Yesterday was my, actually, no, it was two days ago. Today is Friday and I had my second meeting with my health coach on Wednesday. It was, I don’t want to say enlightening, but certain things were confirmed. My weight, which is measured every day, is fluctuating a little bit. I mean, that’s pretty normal but according to the graph I should be going down at a fairly steady rate. If your weight does not go down the way that they want, then you are monitored. There is a stoplight type thing so as long as your weight is going down the way they want it to, you’re green. If your weight starts plateauing or if you’re not going down as quickly as they would like, then you’re yellow. And if you either plateau for more than three days or your weight starts going up then you are red and if you’re yellow or red they put in interventions.
The interventions are- I just don’t even know how to say it. There are things like yeah obviously you were not supposed to be drinking anything with calories: water, diet drinks, coffee and tea with no sugar, that kind of thing. The other thing is if your weight’s going up and you can cut those calories or if you splurge a little over here then cut those calories over there. Which is why, again, I say if you have any kind of eating disorder this diet would be deadly. My calorie allotment is 1600 calories. I have been tracking my food in my Samsung health account. According to the app I am averaging more like 1000 to 1200 calories. I am being rewarded for this.
Now I have to admit like there have been a couple of days that were not good like this Saturday. It was a birthday party, and I totally had some king cake cause girl that’s king cake. And I might have had a bag of chips and a couple of sandwiches… And the next day was church where there was lasagna and cheese and crackers and cookies and more king cake. And I plateaued, maybe went up a little tiny bit. The weight scale that they gave me goes into point 10s I guess that’s the thing so you don’t just weigh 100 pounds you would weigh 100.3 and I went up from like a 170 blah blah blah something point something and uh to 170 blah blah blah something higher point something and it’s noted.
I have to admit, I like looking at the numbers on the scale going down. It makes me feel good and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It can definitely feed into parts of the psyche that are not necessarily healthy. I have said before that America is killing me. That’s because it is so much harder to do the right thing here. And then of course there’s that idea that you know that there is a right thing, a right food, a good food, or a bad food. Dividing food into these categories.
It is much easier, or it has been I should say, much easier for me outside of the US. In Denmark I dropped a whole size eating potato chips and drinking wine every day. I was walking a lot, oh certainly a lot more than here. And the same can be said when I was living in Korea, particularly actually outside of Seoul. In Seoul I had to think about you know exercise and food a little tiny bit but still not much. It was more just walking to the next bus stop instead of the one closest to me or walking down the hill from work rather than catching the bus from work. We were eating more at home. I was planning out my menus a whole semester in advance because I enjoy cooking. Well…I enjoy cooking when I don’t have to cook, lol.
Here in the US however, you have to think about everything. You have to think about exercise, you have to think about eating, you have to think about what you’re going to say no to, and you have to say no all. Of. The. Time. And that’s what’s hard. I honestly think that the only way to lose weight, much less maintain the loss, here in the US is to have a disordered eating pattern. Because as important as food is in the US, and it is important. I mean, it’s the way that people connect and that is true all over the world, here it is not given value. And this is seen in part by what we do to our food. Our food is heavily processed and it is difficult to find food that is not. Not to mention expensive. We used to joke about Copenhagen and it’s not even a joke, it’s a reality. Copenhagen does not have dollar stores they have $5 stores. But groceries in Copenhagen cost me the same or less than what it cost to go shopping here. And I felt like the groceries there were of a higher quality. More whole food less processed food. And, of course, thanks to the absolutely fabulous transportation public transportation I walked to go get groceries and usually brought them back on the bus because carrying all those groceries is heavy.
Here partially because, Oh. My. God. It’s so hot and it’s hot from April through October that you do not walk much. There’s a grocery store about 2 miles from my house and that’s maybe even closer than the Fotex was to our apartment and I’d never walk that. It’s not comfortable, it’s a major road there is a sidewalk but it’s it is not a welcoming walk or. Whereas my walk to the Fotex was not bad. I mean it wasn’t awesome, still big road, but it wasn’t bad. Most importantly, the weather didn’t leave me a pile of ooky sweaty mess at the end of the walk. Not to mention that there was an assumption that people were walking. Whereas here there is no assumption that people are walking so things like crosswalks are, if not completely nonexistent, still a rarity.
So I’m gonna go drink my breakfast. And then I’m gonna go for a run walk jog thing that I do. And we’ll see how this whole thing goes, I guess. Signing off.