Ice Cream Leads to Mohawks and Anarchy

On Friday as I was driving home from an appointment with my nutritionist, I was thinking of writing this post and naming it, "Please Excuse Me While I Go Eat Another *#!$%$!!* Yogurt." Let me explain.

You see, my appointments with the nutritionist never go as planned, and today was no exception. When it comes to weighing myself week to week, I get the same feeling in my stomach as I do when I see a test full of essay questions rather than multiple choice. There's no making up for your lack of preparation at that point. You either know the answers to the essay questions, or you don't; you either lost weight, or you didn't.

Do I even have to say at this point that I didn't lose any weight this week?

So, in true Erin fashion, when I got home, I cried myself into a two hour nap and swore to myself that I would never eat again. (I openly admit to being a girl in every sense of the word- sometimes I have to cry and pout and throw a small tantrum before I can move on with things.) Then I woke up, and ate my lone yogurt like a good girl, and I decided that that blog title is probably unnecessary and also not very creative.

But I don't want this post to be about how crappy today was (although the intro to this post is the finishing touch on my tantrum- whew! Okay, I'm done!). In reality I'm making progress in a few areas regarding my diet, and I want to share with everybody because there are things that are working for me, so maybe some of them will be helpful to you.

I've heard about, and tried, lots of different kinds of diets:

1. Ones with pills. When I was about 16, I was prescribed some with the side of effect of "explosive diarrhea." As if high school isn't hard enough. That never happened to me, though, since I refused to take them. 
2. Ones that require you to eat half a grapefruit for every meal. Or nutrition shake. Or celery. Or whatever. Yeah, right.
3. Ones that require tapeworms. While I never did that one, I'm sure it would've happened to me sooner or later if I had drunk the water in Paraguay! :)
4. Ones that require surgery. This was a definite no-go for me. Not only would I have to deal with the pain and recuperation of the surgery, afterwards I would still have to go through the same process of learning to eat correctly as I would if I had never had the surgery. So, no thank you.
5. Any "Biggest Loser" style. Lose it all by working out eight hours a day. Also no thank you. (Although, I do have Biggest Loser to thank for at least getting me started in this path. I auditioned for the show a couple seasons ago, and I realized that if I was willing to go on national TV to lose the weight, I should be willing to do the work at home, since that's where I was going to be anyway.)
6. Any from the list on this site: neatorama.com

 So anyway, let me tell you about my diet. The program I chose is from Total Health and Fitness. You can go to their website by clicking here, and you can watch a video about the philosophy behind the program RIGHT HERE. I HIGHLY recommend watching this video. If you don't do anything else as a result of this post, I won't care, but please watch this video! It's so informative.

 I always knew that the best way for me to lose weight was to learn self control and healthy eating habits. If I didn't learn those, then to me, I wouldn't be as successful. The main idea of the diet is in order to keep your metabolism high to burn calories and fat all day, you eat 6 or 7 small meals a day, as opposed to 3 large ones. Here's a graph that I found on Google images that kind of shows what I mean:

Rather than having the high highs and the low lows of eating 3 meals a day, your body is more efficiently burning the calories that you take in by keeping your metabolism higher throughout the day.

In order to learn to do this, my nutritionist and I decide what my daily menu be for a week. Yes, it's the exact same menu every day for the whole week, and the next week I can change it. This may seem boring to some people, but do you really think it's easy to program yourself to live a completely different lifestyle? Bad habits need to be broken and better ones put in place.

Here are some things I've learned about why doing this is difficult:

1. There are 1,000 reasons why I eat. Only one of them is out of hunger. Food is my party buddy. It's my shoulder to cry on when I'm sad. It's my needy friend that calls when I have a million things to do. It watches movies with me. Man, I need more friends. Anyway, you see my point? Using food as a social lubricant or a coping mechanism for stress or sadness leads me down a bad road. The key for me (and I'm still learning, so don't think I've mastered it) is to know why I want food. Am I really hungry? Or am I just avoiding cleaning my room?

2. I miss feeling full. This has been a huge struggle for me. There's something so satisfying about being full! It's my adult security blanket, if you will.  There's such a huge difference between not feeling hungry and being stuffed. I've kept myself stuffed for most of my life, as if being hungry (or the lack of being stuffed) was not the correct way of living. Now I have to rewire my brain to think of food as fuel, and not my security blanket. That's my new mantra: "food is fuel." I need to start saying that when all I get is cottage cheese and veggies. FoodisfuelFoodisfuelFoodisfuelFoodisfuelFoodisfuel!

3. Eating the same thing day after day sucks. It doesn't matter how much you love a food, if you eat it because you HAVE to, you're going to get sick of it fast. Yogurt is one usually of my favorite foods. Clearly not so much right now. I know that I get to choose the menu. But seriously. You try eating the same thing every day. But as I said before, this is all just to help me break bad habits and develop good ones.

4. Diets suck in general. In the past, while I've been on a diet, I've eaten whole containers of ice cream just because nobody tells me what to do, dang it! I'm such a rebel, I know.

        These are the steps: first, ice cream; second, mohawks; third, anarchy and chaos!

The key to change this mindset it to think of "diet" as a four-letter word. What I'm doing is NOT a diet. It's a lifestyle change. Eating healthy and being active is a lifestyle choice. I make that more complicated by carrying my emotional baggage with me like it was a 72 hour kit in the middle of a disaster. But it's really that simple.


Back to stuff my nutritionist said. There are 3 basic foundations to eating healthy:

1. Eat every 2-3 hours. I already talked about the benefits. I really should mention that the goal is that you'll be satisfied, not hungry or full. You know, the whole "everything in moderation" spiel.
2. The more you do (ie calorie output), the more you eat. The less you do, the less you eat. Pretty self explanatory.
3. Every meal should include protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Your body needs all of them.

This is kind of an unorganized post. I have more to say about this topic, but I've been writing for a while and don't want to finish this right now. So I'm going to write more later. I guess I'll go eat my yogurt now.