My progress for week one

Disclaimer:  I am not a doctor, nurse, or nutritionist.  I am just posting things that have worked for me in my quest towards a healthier lifestyle.  Any changes you choose to make to diet and/or exercise should be made only after consulting your physician.

Okay, so it’s been a week since I started with earnest to modify my eating, or as I call it,  “cranking it down”.  I find visual pictures helpful as I attempt changes in my life, and I equate the small, progressive steps I’m taking in my quest to eat healthy to putting a block of wood into one of those big clamps, where you slowly turn it tighter and tighter.  Maybe not the greatest mental picture for you…but it works for me.

How am I doing with breakfast and mid- morning snack?  Well, I’m happy to report “pretty darn good.”  I’ve consistently eaten both a low-fat, low-sugar  breakfast and a mid-morning snack every day this week, hitting in the ball park of around 400 –500 calories for the two together each day.   I’ve been eating Kashi bars, cooked egg whites, fruit and peanut butter, and yogurt and nuts, mixing them up as needed to accommodate my schedule.

Not that it has been that easy.  TWO days this week, sales reps brought food to the hospital.  One morning, Shipley’s Donuts were in the break room for hours.  And there were several of my favorites in the box just calling out to me.  Another day, there were so many kolaches in the break room I got intoxicated just by the smell (for those of you not from Texas, just google “kolache” to see why I love them soooo much!) 

Many people were eating the donuts and kolaches.  And I was tempted to join in.  However, I had my healthy snack to eat.  And I thought about my ten reasons for wanting to get healthy.  And I resisted the temptation.

Another big challenge for me it is that it is hard for me time-wise in the morning to pack food when I have to be at work at 5:30 am.  I know I should get my food together the night before, but that doesn’t seem to happen much.  I'm just not a night-time kind of gal.  So, the temptation in the morning is to think “I don’t have time to pull together anything healthy for the morning.  Where’s that left over banana pudding???”  So far I’ve resisted, but I know I’ve got to get some more healthy “grab and go” options for the morning.

So have I lost a ton of pounds this week?  I doubt it.  But I don’t know because I rarely get on the scales.  Just looking at my body and the way things fit, I might be making a tad bit of progress.  A tad. Not much.   But that’s okay, because I am not in a foot race.  I am running a long marathon that is going to take time.  It took me a while to put this weight on, so it is going to take a while to get my eating where it should be and time to take the weight off.

And how am I doing with lunch and dinner?  No fair asking that now, because I am taking one step at a time and this week I was focused on breakfast and mid-morning snack..   Next week I will move on to lunch.  

There are some modifications I am still wanting to make in my morning eating routine.  As I have to be at work at 5:30 pretty consistently in the coming weeks, I want to make things even simpler…more “grab and go”. 

1)      Instead of buying one big container of yogurt that I divvy out of, I’m going to buy the small, individual portions.  No need to find some container to put the yogurt in (since I can usually find all sorts of containers in my cabinet but no lids to match).  No excuse…just grab the little thing and go.   The individual containers have another advantage in that they hold ½ cup rather than the 1 cup I have been eating, so I’m cutting out ½ the portion and ½ the calories as well, which I think I can do with minimal pain.

2)      At my shopping trip today, I’m going to buy some frozen whole wheat waffles.  Again, something very “grab and go”.  Slap some peanut butter on it or sugar free jelly and I’m good to go for one of my morning meals.  I’ll let you know what brand I decide on.  I can do the same with rice cakes.  Also going to pick up some cheese cubes that I can partner with fruit some days.  And replace the mixed nuts that I had been using on my yogurt with walnuts only (which are healthier than the peanuts in the mixed nuts).

3)      Lastly,  I found some protein shakes in my cabinet from an abandoned weight loss attempt a while ago.  (and no, the shakes haven’t expired).  So I am going to start adding them to my morning options.  How much more “grab and go” can you get than that?

How are you doing with breakfast and mid-morning snack?  Have you started bringing in healthier options and weaning out the less healthy stuff?  What have been your successes and your challenges this week?

Maybe you have yet to get started towards better health.  I hope you’ll give it a try.  Maybe you jumped great guns into a radical diet or exercise program at the New Year that required too many changes too fast  and you've already given up trying to get healthier.  Don’t give up!  I encourage you to begin again, taking small, progressive steps towards eating healthy. 

We have a great FB group, “Steps To Better Health”, where we share, encourage, and support each other on our journey.  I encourage you to join us!

   

Mid Morning Snack

If you google “eating every three hours”, you will find a great debate about whether eating six smaller meals a day is better than eating three larger ones.  Now, as I say in my disclaimers, I’m no expert.  I’m just saying what works better for me.  And for me, eating every three hours works.

Why? 

1)      It seems to keep my glucose spikes down and my energy up

2)      It keeps me out of the break room donuts because I have something of my own to eat

3)      It definitely keeps the hunger and panic at bay.  Why do I say “panic”?  I know from past experience that as I begin to whittle down my meals to smaller and leaner choices, I sometime finish my meal and seem to  immediately feel hungry.  Maybe it’s physical…maybe it’s mental.  But I find myself  thinking “Good grief! If I feel this way now, how am I ever going to make it to lunch!”  BUT when I incorporate in a mid-morning snack at around three hours after breakfast, I gain confidence in knowing that I’m going to get to eat something again in three hours, not six.  I CAN handle some hunger pangs for three hours.  And when lunch does come around, I’m not ravenous.

So, as I have been reworking breakfast, I’ve also been working in a mid-morning snack around three hours later.  My snack might be a small apple and peanut butter, a Kashi bar, rice cakes and peanut butter, or some protein shake.  For breakfast, I’m shooting for around 300 –350 cals and for snack  around 150-200.  I am trying to develop some choices for breakfast and snack that are more “sit down” and some that are “grab and go”, since there are days (the days I have to be at work at 5:30 am) I switch around breakfast and snack..

In the coming days I’m going to be searching around the net for other foods that I can incorporate into my morning eating habits.  But I am going to limit the number I try.  I know myself well enough that I can’t handle too many choices.  Then it just becomes too overwhelming!  So I’m going to pick and choose items that are low fat, low sugar, easy to prepare, and don’t cost a fortune. Oh...and they have to be something I'll actually eat!  I’ll let you know what I find.

Portion Control

Disclaimer:  I am not a doctor, nurse, or nutritionist.  I am just posting what has worked for me.  Any changes you choose to make to your diet and/or exercise should be done in consultation with your physician.


In my last post, I said the thing I needed to work on most with breakfast was portion control.  Does that mean I’m going to start weighing and measuring everything I eat?  Thank you…no.  I could do that for maybe a couple of days and then I’d throw up my hands and quit.  Let’s face it…that’s one reason  most of us hate “diets” in the first place.

What I did start doing was looking at the food label for stuff I was eating for breakfast.   Now I’m pretty sure I’m the only one  in the world who does this, but what I usually do when choosing food is look at the “calories per serving” part on the label and ignore the “serving size” part, preferring to decide for myself what the serving size should be.  Unfortunately, the majority of the time (as was the case with my breakfast choices) my idea of a serving size is far larger than the manufacturer’s idea of a serving size.

In these first few days of self-discovery, I’ve discovered:

1)      My cereal bowl holds two cups of cereal, not 2/3 of a cup
2)      That same bowl can hold three cups of yogurt when piled high
3)      My handful of mixed nuts holds way more than 15 nuts

So, what I’ve decided to do for the time being is measure foods once, to get an eye picture of what a serving size should be.  That way, when I dump the cereal in the bowl or reach in for a handful of nuts, I’ll have a better idea what I should be going for.

How are you doing with your breakfast choices?  I hope you are taking baby steps to wean yourself away from high fat, high sugar choices to healthier ones.  And for those of you who are not breakfast people, I hope you'll give it a try.  Google and you'll find lots of ideas for healthy, easy, inexpensive choices.

Let's Get This Ball Rolling With Breakfast !

Disclaimer:  I am not a doctor, nurse, or registered dietitian.  I am just posting what has worked and made sense for me.  Any changes to diet and/or exercise you chose to make should be made in consultation with your physician.

Those of you who have read my previous posts either here or on FaceBook know that I have committed to getting healthier in 2011 and that I am convinced the way for me to do that is through small, progressive steps toward more healthy habits.  It worked for me before and I know it will work for me again.  So, on the food side of things, I am getting the ball rolling by looking at breakfast and what changes I can make there to make it a healthy one.

Why start with breakfast?  Several reasons:

1)      If I start the day eating a healthy breakfast, it encourages me to eat healthier the rest of the day.  If I eat that bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit at breakfast, the next time it comes around to eating, I’m tempted to say  “I’ve blown it today anyway, so why not eat that donut”.

2)      If I start the day with a little protein and lay off the sugar and fat, I find I have more energy through the morning, which is my busiest time of the day.

3)      Breakfast is the low-pressure meal of the day for me.  What I mean by that is that I usually eat breakfast with no family or co-workers watching.  There’s no one around to roll their eyes when they see my change from that bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit to something healthy and think to themselves “Oh boy.  Here they go again.  Trying another DIET”.  (IMPORTANT NOTE:  My family would never do that.  Neither would any of my co-workers.  But you and I both know there are people out there who would.)

Now in the past, I’ve been known to eat just about anything for breakfast.  Cold pizza.  Left-over chile.  And, yes, bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits (YUMM!!!)  But, let’s face it.  You and I know that those are not great choices on the nutrition scale.  So, a few years ago, I decided to switch over to cereal and skim milk on a regular basis.  Good transition to be sure.  And I’ve even tweaked that through the years, moving from really any kind of cereal to Special K.

Lately, I’ve taken a liking to low-fat, vanilla yogurt for breakfast, mixed with some All-Bran and mixed nuts.  Yogurt for the calcium and Vitamin D, All-Bran for the fiber, and mixed nuts cause…well…I like nuts.  So this sounds crazy healthy, right?  Until the other day when I realized I was using no portion control.  I was just slopping things in the bowl, and what I had in there probably added up to 500 calories or more.  Calories of healthy stuff, you might argue.  But since one of the things I would like to do is lose weight, I need to lose some of the calories as well.  So my first tweaking for breakfast is to get a better grip on my portions to hold breakfast at about 350 calories.

Of course, yogurt and cereal aren’t the only options for a good breakfast.  Here are a couple of sites where  you can find easy, healthy options:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/food-and-nutrition/NU00197

http://www.myoptumhealth.com/portal/Information/item/Recipe%3A+Turkey-Stuffed+Cabbage?archiveChannel=Home%2FArticle&clicked=true

Check them out then decide what baby steps YOU can take to start working your way towards  a healthy breakfast.  Some of you may be used to donuts or that bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit every morning.  I encourage you to start eating only half of those less-healthy choices each morning for the next few days or week and supplement the rest with a piece of fruit or some other healthier choice.  Slowly work your way towards eating less of the less-healthy choices and more of the healthy ones.  Take your time and slowly progress and soon you will find yourself weaned away from the high calorie, high fat breakfast all together and choosing a more healthy one.

Some of you, on the other hand, may not be eating breakfast at all.  Again, I encourage you to start slowly with baby steps.  Maybe start with a low fat granola bar (I like Kashi), or nuke a whole grain frozen waffle.  Then work your way up.

A good breakfast doesn’t have to be difficult to make, expensive, or complicated.  But I’m convinced it is the best way to begin a transformation of the way we eat.  If you have suggestions on how you work breakfast, I’d love to hear them.  And I hope you will consider joining our FB group, Steps Toward Better Health.

Why I think we fail.

I've done it and I bet you have too. Maybe it was the New Year, maybe it was an invite to the class reunion, maybe it was a visit to the doctor's office. Something happened that made us decide "I've got to do something...anything to take off this weight now!"

That's when we do it. In one day we go from eating whatever we want to vowing we will never top 1000 calories again. Or we jump from being a total coach potato to swearing we'll do 30 hard minutes every single day on the elliptical. And we start our grand plan. And it works...for one day...maybe two days...maybe three. Then we find ourselves starving, craving for all the things we used to eat, and sore because our bodies simply aren't used to doing what we're asking of them now. So we give up and go back to our old ways. We gain back any weight we lost. And we feel guilty and defeated thinking getting into better shape is a hopeless cause.

Where do we go wrong? I'm convinced most of our plans to diet and exercise fail because we try to make too radical of changes to the way we eat and exercise too fast.    It's like we're trying to take ourselves from 0 to 60 in a few seconds and our bodies are saying NO !!!!!

Now don't get me wrong.  I know some people who have made radical changes to their diets and/or exercise routine quickly and have had great success.  Some of my friends have.  Some have joined great plans and have stuck with them.  Their results are incredible and I am inspired and proud of them all.

But I tried radical changes for years and I just couldn't make them stick.  For me, the secret to finally losing weight and getting into better shape five years ago was to make small, progressive changes in what I ate and how I exercised.  I would make one small change and work on that for three days or so before I made another small change.  I started making my changes with breakfast and worked myself through each meal down to dinner and after.   Each success I had with a baby step gave me confidence to move on.  And within a matter of four weeks or so I had transformed my eating habits from "not good at all" to "pretty good".  I went from "not working out at all" to a decent  workout 4-5 times a week.  I developed habits in a way that wasn't painful and they were habits I could stick with.  I weaned myself off sugar and fat, and in the coming months, developed some muscle tone, and lost 40 pounds.

Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, I started on a "slippery slope" of indulgences that have moved me away from healthier habits rather than closer to them.  My diet is far from great.  I don't work out regularly.  I've gained some of the weight back, lost energy, and have felt crappy about the whole thing.  I've decided it's time to turn this thing around.

So my plan this go around is to do what worked for me before...to make small, progressive changes in what I eat and in how I work out.  Step one for me was to remind myself of 10 reasons why I wanted to get into better shape (see my other post).  Step two is for me to take an honest look at breakfast...breakfast only (remember, one step at a time) ...and evaluate what I eat now to see where I need to modify.  What small change can I make today that will move me towards a healthier breakfast?  Only after I get breakfast whipped into shape will I  move on to mid-morning snack and work my way down the day.  And I am going back to the gym today.  Am I going to try the 45 minute ellipticle and weight workout that I used to do?  No.  I'm starting with a slow 30 minute walk.

Slow and steady...that's my motto.  I want to make changes that will last.  I'd love to have you join me during my journey towards better health.  I've set up a Facebook group for others wanting to take Steps Towards Better Health.  We're not selling any products or programs.  We are there to encourage, support, and help each other in our efforts to get healthier in 2011 !

Why make the effort?

In thinking about changes I would like to make towards better health in 2011,  the first question I had to ask myself was not "What ?"  or "How ?" but "Why ?".  You may think that is a silly question.  I mean, everyone wants to lose a few pounds, right?

Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to eat better and get more exercise.  One thing I learned when I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago is I really needed  more than one reason to eat right or work out.  Why?  Because it is really really easy for me to work my way around just one reason.  If my reason for eating right is to fit into a size 10 dress for cousin Nancy's wedding in August, I can always justify that the wedding is in August, for Pete's sake!  I have plenty of time to work off that doughnut.  If my reason for working out is to run in a marathon next month...well, that's just a stupid idea to begin with and I'll never make it anyway, so I might as well not try.

I found that if I had 10 practical reasons for taking care of myself, it was really hard to discount all of them.  By the time I got to reason 4 or so, it was more work to try to justify eating that doughnut than it was to put it down.

So, listed below are 10 reasons I have for taking steps towards better health in 2011.  Yours will be different.  I hope you will take time to write your down and post them on your fridge, by your treadmill...whatever works for you. 

Diana's Top Ten Reasons To Get On The Ball And Take Care Of Herself:

When I exercise my fibromyalgia and depression don’t act up as much

When I exercise my blood pressure stays lower and I keep off the meds

When I exercise I have more energy

When I exercise I ward off osteoporosis

When I exercise I am more flexible

When I lay off the sugar I have more energy

When I lay off the fat I keep my gallbladder issues at bay

When I am in better shape, the clothes in my closet aren’t tight.

When I take care of myself, I am honoring the body God gave me.

When I take better care of myself, I feel better about myself.

My story

I'm a woman in my 50's with grown kids.  I have a busy life with work, church, and other volunteer activities.  I don't like to cook and working out is tough for me.  I'm not exactly the "athletic" type.



I've always struggled with my weight. I lost the "college 30" after my wedding, then years later successfully lost the baby weight after having twins.  While raising the family, though, weight slowly crept back on until five years ago I found myself weighing what I weighed when I was carrying the twins.  And the doctor said my blood pressure was high enough that the next year I would probably have to go on meds.

So I got going and slowly lost 40 pounds.  No magic pill or magic program.  Just slow, steady changes to my diet and level of exercise.  Through it, my blood pressure dropped way down and my fibromyalgia, which had been flaring up a lot, decreased dramatically.  Depression issues, which I've also dealt with through the years, also decreased.  I'll be sharing in later posts more about how I lost the weight and how I hope to use the same tools to do it again.