Fighting to Stay Slim After 40

Too Many Vacations!

So here I am several weeks later, with absolutely no progress towards my goal.  My problem?  Too many vacations!

If anybody out there has a good way to stay slim on vacation, please let me know about it.  I'm thinking hypnosis.  It's not really the food choices, either, as much as just the sheer quantity of food.  For instance, on vacation in the mountains this weekend, I ordered the lobster wrap for lunch.  It was delicious!  But, it came with the wrap, a corn and bean salad, which was also quite good, and a very healthy serving of fruit that inlcuded pineapple, cantaloupe, and watermelon.  This was all very healthy stuff.  Unfortunately, after eating it, I felt overly full for several hours.  I was determined after that not to eat anything else until dinner, because I just felt so full.  But, of course, the kids showed up with gelato and gave me most of one of theirs.  Good gelato!  During this whole time, I was drinking only water, and then I had a glass of wine before dinner, yet I was still feeling overly full.  I knew I had had too many calories.  Dinner was a problem, because we knew the kids weren't particularly hungry and didn't want to spend a lot of money on it.  We settled for the pizza place, which probably had the best food in this little mountain town.  I kept it sane, ordering my half with onions and tomatoes, and only eating two slices.  But that's the problem, isn't it?  After you turn 40, you can't eat a lobster wrap with garnish, gelato, and pizza for dinner.  It doesn't matter how sane you make the pizza.  Even though we took an hour and a half hike that morning, there's no way my body was burning all of those calories in one day.

Now I'm starting again.  Only two more mini vacations in August!  Let's see how I do.

Your 5-Day Food Plan from Good Housekeeping

I love to read the different women's magazine articles about dieting.  Good Housekeeping has a good one this month with Your 5-Day Food Plan, saying "Every day you can eat six snacks (about 180 calories each) and dinner (about 300 calories)," which, by my calculations, adds up to a tidy 1380 calories per day.  I've often wondered about these diets, which are appealing because they tell you exactly what to eat and when to eat it.   Here's a sample day:

8 am  Kashi Go-Lean cereal with small peach and fat-free milk

10 am  Snack size 100 calorie Clif bar

12 pm  Salmon spinach salad

2 pm  1 mini pita with nonfat yogurt and chopped cucumber

4 pm  1 cup honeydew and lime soup plus 10 almonds

6 pm  Seared Scallops

8 pm  1/2 cup light chocolate ice cream

It's a great diet, high in fiber, with lots of fruits and vegetables and lean protein.  I'm always tempted by these.  Experience, though, tells me where this diet might go off the tracks for me. 

The first challenge of this diet is that none of the snacks repeat, which at first seems awesome, because you won't get tired of it.  The shopping list for this, though, has got to be crazy long.  Also, who wants to buy a whole box of Kashi GoLean cereal that you're going to eat one morning a week (assuming the diet repeats the next week)?  Admittedly, you're allowed to swap snacks for other snacks listed on the other days, so it's perhaps possible to simply have the same 6 snacks repeat daily.

Second, Honeydew and Lime soup?  Yeah, I can see feeding that to my whole family!  It's hard enough to cook a meal for the family, much less one thing for them and one thing for me.  And this diet calls for me to cook not once, not twice, but four times in the same day.  Right!

Finally, when I've tried other diets that are low in calories like this, I usually face the exact same problem.  I would get up, have the first thing (which I eat at 6 in the morning, not at 8 am, so now I'm really off!) and then I go for my run/walk.  Then I would come home and eat the second thing, perhaps getting more caught up on the timing, because my mid-morning snack does usually come around 10 am.  The problem, though, is that after running, jogging, or walking 3 miles, I'm usually so hungry I want to gnaw my arm off.  The hundred calorie Clif bar is probably not going to get me the number of calories that I need.  I've discovered in the past that I've eaten my caloric allowance by 2 pm.  That usually doesn't bode well for my choices for the rest of the day.

It might be doable, though.  I've never tried THIS actual diet.  If I were to increase my 10 am snack by the same number of calories that I burned in my run, it could actually work.  I'm going to keep a copy of the article, and if I don't get any traction with the next thing (just keeping the carbs low), I might try it.

Drinking 10 Glasses of Water Every Day is a Lot of Work!

Pretty much all of the diet books say that you can lose weight just by getting your full 10 8-oz glasses of water in every day.  Apparently the water helps your body maintain its metabolism, which is better for losing weight.  It also makes you feel more full.  I don't think anybody can deny that drinking 10 glasses is a good thing for anybody.  So why is it so difficult to do?

Left to my own devices, I've determined that I'll drink roughly 6 glasses of water daily without thinking about it.  So 10 should be easy, right?  Yet for some reason, getting those extra 4 glasses in every day is a lot like work.  I have to think about it, I have to track it, and I have to make sure that I get it. 

I've tried a lot of different methods for making sure that I get my water.  I've tried getting a large plastic container that holds the entire 80 ounces.  That way, I just sip my way through the day, knowing that I have to finish it by the end of the day.  Of course, a jug that big isn't very practical to bring in the car or to restaurants or to parties.  So I gave that up.

I've tried writing down each glass.  That works, too, except, of course, the part where you have to write it down.  That's a lot like work.  I do it for a few days, but then I lose my sheet of paper, or I simply forget to record the amounts, and I think at the end of the day, "was that 8 or 10 glasses?"  Who knows?

One way that worked for a while was by purchasing the large bottles of Evian water.  Each bottle is 4 cups of water.  Between the water I drink in the morning and the water I drink before bed, if I finish two large Evians, then I'm golden for all of the required water.  This method works until I run out of Evians, and then I go to the store to buy more, and think to myself, "Wow!  These are expensive.  I could put gas in my car for what I'm paying for waters." 

The way that works best, in the end, is that I have several large, plastic cups that hold 16 ounces.  I chug 16 ounces down at a time, and I promise myself that I can't have a diet coke until I've had 5 glasses of water.  Again, though, it's work.  You have to somehow keep track of how many big cups of water you've had.

And don't get me started with the fact that if you're drinking the proper amount of water, you'd better be darned sure there's a bathroom nearby!

Going the Wrong Way: 12 Pounds to Go

Okay, feeling a little down today.  The Slim4Life On Your Own experiment didn't work for me.  Apparently I can't keep from snacking when the kids are home for the summer and I'm not being held to the diet, uh, "lifestyle", by outside forces.  Yesterday I thought I was eating fairly normally, not dieting but not going crazy either, and I was up a full pound more this morning.  Yikes!  This really is going the wrong way.

I only have three days before I go on a quick getaway to the mountains, and I'd like to at least lose the two that I've put on since starting my diet.  I think it's back to what I know works but isn't sustainable, which is almost completely no carb and very low fat for a couple of days.  Then we'll see.

Day 6: Back Where I Started

So I'm coming to a conclusion:  Perhaps it is not possible to do Slim4Life on my own.  It seemed like such a good idea, and I started out well.  There is definitely something mental that happens when I know I'm going to see the dieticians there.  Clearly, for me, their value is in having somebody to keep me on the straight and narrow.  It's why they make money.  Since I've started Slim4Life on my own, I've been perfect on the program for 3 days, and I've cheated on the program 3 days. That's not a good record.  Certainly having the kids home for the summer isn't helping -- we go out for ice cream and it's hard not to have a bite of theirs, they made scones last night, we bake chocolate chip cookies, and it just goes on and on. 

A little background:  I started Slim4Life about 5 or 6 years ago, and did the program, including seeing their people daily.  I lost 10 pounds, which was my goal.  Then over the course of 2 years, the weight crept back up.  Some would say that it's only 10 pounds, it's not that big of a deal, but I don't want to look like I'm one of those people who "need to lose 10 pounds."  I want to look fit.

Then 2 years after I was over Slim4Life, they contacted me with an offer to start it again at a very good price.  The price was significantly lower than just going in cold, because, believe me, it's not cheap.  Let's face it, you're paying them to scold you for eating the wrong stuff and to tell you what to eat.  Again, I lost almost all of the 10 pounds that I wanted to lose.  Again, over the course of the next 2 years, it crept up again.

Two years after that again, I was contacted by Slim4Life again with a slightly different re-start offer.  Again, my price was significantly lower than the normal, but I had to bring a friend in who would get half off the normal price.  I have many friends who, like me, struggle with getting the weight off since we've turned the corner beyond 40, and she and I started the program together.  Again, I lost 10 pounds.  I am determined not to gain that weight back again.

So here I am with a choice.  I'm five up from the original 10 that I've lost.  I refuse to be that high again.  I don't just want to look thin, I want to look fit.  I want a lifestyle that supports my being fit.  Trying the Slim4Life program on my own seemed like a good idea, mostly because there's nothing magic about the diet -- it's well-balanced and good for you. 

Besides trying to find a way of eating that helps me be fit, I also have found a great way to stay fit through exercise.  I joined Deeptone, the one hour per week weightlifting workout, and have seen great results from it.  I skipped this week because of the broken toe, but plan to get right back in there this week.  The bad thing about skipping a week is that, because it's only one hour per week, it's like skipping an entire week's worth of weightlifting workouts.  I like Deeptone because it works.  I can tell an amazing difference in my muscle tone since I started.  People that I see in there who have been going 5, 6, even 10 years, are super strong.  I'll blog about Deeptone later.

The other additional thing that I've been doing is running/jogging/walking every morning with the dogs.  I also haven't been able to do that consistently because of the toe, but I plan to start again once I can put my foot into a running shoe without pain.

So after 6 days I see myself at a crossroads.  Keep at it?  Try something else? 

I've had luck on low-carb "lifestyles" in the past.  The key to low-carbing it is to eat lean meats and include lots of vegetables and even a couple of fruits, which is different from an Atkins diet which allows fat.  I might try that.

What I'd really like, though, is a "lifestyle" where I can eat whatever I want and still keep the weight off.  Anybody know of that one?

Day 5: Still 1/2 Pound Down

Whoa!  The train really went off the track yesterday!  Holy cow.  I have no idea how I ended up still my 1/2 pound down, because by all rights, I should be up at least one in just water weight.

The day started out fine.  I had my protein bar for breakfast, and then had an early lunch of a baked piece of fish.  I was picking my oldest up on Pearl Street, and we had planned to go out for gelato, because that was one of the last times we'd be able to do that as we wouldn't be near Pearl Street any more after that.  I had made it right in my mind by silently offering to give up a fruit and two starches for the gelato.  That wouldn't be okay if I was still going to the dieticians, but it was a trade I was willing to make. 

And let's just say, the gelato was awesome!

But then I remembered that I also had offered to bring cookies to the kids' karate place for a birthday.  Uh oh.  Cookies are a trigger food for me -- it's hard to stop eating cookies fresh out of the oven.  After the gelato, though, I kept it to only a cookie and a half, along with several chocolate chips popped into my mouth before baking.

I had planned hamburgers for dinner.  Very lean hamburger meat is allowed on the diet for the protein, but at this point, I shouldn't have been eating any more starches whatsoever, but of course I had already been so bad for the day that I ate the hamburger with a bun.  So let's tally this up:  gelato, cookies, hamburger bun (and finally a half muffin right before bed).  No fruits, no veggies.  The meats were good and lean, though. 

Even though I've been good today, I'm wondering if I'll see the results of my poor eating tomorrow on the scale.

Day 4: Down 1/2 pound, 11 to go

Whoo-hoo!  One day and I'm down just a tad.  I did well on the diet yesterday, managing somehow to avoid my daughter's fries (okay, I may have had 2).  I stuck with it, and had my 2 fruits, 2 veggies, and fish for dinner.  I splurged and had fish that was already breaded (a big no-no on the plan), but I looked up the sodium and carbs and decided that it seemed reasonable.  My only excursion away from the diet was that I indulged in a low-carb Mike's Hard Lemonade again.  I can't seem to get off those.

I also had to get up multiple times in the night with a dog who had a little bit of the runs.  I was wondering if going up and down the stairs five times in the night might increase my metabolism and help me lose a little.  Hey, it's a theory!  I like to think that every little bit counts.

Day 3: Start of Actual Slim4Life Program

I got up and weighed myself this morning.  Wow!  I must have really partied hard over the Fourth of July weekend.  Even after two days of doing the Slim4Life re-start program, I'm still 1 1/2 pounds heavier than I was last Wednesday.  That means that now, instead of just losing 10 pounds, I need to lose 11 1/2. 

Why is it that it takes such a short amount of time to put the weight on, but so long to get it off?

I started this morning with a Slim4Life protein bar, which in my opinion really are about the best ones on the market.  I've compared their bars to others that you can buy at the grocery store, and when you weigh taste, carbs, and calories, these bars excel.  My problem is that I only like a couple of the flavors, since I don't like nuts in anything, I don't like mint, and I don't like mocha.  It doesn't leave much!  One of my favorites is the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bar, which only has 150 calories, 21 g carbs with 5 g fiber, and 10 g protein.  Everything else on the market that I've found either tastes terrible, has more calories and carbs, or doesn't have as much protein.

As for exercise, I typically job/walk 3 miles almost every day.  Since breaking my little toe, though, I flip-flopped around a dog park yesterday and today, putting in a mile.  I'm not sure that even counts as exercise.  This means that I'll have to be even more strict on the program.

Now I've got to go find those official Slim4Life diary sheets.  I know I've got them laying around somewhere...

Day 2: Still in the Prep-Phase

I can’t remember how long the prep phase is supposed to last for the re-start.  I know that when you start for the very first time, it’s three days, but for the re-start, it seems like it was two days.  I could go look at the actual sheet that I have filed downstairs, but really what would be the fun in that? Perhaps that’s where the whole “doing this on my own” thing comes in – if I went back to Slim4Life and paid them, I’d probably know how long this part is supposed to be. I’m going to shoot for ending the re-start today and starting the actual program tomorrow.  Looking forward to that fruit!

I can tell that I must have had a little too much fun over the Fourth of July weekend, because once I started on this, I’ve been peeing like crazy.  Clearly, I was holding a ton of water. 

Last night I splurged and had a half glass of white wine.  That’s actually a total no-no on Slim4Life.  Today my splurges included a low-carb Mike’s Hard Lemonade.  They’re delicious, and hardly any carbs.  I’m pretty sure that’s also a total no-no.

Weighing in tomorrow!

Day 1: Is it possible to start Slim4Life on my own?

So here’s my plan:  Slim4Life has always worked for me, but it’s unclear if it’s worked because it’s a well-balanced, nutritious diet, or because with Slim4Life, you see one of their dieticians daily and write everything down that you eat in a food diary.  I can keep the diary by myself, but will I be honest about what I eat? 

When somebody is actually holding me accountable, I have an ethical dilemma.  I can either tell the Slim4Life dietician that I at half of my daughter’s cheeseburger as a dessert to my broiled fish, or I can keep it to myself and hope it doesn’t show up on the scale.  In the end, if you’re honest because you’re paying them, you simply choose not to eat the half cheeseburger, and spare yourself the ethical dilemma.  But by trying to do this on my own, I’m the only one who knows whether I’ve cheated or not, so will I even care?  Time will tell.

Day 1 on the Slim4Life is the prep phase, which is sort of a modified Atkins, with very little except meat and green veggies.  The re-start diet also includes two of their bars or drinks, which I find to be very good.  They’re especially good when you feel as though you’re starving to death!  I found, though, that when I wasn’t keeping strict on Slim4Life, the little snacks seemed a little, well, off.  That’s because THEY’RE GOOD FOR YOU!  Why is it that the foods that are good for you just don’t taste as good as Haagen Dazs?

So far, I’m doing great.  I broke my toe over the 4^th of July weekend, which makes it all a bit harder because I can’t run, and walking is very, very slow.  I usually walk or jog with my dogs every morning, so now it’s even more important to stick to a “lifestyle”.  On Slim4Life, you don’t even start your weight-loss point until you’ve completed the prep phase, so since I just got back from a Fourth of July weekend of too many drinks and too many nuts, I’m going to stick with that and wait until Wednesday to weigh in.  If I’m lucky, I’ll be exactly where I was right before I left, which is where I need to lose 10 pounds.

Already, my YD (youngest daughter) pulled out a pop tart.  Chocolate with chocolate icing, my favorite.  I resisted, but I did manage a very small bite out of it.  I don’t think that’s reportable.

So, to answer my own question as to whether it’s possible to do Slim4Life on my own, my answer would be:  we’ll see.