diet

Weight Loss

Submitted by Amma
on Friday, 25th May 2012 - 8:37
weight loss
diet
nutrition
diet tracker
excercise

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:

  1. Food or meal (description)
  2. 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!

A couple of cupcakes and a lot less sleep...

Submitted by Amma
on Thursday, 17th May 2012 - 9:46
weight gain
weight loss
Holiday
travel
sleep
diet
nutrition

Puerto Rico is a beautiful and nature rich country.  That said, their average food selection given that you're on vacation is difficult when surrounded by skinny people who like to munch down on unhealthy snacks is terrible!  I will forever regret not packing a swiss army knife in our checked luggage.  Had we stopped by the side of the road to buy some of the luscious fruit that was available rather than visiting the local Pueblo grocery store and skipping over their dilapidated selection of available fresh food.  All that remained were processed meats, processed cheese, cupcakes, chips, and cake.  Lunches were meat(or seafood) and heavy beans and rice or plantains.  Everything deep fried that could be.  Swimming and the hot weather mean you alternate from intense hunger to not feeling hungry at all.  Minding a little one and making sure he's properly fed and hydrated (not to mention the layer of sun block that is religiously applied) means taking less time to make sure that you are fed and hydrated.  Sleeping a full night without waking up by nightly disturbances - yet another challenge.

Not one thing is to blame for my explosion in size.  The week before, trying on my swimsuit - I felt fabulous.  I finally fit a size 12.  But as the pictures of the trip come back - I realise that somehow with lack of sleep and eating badly - I had ballooned to a ball shape barely contained by my swimsuit.  I am reminded of various ball shaped aunties and cousins in my family and I wonder - just why is it that I am SO effected by these changes in environment, sleep patterns, etc that my body responds so quickly! 

Upon return home, I had two nights of sleep... started drinking water as I usually would, and eating my usual high fibre, healthy sourced food diet.  Within 2 days, I can see that I'm visibly becoming less round.  I immediately start a regiment of moderate repeatitive excercise and walking.  I also decide to download a point counter and start watching my weight and whether I'm successfully able to bring about a loss.  I weigh myself and aside from looking like a ball, I am about the same weight as when I left. 

Goals: Not to become one of those people who is starving themselves and not to be so tied to the excercise that it takes away from the rest of my life.

How to overcome that?  Make sure I eat, although I may want to stop eating entirely in the hope that the pounds shed off me.  Also, to concentrate on short bursts of excercise.  Squats, sit ups, kicks, jabs... all timed for 10 minute intervals spread out through the day.  Most importantly, to do some form of tracking.. to see if I am in fact shedding mass.   To me, shedding mass is more important than shedding the weight. Ideally, I will fit a size 10 pant size... maybe in 6 months.  If I can get down to a size 8.. I will be ecstatic.

Folic acid supplementation?

Submitted by Diliny C.
on Thursday, 30th July 2009 - 10:09
folic acid
nutrition
pregnancy
malaria
diet
supplements

As to the benefits of using folic acid - I realise that the number of births was 1.57 per 1000 births (of the 1.3 million studied) in Quebec from 1990-2005 were born with severe congenital heart defects.  This was reduced to 0.90 or 0.97 per 1000 births post fortification.  (They do site a reduction of 6% per year).  Now, let's say 2 babies out of every 1000 births had birth defects - so now only 1 baby out of every 1000 births has birth defects.  Does that mean that adding B12 (folic acid) to our diets will actually be much of a benefit?  (Reference Prevalence of severe congenital heart disease after folic acid fortification of grain products: time trend analysis in Quebec, Canada, Ionescu-Ittu et al. 2009 (BMJ 2009;338:b1673))

So far, there are an overwhelming number of sources siting the benefits of folic acid to our diet.  The question I have as a former metabolic engineer - what's to stop our bodies from simply 'normalizing' these additional nutrients?  I think the stress caused by having to take a vitamin supplement and the paranoia resultant that our existing food does not supply enough nutrients - not to mention that most food marketing strategies involve the 'fortification' of food with various nutrients.  Bottom line: we're complex animals and such a simplified solution over time and combined with reproduction of our species... The issue has been raised in a Nature Review though it is a bit dated as of now. (Reference: Folic acid - vitamin and panacea or genetic time bomb? Lucock M & Yates Z (Nat Rev Genet. 2005 Mar;6(3):235-40)).

My real question (and point) is that if we're taking supplements, eating a healthy diet, and possibly eating some of these 'supplemented products' such as breakfast cereal which may inadvertently provide us with our 100% RDA of folic acid --- isn't there the incredible danger of over-doing it - when most of these studies are in fact statistical and at the end of the day result in a reduction of 1 baby per 1000 born of people from incredibly diverse backgrounds and diets.  

So - where do we get folic acid from?  Lentils (a great staple of most asians), dark green leafy vegetables, fruit, the list of foods is actually quite endless... hmm - yet do we need this supplement?  Or is it yet another nutraceutical that is making someone somewhere millions?  When I found an article stating that we absorb natural folic acid badly and synthetic folic acid well - that made me ask even MORE questions.  Since, how does synthetic folic acid compare to naturally occurring folic acid?  

Note:

To people living in the tropics -

As copied from the Lancet article: Routine supplementation with iron and folic acid in preschool children in a population with high rates of malaria can result in an increased risk of severe illness and death. (Reference: The Lancet, Volume 367, Issue 9505, 14 January 2006-20 January 2006, Pages 133-143)