Well, January is now over. I was able to push my body weight down 10 pounds during the month so I consider it a very successful month. My weigh in information is posted in the sidebar to the right. You might notice that my Tanita scale reported a large increase in my percentage of body fat at this week’s weigh in. It seemed the battery died right after I stepped off the scale. I had no part in the death of the battery, I swear.:)
At first I thought I would just re-weigh myself the next morning after changing the battery. Later, I concluded that re-weighing would break my hard and fast rule of 1 and only 1 weigh in per week. I do make an effort not to obsess about the number each week and I believe that multiple weigh-ins lead to such obsession.
I did manage to get through the book, “The End of Overeating” by David A. Kessler, MD during the month and found it to be very interesting and enlightening. Early in the book, at the bottom of page 8, Dr. Kessler writes “How much we eat predicts how much we weigh”. The simplicity of this statement has really resonated with me and I have turned it into a mantra “I need to eat less to weigh less” which I have been repeating to myself when making food decisions.
A big part of this book is about eating behavior and food cues. I had an experience during the month that highlighted how the type of food cues that Dr. Kessler writes about can and have affected my food consumption. During the month I was driving north on US 41 one day and noticed a new business “Little Joe’s Italian Beef Sandwiches”. In the window was a large cutout of a Chicago Bull’s basketball player. My mind immediately went to a memory of the few times I have stopped for this type of sandwich while in the Chicago area. Later in the month, on a particularly stressful day, also while driving on US 41, my mind flashed, in an instant, back to the memory of “Little Joe’s” and the Italian Beef Sandwiches in Chicago. I think the stress of the day caused my mind to shift to this comfort food.
Also during the month, while eating my oatmeal in the break room at work, I was just shoveling it in as usual and a funny thing happened. For a very brief instant I thought, “Boy, I am getting full”. When I make my oatmeal I make 5 servings at a time and have always used kind of rounded scoops. When I divide the servings up into 5 containers, I have always known I am getting kind of a large serving. Since I realized I was full, I put my spoon down, closed the container and put it in the little refrigerator. The next weekend, I opened up the remaining oatmeal servings and measured them to reflect the actual 1 cup serving size.
Last month I mentioned that I had been feeling fatigued and that my blood work revealed low white blood and ferritin counts. I had begun a slow release Iron FE supplement. Near the end of January, right before I was scheduled to have a blood work follow up, it occurred to me one evening that I didn’t think I was feeling as fatigued as I had been. The next week my blood work revealed that my white blood count and ferritin had risen to acceptable levels.
At the top of my reading list this month is Spontaneous Happiness by Andrew Weil, MD. This book came highly recommended and even though I am still in the early chapters, I can see why. I hope to be able to post to this blog again around the 1st of next month when we will find out how my percentage of body fat fared with a new scale battery.
