THE "WRITE" STUFF

Yes, I realize that puns are the lowest form of wit. Hey, I admit it, I'm  not a professional, just a "hack" trying to help.

Looking back, I think my childhood memories shaped a lot of my ideas about how to lose weight. Seeing a lot of neighborhood moms weighing their food out, or not eating this or that, or being on some sort of fad diet. And they never lost weight. So it was easy for me to assume that counting calories was not the way to go. I avoided it for so many years. In the late 1980s, I was on a low fat diet and did have success with that. My workouts were brutal though. I worked very hard to lose weight, but I managed to lose 50 pounds in a summer. But food manufacturers caught on and started producing low-fat foods.  What I was unaware of  at the time is, these low fat foods contained a ton of sugar to add flavor. So once I started a career and couldn't do brutal workouts anymore and I started going for the pre-packaged low fat foods, that's when I started gaining weight again. So I kept looking for the next diet that would work. There was Atkins, South Beach, this diet and that diet, and I tried some sort of variation of most them with little to no success.

Once I broke through my own mind's barrier of counting calories and writing everything down, that is when everything came together for me. It literally happened in one day. I read an article on the USA Today web site, titled Many Americans Clueless Of How Many Calories They Do Or Should Eat, written by Nanci Hellmich, published July 7th, 2010. For some reason after reading that article a light bulb went off in my head and I started my weight loss plan that very day. The first day in my journal is July 7, 2010. No, I'm not related to Nanci, and she (or the USA Today) didn't pay me to mention the story. You're such a skeptic.

I became determined to write everything down I ate, no matter how embarrassing it might be to me later on. And I have stayed true to that. The beautiful thing is that, writing things down has so many other benefits I never even thought of.  Writing everything down gives you accountability. What I mean is, it stops bad habits formed over the years. Habits like "the drive-by", you'll be walking past a candy dish and just grab a piece out of habit, they're small, it's not much, it won't hurt. But how many times a day do you walk by that dish? Now, you take a piece of candy, you have to go write it down in your journal. The next time you walk by that dish and reach for that candy you're thinking, if I have this candy, I have to go write it down. You don't feel like writing anything, so you don't have it. Or you've already reached your calorie limit for the day, so you dutifully put the candy back. Then there is eating out of boredom. You're not really hungry but there is something good on T.V. and you have to have a snack while your watching "your shows". But now you are more aware of what you're eating, so you can easily break the habit of snacking while in front of the tube, because snack foods have a lot of calories. Then there is the one I fear the most. "Stress-eating". That is the one that gets me. I think I formed that habit early in my childhood when I went through a very stressful event. It all turned out O.K, but I developed the bad habit of eating (because I was too young to smoke or drink and there were no anxiety pills in the house) to cope. When I'm angry I eat, when I'm nervous I eat, when I'm frustrated I eat. But now, by writing everything down, I'm aware that I'm reacting to my anger so I do something else to cope, and that helps me stay on course. It gives me the strength I never had before.