"I love food. I always have. I love the smell, the taste and texture. Everything I do revolves around food. While eating dinner I think about what I'm going to have for breakfast the next day. I love food for all the wrong reasons. I love food for every emotion I have and every event that is taking place in my life."
-- Author Unknown
Does this sound like you? When I read this a year ago, I felt as if I had wrote it. I was like, “Wow that is CRAZY that I let food control my life!” I always get asked if I totally changed my diet. This is what I am writing about this week.
I started my lifestyle change the Sunday before Thanksgiving 2006. I took a look back at my "Nutrition tracker" on Sparkpeople to see what changes I have made. One major change I made is that I no longer use butter or margarine when cooking. For most meals you will not even notice the difference. I also no longer drink my calories. I know this could be a major challenge for most people. I did not drink soda to begin with so the only things I had to cut out were sugary juices. One thing I cannot eliminate from my diet would be chips. I love them with all of my heart. To fulfill this craving I began eating Baked Lays (the cheddar ones are so good). Not to say these chips are good for you, but they are much better then the ones I was eating before. My family eats pizza once a month and so instead of eliminating that from my diet I now order thin crust Chicken Supreme and limit myself to two slices. I didn't think I was going to like it but, I have to say I LOVE it and my children have switched their pizza from pepperoni to Chicken Supreme also. These are just a few small changes that I have made in my diet. I encourage all of you to pick a food that you know is not good for you and find an alternative that makes you just as happy!
Before I go I just wanted to let everyone know that I didn't lose weight again this week but, I am maintaining...........if you would like to follow my daily progress please go to http://www.sparkpeople.com/mypage.asp
Best Regard,
Kristi Smith
next: It Really Is A Choice
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I love food. Cheese, pizza, ice cream, bread, puddings, doughnuts, sour cream, cottage cheese, cake, noodles, soups of all kinds, fried fish, baked chicken, fried chicken, stuffed chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, green bean casserole, chicken pot pie, biscuits, cobb salads, ranch dressing, blue cheese dressing, blue cheese, gorgonzola cheese, salads, chinese chicken salad, boiled eggs, souffle, omelets, lasagna, raviolis, spaghetti, I better stop I'm making myself hungry. I love everything about food, the way it tastes, smells, the way it feels in my mouth. Although I love food, I do like smaller dress sizes. Wherein has been a horrific battle for me ever since junior high.
I've always been pretty good about monitoring my food intake. Try not to eat too much, leaving leftover portions at the restaurant, not going back for seconds, counting calories, exercising to rid excess calories, etc... I've always had a little bit of a chub tub on me since junior high and high school. I even was bulemic/anorexic for a period of time, even through the first year of college, when I realized that wasn't probably the healthiest thing to do for myself. So I packed on the sophomore 25. Lost 10 as a freshman, gained that plus 15 more. So I started taking exercise classes, walked all over campus, lowered my food intake, lost 5 or so pounds. And I have hovered around 150 pounds, give more than take, ever since then. Being barely over 5 feet tall, that's not considered a healthy weight for a person with a medium sized bone structure. In college I didn't really worry about it too much, although it did keep me from dating like I would have liked to.
After college, I worked out occaisionally, which didn't really help, even if I did it every day for weeks. I think it is important to note that after eating, sometimes, I would feel extremelly exhausted and fall asleep for long periods of time. I usually attributed it to all the sugar from my favorite cereal, and so I really cut back on the amount of sugar I was consumming. I also cut back on the amount of salt, I cooked basically salt free for three years. I also used only extra virgin olive oil to cook with. I consumed mostly soups, vegetables and some meats. During that time I was my trimmest, a modest 145. Then I had a change in lifestyle, where I ate out a lot, and spent a lot of time enjoying food from different local dining spots. I gained some weight, almost 15 pounds, and what delicious 15 pounds they were. After a year of that, I moved 300 miles away to the area I'm living in now. I immediately put myself on a severly restricting diet, got involved with some exercising, and lost 10 pounds. I wasn't happy with that amount so I did the Atkins diet as according to the instructions outlined in his book, which made me feel really weird and I stopped it after the initial two weeks (lost a total of 2 pounds). I did the South Beach diet, which sort of worked, but didn't really lose much weight. Just kinda hovered around the same weight. I noticed if I didn't eat, I would get horrible headaches and my pulse would race and I would feel jittery and out of it. In fact, a lot of the time, words would escape me. I'd know exactly what I wanted to say, and have it pictured in my head, but it wouldn't come out and I'd be stumbling around for the one word. Words like thing, stuff, you know, were excessively common in my vocabulary. I'd have huge pauses in the middle of sentences, or not be able to finish them. I was also beginning to become lethargic, more and more so. I found working a regular work week, took everything out of me. I had little energy for anything else. I was also starting to slowly gain weight and not being able to lose it.
At one point I became so frustrated with my weight and inability to lose it, I gave up excess calories for lent one year. I was going to only eat 1200 calories a day, in 6 regular intervals of 200 calories per meal/snack. For forty days, I did it. Did not slack at all on consuming extra food. I was vigilant. The first four days were hell. I dealt with headaches, and a feeling that I was starving, but I pressed on and I lost 8 pounds by the end of it. I must point out that I did not have a regular desk job, but one where I was physically active all day long. After that, I eased off of my diet, and did not lose anymore weight. In fact over the next six months I gained it all back. The funny thing, I didn't have a change in exercise habits, and I wasn't eating much more food, calorie wise, than what I did for lent. I attributed it to my love of ice cream once or twice a month, and the handful of peanut m&m's every once in a while.
I felt doomed to forever have a love handles that would never melt away. Yes, it did take a blow to my self esteem. I have a mother who is barely over a hundred pounds and a sister who can drop five pounds as if it were a small backpack. She once challenged me to a lose a thon, I knew she'd win because she can take it off faster than I can say I love vegetables. I know she was only trying to help me, but it kinda stung. I felt that I would only hear how to lose weight from my mother for the rest of my life. She was constantly bringing to me articles about what's in food and how high fructose corn syrup is horrible and no person should ever eat it. Or whatever is bad for a person to consume or over consume. It's difficult to tell one's mother that you regularly stock your refrigerator with salad, cook with evo, eat mostly white meat and fish, take vitamins every day, eat fruits and vegetables, drink enough milk to drown a small child, and don't eat deserts and candies (except for the occaisional pint of ice cream), when you're the fattest one in the family. Every time I'd see my father, who happens to be an exercise nut, he'd tell me that I just need to get out and exercise more. I just couldn't tell my father of 70, brimming with health and rigor, that I didn't have the same amount of abounding energy he exhibited on a daily basis.
So cut forward to almost two years ago. I was regularly feeling run down with minimal work, unable to complete house chores, falling asleep after 2 hours of work, feeling exhausted all the time. I would also go through bouts where I had fluid in my lungs. I was beginning to have a hard time thinking about everything and was developing thoughts of paranoia and anxiety. I was depressed, and slowing gaining weight,even though I was slowly cutting back my food intake.
I moved into my fat fat pants, and the pairs of sweat pants I owned. I felt more comfortable in those, than my ever increasing waist line being crushed by the structure of a pair of jeans. Luckily enough, I met a guy who liked me for me and not the size I was. We got married in September of 07, despite my inability to lose weight. In fact, the dress I bought was a little on the large size, and by the time our wedding rolled around, the dress fit. Since then, I've made an effort to eat better and lose weight, with little to show for it. I started exercising, but just belly dancing and only 20 minutes of it, any longer and I would lose my breath and be unable to catch it for about 15 minutes or so. I would also run out of air on long walks, not tired, run out of air. I also began a diet that consisted of 1/2 cup of cottage cheese with 1 cup of fruit for breakfast, one activia yogurt for lunch with a half a sandwich (no cheese or mayo) or tuna, and a small sensible dinner. Since I had boughts of constipation or diarrhea (not really anything inbetween), I thought the activia would help. Still did not lose any weight, but continued my diet. I began to develop gerd. Severe gerd. Where I would eat breakfast, and then nothing till dinner because of the feeling in the back of my throat and nausea. I stopped eating the activia, because I'd eaten two a day for a week, and thought maybe that was causing the gerd. It continued. I stopped eating cottage cheese after I puked it up one morning with the pineapple I had consumed. I thought, stupid, it probably soured in your stomach. So I stopped eating cottage cheese with pineapple. I was still battling the gerd, and insomnia. I was hungry, but unable to quench my hunger. I was getting less than three hours of sleep a night, and eating little more than a piece of french bread lightly buttered or no butter at all.
I think the moment that I had an epiphany, I had just chugged a drink from a coffee shop, and hadn't really eaten anything at all that day because I was dealing with gerd something fierce. I felt this overwhelming urge to puke. I raced to the bathroom and lost every bit of my drink and the three pieces of dried fruit I'd eaten. I thought, there's something wrong. I went home that evening, hungry and feeling extremelly tired. I had 1/2 cup left of my all time favorite ice cream left in the freezer and decided to eat it. As soon as I had eaten the last bite, I began coughing, wheezing, almost like an asthma attack, and a wave of nausea overwhelmed me and I puked up every bit of the ice cream. That was my last bite of ice cream.
Over the course of the following month, I found out some interesting information, from my mother about my family history. There are milk allergies. Not just lactose intolerance, which I already knew, but milk protein allergies. On both sides of my family, my father and my mother. Now I knew there were allergies in my family, pollen, plants, certain chemicalsNot only that, if a serious allergy is going to happen, it happens in their 30's in my family. Lovely. Isn't that just peachy.
I cut out everything of my diet that has lactose, lactylate, lact(whatever), casein (milk protein), caseinate, casein(whatever else the put behind it or in front of it), and caramel coloring. Which is made with sugar, water and butter. Surprisingly, within two days, I felt better. Within a month, I have felt better than I have in years. Of course, having a milk protein allergy produces its own challenges. Eating out is horrible, pretty much salad, no crouton, no cheese, no dressing. Buying pre-made foods at the store is difficult, everything has milk or caramel coloring in it. I was a label reader before, and now a much more vigilant one now. I buy vitamins that don't use lactose as a filler, and I have to be careful about the kinds of wine I choose. I have more energy, regular sleep pattern, can think clearly again, no gerd, no more dry weird patches on my skin, no more adult acne, no more double vision, no more bloating (except occasionaly), and most importantly, I've begun to lose weight. The only thing I've changed in my diet, is milk. I eat normal sized portions and I'm still losing weight. I don't have 'food' headaches anymore, carry benadryl in my purse, and I can fit into some of my smaller pants now. I've lost some, and counting.
Posted by Rebekah Curtis | April 3, 2008 11:27 AM