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When I owned my publishing business, I spent 50 to 60 hours a week sitting in front of a computer. By 2000, I reached a point where I couldn’t go on without doing something to change my weight and my life.

I tried almost all of the popular diets and had consequently ballooned up to over 275 pounds. Losing the first thirty pounds wasn’t too hard. I changed what I ate, gave up fast food restaurants – yes, I haven’t had a McDonalds hamburger or fries, anything from Burger King or any form of Taco Bell combos for eleven years – and started drinking more water.

I didn’t exercise in the beginning. I think the shock of decreasing my daily calorie intake to something closer to what it should have been got my body moving on a fast track. There came a time, though, when I had to face the dreaded exercise issue.

I hate to exercise.

I joined a gym. I hated every minute of it. I mapped out a one-mile course through our neighborhood. I didn’t like that any more than the gym. It all felt like more work added to the end of my already exhausting day.

Exercise, by its definition, seems to be forcing yourself to do something you dislike so you can lose weight faster and get in shape. I don’t like doing things I dislike.

Then, one day I was at the park with a friend. We just finished walking the 2.2-mile lake perimeter – which I didn’t think I could do – and were sitting at a picnic table, watching people pass by on foot, rollerblades, skateboards and bicycles.

Something clicked in my head and I had one of those “Ah Hah” moments.

I love walking the lake with my best friend. We talk and laugh the whole time and it goes by quickly. I watched the rollerbladers with the wind in their hair. I could tell they were loving it and I thought about how much fun it would be to try it.

Click.

The problem with exercise is the word “exercise.”

Any activity put on a list called “Exercise” automatically becomes something I don’t want to do. Running, lifting weights and circuit training go into that category. I never thought of walking the lake as exercise just as I never thought of practicing Tai Chi as exercise. These are just physical things I enjoy doing that make me feel better.

If you can make that perspective shift and start looking at exercise not as something you have to do, but as getting out and doing fun things such as riding a horse, playing a round of golf, bowling, volleyball or learning how to rollerblade, “exercise” will be something you look forward to.

We need to find a new name for exercise. Something like “Recess” or “Playtime.”

We only have a few hours a day that we can call our own. I don’t know about you, but I plan to spend those hours with someone I like, doing something I enjoy. No more exercise for me.

Until next time,

Susan

Healthy Diet: Fresh fruits, vegetables & low-fat dairy

There’s something about a new year that fosters renewed hope. Are you ready to make 2011 the year you finally get serious about your weight? Are you ready to give up fad diets and find a better way to lose those pounds?

One of the biggest pitfalls for people with a lot of weight to lose is that mindset of “Let’s go, go, go! and see who finishes first!” This pressure to “get on board and get it done” results in diets that are unhealthy in many ways. Those women who want to lose 25, 50 or 100+ pounds, need to realize that this is not a race. To lose that much weight, we must first change how we live and then watch the pounds come off as a result of those changes.

Key #1 to losing a lot of weight

~ Slow down and make your life changes thoughtfully by integrating them gradually ~

(If you don’t do this, I can guarantee you will fail to lose your weight – again)

Choosing a diet program can be difficult. Many popular diets – like Atkins – emphasize some food groups over others, for example “high protein, low carb.” The Mediterranean diet takes a more vegetarian, “high carb, low protein” approach. Others advocate cutting calories drastically – under 1,000 calories a day. This is hard on your kidneys and will slow your metabolism. You may see some (temporary) results but you won’t be able to stay on a diet like that long enough to lose all of the weight you want to lose. Any diet that doesn’t support your overall health is dangerous. The simpler the diet and the closest to eating food in its raw, natural state (like salads and fruit), the better.

The fact is, you know your body so much better than any diet program. It may take awhile to figure out the best way to implement a weight loss plan, but you can do it. A good place to start is working with this Lifestyle Changes list. These are areas that trip people up. You could begin to lose weight by working on the things on this list.

Lifestyle Changes

• Controlling portion sizes
• Journaling how you’re doing and what you’re eating
• Eliminating sweets
• Adding more vegetables to your food plan
• Controlling stress
• Eating breakfast every morning
• Setting reasonable goals*
• Giving up eating in fast-food restaurants
• Giving up or limiting foods you’re “addicted” to
• Packing a lunch and two snacks so you’re prepared to nourish your body during the work day
• Giving up sugary sodas
• Finding a healthy “diet” plan
• Using the scale appropriately
• Starting an exercise routine
• Eliminating dairy and/or wheat
• Drinking more water
• Learning how to order in a restaurant

Setting reasonable goals*: be sure they are attainable and give them a deadline.

I’m planning to write blog posts covering many of these things in the weeks to come. In the meantime, you might want to copy these ideas into your journal and add anything that’s not on the list that you want to work on.

Dear Reader: I’d love to hear about your lifestyle changes. What areas are you working on? What goals have you set for 2011? Let’s talk about how you’re doing. Please leave a comment at the end of this post.

Until next time,

Susan L Stewart

Snacking is a common, and diet destroying, eating behavior. That “food-to-mouth” motion is natural; you do it at least three times a day during meals. It’s when you do it while cooking that it becomes dangerous to your health and weight loss. It’s possible – and very easy – to eat an entire meal while cooking it! Eating mindlessly is the problem, realizing you have the problem is half the battle. Here’s a Q&A from “Ask Mary.”*

Question:

I have a horrible habit of snacking on the ingredients while I cook – grabbing a pinch of cheese while I grate it, stealing chocolate chips while I make cookies, things like that. I make a lot of pies and sweets for friends, and have no problem passing them up once their baked, but I can’t find a way to resist while I’m in my cooking groove! It adds up calories I can’t afford, and is almost impossible to measure.

Answer:

Some methods that people use to avoid snacking during food prep (and clean-up!) are to chew gum, sip on a low calorie beverage, have a snack before starting if hunger is an issue, and remind yourself that dinner will taste better if you don’t ruin your appetite with a snack.  I saw someone wear a surgical mask to stop picking but I hope you won’t need to do that! Since it is mind over matter, psych yourself before you start by visiting the Calorie Count forums.

Dear Reader: How do you handle “grazing” and the extra calories you end up eating? Please leave us a comment.

Until next time,

Susan L Stewart

*Taken from “Ask Mary” on the site http://caloriecount.about.com

My husband and I were invited to an elegant weekend at a beautiful resort about two hours away. Everything was taken care of including the food and I didn’t know if, or how, my diet was going to survive.

I don’t know if this would be considered five-star dining, but it was close enough for me. At the first night’s dinner, there was filet mignon, a made-to-order risotto station with three kinds of cheeses, mushrooms and a squash puree, and hot, homemade bread. And – don’t let me forget – an open bar for the entire weekend. Oh dear.

I could tell right away that this was not going to be a “be nice to your diet” oriented weekend.

For the rest of the weekend we noshed on filet mignon (twice), a vegetarian lasagna in which the vegetables lost in the battle of cream and luscious cheeses, roasted asparagus frittata, cheesecake, dark chocolate cake with dark chocolate ganache four inches thick and, well, you get the picture.

I have been working very hard on my diet lately by keeping track of my food choices and their calories. Now I was faced with more food (quantity) at a level beyond my cooking abilities (quality) and I was a little overwhelmed. I did the best I could, including making some very good food choices, but still, I never would have eaten that much if I’d been home.

Now that I’m back home, I’m spending some time reflecting on social events while trying to diet. We all face times when what we eat is out of our control whether we are at a friend’s birthday party or spending long days at the hospital with a loved one and facing the dreaded cafeteria.

Here are three lessons I learned from an incredibly fun and overly pampered weekend.

Lesson 1: I can’t stop humming the Rolling Stones’ song, “You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.” It’s true, when someone else is in charge of the menu, you can’t always get what you want. High fat, high sugar, tons of starches and too many desserts can derail your diet efforts. However, if you try, you can get what you need: an extra helping of salad, a pass on the bread and butter or a lower calorie dessert. There are choices to be made.

Lesson 2: Engaging with the people around you may help you eat less … or more. A recent study showed that when women ate with their women friends they consumed an extra 300 calories. This could be referring to those intimate lunches with your best friends where, when the waiter asks, “Would you ladies care for dessert?” you collectively throw your diets to the wind and respond with a resounding, “Sure, why not?” and then choose the ooey, gooiest chocolate mountain of fudge thing on the menu. It’s OK, you justify, because you’re going to share. On the other hand, if you spend more time talking and less time eating, you’ll slow down and allow your body to register as “full” before you consume everything in sight. In theory.

Lesson 3: There are always consequences to our actions. We can still make the best choices possible for our diet – and keep a tight rein on portion sizes – but the consequences of four days of luxury could still be gained weight and a struggle to get our eating back under control. If you gained a pound or two, it should be fairly easy to lose it. Short-term weight gain, compared to the weight you gain from constant eating from Halloween candy to New Year’s Day, should come off in a few days to a week at the most.

The bigger challenge may be in trying to get your head back in the “game.” You could try to give up full breakfasts complete with Danish for a small bowl of whole-grain cereal and skim milk slowly, but I have found that when I’ve only lost control for a few days it’s better to jump right back on that vegetable wagon with both feet.

We had a lovely time on our mini vacation and consider it just that: a short-term fantasy escape from our real life reality. It didn’t hurt to have a half-cup of low-fat cottage cheese and some fruit for breakfast this morning – at least, not too much.

Dear Reader: How do you handle short-term temptation? What do you do when you realize there is nothing diet-oriented at a dinner party? Please leave a comment. You never know what might help someone else.

Until next time,

Susan L Stewart

Most people would agree that losing weight is difficult. For some it might be how long it takes to see results or learning to eat differently. For many, though, the difficulty lies in “all-or-nothing” thinking. This attitude – if I can’t do it perfectly, it’s not worth doing – can affect your diet every day making things harder and harder until you just want to quit.

All-or-nothing thinking at its worst implies that anything worth doing has to be done perfectly. I’m not a doctor or a psychologist, so I can only speak from my personal experience as someone who struggles with this. Being stuck in perfectionism is a nightmare. Very few things in life are perfect. Actually, I can’t think of anything perfect in my life.

Do you see yourself in these all-or-nothing profiles?

• You find a spot on your blouse, and even though you’re running late, you stop to change your whole outfit — not just the blouse — because nothing in your closet will work with the other things you have on.
• You go to your favorite restaurant and there’s nothing on the menu that’s also on your diet, so you order your favorite things and dessert, too.
• You need to get an important report to your boss, but as you’re glancing through the pages one last time, you see a misplaced comma. You hurry back to your office to fix it even though chances are great no one – especially your boss – would ever see it, or question it, except you.

People wanting to lose weight tend to live in an all-or-nothing world. Either you never cheat on your diet or you abandon it all together. If you eat a donut for breakfast, you just give up your diet for the rest of the day and promise yourself you’ll start again tomorrow. The problem is, when you have an all-or-nothing mindset it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get started again. Perfectionism keeps you from forgiving yourself and moving on when you mess up.

Being aware of the problem and seeing how it affects your life is the first part of getting on top of it. From there, every time all-or-nothing thinking stands in the way of what you want, you will have to challenge it and create a new way of looking at it. For some, this problem is so life defeating they need to work with a professional to figure out why it happens and how to stop it.

Do you struggle with perfectionism or all-or-nothing thinking? Has it made losing weight harder? How do you handle it? I’d love to know what you’re thinking. You can leave your comments below.

Susan

I started taking piano lessons when I was in the third grade. As any child, I had an on again/off again love affair with my piano but when I loved it, I dreamed of doing something professionally with music. That was, until I was in eighth grade and asked my piano teacher something about doing something professionally and he said, “You’ll never be able to play professionally. Your hands are too small.” I stopped playing that day.

We all have stories like that. Simple words, spoken at a vulnerable time, can destroy your self–esteem, relationships or dreams. These words seem to be even more hurtful when you’re trying to lose weight.

“It looks like you’ve gained a little weight,” spoken innocently by your favorite aunt is devastating, especially at the dinner table with all the relatives.

“You don’t need to lose weight,” your mother says as she passes you the mashed potatoes, “I love you just the way you are.”

Now you want to crawl under the table and stay there until everyone leaves.

If you find yourself all over the place emotionally, you may want to sit down with your journal and think about the people in your life. Ask yourself, “Does Cousin Janet lift me up or lay me flat?” Your answers may surprise you. Your best friend, mother or father may not be as supportive of you and your weight loss as you assumed they would be.

This is an important lesson to learn whether you are talking about weight loss, the promotion you have your hopes on or a new relationship that, so far, seems to be great:

Never share your dreams with unsafe people and, especially, never, ever, share your weight loss goals, struggles or successes with them!

Dieting is intensely personal. Your struggles with specific foods can easily become the subject of jokes and “funny” efforts to tempt you: “Here, just take a bite of this three layer lasagna. Ha, ha!” Your changing body shape can be used to embarrass you or as a reason to make inappropriate remarks. When a family member thinks it’s OK to tell off-color jokes around you, it becomes unendurable.

Unsafe people can kill your dreams so fast you’ll question your judgment. Sometimes they act out of ignorance and insensitivity and other times out of jealousy and meanness. Having someone to share your weight loss struggles with is important for your success; you just need to be careful to share them with someone safe.

My husband just asked me out for dinner. We have been married a long time and “Date Night” isn’t something we normally do and besides, it’s a Thursday. We easily decided on Romano’s Macaroni Grill, one of our favorite Italian restaurants. We haven’t been there in months and I know I won’t be able to resist the Chicken Parmigiana. So here I am, faced with an unexpected food situation that undoubtedly won’t fit into my weight loss plan and that I haven’t had time to prepare for.

Food surprises can happen any time, like office birthday parties and co-workers inviting you to go out for drinks after work. You know those drinks will involve bar snacks and the last time those bar snacks were several orders of nachos. Still, you don’t want your diet to interfere with your social life.

Unplanned for food situations aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They can be great opportunities to see how creative you can be so you don’t totally blow your diet. How will you manage to eat the high-calorie foods you would normally avoid like the swine flu?

Here are four things to consider before you go

• Be sure to eat the healthy meals you planned. You could remove some of the “extras” to decrease calories. For example, the cheese on a sandwich or the fruit salad you were planning to have. Just don’t starve yourself trying to compensate for the additional calories you’ll be eating.
• Arrive already full. Drink two glasses of water before you get there and you will be a lot less interested in what’s on the menu.
• Engage with people, not food. The more time you spend with people, the less time you spend with the yummy, high-calories treats.
• Don’t beat yourself up for indulging. The emotional fallout when you fall off the apple truck can be remarkably hurtful. You went out with friends and ate some things you normally wouldn’t have. That doesn’t make you a failure or give yourself a reason to quit your weight loss program. Now you understand where you are strong in this kind of situation and what you need to work on.

The occasional treat will not derail your diet unless you give in to old habits and smack yourself around for eating pasta. Instead, the occasional diet deviation gives you a great opportunity to practice the new lifestyle skills you’ve been working on. You will be able to see what a good job you’ve done learning ways to have a life that includes celebrations. You can also see where you need to improve.

So how did I do on Date Night? I spent a long time looking at the menu. Instead of falling back on my standard order, I found a pasta dish that didn’t involve frying anything and didn’t have a ton of cheese on it. We ate until we were comfortably full so we could walk away without dessert. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not quite the whole story.

Have you eaten at Romano’s Macaroni Grill? If so, do you remember the hot-out-of-the-oven Rosemary bread? It’s lightly crispy on the outside with a light coating of butter or olive oil, and soft and chewy on the inside with a subtle taste of Rosemary. Then, of course, they make it even harder to ignore with a saucer of extra virgin olive oil and fresh-cracked black pepper.

So there I am, just sat down, looking at the menu when our waiter arrives with the first loaf of hot bread and prepares the saucer of EVOO and black pepper. Let’s just say I’m not perfect and have some things to work on, shall we?

To your success,

Susan

Here’s a quick snack that takes little prep, tastes great and keeps you full for hours. If you like peanut butter, this is a great way to go.

Peanut Butter and Rice Cake

1 tablespoon Peanut butter, 95 calories

1 Rice cake, plain with salt (or your favorite flavor), 35 calories

1 teaspoon All Fruit (I like Apricot), 20 calories

Total: 150 calories

I buy my peanut butter from the health food store – they make it on site. I add some stevia, a natural sweetener, and a little salt. This way I can control the amount of salt and sugar (none) in my peanut butter. Keep it in the fridge since it has no preservatives.

A teaspoon of Apricot “All Fruit,” a jam with no sugar found in the jellies and jam section, adds just enough sweetness. And since the peanut butter and jam delivery system (crackers, bread) is normally high in calories, a plain salted rice cake – or a more adventurous flavor – works great. I break my rice cake into pieces and make the experience last awhile.

Happy snacking!

Susan

Check this out

The next time you cook dinner, grab a piece of paper and write down every little taste you take – including those bites from the kid’s plates when you’re cleaning up. Be honest and write everything down and then figure out the calories from the labels on containers or by going to a website like About.com’s Calorie Count.

There is no profit in lying to yourself here; no one’s going to know. Are you amazed at how much you’ve eaten and the number of calories in your diet that have been unaccounted for? Before I lost my weight, I could eat the calorie equivalent of a dinner while fixing it, and then sit down and eat another dinner.

Keeping a food journal is critical to losing weight and keeping it off. You can’t lose weight if you don’t know how many calories you’re eating. Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research conducted a research project that showed that people who keep a food diary lose twice as much weight as people who don’t and they’re more successful at keeping it off!

Here are some tips for managing a food journal

• Don’t make a big deal out of it

Food diaries don’t have to be kept in leather bound journals.

“Keeping a food diary doesn’t have to be a formal thing. Just the act of scribbling down what you eat on a Post–It note, sending yourself e–mails tallying each meal, or sending yourself a text message will suffice. It’s the process of reflecting on what you eat that helps us become aware of our habits, and hopefully change our behavior,” says Keith Bachman, MD, a Weight Management Initiative member.

I need something a little more permanent than a Post–It so I took a yellow legal pad and recorded the date, the time of day I ate, what I ate and the number of calories. It was interesting to compare different days, see how stress affected my food choices, realize that I’ve narrowed my breakfast to three choices and that I need a snack at 3 p.m.

• Create your own calorie count resource

When I didn’t know a food’s calories, I looked it up on the computer at Calorie Count and wrote the portion size and calories on the journal page. The next time I ate it I could look it up on a previous day rather than going back online. If you would prefer to keep your food journal online, you can do so at Calorie Count or any number of other websites.

• Find a convenient place to keep it – and that might not be the kitchen

One of the most frustrating things is having to search for my journal and a pen. I have to write stuff down when I eat it. I can’t remember what and how much I ate later so if I can’t find my journal when I need it, the whole thing is a waste of time.

I tried keeping my journal on the kitchen counter but if yours is as messy as mine, you’ll understand that I still couldn’t find it. Now I keep my journal by my chair where I spend a lot of time writing. Removing it from the kitchen was a big help.

Keep a little notebook in your purse so you can write down what you ate on the go then transfer it to your journal.

• Tally it up before adding dessert

A food journal is a great help if you’re contemplating dessert, a higher calorie meal or eating out. Add up everything you’ve already had that day so you know how many calories you can budget rather than splurging and blowing it.

It’s easy to forget what you’ve eaten and neglect to write things down; when that happens it affects how much weight you’ll lose. Keeping a food journal is a proven way to lose more weight and keep it off. Why not make a commitment to journaling for a month and see for yourself?

Do you have a tip for making food journaling easier? We’d love to read it!

“I lost 78 pounds in 4 months on ____!”

They don’t add: “By eating boxed food they mailed to my house!”

I’m sure it’s still a challenge to lose weight when someone is on one of these kinds of diets. They’re still going to deal with cravings and I’m guessing they’re still going to be hungry at times. But there are two things that become so much easier they’re a no-brainer and that’s deciding what and how much to eat. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and dessert are delivered to their door in pre-proportioned servings. Six ounces of chicken? No problem. Keeping lunch to 250 calories? Don’t give it a thought.

They still buy fresh fruits and vegetables to supplement their frozen and dehydrated meals but the difficult, most important decisions are made for them. Portion control and the amount of calories they eat are not a concern. Unfortunately, portion control and calories are exactly what they should be concerned about. Those are two of the keys to success for long-term weight loss.

Losing a lot of weight and keeping it off is all about success and failure. From the time we were young we were taught that failure was something to be avoided at all costs. What a sad misconception. Failure is one of the best ways to learn.

So, what’s going to happen to their weight when they have to start cooking and making food choices without these valuable keys? What happens when the food fairy stops dropping by in a UPS truck? You got it. They go back to eating the way they did and gain it back – slowly.

If they went off the diet and the weight jumped back on they’d panic and go back to the diet program. Instead, the weight comes back slowly, giving them lots of time to rationalize – “Wow. Up another two pounds! I’ll start back on my diet tomorrow.” – but this rarely works and, besides that, what diet do they go back on? Can they get the diet program to mail them a couple of weeks worth of food when they need to lose a few pounds? I don’t think so.

Of course they regain their weight. They didn’t get to practice making food choices, seeing the positive or negative results and course correcting. Doctors recommend healthy weight loss programs that give people a chance to make those decisions but the weight comes off too slowly for most people.

Yes, someone can lose a lot of weight in a short period of time on these diets. It’s what they didn’t learn that makes it so difficult to keep it off. If only they had had the chance to figure it out. That would be weight loss success!