H - Preface: Confessions of a Serial Dieter...

Okay so before we start, a bit of background ;)

This blog is written by Carla and Joyce (that's me! aka H). We're two best friends who decided to undertake the "Eat to Live" 6 weeks Challenge. Eat to Live is a book written by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and is based on the concept of nutritional density. Where Nutritional Density = Nutrition / Calories.

Essentially, you want to eat foods with the most nutrition in the fewest amounts of calories while staying away from foods that are high in calories and low in nutrition. If you look at it as a spectrum from the best foods to the worst foods, it would go something like this: green vegetables, other raw vegetables, beans, and fruit. The nutritionally un-dense foods would be your cheese, meats, refined grains and oils.

Now the 6 week challenge is even more intense than the above concept, Dr. Furman feels that this is necessary because 6 weeks is the time it takes to form a habit and also because your body needs time to adjust to not eating meats, sugars, and oils. He claims that after the 6 weeks you will lose your cravings for such foods. Everydiet.org has a decent summary of this plan here

I think our initial intentions for starting this challenge is quiet relatable. Ever since graduating from university and starting to work full-time we both gained some “post graduate ponch” and we wanted to shape up for the summer.

Of the two of us, I’m the serial dieter. I started on Weight Watchers about 2 years ago – the first 2 months were great, I lost about 10 pounds and was happy with my progress but then I hit 2 road blocks, the smaller of the two was Christmas and the bigger one was that I hit my plateau weight. After a few weeks of no progress at all I gave in to all the sugary temptations of Christmas and fell off the boat. But now that I think back, even though I saw results, going on the Weight Watchers diet wasn’t the healthiest either. I remember eating sausage and egg mcmuffins for breakfast with a large cup of coffee and basically deprive myself for the rest of the day, eating barely anything and continue pounding away at my desk.

The following months was not so good, I was laid off from my job and was feeling pretty blue. But now that I look back, being laid off was the best thing that could have happened to me. I’m not sure how long my health could have suffered if I continued on that path. I was intensely stressed out from my job and as a result I suffered from insomnia and had constant pain in my shoulder and back from all the office work I did and sleepless nights and low nutrition didn’t help the case either.

I decided that I wanted to be healthy again.

So rather than going back on WW I decided to start exercising. I went to yoga classes and started going to the gym at least 5 time a week. I still remember the first yoga class, my instructor had to keep adjusting my shoulders because they kept curling forward, in fact my boyfriend had made fun of me for months before saying that I was starting to develop a small hunch just below the nape of my neck. I was turning into Quasimodo and I didn’t even know it!

Surely but slowly I started sleeping again… The first few months were not easy though. Even though I could fall asleep as I was tired from all the exercising, I would wake up in the middle of the night from anxiety about not finding work yet. But during the day I would remind myself that health took precedence over that.

Then the pounds started to slip back on.

With all the exercising I was doing, I would let myself indulge as a reward. But these indulgences seem to occur more and more often and afraid of reality, I avoided the scale. I think I did this for maybe a few months and when I finally did step on the scale again I realized I gained back 6 pounds.

By this time, it’s been 5 months since I made the decision to get back in good health. I was sleeping regularly and I felt my psyche was wound up less tightly. I decided I was ready to add a diet portion to my exercise regime. Being unemployed, and living off EI I didn’t want to pay for WW so I found a similar online calorie counter system for free. It’s called CalorieCount and I highly recommend it.

This time around I decided to use a different tactic. I started eating low-fat, low calorie substitutions of almost everything I would normally eat. I bought WW bread/wraps, Special K, low fat mayo, etc. During house parties I would opt for one slice of pizza and a green salad for dinner rather than the usual 2-3 slices I would eat. With the addition of exercise, the weight came off easily. In 3 weeks I lost the 6 pounds I gain and I felt great. By the way, during this time I was also interviewing as well and luckily I received a job offer. With my smaller waist line, I started shopping and preparing for my new job. With high hopes that this time it would be different from the last.

Work began, and I could feel that this was a different culture and work environment. I had an amazing manager that I greatly respected and my coworkers were welcoming and open. In the beginning I did have a few sleepless nights from the anxiety of starting something new but I knew what to do. Even though I was extremely tired from long day of work I would force myself to go to the gym, even for 20 minutes and eventually I fell back into my normal sleep habit. With this however, I fell off my exercise regime.

Ever since I lost that 6 pounds I was back at my plateau weight again and I stayed there. I’ve been working happily for 5 months but in the back of my mind I needed to get past the plateau. I decided I needed to do something different. With drama stirring up at work, I realized my body didn’t handle stress well and I wasn’t doing everything I could to help it cope.

I came across Eat to Live from an article I read online with a before and after shot of Alanis Morsette. To be honest, I didn’t even realized she had gained and then again lost a bunch weight. But that sparked my interest and I decided to buy the book from Chapters. I started to read the book and after the first few chapters I was intrigued. Everything he said in there made sense to me, it was just logic and good research and I decided that I was going to do this Challenge. Around the same time, my best friend Carla was talking about getting in shape for the summer. She is pretty fit but wanted to lose the extra few pounds she gained since graduation. I think having the extra support was what really motivated and drove me into really doing this extreme Challenge.

I’ll tell you all about my first week in my next entry!

Until next time