A "STICKY" SITUATION

20 November 2002

Well, the question of whether to stay up for the meteor shower or get up for the meteor shower was solved when I fell asleep while waiting for the rice to cook for dinner and woke up at 5 a.m., after it was all over. At least I have finally caught up on sleep!

I woke up in time to get up to the club. A cold morning this morning. I was double layered everywhere--heavy sweater over t-shirt, two pairs of sox, gloves, and wishing desperately for a face mask.

I'm discovering lately that when I ride the stationary bike (while reading a book), and suddenly look up at the gauge, that I'm riding with much more intensity than I used to--guess those legs just automatically rev up and push hard, just like when I'm biking around town.

Likewise, when I get on the treadmill, the angle goes up higher, the speed cranks up a bit--still not exactly fast, but 3.2 mph at an incline of 4 (not sure what that relates to), which is a far cry from the flat 1.8 where I started 9 months ago. It's good to feel there has been progress.

Following my 45 minutes at the club, I stopped at the supermarket to load up on veggies (not donuts) and got home in time to strip off the heavy sweater and the heavier exercise shoes and get into my weigh-in clothes. I wasn't worried this time. By the scale in the office, I'd lost 4 lbs, and though I hadn't weighed on the home scale last week, this week it was showing unbelievable numbers, so I knew there would be a loss registered.

Also, I had planned on a vegetarian dinner last night, so as not to weight my system down with meat and bready stuff, but since I slept through dinner, I hadn't had anything to eat since about 4 p.m.

And yes, I lost weight. 2.6 lbs. That was lovely.

It was the last of my weigh-in coupons. You can buy ahead 10 meetings, so you save a buck or two on the weekly fees. It was time to re-up. When I bought the last set, I thought that maybe by the time I'd run through them I could just continue on the diet by myself and not pay $10 each week, but I've discovered that it is the accountability that keeps me on track and that is worth $10 a week. So I've plunked down another $100 for another 10 weeks. Who knows where the weight will have gone in 10 more weeks?

This continues to be such an amazingly simple eating program for me to follow. Of course, part of the reason is that I am still in the high point range of foods. Soon, now, I will have to lower my maximum number of points and then the real "work" may begin.

But for now I have no problem staying on track. Prevention magazine recently came out with a big article on "the peanut butter diet," which is supposed to be very successful (almost three times as many peanut butter dieters as low-fat dieters managed to maintain their weight loss over an 18-month period.). I didn't read it in depth (because I'm not going to change diets in mid-stream), but the success seems to be due to the fact that peanut butter is considered a treat and people find it easier to stay with good eating when they can look forward to a peanut butter treat several times a day.

And peanut butter is a nutritious food as well.  Prevention says:

Some fabulous news about peanut butter started trickling in from nutrition research laboratories. True, peanut butter is high in fat. But most of it is monounsaturated, the same "good fat" that's found in olive oil. Groundbreaking studies were proving that a diet high in monounsaturated fat from peanuts and peanut butter could actually be good for the heart, and perhaps even better than the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet most health experts were recommending. A diet high in monounsaturated fat even looked promising as a treatment for diabetes, a disease that has become epidemic in the United States.

Peanut butter had already become a cornerstone of my diet. I've always been a big breakfast eater and so my usual breakfast, now that it's winter, is a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries (I make the oatmeal myself and add thawed frozen berries) and then 2 slices of high fiber bread (1 point for 2 slices) topped with 1/2 Tbsp peanut butter each. It gives me a great start to the day. I also frequently have fruit--bananas or apples--topped with peanut butter as a treat.

As I said, I don't know what the Peanut Butter Diet actually consists of, but peanut butter is certainly keeping me on this eating plan.