Now that we’ve had practice tracking our food throughout the day (you HAVE been tracking your food, right?  Right?) let’s get comfortable with the next step in getting healthier.  Assessing our progress.

Too many people choose to tie their success in a fitness program with a number on a scale.  I don’t want you to do that.  Weight is just one factor in being healthy, and it’s a factor that doesn’t by itself tell you very much.  

You’ve lost 2 pounds.  Does the scale tell you if you’ve lost water, fat or muscle?  No.  Not even a high-tech scale that claims to measure your body fat and hydration is accurate.  (I have one, it has me 4.5% leaner than more accurate body fat measuring techniques).

So I’m suggesting a different method of assessing your progress.  The real-life method: clothes.

Find one item of clothing that fits you close to the body.  Something that shows your shape.  It might be a t-shirt, a dress or a pair of jeans.  Heck it could be a t-shirt AND a pair of jeans.  

Put them on and memorize how it feels.  Where does it bind, where does it want to stretch.  Where does it feel “just right“?  If you can, take photos of yourself today wearing this item.  Front, side and back views if you can.  (It is that hard, but it isn’t that easy either).  

While you‘re at it, photograph one body part you are proud of.  

This item of clothing will be your “check in” outfit.  When you wonder if diet and exercise is working for you, put your outfit on.  Does it fit the same as the last time?  Is it just a little less snug?  Does it hang a bit straighter from your shoulders?  THAT‘S the sign that you‘re succeeding.

I took my own check-in photos this morning.  While I can look great out in public, I still need to lose some adipose fat from my midsection (it’s the most persistant fat), and firm up my abs and lower back.  A tendency to sway back shows its a long-term problem.  

You can check my set of photos on my [Link Removed]   Guess which part of my body I'm proud of!

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Food.

Michael Pollan's oft-quoted line from [Link Removed] is a good place to start.  I try to:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

It wasn’t that long ago that I wouldn’t make this claim for myself.  While I spurned “fast-food nation” except for the occasional visit to KFC,  many of my meals were composed of food items made by someone else, at a place somewhere else, and at sometime in past.  It wasn’t that easy to look at a dish and identify it’s pieces.  I was all about throw-it-together quickly from the freezer.

Slowly over the past two years I’ve been moving back to the idea of eating the way I did when I was child.  When you bought simple foods and ingredients from a grocery store: carrots, cabbage, apples, pork chops.  When you then took these simple ingredients home and prepared them to be eaten.  They were peeled, sliced, chopped, steamed, broiled, baked.  In the summertime, they were grilled.

My food doesn’t come with a nutrition label.  It typically has one ingredient and you can identify that for yourself: carrot, mango, lettuce, brown rice.

That what I’m moving to do now.  Today I try to eat:

Vegetables.  Fresh and whole when available, frozen for greater seasonal variety.  The only canned item in this section would be diced tomatoes.

Fruit. Fresh, whole and in season.  Frozen berries to supplement since their season is so short.  Canned applesauce occasionally.

Whole Grains. Brown rice, red quinoa, bulgur wheat, polenta, steel-cut oats.  Grains that come in small bags or boxes.  Grains that you cook with water.  You can look at a small pile of these on a plate and know what kind of grain it is.  Occasionally I eat a processed grain (a flour product) such as a whole grain slice of bread, tortilla, or pasta.  Maybe some cereal.  But these products make up about 1 serving/day.

Legumes and nuts. Cooked dried beans (since we are a small household, I do usually to for the canned varieties), dry roasted nuts or nuts in the shell.  The beans give me a lot of my protein and the nuts provide quality types of fat.  Both give me a lot of my protein.

Fats. Olive oil and canola oil are the fats of choice.  A little butter every once in a while.  But I try to limit my consumption of saturated and animal based fats.

Meat/Fish/Poultry.  About 3-4 days a week I might eat one serving of animal protein.  Last fall and winter, I was strict about only eating these on days I pushed heavy weights.  It's what finally got me to lose the last bit of weight.  Unfortunately, it put me in such a protein deficit that I was unable to build new muscle despite the hard work I was doing.

Protein powder supplements. I tried for a while simply eating more lean proteins.  I found that I was returning to my old way of cooking and eating and was gaining back several of the pounds I'd fought hard to lose.  My "leaning way" wasn't leaning anymore, though I seem to be building muscles.  For a temporary period of time (I'm not sure how long), I will supplement my whole, pure foods with a powder to get the protein I need.

I have a deal with myself.  I have permission to eat what I want when I want without guilt.  So I can choose to stop at KFC and eat a 3 piece snack box and order an extra biscuit with fake butter and honey.  I can choose to have cake or pie or cookies if I want them.  Nine times out of ten, when I ask myself if I want these items, the answer is “No.”  So I leave them for another day.

I am not giving up eating good tasting food. If you ever tasted my grilled veggies with balsamic vinegar, you’d know that I eat for taste.

I am not giving up anything.

I am eating differently than most of my friends and most of the United States.  Some might say I am depriving myself of something.  But what?

Better Every Year is the goal of writer Debra Roby.  She has been published at [Link Removed]  

Bettereveryyear, Your links have been removed, please consider upgrading to premium membership.

We’ve committed to getting healthier together a step at a time.  So where do begin?

Start by knowing exactly where you stand today.  Since we will be talking about fitness and diet, let’s start with your diet.  This is NOT going to be difficult (promise), but it’s not going to be pretty.

I want you to  write down everything you eat for a week.  Get into this habit.  It’s a good one.

Some websites that will become your friend:

[Link Removed]   Register with this site, and use it's many tools.  How many calories do you need to eat to maintain your current weight?  What is the nutritional breakdown of what you've eaten?  Are you staying within your goals for the day?  

This website will help with much of this information.  I think you can also track food and calories for the day here, though I’ve never used it that way.

FitDay  a free diet and journal plan online.  And if you belong to [Link Removed]  they, too, have an online compotent.

Now, before we start thinking that we‘re “on a diet“.. because I won’t be emphasizing that idea... let’s just see what we are eating in a week.  Just as an assessment.  For the next week, write down every food.  Be honest with yourself. I really find online journals (or desktop software) the easiest way to do this.  

Play with the programs and see how many calories you‘re averaging over the week, how much are carbs, how much are fat (and what kind?), how much are protein.  A simple assessment. Where do you stand right now?

I will not ask you to share your information with the group.  Your stuff is your stuff.  But in the interest of transparency, I’ll post some data about myself next week.

Better Every Year is the goal of writer Debra Roby.  She has been published at [Link Removed]  

Bettereveryyear, Your links have been removed, please consider upgrading to premium membership.

We all want that healthy slim body that makes us look or feel younger.  We see the ads and infomercials pushing the latest miracle supplement or “minutes a day” exercise equipment and, though we don’t really believe it will work, we plop down our coin and wait for the magic to happen.

Then, disappointed once again, we‘re left feeling like a failure because this “miracle” didn’t work.  

Can we be honest with ourselves for minute?  It didn’t take any of us minutes a day to get in the shape we‘re in.  We did it to ourselves through poor diet, lack of physical exercise and often a negative self-image.  We did to ourselves bite-by bite, day-by-day, slowly over time.  

So let’s banish the words “quick“, “miracle” and “easy” our minds.  Let’s commit to taking on healthier lives one step at time.

In October, 2006, I was at my heaviest weight and so completely out of shape that a half-hour easy exercise routine left me completely wiped out and sore for 3 days.  But I committed to the work, committed to taking steps to change the way I eat.  Committed to changing slowly, so the patterns stuck.

Today I am 42# lighter, and have just lost enough fat, and built enough muscle to have a “healthy” body composition for a woman my age. I’m 55, 5‘3” with a slender frame, 122# and 2 body fat.  I’m aiming to get number down to 24 , so I still have work to do.

I’d like to share my journey from the start to wherever I end with you.

Would you like to join me in getting healtier, step by step?

Better Every Year is the goal of writer Debra Roby.  She has been published at [Link Removed]  

Bettereveryyear, Your links have been removed, please consider upgrading to premium membership.