What are your non-negotiables?

Lesson learned (yet again);  Deprivation does not work for me.

I already eat a diet that is pretty limited compared to most people.  I do not eat meat (poultry and seafood included).  I try to avoid dairy aside from a slice of light cheese every now and then.  I eat egg whites but avoid eating egg yolks.  I avoid sugar in terms of chocolate, candy, cake, cookies, etc.  I do not eat rice because I don't like it.  I avoid white bread and eating bread in general except for a few servings of reduced calorie bread a day.  You get the point.  However, it is a balance that I have personally struck between having mostly all healthy stuff with the right mix of indulgence thrown in to keep me appeased. 

Every now and then I get this extreme inclination to try to modify my diet to give up something else.  It pretty much results in me hyper-planning, initially executing successfully and then crashing when I realize that I feel deprived.  This week I decided that I was going to try an Atkins-ish induction type of plan.  I was not going to consume more than 20 net grams of carbohydrate per day to see how my body responded.  I tracked everything meticulously.  The first day went very well.  I was proud that I stuck with it.  Same with the 2nd and 3rd days.  I realized on the evening of day 3, I was starting to get slightly annoyed.  I wanted bread.  I wanted pasta.  I wanted vegetables!  I eat 5-15 servings of vegetables on any given day.  I love eating them.  But they did not fit in with the crazy plan that I had devised.  I could only have a small amount here and there to stay on plan.  

Late on night 3, I told myself to have a serving of SOMETHING to try to quiet the crazy feeling.  I could not stop fixating on all of the food that I was trying to eliminate.  In my head, I agreed to 1 portion of whatever looked the most appealing.  I ate 1 package of my kids' microwave mac and cheese.  I think it was the best mac and cheese ever.  The next day I woke up and went carb crazy.  Four servings of pita chips with hummus.  Four servings of biscuits and gravy.  I had 3 diet cokes.  I had french fries from McDonald's.  I felt gross and bloated.  But I finally felt satisfied and reached a point where I felt back in balance.  The crazy cravings were gone.

Lesson learned - when you have found that sweet spot that works, don't rock the boat.  For me, that means that I need to listen to my body and know what I can realistically give up and what I will never be able to part with, even in the short-term.  I think when you look at your diet and figure out what your non-negotiables are, you can start planning everything else around those things.

So, what are your non-negotiables?   

My favorite way to cut calories when eating at a sit-down restaurant ...

When you eat at a sit-down restaurant, your best bet is to start by choosing the healthiest thing possible.  However, sometimes we want to indulge and enjoy something not so healthy.  A tip that works in either instance is to: 

Pack up half before you even start eating!

Have you ever thought, "I will eat half and take the rest home."?  That usually equals eating the first half and some or all of the rest!  Once we start the process of enjoying a meal, it is more difficult to emotionally disconnect and to realize when we are full or that it is time to stop.  So ask for a takeout box.  Pack away half of your food to take home and then eat the half that is left.  Bonus:  You have another small meal to enjoy at a later time.  

For a healthier breakfast, skip the drive-thru.

My favorite low-calorie, on-the-go meal is from Subway.  I get an egg white and mozzarella cheese (easy on the cheese) English muffin.  I add spinach, tomato, green pepper, onion and salt and pepper.  That is a whole serving of veggies there!  I also add just a few drops of fat-free honey mustard.  This sandwich comes in at right around 150 calories!  You can get TWO egg white and cheese melts at Subway for the same amount of calories of ONE egg and cheese muffin (300 calories) at McDonalds.  Um, not a difficult choice.

You can even add in a bag of baked Lays (130 calories) and still be under the calories you would consume at McDonalds.  280 calories at Subway vs 300 calories at McDonalds.

Not a fan of the vegetarian option?  The meat-based egg white muffin sandwiches at Subway are all under 220 calories each.

Remember:

• choose egg white, not egg.
• no condiments, sauces or dressings.  If you want them, get them on the side and add just a tiny amount.
• go easy on the cheese.

Subway serves breakfast food all day long.  YAY!  More fast food calorie hacks coming in the near future.  Send me some of your favorite fast food meals and I will help you find ways to make them as healthy as possible.

My "detox" from YAZ. The good, the sad and the ugly.

This post is related to health and wellness, so I consider it fair game.  If talk of things related to hormones makes you squeamish, you have been fairly warned!
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I have always been one to avoid medicines and things that I considered not medically necessary.  However, I as entered my late teens and early 20s, I started having problems with mild to moderate acne.  Not horribly disfiguring, just annoying enough to cause me stress and to force me to always wear a bit of concealer to cover up the spots.

I tried the following:  dietary changes, drinking more water, vitamins, naturopathic supplements, elimination diets, expensive cosmed skincare lines, chemical peels, microdermabrasion, Proactive and topical prescription medications (Differein, benzoyl peroxide and Retin-A).  Out of breath from reading that sentence?  Nothing really helped significantly.  I was seeing an awesome dermatologist and he said that based upon everything that I had tried, he thought I should consider trying YAZ for a few months.  I waited it out for a few months, not wanting to put additional hormones into my body.  After a crazy breakout cycle, I decided to give it 30 days.

From talking to many friends and family members, I have learned that YAZ (and its generics) is a love it or hate it kind of medicine.  It ended up being a LOVE IT medicine for me.  Within 2 weeks, my skin was the clearest that it had been in years.  I did start having headaches when I took the 4 inert pills in each pack.  I was told to skip those and take it 365 days a year.

I took it for almost 4 years and to the greatest extent, I never had any complaints.  However, I recently decided that I wanted to consider going off of it to see how my body would respond.  I have several friends or friends-of-friends that have estrogen-fed forms of breast cancer.  I started to get paranoid taking a medication that could increase my cancer risk.  This came along with another worry ... I hated the thought of dealing with my face breaking out.  I figured that I would once again give it 30 days to see how my body responded without the medication.

"Detox" has better than I expected in terms of breakouts!  In over 70 days, I have only had 2 real pimples on my face and 2 on my back (yuck).  Honestly, the biggest annoyance has been with my skin and scalp.  I feel like my skin and scalp are twice as oily as they were on YAZ.  I am always blotting with oil sheets and have to wash my hair more frequently.  The other annoyance is that I have to shave more often!  On YAZ, I shaved maybe once a week.  Now I need to shave every other day.  My chest size has also gone down a cup size (that is the SAD part!).  However, I can't pin that on YAZ alone, as I have been exercising like crazy so it is probably a mix of both things.  Funny how what you fail to consider as a negative outcome often ends up being more annoying than what you actually worried about.

At this point, I am going to take it month-by-month to see how my body continues to readjust.  I have talked with many of you about YAZ, acne, hormones and their effect on weight-loss or weigh-gain.  I thought you might gain something from my personal experience.

I'm not starving! How I eat 1,200 calories a day and feel satisfied.

If you would have told me 6 months ago that I would not only log all of the food I eat but also try to stay under 1,200 calories a day, I would have laughed.  I always had some excuse about why I did not need to keep track or count calories:

1)  I eat a plant-based diet, no meat or dairy.  I don't need to worry about it.
2)  I am eating gluten-free or nearly so and not really anything with sugar, so I should not have to worry about calories.
3)  I am focusing on protein shakes and eating a lot of egg-whites.  I can't be consuming many calories!
4)  I am staying within my Weight Watchers points for the day, so calories do not really matter!
5)  I worked out every night this week and burned thousands of calories.
6)  Blah blah blah ... some other similar excuse equal to those above.

NONE of those things worked.  It took a lot of frustration and wasted time on my part but I eventually figured out that tracking calories will probably always be a necessity for me.  I may get to a point where I do not track everything, everyday.  It would be nice to eventually use regular weigh-ins and how my clothes fit to assess if I am on track or need to cut down a bit.  I have heard that many reach a phase where they can intuitively know when to keep eating and when to stop each day.  I am nowhere near that point.

I aim to fall in the 1,100 to 1,300 range.  I have 1 day every week or two where my calories spike and another day or two when they go lower.  I very much believe in the concept of "caloric cycling," or trying to avoid eating the same amount of calories day after day.  If your metabolism knows what to expect, it goes into autopilot mode.  If you are always providing your body with a slightly different caloric intake, it removes the ability of your metabolism to adjust and become more efficient at a set caloric intake.

I LOVE to eat.  I am not someone that could eat three times a day and never snack.  Besides, that way of eating is not good for our bodies.  When you eat a lot and then go more than 3 hours without eating again, you create a huge spike and then subsequent crash in your blood sugar/glucose levels.  That makes you tired, agitated, irritable, etc.  You need to eat within an hour of getting up and every 2-3 hours throughout the day.  I have a whole list of 50, 100 and 150 snacks and mini-meals that I choose from.  This allows me to eat on a regular basis and to stay within my calorie range.  I went back through all of my food logs and found many of the non-fruit and non-vegetable snacks and put them together on a list at Pinterest.

You need to think of your calories like money:  put yourself on a daily budget.  If I know that I am going to have something higher in calories for dinner (usually a restaurant meal), I try to eat all low-calorie snacks earlier in the day.  If I have a high-calorie lunch, I know that I need to wisely budget the rest of my calories in the evening and also at night.  Some nutritionists believe that you should stop eating a few hours before bedtime.  I really enjoy a bedtime snack.  If a snack at night and its ensuing digestion bothers you, skip it.  If not, enjoy.

This exact plan will not work for all women but consider analyzing everything that you eat for a few days.  I think most of us underestimate exactly how much we consume.  Experiment with the amount of calories that you eat to find an amount that leaves you satisfied yet also allows your body to maintain your health weight.  And for men, I would not recommend anything under 1,500 calories a day.

What are your main obstacles to eating what you consider to be a healthy diet?  Share them with me below or via email and I can assist help you think of a few tips and tricks to try.