Posts by wanderingjew

The first thing I should say is "Congratulations!" Having a baby is a wonderful thing - being a proud papa of a 10 1/2 month old myself - and I wish you the best of joys with your new child.

The second thing I should say is "There is never a good time to have a child." It doesn't matter if you're married, single, rich, poor... you can always come up with an excuse why it's not a good time to have kids. In my wife's and I's case, we didn't have good jobs, we had crappy insurance... we were married, but financially unstable. We went ahead anyway and things worked out. We made a deal with a local hospital to pay in installments... then later on, I got a good job with GREAT insurance, and we got the money we paid to the hospital back. If things aren't so good now, it's all right - it never is.

The third thing I would tell your boyfriend is "S*&$ or get off the pot!" You've been dating for three YEARS now? And you're 32? What in gehenna is he waiting for?! I have no problem with you "pressuring" him with your pregnancy. Whether you did it intentionally or not, he needs to man up to his responsibilities, make you a honest woman, and marry you. If he's still teetering after this news, dump the man, and you'll be much happier in the end.

For now, take care of yourself and the wee one, and God bless. I wish you every happiness, married or not.

I'm sure they would argue, much like Starbucks or Hooters, that any product that is variable in their construction can't be given a consistent calorie count for. For coffee, you may have sugar added or cream, which would drastically change the calorie count. There's no way to predict this, so they don't include the nutritional information for fear of being sued for misrepresenting their products.

Strangely enough, any place that sells buffalo wings uses the same argument. They claim that since wings change in shape, style, and preparation from wing to wing, there's no way to give decent nutritional information. I think that's a rather silly argument - I think they just don't want people to know that eating 10 wings is like eating half your caloric intake for the day. No one would buy beer on top of that!

Katie,

The trick is that if you don't eat your calorie limit per day, your body thinks that it's starving, and suddenly starts holding on to every inch of fat on your body to burn for the lean times ahead. So you have to stay within 1000 calories of your daily calorie burn, otherwise you don't lose any weight. Sometimes you might even gain - it's weird like that. I try to stay within 500-1000 calories and I find I get good results. I've even had to force myself to eat more some nights just to get over the limit. Who knew?

Cura,

As fanatical as I've become with calorie counting lately, even I have "cheat days" and "binges." I'll try to explain how this happens. Very few times do we try to have these lapses in judgement in our minds, it just happens. The Christmas season is probably the best example, since that's coming up now for most people.

You start out with the best intentions - you eat a light breakfast - maybe an egg or yogurt, and then you get in the car and you go see the family. Your family is not interested in your diet plan, your mom doesn't have a computer at home, and food on the table is ham, sweet potato casserole, and marshmellow whatever with pecans. You have no idea of how much a cup is when dad is piling on the meat for your plate. You pick at what it is, while getting the mean look from mom, since you obviously don't like her cooking anymore because you're not eating it. So with the temptation and pressure to go off your diet for "just one day," you go from eating around 2000 calories to devouring everything in sight and jumping up to 4-5,000 in one day. Three pounds if you're lucky... going up!

Many of us forgot how to watch what we ate early in life, and suddenly ballooned up 20-30 pounds. At that point, you don't care what you put in your mouth, because people label you as fat, and you can't get a date or play any sports as well as you did. So you keep eating badly because, "Who cares at this point?", right? Suddenly you're up to 50 pounds overweight; now you realize that you've gone off being healthy, so you look to having some sort of miracle diet. Maybe it even works for a while (I lost 40 pounds eating 700 calories a day for three months), but after eating so little for so long, you forgot how to eat healthily, so your weight goes right back up and now you're 70 pounds overweight. Then you might try another miracle diet or you might try learning how to eat right. The key word is "learning" how to eat right, because you've forgotten, and so for the first time in three months, you brave stepping on the scale.

So after YEARS of eating badly, suddenly you're on the right track, you're feeling good about yourself, you even start losing weight. Then the family gets together, the guys play cards, the boss holds a Christmas party, a friend comes in from town - and everyone wants to eat. So when you do, suddenly you're gaining again, and all that effort to lose five pounds over a week is wiped out because you're right back where you started. You feel guilty because you're angry and have no one to blame but yourself. When you're overweight, you always feel like you have so far to go, and one screw up in your eating can wipe out your good efforts.

That's why we write about our sufferings so much. If you don't have that situation, good - I hope you never do. But maybe you understand why the rest of us struggle.

The online BMI scoring tool is only an approximation unless you go into a doctor's office and get professionally scored. The Body Mass Index assumes that you are of a medium build with a medium bone structure. If you have a larger build (broad shoulders, e.g.) with large bones (I blame all the milk I downed as a kid), then naturally, your BMI is going to be thrown off. Bones weigh a heck of a lot more than fat. So if you feel comfortable at 180, stay there, and who cares what the BMI says.

Your exercise routine seems to be great. Understand that muscle also weight more than fat, so if you want to build muscle, you have to put on weight. But if you look great, who cares if you're 200?

You seem to be more extreme on the food than I am, but then again, I was where you were before you started counting calories. I have my "fancy creamer" which adds 40 calories per every cup o' joe I have - add 17 calories for the coffee and 0 for the Sweet-n-Low, and that's around 60 calories a glass. Not too shabby.

Sounds like you're on the right path, JC, so the trick is to keep it up. Cheat days are all right, but I've always found that on the days when I didn't keep track of my food, it took me three days to recover my previous weight. Do that every week and you'd be four days good, three days bad... you'll make slow progress, but you sound like you're near your goal anyway, so maintenance may be your watchword.

Anyway, keep up the good work! You're doing great!

Liosa,

Although U.S. law states that companies have to put the nutritional information on the container itself, companies also know that if a listing has a huge amount of calories on it, fewer people are going to buy it. So they adjust the "serving size," sometimes to ridiculous levels, as is the case here.

To give another strange example, popcorn. Everyone knows that popcorn is a nice light snack to have when you're dieting. Now a bag of microwave butter popcorn (the regular kind) lists a "serving size" of either 120 calories per 2 tbsp of unpopped corn, or 20 calories per 1 cup of popped corn. No one ever eats unpopped corn (and if someone does, please correct me), so that amount is useless. So you look at the popped corn listings, which sound pretty good, except that the information above says that each serving contains 7.5 cups. Okay, I do the math, and that gets me 150 calories. But wait - it gets better. There are 3 servings per bag! When was the last time you didn't finish a bag of microwave popcorn? So that means your "healthy snack" was 450 calories! That's the same as Quarter Pounder with Cheese!

So don't be too frustrated with nutritional information - just learn how to read between the lines. And if it helps, remember that you're not alone.

Honestly, I just thought you were switching tenses - like going from first to third person without realizing it. (I do this all the time.)

Anyway, I wish your friend the best of luck, as I'm in a similiar situation - but have found this site very helpful. Since I started, I've managed to understand my cravings better, and can ignore them. My particular problem was not hunger, just a bad habit of eating when I was bored or stressed. Once I discovered what I was putting into my body, it was a real wake-up call for me.

However, I am curious - what is Tang Soo Do? It sounds Korean - is it a variant on Tae Kwon Do?

The right activity level varies per person. If you intend on logging your activities as well as your calories, then mark yourself as "sedentary," and then each time you enter in the calories burned through an activity, you can watch the estimate increase. If you don't want to log your activities, mark yourself as "light activity," which will add 500 calories burned to your log, and you can make your calculations from there.

Working out is ALWAYS a good thing - don't stop doing that. However, you may be facing a classic problem. Since you are burning more calories, you may be eating more to make up for that. It's easy to eat WAY more than you burn on those times because you're hungrier from the greater workout. For example, I like to walk. For twenty minutes, I walk a mile, and burn 192 calories. That's less than a McDonalds hamburger or a pack of peanuts - a tiny little amount of food! However, you may feel like eating the Big Mac - close to 700 calories! So if we take my example, I walk a mile to get to the Mickey D's, get hungry, order the Big Mac, and now I've taken in 500 more calories than I burned it getting there. Even walking home another mile, I'm still gaining 300 cals.

You may also be building muscle mass, which weighs more than fat, but that shouldn't make you not fit into your clothes. Is it just around the shoulders, where you want muscle, or is it the belly, where you don't? You may also be doing the wrong type of exercises.

Just some thoughts for ya. Best of luck and keep up the workout!

I've noticed that the only foods that get "A" grades are vegetables and fruits... for obvious reasons. Now, unless you're a vegan, it's nigh impossible to stay above the A- range, because something is going to drag your grade down.