If I had it all to do over..........

[T.M.]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

>>I have a difficult enough time determining with any degree of accuracy what I'm eating today,>>

Why are you having a difficult time?

"Difficult" may not have been the best word because, let me put it this way, learning to play Chopin Etudes was definitely more difficult. My routine is below. You pick a better word.

1. Decide what food I will eat.

2. Weigh the food I will eat (unless it's something like an egg).

3. Open my custom Excel spreadsheet and enter amount of food. (The instant I enter the data, Excel calculates fat, protein, carbs, calories, fiber, totals of those and % of total calories due to fat, protein and carbs.)

4. When satisfied, I subtract any food that I did not eat.

Using the above method, I think that I have a pretty good idea of the amount of carbs I'm eating on a daily basis, plus or minus 2 grams, and the amount of kcal plus or minus 50 (neglecting the inevitable error in manufacturer data on a particular package of cheese, for example).

Either I remember every number of grams for each particular food for the entire day and enter it once in the spreadsheet, or I enter data in the spreadsheet as the day goes by before, and sometimes after, each time I eat. Because I am at home most days, I have chosen the latter, so I open the spreadsheet (instantaneous) and enter data at least three times a day.

Voila!

I'm anxious to hear what word you might have chosen instead of "difficult".

[atkinsgal08]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

What you're doing doesn't seem "difficult".

I used to keep a notebook ... and simply wrote things down as I ate them, tracking as I go along.

To me, "difficult" means "hard to do" ... which is why I asked what was "difficult".

I think your routine is what a lot of successful people do ... in one form or another.

I would consider it "planning"!

[Spring Towry]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

>>I must disagree with you about one thing you’ve said, however. I DO want to remember how I ate “before”. I speak for myself when I say if I forget my past, I might very well repeat it. <<

All I meant from that is that I will never go back to eating the wrong way for my body. I meant no insult, I am sorry.

[chibelly]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

Before atkins i was drinking about 6 20oz sodas per day. No water no milk no juice no tea no coffee no other fluids but those 6 sodas per day.

Breakfast was either a fast food breakfast sandwich and hashbrown or nothing. Lunch was fast food or subway. Even though subway is looked upon as heating healthy its really not when you are eating a footlong sub with chips and a soda. Dinner would be more fast food if i am working or some sort of pasta at home because my girlfriend eats pasta like 9 days a week .

What suprises me is how slowly my weight climbs. Im guessing if i took a week off of work i would probably gain 30 pounds eating that way. That has been my diet since i quit smoking a few years ago with a few candybars and ice cream here and there. When i smoked i skipped breakfast and lunch and ate out for dinner. I was probably drinking about 6 sodas a day back then also. Smoking has zero carbs . Seriously though i gained a lot of weight after i quit smoking but now i can climb stairs without wheezing and when i smoked i could not. So if i had to stay fat forever because i quit smoking i would do it.

If not for the 2 weeks of induction i would have given up on atkins after the first week. It took 3 days just to get over the cravings and the loss of appetite really helps you think/feel/understand that you really dont need to eat all day long. Then when the weight just falls off after the second week it really motivates you to stick to the plan and before you know it week 3 is over and then week 4.

[T.M.]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

What you're doing doesn't seem "difficult".

I used to keep a notebook ... and simply wrote things down as I ate them, tracking as I go along.

To me, "difficult" means "hard to do" ... which is why I asked what was "difficult".

I think your routine is what a lot of successful people do ... in one form or another.

I would consider it "planning"!

At first I did the writing-things-down technique, too, but I abandoned it instantly after I developed the spreadsheet. In fact, I developed the spreadsheet because I got sick of writing things down. However, if I were working away from home every day, I'd still have to write things down.

But even with the spreadsheet, I think measuring, recording, etc. is hard to do - meaning I have to force myself to do it. Even after this length of time, it does not come easily or naturally. When and if I reach my goal weight, I will try to curtail doing it and see what happens. It is simply too much hassle.

I am more than willing to weigh myself each day, or every few days, but I really do not want to keep track of all the numbers.

At least I have a very good idea what has a lot of carbs and what does not. After I reach goal weight, as long as I stick to the stuff that doesn't, I should be OK. (Maybe that's the case for everyone.) For me, this means that I must have low-carb stuff instantly available for snacking and no high-carb or sweet stuff in the house at all.

>>I must disagree with you about one thing you’ve said, however. I DO want to remember how I ate “before”. I speak for myself when I say if I forget my past, I might very well repeat it. <<

All I meant from that is that I will never go back to eating the wrong way for my body. I meant no insult, I am sorry.

Absolutely no insult taken, so don't be sorry.

An argument could be made that forgetting the way one used to eat might be a good thing. I wish that I could erase all memory/knowledge of cookies, fudge, all candy, birthday cake, pastries of all types, doritos, potato chips, lasagna, spaghetti, pizza, ice cream shakes, etc.,etc., but I know that I used to eat tons of them and I know that that is why my weight was what it was.

(Maybe someday there will be mandatory warnings on chocolate ice cream sundaes that are similar to the warnings on cigarettes - "eating a lot of this will make you big and eventually kill you".)

Before atkins i was drinking about 6 20oz sodas per day. No water no milk no juice no tea no coffee no other fluids but those 6 sodas per day.

Breakfast was either a fast food breakfast sandwich and hashbrown or nothing. Lunch was fast food or subway. Even though subway is looked upon as heating healthy its really not when you are eating a footlong sub with chips and a soda. Dinner would be more fast food if i am working or some sort of pasta at home because my girlfriend eats pasta like 9 days a week .

What suprises me is how slowly my weight climbs. Im guessing if i took a week off of work i would probably gain 30 pounds eating that way. That has been my diet since i quit smoking a few years ago with a few candybars and ice cream here and there. When i smoked i skipped breakfast and lunch and ate out for dinner. I was probably drinking about 6 sodas a day back then also. Smoking has zero carbs . Seriously though i gained a lot of weight after i quit smoking but now i can climb stairs without wheezing and when i smoked i could not. So if i had to stay fat forever because i quit smoking i would do it.

If not for the 2 weeks of induction i would have given up on atkins after the first week. It took 3 days just to get over the cravings and the loss of appetite really helps you think/feel/understand that you really dont need to eat all day long. Then when the weight just falls off after the second week it really motivates you to stick to the plan and before you know it week 3 is over and then week 4.

I was "lucky" in that I drank absolutely no soda pop. I don't really know why, because I loved sugar.

I was also lucky that I never smoked (except some grass in college). I know several people who blew up like balloons after they stopped smoking. (I, on the other hand, had no excuse other than that I loved carbs.)

[not2late]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

I have a difficult enough time determining with any degree of accuracy what I'm eating today, let alone an average daily intake for the 30-day period prior to my starting my Atkins-like regimen 156 days ago.

For example, if MacDonalds' data about its own meals is to be believed, the meal I described above by itself has 2200 calories and 201 grams of carbohydrate! Now what I might have eaten prior to, or after, that honking meal on those days that I consumed it, I have no idea. How many times would I have eaten that meal in a typical month prior to Atkins? Minimum once per week. Maximum twice per week. But I might be wrong even on that estimate.

I used to drink "at least" (new unit of measure) a gallon of whole milk a week. That's at least 2400 cal and 176 grams of carb per week. But sometimes I drank more than that. And much of that was part of ice cream shakes, whose ice cream contained much sugar and I added much more. (I ate almost a gallon of ice cream a week.)

How many potato chips and doritos did I eat? Not a clue, but sometimes I'd eat "a bag" at a sitting. How big a bag? Not a clue.

See what I mean? I don't have a clue beyond knowing that my carb and cal consumption was an astronomical number. My body may have in fact been a very efficient burner of carbs, .......... or maybe it wasn't.

Again, having such ignorance about what I was eating, and my body's rate of weight change, if any, was no way to start an eating plan.

I agree with you there. I guess I was aware of my pre-Atkins menues because I was trying to eat "healthy".

[lannerjarv]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

prior to atkins i was a carboholic.
i was constantly on some "plan" or "journey" trying to lose weight and feel better about myself.
i typically had a coffee shop muffin and a coffee for breaky, a panini or something even worse for lunch and then at dinner would have potatoes, a meat and then chips late at night. AND a lot of booze.

i just got back from Vegas and pretty much (despite all my self talking) returned to the above. i drank too much, ate too much and came back feeling awful. I'm back on the plan today and already feeling so much better.

i think this WOL is about finding what is best for your body and working with it instead of against it. i eat WAY more veggies now and find that i'm enjoying them. processed food tastes chemical, sugar is too sweet and all that junk makes me bloated and cranky.

at the end of the day i want to look in the mirror and like what i see and feel confident, and I find that eating the atkins way does that for me.

[T.M.]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

Since I started this thread and it's still on Page 1, I'm going to go a bit off topic rather than start another thread.

My Atkins-like diet is one in which I have decided not to go over 30 g of carb for any reason. Most days it is very close to 24 g. (I do this because I think that it maximizes the rate of my weight loss, although I am not certain of that. But that is not the point of this post.)

Since Day 1 (Oct 17, '09) I have not "slipped up" once. No sugar; no "bad" food whatsoever of any kind. This is the first time in my life that my body has gone anywhere close to that long without a great deal of carbohydrate every day. If I remember right, my first experience with Atkins 10 years ago lasted maybe 60 days and I cheated occasionally during that time. I never lost my desire for certain high-carb foods - pizza being the highest on that short list.

Now I have no remaining desire for any high-carb food, but that is not exactly why I'm writing. I am writing because at the age of almost 60, I have discovered the difference between "hunger" and "craving".

I now experience hunger solely as a two sensations - one is a slight overall weakness, the other is that my stomach begins to feel uncomfortable. Absolutely no part of hunger is in my brain. I simply "know" that I'll feel stronger and my discomfort will go away if I eat something - anything.

I remember what it was like to "crave" something. For me it is a completely different sensation than hunger. It occured only as a thought (or a desire) in my brain. The lack of the food being craved did not produce the same weakness or feeling in my stomach that hunger now does. I experienced many cravings right after a big meal, when I was already "full"! Ironically, a full stomach was one of the absolute best times to "satisfy" that craving!

I now realize that the almost-constant overlapping of the two made it impossible for me to separate the two (although if you had asked me after that big meal whether I could survive without the gigantic piece of apple pie a la mode, I probably would have answered "yes".)

My wife, who has remained at normal weight her entire life, has a particularly strong craving for chocolate - a craving, ironically, that I never had. She cannot go for more that a couple of days without at least a little bit of it, but she, unlike me, is a person who can eat one small portion of it and "that's enough". I find her cravings amusing, especially because she doesn't put on an ounce of fat as she eats her chocolate and toasts and sweetened yogurt and occasional ice cream cones and french fries with the grand kids.

It is strange, unusual and downright foreign for me not to crave anything, but it is liberating. And for the first time in my life I now actually know what it feels like to be hungry (by itself).

[Spring Towry]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

>>Since Day 1 (Oct 17, '09) I have not "slipped up" once. No sugar; no "bad" food whatsoever of any kind. This is the first time in my life that my body has gone anywhere close to that long without a great deal of carbohydrate every day. If I remember right, my first experience with Atkins 10 years ago lasted maybe 60 days and I cheated occasionally during that time. I never lost my desire for certain high-carb foods - pizza being the highest on that short list.<<

I have been on Atkins full force since 10/1/09 I have not slipped up once either. I don't have any cravings. I feel more in control of myself. I sometimes think"Hmmm, I want a peanut butter cookie." then I think"No I don't, I don't want a cookie." It is never really a craving, only a habitual thought.

[T.M.]

Re: If I had it all to do over..........

.............................
I have been on Atkins full force since 10/1/09 I have not slipped up once either. I don't have any cravings. I feel more in control of myself. I sometimes think"Hmmm, I want a peanut butter cookie." then I think"No I don't, I don't want a cookie." It is never really a craving, only a habitual thought.

I'm even beyond the simple thought, unless I have a visual reminder. Now the only time I ever think about "the bad stuff" is when my wife or someone else is eating it right in front of me.

I'll know that I've really arrived at the pearly gates when I have to ask someone what a dorito is. (I was just searching my brain for an example. Honest.)