Weight loss is such a huge topic in the media these days that it almost makes it harder to feel good about your own progress, no matter what you choose. Two pounds per week is the only safe way, but shows like The Biggest Loser set up competitions for who can lose the most weight fastest. Diets are wildly popular and then derided as massively unhealthy only a few months later.
So I say listen with curiosity and then pay attention to yourself and your body for what the right decision is. For example, everyone seems to agree that keeping a food journal is one of the best ways to lose weight. I detest this process. It’s too time consuming, I find it demeaning to write down absolutely everything, and if I’m counting calories the numbers make me feel like I’m starving. A curious thing happened recently – my dad’s girlfriend started Weight Watchers for approximately the 50th time. She explained the point system and for kicks, I went through and figured out my point allowance etc. As it turns out, points are fake enough that I avoid my mental relationship with calorie counting and the numbers are small enough that I can keep track in my head. I’m not planning on going to meetings but the point system is one I can buy into for easily keeping track of how much I’m eating and if it’s an appropriate amount.
So now that I have a way of keeping track of how much I eat, what am I going to eat? I’m stubborn as hell and I hate being told what to do, even by the little voice in my head. There’s no way I’m going to abandon the things I love most in life, like bread and cheese. A while back I realized though that most of my problem was that bread and cheese is incredibly low effort. I need equally low effort options available that are a little lower in the saturated fat department and involve fruits and vegetables, at least occasionally. Now that fall is arriving I think I’m going to try out soups as a “cook once, eat many times” thing.
The best no-planning-required meals though I’m still working on. I need inspiration. I eat out at coffee shops pretty regularly, so I’m going to start paying attention to the things they serve and how hard they could possibly be to make quickly at home. What do you eat when you only want to take 5 minutes to prepare food?
Now the last component is to actually have the food around when I need to eat. I wish I could get Amazon to mail me everything I need, but it might take a while before they can do frozen and perishable foods. The grocery store online ordering requires too large of an amount to be feasible. Although, given my disinterest in shopping at regular intervals, it might be worth forking over the delivery fee for small amounts. For the time being, my plan will be to stop at the grocery store on my way back and forth between Baltimore and DC, which is every 4 days or so. I’ll use only a list of the ingredients for my low-effort meals and a recipe. As long as I actually make the recipe, this should help keep food costs low, too.
Combining financial, dietary and mental health goals is more difficult than I expected. It is especially difficult to be mindful of cost while trying new things. The only reasonable thing to do though is to monitor and try to make educated decisions about how worthwhile an expense will be.
Today I am almost 5/12ths into my 29th year of life. Like most people, I look at those big age milestones and see whether I’m doing as well as I think I should be. In some ways I am doing better than I ever expected – I’ve had interesting and meaningful careers, made some not-stupid financial investments, and had some fun. However, I have also almost completely neglected my personal life. I am 100 pounds overweight. I have a couple of incredibly good friends, but not the kind of social engagement that I really enjoy (and no boyfriend). My life is almost completely devoid of non-work fun. I have an enormous amount of debt.
When I turned 29 on June 7th this year it was like a slap in the face. How could I have let things get so skewed? I began making some changes. Life is better now than it was 5 months ago but I wonder how I am going to meet my goals for June 7th, 2009. This blog is going to be about rapid change, sustainable choices and holding yourself accountable. I get all the same information that you do – from the media, from other blogs, from books. All the advice sounds pretty reasonable until you try to put it into practice or tweak it for your own life and personality.
Here are my goals for my 30th birthday:
Lose 100 pounds. I’ll be pretty up front about this – it’s a big goal. It flies in the face of the 2-lb a week safe weight loss that the media babbles about incessantly. I’ll explain why I think it’s safe and acheivable in a later post.
Build a social life around 3-4 hobbies that I truly enjoy. This means doing the activities and also translating the time I spend with those people into friendships, doing things that aren’t the activity. This might be kind of rough for me since I have never had “hobbies” per se, and making friends takes a degree of conscienciousness that I have a tendency to underprioritize.
Pay off my two credit cards, currently with a balance of $9,492. The balance was actually a lot higher 3 months ago, but I’ve been doing pretty well so far. Still, to reach this goal by June 7th I’ll need to make more changes.
With this brief overview I realize, as you probably do, that these goals constitute a life-overhaul. I can’t afford to neglect my work or other obligations. It’s going to an adventure, one I think will be worth reading about.
