A week later - and on the subject of calories... and portion size

Reducing food intake is good for you as you age... but you have to be careful that you ARE in fact eating enough for your body's requirements.  For example, my requirements are about 1900 calories for someone who is my age and height.  That said, when I tabulated my eating over three weeks.. I found I regularly have days where I am under eating this because of my portion size.  Then there are days when I go over and that's usually because of going to a dinner party or having the husband cooking.  Given the amount of excercise that I do, my daily requirement can increase slightly. 

What happens is that when you aren't taking in enough food?  Your body normalizes.  Your body thinks that 1500 calories is what you're going to take.. normalizes to that.. and then when you go over on occasion, will take all those nutrients you eat and store them in fat.  In otherwords, you become fat the moment you break your habit and are travelling, or going out for dinner to friends a few times more often than normal.

You can't hope to go less than 1500 calories.. in a healthy manner. So what happens is that your body adjusts and thinks that '1500' is the norm.  What more can you do to lose weight?  Nothing.  Eating less will deprive you of what you need to run on for the day and eating more will make you gain weight.

So smaller portion size works in theory if you're a big eater going from giant sized portions to something I normally eat on a daily basis.

BUT, at this point, smaller portion size does not work for me because it puts me under my daily caloric intake requirements and this, is why diets don't work.

Plan-Remains

1. Still monitor food intake, water intake, excercise
2. Continue to do a good job keeping up with > 30  minutes of activity a day
3. Drink at least 5-8 glasses of water a day.
4. Eat the healthy* small portioned food - keeping in mind to meet my daily requirement (1500 - 1900 calories)
5. Drop wheat from my diet

* where healthy is defined as good calories/bad calories would have it.  Healthy food selections including dairy, meat, fruits, veg, whole grains all in decent proportions.   

Currently reading through Wheat Belly by William Davis, M.D after my doctor made the suggestion that I try reducing my wheat intake to see if that gets me anywhere.  For one, its incredibly hard avoiding chocolate cake, tortillas, bread, and all the random things that require just a little bit of flour.  It seems every day something wheat containing sneaks its way into my gut.  But being mindful of my wheat consumption is a start. 

What really blew me away were all the reviews of the book by people who have cut wheat and seen dramatic results.  For someone who's weight has not dropped significantly (aside from having a baby) in about a decade, I'm interested to give it a shot.