God & Determination

There are two things that helped me start and stay on the program I am now using.

God was the first thing I needed to begin and maintain what has become a life change for me.  God is the one who helps and encourages me to stay true to this eating pattern.  I know I can turn to Him whenever I feel discouraged, like when I hit the plateaus were I stop losing or go on a rollercoaster ride of gaining and losing.  I always know He is there for me, so I do not become completely discouraged and give up.

Determination was the second thing I needed.  Now, I have been determined before, but what I lacked was a platform whereby I could make a change and monitor what I was eating.  I have to admit that I have felt determined in the past, and the desire to lose weight has been with me for a very long time; the problem was that I did not know how to go about it.  Oh yes, there is the concept of just eating less, but how can you do that when you don't want to give up certain foods.  That was one of the major factors that stopped me many times before I even started.

As I said before, my doctor made many suggestions, and one of those suggestions was counting calories.  Now, anyone who is of the older generations and remembers what it was like to try to count calories will remember that you had record everything on paper, you had to look up foods in books, and you had a real hard struggle with meals that came from your favorite recipes or from restaurants. It was not an easy task and became frustrating very fast, and what generally happened was that you gave up.  Absolute frustration that leads to giving up puts an end to anything whether you have the determination or not, and even knowing that God is on your side may not be enough to keep you going in the fact of frustration so overwhelming that you do not know how to make something work effectively.  With that said, so ends any attempt at losing weight, and if you lost anything, you immediately gain it all back.

So what if you have determination and God on your side?  How do you go about gaining your GOAL?  That is where the platform came in for me.  MYFITNESSPAL was a God send for me, and the fact that I even stumbled upon it was great.  Here was something that would count the calories for me, and not even just that, it also had the calorie count for restaurants and fast food places.  I could also add my own recipes and it would give me a calorie count for my meals.  With that said, I past the first major roadblock in my personal goal to not only lose weight but to make a life change in eating that I could live with.  That fact was also one of the major roadblocks in my quest for losing weight.

If whatever way you want to use to lose weight, it has to be something you can live with for the rest of your life.  Any diet you choose is never going to be something you can live with because all of them are to last only as long as you are losing weight.  They do you cover what to do to maintain that weight lose.  Myfitnesspal has a setting for maintaining your weight, and for those who need to gain rather than lose, there is also a setting for that.

Let me, right now, warn anyone who decides to use this wonderful app to lose weight that it is not a magical app that make weight loss easy.  Weight loss is never easy, and anyone who convinces themselves or anyone else that is lies.  Nothing worth really having in this life is easy; there will always be struggles.  It might start easy or seem to, but you then hit areas in your life that make it much more difficult and that is where God and determination step in to help, at least for me.  You see, I know that my determination to succeed is coming from God and that God helped me find a platform that would work with my determination.

So how much have I lost?  Well between January to April, I lost another 26.8 pounds, and I was not ready to stop there.  Was it easy to shed those next pounds?  Heck No!  It was a struggle, but once again God and determination were on my side.  Between that 26.8 pounds and 25 pounds I lost before that, I have seen a total loss of 51.8 pounds; I first-time achievement for me.

I was not done at the point; I still had more to go before I would reach my goal, but I was not going to give up, become frustrated, or lose heart even as more changes in my eating had to change to continue on my personal road to success.

Dieting

The most horrendous word in the English language is 'diet'.  To me, it is a word that breaks down into two words: 'die' 'it', and most time diets do die.  No diet is meant to be lived on for the rest of one's life, and in order to lose weight and keep it off, at least for me, it has to be something I can stay on as a new lifestyle.

This is me at what is probably my heaviest, and I must admit I was never proud of it and have wanted to do something about it for a long time.  I just did not know what to do.  It was not until last November that I became very determined to try something if I could find something that would work.  To date, I found that pills, regimented diets, and regular diets did not work for me.  My doctor suggested those foods you buy, but I could not afford that, and I knew they would have too many foods I could not eat.  I cannot eat tomato based sauces or recipes - tomatoes make me want to throw up because of an encounter I had with stewed tomatoes when I was a child, plus they give me bad heartburn as in the case of sauces made with tomatoes, canned tomato pasta, and canned tomato sauce - nor can I eat anything too spicy.  I also dislike most vegetables and especially most of the cooked ones with the exception of cauliflower, glazed carrots, and corn.  Other vegetables I prefer to eat raw if I eat them at all.

The next thing my doctor suggested was sending me to another doctor who would put me on a calorie diet.  See, there is the word again - diet, and again, we were talking about money I did not have.  So, I decided I would look for something I could live with on my own.

The first thing I found was a calorie program that started me at 1200 calories, and I knew that was not something I could start out at.  It was dropping too much too soon and meant instant failure.  I wanted something that I would not fail at and something I would be able to live with over time.  So that program led me to an ad for another program called My Fitness Pal.

Now, My Fitness Pal can be used three ways.  There is the on-line program, an app for your cell phone, and an app for iPad.  Better yet, it started me with 2200 something calories, so I thought I would try it.  One of the best features is that you can scan the bar code of the food you are eating or type in the type of food it is and it gives you the calorie count without having to look it up in a stupid book that only lists the most common types of food.  Second, you can put in your own recipes and it will figure out how many calories are in a serving, and even better, if you find a recipe on-line or on Pinterest that you want to try, you can copy and paste  the URL code and it will match the ingredients (most of the time) for you and also give you a calorie count for a serving.  The one glitch with recipes by other people is that they do not always tell you what constitutes a serving size.  It will say it serves 4 but does not tell what the portion size is and you usually cannot figure out the actual size of a serving until after you make the recipe.

Okay, so I decided I would try this app and see what would happen.  The first thing I discovered was that I certainly exceeded my daily allotted intake, so I had to make some adjustments to what or how much I was eating.

Now, this app is very nice because you can go back to the beginning of your records and see how you have done over time.  In the first month - November to December - I lost 15 pounds and that includes having Thanksgiving dinner, and from December to January - the dreaded Christmas food season - I lost another 9 pounds.  That was a total of 25 pounds in two months.  It was a very good beginning, and, for me, I found it very easy to do; now that does not guarantee it will be as easy for everyone else, and that is something I will address in on coming blogs..  The one surprising thing, but it should not have surprised me, was that for every 10 pounds you lose, your calories are dropped.  Of course, you could tell the app that you did not want to drop the calories, but that simple fact is part of the reason you can keep losing weight.

Overall, I felt very happy with myself because I had finally found something that worked and that I was able to live with because I chose what foods I would and would not eat and nobody became the food police saying 'No, you can't have that,' unless it was me that said it.  Donuts, for instance, I found out how many calories one donut had and decided to avoid them unless it was to have it as a treat, but if I chose to eat one, then I have to give up the calories someplace else during the day.  Do I eat donuts now - no, and I find I do not miss them, and they now have ended up tasting too sweet.