Weight Loss Secret: Talking to “id” in the Moment of Choice

Quite often people ask me what my secret is. I’m always kind of puzzled by this question because weight loss is kind of straight forward, right? Sometimes yes and sometimes no – it kind of depends on who you are. A lot of it has been a mind game for me. That’s one of my secrets.

Remember back in high school taking psychology class and learning about Sigmund Freud’s id, ego and super ego? Remember the id being the impish child in you that whines, screams and kicks until he or she gets its way? Well, cussing at my id along my success to weight loss has helped me out a lot!

I realized that it was not an issue of “will power” to eat things that I should not be eating. No, rather it was an issue of recognizing that the impish, selfish id was spoiled rotten and I was not going to stand for it anymore!

I learned to use the “F” word A LOT when I was tempted. I’d cuss at my id, even have full blown conversations in my head with my id and debate the merits, or lack thereof, of a helping of peanut butter pie (or fill in the blank). My id would say that I deserved it and even proved that to me by making me salivate, oh the gall! I told the id to “f-off” upon many, many occasions. AND IT WORKED! It still works. The id’s eyes don’t ever miss a thing, either. Desire is id’s middle name. But my desire for things that are not good for me has greatly subsided. I think my id may have moved on and attached it’s greedy little paws to someone else’s hips.

Saying “f-off” to the id in a moment of choice at a cocktail party table has served me well. Go ahead, get mad at that little bugger. id will just shrug it off and pop up it’s impish head at the next opportunity. So be ever vigilant. And feel ever so good!

Here’s to your healthy choices!

Love,

Katz

This is not a Milk Shake

It’s even better than that. This is a coconut milk*, banana, honey, olive oil and walnut shake.  AND IT’S REALLY GOOD FOR YOU!

You can leave out the banana if you want to or actually any of the other ingredients. But I’m making an argument for the health benefits of all the components and that’s why I decided to write this post. I also decided to write this because I don’t have “sweets” in my diet, per se. So, this is a refreshing change from the sweetness that I get in my daily fruit. My shake is a new guilty pleasure.

Last evening after reading about the health benefits of olive oil and honey in an article by Amy Capetta on AOL health**, I hopped up out of bed at 12 a.m. and made a little shake in the blender with coconut milk, honey and a little bit of olive oil. That read is what inspired this post. The olive oil makes the drink “fluffy” and it doesn’t taste “olive oil-ish”.

Amy’s article stated that olive oil and honey both have polyphenols (antioxidants) in them and that those act as anti fungal and anti bacterial agents in out bodies. I don’t know why, but this concept really appealed to me and it sounded like I should drink some of that up right away, so I did! And I’ll continue to do so.

The coconut milk has 45% DV of calcium versus only 30% for 8 ounces of 2% milk. You all may know by now that I am not a fan of cow’s milk for human consumption. It also has 90 calories vs 120 in the 2% milk, and fewer sugars. I don’t worry about fat content, ever. We all need good fats. I also don’t let my little panties get in a wad about the cholesterol in foods, but more on that later.

According to the Journal of the American College of Nutrition walnuts lower blood pressure. To quote: “After eating 18 walnut halves and taking one tablespoon of walnut oil daily for six weeks, study participants had lower blood pressure when exposed to stressors than participants who did not consume walnuts and walnut oil. Healthful omega-3 fatty acids in walnuts are likely responsible for lowering the body’s stress response.”

We all know the benefits of the potassium in bananas. The banana also makes the shake really creamy. Plus, the flavor of the banana and the coconut milk compliment each other. (“Gee, you’re looking good today” and “So are you, white’s your color!”) Sometimes I think that foods that are the same colors compliment one and other taste-wise. Like the other day I used macadamia nuts instead of walnuts — all of the white foods went together really well. But I digress.

The next post will be related to making good choices as related to the id, the ego and the super-ego.

Cheers to your health!

With love, Katz

*The specific coconut milk that I am CRAZY about is made by Silk and it’s called “PureCoconut tm”(all natural coconutmilk)  vanilla flavored. It is in 1/2 gallon containers near the almond milk in the milk.

**This article was by Amy Capetta on AOL health titled: “Beauty boosters: 6 natural ways to look amazing for years”. For the full article visit this link:  http://www.aolhealth.com/2011/02/11/beauty-boosters-6-natural-ways-to-look-amazing-for-years/?icid=maing%7Cmain5%7Cdl7%7Csec3_lnk3%7C45490&a_dgi=aolshare_facebook

I Feel so Green!

Okay, so I’m pretty excited to share my weight loss journey with people, especially if it helps even just one person. But I have to admit that this blogging and figuring out wordpress.com makes me feel so green! Well, I’m not perfect out of the gate. Please bear with me as I make my posts and my links and ect. all look better and easier to navigate.

 

I think that my wanting to be perfect right from the start with so many  different things in my life has actually prevented me from starting some things. Kind of like making mountains out of molehills!

 

Cheers to one sip at time. Cheers to drinking life up and enjoying it!

 

Love, Katz

Strength Training for Women

Last November 30, 2010 my trainer, Alex Kissinger, sent me this e-mail. It perfectly and succinctly states so many things. Enjoy the link.

And I quote:

“Here’s a great article from the bodybyscience website that outlines why strength (resistance) training is so important for women.http://www.bodybyscience.net/home.html/?page_id=301 Perhaps the most important sentence in the entire article is “when it comes to losing body fat you cannot achieve it by ‘burning calories’ in an attempt to influence the calories in/calories out equation.”

This is an extremely important concept in the fact that, as the article details, our bodies are far too smart and far too adaptive for us to make any sort of big gains by simply cutting calories.

Hope this article is very enlightening for you, and if you haven’t caught on yet, the entire website is a great resource for all things HIT (high intensity training). “

End of quote.

Here’s to your health!

Katz

Metabolism is the Key to Weight Loss and Health

Yesterday I mentioned that I’d write about how metabolism is the key to weight loss. As far as I know there are at least two ways to increase your metabolism. Can you guess what they are? Cardio, right? No, wrong. (Please see my link on the cardio myth that I’ll post later today.) Two ways to increase you metabolism are to build your muscle mass via “slow burn” workouts (no you won’t turn into a he-man) and to eat small amounts of food all throughout the day.

Beginning around the age of 15 for woman and age 20 for men we start to loose our muscle mass. After I learned this I was really motivated to build up my muscles so that as I aged I would have something to loose. Since I have been working out my lower back problems have disappeared. Why do old people walk at a 90 degree angle? Because they don’t have their muscles anymore to hold themselves upright. That’s very sad, I don’t want to be one of those people.

The fact is that when we stimulate our muscles and work them out to their maximum potential (once a week) our metabolism increases – and not just for that day – the effects are long lasting, even when we are asleep. This increase in our metabolism helps us to literally burn the fat off of our body for many days after we workout. And that coupled with eating the right things at the right calorie count (about 1.400 for a woman and about 1,800 for a man) will result in permanent long term weight loss and increased health! Doesn’t that sound good? It IS good and it feels good too.

Okay, so this was a really, really short post. I have a lot more things to say but I’ll leave this as it is now because I need to meet a client. I will post the link I mentioned later this afternoon. I also want to say that the claims I make in this blog are substantiated. It’s just that I have done so much reading over the past four and a half years that I forgot where I read what. So, I am going to track my facts down and cite my sources via links so that you may read longer versions of the things that I say in here. I’ll be making links to topics like the paleo way of eating, why slow burn is better than traditional working out, dairy, soy, water, the cardio myth and the cholesterol myth.

More later, I promise!

Love,

Katz

Losing Weight is a Mole Hill, NOT a Mountain! Post #1 (My first ever in the whole wide world!)

2-20-11

I’ve written my first post (to myself, it’s not published yet) and it was about starting this blog “in the middle” of my weight loss journey. But I’m saving that post for later. For today I’m going to get really bottom line to get you started right here and right now. You can think about all of the other details later. I’ll walk you through some important stuff in the next post. To inspire you, right now I’m 55 pounds down and about 20-40 more pounds to go (actually at this point it’s more about body fat percentage than weight loss). This morning I weighed 168.6 and when I began I was 225 pounds.

So, here we go! Go to the grocery and buy what I have listed below. Then below that list I have what I recommend to eat each day. This amount of food will last you for 3 days. During those three days you can read more and get a better understanding of how easy this can be if you just take it day by day, step by step and bite by bite and choice by choice. That’s what I’ve done and when people ask me how I have done it I always say: “I ate food!”* Isn’t that funny? “How’d you do it?” “I ate.”* And that’s how you are going to do it too!

Go buy:

3 bananas

almond butter (or use what’s in your pantry, PB is fine also)

3 other fruits – but make it simple, just buy 3 apples

chicken breast (or go to Trader Joe’s and buy their packaged chicken walnut apple sausage) – remember make this easy…because it is easy or buy some other protein you like (no soy, please)

walnuts – or any other nut you like – ANY nut even if it’s macadamia nuts

chopped lettuce or Trader Joe’s pre chopped cabbage/salad mix is awesome – it is in a round plastic container and has all sorts of good cut up veggies in it

balsamic vinegar

olive oil mayo or the low cal mayo

salsa

eggs

asparagus, spinach or another good green vegetable that you will steam

artichoke heart (the kind in a jar) I get mine at Costco

coconut milk (vanilla) or almond milk (I don’t ingest dairy at all) – so you can use regular milk if you prefer – please stay away from soy, more on that later also.

Days 1-3 are basically all the same. What I do is buy food for about three to four days out and I make it easy on myself, I’ll repeat the same thing for a few days and then change it up for the following few days.

Breakfast**: 3 eggs***, I cook mine in boiling water in the skillet with a pinch of salt

add 1 T mayo and about 2 T salsa to the eggs and mix it all up together. I like “gloppy/saucy” food – if that is not your style don’t mix it all up.

add all of your asparagus (sans the woody stems) or spinach or another good green steamed veggie for bulk and vitamins.

about 2-3 hours eat your banana and 2 T nut butter (almond or peanut…). The combination of the first and second meal before noon will really tide you over and keep your blood sugar at a constant. I usually have my eggs at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. and the banana nut butter combo about three hours later. Or sometimes I’ll switch up the two things and have the banana/nut butter first.

Lunch: Make the BIG SALAD (thanks for that phrase, Bo Railey, owner of Exercise Inc.) and take your food with you (I carry my food with me everywhere…)Use the chopped up lettuce, 7 1/2’s of the walnuts, chicken – 1.5 links of the TJ’s sausage or cut up chicken breast about 3 ounces (think 1.5 amount of a deck of cards), 4-6 artichoke hearts, some salsa, another T of mayo and some balsamic vinegar (I love that stuff). This salad has the right mix of things in it to keep you going for the rest of the day. I’ll actually nibble on this from about 1:00 p.m. till 5:00 p.m. But do what you can do and what fits into your schedule.

Fruit between 4:00 and 6:00

Dinner: as strange as this may sound, by the time 7:00 or 8:00 rolls around I’m not all that hungry. I’ll have 8 oz. coconut milk and 1 T almond butter.

I hope this start will help you. I want to make my second post right now and I probably will but YIKES, I have act two to learn for the show I’m doing in less than three weeks!!!

Keep your chin up!

Love, Katz

* I can’t make my first post without bringing up the subject of increasing your metabolism via “slow burn” work outs. In the Indianapolis/Brownsburg area I recommend Exercise Inc. This has actually been the #1 key to my weight loss success…but more on that in the next post. Right now we need to get up your energy level enough to be able to go to your trainer. It was at my trainers request in December of 2006, that one day I just go to the grocery and buy two fruits and two vegetables. He made it that easy for me. Heck, I couldn’t remember the last time that I ate fresh fruit or steamed veggies! I thank Sid Morris, my first trainer, for making the weight loss mountain into a molehill. And now I am grateful to my trainer, Alex Kissinger,  for somehow knowing the right balance in keeping me focused, motivated and inspired.

**I’ll address the coffee/issue later. Remember, baby steps. I have made the choice to keep coffee in my diet. I now only have 8 ounces in the morning with two packets of Ideal. And boy oh boy do I LOVE my cherished 8 ounces! It used to be more but now I feel better.

*** eggs don’t actually cause humans to have elevated cholesterol levels. Google “the cholesterol myth” and read the scientific research and come to your own conclusions.

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