the way I eat (it helps to not think of it as dieting, I think), I tried to find exercises that I enjoy. I love yoga, but the town I live in doesn’t have any yoga studios. So I found some videos online, and I started practicing yoga in the morning. Oddly, there is a pilates studio near me so I switched to that and I love it. I also walk on the treadmill (I hate running), bike, take the stairs instead of the elevator, park farther away from the entrance of a store in the parking lot, and use my standing desk instead of sitting all day.
Exercising isn’t necessary for weight loss, but I thought it’d make me feel good and like I’m doing something more than obsessing over my plate. And because it’s not necessary, I don’t do anything I don’t like. I hate running so I’m not going to force myself to run. I’m not into high intensity classes so Pure Barre isn’t for me. My goal is to be active but not be miserable. A miserable workout isn’t going to result in a sustainable lifestyle change and I’m not going to magically start liking running one day.
Exercising also gives me something to do with my time, which I need. I have a feeling that if I stopped, the unhappiness of my situation will set in. So I workout out to distract myself. I count calories to keep my mind occupied. This is a blog post about how I’m using food and exercise to regain some of the control I lost through my job choice. It’s not really a log with instructions for someone to follow.
Last thing I found to be helpful is to weigh myself everyday. I gained weight because I didn’t know that I was getting fat. One day my clothes didn’t fit, and I looked in the mirror to see a 200 lbs girl. The scale isn’t always easy to read. My weight fluctuates from day to day, and it’s easy to lose hope. But I know that I’m not going to lose the weight overnight, and I know that if I stopped exercising and counting calories, that 200 lbs girl will be back. The weigh-ins just let me know whether what I’m doing is working or not. And when the scale goes down dramatically, it’s also a nice little boost.
In the beginning, the weight came off faster. In the past month or so, I’ve lost only 5 pounds, which is a healthy amount of weight to lose. (I also increased my calorie limit to 1,400 calories a day for about a month.) Overall, I’ve lost around 30 lbs.
Invisible Womanhood 