Weight Loss – Page 13 – A Measured Life

How to Lose 100 Lbs Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking the Bank: Part II – Know What You Consume

If all of this seems a little overwhelming to you, it’s okay. I promise you that despite it feeling like a lot of work in the beginning, but it’s worth it, and on top of (hopefully) losing weight you will also learn about portion sizes, nutrition and how your body works. If you want a quick and dirty way to figure out how many calories you should be consuming without going under, use this rule of thumb: Figure out what your weight would be at the top end of your weight range. For me, that’s 174 lbs. Then use a daily calorie intake estimator to figure out your maintenance calories at your goal weight. For this exercise, you’re going to need your age. I was 30 when I started losing weight, and I’m 33 now, so I’ll use 33 as my maintenance age. (You can find a good daily calorie intake estimator here at The Mayo Clinic website.)

So you’ve checked your liquid calories and cut back where you could. Hopefully in that process you’ve shed some

pounds and upped your water intake. This helps in more than one way, by the way: drinking more water helps flush your body and keep you hydrated, it’s great for your skin, aids digestion, and helps you feel full. It also makes you pee a lot. (Take it from a 160-ounce a day drinker! I may or may not be overly interested in the color of my pee.) Pro Tip: If you think you may be hungry, drink a big glass of water and wait 15 minutes. If you’re still hungry, eat. If you’re not, you may just have been thirsty: the body’s signals for thirst and hunger can be easily confused.

Business Dog says "Get to the point, Andrea!" — Business Dog says “Get to the point, Andrea!”

Anyway, back to business. The next thing I did on my journey to become healthier was to find out how many calories I was eating on a daily basis. Remember, I hadn’t yet changed my eating habits. I was still 252 pounds, but I was moving in the right direction. I wanted to make another small change, but the advice around the internet for a woman to eat 1200 calories a day to lose weight just did not fly for me. It sounded like torture! I’m 5’10” tall. That’s just too little food for me to subside on without becoming a raging crankypants. I figured if I knew how many calories I was consuming, I could cut back a little bit at a time and still lose without being miserable. So I scoured the internet for a place where I could track my food easily, and I remembered that I already had an account on SparkPeople.com from way back in 2008 when I had tried to lose before.

SparkPeople is a FREE website where you can track your food, exercise, and water intake, find recipes, articles, message boards and blogs about other people who are also trying to lose weight. I often describe it as Facebook for people who want to lose weight. Now I’m not compensated in any way by SparkPeople, I’m pimping it here because I USE IT and it works for me. I’ve been there full-time since April 2012, and I log in every day. If you don’t like the look and style of SparkPeople, there are many other options you can use: MyFitnessPal, FitBit (if you have a FitBit device) and LoseIt! are just a few. All of them have apps for your phone as well. Use whichever works for YOU. (Side note: You’re going to be hearing me say “do what works for YOU” a lot around here. It’s kinda sorta my motto. Diet, lifestyle, journey, method, whatever you want to call it, there isn’t one that works for everybody, because we live in this crazy diverse world where people are different, gosh darn it. To quote Martha Stewart, “And that’s a good thing.”)

For at least a week, just track your normal food intake. Be as accurate as you can. I invested in a digital food scale

right off the bat: weighing food can be much more accurate than measuring by volume, particularly with things that are oddly shaped. Potato chips, in particular, are better weighed than measured. Why? Because when the chips are whole, they take up more room volumetrically then when they’re broken into the crumbs you always find at the bottom of the bag. There’s a reason the nutritional information given on the back of the bag is related to weight. By the way, I’m not telling you to eat potato chips, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m telling you that *I* ate potato chips. I still do, actually. More on that in future blog entries. I’m also telling you that I TRACKED those potato chips in my food tracker, and I STILL FREAKIN’ DO. Whether I go over my calories or stay within my range, I track. Period. (There are very rare occasions where I am at a party and it’s just impossible to track what I’m eating. If it’s simple, I just guesstimate, but I always assume I ate more calories than I think I did. If it’s complicated, like a recent family party, I just track the rest of the day and skip that meal, and I try to eat more lightly the rest of the day.) Just the other night I blew my calories on an assortment of Reese’s peanut butter treats. Two Reeses trees leftover from Christmas, and FOUR, count ‘em, FOUR individual cups. Ugh. Yes I went over my calories, yes I tracked them. Why? So when I gain a few pounds, I can check my food tracker to see where exactly I went wrong. It’s called accountability.

"Andrea, I don't believe you." http://khongthe.com/wallpapers/animals/suspicious-dog-99007.jpg — “Andrea, I don’t believe you.”
http://khongthe.com/wallpapers/animals/suspicious-dog-99007.jpg

Once you have your week’s worth of calories consumed, take a good look at how many calories you’re consuming a day. For me, at over 250 pounds, it was close to 2,500 calories a day. I was also, despite thinking I was “active”, sedentary. I basically had a desk job, I drove to and from work and parked close, and when I got home from work I would cook myself dinner and play video games on my backside for hours, stopping only for snacks, which usually consisted of Doritos, potato chips or ice cream. According to the USDA a 30 year old woman who is sedentary should only be eating 1800 calories a day to maintain a healthy weight, but the fine print says that woman is 5’4” tall and 126 lbs. Yeah, that wasn’t me. So, what then? How do you lose weight without feeling like you’re starving to death? Well, I cut back a little at a time. I don’t really remember how much it was right off the bat, but I’m pretty sure I decided to eat within an 1800-2200 calorie range. For a person of a healthy weight with a moderately active lifestyle, this is maintenance range (In fact, I’m eating around this amount right now, when I’m not bingeing on Reeses cups!) but for someone who is almost 100 lbs overweight, it’s weight loss range. So I ate at that range, and again, I lost!

If you’re as overweight as I was, and you want a good idea of what you’ll be eating when you reach your goal weight, the first thing you need to know is what your goal weight should be! I’ll be honest: my goal weight changed over time. Yours might, too. My doctor advised me to stick to the high end of the BMI chart, which is just under 25. (Yes, yes, I know the BMI chart is mostly bull hockey, as it doesn’t take into account your muscle mass, but when you’re morbidly obese it’s a good guideline to start out with. It’s not the be all end all of determinants but it helps.) So I scoured the interwebs for an ideal weight calculator. (You can find a good one here at the CDC website.) For a 30-something woman who is 5’10” tall, a good weight range for me is between 129-174 lbs. So, I was originally aiming for 174 lbs, or a loss of just over 100 lbs. A HUNDRED POUNDS. This was the first time I realized I was more than a hundred pounds overweight. I may have freaked out a little. I mean, I’d always known I was fat. I’d basically been fat since birth, and when you’re a fat kid all the other kids let you know, am I right? But a HUNDRED POUNDS overweight? I was gobsmacked. I’d already lost 23 of them, but still, it’s a shock.

BMI Calc — There’s that word again: OBESE!

You enter your info like so:

So, if you want to maintain a weight of 174 as a 33-year old woman who’s 5’10” tall, you’d want to eat a maximum of 2100 calories. To maintain a weight of 275 with the same stats, you’d want to eat a maximum of 2250 calories. Not a huge difference, is it? If you’re eating 2250 calories a day, and cut 150 calories a day (that’s just a snack, really), in a year you could potentially lose 15.64 lbs. Not bad, eh? Just by skipping ONE snack a day!

“But Andrea, I have way more to lose than 15 lbs, and a year is FOREVER! Can’t I lose faster than that?”

You can, and you may. But this is A Measured Life, and we do things the slow way.

Stay tuned for Part III!

Click here to read Part I.

How to Lose 100 Lbs Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking the Bank: Part I – Drinking Your Calories

*sings* Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to staaaaart…

Heeeeeeey, it’s the New Year!

The holidays are over and you’ve decided to lose weight. You’ve made a resolution to do so, but you realize: you don’t know how!

Well, unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to lose weight. You may be confused by this statement. “Andrea,” you say, “You’ve lost more than a hundred pounds, surely you can tell me how to lose weight?” Nope, sorry, I can’t. What I *can* do is tell you how *I* lost weight. And no, it’s not the same thing. I am not you, and you are not me. This blog is called A Measured Life, and everything I do is measured. If you’re looking for a Get Thin Quick scheme, then my method of weight loss will not be for you. It took me almost three years to get to my goal weight. I did it my way: without a gym membership, without spending money on a weight loss club, without buying special “diet” food. When people ask me how I did it, I often tell them I lost weight in the most mind-numbingly boring way possible.

This will be a series of entries where I outline my weight loss story and what worked (or didn’t work) for me. I repeat: this is MY story, and just one way to lose those extra pounds. It is by no means the be all end all of weight loss, and it was not EASY. It is, however, pretty simple. These are guidelines, baby steps. Adjust it to your needs: if a step doesn’t apply to you, skip it, or add something that does apply to you. Adaptation, determination and consistency are your tools, use them.

HOW TO LOSE 100 LBS WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MIND (OR BREAKING THE BANK): PART I – DRINKING YOUR CALORIES

Picture this: October 2011. I was 275 lbs. I was 30 years old with pre-hypertension and nearly pre-diabetic. I was addicted to Coca-Cola and Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolattas. I drank my coffee in the morning with half and half, and I often drank an entire 12-cup pot by myself. My doctor was seriously worried about my health, and in truth, so was I. In the past, I had made half-hearted attempts to lose weight: SlimFast shakes, the South Beach Diet, a liquid cleanse that looked AND tasted like bile. I even tried one of those belts that you wear that are supposed to give you a six-pack while sitting on your ass. Many of my friends and family were obese, and it was often mentioned that I “carried it well”. Hell, even the medical assistants at the doctors office were often surprised by my weight. But that didn’t change the fact that I was, indeed, morbidly obese. *insert music from the shower scene of Psycho here*

Ugh.

Well, I knew three things:

I had a tight budget.
I was lazy. (I stand by this fact, despite numerous protests from friends.)
I didn’t want to deprive myself.

So I decided to start small by cutting out calorie-laden drinks. An attempt to cold turkey Coca-Cola yielded nothing but agonizing headaches. (Note: do NOT cold turkey caffeinated soda, it will cause you to shake your fist at the sky and then groan in pain and go lie down because it huuuurts, it huuuurts!) So once again, I decided to start small, and I replaced one 12 oz. can of Coke a day with an equivalent amount of plain tap water. (For the record, a 12 oz. can of Coca-Cola Classic has 140 calories.) Each week, I cut back yet another Coke until I no longer drank any soda on a regular basis. (I drank a LOT of Coke.) Phasing out Coolattas was easier, as drinking a frozen beverage in the middle of winter is not my idea of a good time, plus, at $4+ apiece, they were expensive. I still drank my morning coffee, but over time I replaced sugar and half and half with agave and almond milk.

December 2014 - A happier, healthier me! — December 2014 – A happier, healthier me!

This is the ONLY STEP I took towards a healthier me for 6 months. That’s it. So what happened in that 6 month period of making one tiny change?

I lost 23 pounds. TWENTY-THREE POUNDS. Think about it: a pound is the equivalent of 3,500 calories. That’s 80,500 calories I didn’t consume in that 6 month period. If those calories were just from my Coca-Cola consumption alone, that’s 575 cans of Coke I didn’t drink. If you assume each of those months has an average of 30 days, which makes a 6 month period approximately 180 days, that’s 3.19 Cokes a day. A DAY. That’s 447 calories I was consuming in liquid form alone. Considering the average woman should be consuming 2,000 calories a day according to the FDA, that’s nearly a quarter of my daily requirement of calories that is nutritionally void.

Note: Coke was my caloric liquid of choice. There are millions of caloric beverages out there that are drunk on a daily basis without the drinker even considering how many calories are involved. You go right ahead and check Google for the calories in a Starbucks Frappuccino, I’ll wait. Yup. A Grande Mocha Frappuccino will set you back 410 calories. That’s almost what you should be consuming for an entire meal. In the years since, I’ve cut my liquid calories down to fewer than 50 a day on average, and most of that is in the form of the unsweetened coconut milk I use in my coffee.

So think about it: how many calories do you drink on a regular basis, and how many can you avoid in the new year?

The Obligatory Welcome Post

Welcome to AMeasuredLife.com!

My name is Andrea, and I live in a vast world where many things are quantifiable. (*ahem* For the record, so do you.) The word measured has a special meaning for me: it describes the way in which I live my life every day. What’s funny is that I didn’t even realize it: it took a friend’s observation of my behavior for me to see this side of my life. Dictionary.reference.com defines measured in the following ways:

adjective

ascertained or apportioned by measure :

The race was over the course of a measured mile.

2.accurately regulated or proportioned.

3.regular or uniform, as in movement; rhythmical:

to walk with measured strides.

4.deliberate and restrained; careful; carefully weighed or considered:

measured language; measured terms.

5.in the form of meter or verse; metrical.

In my life, measure is everywhere. I’ve spent the last 3+ years regaining control of my health. In October 2011 I was a 275 lb pre-hypertensive, pre-diabetic woman barely making more than minimum wage. In the process of losing more than 100 lbs, there have been many things that required measurement: my weight, inches lost, the weight and volume of the foods I ate, the volume of water I drank, the calories I consumed and the ones I burned, the miles I walked, the stairs I climbed, the reps I lifted, the seconds I planked, the days I’d worked, the new recipes I learned, the money I spent on healthier food, workout equipment and (*gasp*) new clothes, the new friends I made, loved ones I lost, times I cried, times I raged, times I laughed and smiled. (Holy moly that’s a buttload of measuring!) And while I measured all these things, I, myself, was measured, controlled. I walked the line between lazy bum and overachiever. I found a middle ground that worked for me in all aspects of my life: emotional, financial, physical and dietary. I found that being measured worked for me.

I still don’t have a large income. Money will always be something that needs to be carefully budgeted in my household. But instead of using this as an excuse to buy cheap junk food, I thought of it as a challenge: how can I get the best results out of the least expenditure while still feeling like I wasn’t depriving myself? How can I still enjoy the things I love while bettering my health? I didn’t spend any money joining a gym, or using a diet club like Weight Watchers, or buying food from Jenny Craig. All of these things can, and have worked for people. But each of them represented a financial cost that I wasn’t willing to spend. What did I have that I was willing to spend? Time. I learned to budget and plan for meals. I learned I loved to walk outside when it was nice, or jog in place at my computer when it wasn’t. I learned, with the help of a few friends, to love kettlebells, a workout that I could do consistently from my living room. I learned that I could still enjoy all of the exotic foods I loved to eat by making them at home in a healthier way. I learned that eating healthier and saving money could go hand in hand. I learned I could enjoy my life and lose weight without feeling I was giving up everything I loved. I learned so many wonderful things about living and about myself. I have grown as a person on the inside as I shrunk on the outside.

This blog is not about telling you how to lose 100 lbs, or how to be measured. Sure, you could get those things from here if you wanted, and I hope you do. But what this blog is about is me, exploring the world as only I can: with measure, through budgeting, food, physical activity, culture and, perhaps most importantly, observation and thought. I hope, in the process of reading my recipes and stories, that you can garner some insight into yourself and your life, and expand your views of the world at large through your own exploration. There’s a lot to learn out there, a lot we can measure on our own terms. You just have to seek it.

Dare to know. Dare to learn. Dare to measure.

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