Two days late, and an hour short...

...but maybe, just maybe, I've taken the first few steps this morning.

Got up and weighed first thing. WAY worse than it should have been, WAY better than it could have been. But to get to where you want to go, you have to know both endpoints - where you want to go, and where you currently are. I've got that now.

Drove straight to work today, brought my workout clothes. There is a workout class at 8:00 am, but I really didn't feel ready for it. So I'm working out on my lunch break.

Food - brought my lunch today. My company just moved to a brand new building. The old building had a cafe where I could get pretty good options. The new building has a cafe as well, but the choices are just abysmal. I know that there are probably some that like them, but the "healthy" choices are usually rather unappetizing to me.

So...

My plan...

Still working it through. But here are the current elements:

1) Stick within my calorie deficit. This means that (for now) I can eat a bit more if I do exercise. I must NEVER eat as many calories as I exercise, however.
2) Use myfitnesspal to track everything.
3) Up my fruits/vegetables significantly - at least 4 vegetable servings per day, and 3 fruit servings per day.
4) Hit 10,000 steps daily (I've got some fitbit friends I need to beat...)
5)
6)

That's all I have at the moment. I do know that my fitness plan does need some work. I will keep coming up with it. I am also considering the "take a picture of everything I eat" route with the food. That could help a lot to keep me honest in the food department.

Something else that I need to work on...fear. More on that next time.

For now, time to get to work. Have a good day...

-Silas

Something has to change.

It's time for the normal "tail between the legs" return to blogging that normally accompanies a long break. Of what, 9 1/2 months?

As you can probably guess, doing the same old thing has brought me back to the same old place yet again. I do know that something has to change.

I know what to do to get things to work. Eat way less crap, eat way more raw foods, and get moving a lot more. But when you have an eating disorder, that is a lot easier said than done.

I need something. Accountability? Certainly. A new plan? Maybe. Motivation? Definitely.

So I may start taking to posting here on a daily basis as an accountability thing. I am considering taking a picture of every single thing that goes into my cake-hole, both liquid and solid, and then posting all of it here.

I have been trying to start and restart since last September, and there is always "one more." One more work lunch, one more holiday, one more scout activity...there is always one more.

But I do know that there is one more thing that I need.

I need a new mindset.

I've always done the diet thing until I've lost a ton of weight. But then my mind shifts back to whatever it is that I want. For some reason my brain thinks of food and dieting as all or nothing.

That is silly. And consciously I reject it.

However, subconsciously, it is in the forefront of my beliefs, apparently.

Time to find a way to change mindsets. Time to find some way of changing natural reactions, and trying to forget the all or nothing mentality.

I need to find a way to not just go on a diet. I need to make a long-term life change.

I've known this for a very long time. I have yet to find a way to accomplish it.

So over the next three days I'm going to try to spend some time figuring out version 1.0 of a long-term life plan. Then on Monday I'm going to start it officially.

I'm also most likely going to be working out the format and content of my (hopefully) daily posts as well.

Get ready for a ton of pics of what I'm ingesting.

As long as I can keep rigorous honesty here with what I eat, then I truly believe that this will help.

Time for another change.

Time for another start.

Because even though I've given up, I refuse to actually give up.

See you soon.

Ugh part 2.

I get home, and it was one of those days at home - it had been hard. My family asked for pizza. So we ordered pizza. Man, that stuff smells good.

I ate a salad.

I'm not kidding.

And I'm down another pound.

It was hard, driving home and smelling it, and then sitting there with my family while they ate it. But somehow I have to be able to make these hard decisions, these hard choices, if I'm going to make any lasting changes.

Off to work again. I'm hoping that the lunch for training today will be better. But even if not, I can do this.

Ugh.

Well, all is going just fine. And then today happens. I'm in training today at work. They brought in lunch. I partook of more than I should have.

It's not a huge setback - it's actually going to be well within my calories for the day - it's more the principle of the thing. I have to make sure that I'm in control of what I eat at all times. Otherwise, it will start to spiral out of control again.

I'm  thinking that tonight I need to get out and get some exercise in - which is easy, because I'm going to be clearing out some flower gardens in the front lawn and disposing of the extra dirt and stuff.

Then for dinner I'll see if I can pull a nice big salad with some sort of grilled chicken. That should put me where I want to be today.

I hate feeling out of control. So I'm going to ratchet the control down again.

Speaking of that - still no bar-shaped food since last week. That one was hard a few times over the weekend, but I'm sticking to that one.

I think I need to talk a bit about exercise. The next post.

Another weigh in.

Not official, mind you, but down another 1.3 pounds since last Sunday. I'll take that and run with it.

Sometimes I sit in front of a blank blog post and words just seem to flow. Sometimes it's like today. I don't feel that I have anything earth-shattering enough.

Still, I want to try to keep some semblance of regularity and accountability. So here I am again.

Keeping up the good fight against the glorified candy bars. I'm finding that it's not even so much that they are so good - but it's more that they are so very convenient.

So not much today, but I'm here.

Avoiding the bars, and small amounts of travel.

As exactly nobody reading this blog knows, I'm a teetotaler, so the bars I'm referring to are the ones from yesterday's post. When I got home from work, that stupid Nature Valley Candy Bar box was calling my name.

Sweet and Salty

Those are the ones that I'm talking about. There are 12 grams of sugar in there. I'm not talking carbohydrates. Sugar. In something that will do next to nothing to fill me up. It certainly does a lot to trigger certain responses in my brain, though.

Oh, I know - they are loved. If you love them and they work to help you - by all means, go ahead! My only point is that for me, these are an enormous mistake.

On three separate times, I found myself reaching into the box without thinking about it. All three times I remembered yesterday's vow to avoid food in bar form, and I put it back. But it's the fact that I grabbed it before I even realized what I was doing.

Yikes.

I missed breakfast altogether yesterday. That wasn't good. I'm a software engineer, and while it does lend itself to mindless munching if I let there be food at my desk, it also lends itself to being lost inside my code and inside my head, making hours pass before realizing where it went. That happened yesterday. By the time I looked up, it was 11:00, so I just waited the extra half hour for the cafeteria to open.

Indian butter chicken...mmmm...the calories on that aren't bad, if you eat a normal portion, by the way.

After work my wife and I went to support my oldest kid at a marching band competition. It was a lot of fun! Food avoidance was easy again. Except for the ladies next to us eating Cafe Rio something-or-other. HOLY COW it smelled good.

But my plan is slowly working. Slowly but surely. It's getting easier to say no, as long as I say on a roll and don't eat the crap that will bring the cravings back.

Now if only the scale would budge. I wonder if there's something wrong with it. ;)

Alive and kickin'!

Weekends are notoriously bad for me to be able to blog - I'm usually just so dang busy with everything going on in my life. Take last Friday night/Saturday - I was out camping with a bunch boy Boy Scouts. (I'm a Scoutmaster). It was a fantastic time.

Eating, on campouts, is actually very easy for me. Low-fat hot dogs (skip the buns) and a bunch of fruit and I'm good to go. The kids enjoy some s'mores usually, but I'm not that enamored with them, so there you go.

Weight is down again - officially, I'm down over 22 pounds. Unofficially, it's probably more like 25-26. These are the times when I wish I WOULD have weighed and gotten the highest number. :) Still, I'm heading in the right direction and I don't have any intention of stopping.

I do need to take a bit of personal inventory about snacking. It's always hard to admit when things start going wrong - but I would rather start talking about it now when it's minor issues than later when it's a day of (and I'm not joking - this has happened in the past) 4 donuts, 2 bags of chips, 80 oz of full sugar soda, and a bag (the 1 lb bag) of peanut M & Ms.

So about yesterday...

I had some fruit for breakfast, due to bad planning, in that I didn't get any protein. That usually keeps me full for much longer. It was 80 calories of flavor grenades.

Lunch was good - some brown rice and asparagus with a small portion of homemade sweet & sour chicken. About 300 calories.

So when I get home from work, I've had less than 400 calories for the day. NOT optimal - I do much better when I spread my calories out better than that.

So there's this Costco-sized box of Nature Valley Peanut something-or-other granola bars. They are GOOD.

So over the evening, I had three.

With a light dinner and some moderate exercise for the day, I stayed well within my calorie goal for the day.

But there is something unsettling about going back for another granola bar (which is, let's face it, a glorified candy bar) even though you know you shouldn't.

What this means is that it's time to ratchet things down a bit further. Yet again. I'm not going to go "no refined carbs" again yet, but for the moment, all kinds of "bar" food - that is, food in bar form, is verboten. I have been doing VERY well without granola bars. I think that I'll be able to be just fine without them for the next, oh, say, month at least.

Actually, make that until November. If I can get through Halloween without eating any "bars", that will mean that no Halloween candy will have been consumed. And while I don't yet know what I want my attitude to be towards sugar for the long run, I do know that this year I really don't want to deal with candy.

So there you go. Personal inventory out there for everyone to see. Kinda glad I did it. Now to go find breakfast again. More Flavor Grenades, but this time with a cheese stick? Sounds good.