After reading Peni R. Griffin's comment on my post from the other day, I feel a little like the nephew in the old joke:
"Uncle, you smoke, you drink, you stay out all night -- it's not healthy!"
"Let me tell you, nephew, one day my doctor is going to tell me, 'You have to quit drinking, you have to quit smoking, you have to quit staying out all night, or you're going to die,' and then I'll quit smoking and drinking and staying out all night, and live to be an old man. But you? What will you say when your doctor says to quit smoking and drinking and staying up late, or else you'll die?"
"Well, I'll say that I've never smoked, never drank, and I'm always in bed by ten."
"Yes, and your doctor will say, 'In that case, there's nothing I can do for you'."
Peni said to eat fruit instead of refined sugar (and no artificial sweeteners, which only increase the appetite for carbohydrates), take the stairs instead of the elevator, bicycle and walk instead of driving.
Darn, I already do all of those.
I love fruit. I make sandwiches that are two slices of sandwich meat and six leaves of lettuce, and I don't like mayonnaise.
I used to drink soda pop, lots of it. And never diet, because artifical sweeteners all taste like poison to me. These days, I drink coffee. Lots of it. With sugar and milk.
Oops. Double darn, there goes the coffee.
Instead, I'm drinking cold black tea, unsweetened. It's bland and slightly bitter, but I find I like that better than just water. And it definitely doesn't have any refined sugar in it.
Oh, well. Kathe reminds me that the difference between slowly growing fatter and slowly growing leaner is only a few hundred calories a day. Maybe I can do this.
//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Signs point to yes."\\
3 comments:
It does sound like the slow slog for you, doesn't it? The thing to do is figure out why your weight went up. In my case it was obvious - eating for psychological reasons when I wasn't physically hungry. Most modern Americans just make crappy food choices and don't eat appropriately for their level of activity. Your weight went up for a reason, and once you figure out what that reason was and deal with it, you'll start seeing progress.
But healthy weight loss is always slow and there's no getting around this. The fastest weight-loss programs I know are physical illness (HIV, cancer, and amoebic dysentery'll take that weight off faster'n you can turn around and spit), psychological illness (hello compulsive vomiting!), and the subsistence farming lifestyle. The last is an option with much to recommend it - it's environmentally sound, and you can literally eat all you want to of what you produce for yourself and still lose weight!
Amputation will also take the pounds off, but the weight distribution that results is normally less than optimal.
After a certain point, you just need to not sweat it. I like living in a country where more people are worried about weighing too much than weighing too little!
Peni, I'd be willing to hazard a guess that heredity hs something to do with it. Since after all, I've seen the other members of his family. However, some of them have managed to get thin, or anyway thinner.
Say, that's another idea, John. Ask Tom how he did it. Remember how impressively rotund he used to be? Of course, it could just be having two toddlers to look after. In which case, we're sorry, we can't help you. (Job in kiddy daycare?)
Kathe
It's a tough haul, isn't it? But your last statement is right - the difference between going up and going down is a few hundred calories.
I never really though about it that way and suddenly, I don't feel like a snack.
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