High Body Count / This is not helping my diet
Posted by erin at January 31, 2005 01:50 PMThanks to the miracle of livejournal, tracking diseases is easy! It works like this: Someone gets sick. They stay home from work and post on livejournal what all their symptoms are. You read their post on your Friends page. Then you read, over the next two weeks, dozens of other posts about people getting the same illness with the same symptoms. Then you hear about people at work getting sick. And you over-hear a conversation in the gym. Finally your boyfriend gets sick! Same symptoms! I guess he failed a con check.
The illness in question includes a lovely hacking cough, and flu-like symptoms, and slight fever on the first day. Word on the street is that it lays you up for an entire week. I hope I don't get it. I haven't been sick in quite some time, since before Christmas at least... I don't remember being sick in November, either. Nevertheless, the body count is piling up!
N.'s illness comes at a time when my roommates are out of town for two weeks, visiting Australia. That'd be fine, since we're mostly going to use that time to watch anime on the high-definition TV (and abuse bandwidth downloading more anime), but N. was pretty much bedridden all day Sunday. If he stays bedridden, I can finally finish watching Princess Tutu! (Trust me, it's a good show!)
Next I whine about dieting for a while:
I read somewhere that the average American gains 6 pounds over the holidays. I know I did! I'm trying to lose those 6-10 pounds, and have been since the beginning of January. But for some reason I'm having a really hard time sticking to the diet and counting calories. Like, I'll count calories for the first half of the day, but when I've hit my weight watcher's point limit for the day (around 4pm or 5pm) and I haven't eaten dinner yet, I stop counting, because f*ck, what's the point? It's demoralizing to find out exactly how much I've overshot my goal.
I've tried to give up drinking entirely in the time between N. and I's anniversary and Valentine's Day (both nights which I tend to drink on), but I had three drinks on Friday night. The trouble with drinking is that when I'm tipsy, I disregard any kind of dieting and start snacking like crazy. The more I eat, the more I can drink, because the food absorbs some of the alcohol. (As we all learned from the prom episode of 90210...) Beer and other alcoholic drinks are not exactly calorie free, and they also make you dehydrated. I usually have a spike in my weight a day or two after drinking - I assume it's my body taking on more water to make up for the dehydration. I have found that drinking one or two beers while sticking to the diet has a negligible effect, but the closer I am to my goal weight, the more adversely alcohol seems to effect me.
That said, just giving up alcohol isn't really enough to lose weight. Neither is just going to the gym enough for me to lose weight. I've found that going to the gym regularly helps keep me stay the same weight and not gain any - but I must stick to the diet if I actually want to lose weight (in addition to exercise). This is hardly the secret of the ages - dieting and exercise are the way to lose weight! Duh!! Auuugh! It's easy to do one or the other, but sticking to both is pretty hard. Going to the gym makes me hungry afterwards!
There's a problem to, where I have to feed N.. In a typical day I eat a lot at work, because I'm always hungry around lunchtime, but then I really screw up when I get hungry at 4pm and snack too much. That's it for my calories for the day! Then I go to the gym after work, which makes me hungry. Then I go home and have to cook dinner for N., and I'm not going to cook without eating any of it myself, so even if I eat a less than N., I still eat, and that's more calories.
When I worked at ISO I used to eat less for lunch and save up a lot of calories for dinner. Now that I work until 7pm, I find that a lot harder to do. I often feel that 6pm is a good time for dinner, so by the time I actually eat at 10pm, I've been waiting for dinner for quite a while. I probably shouldn't eat anything after 10pm, but I get home late often (not because I'm working, necessarily), so it's not unusual for me to fix dinner at 11pm.
It was a lot easier to lose weight when I was severely overweight and not just a little overweight. It was really hard to lose the last 10 pounds the first time (the first 40 pounds were much easier to lose!). In the end I know that's my problem - I can't mess up the diet at all in order to lose the last 10 pounds, and it's hard to work up the kind of motivation necessary in order not to slack off at all. I'd have to have a concrete goal in order to do it (like for Jen's wedding I was able to shape up long enough to drop a few more pounds), but I don't really want to wait for Maggie's wedding to get back to weight that I was at for most of last year. There's also the part where I'm not entirely unhappy with my current weight. I mean, one pair of jeans doesn't fit, but I don't feel like a giant fatass anymore.
Sure, it might be annoying to hear me whine about dieting, but you know what I'm not doing while I type this? Eating.
Comments Individual Archive Index
January 31, 2005 02:13 PM, Jay said:
I just had my bioenergetics test today. I can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about dieting. Granted talking about calorimetry is probably not what you want to hear.
Weight becomes harder to loose as you slim down because your BMR decreases in proportion to your size. Bascially, the more BSA you have, the higher your BMR is. As you loose weight, BSA and therefore BMR decrease. You require fewer calories (really kilocalories) to meet your daily energetic needs so you either need to workout even more or further reduce food intake.
January 31, 2005 02:15 PM, Jay said:
Now that I think about it, that points plan is ingenious. They keep you at a level even when you've lost weight. If it was a good diet, the number of points per day would become fewer and fewer as you lost weight. If the levels stay the same, they can keep you still wanting to loose more and paying for their shite further...fucking brilliant marketing.
January 31, 2005 02:33 PM, Erin said:
The points plan IS graded by how much you weigh. The points do become fewer and fewer the less you weigh.
Also I'm not paying any more money to stay on the diet. I learned it, and that's it. Unless I want to go to more meetings it's a one-time payment.
January 31, 2005 02:34 PM, Erin said:
Also what the hell do those acronyms stand for? Body Mass Ratio?
January 31, 2005 06:44 PM, Jay said:
BMR = Basal Metabolic Rate
BSA = Body Surface Area
January 31, 2005 09:47 PM, Agnieszka said:
You can increase your BMR by increasing your muscle mass. Lift very heavy weights. You might not lose pounds and still lose inches. But, it might make you hungrier and so you'll stay in the same place. I think it's better to stay the same weight and be twice as strong, even if you don't get as skinny as you might hope, but you might have different priorities.
By the way, you can also try breaking your meals down into several smaller meals. Instead of one big lunch, schedule two medium lunches, one of which might be say, at 4, when the snack urge hits.
Though I don't really undestand what the surface area of your body has to do with it. Is it just a correlation or is there some causal relationship?
February 2, 2005 11:40 PM, mom said:
I cannot believe I'm kicking your butt! I actually have lost my Christmas weight and have changed what I eat and how much I eat. HAH It is not genetics!
Hey I'm sorry Noah is sick. We all have colds but we aren't bedridden. Make him a pie.
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