Today, I consumed the following items:
Total calories: 765.
When I’ve observed the following symptoms in myself, careful inspection of my recent diet habits reveals that I’ve consumed lots of added sugar and other refined carbohydrates over a period of several days to a couple weeks:
You may have experienced some of these, or perhaps you’ve seen other symptoms not listed here, develop in you. But if you’re King Sugarholic like me, and have struggled to control your weight as I have, I think you’ll find that if you give up the added sugar, these problems will either disappear or become way less pronounced. Hey, it’s worth a shot isn’t it? Rather than spending all the time and money to treat each of these problems separately, wouldn’t it be wonderful to make just one fundamental change to the diet, and correct them all? I believe that omitting added sugar can achieve this though admittedly, I’ve not been able to consistently stay away from it, because I like it way too much. 
But one of these new years, the New Years resolution I make every year to swear off of all refined carbs just may take hold, like when I gave up snuff in 1986 and when I totally eliminated all alcohol consumption in 2004. We’ll see.
Take care.
Today, I consumed the following items:
Total calories: 1685.
Today, I consumed the following items:
Total calories: 1040.
Today, I consumed the following items:
Total calories: 965
Well, I’ve not been able to eat so little, as 800 calories. I just get too hungry late at night. So perhaps I’ll just stick to 1000 calories a day for now, and slowly work down to the 800 calories as my body gets used to eating less food.
I thought I’d start keeping track of what I’m eating daily in posts so titled Today’s Diet, to give readers more details on the sorts of food I’m eating while I’m losing the weight this year, per the Weight Loss: 2010 project. In this food diary, I’ll list what I ate, how much, when, and its calorie count.
Today, to stay on schedule with my weight loss (trying to lose ten pounds this month and am almost half-way there), I’ve limited myself to 800 calories. Here’s what I ate:
Total calories: 960.
Total cost: $107.19
These will be shipped directly to [Emmy]. Hopefully, they’ll help her better cope with the noise from the tenants above.
[Emmy], keep an eye out for this shipment. You should have it in a week or so.
[Emmy] seemed a bit out of sorts tonight due to the near-constant squeaking, banging, and thumping she hears from the neighbors above. I tried consoling her. But as I’ve found, there’s not a whole lot she can do about it. except for what I’ve described in my Tom’s Views –> Coping With Noisy Neighbors: Apartment Living piece.
So I very much feel for [Emmy]. Sadly though, it’s harder for her to move (if moving was ever easy), than it was for me.
So I offered to bring her here to stay with me if she finally decides that she really can no longer bear the noise, until we devise some quieter housing for her. In the meantime, she’ll practice with the earplugs I gave her, and try the Sleep Mates. Plus, she’ll mention the problem to her therapist this week and get his input. He may know of coping mechanisms that I do not.
Hopefully, she, unlike me, will find a way to live comfortably where she is, with the noise intact. But if not, we’ll figure something out before summer arrives.
From audio journal episode: AJE-2010-01-09-14-11.
As this new year came in, out went my certainty about going to camp this summer. What’s weakened my resolve to attend is this: Last year, I was doing pretty well on my diet as summer arrived. Then, I went to camp. Indeed, the food they serve is not part of my normal dietary fare; consisting of lots of refined carbs; specifically, white flour. They offer white flour-based courses at nearly every meal that have lots of added sugar as well. So when I go there, I gain lots of weight as a result. I eat way too much, and I’m sure that part of the reason for my gluttony is the presence of these refined carbs and empty calories.
I’ve tried in vane to avoid these foods by taking my own healthier dishes. I remember one year we took all kinds of nuts, dried fruits, sardines, anchovies, and cans of soup as well; the Campbell’s Chunky variety. But still, I was unable to resist “the bad stuff,” though that year, I gained only five pounds, whereas other times, when I took no “better” food, I gained eight to ten pounds. Taking my own food curbed, but did not completely avert my perennial tendency to pack on the pounds at camp.
Yes, history shows that keeping on a healthful diet is hard to manage at camp, not only because the food is not normally what I eat, but also because everyone else there is eating it. This encourages me to jump off “the wagon”. There’s ritual. There’s activity. There’s socialization that goes on in the dining room at mealtime. So to proclaim that, well, I’m just not going to go there and eat that food, turns out to be futile. You know, that’s cutting out quite a bit of the fun of the camp experience. So, excising all meals and eating only the food I brought is just not doable. I often affirm on the first day that I’ll only eat at the dining hall one or two meals per day, and eat my own stuff otherwise. But like most New Years resolutions, I typically end up forgetting that, and attending all three camp meals daily. If I don’t go, then I’m just hanging out by myself while everyone else is talking, laughing, enjoying the taste of the food, and having one hell of a good time in the dining room. Despite the noise, it’s fun to sit around the table with friends, laughing, debating, and interacting in general. The dining room is a place where people connect and share at camp. But it’s also the place where I get into big trouble when it comes to keeping my weight down.
Now if it were just the issue of gaining eight pounds each summer, I’d probably just shrug my shoulders, suck it up, and accept this as part of the normal camp phenomenon. After all, most people who go also gain weight, and besides, I can come home afterwards and lose it again in a month or so. Or can I? In fact, it’s surprisingly difficult to get back on the same track of healthy eating in the weeks that follow that I was so firmly planted on prior to camp. Sometimes several months go by before I get the new pounds off, and get back on “the good foot” in terms of my diet. Historically and sadly for me, camp wrecks the rituals and practices that I so meticulously establish here at home during the first half of the year. Indeed, it’s quite challenging to simply resume those rituals immediately after check-out on the day of departure. As I said, it can take me three or more months to wean myself off of refined carbs again, that I get so used to consuming at camp. Thus, I’m worried about attending because I fear that, as in years past, I’ll regain much of the weight that I’ll spent the first half of this new year struggling to lose. I would have lost 14 pounds total last year, instead of the 6 I actually managed, perhaps, if not for camp.
Now I don’t mean to say that camp is the only place where I screw up my diet. But it’s one place where I goof it up the most. If we visualize the entire collection of my dietary mishaps as a large tree, camp would be a huge branch on that tree that really needs to be pruned, and I’m thinking now that maybe this year, I should whack it off, and just not attend.
I won’t declare that I’ll never go to camp again, because maybe I just need a year or two off. You know, there are lots of folks who don’t attend, every year. Some come every other year while others stay away for three to five years at a stretch. I might just need a break.
Will I actually take it? Stand by to find out.
09:48 AM: Slept great all night last night; woke up not once between 2:00 AM and 9:10 AM. So given the high number of times that I’ve repeated this experiment, and gotten the same results, I believe that “conventional wisdom” is right in this particular case. Common knowledge says not to eat within a few hours of bedtime in order to reduce how often we awaken during the night. Well, for me this turns out to be indeed true; when I consume lots of heavier foods too soon before bedtime, I’ll almost certainly experience broken sleep that night. Eating less, later in the day, I’ve found, promotes less broken and thus, more healthful and rejuvenating sleep.
I’ve heard too, that depression can cause insomnia, though I’ve not been able to definitively demonstrate this in my own life. Mostly, when I wake up prematurely, it appears not to be caused by any sad or otherwise bad moods I’m having, though I have observed, especially while working in corporate America, that lots of stress can interfere with sleep routines. Usually though, when I can’t stay asleep, an examination of the previous day’s food diary and times that I ate reveals the strong correlation between how well I sleep and how much I eat. Under certain conditions, these two concepts are inversely related; especially once my daily calorie intake goes above around 1500. In that case, the more I eat beyond that, then the less well I’ll sleep.
But, when I’m dieting, and my total calorie intake hovers around 1000 or less, then it seems to matter less what time of the day I eat, for even if I ingest immediately before bed, I’ll stil sleep well; particularly if I’ve been dieting for at least a few days prior to this.
I’ve also come to understand that I sleep best in a cooler bedroom (with the temperature set at around 65 degrees). When it’s much hotter than 68 degrees, my sleep again, becomes erratic.