Some thoughts

I was driving to work this morning and watched as car after car pulled into the gas station/convenience stores.  I couldn't help but remember all the forays I made into those stores.  Mornings would consist of a bagel perhaps, a pastry (or two), a huge muffin maybe.  There was my favorite of course which some of you might recognize.  That big crumb cake that comes in thick chunky slices, the top is thick buttery (oily) and the bottom is a thick cake like base.  It has to weigh a pound and I can't begin to imagine the amount of calories it has in it.  By far my favorite and not only did I purchase that in the morning, but also in the afternoons at times.  Many the times where I also purchased a container of chocolate milk to go along with it.  I think back now to my "breakfasts" that consisted of at least 700 empty calories, nothing to sustain me until lunch.   Wow, lunch.  I tried hard to do better at lunch, but didn't always succeed.  I brought lunch from home a lot, BIG lunches.  It was nothing to visit the vending machine for a candy bar or a cake like food.  If I ate out, which was often the case, it was nothing to eat an entire meatball sub.  But ALWAYS with diet soda.  Dinner, wow, I remember now NEVER being hungry at dinner.  How in the heck could I be hungry?  I would eat from the second I came in the door until dinner was served.  Then I'd proceed to eat at least 2 meals while I sat there.  I am amazed now at the amounts of leftovers from the exact same foods.  Ahhhhh those days make me cringe. Why am I reminiscing about bad foods?  I guess because I kinda wonder why I didn't get even bigger than 350 pounds.  How much bigger did I want to get??  But why didn't I gain like on the average of 2-3 pounds a week?  Clearly I ate enough to gain that, but my weight while not going anywhere near down, and creeping up slowly, didn't change all that much.  Granted I didn't weigh everyday, christ perhaps only once a year maybe.  But I was pretty much right around 350.  Now I can go up and down 5 pounds in a day.  What's up with that?  Is it as elementary as saying that I didn't know about the fluctuations because I didn't weigh every day, or even one a week?  I don't know.  The amount of food I was consuming surely should have had me gaining steadily, but the scale stayed pretty much the same.

I think we do a real number on our bodies when we start becoming more healthy.  I don't know, I suppose perhaps it's our body's way of keeping us on the straight and narrow, never letting us take our eye off the prize?  It's like it demands attention after all those years of abuse, real succinct attention!!  Either way, I'll take this over what was any day of the year.

Sorry for the early morning rant, but I had to share out loud. Donna

Very well said... with being a daily scale person i can tell you my scale can go up & down 5 pounds daily...i am not going to weigh myself daily any more but will weigh in weekly and record it on a calender i will keep in a private place...the up, down syndrom is a killer and a mental down.   This morning i ate my breakfast a s a lapbander would, slow and tiny bites..it was painfuly slow and being the impatient person i am i could not wait for breakfast to be over with..that was a first.  My SIL went to a gastro man for her heartburn and he told her to eat slow very slow and she would eat less and in the end lose weight also....hmmm daaa it is a no brainer but i have shoveld for so long this is going to take a while for correction but i am working on it  now. i will never do good with the lapband surgery if i continue to eat fast and take in to big of a bite i relize this now from all my new friends on board. This has been one of my biggest concerns with the band...so now i am changing one thing at a time.

The heavier you are, the more calories you will burn just to keep your metabolism going.  So if you eat a constant amount of food, eventually you will reach an equilibrium where you neither gain nor lose weight. Daily fluctuations in weight are far more traceable to water than anything else.  You are not gaining or losing 5 pounds of fat in a day.  I'll link this again: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/subsection1_2_2_0_6.html I quote, "...68% of the mass you consume every day is water, and 81% of what goes out is likewise water."

On the topic of water: I had to get up after 4 hours of sleep because my eyeballs are creaking. No, I'm serious-- I am THAT dehydrated. I don't know what the hell my problem with drinking water is-- but I better get over it. I'm a little anxious that I might overdrink, maybe, and blow my pouch. I'm supposed to get 64 ounces of water a day. Yesterday, I made a concerted effort and got in 10 ounces. TEN! If I don't cut this the hell out, I am going to end up blowing my kidneys out.  I'm finishing this 16 ounce bottle and going back to sleep. gah!

That big weight fluctuation is indeed from the weight gain cycle. We trained our bodies to handle large amounts of food.   i have often wondered if at times, i ate so much that some amount could not even be processed.  I wonder if the calories even stayed in me. It had to be an overwhelming amount for my bowels, the first stop the stomach tries to break it all down, but when you keep on shoveling...i wonder????  Like you, once in a while I too am amazed I only got to 230....looks like our bodies were slow to react becasue we threw so much into it.

Yup yup to all those thoughts.  You know, this might be TMI, LOL, but I remember when I was eating out of control I would barely make it through dinner before I had to visit the bathroom. My SO used to ask how I wasn't the size of a twig because it appeared nothing stayed in me. Now I envision this overloaded body pushing stuff out to make room for other stuff. Yuck, huh?

I hear that. I have dumped on fat for years-- literally ran from the table if I ate batter-fried anything. And did it just the same, over and over.