Quitting smoking was a similar situation. We’re both successfully quit for almost 6 months now using those electronic water vapor cigarette  — otherwise known as an e-cig. We both wanted this with the same passion and desperation. How much better we both feel since we stopped smoking!

But when it comes to food, dude can pack it away and when I bring out the barks and seaweeds, he can’t deal. He’s skinny, andl except for his little potbelly, which, for him is a non-issue that goes away if he runs around the block every day for a month. lol.

So today after an especially painful cuisine experience, I’ve decided that our kitchen is going to be transformed into a health center. He has no say in this. He can eat his food out if he wants to have anything that is not in the kitchen, and I’m chucking a whole truckload of food out, that doesn’t need to be here. But really, I don’t have much on hand that is necessarily “bad,” but for example, peanut butter… it’s just too damn easy to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, you dig???!  This kitchen needs to be a restricted area, with barks and seaweeds, lentils and hempseed.

And that is what is going on tonight. The transformation of the kitchen from a feeding trough to a health center.

I haven’t told my husband yet.

How did I begin to love this simple, yet good-for-fatties food? I started experimenting with different herbs and spice mixtures that really liven up the old school “cottage cheese and tomatoes” into a new school gourmet treat! I’m going to give a general recipe you can follow, but you should experiment with your own favorite spices and herbs. Fresh herbs are just lovely with it, I especially enjoy thyme and basil, fresh, diced up and tossed in with the cottage cheese. Oh, and another thing, I don’t like “fat-free” anything, and that includes cottage cheese. yuk. It’s got to have a little butterfat in there to keep my taste buds satisfied, so what I do is go for the low-fat or reduced-fat cottage cheese. Again, to each his own here, some people dig the fat-free stuff, just not I. Use it for this recipe if you like it.

1 cup of your favorite cottage cheese

2 ripe tomatoes (or one large one)

1/4 cup chopped fresh basil

2 tbs chopped fresh thyme

Now here is the kicker: Go to the supermarket and select one of their multi-spice combos that fits your taste buds. I selected one I really like that has hot red pepper in it in addition to 14 other spices and a little salt.

Toss your cottage cheese with the fresh herbs, cut the tomatoes in wedges of 4 and place them around the mound of cottage cheese that has been tossed with the fresh herbs. Now, sprinkle your favorite multi-spice addition on top of everything. Viola’ !  You have a jazzy fun cottage cheese and tomatoes!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m not a huge fan of the proliferation of bariatric surgeries these days. I’m also not a huge fan of the pharmaceutical industry. But side by side, I’d much rather see people get this surgery than swallow “diet pills,” prescription or not. Both of these things remind me of the huge increase in prescriptions written for people with “depression” in the 1990s. Of course, depression, like morbid obesity, are very real illnesses that require medical intervention. However, depression medication for people that aren’t mentally ill and bariatric surgery for people 30lbs overweight (and yes there are doctors out there that will do both of these things) is in my layman’s opinion, unnecessary, stupid and possibly dangerous.

But as you will see when you read the Bariatric Girl blog, she spent 3 decades morbidly obese and thanks to life saving surgery, she is no longer ill and obese.  A human life has been saved. Thank the god of your choice for that! Seriously. There should not be a stigma about obese people having life saving surgery. If I had to have this surgery and someone had a stupid comment about it, I would just ask them, “hey, would you like me to drop dead?” Because let’s face it, people that are morbidly obese are on death’s doorstep. That’s what the MORBID part means.

If you are depressed, and have a clinical brain chemistry issue, if you are an obese yo-yo-tried-everything-dieter-for-decades, diabetic, severely ill, severely obese, yeah, you need medical intervention; and that is between you and your doctor.  And I can honestly say here, that if I needed life saving bariatric surgery, I would get the surgery instead of staying ill and obese.

Weight loss is a very personal journey; but one constant always remains the same for everyone : You must take in less calories than you expend. Period, end of story. Bariatric surgery alters your digestive system for life. Like any other surgery there are risks, and like taking pills, there are risks. The question you have to answer is, will the risks outweigh the benefits? I think in the case of some fussy primadonna with too much time, money and 40 lbs to lose, this surgery is way more riskier than the so-called benefits. This is what I call “taking the easy way out” .. you aren’t clinically ill, you’ve found a doctor that will perform this surgery (and hey, look at how many plastic surgeons have worked on Michael Jackson, when he certainly did not need it, lol) and so instead of learning to control yourself, you go out and get this surgery. I think it’s dumb. But your mileage may vary.

I was 120 lbs overweight when I started my new life as a slender person. 2 doctors told me I did not need this surgery. I do not have diabetes, I do not have high blood pressure, I don’t have any of the major illnesses associated with obesity. Arthritis and GERD (which has since gone away since I changed my lifestyle) are my challenges. These don’t necessitate bariatric surgery. I explained in another post why all of the fat people my age, in my family, have diabetes and high blood pressure, FAST FOOD, DINTY MOORE and SPAM. lol. I’m an artisan-bread-dipped-in-olive-oil girl, always have been, my problem is I intake way too many calories and did not exercise. That’s how I gained 120lbs. That’s also why, at 120 lbs overweight, I did not and do not have diabetes, cholesterol problems or high blood pressure. I’ve got the genetics for all three baby! I’ve never done the things to make those genes express… fast food is a killer, people. I know of several young adults that have had to have their gall bladders removed because of gall bladder disease due to obesity and fast food diets.

So, let’s take a look at what kind of diet these people that have had bariatric surgery eat. Now, this is absolutely fascinating, because it is the exact opposite of what Weight Watchers and and a lot of these other diet programs suggest. The only diet program I know of that comes close to mimicking the diet that a person who has had bariatric surgery easts is that doctor’s Medfast diet. Here’s the link from Duke Medical Center that give complete instructions to the bariatric patient after surgery. And here is the meal planning guide for bariatric surgery.

I guarantee you that if you eat the same diet the bariatric people eat, you are going to lose weight. Protein powder and clear liquid starting out the first 3 weeks. Oh yeah, you are going to lose weight.

The question is, can you overcome the horror that lurks in your own brain? The cravings, the cheating, so on… people that have had this surgery cannot cheat without getting very sick or busting their “pouches.”  Bariatric surgery is a straight jacket for your digestive system.  You either do what you are supposed to, or suffer the consequences.

I started losing weight when I adopted a modified version of what the bariatric person would eat. I graze and drink small amounts throughout the day. I do not eat large meals, or drink huge glasses of water. I do not stuff my stomach with raw vegetables. I keep my intake down to half cups of anything. Considering that I could put away a half gallon of ice cream before I started living like this, half cups of food/drink spaced two hours apart has reset my appetite in ways I never imagined. It’s so easy now not to cheat! That’s why I call it “bariatric surgery of the brain.” heh.

Here’s the simple rule of getting through that rough period when you are just starting out: Be kind to yourself. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Slowly reduce your calorie intake over the period of a week if that will help you.  I have failed more times than not setting myself up with a militant diet plan and then feeling sick all day, just to end up cheating bigtime. This time though, I let myself have a little wiggle room that first week. Now, a little wiggle room does not mean that you can down a half gallon of ice cream if you feel like it, what it means is that if your plan has sent you over the edge wanting to cheat, try something a few steps up.

For example. My first week was a planned shake diet. One thing I’ve done this time around is that I switch-a-roo my diet plans, I don’t stick to the same one all the time, although I do stick to the calorie limit as closely as possible. My first day on this diet was a living hell. 800 calories of living hell. So what did I do? Instead of ordering a pizza, I went into the fridge, took out a small piece of whole grain bread, slapped some fat-free pizza sauce on it and some grated parmesan cheese. For about 150 calories, I chased the pizza monster away. So instead of my first diet day being 800 calories, it ended up being 950. Whoopdedoo. You are NOT a fail whale if you do this! You have succeeded much more than if you broke down and ordered that pizza!

I went the entire day without cheating and by bedtime I was ready to order 10 pizzas. lol.  That one little snack for 150 calories filled my belly and I fell blissfully asleep. And guess what? The next day I woke up feeling much less bloated, not as hungry, and not as tired as the first day on my diet.

Remember to be kind to yourself.

You see, these foods are for other people. People of normal weight, people that are skinny, and people that are fat and unhealthy and aren’t ready to do anythng about it yet. But you say, “Ms. Fatty, having just ONE of something will fit into my calorie plan.” Ok. I can jive with that. But the question isn’t “just one won’t hurt?” The question is, can you eat just ONE and stop there? Can you eat just one rib, one tablespoon of mayo potato salad or one half of a cookie and STOP? If you aren’t at the point in your life where you can do this (and a deep, honest and very personal inventory of yourself is necessary) I wouldn’t take the risk of blowing your calorie limit for the day. It’s not worth it! No holiday is worth it! Once I stopped that “oh I’ll just enjoy myself today” crapola, was the day I finally started losing weight. Let me put it this way: It’s soooooo much easier to stick to your calorie plan 24/7 than it is to try and get back on the wagon once you fall off.

So how are YOU, the fat person trying to lose weight, going to celebrate this holiday? I’ve got some great ideas for a slender 4th of July that are fast, easy and yummy. This is how I’m going to be doing my 4th!

Here is my list of tasty options that won’t make you fall off the wagon:

Grilled Fish

Fish is something you can fill up on and boy is it yummy right off the grill! My favorite grilled fishes are mahi mahi, salmon and trout. Another great low-cal griller are wild caught scallop on kebobs with vegetables marinated in an no-fat or low-fat Asian sauce.

Grilled Tofu

You’d be surprised how many tofu haters I have converted using grilled tofu. I am convinced that this is the way tofu tastes the best, hands down. It can pair up with any sauce you want, American BBQ, Asian, Mexican, Tandoori. I don’t suggest tofu with Italian spices, although I realize this may be just a matter of taste, in my opinion, the two don’t pair very well.  Marinate the tofu in sauces overnight and then brush your grill lightly with oil to prevent sticking. Grill like you would any meat.

Angel Food Cake

The food of the gods. Angel food cake is my personal diet savior. A big 3 inch slice is going to cost you about 160 calories, and no fake sugar or weird “diet flavors” just good old-fashioned cake flavor! Pair it up with fresh fruit, lots of fresh fruit. My favorite is what I like to call my Liberty Cake -  fresh blueberries, raspberries, strawberries paired up with angel food cake make a beautiful and patriotic cake for the 4th that everyone, including you, is going to enjoy.

Grilled Corn

This is another favorite and I dress them up with spices to match whatever main dish is being served. Spray a light coating of olive oil on the ears and then roll them in a mixture of spices of your choice and grill! You won’t believe how well corn can be paired with any cuisine.

Sun Tea

This is a summer party must have. This is so easy to make and a lot cheaper than soda. It’s also a lot better for you. It couldn’t be easier to make. Get a glass jar and select whatever tea you like the best and steep it in the jar with water. Park it out in direct sunlight for a few hours and then refrigerate. That’s it! To sweeten, don’t add sugar, add sprigs of fresh spearmint or mellissa.

Lemonade / Cherry Limeade

I have a product I’ve reviewed here before in mind for some refreshing, sweet and low-cal Lemonade and Cherry Limeades. See my post about True Lemon. They make two products that are outstanding for these drink recipes. Now, both of these drinks call for sparkling water, flavored or unflavored. Actually, flavored is best, lemon flavored for the lemonade recipe and lime flavored for the cherry limeade recipe. For the lemonade: Use the True Lemon “Naturally Sweet” Lemonade mix and mix into proportion to lemon sparkling water. Float some fresh lemons in the drink. For the cherry limeade: 2 packets of True Lime for every 12 oz of  lime flavored sparkling water, 2 tablespoons of cherry juice (or use a tablespoon of marischino cherry juice) and top with some fresh cherries or a couple of marischino cherries. Marischino are a kind of candied cherry for drinks; and the juice can be measured out of the jar to suit your taste. I find that a tablespoon works well in this recipe, giving it just enough sweetness when paired with a marischino, while remaining low-cal (about 30-40 calories).

Liquor.

You gotta have it, right? Well you’ve got plenty of low-cal choices, just be sure to count all of those calories and adjust your food intake. Vodka, Gin, and many beers make a good choice.

Fruit Snack Bowls

Instead of a bowl of chips on your 4th of July table, try a bowl of cherries! They are in season right now and the ones we’ve been getting around here are as sweet as candy.  If you can’t get away with a fruit bowl, try some baked crisps instead of fried.

I picked up some Trader Joes granola/nut bars and thought they were a great deal at 150 calories each. BAH. I am D-O-N-E with any of these granola or “food bars.” I ate ONE and damned if I didn’t feel like eating the whole box!! But alas, I did not cheat, I did resist! I gave them to my skinny husband and told him to hide them in his room and eat them.

Calories can be deceiving. That’s like those little Weight Watchers desserts, you can’t eat just one if you are in possession of more than one in your house. One of my very first diet failures (and there have been many, before I learned the “never cheat no matter what” rule) happened with those Slim Fast meal bars. Let’s get something clear: all of this crap is just another form of candy bars with vitamin powders and maybe a couple of whole grains thrown in. Other than that, pure sugar, fat and salt. I don’t care whether it comes from Slim Fast, the health food store or Trader Joes, they all produce the same result after they are consumed: ravishing hunger.

And that is how the calories are deceiving. At 6 meals a day, about 150 calories a meal (my eating plan which is more than great for keeping my appetite from going completely out of control), one of these stupid bars seems like a great option. You pull it out of the box, it’s big, it’s “natural,” it’s tasty and it’s a MASSIVE FAIL. I slapped myself on the head and thought, you dork, why didn’t you think of this before and remember your Slim Fast bars experience?!?!

Ah yes, the time I attempted the Slim Fast diet. “Just one regular meal a day and two of our drinks or bars.”  Um, no. The Slim Fast diet is one huge piled up meal and an entire box of Slim Fast bars; you just can’t stop eating them once you get started! These things are not good for fat people. Don’t listen to the advertising. And honestly, with all the sugar in that stuff, I don’t see how people with 10 pounds to lose could stick to it without plowing through their chocolate shakes or bars.

Ditto the experience with the granola/nut bars. If husband wasn’t hear to eat up my potential fails, I’d have to take the things out to the dumpster, I wouldn’t even be able to throw them in my trash.

I know us fatties all have trouble with food like ice cream, cakes, fried foods, etc., but granola bars? diet bars? I can’t believe that I am the odd one out on this one.

But I’m such a priss about it. I like FRESH sliced lemons in my water.  The little packages of preserved lemon juices skeeve me out. It all tastes like plastic to me. Although the packaging is supposed to be “food safe” plastics, side by side, I can taste the difference between lemon juice from the lemon and the lemon juice that has been sitting around in plastic for a while. How can that plastic not be leeching into the lemon juice, especially since it is so acidic? I say, if you can taste plastic, you are ingesting plastic.

Check this lemon juice out:

I tried True Lemon this week and was really surprised how fresh it tasted! This is a crystallized lemon juice concentrate, not a liquid packaged in plastic. Wow and was it delicious in water! It’s good with cut fresh lemons as well, it really boosts the flavor. By itself, it make an excellent addition to water, I really could not tell the difference between the cut lemons and the True Lemon. Fantastic.

Haha. Now that I’ve sold you on how great this is, you want a free sample too, don’t you?  True Lemon is giving away free samples galore of their entire line of crystallized citrus juices, lemon, lime and orange. Their also giving away free samples of their lemonade product, Naturally Sweet.

Naturally Sweet is some heavy duty competition for Crystal Light!!! I’ve never liked Crystal Light. I hate fake sugar. I’d rather have a tart drink than one with fake sugar. I don’t include fake sugar in my diet plan at all. I was mildly surprised at the Naturally Sweet being as good as it is. It’s 5 calories for a packet mixed with 12 oz of water. They use a combo of cane juice and a natural stevia sweetener to sweeten this lemonade. The “mouth feel” is definitely superior to Crystal Light, and so is the flavor. There is still a bit of that stevia “aftertaste,” so I would not say that this low calorie lemonade is perfectly aftertaste free, nothing that uses sugar substitutes is. But, they far outdo their competition in this area, and it’s definitely one low calorie drink mix that doesn’t make me grit my teeth.

]]> http://www.msfatty.com/true-lemon-to-rock-your-world-people/feed/ 2 http://www.msfatty.com/you-know-what-you-are-supposed-to-do-you-just-dont-do-it/ http://www.msfatty.com/you-know-what-you-are-supposed-to-do-you-just-dont-do-it/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:26:56 +0000 Ms. Fatty Cake http://www.msfatty.com/?p=198 I am a dieting expert. I know every diet out there backwards and forwards and can talk about them in my sleep. I’ve tried almost everything, I think. Some good, some bad. If there is one thing about us fatties, we are experts in the field of diet, nutrition, and fitness, a vast majority of us are..

Wait… what???? Then how come we’re all a bunch of fatties if we know all this stuff??!?!  Simple – we have memorized the facts but can’t apply them to ourselves or fail every time we try to apply them to ourselves. The main culprits here of course being that awful appetite monster we all battle, and the lazy bum in a chair monster we battle.  I think the appetite monster takes first place for most of us, HENCE the reason “bariatric surgery works so well to cure diabetes,” according to medical experts. Well, hell yes it cures diabetes if you take someones appetite and ability to hold more than a couple of tablespoons of food at a time.

Here is how it was explained to me by a doctor once: As an obese person your digestive system is so accustomed to processing such huge quantities of food all the time, that when you take away that volume of food, for a while it is going to trip off the hunger signals to your brain like mad. If you can make it through 30-60 days of not cheating on a diet and eating a very calorie restricted and volume restricted diet, you will reset your hunger signals. You will. Absolutely guaranteed. He used a rather shocking illustration with me so that I could understand this more : In places of the world where there is mass starvation, and aid workers go in with food, it’s not like they can serve a huge plate of rice and beans to everyone. In a starvation situation the digestive system will not be able to handle meals, hence why they will start malnourished people on some tablespoons of liquid nutrient gruel, because when you stop eating for so long, you can’t hold down food very well. Essentially, the same thing takes place with bariatric surgery, the stomach contents are restricted to reset the appetite and ability to consume food.

But this same doctor also told me that no one needs bariatric surgery if they can reset their own digestive system on their own. And as I’m always talking about here, never cheating on your diet is the quickest way to get your body to start responding to food differently within a month or two of starting the diet.

Ok ok ok you say. So what?  Well, you understand the point well if you are saying so what at this point. Knowing what to do and doing it are different activities. It wasn’t until I started doing what I knew to be the right thing that I began to lose weight. It wasn’t until I started DOING that I lost my huge appetite. Doing means NEVER CHEATING. If you cheat, you just extend your pain. Seriously. Every time you want to cheat you have to tell yourself, if I break down and do this, it’s just going to extend the inevitable, which is, I either have to lose this weight now and suffer some of these horrible hunger pangs and headaches or I’m going to pay later. Now or later?

Say to yourself.. just today, just for today I will not cheat, I will not extend my suffering by cheating.

Did you just get that? I said chocolate is the food of fatties! The food of fatties trying to lose it. And let me tell you what a wonderful tool these crunchy little nibbers are at keeping you on the straight and narrow:

If the only chocolate you’ve ever experienced comes mixed up with a bunch of sugar and fat, you are missing out!

This is real cacao bean, raw, fresh from the mighty chocolate trees. It’s nothing but the bean. And it has the most satisfying “chocolate punch” that works a wonder on the sweet tooth. Now, since this is the raw bean, it’s not sweet. Don’t expect sweet. The way I like to eat these is a couple of tablespoons of the nibs with a teaspooon of organic sugar in a small cup with a little silver spoon. They make an amazing coffee companion and satisfy me like nothing else can. The other think I like to add to these is a few drops of vanilla extract, which really makes the chocolate “BURST.” These beans are very low in calories and fat… before you give into that plate of brownies, pull this out of the cabinet and try them with my little recipe, or if you want, just eat them plain! I like a very slight sweet edge with these, personally, hence the teaspoon of sugar. But if you are diabetic or otherwise not eating sugars, they are good with a little powdered stevia and vanilla extract too! This way they are totally great for diabetics.

If that someone is still here, or comes back, baby, this post is for you.

If you’ve cheated and eaten a lot there is nothing you can do. You’ve blown your diet. What you must do right away is get back on the wagon and set your mind firm on the path of not cheating, and not deviating from your exercise, not one bite, not one lazy day in a chair doing nothing.

Here’s what I do when I am tempted to walk into an ice cream store and start plowing my way through a half a gallon of ice cream:

Tell yourself, NOT RIGHT NOW. Tell yourself: This wonderful, fatty, sugary food will be there for me after I lose all my weight; it’s not going to go away, it will still be there IF I want it WHEN I lose all of my weight. I don’t need it right now, I can wait. The day I weigh 135 lbs is the day I go looking for a huge cake or a half gallon of ice cream…

But guess what? I’ve got a while to go to my goal weight, and I have to be honest here, because I do not cheat on my diet, not one bite, I honestly am not craving this crap food like I used to. I can walk past the ice cream store many times without giving it a thought. Of course, I am human, so there are times when visions of sugar plums start dancing in my head, but guess what? Since I do not cheat on my diet, EVER, not one bite, EVER, the sugar plums aren’t as entertaining as they used to be, sometimes they are downright boring and I want them to go away so I can enjoy my damn salad in peace.

Losing weight is in your head. You must work with the brain you have right this moment. When a Dr. cuts you open and gives you bariatric surgery, he’s really messing with your head by making your stomach smaller so that it stops signaling your brain to eat. I’m going to discuss more about this in another post; but one Dr. actually told me the big secret to fooling your brain, to resetting your brain to accept smaller amounts of food and that is to injest smaller portions of food. This flies right in the face of all those diets out there that claim you can “eat all the raw vegetables you want!” No. And how many times I have failed on diets like that, keeping my stomach stuffed full. Vegetables or not, this does not work to solve the root problem of overeating and that is your brain. Your stomach MUST stop signaling your brain for food and the only way to do that is to give it less food, period.