Not fasting

[avram]

Today I am obsessed with food and with watercolor pigments. (The “current music” item is an amusing coincidence.)

I decided not to fast. I weighed in at 285 (same as yesterday), which isn’t bad if I ignore Monday’s 284 reading as some kind of weird scale hiccup and note that I weighed 287 on Sunday. I ate too darn much yesterday when my parents took me out to dinner (the New Prospect Cafe on Flatbush, which is highly yummy, but too pricey for me to go there on my own), but not as much as I would have with my old, worse eating habits — I left about 40% of my meal on the plate after I realized that I was more than full.

So today’s goal was to eat nothing out of habit, to wait till I was really hungry. It’s gone pretty well. I didn’t get hungry till I’d been awake for a few hours (which is actually typical for me, after more than a year of waking up, going to the gym, showering and dressing, and then picking breakfast up on the way in to work) (God, I miss those days!), then had a cup of yogurt, and then later a nectarine.

I travelled into the city to pick up still more pads (hot-press watercolor paper, because I’ve decided not to fight my impulse to do fine pen work) and a cheap squirrel-hair brush at NY Central, and then over to the northern branch of Soho Art Materials (8th Street, just west of Fifth) for a tube of M. Graham sepia watercolor, because it makes such gorgeous mixes. I started to get hungry again walking towards Soho Art, passed an Au Bon Pain, and decided that I’d stop off there if I was still hungry after. So I got the sepia, and also a tube of gamboge, gave one of the clerks some advice (and Google keywords) about the paper she was working on (about evolution and the “intelligent design” movement — she was reading an article in US News and World Report, and it didn’t go into what I thought was adequate detail about the inherent dishonesty of the “intelligent design” folks, and how they’re actually out to overthrow all of secular materialism), and was still hungry. So I had a small bowl of broccoli-and-cheddar soup, a rosemary breadstick, and a cup of lemonade.

And that tube of gamboge (a yellow paint) turns out to be the single-pigment version — isoindolinone yellow, PY110 — which M. Graham stopped manufacturing last year, though they were the only commercial source. Cool! Maybe I should stock up. (Hm, looks like they’re still using PY110 in some of their paint mixes, like Hooker’s green, but not as a single-pigment paint.) I discovered this while researching my new purchases at the Handprint.com watercolor pages, the best source I’ve found on the ’Net for detailed information about watercolors. It also turns out that alizarin crimson, one of the two tubes of paint I got as free samples (dioxazine purple was the other) I got last year that turned me on to M. Graham’s paints, has atrocious lightfastness. I’m going to have to pick up some quinacidrone rose or something.

Back to food, I bought some ears of corn yesterday, planning to have it today with onion naan and pesto (a common meal from the days a few months back when I was losing weight more quickly), but now I’m not hungry, and if I get hungry will probably just have the cherries I picked up on the way home today (mmmm, cherries) or the grapes that’ve been sitting in my fridge since Tuesday. Tomorrow is barbecue day in Queens, so I probably won’t get to the corn till Monday.

Comments

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

Just FYI, I've recently learned that not eating, and specifically not eating breakfast, is possibly the worst thing that you can do. Apparently if you don't eat breakfast, your body goes, "Huh, golly I bet I'm going to get starved today. I better take things slow." and in turn your metabolism drops to it's lowest burning level. So I've just now discovered that I've been sabotaging myself now for years by skipping breakfast.

[avram]

Hm. It's just that I've gotten to the point where it takes a few hours for me to get hungry in the mornings. Not always, though. Today I was hungry right off the bat, so I had a banana, then went to the gym.

What I've been trying the last couple days is to wait till I'm sure I'm really hungry, then eat something small, then wait for the hunger to come back. I'll give it some time to see how it works.

[avram]

On the other hand, I remember a time when I was getting up early and eating before I went to the gym, generally a grapefruit. Now that I think about it, that might have been the Time Of Great Weightloss back in '99. Hmm.

Anyway, the Eat Only When Hungry plan (which seems to be including a small pre-workout breakfast) looks like it's working out. I'm down to 284 again today, this time I suspect for real. Though I did have that horrible low-energy period late yesterday afternoon -- if that keeps happening I'll need to figure out what causes it. I don't think it could have been lack of food, because it was an hour or so after I'd had lunch. Or dinner. Or whatever it was I ate at Au Bon Pain.

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

What I've been told is pretty much this - if you wait until you are thirsty, you are already dehydrated. If you wait until you are hungry, chances are your body already thinks it's starving. It is far better to eat small quantities of food throughout the day, just as it is better to drink water throughout the day. The whole three meals a day thing isn't a great plan. You do need to keep an eye on how much you eat throughout the day though, especially portion size. The nutritionist that I'm seeing pretty much eschews all the fad diets that are out there, including the high protein, low carboyhdrate diets. Carboyhdrates attract and hold water, so a lot of the weight one loses is water weight. I was pretty shocked to learn that 3 oz of protein is a steak or chicken or fish piece that is as big as my palm. Not my hand, my palm. And I'm only to have 2-3 portions of that size a day.

In terms of the breakfast thing, I never ate it because I never felt hungry. But I've discovered that when I have a bowl of cereal in the morning, I'm actively hungry by lunch time and actively hungry in the mornings when I wake up.

Everyone's mileage varies and one can always fool one's body into weight loss, but I have found more often than not that the weight cycles back up again once the trick is figured out ... and the body has a way of playing tricks right back atcha. A friend of mine did the whole high protein low carbs diet for over a year and lost a HUGE amount of weight ... but as soon as she tried to eat normally again, the weight started pouring back on. According again to my nutritionist (so I'm taking this on faith here that she's not a ding-dong ... mmMmmmmmm ding-dongs .... laaaaaaaal! Oh, what? Ahem!!) natural healthy "keep it off" weight loss should only be 1-2 pounds a week. You also want to concentrate on aerobic exercise, which brings your metabolism up to it's highest burning point. Weight training is good too, cause muscle burns more calories no matter what you're doing, but the most important thing is to get your heart rate up from normal levels for at least 20 minutes a day. Ideally, 20 minutes twice a day - once in the morning and once in the afternoon/evening.

[avram]

The amount of meat you've described -- three palm-sized pieces per day -- sounds like plenty to me. Maybe my expectations have shifted. Maybe I've got big palms.

[redbird]

You could bring the corn to the barbecue, and we could roast it.