Reverse calorie counting and other tips...

My beautiful sisters!

Because I cannot sign my name in less than three pages (chuckle), the last post got too long. So this is sort of a "part two" of the last post. I want to talk about how we can "detoxify" ourselves, purge society from controlling our thoughts, and learn to think properly about weight and food.

Now, a couple of tips!

1) Focus on the Lord! If you are overweight, ask His guidance to make you healthy--that might not mean you lose an ounce! It might just mean that you need to make your arms strong for your tasks as the Proverbs 31 woman. It might mean that you are eating the wrong foods or not getting enough sleep.

Draw closer to Him until His peace descends on you. Lay everything, every sin, every pride, every fear, every sorrow, ever resentment, every happiness, every thing at His feet. Give everything to Him, and allow Him to fill you with His Spirit. TRUST HIM with the things mean the most to you--that means no more fretting, but trusting His Wisdom and Power.

2) Be conscious of your eating. Are you REALLY hungry? If so then eat! Are you just "munchy"? Then stop eating and try drinking water, coffee, tea, milk (even chocolate!), juice. NOT cokes and nothing with chemicals. If you drink something and at the end of the glass are still hungry, then eat.

3) Learn to identify that "denial craving" vs real hunger. My personal bad times are at supper--I WANT more for supper. But the thing is that I am not actually hungry, I just REALLY REALLY REALLY crave an extra slice of garlic cheese bread or another helping of noodles. (Amazingly enough, I never crave an extra helping of vegetables lolol.)

Anyway, that craving will get so intense that I am irritable that I am not having what I want. THAT is not hunger, that is the flesh--I want what I want when I want it!!!! THAT needs to be denied, whether it is a nap, an extra biscuit, to let a cuss word slip, whatever. Everytime you feel that pressure in your chest (maybe to post something on a board), or that desperation to get a nap, that irritation at being denied or interrupted, THAT is the flesh. Do NOT give into that feeling!!!

**Point of note--each time you deny your flesh in one area, it can help you learn to deny it in others. Be diligent about recognizing the feelings you have, whether they are godly or not, and take every ungodly impulse and deny it.

So how do you deny it? Well, in the case of me and an extra helping, I just tell myself "Put your plate in the dishwasher, go do something else. If you still want it in, say, 20 minutes, then go have it.". I almost NEVER want it in 20 minutes--it was not hunger, it was craving. It was my flesh, not my tummy. (truth in advertizing here--I am REALLY not all that good at it. I know what it is, but give into it WAAYY too much. lolol).

Now, as the dishwasher in the family, that allows me the opportunity to eat that last bit of pasta, that last onion ring, that last scoop of rice, that last bit of meat. I am putting the food away in the fridge, it is easy for me to say "Well, I will leave a little bit and pop that in my mouth while putting the pot away.". Fight this! This is not food you need, it is food you want. When I am good, I recognize this and scrape as quickly as I can because if I leave it, I WILL eat it!!!!

4) GET ENOUGH SLEEP. When you do not get enough sleep, your body will crave calories (It has to get energy from somewhere!). Get good rest, wake up at the SAME TIME every day, even on the weekends (sleeping in on the weekends messes with your circadian rhythm). Now, you might be tired, so go take a nap LATER in the day (not too long, 30 minutes is supposed to be pretty good) and then make sure that you go to sleep earlier so that you can maintain the same wake time. If you are sick, of course, sleep more, your body needs to heal.

5) Eliminate junk from your diet. No, I am not talking about eating only fruit juice sweetend, whole grain cookies with carob chips! I am talking about FALSE FOOD--food that is not real, food that is more chemical than food.
-Find meat that is not filled with hormones or antibiotics.
-Get produce locally, not shipped from Ecuador. Stock up on produce in season and freeze it or dry it or can it OR just eat the produce that grows in your area duing the season.
STAY AWAY FROM artificial sweeteners unless you have a medical condition that REQUIRES it.
-Stay WHOLLY away from high fructose corn syrup--it is poison, IMO. We even make our own pancake syrup--SUPER easy and cooks while you are there cooking the pancakes anyway, so it is not really much of an extra step. AND it does not have HFCS.
-Stay away from partially hydrogenated oils--it is better to eat butter than to eat chemicals, again, IMO.

6)Make your arms strong for your tasks, as per Proverbs 31, by DOING THINGS. How long have you sat at the computer today? (I am not calling the kettle black, I have been posting all morning!). TURN OFF THE COMPUTER (well, finish this post THEN turn it off ! hee hee!). Get up and get moving. If you are on the phone, empty the dishwasher. Get off the phone and take the kids outside. If your house is a mess, the computer and tv should be off. If your house is clean.....you are a better woman than I am! lolol.

Seriously, whether you are thin or regular or overweight, get off the computer and away from the tv and do something. Unless we are actually disabled or sick, we all should be able to keep a VERY NEAT house.

You know, this is something that I struggle with too....maybe we should have a special post about accountability and see if we can get some serious homemaking going here! :-)

(Why wait? Let's ask ourselves right now
1)How much time (honestly) have I spent on the computer today?
2)Is my house neat and supper planned?
3)Have I spent time with my Lord? How much time?
4)Have I spent time with my children? How much time?
5)Have I spent time with my husband, or do I have plans to do so? How much time?
6)What work have I done today?
7)What are three tasks I can be doing right now?
TURN OFF THE COMPUTER AND DO THEM!!!! :-) )

7) Create special moments and routines. For example, instead of having dessert, have an after dinner coffee. Instead of grabbing a bowl of chips, have a cup of tea and a piece of bread with butter or jelly. While we do not want to overemphasize eating, making a blessed little "moment" with our children, husband, or Lord is wonderful.

8)Put society on mute. Rely on the Lord and your husband for good feedback, not society.

9)Reverse calorie counting. This is something I really enjoy because it rewards self control immediately, not makes you feel guilty or deprived:
Instead of counting up what calories you are eating, count up the ones you REFUSE. If you normally have, say, 2 tsp of sugar in your coffee every morning, then one morning do not have those and put 30 cals on your list of "refused calories". That is 30 cals you did not need! For me, it makes me feel more in control because *I* am doing the decision making, and *I* get to see, on paper, what the results were.

For example, last night I really was going to have a bowl of ice cream. But I waited until the craving past (NEVER EVER eat "denial cravings", even if you can. Allow that to pass--usually takes about 20 minutes--THEN you can eat. You master your flesh, do not let your flesh master you.). So 1 cup (probably more, but lets pretend I only eat one cup of ice cream at a sitting lolol) of this ice cream plus chocolate sauce was approx 400 cals. If I avoid ice cream that I would have eaten every day for a week, that is 2800 cals!!!

I did NOT refuse to eat extra garlic cheese bread and ice cream and coke the other night that we had for girls night. If I had, I would have saved myself about 1200 cals...just from one night!

At the end of the week, you might find that you avoided a whole pound of extra weight! Maybe more! You can see on paper the results of your diligence, and then at the end of the week, you can see how much worse off you would have been (AND you would have seen that you did not die or suffer because you did not have extra food!).

Now, there are a couple of rules to this deal for it to work. First of all, you have to have habits to your eating. You have to know what you normally would eat. If your eating is all over the map (no food one day, 5000 calories another) then this will not work.

1) It has to be something that you really were going to eat. You cannot go through your pantry and say "Wow, there are 15,000 calories in this sack of flour that I am not eating!" lolol.
2) You have to make sure you do get enough calories to keep you healthy. Do not use this to go below the 1500-2000 calories that a healthy woman needs. This is not a race to the finish, this is a lifestyle change.
3) DO NOT count the calories if you use a chemical to replace it!!!! Putting aspartame in your coffee instead of sugar does not allow you to count the sugar. Why? Because even though you are not consuming calories, you are replacing them with things that are not actual food, but rather chemicals.
4) Do not count things that you do already. If you already eat ice cream with no whipped cream, do not count whipped cream that you really could have. This is about what you normally eat OR what you are honestly about to eat.
5) Do not count calories that you replace with other calories. You cannot say "I did not have this 300 cal piece of pizza" and then eat a 300 calorie plate of nachos.
6) You CAN count the difference between choices. For example, if you did not eat that 300 calorie piece of pizza, but you did eat the 60 calorie bowl of fruit, you can credit yourself 240 calories.

You can also use this in reverse if you need to gain weight to be healthy--a reverse reverse calorie counting! Instead of what you do not eat, of course, you write down what you would have avoided, but didn't. You can use this for everything from exercising to to do lists (for example, I write down what I DID do in a day. That helps me be productive).

I am not saying that this reverse calorie counting is a whole way of controlling yourself, it is one tool to use to take some of the negative emotion out of eating sensibly.

Ok ladies, let's get healthy!!! :-)