<$Monday, June 25, 2007$>
Zoning My Health
| So I'm a pretty big believer in the Zone. It's how I lost about 30 pounds in time for my wedding last September. Once I'm doing it, it's easy to maintain, I burn fat despite my lackadaisical approach to exercise, and I just plain feel healthy. Hooray, Zone! Despite all of this, though, Husband and I both let ourselves fall out of the zone for about six months. We have excuses, and plenty of them, starting with our honeymoon cruise, which was basically a week-long 24-hour floating gourmet smorgasbord, and followed up with arriving home just in time for the holiday season with absolutely no willpower left to us. Needless to say, there was weight gain. But now we're finally back in it, and feeling much better, not to mention much better about ourselves. It took a long time and several false starts to finally get back on the wagon, but for me, what finally made it stick was giving up lunch in favor of small, healthy snacks throughout the day. I read some scientific technobabble about how our metabolism gets a kickstart every time we eat, and how grazing all day long like this pretty much doesn't give the metabolism a chance to rest. Whether or not that's true, I find I'm perfectly happy eating small portions, just enough to stave off hunger, if I know I can eat again in just a couple of hours. A paradoxical result of this is that eating more often is actually causing me to eat less. Pretty nifty, eh? Whatever the reason, it's working very well for me. I've stuck to my dietary plan (I refuse to call it a diet, because that's not what this is) for a couple of months now, barring the occasional planned-for splurge here and there. I'm halfway back down to my wedding weight (which is one-third of the way down to my ultimate goal weight), and only about five pounds away from being able to squeeze back into the fancy pants I bought for work last fall. Yay, fancy pants! Best yet, eating this way gives me tons more energy. I have untreated hypothyroidism (which will be remedied as of this Friday; after several years without health insurance and one of sheer procrastination, I'm finally going to the doctor to get tested and, hopefully, treated for it once again), so my energy levels tend to be pretty low on good days and practically non-existent on bad ones. But eating this way has been keeping me energized and clear-headed throughout the day. It's really pretty excellent. It will be interesting to see how the combination of this eating plan works with my thyroid medication, once I start taking it again. I anticipate a pretty dramatic impact on my motivation levels. Labels: healthy living |
