The Devine Miz Cee

Happy, Happy, Happy

2011-05-14T07:46:00.001-07:00

Not am I only 6 lbs. from my interim goal, I have lost over 2 inches in my waist plus my bust and "spare tire" are smaller too. All this despite a bacterial infection that put me on an antibiotic that made me sick to my stomach and made me crave carbs. Life is good - Onward and downward!

Flush away the pounds...

2011-04-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

Happy about my weight loss this morning. Now I am only 8 pounds from my interim goal. Of course once I get there I will want to lose even more - that's human nature!

On Hold

2011-04-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

No progress right now but I am holding steady. This is OK. I hope to somehow kick myself back into gear and start losing weight again. Only 15 lbs. to my interim goal right now. Of course I would like to weigh less but this is probably doable for now. Once you get older it's more of a chore to lose weight, unfortunately!

Yea!

2011-03-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning of Day 6 of my newest diet scheme - LOL! I am very gratified to have lost 4 lbs. since Monday. Yes it is probably still water loss since this qualifies as a low-carb diet, but I will take it! I have a birthday party for my granddaughter to attend in late afternoon so I plan to eat something just before leaving my house and plan to stay away from the cake!

Better!

2011-03-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am feeling fairly good today. I woke up to a slight weight loss of one pound and my glucose reading was much better than it has been. Naturally I would prefer the glucose level to be under 100 but I'll take 114 because it's 10 pts. lower than what it has been for quite some time. Onward!

Darn body!

2011-03-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

It's not cooperating with me! Grrr! My weight loss efforts just don't seem to be working. I lose and regain the same two pounds over and over. How can you gain weight when you are dieting?

Not fair!

2011-03-12T08:09:00.000-08:00

LOL, somehow I gained a pound! Theoretically it's not possible with the number of calories I've been consuming because in order to gain a pound you supposedly have to eat 3500 extra calories. Now most women know this couldn't possibly be true because most of us don't eat that many extra calories in a week, much less in one day. Indeed I am not consuming "extra" calories because I have cut the number of calories to be no more than 1200 per day, which is the minimum number of calories for a safe weight loss. So I chalk it up to excess sodium which causes water retention and voila, there you have it - weight gain! All I can do is to soldier on...

Almost a year!

2011-03-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

Hello world, I am back! I can't believe I haven't been blogging about my little odyssey during which I made no progress whatesoever. In fact I ran across a weight loss weight tracker that I had been logging back in August 2009 and discovered I weighed the very same weight yesterday as I did in August, 2009. It's sickening because basically I have been dieting all that time with no luck!

I know other people write about their cravings and I read all sorts of information about quelling your cravings, dealing with your cravings, etc. What if you don't have cravings? What if you log every bite of food you put into your mouth so you know you are not overeating and you still don't lose any significant weight?

If there is a diet out there I have either tried it personally or read the book. In fact I have a stack of diet books in my basement and I have a yard and a half of diet books. Some of them I could probably sell on Amazon.com but most of them are "a dime a dozen" these days. Why? Because diets don't work! I guess I shouldn't really say that because back in 2007 I lost 57 lbs. on a diet. However with the diet I took "pep pills" or "Metabolizers" as they put it. I was so hyped up with caffeine that I was full of energy all the time in spite of only consuming about 1000 calories a day. Of course I regained about half of it. My doctor says I am actually one of the lucky ones since most people regain all the weight and a little more within a year. I've kept half of that weight off so I guess that makes me halfway successful?

There are a few things I have noticed about myself. One is that I am better off and even feel better when I don't consume too many grains. This doesn't mean that I don't eat them, I just don't consume all the servings the Food Pyramid tells me to consume. If I did that I'd weigh 300 lbs, not 160. Also if I don't eat things that contain sugar (added sugar) I don't EVER get cravings for sweets. Add to that that I have NEVER had cravings for salty foods and this is a winner. Doing this is also beneficial to my Type 2 Diabetes.

So what I am doing now is eating normal portions of poultry, fish, seafood and meat, good size portions of fresh vegetables, a few starches and grains and a couple of pieces of fruit per day. Add to that some cottage cheese and hard cheese once in a while and a glass of 1% milk a day and hopefully the weight loss will continue. The first three days I have mostly been eating raw green veggies and my proteins with half of an orange twice a day and that's how I have lost the first few pounds. Oh, I found out from tests done at Berkeley HeartLab that my genotype is best off with a diet that is 35% fat, That is the highest amount of fat recommended for a genotype and I consider myself very lucky. It means I don't do as well on a low fat diet. Who knew?

Today is the last day of the "prep" portion of this way of eating but I may continue it through Friday to give myself a better start. Then I will add back starches such as a piece of light bread at two meals per day and maybe a yam, small amount of brown rice or potato at a couple of meals. It's basically a low-carb plan but not really low like Atkins and certainly not high protein or high fat. You know a lot of people think Atkins is a high protein plan but actually it isn't. It's a high fat plan. But I am not doing Atkins. I've tried it before and to me it was too boring, even after I started adding nuts and berries, etc. I'm on Miz Cee's own diet now and we'll see how it goes. I will try to keep you posted (like anyone actually cares - LOL!). Well, I care and my doctor cares but he doesn't read my blog!

Here we are again!

2010-04-03T12:28:00.001-07:00

All winter long I slaved on a diet meant to fix my metabolism and decrease my glucose levels. The first step was fairly low carb and by that I mean that it was nowhere near as low as a diet like The Atkins Diet. Most food groups were included in the first step (8 weeks) but not fruit or beans (kidney bean type) or regular bread, milk, etc. You could have low carb versions of bread and milk. I was disappointed because in that time I lost 5 lbs. My glucose levels did decrease but not to where they were last summer. Heck, I still am not down to where I was when I started this quest over a year ago!

Two weeks ago I started on the Step 2 portion of the diet where you add in from 33 - 60 more grams of carbohydrates from fairly low impact foods. Within 3 days my glucose levels shot up an average of 30 points and have not come down. Obviously I am very carb sensitive - I've known that ever since I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. I DO NOT want to have to take drugs for this condition again. I did that prior to a huge weight loss and I don't like the side effects. I don't like the inevitable results of high glucose levels on the body either!

Last week I visited my doctor. He's pleased with the 5 lb. weight loss. I do not yet have the results of my A1C test so I don't know how much I have improved. With the diet I followed all winter I had to have lowered it - quite a bit I would think. I explained what I was doing and he made a surprising comment. He actually suggested I might want to buy the newest Atkins diet book and follow it! I've known for quite some time that he believed lowering carb levels was good for Type 2 Diabetics but going to this extreme was a surprise. He said he thought it was a healthy diet, especially for someone like me.

So I have the book now and I've been reading and planning a lot for the last few days. I plan to start this on Monday. I am already ahead of the game since the diet I have been following did away with any food cravings for carby foods. This should be interesting. Stay tuned!

Not yet!

2009-06-27T07:21:00.000-07:00

I certainly am not a testimonial to losing weight. So far I haven't lost any. I tried the "Sleep Diet" and increased my sleep for a while. Unfortunately my body got used to going to bed earlier so I started waking up earlier. Apparently not everyone needs 7 1/2 - 8 hours of sleep per night. I'm not sure where the weight loss idea fits in if a person gets more sleep.

I then tried a diet that was supposed to be suited to my metabolism. I gained weight. Then I tried low-carb and gained more. Then I tried the Sonoma Diet and gained yet more pounds. SO now I weigh a few pounds more than where I started. I ventured on these quests and I gained! So I stopped dieting and I quit gaining but I haven't lost any weight. It's depressing because a year ago I had a lot of lovely clothes and this year I only have a few. I actually had to buy some in larger sizes and I swore I wouldn't do that. However I have to have clothes to wear!

I'm not sure what to do about all of this. My doctor has no advice. He said to log my calorie intake and I've done that. I seem to average about 1350 - 1400 calories a day and that seems to be what most of the commercial diet plans suggest for me. I've signed up for online diet plans through eDiets and most of the time that's what my average calories per day are. When I lost all the weight a couple of years ago my calories per day were between 1000 - 1200. I hate to go that low because I keep hearing that's dangerous but I'm not so sure it was.

Diet books anyone?

2009-03-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

I've been working on the mind part of losing weight without "dieting" for two weeks now. I can't tell you if I've lost any weight because I haven't gotten on the scale. Today I decided that it would be good to clear away some of the clutter around here as part of my spring cleaning. I gathered up all my diet books and the cookbooks that go with many of them. After checking on what I could sell them for on Amazon.com I listed 25 books to sell. But that's not all - two of them have already sold! That's pretty good especially considering that none of them ever did me much good. The rest of them that aren't worth enough to bother with listing I will take to Half Price Books. Why not make some money and clear some space in my house?

Still haven't weighed!

2009-03-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

I am feeling great. I am focusing on the positives, focusing on how slim I will look this summer. I have been working on some exercises, both for my mind and body. I am appreciating myself and my body. As I focus on being thinner I can feel a shift in my relationship with food and it's all good!

Breaking of a New Dawn

2009-02-27T19:18:00.000-08:00

It’s a lifelong story for me and a typical one for a woman – a struggle to be at a healthy and attractive weight. It seems like I have always been on a diet yet I have only had one time when the diet was successful and I was very pleased with the outcome. Unfortunately it’s two years later now and my struggle is still going on. Yes, I lost the weight but I was so focused on NOT gaining the weight back that I have done just that – I have gained weight!

I realized that I was bringing this on myself. By focusing on weight all the time it was just like I was asking to gain and then I did. I ate “fake food” with artificial sweeteners that caused me to crave more sweets. Since I felt I couldn’t have much bread I craved bread and then I would overeat bread. It’s ridiculous!

As a result I have a new thought process, one that involves visualizing myself as slim and trim and healthy. Little my little my body is beginning to reform itself from what it is to the new vision. I fully expect this to work. I am not dieting. I am eating what I please and the funny thing is that what I please to eat isn’t loads of rich fattening foods. Yes, I plan to eat whatever my body wants me to eat. My body and mind are still getting used to this idea. I expect that my mind is beginning to notice that eating good healthy food will give the results as seen in the mind’s eye, at the weight I think is right for me.

This is not just a quest for a certain look. My body isn’t perfect even at a healthy weight. No one really has an ideal figure but I will say that when I finished that diet 18 months ago I really was pleased with how I looked. In addition to my looks, I felt marvelous – had energy to burn! I could run upstairs. I had the shock of my life one day when I picked up my mother at her assisted living facility, realized we didn’t have some papers so I ran up the stairs and down a long hallway to her room to get them. I couldn’t find them so ran back downstairs to ask her where they were. Then I ran up the stairs and did the whole sequence again. When we got into the car after all of that I realized I wasn’t even winded! At 67 years old I had more energy than I had when I was 50.

That was when I weighed 22 lbs. less than I do now and I want that feeling and look again. Right now I am threatened with having to take medications for high blood pressure and Diabetes – the ones I had to take when I was heavy. They are costly and they are artificial products that I know don’t need to be in my body if I weigh what I am supposed to weigh. I can avoid taking medications by getting my weight down.

I weighed myself this morning and I don’t plan to weigh again for several weeks because I want to keep my mind on the vision and don’t want to bother with trivialities that could distract me from the vision. If I can visualize it, then it will be so. Besides, there are other ways to measure weight loss. The best one is when the clothes start being a bit too big. That will be soon – LOL! I’ll keep you posted on my inner transformation.