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Let Them Eat Cake

Offices are evil.

There's no ifs, ands and but(t)s about it. Offices are determined to trip you up when you're dieting (or changing your eating habits or whatever you want to call it today).

Yesterday management decided everyone "deserved a break" and offered cookies (jumbo oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip) and lemonade in every kitchen in the building. That's four kitchens. No matter where you were in the building, you'd have access to those cookies. Of course I took one. Are you kidding me?! Hopefully I worked it off in my one-hour aerobics class and 45-minute after-dinner power walk with Brian.

Today there's birthday cake in the kitchen. It's cut up into nice serving sizes in bowls along the counter. Lovely. So pretty too with purple flowers. I happened upon them when I went in there to heat my Balsamic Chicken Lean Cuisine. While I was microwaving, I stood there and stared at the cake. You see, I love birthday cake. Yellow cake with vanilla frosting to be exact. And this had tons of frosting. Just how I like it. The only thing preventing me from grabbing one of the bowls is that there was no e-mail saying they were up for grabs. I'm waiting for that e-mail and when it comes, I'm gonna be all over it like the frosting on that cake.

I told you, I have no willpower and I'm not even gonna try some Jedi Mind Trick to get myself not to eat one. The only thing that will stop me is if that e-mail never goes out because grabbing one without being offered would be rude. And since I'm the new kid on the block, I don't want or need that label.

Is Low Fat the Worst Diet Option?

I was watching "ABC World News" tonight and they had a story about the best diets. They compared Low Carb, Low Fat and the Mediterranean. Although more people follow a low-fat regimen, turns out Low Fat is not the best choice. According to the story:

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass., found in a study of 322 obese subjects that the so-called Mediterranean diet — a diet plan characterized by high levels of healthy fats, fruits, and vegetables — beat out the low-fat diet both in terms of how much weight patients lost, as well as how many health benefits they gained as a result of the diet.

And...

Moreover, researchers found that a low-fat diet bestowed the least health benefits on the dieters compared with the Mediterranean and low-carb diets. Those on the Mediterranean diet were most likely to have improvements in blood sugar levels, while those on the low carb diet had the most improvement in cholesterol levels.

I have heard of the Mediterranean diet but didn't know it could do this much for you! I especially like that not only did people lose more weight, but they were able to keep it off and maintain this style of eating for the rest of their lives.

My husband and I honeymooned in Italy last year and loved the food. It was fresh, nothing processed, the right portions--no wonder everyone over there looked healthy and great in their clothes. While here in America we're afraid of fat yet getting fatter and sicker each year.

Has anyone tried the Mediterranean diet? How'd it work out for you?

Office Saboteurs

This morning I get into work and fire up the computer. I take a sip of my coffee, a bite of my Nigella Breakfast bar and launch Outlook. The first e-mail is titled "Want Sugar With Your Coffee?" Not a good way to start the day. I knew what was coming. The e-mail announced that there were donuts in the break room. Oh joy.

I walk into the break room to put my lunch bag into the 'fridge. I glance at the individually-wrapped donuts in glazed, chocolate glazed and blueberry. Oh joy.

But I don't bite. Nope. I Dionne Warwick and walk on by.

I usually crash around 2 p.m. and hunt for something sweet. I return to the break room. There are two donuts left. A little voice says, "Take one!" But I beat back the temptation. I have a small cup of hot chocolate from the machine instead. Not sure if that was better. Probably not, but at least I didn't eat a donut!

I get really irritated when people bring their junk food to the office to share, especially if I'm working on changing my eating habits (notice I didn't say "diet"). I have no willpower. I will eat any cake, cookie or candy you drop in front of me. By the Grace of God, I was able to resist today's temptation. But what happens tomorrow or the day after? Will I be as strong? Suppose I have a bad day and succumb to my Emotional Eating disorder?

Luckily, the Office Diet blog offers a great post about keeping control during the work day and provides some handy suggestions for navigating food temptations.

How do you handle the food landmines in your office?

Online Food Journals

I need to stay on top of Web 2.0 trends for my job, so I read Mashable, a social media news site. To my delight, they did a post on 25+ Web Apps for Dieting and Getting Into Shape. This post was right on time since I know that to be successful, I'll need to keep a food diary.

I've done Weight Watchers five times and the thing that always screwed me up was the POINTS system and keeping track of them in a journal. I didn't do it most of the time and it's probably why I never did well on the program. Constantly reading food labels, using the slider to convert everything to POINTS and then writing it down in those little booklets they gave you at your meetings got on my nerves. I need something really simple and easy to use.

As you can see from the upper-right corner, I decided (begrudgingly) on The Daily Plate (TDP). It's not a bad journal, per se, but their Web page layout is horrible. I also tried MyCalorieCounter, DietTV and MyFoodDiary (you gotta pay to play on this one).There are too many ads on MyCalorieCounter and I got too many error pages when I was surfing the site.

I really liked the interface on DietTV. It's clean, it's got nice graphics and it's easy to navigate. Only problem is you have to follow one of the diet plans they list. That's great if you want to use a specific plan and they have 90 you can choose from. I also like that they let you track how much sleep you got because that's an important, yet overlooked, aspect of weight loss. If I was on a specific plan, I would definitely use them.

The charts on MyFoodDiary are overwhelming. After you enter your food for the day, it says, "If every day were like today, you'd..." and they predicted I would gain 10 pounds by August. But according to The Daily Plate, I'm on track.I have no idea who's right, but for now, I'll stick with TDP for a bit and see how it goes. They have free and Gold (paid) membership. You can try Gold for five days and I still can't figure out why it's better than the free membership. Gold gives you a cute weight tracker that you can put on your blog that is supposed to work with Blogger, but when I tried it, it didn't show up in this space. (Hey TDP, you may wanna fix this).

So far I'm having a hard time trying to navigate the site and that doesn't bode well for me sticking with keeping a food journal. Good ol' pen and paper may have to be the way to go. We'll see. Or maybe I'm just cranky and don't feel like trying. Whateverrrr! I'm going through sugar withdrawl!

What kind of eater are you?

Somehow I stumbled upon About.com's Calorie Count Plus to figure out how many calories in a recipe I'm going to try. I ended up setting up an account and so far they have some pretty simple journaling options. I like how they grade food from A to F. That's helpful to me. I'm going to test it out this week and compare it to The Daily Plate.They also have a quiz you can take to determine your diet profile. Here's how mine came out:

Emotional Eater

You use food to affect your mood. This started as a conscious way to motivate yourself when you needed it, but then it became your second nature and turned into an unconscious method of dealing with problems.

Your Eating Habits

You are familiar with sweets, such as cookies, ice cream, cakes, waffles and other carb-loaded diet killers. They somehow creep into your diet whenever you need a little bit of moral support, or when you feel frustrated, unhappy or simply bored. Therefore, those excess calories are not consumed during your regular meals, but in between.

The Solution

Emotional cravings are easily confused with hunger and are therefore difficult to identify. In most cases, emotional eating patterns only become evident when they have already taken place. Therefore, emotional eaters should plan their meals ahead, and always have a clear idea how much they want to consume. This makes any deviations clearly recognizable and allows the user to find alternate and non-food related methods for dealing with emotions.

Well duh! No news there.

What's your diet profile? Find out here. You may have to set up an account to do it.

The Daily Plate tracker update

Looks like they fixed it. You can now see it at the bottom of the blog.

Fake Out Your Brain

This summer, a doctor is going to implant a device in 30 volunteers to see if will aid in weight loss.  According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The pacemaker-like device is inserted just beneath the skin near the rib cage. It sends electrical impulses to block the vagus nerve, which tells the brain when the stomach is empty. The idea, in effect, is to trick the brain in order to curb the appetite.

Would you try something like this?

Food Planning

Last Sunday Brian and I decided that the best offense for this adventure we're taking is to do some hard-core food planning.  Makes sense in theory but when you've got two people who are essentially lazy and aren't very good at planning, we could be setting ourselves up for disaster.

Brian is the cook in the house.  He enjoys cooking immensely, so the challenge for him will be to create meals that are healthier than what we've been eating. We just celebrated our one-year anniversary and I think we've probably gained 20-30 pounds between the two of us.  So scary.  What can we say--we like to eat.

I gathered my recipe books (three from Weight Watchers and one from Prevention) and we went through them, flagging recipes that seemed palatable.  We came up with meals for the week and then Brian went shopping.  I hate going to the grocery store and he's way better at selecting things like meats and vegetables and catching good sales.  When he came back, we made breakfasts and lunches for the week.  We also did a little prep work for the week's dinners.  It was fun.  A nice husband/wife bonding activity.


All in all, we did a good job at eating what we made during the week.  We also liked the dishes.  We had Good Morning Muffins, Ham and Cheese Grits, Chicken-Apple Pita Sandwiches, Tuna Steak with Mango/Papaya salsa.  I wish I could provide links to these recipes.  I'll check to see if they're online.


I did miss sugar a bit this week as I was PMSing.  Also, I had a bad day Wednesday.  I had to pick up something from the grocery store and ended getting a bag of Terra Blues potato chips.  They have a new flavor out with chili and jalapeno.  I think I ate half a bag of it with my pulled pork sandwich, a leftover from the Food-a-Thon Brian and I held over July 4th weekend before the Great Weight Loss Challenge was to begin.

I will not lie--those chips were damn good.  And I didn't feel guilty about eating them either because I was in such a bad mood.  Obviously I have emotional eating issues that I need to work on.  Add that to the list. 

I'm On My Way, part deux

Or The Awful Truth...

The experts always say two things to help you with weight loss and motivation--keep a journal of everything you eat and take snapshots of yourself as you go along. Obviously a scrapbook is the best of both worlds.

Last Saturday I asked my husband Brian (who's doing this weight loss thing too) to take the pictures of me. I wore some spandex exercise pants and tank. I decided to pick the clingy-est clothes so it would be easy to see the weight melting off as time passes. He took an above-the-knee full body shot and a profile shot. When he was done, I looked in the viewfinder.

That's not how I look!

The first stage is denial...

I went upstairs to the office, plugged the camera into my computer and downloaded the files. Then I fired up Photoshop.

Anger...

The bathroom mirror has been lying to me!!!

Then acceptance...

Ain't no amount of Photoshop tricks that will help me.

Good lord! Do I really look like that? I had no idea.

Yeah, reality bites, doesn't it?

I think if I had seen pictures of me like this years ago, I would've never allowed myself to get to this point.

I'm sharing my first layout with you here. This is only the picture portion, not the roundup as it's not the end of the month.

I highly recommend this exercise. But don't just put this in your scrapbook. Put it on your refridgerator, in your pantry, on your bathroom mirror, in your wallet. Everytime you think about going to McDonald's, that picture will be a reminder of the work that needs to be done.

The funny thing is I didn't even cry when I saw these photos. There's no point. I let myself get this way and now it's up to me to make it right.

If you want to share your pics, add your link in the comments below.

I'm On My Way

Today is the first day of the 40 & Fierce Campaign. If you're thinking about making a change, I hope you will join me on this journey. We all need cheerleaders and weight loss is hard to do alone. So come on board the Weight Loss Train and let's do this!

As part of my program, I'm going to do a scrapbook documenting this entire process. To help me get started, I downloaded a PDF of Simple Scrapbooks Fast Album Formula (when you get to the site, look under Our Team/Formula Worksheet). Following the prompts on the sheet, I was able to come up with the album design and scheme.

I used some 8x8 sketches from Page|Maps that I thought would be easy to replicate. This will save time trying to figure out how to lay out the page and ensure that I complete one each month.

I'm using Making Memories' Noteworthy line to keep notes on the process (get it?) and an 8x8 Noteworthy album that I got at the Great American Scrapbook Convention. I want the look and feel to be as if I were doodling in a notebook and this is a great collection to achieve that look. I also wrestled with using a 12x12 album since all the papers are 12x12, but decided that 8x8 was better and the album was just too cute not to use for this project.

After I assembled all my materials, I made a title page and the first month's layout. My approach will be to make one layout per month. That layout will provide my starting weight and the month's observations, successes, stumbling blocks and next month's goals. Most importantly, there will be a full body photo of myself . More on that later.

In the meantime, here's my title page:

The journaling is taken from my blog post of the same title.

Ready to make your own scrapbook? Just follow the formula, think about what you want to document, come up with your design scheme, gather your materials and go! If you'd like to share your layouts, you can include a link to your blog/Web site in the comments below. Next time I'll show you my layout for July.