I've been busy for the last couple of days so haven't had the time to properly muse about the daily lessons. It's 5am in Nice and I've been up for two hours... so what better time to catch up, right?
First, about the January 17th lesson:
Make a list of things you’ve tried to lose weight in the past. Now ask yourself, “How did that work for me?”
I know many women have tried numerous dieting programs, but I've only tried one thing: Weight Watchers.
The Weight Watchers (WW) thing, many years later... I don't really regret it, per se. It was a relatively safe way to lose my weight, but there were two key things about it that I didn't like:
The first thing I didn't like about WW was that it vilified fat. Basically, WW is a calorie counting program. You're allowed a certain number of points per day, depending on your weight. 1 point generally equals 50 calories. Except the calculation of points is rigged a little... 50 calories that have a lot of fibre in them cost slightly less than a point. Calories that have a lot of fat in them cost slight more than a point.
The result of this fat/fibre calculation is that people are supposed to skew their foods away from fatty ones and toward fibrous ones. This means a lot of whole grains and not very many nuts and avocados. Honestly, I never ate avocados on WW because they "cost" me so much points-wise. The same goes for nuts and seeds. How is it healthy to avoid avocados, nuts and seeds? Eaten in the proper amounts, there is nothing wrong with them (particularly if the nuts and seeds are raw rather than roasted). But here I was, eating WW snack cakes and chocolate bars instead. Bleagh. (That's another thing I didn't like about WW - their promotion of processed and artificial foods, rather than whole, unprocessed foods... as evidenced by their WW line of Splenda-laced crap.)
The second thing I didn't like about WW was the counting. I was obsessed with optimizing my points and always had to plan a day's activities around food. I would only go out to Japanese restaurants or places I could get salads, which affected my social life. I knew every point value for foods I commonly ate and was constantly thinking about food. I drove my husband bonkers... and to be honest, I drove myself bonkers too. When I finally hit maintenance I experimented with eating healthily without counting. It was a great struggle.
All of my obsession with food and counting calories led to binge eating. I would get to the end of the day and wouldn't have enough points to eat what I wanted to eat... and instead I would gorge on sweets. I was working out with a personal trainer at the time (2 to 2.5 hours a day at the gym, 3 to 4 times a week) and it was only because of this intense workout schedule that I was managing to keep the pounds off. When I stopped working out because of my back, on they came.
So yes, although WW technically helped me lose 50 pounds, and I learned a lot while on the program, I can say confidently that it didn't work for me. I'm looking forward to trying something much more healthful and sustainable.
