Ishie
Guest
erparamedic:
A few issues...
7 months is a good long time to drop a significant amount of weight in a healthy manner.
I don't know about "great diet ideas", but I can tell you what works for me (40 lbs gone).
First of all, don't diet. "Diet" implies a short term solution to achieve a goal, which may SEEM like "7 months" but more implies a regimented system involving 'cheating', 'being good', and an 'end in sight', which isn't a good way to eat or live. Change your eating style with the goal of this being a permanent change. In your new 'diet' (meaning life eating habits), unlike a "diet", you will not be depriving yourself of items you will be able to eat again after that 7 months, making it easier FOR that 7 months.
What helped me was a food journal and knowing nutritional information, PARTICULARLY calorie counts. No food is 'off limits', but nastier foods have higher calorie counts. Fairly simply, if you are not concerned about ANYTHING but losing weight (versus things like clogged arteries and high cholesterol), so long as you are eating fewer calories than your body requires to function, you WILL lose weight. You can have the slowest metabolism in the world, have a body that only needs 500 calories a day to function (unlikely), but if you eat 400, you'll lose weight.
After that, it becomes a matter of 'is it worth it?' My problem is that I like food... not just unhealthy food, all of it. But I like a lot of foods more than others. For instance, I can take or leave muffins. They're "eh" to me. Before knowing calorie counts, if I was hungry and there was a large banana nut muffin nearby, I'd eat it because it was there.
Once you find out that the large banana nut muffin has 900 CALORIES (I wish I were making that up), you start thinking: "Hmmm... I could have this muffin... or I could have a couple of Big Macs, or I could have 22 strips of bacon, or I could have..." See what I mean?
I keep track of the calories I eat in the journal, and add them up. I try to keep around 1600, but if I go over one day, big deal. I didn't "break my diet". As far as starving, I'll tend to stuff myself full of low calorie, high bulk foods (like veggies), and then use the remainder of my calories on indulgences, without feeling deprived. 600 calories is a LOT of vegetables, and then I have a full thousand calories to eat my 22 strips of bacon (blech), or whatever else.
Increasing water intake helped me a lot. It keeps me from feeling hungry, and also makes me feel better and healthier. At first it was hard, and I gradually increased my intake (don't want to flood yourself or you'll screw up your electrolytes). Now, I feel deprived if I'm not drinking about 3 liters a day.
Exercise is important and also involves tradeoffs. Exercise burns more calories, increasing your body's need, AND builds muscle, which increases your metabolism. I believe adding a pound of muscle increases your daily calorie burn by about 50 calories, and that's just while you're sitting or sleeping. Free fun size snickers a day. With knee surgery, depending on how sore and what type, swimming is a given, elliptical if you can handle it, weight training that doesn't involve knee stress, aerobics tapes designed for people with bad knees (they're out there).
If your exercising more, and particularly with diving, please don't mess with your carbs. I've tried exercising when I was unintentionally low on carbs (eating eggs for breakfast, meat and veggies for dinner), and cramped up pretty quickly and felt like I'd been punched in the stomach.
The other issue is body image. I fully sympathize with not want to look like a 'whale' in a wetsuit on vacation, but at the same time, I acknowledge that first of all, if I'm heading out with Americans, there's like 75% now that are overweight, so I'm not going to be waddling around a bunch of Jessica Albas drawing attention. Secondly, maybe it's just a cold water thing, but I come up from a dive with kelp in my tangled mass of hair, boogers smeared all over my face, pee in my wetsuit, generally spitting salt water, with my pasty white legs getting goosebumpy, and when I strip my wetsuit, I get nice seam lines decorating my pasty (or on vacation, sunburned) body. In the Philippines, I added to the attraction with a rash on my back compounded by deep ugly looking scratches because it itched so badly I was trying to scratch with my dive knife (kids, don't try this at home). Sexxxxxy!
Even if I *did* have Jessica Alba's body type, I'd STILL look disgusting. Diving is a disgusting sport.
You've got an awesome husband that loves you (not 'anyway), and are in the same boat with three quarters of this country. Lose the weight to get healthier, feel better, and live longer, but don't EVER let it make you self conscious.
