Well they say the best way to help yourself lose weight is to keep a food diary. Well I tried that and lost interest quickly due to it being boring. I do, however, love to blog. Therefore I've started this blog as a way to keep track of my progress and perhaps to rant about/ponder aspects of dieting. I in no way expect anyone to ever read this thing but the potential of an audience might make me keep on track.
So I guess I should start with a bit about me and why I'm dieting. I'm 25, almost 26, about 5' 11" and around 300 lbs. It's been a rather slow but constant weight gain since I was really young. It has to be genetics but I'm not going to blame this on that because then I'd feel helpless. Over the years I would slowly watch my size go up and my physical activity go down. I've always had the bad self esteem associated with the overweight but that's not exactly why I'm starting this diet.
I like me and it's taken a long time for me to get that way. I'm comfortable with my size though I do wish I was skinnier. I know I'll never be a size two but I want to be healthy. That's what this diet is about, health. I've got diabetes and other horrible health things in my family and I've noticed that my ankles and knees hurt more (heck I'd hurt if I was carrying this much weight around). I want to eat better and exercise more. In fact this is more an exercise program than a diet. While I'm going to try eating healthier I want to focus more on actually exercising or moving more.
I'm a lump, a cough potato and as you can guess by the title of the blog I'm lazy. Normally this would be considered a negative to eating healthier and exercising more but now that I've identified this negative I'm using it to in fact help my progress. I shall explain that later.
My biggest obstacle food wise is that I'm a vegetarian or as my mother likes to call me a pastarian. As the Atkin's diet has so nicely in grained into our society, carbs are evil. So plan one is to eat more vegetables. For budgeting purposes, I only go grocery shopping every two weeks and I have decided that I shall try a new vegetable or fruit each trip. I think the reason I give up on veggies is because there are only a certain few that I eat/cook. I want to change that. So occasionally you'll see me update with my current new vegetable of the bi-week. These might not necessarily be something I've never had but something I've never bought/cooked with. Like this time it's avocado. I've had them before but I've never tried using them at home. I also need to do some more research into vegetarian diet recipes. Most vegetarian meals are nice in that they tend to be low fat/low cal but usually not low carb. But they can also be really fattening as well, so it gets tricky.
In order to help me eat better, I've stopped buying the junk food so that it's not here to tempt me and I'm buying more veggies. It dawned on me a few weeks ago, that while the crisping drawer keeps veggies crisper longer, they also hid them from me. I'm totally a grazer when I'm hungry. I usually open the fridge or the cabinet and grab what is easy and I can see (remember lazy). So those carrots hiding in the drawer are easily forgotten about while that cookie batter is right there. Therefore I've decided, veggies and fruit get center stage in my fridge and those not so good occasional foods go in the drawers. The veggies don't stay crisp as long but then again they don't stick around as long as I eat them. It also reminds me that I need to have them with lunch and dinner. I have noticed however that they good bad quicker so perhaps I'll have to get some of those Green Bags to keep them fresher but in view. I have also cut back on caffeine so that I drink more water/water based drinks (iced herbal tea, home made so no sugar). In order to do this I only buy cans of soda so that I can have one can for lunch and keep them in the car. My lazy butt won't go all the way outside to get soda when there is ice tea in front of me. It's sort of sad the lack of will power I have but at least I'm lazy!
The exercise department is the hard part. My apartment complex has a "fitness" center with like 5 pieces of equipment. I keep meaning to go but it's that lazy factor that stops me. When I get home I don't feel like changing and heading over. If I have someone to go with like when I use to go to the gym with my sister on the way home from work, it was okay. But here on my own, it's tough. Therefore I've decided to invest in a piece of equipment at home, this way I just get changed and use it and not have to worry about getting to the gym and back. Also when I feel like doing something while watching TV it's great because it is right there. I wanted to get a recumbent bike or elliptical but try finding an inexpensive one that has a weight limit high enough for me. *rant time* I don't get how they expect the people who really need to exercise to exercise if the equipment won't hold them. The gym quality ones do but they are expensive and what fat person wants to work out in a gym with people who really don't need to be running hours on a treadmill. My decision was to get the Urban Rebounder. It actually is a pretty good piece of equipment and gets my heart rate up. I haven't been able to build up to more than 15-20 minutes, which surprises me because I can easily do 45 minutes on a recumbent bike. Guess this is more of a workout. The first week I was really good and did it for at least 10-15 minutes each day. Then I went away on business and it's been hard getting back into it. But I'm going to work on doing it at least 4-6 days a week. Now that I'm going to work earlier and getting out earlier I think I'll have the time to use it more. In a perfect world I'd exercise in the morning but I have a hard enough time getting up in the morning let alone motivating myself to workout.
Well I think that's enough for now. The plan is each night I'll write an entry with what I ate and did but hopefully in a more fun way of just listing it. Who knows!
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