Posts by galax

Tannis, I'm right there with you as far as tea is concerned. I figure I can count it as water as long as I don't add sugar or milk or anything. Especially if it's herbal tea! how can a few spices or flower petals really count against me? The caffeine is the only part I really bother concerning myself about.

Am I the only one here who has no interest in having babies? ^_^; I've done enough babysitting to decide that it wasn't for me. Once they're old enough to hold a conversation with we get along fine, but I can't handle them when they're at the drinking-milk-wearing-diapers-crying-without- being-able-to-tell-me-why stage. I always sort of feel like, "I fed you, I changed you, I rocked you, sang to you, bathed you, and tried to put you to sleep. Why are you still crying? What else can I do? My pets make more sense than this!" It's bewildering. I have nothing but admiration for those who are up to the task! Godspeed, baby-makers! I'm just not cut out for it. One day I would like to adopt children, though.

I vote for leaving her alone. I was a chubby teen, and my mother encouraged me to eat less and to exercise. I was very insulted and annoyed at her for doing this, and would sometimes eat more just so she would stop telling me how great it was that I ate less. I gained quite a lot more wieght as a result and am still having a hard time losing it. Seriously, I just watched a home video from 9th grade and realized I was only slightly pudgy at the time. Before I joined CC I'd gotten up to 360 lbs! I'm now 23 and have only made it down to 294 so far. I feel like I lost the best of my late teens and early twenties by being morbidly obese while most girls were running around in short skirts and bikinis. If there hadn't been so much tension about my weight between me and my mother during high school, I might have stayed only a bit overweight instead of balooning like I did.

It's very hard to be the fat girl in class, and when you come home after dealing with all the nasty comments and such you get at school, you really just want to relax and feel accepted by your family instead of having to hear more of the same. Even if it's said in a loving way, I think teenagers naturally get more upset about anything their parents say, you know? I would be very concerned about backlash. If she comes to you for help, great. Also, I think it's wonderful that you are leading by example and cooking healthful meals. Keep that up, but please don't put too much pressure on her!

You could try smoothies, adding tofu for creaminess and protein. If you put in a lot of fruit and not much else that's sweet it shouldn't be overwhelmingly sugary, but will not be savory. Or you could eat yogurt or cottage cheese. If you put some lemon pepper or other spices on the cottage cheese, you can make it more interesting without being sweet. Oats also have some protein, I believe.

785/2500

It's finals week and I've been slacking! 

Thanks for all the help! I do have some almonds, so I'll give it a shot, and if that doesn't work, well, I have a banana!

555/2500

I don't own a scale at home, so I weigh myself when I go to the gym. There's one of those big doctor's-office-type ones with the weights you slide on a bar at the top, and it's in the locker room. I'll hop on naked after I go to the bathroom and before putting on my gym clothes. I go to the gym anywhere from 2-5 times per week, so  this means I weigh myself fairly frequently but not every day. I also don't get too freaked out about variations of a couple of pounds because I go to the gym in the evenings and my weight can vary depending on what I've eaten and how much water I've had during the day. (In fact, occassionally I will weigh myself before  and after my workout just to remind myself of this - I'm invariably heavier afterward because of all the water I drink when I'm there!) It's the trend over time that I'm interested in.

For treating myself, does putting on some old music I listened to in high school and dancing around my apartment naked like a crazy person work?  I did have fun, haha! I'm not counting it toward exercise points or zany workout, though, because I have no idea how long I was at it. Well, even if it doesn't count for treating myself, I still kicked back with a glass of sangria aftwerward, so I suppose that does.

Great points above!

First, I'd like to add something I picked up from my anthropology courses: it's not just "modern" society that suffers from our technology and lifestyle. Basically, as soon as people stopped foraging and started staying in one place to grow crops, they began to have more health problems. Not just weight, but repetitive stress injuries from the type of activity required for agriculture, and even dental problems. More sickness occurred as well, and the larger our cities got the more opportunity sickness and disease had to just constantly move around our communities instead of running their course and disappearing. Even our nutrition was not as good. Hunter/gatherers eat a wide variety of different things, which provide them with different vitamins and minerals. When we limit ourselves to a few types of plants that we grow, we get less variety in the nutrients we gain from our food.

Granted, in modern western life here we have a wide variety of fruits and vegetables available at the grocery store and do not have to rely solely on a few plants that we grow. Still, if you look at ingredients in our packaged foods and fast foods you will see that there are a few that turn up all the time, in large quantities! We use corn in a massive amount of our food (often in the form of corn syrup as a sweetener), and wheat flour is also found everywhere. Besides, compared to these pre-packaged nightmares, produce can be awfully expensive! Try comparing the price of soda to the price of fruit juice, and you'll get the idea. It's cheaper to live on refined sugars and artificial flavorings than on real food.

Also, the aesthetics of our culture can be bad for our health. We like white sugar and bleached flour and the fluffy white baked goods we can make from them, even though we would be much better served eating whole grains and less refined products. It's not just western culture that has this problem, though. The same thing happens in asian cultures with rice. White rice, all scrubbed clean with its nutritious hull removed, is usually seen as more appealing than brown rice.

To make matters worse, the more of these over-sweetened not-quite-food items we eat, the more we want. If we drink a lot of soda, we crave that sugary taste. If we decide we can't have soda anymore because the sugar is wrecking our health, we often turn to diet sodas made with artificial sweeteners. Maybe these don't pack in all the calories, but they are still nutritionally void for the most part and still keep us craving more too-sweet "'foods". It can be hard for us to retrain ourselves to stop eating candy and start eating fruit or to stop eating chips and start eating fresh veggies when we've been conditioned to want those unnaturally strong flavors.

Stress is certainly a big part of it, too, and especially our fast-paced, work-all-the-time lifestyle. A lot of people simply cannot find the time to prepare their own meals, so they grab whatever is convenient on the way somewhere, which is often fast food. Fast food is usually made more flavorful by packing more sugars and fats into it because that is much easier and cheaper than using fresh ingredients, like ripe fruits and vegetables, to make things taste good. Also, a slab of fried meat between slices of bread is convenient to hold in one hand and munch on while doing something else, while a salad is a bit more engaging, what with the need for eating utensils. I try not to fall victim to this (like a lot of my coworkers and fellow students who almost never cook, and some of whom insist they can't), but it can be challenging. I might prefer to spend an hour or so slowly savoring a meal of varied ingredients that took me a while to prepare, but when all I have is a half-hour lunch break at work and so very little time to pack my lunch between when classes end and I have to leave for work, I often find myself either skipping meals (a big no-no as far as keeping your metabolism up) or wolfing down something convenient but packed with empty calories.

Then, of course, our society can also affect people's weight in the other direction and inspire some to anorexia, but it sounds like that's not what you need for this particular project! Anyway, I hope this helps.

I love cottage cheese! It's all right with fruit, or with a little bit of no-sugar-added jam or preserves. I also like it with a little lemon pepper or old bay seasoning on top. Mostly, though, I just like it plain. I guess I'm a little unusual that way! Whenever I buy it, it never lasts long because I just want to eat some with every meal!

Hi there! Thought I'd join in. I hope my goal isn't too extreme for you guys, but it should be doable judging by my past info, and percentage-wise it's not that much, really. Anyway, I'd like to lose 30.5 lbs by July 3rd, because then I'll no longer count as morbidly obese, which, honestly, would be the first time I can remember that happening.

Starting weight (on May 1st): 300.5

Goal weight (on July 3rd): 270

May 1 - 300.5

May 8

May 15

May 22

May 29

June 5

June 12

June 19

June 26

July 3---final weigh in

90/2500

I've decided to be ambitious. :)

I get it too. I just try to eat it with a fresh vegetable or something that will get the taste out of my mouth better. Like carrots or celery or bell pepper. Something refreshingly crunchy and wet.

I will second the smoothie idea. They really can be quite filling, even if they don't sound like it! Make sure it's thick, and it will be even more satisfying. I find bananas and silken tofu to be great thickeners, although you do need to watch out for the calories in the bananas. Smoothies are cool, refreshing, and can be made with whatever fruit and/or creamy things (like yogurt) that you have in the fridge, plus you can switch up the ingredients all the time to make different flavors and keep it from getting boring, so they are perfect hot morning food for me!

Avocado is great with crackers. If that is too many calories, pairing it with crunchy veggies like celery would work, too, although I do like that carby goodness. Honestly, though, I can even eat avocados plain with lime juice and salt, and I'll put them on top of anything, from sandwiches to salads, cottage cheese, wraps of all kinds, cooked portions of meat, and some soups. Basically, anywhere I'd like a bit of creamy texture. (I've even had avocado milk shakes and avocado ice cream, but I'm sure that's not the kind of snack you're going for.)

Oh man, now I want an avocado...