The Crazy Exercise Week Finally Hits Me
Yesterday was Day 6 on the P 90 X program. "Kenpo X". Kicking, punching, jabbing, hooking, hammering, swording and lots of yelling. I woke up yesterday, as I have every day this past week, fully intending to fit my workout into the day.
The previous 5 days of workouts finally caught up to me. I had ZERO energy.
I spent most of the afternoon in bed, intending to take a nap, hoping that would help, instead screwing around on my laptop but still "resting". Still no energy.
I ate a big bowl of cereal around 3pm, hoping the extra carbs would get me going. Nope, didn't work.
In addition to the low energy, the scale has only budged 1/5th of a pound ALL WEEK. Those of you familiar with dieting know the frustrations of a plateau. And a plateau is frustrating ENOUGH when you're doing things "mostly" right. You can sort of, in the back of your mind, come to terms with a plateau if you know there are things that you could be doing differently or better, but you're just choosing not to do things 100%, and when 90% *used* to be good enough to lose 1-2 pounds a week, and now it's not - well, you still have that extra 10% as your ace in the hole to get things going again.
I had no ace :( Not only did I eat completely clean during the week, but I also exercised at LEAST 90 minutes a day, with this crazy P 90 X deal. And I mean REAL exercise, not just bouncing around the room with my heart rate at a comfortable 125BPM. I mean the quads-and-glutes-intense Plyo. 150 pushups Arms and Back interspersed with an equal number of pullups and chin ups for an hour. The crazy 90 minute upward dog/downward dog/runners pose/warrior 1-2-3 side bend triangle bend twist etc etc over and over for FORTY straight minutes followed by 40 more minutes of stretches and balances - I was MOVING and I was sweating and my heart rate was through the ROOF even with the yoga!
All this, and not even a QUARTER pound move in the scale.
Evil Bathroom Scale!
NOW, I will be the first to tell anyone ELSE, that if they are engaging in an intense fitness program, and dieting, that they should not even OWN a scale, and instead should rely on the tap measure, and body fat, and how their clothes fit, to determine their progress.
Yeah, I'm one of those. I should take my own advice, and too often I don't :)
So I was a tiny bit dejected from my admittedly unhealthy dependence on the scale for validation. And I was also super tired, so tired that I considered going off-program and making yesterday my rest day instead of today. And I decided that I would make Saturday a "treat day" - I think I've written before about the pretty-well-known fact that if you are plateauing, and you want to get things moving again, a couple of days of higher-than-normal calories usually does the trick. In my experience, for whatever reason, this doesn't seem to work if I simply eat larger portions of the foods I usually eat, which is pretty much vegetables, strawberries, a banana every now and again, chicken, fish, and whey protein. For me, it has to be an increased number of calories consisting of foods I *don't* usually eat, and the scale gets going.
Intentional Cheating
So I asked Jen (my housemate) if she wanted to go to Carabbas for dinner. She's *sort of* on board with me on the healthy eating journey, although this week she appears to have faced some challenges of her own in the form of a huge plate of WHITE FLOUR spaghetti and meatsauce. But that's for her blog, not mine :) So when I invited her out for this treat night, she said her husband was already planning to barbeque ribs. RIBS!? Those aren't even allowed in the house haha. But whatever - if I am going to have a treat day I'm NOT going to do it with gross fatty ribs that I don't even like. So I decided, since no one else in the house likes Indian food and I love it, I would go get some takeout while they chowed down on their bone-in heart attack meat.
The Incredible Shrinking Appetite
Now here was a cool thing!! In the "old days", when I would get Indian take out, I would get Saag Paneer (creamed spinach with cheese cubes), mali kafta (vegetable and cheese balls in a heavy fatty yogurt sauce), navratan korma (vegetables in a creamy fatty yogurt sauce), chicken tikka masala (white meat chicken in a heavy fatty tangy tomato cream sauce) and an order of naan bread. And if I wanted to pretend I was being healthy, I would get aloo gobi (cauliflower, onions and peppers in a spicy tomato sauce). All this would come with 2 or 3 pounds of white rice. And I kid you not, I could eat ALL of this food in 2 or 3 meals in a 24 hour period. That's like 7 POUNDS of food. Crazy.
So here's what happened last night. I was so pleased. When I went to the website to look at the menu and think about what I'd like to have on this rare "treat day", I looked at my usual choices. I had NO desire to have pretty much any of them. The thought of all that fat and carbs sitting in my stomach weighing my body and mind down really grossed me out. Mali kafta? Too heavy. Saag paneer? Too fatty. Naan? Absolutely nothing redeeming in white greasy bread, no thanks. Navratan korma? Waaaay too greasy! Here I was, giving myself permission to eat anything I wanted - and I didn't want it.
Now THAT is progress. And in the grand scheme of things, much more important than a pound or two downward trend on the scale.
So I ended up ordering the aloo gobi cauliflower, which from what I can tell is probably the healthiest dish on the typical Indian menu. I got the chicken tikka malasa with the intention of taking the chicken pieces out of the sauce and just eating those. I called up, placed my order, and took the 20 minute ride to pick it up.
On the way I stopped at Starbucks to get a "skinny iced cinnamon dolce latte". Again, even on the "treat day" I opted not to get the full fat, full calorie version of my fave drink. I was proud and the weather was fine and the convertible top was down, and I was on my way to pick up a relatively healthy treat meal, and my energy was picking up.
By the time I got home, about an hour after I dragged myself out - pleasant surprise! I had enough energy to get through the kenpo dvd. I decided to take advantage of this burst of energy, and I put my meal in the kitchen, went upstairs, did the DVD and really enjoyed it , came back down, and served myself a plate.
Another eye opener. I measured out a cup of rice - that looked like more than enough. I spooned an appropriately generous serving of the aloo gobi onto the rice. As planned, I forked the pieces of white meat chicken out of the dish, and onto the rice. I looked at the plate. It looked like a ridiculously huge amount of food. I remembered that I used to eat two or three plates of the same quantity of food for one meal. I thought to myself - how on God's green earth did I ever get so much FOOD into my stomach? Since no one else in the house enjoys Indian, and since Jen is trying to be healthy anyway, I dumped the remaining food - which was most of it, unfortunately - down the garbage disposal, before I sat down to eat.
This one plate of food looked like way more than I'd be able to eat, and as it turns out, it was. I ate about half of it, hardly any of the rice since rice doesn't really offer much in terms of nutritional value. I put the unfinished half into the garbage disposal as well, and I headed upstairs to do some yoga before bed.
Zig Zag or Calorie Cycling
I have read a bit online about the concept of "cycling" or "zig zagging" calories in order to confuse the body out of settling into a new, lower caloric intake, which, when the body gets used to the lower calories, due to the adaptation, can cause plateaus and slowed weight loss. On the 3 Fat Chicks Forum I found a link to the Zig Zag calculator. This is a calculator that allows you to plug in your weight, and it will give you 7 days of varied calorie intake, depending on what your goal is. They offer an "extreme weight loss" calculation, a standard weight loss, maintenance, weight gain, and extreme weight gain. The extreme weight loss was way too low for my current activity level - an average of less than 1400 calories a day. At my current weight, the daily intake average is around 1800 calories for standard weight loss, with two days of the week exceeding 2000 calories (not by much but still, having 2000 calorie days on any weight loss plan seems pleasantly high). I'm figuring that since my BMR is around 1500, and I do at least 600 calories a day of exercise, plus another 200-300 a day just walking around doing things throughout the day, the math would figure that I could lose a pound a week eating an average of 1800 calories. And since I haven't been losing a pound a week even eating 1300-1500 calories and doing all this exercise, I might as well give this a try, since my anecdotal experience has proven that when I go up and down in calories for a period of time, I lose. When I stay the same, I tend to level off pretty quickly.
So if any of you have tried, or are going to try, this method of body confusion for weight loss, please post here and let me know your experiences. I'm curious to see how it works! I will be trying it myself. I put my scale in the closet today - two weeks of daily weighing hasn't done me much good. So I will pull it out again in another 2 weeks time, and see what's doin' then.
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