Not on a weight-loss journey?

I learned that I am a compulsive eater and that makes it difficult to lose weight. Being a compulsive eater does not define me, but it has redefined my journey to acquire and maintain good health habits for life, because there is no point in getting healthy if you don’t plan on staying healthy. Healthy is a state that is constantly moving and changing, I think  striving to live a healthy life is all one can hope for, because you only have so much control over your health as the human body ages, is exposed to accidents and encounters illnesses. For me living a healthy lifestyle is not about weight-loss, diet and exercise. Living a healthy lifestyle is about total wellness, mental, physical and spiritual health. I will never be at a point where I feel like I have arrived, what my focus on instead is on developing, building and maintain healthy habits that I can maintain for life. The standard I use to develop these habits and test them for usefulness is whether the habit is realistic, attainable and sustainable. I can do a self-check periodically on my habits to see how I am doing with them and to make any adjustment s I need to make. I do aspire to lose weight, but I am no longer setting weight-loss as a hard goal or using it to measure my success. Over the course of my journey so far as it has evolved from a weight-loss journey into a wellness journey I have observed that I have developed and maintained many healthy habits despite what the scales says. I have been on a solid walking routine for over a year now, I have continued to drink plenty of water daily, I have cleaned up my breakfast, lunch and dinner meals. I have found ways to stay inspired and stay motivated and instead of focusing on what has gone wrong I am choosing to give myself credit for the lifestyle changes I have made and managed to stick with.

CLM

Tracking for People Not In Love with Numbers!

I have a love hate relationship with numbers. Some times I think they are so cool, it can be exciting to learn the amount of calories in a container in X,Y,Z, but other times, I just get a headache constantly counting numbers. I found two ways to tracking/monitoring/observing your food intake that are free of the dreaded numbers.

#1 You can keep a food dairy/journal. In your food diary you can record just what you ate, or you can record your moods and tudes along with your food record. You can use descriptive language such as, "banana, cereal and milk," You can choose to add other data such as the quantity, "1/2 banana, 3/4 of a cup of Special K," you can develop your own short hand. This frees you from having to do database searches and looking up food data. You can use any journal type, note book or even your computer screen, or random scraps of paper if you please. I have tried many different things and what works best for me is an excel spreadsheet, I have a column for the day of the week, the date, breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks and I just record what I ate in the row. I like to add color to my chart, by pick a different color fill for each day. I have a sheet for each month. I found that using the spreadsheet was the most consistent food recording I have ever had. As a some what perfectionist I can understand how bad it feels to forget what you ate for a meal, or to have skipped a few days of recording, that is why I also use descriptors like Skipped, if I have missed a few days of tracking, or ate random junk, if  I can't really recall what I ate, if I am recording a few days later. The wonderful thing about keeping some type of record of what you ate, is that it can keep you accountable, you might see that you are eating a ton of junk and it might inspire you to eat more veggies, or if you are having a bad week, you can look back to a good week to get some food ideas. No matter how crazy I am eating, I feel better about my eating when I am recording my food intake.

#2 Another device I use quite often is Meal Planning. I create a plan for the day, as well as use a calendar where I come up with meals for months at at time. I am very flexible with my menu calendar, If I scheduled broccoli for Tuesday and I find I am craving string beans, I will eat them. Having a plan does not mean you are forced to eat what is on it, I can always cross something out and change the menu for a meal or a day. I see my meal planning in much the same way that a retirement home or school might have a menu plan for the week or month. I have a daily meal plan, and I also have menu's that I choose from to help me with making food decisions. I find that having a meal plan, helps me with grocery shopping and preparing healthy quick meals. With meal planning I have noticed a significant decrease in the amount of fast food that I consume. I also have very few days where my eating is totally out of control. ( Still a binge eater! I am a compulsive snacker, do pretty well with regular meals especially during the week.)

Hope this helps someone who may be feed up with their current calorie tracker. For those who do love the numbers here are two  websites that I used frequently www.myfitnesspal.com and livestrong.com, you can also try WW online if you like counting points.

I will also say that I do keep my membership to the numbers database websites, because it is nice to be able to spot check an item for the calorie info, when I am using Calorie Common Sense. Calorie Common Sense is when I look at the calories in foods while shopping to choose foods that are lower in calories, without counting my daily calorie intake. Calorie Common Sense might help me to buy Skinny Cow ice cream bars vs eating a pint of Ice Cream. Also if you are noticing that you have gained weight and you ever want to look up your calories for the day, you can always do a spot check by recording the info from your food diary/journal into one of the databases.

There are also some people that might be following a particular diet plan such as Atkins and may not want to track calories, but may want to look back as some of the things they are eating for meal planning, keeping some type of food journal even one without numbers could be helpful.

CLM