admin

My wife controls my meals this month

by

My wife is a very persistent and patient woman.  She asked me to let her take over my diet for this month in an effort to help me get rid of my carbohydrate addiction.

She's taken to a low-carb diet for the past six months to a year, and she's dropped 35 pounds.

She's making it pretty easy on me, though.  All she's modifying this month is what I take in.  Not the amount.  Not how much exercise I get.  Just the particular foods.  That, and I'm not going as low-carb as she did.  She went down really low on the carbs the first month.  I'm going quite a bit lower than I have been, but not as low as she did.

I've substituted orange juice for milk, rice for low-carb bread in a sandwich.  I'm eating more salads.  I can eat at Chipotle, but I get a bowl rather than a burrito (no rice, no tortilla).  I take steamed broccoli instead of a baked potato for a side when I ate out with a friend yesterday.

How is it working?  I may have lost a little bit of weight, but I can say that I feel better.  At the very least, I felt the carb load of the pizza I had Saturday night really bad.  It really knocked me to sleep.  I'm going lower-carb, but for now, probably not lower-calorie.  I have a stash of raw almonds at work that I hit pretty hard during the day.

Anyway, I've been playing along with my wife's experiment for a week and a half now, and it's going pretty well!

Low-carb substitute for rice

by

I really adore my rice and beans because it's something that I can eat day-in, day-out, cheaply, without getting sick of it.

Unfortunately, rice — even the somewhat lower glycemic index brown rice — is really high in carbohydrates.

My wife has gone really low-carb (as in around 40 grams per day) and she's lost about 20 pounds over the past few months without even needing to count calories.  It's really quite amazing.

So my wife did an experiment tonight.  She made some shrimp curry, but instead of putting the curry over rice, she put it over grated fried cauliflower — also known as cauliflower rice.  Instead of nearly 40 grams of carbs (net) per cup, the cauliflower rice only about 2.5 grams net carbs per cup.

She first grated the white part of a head of cauliflower into rice-sized chunks, and then fried it up with some oil and a little bit of seasoning.  One trick that she found was to not use extra water, because it makes the cauliflower rice mushy.  The water in the cauliflower is enough.

I was pleasantly surprised how good it tasted.  I hardly would have known the difference between the cauliflower rice and a small grain.

Our Journey to Zero wants Wii Fit to STHU

by

I met Travis Pizel of Our Journey to Zero at FinCon11 during a speed networking session the Friday night of the conference.

During that brief meeting, I had no idea Travis was such a colorful writer.  In checking out his site I saw that he is on a quest to have Wii Fit stop calling him overweight.  Some of his phrases are a hoot.

It's a simple, well-defined goal, but like anything worth doing, it's been hard work on his part.  He's almost there, too — within 10 pounds.

I guess if you need an enemy, it might as well be an animated balance board telling you you're fat!

 

Oh man

by

Man, I've been a bad boy.

Nothing like having your failure in front of the world, huh?  It's not really the best thing to start a weight loss blog and end up gaining weight over the course of a couple of years!  Was hoping hot to reach 250, but there I am. 🙁

Weight gain brings other problems, too.  It's probably aggravated my sleep apnea, and I'm on constant positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy.  I guess if I give that a little bit of time, it may help to break into a cycle of tiredness and weight gain, because lack of sleep and obesity tend to reinforce one another.

Don't really know what to say, except “it's time to start over … again?!”

On again, off again

by

Since Budgets Are Sexy is running a PF Blogger Showdown later today, and since I mention Deflabbify over there, I suppose I should post what I've done here over the past three months, no? 😉

Anyway, this blog is a bit on again, off again — much like my weight, I suppose — but the good news is that I'm within only a couple of pounds of my goal for the end of 2009.  I just weighed myself in at 238 pounds.

NCN is off a little weight as well, which is a very good thing.  I can completely understand how busy he's been because he, like myself, had a new house purchase on his plate.  Hopefully his went more smoothly than mine, but if it didn't I'd be one of the first to give him some slack.  Buying a house, especially a foreclosure, can mean putting out fires and turning on a dime.

The one thing that has been keeping me plenty active has been the blizzards that have hit the East coast.  We have a long driveway that needs a lot of shoveling, so the unexpected work has also been good exercise.

So here's to thawing out and getting back on track a bit. 😉

Wii Fit Plus is in da house, and it makes you think

by

My wife bought Wii Fit Plus at Costco earlier this week.  I think she bought it to encourage me some more.  I've been pretty good about watching what I eat very carefully and exercising for at least a half-hour each night on the Wii.

I talked about some of the Wii Fit Plus features over at Slimmify but the biggest overall difference is that this software makes you think.  It tests your memory, judgement, and the extent to which you can achieve mental disconnect between different parts of your body.  Some of the games are really, really tough, not necessarily in a physical sense but in a mental sense.

It's like walking and chewing gum on steroids.

What’s the other half of the battle?

by

It's likely that you've heard the phrase, “Well now you know, and knowing's half the battle.”

OK, knowing is half the battle, but what's the other half?

I asked this question over at Slimmify.com:

How do you combat the late-night munchies?

User “robulus” (who runs a website LiveAndMove.net) came up with this response.  Here's an excerpt, with my emphasis:

I am constantly hungry, and I eat constantly. I snack in between my snacks. But I know that I don't need to, that my body is designed to go longer periods without solid food. Water is of course a continual necessity. So, when it's late at night, I do not let myself eat. To be honest, it doesn't always work, but it is a process of mind over body. The battle is won in the mind. […] Knowing is half the battle… the other half is deciding. 🙂

Late at night, I can choose to throw down a bowl of mac and cheese, or I can have a glass of water, or some tea, to stave off the hunger.  It's a decision. Each decision not to pig out at night makes the next decision not to pig out a little bit easier.  The last few nights I've managed to either drink water (with some sugar-free flavoring) or have low-calorie snacks like a fruitsicle or a few corn cakes (like rice cakes, but corn).

Here's to battling and deciding!

Extreme weight loss is possible, apparently

by

Tough Money Love was kind enough to stop by with a comment on my last post to tell me that I was making things too hard on myself.

He provided a lead to a guest post he did over at Lazy Man and Health. He lost 52 pounds in 136 days, and has kept them off for almost a year and a half. That's over 2 1/2 pounds per week for almost twenty weeks.

How did he do it?  He limited himself to 1,500 calories a day by eating several smallish meals spread throughout the day, and did moderate exercise in the morning.

His free website of choice for calorie-counting and was FitDay.com.  I went over there to sign up for an account, and by their calculations (using my height, weight, gender, and activity level) they said I was burning about 2,800 calories per day.  Since my weight has been relatively constant over the past few months, one could assume that I'm taking in that amount per day.

Taking in only 1,500 calories per day would mean cutting my intake nearly in half, but I'd be losing weight at about the same rate that Mr. Tough Money Love did.  These kinds of results would support the notion that the amount you eat is far more important than how much you exercise.  It's hard to argue with the results it can bring.

It gives me hope that I can achieve my weight loss goal, and also that NCN can hit his, too.

(But I'll still keep exercising, though:  I got my gold Wii Fit Bank for working out a total of 40 hours! 😉 )

Mixed in some yoga in my Wii Fit routine tonight — plus a cool website

by

Three nights in a row with 30 minutes or more logged in on Wii Fit … better than the past few months anyway.

Mixed in a little bit of yoga — Sun Salutation and Half Moon baby! — as well as an in-place run around the happy island.  Just about missed completing the tilt-the-board game.

My wife found a site that produces Wii Fit workout routines called, aptly, Wii Fit Routine.  It has a number of different types of routines with different lengths and different difficulties.  It also can be used to generate workouts tailored for specific goals: endurance, strength, flexibility, and balance.  There are a few other extras:  recipes, articles, and the like, as well as goal-tracking for weight, BMI, and other things.

Definitely worth a peek.  And it's free!

Some more Wii Fit, but need to avoid candy

by

Work is pretty evil as far as candy goes. I don't have to look very far for free, bottomless supplies of sweets. There are at least three places — no, make that four — at work that I can pick up some Sourheads®, some bite-sized chocolate bars, Twizzlers®, whatever. Forget the healthy stuff on my desk — sugar is what gets me going.

I'm going to postulate for a second here.  I eat pretty much whatever's available to me.  If I have a box of Stroopwafels, a pack of gum, a 2-liter of soda, or a six-pack of Saranac, I just consume it until it's gone.  (Well, the beer I'll stop at three or so per day.  Thank goodness my wife hides the beer and doles it out to me.)

Much like what NCN found, stuff that's just there gets eaten.  No really good reason beyond that.

But on the bright side, I did do another 31 minutes on Wii Fit tonight, and got another perfect score on the soccer ball heading game.  I found last night that I slept better after some exercise.  Hopefully that will repeat tonight. 🙂