Aaaaannnd.... Score! Goal!

I'm so terribly sorry for not updating in forever. My laptop died once again, this time at the hands of my middle son, the autistic one, who bangs on computer keyboards if the exact video clip he had in mind is not turned on immediately. Typing on a tablet is so insanely annoying that I didn't even bother to do so until the laptop finally got repaired.

AMAZING NEWS! SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS!!!

Despite not believing in myself and despite Rachel firmly believing in me...

I REACHED MY GOAL!

Yes, I lost fourteen pounds in five weeks. And I feel so amazing, and look so amazing, and the plan is so amazing. I REACHED MY GOAL!!!

Well, it's only the first of several goals. Those first fourteen pesky pounds were the most crucial to get to. Now, I have another ten pound goal. But there are some caveats here.

1) It's Motzei Shvuos. I have undoubtedly gained some weight back. Even though I didn't really cheat, there's more food at every seudah. I wasn't going to deprive myself.
2) I am not renewing my weigh-in sessions for now. It's too expensive and time consuming. I will, however, continue the food plan and weighing in on my own.
3) We are IYH going up to the Catskills on July 1. It's both easier and harder to diet in the 'country'. Easier, because I have way more spare time and hence no excuses. And I can swim every day and I can walk. And I have almost no obligations as 2/3 of my kids will IYH be in camp. Also it's harder, because my allowed foods might not be abundantly available in the small boutique grocery, and in the summer you tend to eat more ice cream. But I will be working hard.

So as of Wednesday June 8th, I had reached my initial goal of 14 pounds. My next goal is to lose whatever I gained back over Shvuos. I hope I won't fall the floor in shock tomorrow morning. I pray to HaShem that I should have not gained back more than 5.

Big ol' helping of dietetic Humble Pie

My own bravado came back to bite me in my now-leaner backside.
Yesterday morning I weighed myself and was super pleased to have lost 2 pounds since last Wednesday. You see, I crowed, It's okay to cheat on a piece of potato kugel or salami once in a while. It doesn't affect you if you're really good the rest of the time. 
The problem with these self-assurances is that it leads to a subtle shift in attitude. Suddenly, the wall that you mentally put up between the permitted foods and the forbidden foods grows more translucent. And it's very easy to fall off the wagon, lose progress, and go down the spiral of despair and giving up.
Yesterday was a bit of a difficult day, with having Sonny Boy home thanks to Memorial Day. I ate very few veggies, drank little water, and worst of all, ate supper really late - and ignored the fact that my chosen starch was sliced potatoes swimming in oil.
I went to bed with a feeling of dread and yuck. I wasnt feeling as good as I normally do at night. Sure enough this morning when I weighed myself, the 2 pound weight loss was gone. I'm back to last Wednesday's weight. Plus, I'm really bloated. I had been amazed the past few days that I fit back into clothes I havent worn in 2 years. Now my stomach is protruding again. I feel bizarre.
Eating chicken and potatoes at 10 pm isn't the best idea. Plus, I might be bloated for another reason, who knows. Having PCOS I can probably claim female-related midsection bloating for weeks at a time. I can never know.
Whatever the case is, I now have to decide if I should cancel tomorrow's appointment, or go down and face humiliation.
We'll see. I'll be a really good girl today bli neder. Salads. Water. Stay away from carbs and oils and slippery-slope near-cheats.
One thing I'm certain, that humble pie is always on the approved list of diet food....

Week Four Fatigue

Every time I join a diet program, I inevitably hit the point of diet fatigue. It usually happens around the fourth or fifth week. I tend to get tired of eating the same 7 or so foods; preparing salads and sitting down to eat a big meal three times a day becomes impossible as the treadmill of my life increases in speed; and then I hit the dreaded plateau, where I don't lose anything, and maybe even gain a pound back. I tend to skip my final weigh-in sometimes. Usually by then I already have lost 12-15 pounds and am happy with my weight loss, so I just quit. However, in the past I always do 12-week-long programs. And it often takes me those 11 weeks to lose the 14 pounds.

This time, though, I have not hit diet fatigue yet. I'm still going strong. However, having lost 11 pounds already and very happy with my progress, I did start to quietly cheat a bit. By cheat, I don't refer to sugary stuff, bakery stuff, or extra snacks. But... I did eat a small piece of kugel and farfel on Friday night. I have really missed this slice of Shabbos heaven, and I treated myself. And tonight, I put salami in my cold cut salad instead of turkey. I really don't like turkey. Will this affect how much weight I lose this week? It might. Will I care? No.

One of my least favorite aspects of a diet program is the burden of charting my food intake, and then presenting it to a nutrionist at weigh-in, for inevitable scrutiny and constructive criticism. Remember: I have ADHD. I misplace the food chart the minute I bring it home. I forget to write down what I ate, and then have to scramble to remember at the last minute. And I'm a sensitive person. I do not take kindly to criticism, even if it's the constructive kind.  I feel down enough on myself for so many other things, so getting negative comments about little cheats does not feel good. "See, if you hadn't eaten that piece of kugel, you would've lost 2 1/4 pounds this week, not 1 3/4" But... I'm perfectly happy with 1 3/4! This is not The Biggest Loser; I am not in competition with anyone but myself. If I wanted to have that piece of kugel Friday night or those bits of salami in my salad, the onus is on me.

This is not meant as a criticism of the program or of the nutritionist. (Though I must admit, it's quite unnerving to be weighed in by a skinny-jimmy wisp of a girl!) The program obviously works, incredibly well. I have NEVER had such amazing luck with a dieting program. 11 pounds in 3 1/2 weeks? While eating well, and healthy, and barely ever being hungry? It's incredible. I look really good; people are noticing my weight loss; I am wearing clothes I haven't worn in two years! And at the weigh-in, the nutritionist compliments me with a glowing smile on the amazing progress I'm making every week. I guess I just have some personal work to do to not take the comments on the food chart personally. I can totally lie and not write down my cheats on the chart. But I will be truthful. I will IY"H hand in my honest food chart, and won't take it personally when inevitably the 'cheats' will be brought up.

I realized that I do better when I type than writing, so I created a google spreadsheet to write down my food intake. I had to recreate most of  Wednesday and Thursday from memory, though. Here's what I have so far:

It should be an interesting experiment. I wonder if these little cheats will seriously affect my weight loss. As of last Wednesday I was down 10 pounds. By Friday morning I had lost another pound. I'm still going to be really good the next 2 days. (Though tomorrow will be challenging since Sonny-boy is home for Memorial Day, yay. Not.) If I will have gained back weight, or not lost at all, then I'm willing to admit defeat and acknowledge that veering off the program even with these minor changes are detrimental. If I'll still have lost nicely, I'll give myself a pass. Any diet has to be a long-term sustainable lifestyle. If I have to deny myself kugel Friday night for the rest of my life, and forget about having salami in my salad, ever, I'll be really sad.

Stay tuned!

Keep it up! Err, Down.

Oooohhhhhh baby! The Scale is mooooving!!!

The most exciting thing that can happen to a dieter is when the middle digit moves down a number!!! When you pass the 0 and are into the next set of 10 numbers that's such a great push to keep going. Especially in my case that my initial weight was 1_8.5, and this morning I weighed 1(number less)8.5!!! Yes, I'm down ten pounds!!! My stomach is definitely flatter and my face is smaller! I see a pattern. I tend to do poorly on Wednesday and Thursday because those are busy errand/appt days and then get amazingly back on track by Shabbos, and my biggest weight loss happens on Monday and Tuesday, which are days I am usually home and able to really take care of my meals and eat well.
I suppose the numbers on the scale @ the center will be slightly highter than it is @ home, but ultimately my real weight loss for me is measured by my home scale, Wednesday mornings before my coffee. And that is ten pound less than three weeks ago. If I keep this going for the next few months, even if I only lose 1/2 pound a week or stay on maintenance, I'll reach my goal of looking slim for my niece's wedding in September. Well, that's not the main goal, but one of them. My current goal is getting back to my pre-pregnancy weight from 3 1/2 years ago, which is another five pounds, a total of fifteen. I want to see that goal by the time I finish Tanya's six-week program in three weeks from now. I think it's totally doable, BEZ"H. Then I won't mind so much if it slows down to 1/2 pound a week over the summer.


<

How To Get away With Cheating @ A Simcha

Inquiring minds surely want to know how I did at my friend's son's bar mitzvah last night.
To answer that, I first have to backtrack and tell you how my Sunday went.
Terribly.
By terribly I don't mean that I fell off the wagon. I mean that my timeline was so messed up that I ate virtually nothing all day. Which gave me the mistaken impression that it would then be okay to eat the bar mitzvah meal fully, since I hadn't used up my carbs, proteins, treats and snacks of the day.
But hey, I'm allowed to be human when the occasion calls for it.
So basically what happened was, that by Sunday morning I had plum run out of food. Seriously. There wasn't a MORSEL to be had.
I do my big weekly shopping on Sunday mid-morning, so there's very little food left before I go to the store.
I still managed to do breakfast okay; I toasted my last 2 pieces of whole wheat bread in the oven and made an omelette with cooking spray. All the veggies I had chopped a week before were soggy and mushy already, so I figured i'd have a lot of veggies with lunch.
I had breakfast at 10:00. At 10:40 I put Toddler on his bus. Then I spoke to my sister on the phone while I cleaned up a bit. My plan was to go out shopping @ 11:00 and take along an oola bar to munch on the way. The only problem is.... we were out of oola bars. I had tossed two into my autistic son's backpack for his Sunday program and my husband had given him a third to nosh on the way to the program. So there were no bars.
Okay, no problem, I'll have a fruit before I leave. I open the fruit drawer. The last 2 apples are brown and soggy. No oranges. No grapefruit. Yikes!
Should I have a TAP muffin? But they were all frozen, and I had run out of coffee grounds to at least drink on the side.
Popcorners? I was out. PRetzels? I only had a small bag of broken pretzels and really didn't want to waste my snack on that.
By now it was almost 12 noon. Tummy was getting grumbly. After rummaging in the fridge I found some baby carrots. PERFECT!! I munched on a few to quiet that tummy. Finally I left the house to go shopping.
2 hours, 10 stores, 9 shopping bags, and -$180 later, I was back home, starving. I had never gone that long without eating, especially since starting this program. Before the diet, I'd grab anything just to quiet that hunger. But now, with the food plan, I couldn't eat just stam anything.
It was 2 pm by now and I was due to have lunch. But I hadn't even had my snack yet. And I couldn't have lunch, because the whole wheat bread, tuna, and veggies were at the grocery store in a box, awaiting delivery. and I still couldn't have a snack or fruit because those, too, were in the box!!
So more carrots were munched.
Finally the grocery order arrived at 2:30. Like a starving woman I ripped open the boxes. There was no time to put togther tuna and veggies and such; Toddler's bus would be here soon. I hit a brainstorm: While it's unconventional and very frowned upon according to the plan, I would just push off my mealtimes today. It would work out perfectly, because ordinarily I can't wait til 9:30 to eat supper. I was worried I"d have to eat supper with my family at 7 and then find some fruits to nibble on @ the bar mitzvah. So instead, I had an OOLA bar with a coffee at 2:30, hoping to eat lunch 2 or so hours later, and then have my second snack 2 hours after that, and then my late bar mitzvah dinner.
Have I learned NOTHING from the history of my life???
From the moment Toddler walked through the door, I had no time to breathe, eat, or prepare food, for many hours. Between entertaining Toddler, his older brother who came home 2 hours later, getting supper ready for the family, serving said supper, preparing Middle Son's meds, unpacking the grocery order, yada yada yada, I found myself saying at 7:15 pm, "Do you know I haven't eaten lunch yet?"
It was preposterous. A true recipe for disaster. Tanya's program specifically mandates that you eat every 2-3 hours so that your body doesn't go into starvation mode and your metabolism doesn't slow down. I had violated this cardinal rule. All I had eaten that day was breakfast and snack and it was already evening! And nary a vegetable or a sip of water had cross my lips yet!
My wonderful husband took over minding the kids and told me go to eat. I combined the tuna with the lowfat mayo, broke out a box of cherry tomatoes, and had a carb-less lunch at 7:45 p.m. I added a juicy orange for good measure, and realized with delight that i was so full, that cheating at the bar mitzvah wouldn't even cross my mind.
My family's supper was grilled chicken cutlets, lukshen-mit-brazel (breaded macaroni), and for good measure, since it was Pesach Sheini, I made our family favorite: Matzah meal chremslech. It's made of eggs, matzah meal, and sugar, and fried in oil. Pre-diet I wouldve scarfed down half a dozen of these. Now, as much as the aroma filled me with nostalgia, it didn't occur to me to sample one. Once I have gotten rid of that craving for carbs and sugars and fried food, the thought of eating it made me sick; a moment of instant gratification for weeks of hard work to get those pounds off!
Before I went to the bar mitzvah, I decided that I would handle the food as follows: skip the challah roll, skip the appetizer - unless it was vegetable based, then I'd eat the veggies and not the starchy part; eat the soup, even though I know it's probably chock full of forbidden fats and stuff; and eat the chicken/meat on the main dish, as well as the veggies, but skip the starchy sides. It goes without saying that I wouldn't touch the dessert, or any of the cakes/miniatures at the sweet table.
Lmaaseh, when I sat down and found myself faced with the most delectable-looking vegetable blintz/quiche, all reserve flew out the window. Yes, I knew that technically this was not part of the diet plan, and this thing was full of fats and starches and whatever, but still, it was vegetables. And pieces of pastrami... the actual skin of the blintz or knish or wahtever it was, was pretty thin. The appetizer was delicious. and when I was done, I was shocked how full I was!!!
The vegetable soup was delicious, but there were forbidden nockerlech (egg drops) inside. I turned a mental blind eye and ate them. I had just one helping of carbs today, only one snack, and not having a treat later, I rationalized. When the main plate arrived, there was a sweet sauce on the chicken which I avoided while eating the chicken underneath; I took one taste of the potato thingy and decided it wasn't worth it; and I nibbled on the veggies. And you know what? By then I was so full, it was 10:30 pm, and there was just no need to eat anymore.
My friend, the mother of the bar mitzvah boy, brought over slices of the rich, cloying, decadent ziegelman's cake she herself had baked. I looked at that cake, and thought, piece of junk. In the past, I wouldve polished off a slice. Now, i thought, this is purely for the sake of eating. And why? I'm already full. Who needs extra sticky calories? It wasn't even a nisayon to pass.
Dessert was served; a tall glass of Irish chocolatey coffee, a piece of parve ice cream flower, and some other chocolatey treat. I didn't even feel a pang. I walked over to the sweet table and took a glass thingy filled with pieces of canteloupe and nibbled on that instead.
So in summary, yes, I'm aware that none of the food I ate that night was probably allowed according to Tanya's plan. But you know what? I had budgeted for it. I had eaten sparingly all day to begin with. And I skipped the cakes and desserts! I'm sure had I talked it over with Rachel last week, she wouldve given me guidance on how to manage a simcha. But I was on my own, so I did the best I could. I believe a person shouldn't deprive themselves completely of simcha food and just nibble on a piece of lettuce. There's a golden middle-way.
There's one thing I did this week that'll make Tanya proud: I have not weighed myself since Wednesday. I have no idea if I lost, gained, or stayed the same. It has not been my best week and I have not even kept a food log. I have very little to show when I go to my weigh-in on Wednesday. So maybe I'll just skip it. Or maybe not. Maybe Rachel will read the blog and have choice things to say to me on Wednesday :D.
I'll let you know on Wednesday how it goes!
On a lighter note, my Toddler loves to feed me and is quite upset the way I fight him when he tries to push a piece of chocolate or cookie into my mouth. "Mommy nisht of a diet! Mommy essen!" he insists.
Oh, and one more interesting piece that I discovered yesterday: You know those "foxy pops" - freeze pops - the thin plastic filled with sugar-and-flavored-water taht the kids love? It's only 25 calories. 0 grams fat. A perfect treat when you just need a bit of frozen sugar water after supper. :D
-*******-
Affiliate Exclusive: Get 52% off the Rhonda Wedge at Crocs.com when you use promo code RHONDA52 now through 5/31!

Simchoo Simchoo Simchoo Simchoo

Facing my first real hurdle tonight, IYH: a close friend is making bar mitzvah. I don't want to eat supper at home at 6:30 and then nibble on salads when I go to the bar mitzvah. Then again, 9:30 pm is very late to wait for supper. I'll figure it out... but I'm curious how it'll work out.

I have not weighed myself since Wednesday morning. Nor have I kept track of my food because I misplaced my paper from Rachel. But I have been sticking the plan, even though it's been quite hard at times. I'm not holding out for a miracle but I hope I'll at least have lost something by Wednesday...