by MmmCarbs » Tue Sep 20, 2011 12:39 am
Well I really missed having a place to blather about food and me. So I'm starting over with this journal. I don't want to set goals around weight loss or further trimming foods out of my diet. Something just feels wrong about that for me right now. If I stay at this exact weight for the rest of my life I'll be pretty happy with that. If I lose a few more pounds I'll be pretty happy with that. Not much difference!
I'm still eating the majority of meals and snacks from good choices, and some snacks from poor choices. Yet it feels like a good balance for me. I don't resent my food selections any more like I did when I was "trying" to get to 100% compliance. I really feel freer to enjoy those good choices, knowing they're not *all I get ever for the rest of my life except maybe once a year*. I know that allowing off-plan food regularly is a downfall for many, but somehow it's working for me right now.
I did wonder how on earth I was still avoiding weight gain. Here I'm having a bag of chips several times a week. Something clicked for me about that. Could it be my overall diet was still meeting the calorie density guidelines for weight maintenance? A quick calculation suggests it could be. I think I'm scraping by because I'm still on average only taking in 300 calories or so of the junk per day.
So, what if I'm eating 1500 calories per day of potatoes, and 300 calories of junk? How much do those 300 calories of junk raise the calorie density? I found 280 cals/lb for yellow potatoes, and I picked 2000 cals/lb for "junk" (which is somewhere in between the rice cakes and the doritoes). The 300 cals worth of junk only raised the calorie density of my hypothetical all-potato diet from 280 to 328 cal/lb. It's a jump, yes, but doesn't push it so very high.
So I could be scraping by with maintenance because most of my calories are still coming from the low density choices (potatoes, veggies, fruits, rice). I also have oatmeal, some beans, and ww pasta, but those are lesser amounts.
A couple really eye opening things I learned from looking closer at calorie density:
- OK, I've heard it over and over, but I didn't really believe rice cakes were that bad of an option. They're low fat, right? They have to be way better than chips! Well, not really so much better than I assumed. The ones I was buying were 1800 cals/lb, and the doritos were barely higher (a bit over 2000 cals/lb). I guess I've had the idea that low fat is the bigger factor. The only saving grace is that you do get more bites per calorie. 300 calories of rice cakes is half of one of those big cylindrical bags, whereas 300 calories of doritos is a smallish vending machine bag.
- My beloved Medjool dates are also unpleasantly high on the scale, at 1280 cal/lb, compared to the innocuous 430/lb for bananas. I would have never expected such a difference. Again there, I think I got away with eating them since I find them very satiating, so I was limiting quantities enough they didn't skew my intake too much. And the weeks I was overdoing the chips and rice cakes, I'd run out of fresh dates, so I wasn't having both at once.
(This all jives with my experience of partially doing the 80/10/10 diet. I was eating fruit and greens for all meals and snacks, except for a 410 calorie dinner of cheese pizza. Yet I dropped weight, and was still dropping when fruit season ended and I just couldn't keep it up any more. So the overall calorie density of my diet was probably still quite low, even with the off plan dinner.)
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So what has this really taught me? The main thing for me is about keeping the calorie density low. Thus I need to stuff in the veggies and fruits, and keep using potatoes often as my starch base. And of course... limit the high calorie density stuff. And lose my illusion that lowfat dry and/or crunchy stuff is good & safe. I'd already limited my flour products to ww pasta (after noting that bread seemed to be working against weight loss for me).
So I want to focus on eating even more and more water & fiber rich food. And keeping the level of good habits I've gotten to-- majority of meals and snacks from good choices.
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I'd also like to add exercise. This is an area that's tougher for me than changing my food. I think adding exercise will be a better focus for me than further dietary tweaks. I'm at "good enough" with the food, but far from "good enough" with the exercise.