Fletcher Diet Experiment Day Four

Today did not go very well.  I woke up, had a banana for lunch (100 calories), and decided to go for a bike ride to the Central Park Zoo.  It wasn’t a far ride at all, about 2 1/2 miles, but it almost killed me.  I think that the combination of only eating 500 calories yesterday, only having a banana for lunch, and the crazy hill that is 5th avenue was too much for my body to take.  So even though I wasn’t hungry yesterday or even after my lunch today, my body still needed more fuel before doing physical activity.  I will just have to do a better job of monitoring my calories before exerting myself.

After getting to the zoo I walked around for blocks to try and find coke.  I needed some fast energy and coke seemed like a good solution, even though the zoo only had pepsi.  Please, I’m not wasting 200 calories on pepsi. 

I got back from the zoo, riding 6 miles total on my bike, with the absolute worst headache in the world.  I took some tylenol and took a nap.  Mitch came home with supper, I was going to have chicken and rice but the deli was out of it so I just told him to get me a cheeseburger.  This is where the diet fell apart.  I felt to horrible to think about eating and ate more than I needed without even enjoying it.  Later on tonight I was hungry and all I could think about was food.  It became obsessive, and I started to get anxious at the thought of not having a turkey sandwich.  I decided that the anxiety wasn’t worth it, and had the turkey part of the sandwich, the bread was gross, and a coke.  Overall today it was about 1300 calories which isn’t bad normally, but a lot more than the past three days.

Fletcher Diet Experiment Day Three

Today the diet is continuing to go very well in some ways and slightly concerning in others.  Today my total calorie count was 500.  That’s definitely not something I’m going to keep up full time, possibly not even for the rest of the week.  The point of the diet was to not change any eating behaviors and just chew everything a ton.  This has apparently caused me to lose much of my appetite. 

Lunch today was just yogurt.  Low fat yogurt – 80 calories.  Not great but better than yesterday.  Supper was turkey and baby corn.  I ate about 1/8th of the total meal, Mitchell had the rest.  Supper came to about 150 calories.  I know, it’s crazy.  I had one soda, which is actually a big deal because I drink soda like crazy.  Topped everything off with a banana because I felt I should consume more calories, even if I wasn’t particularly hungry at the time. 

Fletcher Diet Experiment Day Two

Day Two of my dieting experiment went pretty well.  I think as a result of these two days I have become a lot less hungry during the day.  I’m more hopeful that something positive might actually come out of this experiment.

Today’s lunch consisted of leftover mushroom fried rice, but I pretty much just picked out the mushrooms and had those.  So a whopping 38 calories for lunch.  The strange thing is I fell satiated after eating it and wasn’t particularly hungry until supper time.

Dinner was sausage and pepper pizza.  I had two and a half slices for 447 calories, a much better number for a meal.  What was more exciting was that I stopped eating when I no longer felt hungry instead of stuffing myself until I get a stomach ache.  The incessant chewing definitely helps with that, I get tired of eating very quickly, but I also think I’m starting to gain more control over my eating.  Everyone knows that the last bites that you take when you’re already full don’t taste very good and just make you feel like crap.  However not taking those bites can be very difficult.  Hopefully this is a behavior that I’ll be able to continue when I start chewing normally again.

The picture is from Farm Follies, an awesome show in Storyland in NH. 

I Dyed My Hair!!!

Every few months I get bored of my hair and feel an urgent need to change it.  Usually I can resist.  This time, however, I gave in and decided it would be fun to dye my hair.  Mitch and I went to the drugstore last night and decided on black as a color.  I dyed it today in a surprisingly complicated process with many warnings of things that could make the dye explode.  But I was successful!!!  And I now have dark black hair!

Ashamed

I wanted to start putting up almost daily pictures of myself mainly as a record and also as an encouragement to myself to put together cute outfits.  Lately I’ve basically been wearing whatever fit and was comfortable because I was too ashamed of my body to go out and get new clothes that actually fit.  I was doing the whole diet and exercise thing partly to gain some sort of control over my body and to no longer be disgusted by it.  I thought I was making progress, finding things I liked about the body I have now but today I had a set back.

I took pictures last night and today uploaded them to my computer.  However, instead of editing the picture and uploading to the blog I deleted them all.  Because I looked fat.  It’s pathetic really.  I look how I look, I should embrace it not be too embarrassed to even bother editing pictures of myself.

So I have made a new pact with myself.  I will take a picture as often as possible and upload every one to this blog, no matter how fat I think I look in it.

Diet Experiment Day One Part Two

I managed to get all the way to supper without snacking.  I actually wasn’t even hungry, though that might have been from the slight nausea caused by the incessant chewing of lunch.  Either way, I only consumed about 300 calories before supper.  Which is kind of ridiculous, and definitely not something that I’d be able to do or even should attempt to do everyday.

 

For supper we went out to eat and I got macaroni and cheese.  No idea how many calories were in it but I’m assuming a lot.  It was delicious and I did do the chewing thing for the entire meal.  In the end I ate about half, maybe less.  Plus a couple of french fries that I stole from Mitch.  I’m estimating that I ate about 500 calories for dinner.  Overall for the day I consumed less than 1000 calories. 

There may be something to this diet, at least in the short term.  I ate significantly less than normal and wasn’t dying of hunger like I usually am when I try and cut back.  Finally, why is it impossible to take pretty pictures of food?  I swear the mac and cheese looked delectable in person.

Diet Experiment – The Fletcher Diet Part One

My main problem with trying to lose weight is that I am incredibly impatient.  So when nothing happens right away I become incredibly despondent and usually give up.  During this past month I’ve been better than normal about not eating so much and exercising and yet nothing is happening.  I thought instead of getting frustrated I would try and do something fun to take my mind off of it.  So I’m going to start experimenting with some ridiculous old diets.  Starting with the weirdest one I could find, The Fletcher Diet.

Mainly this diet consists of chewing your food until it basically liquefies.  The theory behind it is that when you eat too quickly the digestion that should take place in your mouth doesn’t happen and for some reason this causes you to gain weight.  Or at least not digest your food properly leading to health problems.  If it does work my guess is because it takes so long to eat that you end up eating less.  We’ll see if it works.  Starting today and I’m planning on going on for a week. 

Meal One:

Leftovers from dinner at Gasho, a Japanese steak house; hibachi fried rice, steak, and some mixed vegetables.  about 750 calories total. (It’s not really purple, it’s very hard to take nice photos of food so I decided to just make it ridiculous and fun.

Ok so first of all, the diet recommends chewing about 32 times for each bite.  It ends up so that you “involuntarily” swallow the food and the counting of the bites isn’t actually important. 

I’m about a quarter of the way through lunch and I feel kind of nauseous.  Maybe that’s why you end up losing weight.  Also, my jaw hurts.

After finishing lunch I’ve ended up eating about a quarter of it, so around 250 calories.  I know from experience that normally I would eat the entire meal, plus the soup and appetizers we normally get at the restaurant.  Possibly there is something to this diet, but just as likely I’ll be starving in an hour and eat more.  I won’t really know until the end of the day.