Weight Loss
Every few months I post about my continuous striving to lose weight, go down dress sizes and to become active. Every month I seem to start with good intentions and then changes in lifestyle, travel, baby duties.. bring all of that to an abrupt halt. I mentioned on the recent trip to Puerto Rico the eye-opening experience of looking at my bulges through the red and white polkadot swimsuit I had bought that only the week before fit nicely and reduced my existing flub to a minimum. During the trip, mostlikely due to dehydration and the dearth of good food choices I ballooned into what I could best describe as one dress size bigger.
Other issues I'm finding (albeit I've gone back down to the usual size 12) - is that my recent baby making experience has left me wider in the torso than I was before. Clothing that used to fit in an attractive manner now comes off making me look more tube like and less shapely as a result.
So goals are to lose about 2 inches from my torso, more than 10 inches from my belly as a minimum. I love my doctor's vote of confidence, she asked me what size I had been in high school to which I replied "an 8". She believes that I can reduce that much - and for that vote of absolute belief and confidence in me, I am SO GRATEFUL. In contrast, my husband and my parents are much less confident in my ability to shed the mass... I do find this hits me hard and I start looking for starch laden foods when depressed. Would that everyone have that belief that I'll reduce by so much so that my wavering beliefs will pick up and help me charge to my goal.
We had friends for dinner last night and one of them commented on the sheer drop in size that I have done since having Kiran. My Dr. also pointed out that since giving birth, I had dropped 9lbs. Granted, I'm back to my normal pre-baby weight - which was still about 30 lbs more than I should be.
How to lose the 30lbs?
1. I want to see if I'm actually consuming the right amount of food. I tried using a points tracker but given my propensity for cooking my own food - it makes it hard to convert the points not to mention finding my items in a limited database. Also, I hate counting calories. My compromise is to use a google doc form that has two fields:
- Food or meal (description)
- Excercise (description)
I have the form accessible via a web page on my phone AND via an embedded (visible to me only) block on my website. The form automatically adds a timestamp so as long as I go on to it sometime after having my meal and enter my information - then it captures it all. As for the tracking - last night, I went into the spreadsheet and added new columns for "calories in" and "calories out". Then, I used the livestrong.com website to help find the approximate caloric value for all of the foods I had eaten during the day. My Doc had provided me with a guideline that a woman of my age should be getting in around 1900 calories a day. Well, what do you know - I came pretty darn close to matching that number and that was just from my first day. So I am eating enough, and I should definitely have avoided the dessert my friends brought with them for dinner. Chocolate Mousse cake from whole foods shot my score just a little higher than it should have been.
2. I want to see if I'm able to sneak in 3x10minute slots of excercise on average, per week. The night before last, while catching up with the last episode of the season of Glee, I spent the entire time punching, kicking, doing sit ups, stretches and whatever excercises came to mind. Gosh, I felt it yesterday in my abs. Yesterday with company over, I wasn't able to do any more than to walk Maya in the morning. Since I started tracking yesterday - the workout from the day before doesn't count.
3. My doctor has offered to act as my guide - when I have a considerable portion of tracked data, I'm going to cross it by her so that she can look and identify if there's any spots we should be concerned by. Also, if I don't start seeing lbs melt away within a few months, she can help identify what other causes may be in play. I've already got the test request to get my thyroid checked out as well as my baseline glucose. Hopefully can get to that tomorrow morning.
4. Finally, she also suggested the sneak attack to reduce my starch and carbohydrates intake but most notably, to try to avoid wheat since so many people are proving to have a slight allergy to wheat which causes them to put on weight. Now, this feat is next to impossible considering my husband offers me wheat products at least once per day. No matter how often I tell him, wheat.. it's like he can not compute. Granted, he's french and grew up eating bread as a staple. In my case, being of South Asian descent, Rice is a more reasonable staple. Either way, I tend to mix things up by trying to incorporate other grains into my diet than just wheat. If wheat falls to the bottom of the list of grains that I consume.. then I'm happy.
5. I still want to walk to work one day a week. I will need to figure out the best way to make that happen. This memorial day weekend, I plan to take Kiran for lots of walks and hopefully make a visit to the Boston's Children's Museum. I hope the weather co-operates!