part 367 bears and wolves oh my

[aphanon_meme]

YOU DID IT, I'M SO PROUD OF YOU. Well, it's been a year. I hope it was a good one for you--and that 2018 is even better! And maybe we'll finally get that fansub of even one of the musicals... just maybe.

Enjoy part 367!

Latest Page

View flat!

*There is a rules page here. Please read it before reading and posting.

*There is a contact post here. Please use it for contacting me privately.

*There is a meme calender you can use for tracking and listing meme events!

*Dreamwidth, unfortunately, no longer supports any type of anonymous image posting.

*If you would like the Dreamwidth layout to look more like Livejournal's, you can use this workaround for your browser

Note: All entries prior to Part 331 originated on Livejournal.

Comments

Re: Diet/weight loss

[(Anonymous)]

congrats! hope you reach your goal without stress.

just curious, what kind of foods do you rely on in your new diet, if you have time for an answer?

Embarrassingly tl;dr but hope this helps!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you!

For me, I live on mostly: bok choy, eggplant, green beans, avocado, snow peas, cauliflower, yams, salmon, chicken, yogurt, eggs, tomatoes, watermelon, peaches, blueberries, strawberries, whatever fruit is on sale honestly. Occasionally, corn and potatoes. I don't think the exact foods necessarily matter but it matters more that you figure out which fruits and vegetables you like and learn to cook and consume a majority of those (without drowning them in cheese or cream or breadcrumbs; I strongly favor asian and indian preparations of vegetables, which are flavorful and varied without relying heavily on fats). I don't like salads, and I straight up hate kale and cottage cheese and a bunch of other health foods, so I don't force myself to eat them as long as I am still eating plenty of other good shit.

Personally, the key isn't the exact foods but rather calorie counting, as detailed as I can manage. If I have to make a guesstimate, I round up. I include every tablespoon of oil.

See, I - and I think many, perhaps most, people - have this contrary streak where if I'm telling myself "this item is forbidden" I crave it 10 times more. So it works out a lot better for me to track calories so I'm not outright banning anything, but learning to understand the trade-offs and consequences of my choices. Like if I choose to splurge half my calorie budget on instant ramen, I can do that but then I need to compensate by making my other meals that day entirely bok choy and carrots.

Also, I've found that sugar and sugar substitutes are both terrible because they increase my appetite. I have a sweet tooth. This was the toughest part for me, but I decided to stop having any sugar outside of fruit for a week straight. It refreshed my tastes drastically; fruit tasted sweeter, and more importantly I stopped having cravings. Nowadays I eat a scoop of ice cream now and then, and have this or that flavor of sweet yogurt every day, but I don't have cravings the way I used to; I can stop at just the one. In the past, it would've been unthinkable for a container of ice cream to last more than a few days because once I started I'd inevitably want to go back. Now, it's ok.

And one of the other big things I learned is it doesn't matter how nutritious a health food is, if you are getting nutrition in excess it'll still cause weight gain. Which should be obvious, but I bought into all this bullshit about "oh just eat health foods and you'll be fine" - well ffs look at the calorie count on granola for example. Or even worse, "healthy" smoothies! A lot of these things are intended as health foods for athletes; if you are seriously trekking across the mountains sure, you do need that calorie-dense but lightweight and compact energy bar. But if you're like me, working a sedentary job, making time for at most a half-hour workout a day plus a bit of walking when possible - no, that energy bar is not a good choice. It's better to eat some whole fruit or vegetables that provides more volume and that you have to eat more slowly, which will make you feel full.

Anyway this is way too long and much of it is probably obvious to you and others, but for me, I absorbed way too much of the "just listen to your body" nonsense which kept me fat for ages. You can listen to your body if your body is already used to a reasonable portion size and if you are used to telling the difference between a want and a need, but most people today clearly don't have that intuition, and I certainly didn't. We've all gotten used to taking in more calories than we really need. Once my body readjusted, 1200 calories a day has become quite filling.

Re: Embarrassingly tl;dr but hope this helps!

[(Anonymous)]

no, i appreciate the tl;dr because i need to tweak some things, too. i hate salads (they aren't filling to me) and love sweets, too ;_; but luckily i love fruit as much so i don't think i'll miss sweets much if i cut back to just that. it's just hard because i don't live alone and the other people are always buying sweets, and then they guilt me if stuff goes bad because i wasn't contributing to eating the bad stuff assuming the whole household would take part.

the calorie counting is the hard part for me. i've attempted to do it before over some span of time but eventually got overwhelmed by the measuring and all.

Re: Embarrassingly tl;dr but hope this helps!

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly, just ignore them if they want you to eat sweets. Stop caring what they think. They'll learn to buy less next time, or they can eat it and take the weight themselves. Just as you would ignore telemarketers or pop-up ads, just mute the people being unreasonable.

This is the first time I've kept to a diet/weight loss effort for an extended period of time (and, unsurprisingly, therefore the first time it's really worked) and I've found that while most people are supportive or ambivalent, some friends/family will try to sabotage you in good will, because people are under the impression that self improvement is self hate and they want to tell you that you're fine as is. Like... dude. I don't hate my body; I love my body, therefore I'm going to get it into the best shape it can be.

Aaaand there may also be people who hate seeing others get fit because they want to live in their self-defeating bubble believing that your weight is never your own responsibility and diets never work and blah blah blah. And they want you to keep looking the same so they can feel better about themselves. If there's somebody like that in your life, distance yourself from them. There was one person that I'm not even close to but who is in my friends group who was very annoying in this way, and I just stopped talking to her.

The free app MyFitnessPal is really good for calorie counting, makes things much faster. I also recommend getting a food scale. And there are some things I do estimate now, but it's helpful at the beginning to do some measuring so you can have a better idea of what 1 tablespoon of peanut butter or whatever actually looks like - because in many cases it will be surprisingly less than you thought.

I also use reddit subforums for motivation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/1200isplenty for meal ideas
https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit for general feel-good motivational stories and stuff
https://www.reddit.com/r/fatlogic is a significantly saltier sub, specifically for refuting excuses and mocking HAES myths. Probably not for everyone, but I have found it very useful for shutting down my own inner whiny voice.

One more thing - please make sure to calculate your TDEE here (https://tdeecalculator.net/) and eat at least 500 calories below your TDEE. However, don't go below 1200 calories a day.

Again, probably obvious, I'm just saying it because there was a time when I just bought into, oh, ok, women are supposed to eat 1500-2000 calories - which is complete trash. At my height, 5'4" (which happens to also be the exact average height of US women), I would have to weigh 214 freaking lbs to burn 2005 calories a day. And yet the top google result for "how many calories a day" still says "An average woman needs to eat about 2000 calories per day to maintain, and 1500 calories to lose one pound of weight per week." - wtf sort of "average" is this?! A woman maintaining at 2000 is either very tall, obese, or a freaking athlete! And 1500 would cause me to gain rather than lose weight! Ughhhhh.

Good luck, anon! You can do this! :)