Hey Food! You're not the boss of me, but we can still be friends.

‘Tis the season for diets and such.  And so I am working up the courage to share my weight loss story.

Warning – this gets long and should probably be 2 or 3 posts, seriously I’m looking at 1600 words here!

 This summer I lost 30 pounds.  The “before” me thought  “counting calories” should only be used as a line in a funny song or a punch line for a joke.  My favorite foods were (and still are) gravy and ice cream.  I would read ridiculous stories about astounding weight loss and just watch for the crazy thing they did that would allow me to let myself off the hook.  Something like, “ate 3 grapefruits for breakfast, cabbage soup for every meal for 10 weeks, rice cakes and water, green tea pills, howl at the moon”….blah…blah..blah.  But January is the time of year when I would annually scour the internet for healthy recipes and shop on amazon for light cookbooks wishing for something different in my life. 

This is me right before I started my weight loss journey.

These pictures are from September 09 and September 2010, same shirt - different jeans!

In March of last year I had just been to the doctor and saw that I was pushing 165 pounds, the most I’d ever weighed.  My doctor assured me I was just fine – and I shook off my alarm calling it vanity.  Then my family headed into a season where hubby was really busy and gone and I was stressed out and allowed myself into a yucky funk.  My biggest wake up call came one evening as I was walking down the hallway from my kitchen to my bedroom at about 4:50 on a day my husband wasn’t home.  I was trying to figure out how I was going to manage to the end of the day – feeling exhausted and selfish and unhappy.  I began to plan and comfort myself with the things I would eat that night after the kids were in bed…..and it worked, I felt better (insert red flag).

I believe in comfort food, I love food, I love to cook and share food.  I love to celebrate with food.  You will not ever find anything on this blog that is anti-food.  So don’t hear me saying that you shouldn’t ever comfort yourself with food, because I don’t believe that’s true.  When someone I love experiences a major life transition happy or sad – I take them food.  I know my husband and my kids’ favorite things and I make them for them, happily.  I have a friend who loves my Monster Cookies, and so once when her days were difficult making cookies is all I could think to do to help her…..and it did.  So what made me decide to change the way I was eating?

“When you eat or drink or do anything else, always do it to honor God.” 

1 Corinthians 10:31 CEV

Simply said, I wasn’t honoring God with the way I was eating and drinking.  Part of the original meaning of the word for honor here is to recognize someone or something for what it really is.  So the question for me was this: When you eat are you recognizing God for who He really is?  When I eat or drink or speak or rest or work or laugh or watch or read or think……I say “God You are (fill in the blank).  These activities are powerful little mirrors about what I really believe about God.  It’s not about the food, hear me here, because a chocolate chip cookie dough milkshake eaten at Braum’s with my precious daughter while we celebrate her getting her back handspring at gymnastics can absolutely be honoring to God.  The same ice cream eaten while I’m sitting alone on top of my bed watching some mindless sitcom can be dishonoring to God if I’m trusting my experience with my food to fill sadness or loneliness in my life.  The way I was eating was saying, “Food you are the boss of me” while also saying, “God you are not enough”.  That’s what wasn’t OK in my life.

Thinking back I can’t remember what made the difference in this year and every year before when I hit this same wall in my life.  I will share here what I learned and the boundaries I set – I hope it’s encouraging to you.   Here are the two “rules” I set for myself as I secretly began changing the way I ate.

1.       No dieting, I had to make changes I could make and keep forever.  This immediately disqualified anything sugar or carb-free or hard to cook.  Whew…….

2.       No food-hating.  I refused to make food my enemy.  I wanted to regain control over how I ate, but still eat and cook things I love.  This immediately disqualified anything requiring me to eat a frozen diet dinner while my family ate something yummy or any kind of diet with gross food as the main ingredient.  I am astounded by people who make food their enemy.  To me, that is the same wrong I am doing over-eating, just in a different direction.  Hello – I’d just rather be fluffy than be completely consumed with not eating.  I wanted freedom from food, not just a new addiction that wasn’t nearly as fun. 

Here’s where I would put in a Part 2 if I were a really good blogger, keep going if you dare!

So here’s what I did.  I happened on a cookbook by Taste of Home called The Comfort Food Diet Cookbook.  I bought it and read the opening section with all the weight loss stories (because usually this is where I let myself off the hook).  Even after rolling my eyes at the story of one lady who said she would go to the gym at night after her kids were in bed (nevah!) and stay on the treadmill until it said she’d burned 1000 calories (as if), I found the plan simple and at first glance not all that different from how I was already cooking and eating (a first).  This plan is based on calorie consumption and broke down daily eating into 3 meals and 2 snacks (yes please).  I had no idea how many calories were in anything, so this gave me a good starting place.  About this time I rediscovered an app on my iPhone called Lose It! and started playing with it.  When I entered all my info it set me at about 1350 calories a day.  I never really thought I could do a food diary and I still don’t think I could do one on paper, but something about this app turned calorie counting into a game – and it worked.  This tool allows you to enter all the food you eat (calories in) and exercise you do (calories out) and record your weight loss.  This app has come a long way in the almost year since I started using it (better food and exercise databases), in fact you can now use all the same tools on their website if you don’t have an iPod or iPhone and the creators have a brand new book out based on the success of the app.  I love this app, it made the biggest difference for me.  I didn’t tell anyone I was watching calories because I had no confidence that I would stick with it…..but then I started losing weight and celebrated a little, that was great motivation.

About the same time I downloaded an app where I could look up calories in food at restaurants.  This goes along with Rule number 2, I am not a food-hater and my family realistically is going to be eating fast food – no way I’m not eating with them.  I found lots of solutions using this app as well as just planning ahead a bit.  I spent an afternoon on my computer looking up nutrition facts from our favorite restaurants’ websites.  I made a note in my phone for each one so that when we ended up in those places I could order something besides a grilled chicken salad (which, by the way and much to my delight is not always the best choice anyway). I found a website where I could look up ingredients to food I cooked at home and made notes in my family cookbook.  Yes, all this is a bit time-consuming at first but you only have to do it once.  For everything you eat a second time, you already have the calorie info saved and can just re-select it – have I mentioned I love the LoseIt app?  And let me just mention this, it was good for me to throw myself into this project.  I was changing my life and the investment of time and energy was worth it.  Now that I’m on the other side I just want to say the work invested is very brief compared to the changes in your life which are for the rest of your life.   

Then I just did it, and I lost over 30 pounds in about 4-5 months.  I continue to monitor my weight once a week and record it on LoseIt.  While losing I only weighed twice a week – not at home.  (Trust me, this is important)

This is what I learned.

1.       I can eat in a way that affirms my health, my commitment to God and His Word, and still love food.

2.       I was wasting lots of calories on things I didn’t really want to eat.  I still cannot believe how much I just snacked with no awareness of it!  A handful of this, a bite of that – just to get rid of it……it added up to about 500 or more wasted calories a day.

3.       It feels good to actually get hungry and then eat something I really like and I can love smaller amounts.

4.       There is no cheating, I just ate but paid attention.  On days I really messed up, I just started again the next day – no guilt. 

 I am working on a list of my favorite “Not Bossy” foods, websites, and books with links that I’ll post soon.  I hope this helps, I would love to hear your story and share encouragement.

So, that’s how I made food no longer the boss of me, but we are definitely still friends.

Enjoy your food and your precious LIFE friends!

Jamy

UPDATE:  Since I wrote this I get a couple of questions I thought I'd address.  One is how many calories did I eat daily?  I set up my weight loss goals on the Lose It! app and it set me at about 1350 a day, as I changed the way I was eating I ended up eating about 1200-1300 per day.  Once I hit my goal, the program changed the number of calories, but I still stay about between 1500 - 1600 now for maintenance.  The other question was about why I recommend not having a scale at home.  I think (and have read) that daily weigh ins can end up being really discouraging....but that's just my two cents!  I used the scale away from home to keep myself from weighing too often.