The Dateable Dork

Hello, blogland!  I know I’ve been pretty much non-existent lately, but I’ve been really enjoying my little vacation.  It’s great to spend a little while away from the hustle and bustle of my sexless dating blog (hahaha), but please know that I miss you all terribly!  What’s new, my peeps? 

For those of you who may be keeping up with me via Twitter, you know that my life these days has been much more focused on weight loss than dating, which is actually a very refreshing and rewarding change of pace for me.  I’m actually quite impressed with how well (and how quickly) Weight Watchers has been working, and I’m thrilled to be able to fit into all my clothes again.  It’s a great feeling!  For the official record, I’ve lost 11 pounds in 5 weeks, and I’d like to lose about 3-4 more.  My goal weight is 130 (I started at ~145 naked weight), and at 5’8″, that’s pretty much the lower limit of what I’d feel comfortable with from a health perspective.  I admit that I’m getting a little bony in some areas (particularly my shoulders and rib cage), but I’m also almost done.  No worries.

Anyway, since some of you have expressed an interest in what I’ve been doing to drop the pounds, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the Weight Watchers “lifestyle” (they don’t call it a “diet,” even though I think it is), without getting into any proprietary information that WW will come chasing me down for posting.  : )

First of all, the key to WW is to follow the rules.  If you stick to the program, you *will* lose weight.  You just need the determination to stick with it (no cheating!), and I think you need some kind of strong personal motivation to find and keep that determination.  For me, my motivation was the fact that I have been wearing size 4 pants my entire adult life, and all of a sudden my pants didn’t fit anymore.  It was embarrassing and depressing, especially knowing that there was no other reason except that I was eating too much junk!  Granted, my diet was never that bad at all, but there were plenty of things that should never have made it onto the radar.  For example, I am a self-proclaimed Cheetos addict.  I freaking love them and have been known to chomp through an entire bag at once.  What was I thinking???  Anyway, my burning desire to fit into my pants again really did the trick, and I’ve been surprising myself at my unwavering will power to put my head down and power through the program.  Case in point: there was a freaking HUGE feast at my office a few weeks ago for a departing coworker, and I didn’t eat a single thing.  Even my fellow WW participants got a plate full of cake/pie/brownies, but not me!  I have an iron will, my peeps, and this has really made all the difference.

Another thing to note: while you’re dieting, it’s all that much more important to make sure you’re getting proper nutrition.  WW gives you this handy little checklist so you can check off your servings of each food group each day, which I’ve found incredibly helpful.  At the end of the day, I can adjust my last few bits of food to add a little more protein or veggies or milk – whatever I happen to need more of based on what I ate earlier in the day.  Note that there are no categories for bread, sugar, or cheese.  Bummer!

In terms of dropping pounds, it’s all in the math.  You simply have to ingest fewer calories than you burn each day.  An average person burns 1800-2000 calories per day, as I’m sure you’ve all heard before, and all you have to do to lose weight is have a net intake of less than that, by combining diet and exercise.  I’ve been mainly focused on diet, with exercise as icing on the cake.  I find that it’s easier for me to control my diet than to find enough time in my day to get enough exercise to make a significant difference, but it’s different for everyone.  Do whatever works for you.

So, onto the food.  Below is a list of *everything* I eat in a typical day on WW.  Note that there are no drinks on the list (alcoholic or otherwise) because the ONLY thing I’ve drunk in the past 5 weeks is water.  Believe it, my dears.  Liquids, with the exception of milk, bypass your body’s hunger detection system, so drinking anything with calories is essentially wasting those calories.  In other words, why ingest calories if they’re not going to satisfy your hunger?  You want look at eating as satisfying two important goals: (1) to keep you from being hungry, and (2) to get the proper nutrition that your body needs to function.  Drinking anything other than water (or milk) doesn’t accomplish either of these two objectives, so it’s akin to ingesting calories that aren’t really doing anything for you.  Why bother?  Cut them out!

DD’s Typical Daily Food Intake

Breakfast
1 nonfat yogurt, naturally and artificially sweetened,
mixed with 1 cup fresh berries

Lunch
Option A: 1 can light soup (vegetable, chicken rice, etc.)
Option B: salad with fresh veggies, 1/2 cup fresh fruit, and dressing with 1 tsp olive oil (rest of dressing is lemon juice and lime juice)

Snack during the day
1 mini-bag 94% fat-free popcorn

Dinner
~4 oz. chicken breast with fat trimmed, or ~4 oz. 93% lean ground beef
sauteed veggies (use nonfat cooking spray instead of oil)
1/2 cup brown rice
all sorts of spices – garlic, ginger, soy sauce, salt/pepper, etc.

Dessert
Option A: 2 small “healthy” cookies
Option B: 1 itsy bitsy PB&J sandwich
Option C: small piece of cheese

Weekend treat
Once per week, I have bare-bones sushi for dinner (3 small rolls with just rice, fish, and seaweed – no avocado, no cream sauce, no tempura, etc.)

That’s it!  I’ve pretty much eaten this exact menu every day for 5 weeks and counting.  I’m not saying that this is ideal (for me or anyone else), but this is what’s been working for me.

Things to notice about my food intake:

• The quantity of food is probably about half of what I was eating before.
• There is hardly any fat.
• There is hardly any sugar, with the exception of the natural sugar in fresh fruit (which is better for you than regular sugar).
• There is hardly any pasta or cheese.
• Any rice that I eat is brown rice.  I even ask for brown rice in my sushi.
• Any bread (for my PB&J, for example) is a whole-grain 100-calorie sandwich roll.
• There are no Cheetos or mac & cheese. 
• I am spending a *fortune* on fresh produce.

This was a HUGE adjustment for me during the first few days.  For the first 24 hours, I was absolutely starving and didn’t think I was going to make it.  The key was to go grocery shopping and stock up on WW-friendly foods, which I didn’t have much of when I started out.  For the first ~4 days, I was getting persistent low-grade headaches, presumably from sugar withdrawal.  The headaches went away after those ~4 days, and I haven’t gotten them since, so I assume everything is ok there.  When I think back on what I used to eat, my sugar intake really has gone WAY down, so the headaches are not really a surprise.  Other than that, I haven’t been hungry or cranky at all, and things have been going great!  I’m sure my stomach has shrunk quite a bit because I feel full on much less food now, and I’ve learned how to satisfy my hunger with low energy-density foods (like fruits & veggies) – foods that take up a lot of room in your stomach (so you feel full) while not packing in a lot of calories (so you lose weight).  Makes sense, right?

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to.  I admit that I miss eating pasta and cheese and baked goods, but having to give them up (temporarily, I hope) to achieve an important goal for myself has been totally worth it.  I feel like a million bucks, both physically and mentally, and I’m SO glad I decided to go for it.  For anyone thinking about Weight Watchers in particular, I would highly recommend it.  Aside from the fact that their guidelines have really worked for me in terms of losing weight, the weekly meetings are a great component of the entire process, providing emotional support, tips and tricks for sticking to the plan, a forum to ask questions and discuss frustrations, and great motivation and validation when you lose those few pounds each week at the weigh-in.  I’ve never tried any other dieting program, so I can’t discuss how WW compares, but I will say that I like WW and it’s worked for me.  Do whatever works best for you!

I am by no means a dieting/nutrition expert, but I think I’ve learned quite a bit over the last few weeks.  If you have any questions about WW or what I’ve been up to, please feel free to ask. 

And finally… as you know from my Twitter updates, I recently fit into my skinny jeans for the first time in over year, and there have been some requests for photographic evidence.  I’m not making any promises, but I’m hoping to snap a few shots in the near future.  Suffice it to say, I’m excited to show off my new bod!  Stay tuned.  : )

Hope you’ve all been well.

Hugs,
~DD