News flash! We interrupt this incessant stream of facts, figures, data, and visual evidence to bring you a random thought or two.
Now that this thread is a couple of weeks old, I feel I should take a moment to reiterate the reasons why I’m doing this project.
I’m not doing it because I think that tracking food and nutrients and calories is the way to approach this program. I would never suggest that anyone, especially those new to this way of eating, count or track anything. Eating the recommended foods is all that should be necessary, and for many people, the rest takes care of itself.
In my case, I’ve been following the program for a long time and have done all the recommended fine-tuning, and yet I have been unable to achieve the low BMI I would like, and I have had trouble maintaining a stable weight over time. My “maintaining” consists of allowing myself to gain weight up to a certain upper limit, then losing again, then slowly regaining, over and over. That is weight control of a sort, but not what I would like to keep doing forever.
Naturally, I’ve blamed my body. I must have those “curvy genes” that Doug Lisle talks about in his presentation “How to Lose Weight Without Losing Your Mind.” Or to borrow a phrase from ETeSelle, I’m an “easy keeper.” I only have to look at food and I put on the pounds. That must be why I can gain weight even while eating 100% on plan, and why I have to work so hard and be so strict in order to lose it.
But is that really the reason? I need to know. Because if it is true, then I need to just accept this fact about myself and do what needs to be done. But if it isn’t, then I need to find out what the real issue is and fix it.
Jeff Novick has written that many of his clients are deceiving themselves about how closely they are actually following the program:
A patient came to me who had some concerns and questions and said they were on Dr Essy's program and even told me they were his patient and following his program 100%. After speaking with them for a while, it was quite evident that they were doing about 60-75% of it at best. (Sometimes I have seen people who have told me this and if they were at 25%, they were lucky).
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=26337&p=271971
He also says:
People always underestimate how many calories they eat. Many studies have shown that even peoples best attempts to estimate how many calories they eat is not just off but way off, and always underestimates their caloric intake, even when attempted by trained health professionals, by 30% or more. I've seen them underestimated up to 50% or more. One has to weigh each and every bite of the food & beverages they consume to really begin to come close. Estimates based on volume never work.
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=39129&p=401655t#p401655
Could it be, then, that for all these years I have either
(a) not been following the program as well as I thought I was, or
(b) been eating too many calories of “allowed” foods, or
(c) both of the above?
My idea to track everything I eat for 100 days arose from a desire to find out the answer to the question “why am I having trouble controlling my weight?” By tracking my energy intake and expenditure, using the best tools and methods I have available to me, I should at least be able to find out whether my metabolism is operating within approximately normal parameters for a woman of my age and size. And by monitoring what I actually eat (not what I think I eat), I should be able to find out what happens when I truly adhere to the program as closely as I can for a reasonably long period of time (occasional lattes and glasses of wine notwithstanding!).
Basically, it is all a big “experiment of one.” The final data that I need will be my weight at the end of the project: how much did I lose? For now, I can tell you this: a couple of days ago, I decided to get the scale down out of the attic and weigh myself. I thought I should update my Fitbit pedometer with my current weight, so that it could more accurately estimate my TDEE (since, as body weight decreases, energy expenditure decreases). I won’t report how much I’ve lost until the last day of March, but I will say that the results so far are interesting. I wanted to know the truth. . . but can I handle the truth?
Stay tuned to find out.