[The Little Bowl] This Run (Trucking Trip)

[Guest guest]

I keep thinking I need to reduce my calories below the 1300 average I keep hitting, but haven’t really made the effort yet. Two more days on the road, so perhaps I can manage these two at a lower count. Heaven knows, home-time will bring the calories on. I need to weigh myself tomorrow morning so I have a weight to compare to when I get back on the truck next week. I have been feeling fine, but definitely feel as though I have not lost any weight at all. More delays to my end goal. This run (starting Oct 11th) ended up with these averages (with today and tomorrow being already planned-for meals): Click to enlarge I stayed under my goal limits, so I am pleased with that. I sense that I will have to hit closer to 1000 calorie average though, which I will work on the next run. I read a very stupid article yesterday, about a professor that decided to experiment with eating snack foods as a diet and he lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks. It his being called the Twinkie diet, but he ate other snack cakes and Doritos, some veggies and took vitamins. His point was that it did not matter what one ate, that to lose weight, it was all about the calories. He kept his snack foods at 1800 calories a day. Much like the Subway diet, or the Mcs diet. The premise is all skewed to prove the wrong point. My first comment is that it takes more than 10 weeks for a diet to show significant damage or improved health benefits. 10 weeks is not long enough to prove anything. I do however agree with the calorie principle. I lost weight on a low fat diet, when the calories were low enough. Same with a low carb diet. I lose weight when the calories are low enough. I could lose weight eating nothing but Twinkies….if the calories were low enough. If weight loss is the only goal, it doesn’t matter what you eat as long as the calories are less than you require to exist. The premise that it doesn’t matter what you eat over all, is simply wrong. Eventually it does affect your health. I felt awful on a low fat diet after a year, I lost a great deal of hair, my skin was dry, I was chronically cranky. I was perpetually hungry. I know that low fat is not healthy for me. If I lived on Twinkies I would require insulin to offset the damage a high sugar diet would cause. I feel a sadness that the media showcases this kind of diet stupidity when there are hundreds of people who are working hard to lose weight and make changes to their diets to increase health and wellbeing. We don’t get recognition. No one wants to read about how hard it is to diet day in and day out. They want to hear it was easy because of some magical component of the diet…it was the 6 grapefruits a day…I swear! it was the capsules of a rare Amazon plant! It was complicated formula in a protein shake. It was a diet of Twinkies! I am reading about a new popular trend, intermittent fasting. That’s the new swing and there will always be the initial converts who swear it work like nothing else they ever tried. Or the HCG diet, which is injections and a 500 calorie diet. Seems to me the logic is that it ends up being about less food overall that causes weight loss, not the “component†that gives it a cult status. I remember when Paleo first became popular, how the fanaticism lent itself to a guy eating raw fish…not dead raw fish….LIVE. He felt that ancient man would have caught fish and ate it live. Gads. I just don’t believe that fasting, Twinkies, injections, specific foods, whatever, they all call for having something outside our own common sense as being the catalyst to weight loss. I can’t help but think these influences affect the hard working dieter. It tosses to us the constant nagging worry “am I doing this right?†“Should I be trying that?†I need to stop reading and get better at listening to my own body. --

Posted By elisaannh to The Little Bowl at 11/09/2010 06:21:00 AM