Weight Loss Post

If you can pinpoint your biggest challenges to success when you try to eat more appropriately, you can begin to work on conquering them. If you don’t know what they are,  it is much harder to make the necessary changes.

I actually sat down and analyzed what it is that causes me to not lose weight. Basically, for me, it breaks down into two things – things I eat that I don’t count in my daily total, because they seem insignificant (but are not), and things that I don’t count because the day was too awful to even think about, so I just forget it and assume it didn’t matter. But it did – what I ate caused me to gain or at least not lose weight.

Then I wrote down all of these things and actually estimated how many calories each of them added to my intake on a weekly basis. It was staggering. But the good thing is that conquering these things will make a big difference in my weight loss.

Let me just mention a few to get you started on your own personal list:

Not measuring things like pasta and yogurt. It is so easy to be eating twice what you are counting as having eaten. Total: as much as 800 calories a week, because I have yogurt every day.

Not stopping at just one cookie, but having two or three (or eight or nine). Each one contains the same number of calories, whether I want to accept that or not, so three is three times as many calories as one would have been. Total: Anywhere from 300 to 1200 each incidence – I won’t even say what that might be on a bad week! (Which is why cookies are now banned from my house!)

Eating “routines” such as having several sandwich cookies in the lobby at church while I’m listening to the sermon for the second time on Sunday, or having a McDonald’s cone after every Thursday choir practice.  Total: could be over 1800 per week, if I’m at church a couple times and up for choir as well.

Adding things to dishes and underestimating their impact – this could be granola on my yogurt or nuts and raisins in my oatmeal.  Total: Probably about 400 calories on an average week.

If I’m going to go to Culvers or Dairy Queen (and I AM going to go, eventually), having a big treat with all sorts of toppings, rather than just having a simple small sundae or cone or even just a small dish of the flavor of the day. I really don’t get that much more enjoyment out of the big treat, so why eat it? Total: Of course, I don’t go every week, but the times I do, it could save 300 or more calories.

My list goes on and on, and yours probably will, too. What I am doing now is trying to conquer a few of these things each week. I started with the very easiest and am leaving the really hard things, like my evening eating for the end, when I am feeling empowered by success in other areas. That is another dumb thing I tend to do – going after the worst things first. Sure it would be great to conquer the worst thing, but it simply isn’t going to happen until I’ve practiced conquering smaller things.

As of now, I’ve just about totally eliminated snacking on handfuls of nuts and sunflower seeds. And I’m working this week on measuring every bit of yogurt that I eat, as well as not having ice cream around the house at all, for now.

Next week – the cookies at church!