Weight Loss
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Help! Does anybody else resist eating foods with an unknown amount of calories & want to start enjoying their fav. foods aga


I am a 19 year old, 151lb, 5'8 male who has successfully maintained my current weight for 5 months after losing 135 pounds. I attribute this to continuing to count calories, working out about 5 days a week and monitoring my weight. Although being so strict about counting calories is a little annoying, I realize that I must do this in order to maintain my weight. It's just a way of life for me now. I know myself, and after attempting to intuitively eat and instead suffering a horrible relapse which resulted in me gaining all of my weight back, I have decided to calorie-count for the rest of my life. There is one flaw in my strategy, though... and I want to correct it because like they say in regard to weight maintenance: Don't do anything that you can't see yourself doing for the rest of your life. And I'm sorry, but I don't think I can resist my mom's delicious home-cooked Afghan food any longer! Or the food from my favorite Indian and Chinese restaurants that don't have nutrition information available for customers. Or for that matter, the to-die-for pastries from the local mom-and-pop donut shop. I don't know how I've gone so long without eating these foods... chalk it up to my need to be perfect and 100% accurate about the calories I consume-I know, I know... but it's just the way I am! By the way, I might be obsessive about calorie-counting but I don't think I suffer from an eating disorder. I eat a healthy amount of calories (2,000-2,500 per day) and am entirely in love with food. I realize that if I want to enjoy all of these foods from time to time, I have to accept that I don't know the exact number of calories in them and be content with that uncertainty. That said, how in the world do I even estimate how many calories are in these foods?

Afghan food: Should I just take the ingredients being used into account and take an educated guess at it? It could be so much different than how many calories it really is, though!

Huge donuts and cinnamon rolls from the local donut shop: The donuts are about twice or thrice the size of Krispy Kreme donuts... should I just multiply the calorie amount and call it a day?

Chinese fast food restaurant that I used to love going to: Take the information from a Chinese fast food chain's website and apply it to the food from my favorite place? Chow mein, lemon chicken and curry chicken are pretty classic dishes and probably wont differ that much from the chain's nutritional information right?

Indian restaurant: I have found a couple of websites that give very general estimates... but they use grams and ounces to describe serving sizes, and I'm not going to take a food scale to a restaurant! Do a rough estimate and enjoy this food once in a while?

I think you all get what I'm saying... opinions? Thanks in advance, I have been struggling with this aspect of weight maintenance for a while now and am very excited at the prospect of being able to enjoy these foods once again!

Edited Oct 30 2009 05:56 by smwhipple
Reason: Please do not post duplicate threads in multiple forums.
1 Reply (last)

I think what you have planned sounds about right. I'm still in the middle of my weight loss journey and when I visit my family every couple months I allow myself to indulge a little and I simply make the best estimate I can compared to other similar foods/restaurants, and I'm still losing weight! Don't deprive yourself - I allow myself at least one indulgence (a handful of m&ms, some homemade baked goods, etc.) every day to keep from bingeing. I also find that doing this keeps me satisfied longer and I don't feel like eating as much as I do when I only eat healthily!

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