Shrinking Sisters

A must-read on weight-loss momentum

Just read an article on the Appetite for Health website and giant lightbulbs crackled and exploded over my head.

No, I don't have a problem with my home's electrical wiring (except in my kitchen where I can't run the microwave and the toaster oven without popping a circuit, but that's another story) -- those were the "A-HA!" lightbulbs going off when I read the article "Don't Let Weight Loss Derail Your Diet."

Let that headline sink in -- does it sound funny to you? Then you may have never experienced the phenomenon of taking your eyes off the prize. I do it all the damn time. Lose 3 pounds one week, get all jazzed, forget to write some stuff down, blow off a workout and -- BOOM! -- that 3 pounds comes roaring back.

This particular passage in the guest post, written by Mark Izhak, RD, a registered dietitian and personal trainer in New York City, resonated with me:

After you lose 5 or 10 pounds, you can celebrate your success. But if you don’t immediately recommit to your ultimate goal (either keeping that weight off or losing more) your success is going to be short-lived.

Yup!

By the way, the Appetite for Health founders -- registered dietitians Julie Upton and Katherine Brooking -- have a new book that came out a couple weeks ago called "The Real Skinny: Appetite for Health's 101 Fat Habits & Slim Solutions" (Tarcher/Penguin, $14.95). The book has loads of tips on grocery shopping, dining out, home enviroments, meal planning, working out, and a bunch of recipes that they've curated for dishes like Baja-Style Fish Tacos, Muffin-Tin Turkey Meatloafs, Shrimp Feta and Couscous, and Strawberry Cheesecake Bites.

Food for thought: MizFit flashes forward to 2012

More linky love this morning from another fave blogger, Carla Birnberg of MizFit.com. She asks the provocative question:

If today were 12.31.11 & you were reflecting back on the year, what's the BIGGEST healthy-living accomplishment you would have achieved in the previous 365 days?

Write it. Print it. OWN IT. LIVE IT. ATTRACT IT.

Just thinking about this makes me giddy with anticipation, because I know that this is the year I'm getting it done. So here it is, Miz:

Reflecting back on 2011, my biggest accomplishment, something I've been struggling with since AGE 10, is finally complete: I am at my happy weight. I am now at the weight that I was in high school, back when I thought I was fat (little did I know!)

I know that I'll have to work hard every day to keep it under control, because the minute I take my eye off the ball things go haywire. But I'm not the only one in that boat. I've lost weight before but never sealed the deal. But now I'm surrounded by a family of healthy-living bloggers who share tips, support and friendship. We'll keep each other healthy, happy and at peace with ourselves.

Inspiration from someone who has been there and DONE that

Since I've deemed 2011 The Year of Getting it Done, I thought you'd want to hear from someone who has gotten it done.

My pal, Lynn Haraldson, resolved six years ago to lose weight, and she did, getting rid of 170 pounds the old-fashioned way -- diet and exercise.

Yesterday, on New Year's Day, she wrote a post titled What is Your Destiny? In it, she wrote:

When I started this journey, belief was the only thing I had going. I believed I could do it. I believed I was worth it.  That belief became my thoughts, which I journaled into words and spoke aloud. I told my family and my doctor, “I’m going to lose weight!”

Please read the rest of her post at Lynn's Weigh. It's a potent dose of inspiration from someone who Got it Done and keeps it off. I don't want to steal her thunder (or her pageviews) but I'll quote her one more time:

Losing weight takes courage, yes, but changing your life to make weight loss permanent? Yeah…that takes a lot more than courage. It takes love. And I am, finally, in love…with all of me.

Some bloggy love to the reborn The Skinny

Our old logo (and yeah, I repurposed my tag line).

Back in 2006, I thought it'd be a good idea to start a weight-loss blog at the newspaper where I worked as a features copy editor. I enlisted the aid of my pod-mate Laura and we got to work writing sample posts, mission statements, titles and taglines and designing logos.

For some reason I'll never understand, we ran into resistance from a senior editor who said we were making light of a serious subject -- weight loss. She wanted more gravitas in our blog posts.

To which I thumbed my nose and made raspberry noises.

She stalled and stalled, we pushed and pushed, and finally, in September 2007, we were able to give birth to our blog, which we called The Skinny. Here's a little of wnat we originally wrote:

From Laura: "...Let’s share our experiences and adapt what we learn here to our ongoing efforts to get fit and eat right. Failures too, because they count as lessons learned ... and sometimes they are inadvertantly hilarious."

From me: "I can make sure my dog eats exactly 2 cups of puppy food a day. I can tell my son to eat apple slices instead of doughnuts. Both my puppy and my son are exactly the weight they should be. So what about me? Why do I weigh as much as a Miami Dolphins linebacker? When you hit your 40s, losing weight can be one of the hardest things you'll ever do, but as my doctor said to me recently "it can be done." And why not do it in front of everyone?"

The blog became an immediate hit, and with less than a year's worth of content we won second place in the 2008 Florida Society of Newspaper Editors Awards for Best Blog/Online Commentary.

Then in July 2008 I got laid off and Laura took a buyout a few months after that, and The Skinny stood frozen in cyberspace. The Sun Sentinel kept it floating in the ether because even without us writing it was one of the most popular blogs at the paper.

After an attempt to restart The Skinny with a writer who frankly turned it into a fail blog, it is now back with three very good writers, who I hope will carry the torch that Laura and I first ignited.

You should check them out.

 

 

 

How many calories does a redesign burn?

I was reading an especially poignant post over at the blog See Sara Shrink. She wrote:

... I haven’t lost weight in awhile.  But it’s not like I haven’t been trying.  I wake up every day with the best of intentions, but by lunch I’m fighting the same battles I’ve been fighting for years.  The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

OK, who can relate?

(Raises hand.)

I've been holding steady since the end of the year, when I burned off a few holiday pounds. But I'm tired of holding steady and need to see the scale move again. 

I have to keep reminding myself that I did work on bettering my health in 2009. I got my cholesterol down from borderline icky to perfectly normal and dropped my triglycerides 100 points into the completely normal category. And I did it all with diet and exercise.

So that was 2009. Now it's three weeks into 2010 and I need to make more changes, primarily in calorie intake. I have already mentioned that I have to drop down to 1,200 for a couple of reasons. One, I have a slow metabolism (I had it tested). And two, that will help give me leeway for the "invisible calories" from supplements like fish oil, dark chocolate calcium and other good-for-me things that aren't really food. I really hate counting the calories of stuff that isn't food.

Step one is this redesign. When I first redid the logo I had in it a photo of my sister and me from 1991. That's not realistic, now, is it? So I freshened up the site and added current photos of us.

It's cleaner, lighter and brighter and I'm hoping that'll rub off on us. And you, if that's what you need.

Produce of the Week: Bok choy

This week's veggie is a guest post from my pal Lynn Haraldson Bering, who blogs at -- among other places -- Lynn's Weigh: The Journey Continues. This time last year I sent Lynn an e-mail after reading of her 168-pound weight loss in People magazine and we became friends. Cool thing, this Internet. She recently wrote about the wonders of bok choy. You can read the entire post HERE but here's an excerpt:

Eight ounces of bok choy has just 30 calories, only a trace of fat, 5 grams of carbs, 3 grams of fiber, nearly 4 grams of protein, 240 mg of calcium (that’s nearly 25 percent of daily recommended calcium intake for women 18-50) and 570 mg of potassium (strive to get 4,700 mg a day).

I’m going to add bok choy like I would spinach to vegetable soup and eat it as is in a salad, too. The key around my neck of the woods is finding bok choy that doesn’t look like it just got off a 2-year boat trip from China.

Farewell, Elastic Waist!

Conde Nast had a sassy little diet blog called Elastic Waist but like many media projects lately, Conde Nast has pulled the plug on it. Hope the writers can find a new home for it.

It's a shame because Weetabix and her crew had a great thing going. Catch it while you can.

Work can be fattening

My pal Tracy, who writes the blog Middle-Age Sexy, is alarmed to find her clothes getting a little tight a month into her new job. She writes:

Now that I'm basically sitting for eight hours a day, exercising a little less and eating out a little more, the weight has started creeping on.

To read more, check her out HERE.