DASH-ing Through the Pounds (I hope)

So today is a banner day in the LadyK household. I have, after my scales screamed "GET OFF", started a diet. Yep, I typed it right there -- I'm going on a diet. (sigh)

This has been a long time coming, I suppose. I've always struggled with my weight. Okay, maybe not ALWAYS, but certainly since moving the summer between 7th and 8th grade. That was a summer filled with potato chips and ice cream ... 'twas a blessed summer, that found me 2 sizes larger when school started -- oops.

And here I am, 48 years old, 100+ pounds overweight, single, lonely, and on blood pressure meds.

So -- having done the Weight Watchers thing before (successfully until I quit) and the South Beach thing (again successfully until I quit), I decided to do a more balanced approach. Not that Weight Watchers isn't balanced, because it really is. I simply need something that I spend a little less time THINKING about! It's fairly self-defeating to try to lose weight by thinking about food all the time, and the whole points thing was a lot like math (yuck).

So this time, I'm looking at the DASH diet -- DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. My doctor had indicated that if I lost some weight and got some exercise, there is a very real possibility that I can toss the meds -- helloooo -- that's enough to motivate me right there!!

So, essentially, this is an "exchanges" type diet as follows:

GRAINS - 7/8 servings a day

FRUITS - 4/5 servings a day

VEGGIES - 4/5 servings a day

DAIRY - 3 servings a day

LEAN MEATS - 2 servings a day

FATS & OILS - 2/3 servings a day

NUTS, SEEDS & LEGUMES - 4/5 servings a week

SWEETS - less than 5 servings a week

This looks so simple that even I can figure this out! Nothing's omitted, which I like, because inevitably, if you leave something you like out of your diet for too long, it's gonna come back.

So the journal plan is simple: I'm going to journal my days -- hopefully less than 365 of them to do the trick.

Today: Day 1

Weight: beyond belief, plus 3

Breakfast: I started my day with a bowl of cheerios with milk and a sliced banana. By my best guess, that's 2 grains (1/2 cup equals 1), 1 dairy (although I used whole milk), and 1 fruit.

Snack: I had 1/2 cup of baby carrots (raw -- love the crunch!) So there's 1 vegetable

Lunch: I had some (3 oz?) smoked Boston butt (oops -- I don't think that falls under the "lean" part of the equation, but this is a work in progress), some dill pickles (veggies? they start out as cucumbers!), and (uh-oh) some chips. I don't suppose we can call them potatoes really, can we? If we try, we also have to add the fats -- looks like today's fats are already gone!

no afternoon snack

Supper: Well, supper is going to be my struggle unless I do a little better planning ahead. Tonight we had hot dogs -- with cheese -- and chili - and chips. (but with Diet Dr. Pepper) So, given that they were angus beef dogs (not low fat, but meat, nonetheless), and I had two, that's 2 meats, 2 grains (buns), 1 dairy (1 slice of cheese divided), chips again -- what food group would those fall under? I'm thinking they need to be banished altogether. The hot dog chili is really just a bunch of artificial stuff, so it doesn't count.

Dessert: 1 York Peppermint Patty (miniature)

So not terribly shabby for the first day out of the gate --

4 grain

2 dairy

1 fruit

2 vegetable

3 meat

fats -- off the chart

questionable -- chips (they just don't have a categorical home!)

1 sweet (although 3 is a serving size, so technically I've only had 1/3 of a sweet)

Obviously it's going to take a little better planning, but I really think this is doable.

Oh, and I added WATER (gasp) to my world. Started out with a bottle as I left the house this morning and refilled it twice from the water fountain today, so that's about 48 ounces, plus 2 cups of coffee, and a couple of Diet Dr. Peppers.

Didn't work in any exercise today-- with the cooler weather though, it looks promising to get a little walking in either at lunch or after work for a few minutes every day. The Doc said if I would just walk 10 minutes a day every day for 6 weeks, I'd actually start to enjoy it and look forward to it. I'll have to test his theory on that one.

That's all for day. Thanks for reading (Mom? are you out there? Mom? Momma? Mommy?) ... sigh

Getting Started

Hi, I'm LadyK. I'm a 48-year-old divorced mother of 2; ages 22 and 15. I am a Christ-follower and live in the Southeastern US. I spend my days as a legal assistant, and dream of spending my days reading and writing. Welcome to my world!

I was working on writing a book of Devotions, and had made quite a bit of progress toward that end, until that fateful day when I deleted my desktop. Yes, you read that correctly; I deleted my desktop. Kind of like an electronic version of swallowing your own head I suppose. It's just one of those things that I had never considered as a real possibility.

It all came about simply enough. I was online chatting and the "Download" menu kept popping up, with automatic downloads of files which were titled "Desktop-1," Desktop-2," etc. Every time one would pop up, I'd click CANCEL, and it would stop. Then I'd go look at my files, and there they would be ... all those files just sitting there on the list. And so, fearing they may be attempts to hack my Mac or spread electronic swine flu and the like, I decided to just delete them. I did a global search for "Desktop" and then did a SHIFT+DEL (if you didn't already know, holding the SHIFT key down while you hit the DELETE key does a secure delete, which bypasses your Trash). The computer, knowing what I was about to do, asked me "Are you sure you want to permanently delete the selected items"? "Oh yeah, I'm sure," I thought, and then I did it ... I clicked "YES."

I suppose I should have known something was amok when the little display window showed over 5,000 items being deleted. I knew there had been a lot of download attempts, but that seemed unbelievably high. I could have (and should have) clicked on CANCEL, but I was feeling quite accomplished at having foiled the hacker/swine flu. Then I left the room to let the computer electronically destroy and erase everything in that list.

It wasn't until much later -- too late -- that I realized what I had done. You see, in the midst of that list of all those "Desktop-#" files was this one item called simply "DESKTOP." That one was kind of a biggie ... as in being the actual desktop from my computer. The light bulb in my head (very dim at the moment) went off ... so THAT'S why there were so many files. And then reality hit ... because on my desktop was a folder entitled "Book" which contained over 40 completed devotions and another 50 or 60 partially written entries for my book. Over two years of writing ....poof!

I cried. Not only at that moment, but also each time I turned on the computer over the next week or so and saw the empty desktop. All that work, just .... gone.

So now, it's back to the drawing board, but instead of a book, I'm going to write here, as the mood strikes, in little bits. Maybe one day I'll get back to the book, but I think it's more important to get back to writing!

I welcome your comments, but please keep your language child appropriate. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, and I certainly don't expect to agree with everyone but I do like to hear what others think!

More to come!