Your Diet Plan

In order to start a diet you have to know what to eat, right?  I mean you throw out all your holiday leftovers, clean your pantry and fridge but what next?  How much do I eat?  What is a portion?  How often should I eat?  Whom should I believe about what goes into "healthy nutrition"?  That's the $64 dollar question and there are as many answers as there are websites to help you.  My purpose here is to direct you to what will work for you.  Only you can answer what it is that will work but awareness is the first step and you've already acknowledged that you are aware that you want to change.  Now you need to arm yourself with education.                                                                   

There are several excellent programs out there right now that can help you.  Even knowing everything I know about nutrition as a nurse I turned to one finally for help because I needed a new discipline.  I went on Nutrisystem in 2006 and lost 85 lbs.  I used their coupons and auto delivery to lower the cost and I followed the plan exactly.  It took about one year and I took some short breaks along the way.  There are many other excellent plans out there including Weight Watchers Online and Jenny Craig and I know people who've lost weight with them.  Joy Bauer, a nutritionist on "The Today Show" also has a website and plan you pay $4.00/week to join and she provides a ton of information.  If you feel you can't do this alone these are excellent plans that make it simple and understandable to begin a weight loss regimen without any guess work but the key is following the plan.  Stick to it.  Don't cheat.  If they say don't eat this, then don't eat it.  If they say exercise, then do try.  If they say drink water, do it. You get the drill.

Want to figure out how many calories you'll burn if your moving every day?  Try your health plan's website for resources or check this out from my plan at Blue Cross Blue Shield:
http://healthandwellness.bluecrossmn.com/InteractiveTools/Calculators/41,CalorieBurnCalc

The principles that undergird most weight loss programs that are successful today has to do with the level of blood sugar in your body at any one time.  There are research studies that say that if you starve yourself your body thinks your in an elemental conservation mode and everything you take in will be preserved against this loss of intake.  So if you fast or near fast for several days and then eat, boom, your body holds onto all those calories against another famine.  I would suggest that anything that causes you to delete food groups entirely is probably not the best idea. However, since we no longer go out and plough the back "40 acres" after breakfast, we probably don't need the carb loads associated with a farm breakfast and our energy needs are pretty stable throughout the day.  So a goal that worked for me was to try to keep my blood sugar level relatively stable throughout the day rather than having it go way up and go way down.  They call that "low glycemic index" but essentially it means you take in food items in a way that keeps your blood sugar fairly constant throughout the day.  It prevents those episodes of severe hunger you've felt with deprivation diets and some of the cravings too.

So the first thing is to figure out how much you really need to lose.  Did you use the BMI calculator link I published to figure out where your BMI is and where it needs to be?  That's where you start.  The other thing is that weight loss that really stays lost won't occur if you go into a severe change that you can't keep up after you lose the weight.  So if you think well I'll just give up all carbs, eat all protein and drink no alcohol for 6 weeks you'll probably lose weight and possibly pretty rapidly.  But what happens after that six weeks is up?  Are you never going to eat a dinner roll again?  Did you mean to give up a Friday evening glass of wine forever?  I doubt that.  So the modifications you are going to take on have to be something you can live with for a long time.  That's why the new habits are so important.  You need to rethink your exercise plan overall - not the sweaty, gym rat type- I'm not that - but walking, or swimming, or biking, or bowling or something you enjoy doing that will move you, hopefully every day for at least 30 minutes a day. It doesn't have to be the same thing every day and you can do 10 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night or 10 minutes 3 times/day.  The important thing is that you do it. You need to rethink your intake plan so that you can still include some of the things you love but knock off the things you know you really shouldn't be eating.  I mean seriously, do you really need that handful of peanut M & M's, the wintergreen lifesavers you're addicted to or that glass of wine with dinner every night?  Isn't that how you got here?  If you gave all these things up for six months, melted off 50 lbs. and then could have them once in a while wouldn't it be worth it???

So go ahead re-calculate your BMI here:
http://nhlbisupport.com/bmi/bminojs.htm


Now what about that diet.  Well our government isn't just designed to send us over fiscal cliffs or vex us with the price of milk.  There are things we've paid for that have been done and can provide you with tools you need to help.  Remember that education I talked about.  Here's a good website chock full of information and tools.  Go there. Make use of it. You've already paid for it.
http://www.nutrition.gov/smart-nutrition-101/myplate-food-pyramid-resources


One of the things on this site that I like is the comparison feature for foods.  For instance you can compare a serving of broccoli side by side with a serving of corn.  Broccoli has 65 calories and low sodium.  A same size serving of corn has over 90 calories and much higher sodium.  Which do you think is better for you?  Guess what - the broccoli is more likely to fill you up too.

While you're on this government site they'll also give you some ideas about a weight loss plan and how to formulate it.  Here's what I found out when I embarked on my successful diet.  I hope that whatever strategy you adopt you experience this.                                  

As I came off the breads I loved, the desserts, the candy, the alcohol and ate fresh fruit for the first time in a long time and fresh, I mean really fresh vegetables, it took about a week before I began to like the taste.  When you're used to incredibly sweet or high caloric yeasty, shortening laden foods your taste buds apparently don't do much for you.  By the second week off the junk and on the fresh pineapple, the apple, the zucchini and broccoli, the tomato juice, the water, my mind was so much clearer.  It was like the lifting of a brain fog.  The walking helped too.  I get winter depression - I hate cold and being stuck indoors probably to the point of becoming clinically depressed if I don't go out.  By getting out, doing something for myself, by myself and getting off that junk I had freed my body from processing that poison and was putting seriously good things inside it.  Largely protein based food was the mainstay balanced with some fruits or vegetables and a few low fat cheeses for dairy, some nuts here and there and in controlled portions.  When I was hungry I drank my water.  It helped it really did.  Because I went from a bunch of high caloric junk to real food I immediately lost weight.
As I stabilized on my new foods, the weight loss continued at a more or less stable pace.  Yes, I hit plateaus and we'll talk about that elsewhere.  Yes, I sometimes didn't like something I ate.  But it worked and as the weight began to fall off, I felt so much better it was an altogether different high.  My clothes began to be too big and as I lost a size, I put the old ones in a box and gave them away or sent them to my sister.

I have one size in my closet today.  I have been one size since 2007.  When my weight goes over the 5 lb. variance I allow myself, I get back on my plan because if I don't, I can't close my jeans, button my blouses and I have nothing else to wear!  I purposely spent money on clothes I love because I'm NEVER going back and I have them all which means I have a lot of clothes.  But they're all one size.

I keep meaning to talk about sodas/pop, too. Please give them up.  They say Cola products can eat the paint off a car.  Diet sodas are not your friend.  I will tell you one good thing.  When I stopped drinking sodas of any type and changed over to water, tea, coffee (without anything in them) the cellulite inhabiting my derriere improved and sometimes is difficult to see.  Some of that came from my stretching program and walking but I think sodas, diet or otherwise, have something in them that contributes to that nasty cellulite deposition.  So consider cutting way back and giving them up entirely. They aren't good for your children either.  Give your kids fruit juice - real fruit juice not 10% juice 90% junk.  If you drink your sugar/creamer with tea or coffee consider using Splenda and other low caloric aids until you can work your way to black.  I don't put anything in my coffee anymore and I love the taste of  a fresh brew.

You can do this.  You can take charge of your life and get this part under control.  You can do any number of other things when you best this struggle in your life.  You have my permission to succeed wildly at this.

More to come.
HV 13