I've been following most of the McDougall program for the last 8 years. My tripping point is sweets. The sight or smell of them sets off a craving that I haven't been able to ignore or overcome in most cases. I have no sweets in my house, but the temptations seem to be almost everywhere I go - at my parents' house where I visit twice a week, at restaurants where I eat about 4 times a week, at the grocery store - ugh! I've joined the MWL discussion group and plan to post there daily. My goals are threefold
(1) lose 40-50 lbs without feeling hungry
(2) lose the feeling of dependence on sweets
(3) know how to sustain both of the above for the rest of my life
A response from Carroll to my original post about sweets on the MWL group is very encouraging - my first month may be extremely challenging but her success has given me hope. And I'm really looking forward to a time when I am free from this "addiction".
I weighed my food at breakfast this morning. Not to track the number of calories but to see how much food I normally eat, in lbs, on a daily basis. I'm interested in the calorie density concept which says that (a) a person eats, on average, a similar amount of food, in lbs (or grams) each day, and (b) knowing what that average weight is, we can control our weight by eating food from a certain range of calorie densities (cals/lb) without the need to weigh or measure quantities. For example, let's say that I usually eat an average of 5 pounds of food per day at my current (over)weight. If I want to lose weight, I need to keep the calories consumed less than the calories expended. Let's assume I can eat 1500 calories per day and will lose weight. If I don't want to be hungry I'll still want to eat about 5 lbs of food per day. But to lose weight I'll need to select foods that add up to only 1500 calories each day. That means the average calorie density of the foods I eat should be 1500 cals/5 lbs or 300 calories/lb. According to Jeff Novick's cool chart (
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=16380 ) those are primarily the vegetables and fruits with maybe a few unrefined carbs, and even fewer legumes, thrown in.
Let's look at this another way, if I eat nothing but food from the vegetable category in Jeff's chart, I could eat, on average, 15 lbs of food to meet my 1500 calorie limit for the day. I don't think I could eat 15 lbs of vegetables every day but it could be fun trying!
What if I ate nothing but fruit? I could eat 5 lbs of fruit at an average of 300 cals/lb and meet my 1500 calorie limit. Could I eat 5 pounds of fruit a day? Maybe for a few days. I do love fruit when it's ripe, sweet, and flavorful (not common features of fruit from grocery stores around here). But I suspect I'd get tired of it eating fruit all day every day.
What if I ate nothing but unrefined carbs? With an average calorie density of 500 cals/lb, I'd need to lower my intake to 3 lbs of food per day instead of the theoretical 5lbs I'm used to (remember I don't know yet how many lbs/day of food is my average, I'm just using 5 lbs for now in these examples). Is 3 lbs enough food to be feel full and satisfied? I don't know yet, that's why I'm starting to weigh my food, to determine what my average intake of food is in lbs that makes me feel full and satisfied.
Lastly, what if I ate nothing but legumes? With an average calorie density of 600 cals/lb, I'd need to limit my daily food intake to 1500cals/(600cals/lbs) or 2.5 lbs of food. Considering that I already ate 1.5 lbs of food for breakfast this morning, more than half of this 2.5 allotment, I'm guessing I'd be hungry on an all-legume diet. And bored.
So for the next few weeks I'm going to weigh what I eat and track the calorie density of what I eat, just to see what works best for me in terms of lbs of food and calorie intake. This should be interesting (to me at least
)
As for the sugar issue, and this is a major issue for me, I'll take that one day at a time, and report the ups and downs of transitioning to a sugar-free life.