I tell myself this is because I’m “getting used to my new body.” Well, maybe that IS true in a way. My main goal right now is to be able to eat normally (without counting calories or giving it too much thought) and still not GAIN weight. Once I do that, and reach a kind of homeostasis, I’ll focus on losing again.

Until then, I’m going to take a break from this blog. I’ll report back in when I achieve my next “mini-goal” of dropping below 190. Hopefully, that will be fairly soon!

The reason for my improvement over previous weeks is that I really did try something different this week. As I mentioned in my last post, I had slipped into the “insane” habit of doing the same thing day after day and expecting the results to be different.

Even when we were little girls, getting together with a friend meant eating... only now, it's not pretend tea and crumpets

Over the last week, my partner and I changed the nightly routine we’d been following so long it qualified as a ritual. For years, after dinner most nights, we’d do our own thing until about 8:30, at which time we’d get together to do some outloud reading and watch a movie or some shows on DVD until about midnight.

The problem was that during almost the entire evening, we snacked. I don’t mean we had a piece of fruit or a couple of crackers. I mean we grazed… continuously.  It used to be things like pretzels and M&Ms, or a cheese crisp, or chips and dip, or one of my scrumptious desserts. It was totally habit-driven since neither of us was hungry, but we felt almost like we were going through withdrawals if we didn’t have that hand-to-mouth action going on.

When I started my diet, I switched to “better” snacks like low-fat crackers, fruit, high-fiber cereal, etc. That’s why I was able to lose the first 25 pounds. But while I changed WHAT I was nibbling, I didn’t change the fact that I WAS nibbling and eventually my weight loss plateaued. That went on for weeks, and while I didn’t gain, I didn’t lose.

So, this past week, we mixed things up a bit. We now get together for our reading and watching shortly after dinner; we’re still full and don’t have any interest in eating. I seem to be able to manage about 2-1/2 to 3 hours without snacking (although at this stage, it still feels as though something’s ‘missing’!). As soon as either of us starts feeling the desire to munch something, we call it a night and get out of the living room.

I usually go into the office or one of the few “non-eating” rooms in the house, places where I don’t normally snack. Or I occupy myself with a “no-eat” activity (weaving on my loom, cleaning the garage, playing computer games, taking a long hot bath, etc.).

It’s really weird. After following a set routine for so many years, it’s just plain disconcerting to change. Kind of like being on the “wrong” side of the couch or bed, or using your non-dominant hand to write! I never realized what a creature of habit I was or how challenging change can be. Yet,  if I want change in my weight, there has to be a change in something else to bring that about. And I do want to lose weight.

I’ve also altered another habit that I never even noticed before. I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I realized that when I’m eating (meals OR snacks), I frequently put food into my mouth even though I haven’t finished the last bite. It’s as though I can’t let my mouth be empty for even a fraction of a second or I’ll starve! Now, I’m trying to remember (I don’t always) to finish what I have in my mouth before putting more in there. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’m amazed at how it’s slowed down my eating, and slower usually means less in the long run.

The third change I’ve made is to NOT have an “official” weigh-in day. I weighed myself every day but had an “official” day of the week when I recorded my weekly progress. At first, it was Monday, but that made it difficult to enjoy treats over the weekend, so I switched it to Friday. But that meant I couldn’t enjoy eating on Thursday, even if I’d lost weight that week (you know how it is, you lose two pounds during the week, but gain it all back the night before you weigh in!).

So now, I weigh in daily as usual, and take the lowest weight recorded that week for my weekly weight. For example, this past Friday — on what used to be my official weigh in day — I logged in at 195, but on Tuesday I’d been down to 193.5. I took the latter (lower) number as my weekly figure, and my goal for next week is to reach 192.5 sometime during the week. As long as I keep going down a pound at some point in each 7-day period, I figure I”ll be moving in the right direction.

I only have about four weeks until my 61st birthday, which was supposed to be when I reached 178 pounds (one pound a week). Looks like I’ll be closer to 188, but I’m definitely not going to be sad about that. Even if I keep to the same slow progress I’ve made so far, I’ll be down to 150 by my NEXT birthday. That’ll be the best birthday present I could possibly give myself. Well, that and some brand new clothes!

Albert Einstein is right!

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that definition, I’m totally bonkers. Every day, I eat about the same amount and exercise the same amount (which is none at all) and when I get on the scale in the morning, I’m disappointed that I didn’t lose weight.

For the first few months of my diet, I actually DID diet: I consumed fewer calories than I had in the past. With the first 28 weeks, I lost 25.5 pounds. Not quite up to my goal of a pound a week, but close enough. On July 23, I was down to 195.5 (from 221).

That’s when I stalled.  I stopped keeping a food journal and tried to coast, but in fact I ended up going back to a few old habits like snacking at night so my intake was at a maintenance level. I gained a few pounds, lost them, gained them back, dropped them again. My weight loss graph looked as though it was tracking a kid on a pogo stick (if you’re too young to know what that is, check out this YouTube video).

This has gone on for two months. On my official weigh-in this past Friday, I was 195.  One half pound in eight weeks. Let’s see, that works out to 0.0625 pounds a week. Hmmm…. At this rate, I’ll be my ideal weight in 12.3 years. Instead of celebrating my 61st birthday by buying a size 12, I’ll by trying on new slacks when I’m 73.  And although it’s NEVER too late to get into shape, I really don’t want to wait that long!

So, starting this week (right now in fact) I’m determined to diet or get off the scale, if you’ll excuse my take on the more profane “s–t or get off the pot.” I’m tired of that sense of disappointment and discouragement when I look at the scale every morning — and of feeling “insane” for thinking I’d be seeing a lower number. I miss getting up and weighing myself and bursting into a joyous “YESSSSS!!!!” as I dropped another pound (or even half a pound).  I want to go back to being filled with the sense of expectancy and triumph I experienced when I was on track with my weight loss.

In order to NOT do the same thing over and over again, I’ve looked carefully at my quicksand times and places, the wheres and whens I’m most likely to sink into the mire of “wrong eating.” With me, it wasn’t hard to figure out. I snack at night. Continuously. True, I’ve been trying to stick to good, healthy, low-fat foods like fruit, crackers, and high-fiber cereal (hold the milk and sugar!) but as I realized a few weeks ago, even grapes and peaches add up when you eat a bushel of them at one sitting.

But I don’t eat simply because it’s evening — only while reading or watching movies on DVD. This is something my partner and I love to do and the 10-midnight slot is usually reserved for this type of entertainment. But we also snack non-stop while we’re watching — and have the rolls of fat to prove it.

To avoid these problem times, we’ve switched our schedule so we’re watching the shows right after dinner when we’re not hungry. We’ll spend the late-night period at our computers or in some other “temptation-free zone.”

I’ve only been at this a couple of days but it has greatly reduced my snacking. Since I wasn’t snacking out of hunger, I don’t feel deprived. Hopefully, this will get me back on track and, by doing something different rather than the same thing over and over, I really can expect different results. That scale WILL start going down again! Thank you, Einstein!

This is NOT the way I look in the mirror!

I joined a Toastmasters group a few months ago and I love going to the meetings and making new friends. I’m a fairly good public speaker and have never been nervous speaking in front of an audience, but I have improved my delivery and my listening skills.

What I’ve come to hate about the experience are the photographs. Each week, the person who writes the electronic newsletter includes candid shots of different members, with funny captions or dialogue clouds. It’s all in fun and never mean spirited, but I’ve come to realize that cameras are NOT my friends — at least not when I’m on the lens side of one.

I’m a fat 60-year-old woman with very little fashion sense. Which is NOT a terrible thing! In fact, it has many advantages and I honestly would NOT change places with some skinny 20-something obsessed with design labels (no, really!). But the person captured by the camera at those meetings doesn’t look remotely like the “me” I see in my mind’s eye, or even the mirror.

I swear, I look in the mirror and I don’t see the wrinkles. Yes, I have smile lines all over the place, but they’re not wrinkles. And when I look in the full length mirror, I see a heavy set woman who carries it well, like the plump Venus in Rubens’ paintings, only more mature. My clothes may be polyester and the labels itch more than they impress, but they seem to hang well in the reflection, and I’m always nicely color coordinated.

Then I look at the photos. Who is that frumpy round person with the droopy jowls? Don’t they have a dress code in Toastmasters? Is that a roll of fat, or is that woman wearing a spare tire around her middle? OH NO! That’s me. But it can’t be. Do I really have that many chins? Do my boobs actually sag that far down? Is it true that my clothes look like something the Goodwill store wouldn’t accept?

In my more lucid moments, I realize my capacity for self-deception borders on delusional, but I don’t care. I prefer what I see in my imagination to what the cold, hard eye of the camera sees. Perhaps, if I radiate my inner image strongly enough, others will see it as well.

In the meantime, I’m going to avoid cameras at all cost … unless I’m BEHIND instead of in front of them.

But, just as I know I can lose weight by changing little things in my diet, I realize I can just as easily (correction: more easily) GAIN weight with those little, almost unnoticeable changes. I usually allow myself a single Toffifay candy in the afternoon but if I remember correctly, there were a couple days in there when I had two of them. Then there was that one evening I wrapped my cracker in thin slices of baby Swiss cheese rather than going au naturale. And I have been cooking with more butter than usual. Hmmmmm…..

Gifts of food, like this fantastic basket from Oregon Maiden Gift Baskets, do NOT contain "countable" calories!

Well, even though these “slips” probably accounted for some of it, they didn’t give me an extra two pounds in one week. The other culprit was probably water (my stand-by excuse for putting on weight!). Still, the small things really do count, and I can’t continue to fib to myself and say they don’t. That reminds me of a list of “calories that don’t count” I read. There are a million variations of this list on the web, but here’s mine:

• Small pieces of crackers or cookies (less than 1/2 the whole).
• Food I have to taste while cooking — just to see if it’s done right.
• Food or drink I take for “medicinal” purposes (including an energy burst or to prevent a headache).
• Food other people give me as a gift — it’s not fair to count these because I *have* to eat it to be polite.
• Any piece of food that has fewer than 10 calories (a cashew nut has only 8!) Note: 1/2 hour must elapse between pieces or they do count.
• Anything that can be drizzled on (even that fantastic orange-balsamic vinaigrette I bought at the Rendezvous Grill and Tap Room in Welches, Oregon last week (we had it in this sensational salad of fresh spinach with grilled pears, Oregon blue cheese and toasted hazelnuts and I just HAD to bring a pint home!).
• Spray “butter” — even if I pour it on. After all, it says there are no calories in a serving, so 20 servings would be 20 times zero = 0.
• Anything 1/4 of a normal serving or less (i.e., the bag says a serving size is 3/4 cup and I have a cup. What’s a quarter cup between friends?).
• Anything I eat the day after I had a great weigh in!

So, this week, to turn things around for me, I’ll watch the little things I do and remember that I want to lose weight MORE than I want to eat that extra Toffifay (at least a little bit more, which is all it takes!).