Another Two Months . . .

. . . and still struggling with that slump. Will it ever end?

Getting Out of the Weight Loss Slump

I hit a wall. A big one.

I haven’t gained weight, but I haven’t lost any either. And now it’s the beginning of summer and I am aghast at how I haven’t lost weight since March.

What happened? I got sick, lost my momentum, stopped going to the gym and tracking what I ate. Next thing ya know, it’s June 1 and I am lamenting my big post-baby belly. Way to lose the weight, right?

But all is not lost. I do claim a certain victory in not having put on the weight again. Maintaining a weight is as important as losing.

So what now? Back to counting the calories. Back to healthy decisions. Back to the gym (and what ever other exercise I can get in).

I can do this. I will lose this weight. Soon.

Five Ways to Fit More Exercise into Your Day

Fitting exercise into your day can be like searching for the Holy Grail – a really great idea that is just near impossible. But with a little finagling, you can fit exercise in without throwing a wrench into your schedule. Here are five ways to do just that:

1) Take a walk at lunchtime. Adding just a brisk twenty minute walk during your lunch hour will make a big difference for how you feel and how much activity you get each day.

2) Involve your kids. Dancing around the kitchen isn’t just fun for the kids, it’s a great way to fit in a little exercise here and there. Just three average-length songs could add 10 minutes of exercise to your day without taking time away from your family.

3) Start your day off with 10 minutes of stretching. Stretching gets your muscles ready to work and can be a good refresher at the beginning of the day. Include side bends and lunges and you’re getting a little muscle work in too.

4) Don’t just sit there and watch TV. Instead of watching others lose weight on The Biggest Loser or laughing at the antics of your favorite comedy, get up and do something while you are watching. For instance, you could hop on the treadmill and walk through the show. Or you could do strength exercises like sit-ups and lunges during the commercial breaks.

5) When you clean, clean as fast as you can. Did you know that heavy cleaning, including vacuuming, dusting and washing floors, is a great calorie burning activity? It is. And the faster you do it, the better chance you have of raising that heart rate.

Shawn’s Story

Shawn was mildly upset when he read my first post on here that briefly described his road to overweightness, so I wanted to set the record straight.

When I said that he’s been heavy since the 1990s, I didn’t mean 1990. I meant that sometime in that decade, he began to s-l-o-w-l-y gain weight. Here’s his story

Shawn was a high school athlete — quarterback of his football team and on the track team. He was very active back then . . . but then high school ended and there wasn’t that level of activity beyond the school yard gates. But while his activity level decreased, his eating habits remained the same. Then came the frequent fast food runs while working long hours, which just added more to the pot without a lot of time for exercise to offset it. Slowly, from the mid-1990s on, the weight packed on. And despite a strong interest in working out, his efforts were frequently thwarted by work responsibilities.

Now, it’s been more than 15 years since Shawn graduated from high school. And after the birth of our second child, he is just ready to lose once and for all.

Motivation, Drive and the Tools to Succeed

What drives you to succeed? Is it a desire to do better? A need to be the best? Perhaps it’s the end result that drives you.

Weight loss, like education, careers and even relationships, only works when you have motivation. Sure, you can absently try to lose weight using the latest tricks and gimmicks. And it might even work sometimes. But when you have motivation – a true driving force like the desire to grow old and play with your grandchildren or a need to feel good about how you look – then you will be on your way to success.

But motivation isn’t all your need. You also need the tools to succeed (like a way to think about calories that makes it more real to you) and the drive to get there.

For Shawn, the desire has been there for a long time, but only when he started to use this calories as dollars concept was he able to actualize it and make it happen. This gave him the tools to take advantage of his motivation.

The funny thing is that this method of actualization has actually worked for a friend of ours too. Shawn told the friend about how he was thinking of calories — as dollars to spend — and how it made him think more carefully whether it was really worth it to spend $120 (calories) on a regular soda when a diet soda is free and leaves $120 for other foods – like some fruits or a slightly larger dinner portion.

The friend adopted it without telling anyone and has managed to cut out midnight sandwiches and other waistline-killers.

Me? I had the desire too, but being pregnant couldn’t make it happen. However since giving birth, and making careful decisions about our family planning, I now have my motivation and my tools to make it happen — without worrying that I’ll be gaining it back in a few months. My tool is this plan, which helps me weigh my caloric options more easily. And my motivation is to look like I did before I got married, so that I can wear my favorite clothes and comfortably shop for clothes in any store.

What’s your motivation?

Get Over the Sticker Shock

At Shawn’s old job, top managers and their significant others would be treated to a week-long conference where meetings involved masseuses and their power lunches were around the pool (get my drift?). The company would give each manager an envelope of cash at the start of the week to cover the expenses for meals that weren’t had as a group.

I’m getting to the point . . .

The first year that Shawn and I went, we received our envelope and opened it in the room. It came with a paper that explained how much was budgeted for each meal. It was a jaw-dropping moment for us. $150 for dinner? $75 for lunch? $50 for breakfast? No way! We would never spend that much. Who eats like that? We certainly weren’t accustomed to spending so grandly for meals.

Then we actually went to one of the restaurants on site and saw burgers, the cheapest item on the menu, for $15. Suddenly, it made sense. Everything is relative. We were in a very ritzy hotel and the cost of staying (and eating) there was greater than we were used to. Sure, they could have given us less money for dinner, but then we wouldn’t have been limited to burgers and fries with a side of water for our meals and that would have taken away from the experience.

The same is true of eating. Yes, you can eat “cheaply” and keep your calories ultra-low. I’ve done it. But that kind of dieting isn’t longterm and it isn’t healthy either. You might lose some quick pounds, but you open up your body for injury, illness and gaining back more than you lost because you compromise your immune system by essentially starving yourself. And in the end, that never works out well.

So, to eat a successful diet, you need to get over the sticker shock — yes, you might use a quarter of your days calories on breakfast. You might use more than half your calories at lunch. Where ever you use them, make the calories you “spend” count. That means forgoing the snacking for the sake of snacking. That means savoring each bite, even if you are only having a few of a high ticket item.

Everything, in moderation.

Weight Loss-Friendly Dessert . . . Because We All Need Dessert

I have to confess. Although I usually believe in cooking everything we make from scratch (within reason), my strong commitment to losing weight with Shawn has made me do something I normally wouldn’t: eat a packaged dessert or two. See, I have a huge sweet tooth (if you’ve ever read my cooking blog, Sarah’s Cucina Bella, you’ve probably seen one of the sweets benders I’ve gone on.) I love to cook sweets. I love to eat them. I love to look at them.

But I can’t justify eating a slice of cheesecake with this extra weight on me. Seriously. What sense would that make?

So Shawn has turned me on to Jell-o Sugar Free Puddings (I think they are fat free too, but can’t be sure). He whips up a batch of instant pudding and I toss a dollop of Fat Free Cool Whip on top. And you know what? It’s pretty darn tasty.

I also like the Smart Ones desserts. They are pretty tasty. However, they have more calories then the Jell-o puddings. So, they are for days when I am really good.

What do you quench your sweet tooth with?

Day 18 Update

Well, it’s been 18 days. I am down about nine pounds. Shawn has lost a few belt holes (he won’t brave the scale yet). So far, so good.

Now, if we could just get more exercise into the plan, we will really start losing. Diet and exercise, people. They have to go hand in hand.

The challenges? Leftover sweets. Wanting certain foods (barbecue, anyone?). Fitting in the exercise. Days when cooking is the last thing I want to do … though those are few and far between.

Diet’s Don’t Work. Seriously. They Don’t.

There is a commercial on for Weight Watchers these days that says “Diets don’t work; Weight Watchers does.” I’ve never done Weight Watchers personally, so I don’t know how true that is, but I do definitely agree that diets don’t work. What works is eating the right foods and the right amounts — having a well balanced diet.

In terms of diets though, I’ve tried them all. I read The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet from cover to cover about 10 years ago. The idea was interesting but not for me. At the time, I was a vegetarian and couldn’t figure out how to make the diet work for me. It called for proteins that I didn’t eat and disallowed many vegetables and fruits in the first few weeks. That book is still in my bookcase but I have no interest in reading it.

Nonetheless, a few years later I did the Atkin’s Diet for several months. It worked great. I lost a ton of weight on it — so much, in fact, that friends told me that I needed to stop because I was looking “gaunt”. No lie. The bigger problem with the diet was that I felt so deprived on it. I tried making no carb bread and ended up with a brick. A dry brick. I missed sugar, fruit, bread, pasta, rice . . . And try as I might to make it a lifestyle change, I just couldn’t.

Those weren’t my first forays into dieting. The first time I remember trying a diet was just for fun when I was 11. It was the Cabbage Soup Diet, then known as an American Heart Association Diet. I ate the cabbage soup with glee and munched on only fruits, then only vegetables, then fruits and vegetables . . . but I never made it past day three on several attempts. Again, it worked — I lost weight in those days — but it wasn’t a long term solution (and admittedly, at 11, I didn’t need to lose weight anyway. But I did try it when I was older and had the same results.).

I even did a risky low calorie diet in college where I limited calories to an unhealthy level for three weeks. I lost (and managed to keep off) quite a bit of weight and basically reset my appetite, but knowing now what I didn’t want to know then, I know that diets like that are the enemy.

Anyway, I have tried low calorie, low fat, carb free and fads. I have exercised incessantly.  But as Shawn says, until you are ready to make that lifestyle change nothing will work in the longterm.

I am ready. We are ready.

And the best thing about what we are doing? We aren’t dieting. We are eating better. We are eating with both eyes open. Knowing that an afternoon snack for the sake of snacking is $300 of my daily $1,500 to $1,850 is a very good deterrent if I am not truly hungry. And we aren’t feeling deprived or like we are sacrificing either. We are just eating better.

Why I’m Losing Weight: Sarah’s Side

I was never one of the ultra-thin people who could eat anything. But I was relatively thin and fit until I had Will. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond my control left me unable to exercise for six months of my pregnancy with him. I consoled myself with poor food choices and gained 67 pounds by the time I delivered him. I was so depressed when my body didn’t bounce back on its own like I wanted it to. That’s what everyone tells you — you have the baby, breastfeed and then all the pounds just melt away. Right? Not really. There is more to it then that, in my experience and the experience of many people I know.

About six weeks after having Will, I joined SparkPeople. Through that program (I really heart SparkPeople, so you will definitely hear more about it in the coming months), I shaved off about 40 pounds (33 pounds had come off after birth). I wanted to lose more, but ran into trouble with emotional eating and then with balancing living healthy and working full time again after a year.

When I got pregnant with Paige, I had gained about 15 pounds back. During the pregnancy, I gained 45 pounds by eating better and exercising more. I came out feeling and looking much better than the first time. But I still have a ways to go and that’s where I am now.

On the positive, in the one week since I started tracking my food and counting my calories like dollars, I have shed nine pounds. It wasn’t through deprivation or anything — I ate plenty — but through smart food choices and ensuring that I get enough nutrients.

I am losing weight because I don’t want to be part of the overweight culture of America. It’s not healthy. I want to live a long time and see my kids grow up, graduate from college, have careers, get married, have kids … and maybe even meet my great-grandkids. And I want to feel good about myself. I don’t know how overweight people do it, because I cannot look in the mirror with this extra pudge and not feel like there is just something wrong with it. It doesn’t make me feel beautiful or sexy or anything. I feel that way when I am fit and slim and HEALTHY.

Chances are, I will never be a size 2 or even a size 4. But that’s okay. As long as I am healthy and trim and in shape, I will be happy with myself. And hopefully that will help me live long.

P.S. That’s my official before shot from Jan. 1, 2008 . . .