Parts of the Redlissa diet plan (for dieters and their friends and family)

So,  I  now qualify for the National Weight Control registry (keeping more than 30 pounds off for more than a year). Apparently, this gives me the authority to pontificate about how people can lose weight

Before I go to my advice, my stats:

I have lost almost 70 pounds of non-preggo related weight and I have kept 60 of it off since January of 2010.  It took me a full 3 years to lose it and I don't have any plans to actually join the weight-loss registry.

So, here it goes, in somewhat random order:

1)  Don't tell any woman you love that you think they are fat. EVER. Even if they are family, even if they are at risk for dire health consequences.  The problem is that our society has all this crap with beauty and weight and self-esteem.  Only rarely did someone point out my BMI to me when I was overweight, and all it did was make me reach for the cookie jar. Leave the BMI quotations up to the medical professionals. I lost weight when it was time for me to lose weight. Other people's opinions didn't make much difference.

2) If you are really concerned about the health risks of your friend/lover/wife/mother/sister's weight, make them feel good about themselves with flowers, chocolates, tickets to the football game, whatever makes them happy. Even if they don't lose weight, they will appreciate that you actually care about them.

3) For the weight-losing folk out there, buy cute clothes. I have no sense of fashion so I do not know what these clothes look like. However, I know that attractive, well fitted clothes come in all sizes for men and women and some of the most attractive people I know are overweight, happy and well-dressed.

4)  Eat lots of those multi-colored things that come out of the ground or grow on trees. They fill you up, they make you regular and they have vitamins. Whenever I stop eating them, I gain weight, whenever I start eating them again I lose weight.

5) Drink the clear stuff that comes out of the tap. I do not do this and as a result, my weight fluctuates 3-4 pounds every day depending on how dehydrated I am.  I am trying to drink water I swear, it will happen eventually.

6) Any movement is awesome, but don't kid yourself into thinking that taking the stair up to the second floor of your office building made up for the Big Mac you had at lunch.

7) It is amazing how much crud we can stuff into our stomachs without knowing it, so I keep a diary (like most of the National Weight-Loss Registry folk) of everything that goes in my mouth. Sometimes the diary says 4000 calories, sometimes it says 1500 calories, but I am a firm believer that I would have had 7,000 on the 4000 day and 3000 on the 1500 day, without tracking.

8) If it takes more than three normal bites to finish the cake, cookie or pastry, it is more than 300 calories.(this rule only goes for tasty pastries, there are some diet pastry-like items that have fewer calories, which gets me to my next point)

9) Never feel like crap about gaining a couple of pounds or eating something horrible for you(as long as it tasted GOOD). I have found that feeling like crap generally just leads to eating crap (This is the corollary to "you are what you eat")

10) It is perfectly acceptable to gain a few pounds during an overseas trip, a vegas weekend, finals, while studying for the bar exam.....etc..... If you are doing something super cool, forget about your weight and have fun.  If you are doing something super stressful, worry about the stressful activity, not your weight. (And if people comment about the weight gain....just make an off hand comment about their ugliest feature. e.g, "I know, I totally need to lose a couple of pounds. Maybe we could make a pact and I could lose the weight while you look into plastic surgery for your crook nose")

11) Finally, the most important tip is the Ryan diet plan. It is simple, effective and almost impossible for most of us to follow: "Eat less, move more"  Until the people who decide these things come up with a magical way to lose weight that does not involve eating less than your body burns, the 2/3 of the american population that is overweight or obese should probably take that phrase to heart.

12) As was noted in an earlier post, or a few earlier posts, I do not eat well. I move more than I take in, but I still have a long, long way to go before I could claim that I eat well.  Food and movement are two of the main activities in our lives and we need to think about them in terms of more than what will lead to the best looking abs or what will provide the greatest satisfaction.

Slowing Down

Last week I went to get my metabolism tested. My hope was that I can rev up my metabolism enough to stop taking my daily dose of thyroid medication and that I can get past my current running plateau.  There was good news, my metabolism is now actually slightly faster than most people (this is really good news for someone with hypothyroidism, generally people with low thyroid counts have really slow metabolic rates). There was very bad news as well: to get any faster, I am going to have to start lifting weights and I am going to have to increase my aerobic base.

This is now my most important training tool

First, the weight-training thing sucks. I thought that yoga was a convenient way to get mind-body exercise and avoid weight-training(unfortunately, the person doing my assessment is a vinyasa yoga instructor, and said, "not so much", I should really do both). I don't like lifting weights, I don't like looking at weights, heck I don't even like the smell of weights. It's boring.  The whole idea is to do the same movement several times and gradually do it with heavier pieces of metal.  Who even invented this torturous activity? I wonder if some fitness expert back in the day actually said to himself, "you know what would be awesome? lifting and squatting with heavy objects in a repetitive motion. This will make me strong and able to impress the ladies." I am NOT impressed, inventor of weight-training.

Increasing my aerobic base is just code for slowing down. The idea is that training my body to run at really slow heart rates will train my body to run for a really long period of time without wearing out. Great idea, in theory. However, I run because I love the feel of flying as my feet barely tough the ground passing by each other. I love going slow enough that I can breathe in the salty air by my house, see the boats go by on the ship canal and still run fast enough to enjoy the wind hitting my face as I glide towards Golden Gardens.  "Running" at 4 or so mph is unlikely to feel like gliding or flying.  It is more likely going to feel like clomping.

But I have to say, as a constant optimist, I did enjoy some things about my first "slow" workout. I was able to think the entire time I was running. I never ran out of breath and I always knew exactly how hard I was working.  I have had this constant heel pain in my right foot on my runs. Generally, I just run through it and call the pain a "character building experience"

 As I was running slowly, I figured out what I have been doing wrong to cause the pain. I hit midsole on the left foot, but heel strike on the right. And I hope it looks less weird than it sounds: I limp when I run. My right foot falls down heavier than my left every time. I was actually able to make adjustments to my form while I was slow running, and for the time being, the heel limp is gone.  

I will admit that this heel has made my running life miserable many times 

The slow base building training is supposed to last eight weeks and then I can speed up (and frankly ditch the weights). I am going to put my trust in the expert and hope this nonsense works as well as she described it. 

Weight-Loss...or why I stopped worrying and learned to run.

I discovered I had gotten fat somewhere around my 26th birthday. I looked at a picture of myself from a birthday party and did not see a waistline. Instead, I saw ill fitting jeans and a really lame t-shirt that did not cover up my increasingly  I had been fat for the three years prior to making this discovery, but the plus sized clothing and the wrenching pains in my knees really had no effect on me. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the cute, pain-in-the-ass 22 year-old who could drink anyone under the table and still not gain a pound.  Unfortunately, that 22 year-old had gotten older, developed hypothyroidism, and, had not stopped eating and drinking her friends under the table when her metabolism had stopped cooperating.

I really was mad at 22-year-old me, but decided that I would not deal with my issues because I was going to be an enlightened 21st century, don't mess with me "fat girl". I planned to embrace my weight, attempt to eat a little better and live with fat pride.I also wanted to buck the yo-yo dieting trend that seemed to make every woman in my parent's generation go back and forth between Kate Moss and Roseanne Arnold. I found the entire idea of moving back and forth between a life where I hated eating to one where I despised how I looked, nauseating.  This don't care attitude was great for the self esteem, but fracking horrible on the knees and the back. And it also sucked that I moved slower than my thin friends, and couldn't shop in normal clothing stores. My stay fat plan, lasted about 2 years.

Plan B was to find the most awesome fad diet ever, lose the weight in an entirely unhealthy way and then make the slow transition back to normal eating without regaining the weight. I LOVED, and still LOVE reading the diet books. Diet books are the cable news of nutrition.  They provide endless hours of edutainment, and don't bog down the material with factual information. I tried Atkins, Sonoma, South Beach, various "Detox Diets" (P.S. Detox just means "this diet will make you poop a lot") and even Slim Fast.  I lasted at least an hour on plan. Usually by the end of the day, I was getting bogged down in the reality that I what I was doing eating gross food and following ridiculous advice from a variety of experts whose main goal was to live the American Dream by making a lot of money selling diet books.

Then I tried Weight Watchers, it works and is not a fad diet. Mostly because it works on the basic principle that if you eat less and exercise more, you will lose weight.  The problem for me, on any diet, including the rational ones, is that I really ENJOY food and dessert and beer and all of those things that I had to eat less of to lose weight.

And this is when I discovered running. I had been walking, using the Wii and taking the stairs to get in my "30 minutes of movement on most days" But all of those things only provided me about 200 extra calories a day. That is ONE pint of beer or half a cookie at the awesome bakery down the street. Running gives me 750 calories an hour, I can do it anywhere and I can drink a beer after I am done(okay maybe after I have a glass of water).  I lost 30 pounds (but gained it all back plus 20 during pregnancy) with the diets. I have lost 60 pounds with running and get to eat what I want. I still write down all of my calories (because believe me, if I could eat 10,000 delicious calories a day without gaining weight, I probably would), but I now can focus on other aspects of what goes into my mouth rather than, "will this make me fatter".

And the awesome thing with running is that once you get over the back, knee and side pain, it gets into your blood. Jumping on the treadmill at the end of a hard day starts feeling almost as good as a chocolate bar or a dip in a hot tub.  There is something about making your body temporarily fly through the air as you move from step to step that provides a combination of energy, meditation and catharsis.

More to come on running and weight-loss later....

Post-Running

Pre Running