I have a confession...
Though I have succeeded at losing 65-70 pounds over about four years and maintained at least 65 pounds of that loss for over a year I have never felt like I'm a good example of a healthy eater.
You know how you see some blogs and they post what they are eating daily? I enjoy those. The visual learner in me likes to see what people are eating to have the success in their weight loss or maintenance. However, I've never posted my food for the same reason.
It would be proof that I am not consistently eating healthy.
My weekly weigh-ins were all the proof I wanted to share. With a change in weight at least I could say the scale was up or down due to x, y or z, but you [the reader] would never know for sure if I was truly doing all I could to lose the weight when you didn't know what I was eating. (Which is actually pretty funny when it became obvious after losing only 30 pounds the first year that I wasn't sticking to healthy eating consistently enough.)
Don't get me wrong, I do eat healthier to some extent - both in portions and quality. You don't lose the amount of weight I have and not have done something right. The problem is I have fought tooth and nail to clean up my food to where I know I probably need to be.
My motto has always been "everything in moderation" and I'll be honest that it's been basically because I didn't want to give up certain things. To be blunt and honest, I wanted to "have my cake and eat it too".
And I think this is still okay to some extent.
However, even in my current reading on "debunking diet myths" I am seeing a trend that I was hoping not to find ... Even if we do not need to go through extreme calorie cutting to lose weight (as one writer has been stating-another post for another time) excess sugars, processed foods and basically un-satiating foods are not the best choice for good health.
Darn it.
Now, I refuse to jump on any kind of diet bandwagon to lose weight quickly -- my new ending in life has been about changing my habits -- but I am facing the fact that two major things have to change:
- My quality of food needs to improve; namely cutting back on the sugars.
- I need to be consistent with changing the quality to see the final result of increased energy and health.
Even though I've had success with weight loss I am not exactly looking forward to working on these two areas, but the desire to improve and not fall back into the vicious up/down cycle on the scale motivates me to press on.
I understand that only time will tell whether or not I truly mean what I'm saying right now, so I don't expect you to even believe that I will change. At least now you know a lot of where my mind is right now is taking care of what's going into my body. I know how to move my body and that is coming back slowly but surely.
Now it's time to dig deep and be honest with myself about how I'm fueling my movements. *sigh* True story.
Great post! And one I could have written. I've sometimes seen people on WW forums post their menus, but I would never do that. That would be because I wasn't really eating a lot of fruit, but would snack on chips, or eat out and not have the heathiest foods. I did watch my calories, but it wasn't exactly what you would call "clean" eating. Far from it.
ReplyDeleteI have made some progress on this the last few months. First, I quit buying unhealthy snacks for the house. No chips, no cookies, no ice cream desserts. I sometimes still have those foods, but just in single servings away from the house.
Second, I really cut down on the processed foods. I do still eat some of them, but less than in the past. And, more, a can of beans might go in a recipe as opposed to something that is just totally unhealthy. I'm not perfect on this but it does help to improve the nutritional quality of what I'm eating (and I've found my weight loss doing better as well).