Diet and Routine

Diet is a lot like a good suit...any diet can be made to fit you, but you need to shop around to find one that really fits you well. Notice I said diet, not dieting? They are often linked but usually people don't see a difference. There is one. Dieting is an act and people consider it a temporary measure usually to starve yourself in some way or with some gimmick in order to lose weight while your diet is the nutrition you take into your body. I'm probably oversimplifying but if a nutritionist wants to comment on the post he or she is more than welcome to. This stuff just flows from my the top of my head and people should know that I'm not a nutritionist so if I'm a little off then please forgive me here...

Anyway there are a lot of diets out there. You can follow a vegan diet (are there any overweight vegans or vegetarians out there?), no carb, no sugar, Atkins, South Beach,...blah blah...if you're overweight you're probably familiar with a short list of dieting lifestyles available out there.

I am a person that has tendencies and quirks that befit a person with a mild form of Asperger's. Part of that means that routine is very important to me, and I've found that a diet that consists largely of a set routine tends to work well for me. Once I get into a habit I tend to follow it.

I thought about this as I've now become settled into another food routine. Since my surgery I've had a number of bumps in what I could and could not eat and how to try balancing nutrition with protein intake and such. It's not over, obviously, as I'll need to make adjustments as blood tests tell things and probably adjust for weight maintenance if (hopefully when!) I lose enough weight to be near a healthy size.

Since my surgery I'm now down to a habitual diet that normally consists of a breakfast and a lunch that consists of a kind of home-made burrito and a dinner that is often a third one of these, but sometimes half a sandwich from Panera Bread or some seafood from Red Lobster or something like that. I take the leftovers home and piece them out for meals the next day so I don't let them spoil and go to waste.

The burrito consists of a flat bread called FlatOuts; it's a soft flat bread that is great for making rollups and comes in a variety of flavors. My favorite has been the honey wheat (but oddly enough I didn't see it on their website...I see it at Wegman's, though, where I normally stock up on them). I normally put some mix of 2% cheese, 98% fat free bologna, and/or ham on along with some mustard and roll it up to pack in my cooler.

I variation I make of this is to use a slice of the 2% cheese and some refried beans. I also will sometimes put in a chunk of cheese for calcium and protein.

There are some small variations I'll make along the way; like I said, we do go out sometimes to restaurants, other times I'll get enough ambition to make some Egg Beaters scrambled or as a patty to put into a home Burrito-ala'-Barry.

I always measure this out so that the meal is less than 6 ounces. At first I was keeping it under 8, and through monitoring and reflection I found that my ideal size where I felt pretty good through the day and still didn't have discomfort was a sweet spot near 5-1/2 ounces. So now my meals are less that 5-1/2 ounces when all weighed. I think that's doing pretty good.

Since I started riding the stationary recumbent bike, though, I felt a little bit...off? I suppose that's one way to put it. I felt "off". So I take a few peanuts, watching how much I have of course, to give a little boost. I started riding and going only about 3 or 4 miles. today I ride usually between 6 to 9 miles in about an hours' time before hobbling back upstairs (it really makes your behind sore!). I don't take a bowl of peanuts or a cup or anything like that. I'd estimate I have about a quarter to a third of a cup of peanuts, just roasted lightly salted peanuts. They're a good source of nutrition and I think a good source of energy for exercise; I know I've felt better since doing that so unless the nutritionist tells me to knock it off I don't know what harm there is in doing that.

That said I still dislike exercise and it makes me anxious when I am in a situation where I can't get my exercise time in now. I knew that was going to happen...

I have to say that I have not really felt a lot of pain or discomfort while adapting post-surgery. I had maybe two bouts of what I'd classify as pain, and maybe two or three episodes of discomfort while learning what was and wasn't an amount to tolerate as intake. I also had to discover that rate of eating affects how you feel...in my job, you get short bursts of time for lunch usually on the go an it's hard to step back and have an actual uninterrupted lunch time where you're still not pestered with job duties; this is something I think I'll need to work on more. But still I'd have to say that after all was said and done I had a fairly smooth transition.

I have had exchanges with one of the people that follows my blog, Lee, and I believe he normally sticks with a routine of eating batches of a homemade chile, the recipe for which he has at his own blog. I think the recipe is found here, but he may have altered it and varied it over time...I'm sure if you email him or comment on his blog he'd be glad to share it.

I don't know what works for other people. I just know that I can stick to a routine...about six or seven years ago, give or take, I went on a Very Low Calorie diet which was about 600 calories a day. People asked how I could do that and in truth it wasn't very hard. Well, the resulting pancreatitis and gallstone attack that led to the removal of the gall bladder wasn't pleasant, but the calorie restriction? Not so bad after about two weeks. I simply got into a routine of what I would have for meals at set times. It's probably the Asperger's in me.

So this is an update on another aspect of how I'm adjusting post-surgery as well as sharing that if you are a creature of habit, perhaps a diet with a foundation in habits would benefit you. The bets tools I've found for dieting are food journals and the advice of a nutritionist/dietitician. Various gimmicks for losing weight are usually just that. Gimmicks. At best they'll fool your mind into following a system that can benefit you. At worst you're wasting your time and money.

If you have lost weight or maintained a weight loss, please share your information in the comments!