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Sunday, June 3, 2012

4 Months into Maintenace and the 90 day opt out



4 months into weight maintenance:
There are no magic fairies, just good old fashioned work

  • 1.5 Pounds below my maintenance goal
  • 73.6 pounds lost and kept off for four months
  • Ave walking per day is 8,000-11,000 steps
Short term goal met:
  • 90 day opt out, as described in Refuse to Regain book, by Barbara Berkeley, MD = complete 
What worked
  1. Using 90 days to get my food and exercise routine down pat
  2. Tracking my weight daily.
  3. Tracking my food daily, if I wanted to remain below goal
  4.  Eating Primarian/Paleo 90% of the time
  5.  Using Medifast or other gluten, mostly sugar free treats for the other 10%
  6. Walking at least 45 mins per day
  7. Reading weight maintenance & Paleo/Primal blogs for more learning
What gets in my way
  1.  Too many almonds, pecans, or macadamia nuts
  2. Too much time sitting on some days
  3. My own stressing out over the perfect time to exercise
  4. Dairy, causing some inflammation (as best as I can tell)
  5. Lack of strength training.
The next mini- goals

  1.  Maintain for 3 months, over summer
  2. Build strength training in 2x per week during the summer
  3. Maintain balance with my long term work goal that will keep me studying! (which means balancing my study time with cooking, exercising, family, and you know the drill.) 
The next long term goals:
  1. Sign up for the National Weight Loss Registry in Feb 2013
  2. Work goal complete by Dec 2012


6 comments:

  1. I love the way you are breaking this process down into mini-goals and mini-challenges. You are being such an inspiration for me and I plan to follow some of your strategies once I'm into maintenance which won't be long now. I'm only five pounds from goal!!

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  2. Hi Sharon. Thanks for checking in. I've loved all your trip photos and I read all your entries. So glad you are nearing maintenance. I found the last 5-10 pounds go really slowly, but so worth it to get to where you want to be. Lots of work to get there.

    I've had to really study how I was going to keep the weight off this time around. I'm facing additional obstacles that I don't blog about, but some of the structure I set up is to keep me from eating to sooth myself. That doesn't really work so well, so I've committed to finding non-food ways to deal. So far so good. It's something I can control and the other stuff I just have to deal with. :)

    I think I'm going to start a blog discussing on the 12 Rules in Refuse to Regain and have a topic for each rule and sub-rule. Safe travels to you on your journey. Karen P

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  3. What a wonderful way to work out what does and does not work for you! Thanks for giving me some ideas that may work for me too :)

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  4. Thanks, Suzi. I think looking at what works is so important. For me, I need to know what works, so when a change in my routine happens, I can be consistently flexible, yet be mindful of the basics for weight maintenance. :)

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  5. Hi Karen, I just stumbled across your blog! First off, congrats on the hard work you've put into weight loss and maintenance! I can see from this post that you do seem to track your food, and I was just wondering: Do you adhere to a calorie limit, focus on only eating certain types of foods, or do a combo of both? If you calorie-count, I'm wondering how you figured out your upper limit. Thanks!

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  6. Hello Hazel, That is a great question. Right now , I do both food ( calorie and carb tracking) and I focus on eating certain foods. I used the tracker at my fitness pal to help decide what the top of my calorie range per day should be. Now I know that I could be estimating high or low on foods somedays and high or low on exercise calories ( I'm totally suspicious about the cals I earn for walking. ). I aim for 100 below the cut off, the cut off, or 100 or so cals above the cut off. I try to be consistent with both my food and tracking and that has worked out pretty good.

    By weighing every day, I can go back to my food logs and exercise and troubleshoot. I have a Normal 2 pound rise and fall 1-2 times a month. I don't worry too much about it. Consistency is the key and staying away from processed foods has bee very helpful.

    Thanks for the kind comments and good luck on your journey. Karen P

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