As you all know, this Summer I am the Ambassador for the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women BetterU Program. I started the program just after my 40th birthday in May. It’s been going well, this journey of enlightenment. It’s a literal journey because I have been traveling so much since I started this program. In fact I am on my fourth city this month alone this week. Which actually has been great for my pedometer. (Airports really help you rack up the steps). But traveling messes around with your internal clock and it doesn’t afford you the best food options when you are trying to optimize your health. That’s a nice way of saying traveling makes you chunky.
The BetterU program isn’t a weight loss program, it’s a program to make you aware of your health, and help you make incremental steps to better it. But part of that awareness is knowing your numbers. Your blood pressure, your cholesterol, and your BMI, (all together now, “Dun, dun, dun”)! BMI stands for body mass index, or as I call it these days “Body Mass Immense!” (To calculate your exact BMI value, you can use the AHA’s BMI Calculator, or multiply your weight in pounds by 703, divide by your height in inches, then divide again by your height in inches. Then get the kleenex because you may start crying like I did.) My BMI is WAAAAY too high. I’ve known that for a while now. (Almost as high as my debt to income ratio, but that’s another Mass Index). With all of my travels it’s not just my eating that gets screwed up it’s my sleep too. Which has a direct effect on my body’s ability to burn food. You didn’t know that? Oh yes, if you don’t get good sleep your pilot light, (also known as your metabolism) starts to dim, which makes your body move your food along slower and slower. At this point, with as sleep deprived as I am, I think my pilot light has been blown completely out. I feel like if I even look at food I gain weight these past few years. I pride myself on SMILEing. It’s something that I work very hard to spread around. But I won’t lie to you, there are rarely any smiles that come to my face when I am looking at my body these days. It’s really heart wrenching. Well, actually it’s literally heart wrenching because all of that extra weight squeezes my heart and makes it work harder than it is supposed to. Plus carrying weight around your mid section, which is where many women my age and older start to pack it on, has been proven to increase your risk of heart issues. In other words the tire around your middle is more like a noose around your neck squeezing the life out of you very slowly. (I know, a little dramatic. But what do you expect from an entertainer?!)
Okay enough with all of the doom and gloom it’s time to take some action (Hip Hip Hooray and tally ho and all that). So what do we do? (In unison) KNOW OUR NUMBERS! For weight loss that means we need to know our calories. Here’s a hint: they are always more than you think they are. Haven’t you ever watched a morning news program where they do the segments showing you the real number of calories in the dishes you can order from restaurants. Aren’t you shocked and horrified? I know I always am. That’s why I always feel like I am walking through a mine field trying to feed myself when I am traveling.
But enough whining. Life is what it is. As I always say you have to play to your reality. So here’s what I am doing. I am forcing myself to eat less. Did I say forcing? Yup, I did. Because with as tired as I am it’s very easy for my brain to mistakenly believe that eating more will wake me up. That is simply not true. So it becomes an issue of mind over matter, (literally mind over food). I’ll give you an example.
Yesterday I traveled to St Louis. I had to leave my house at 6:45 am to travel to the airport. I took a greek blueberry yogurt with me and ate it in the car. Why greek yogurt? Because it has a massive amount of protein and less sugar and calories than other yogurts. It even has some fiber. All that protein and fiber helps to sustain me. I rushed out of my house and onto the plane without packing snacks or refilling my water bottle after I got through security. Big mistake! Always carry suitable healthy snacks with you! It is a cardinal rule. (Two rules: tweet 120 characters or less so you can be retweeted and people don’t have to edit your content, and always carry healthy snacks so you aren’t at the mercy of your hunger and the fast food restaurant in front of you.) Words to live by. Now back to my story.
So I get on the plane and we get stuck on the tarmac…for almost two hours. By this time it’s almost 11am and that greek yogurt is long gone. I am flat out ravenous. On this airline they give you a drink and they give you peanuts once you are airborne. I got myself an orange juice and cranberry juice mix. I usually stick with water because juice has a huge amount of sugar and empty calories, but since I was starving I thought the juice would help me last. I desperately gulped down my drink and greedily eat all three mini bags of peanuts. I have to tell you I was still hungry. I really wanted to ask the attendant for more, but I held myself steady. Remembering that I would still ultimately need a meal and I didn’t want to blow my calories on a couple more bags of peanuts. (That is mind over matter!)
I continued to employ my will power throughout the day. I went to lunch at a restaurant with my sisters. The restaurant had a full menu which was calling to me as you can imagine, but they also had a soup and salad bar. We all opted for that. Next trick, stick with small plates, especially at an all you can eat buffet! We have had it drilled into us to clean our plate since we were children. It’s automatic. So, if you know you clean your plate make sure your plate is small so that your portion remains on the right side of reasonable. I got the soup cup, but I didn’t fill it to the top and I got a small plate for my salad. I did get a second cup of another flavor of soup but for that I only filled the cup up a quarter of the way, and I used a wheat roll to consume it. It was very filing. Although my mind wanted more I forced my butt to stay in my chair and not get up for another helping. (Mind over matter!)
Included in the buffet were brownies and cookies. I proudly walked past them, twice, when I was getting my salad and soup. But as we sat there longer and longer, talking and talking, I started to fantasize about those brownies. What is it with chocolate and your 40’s. Geez!) However, we had sat there so long that I got lucky and they had cleared the buffet just before my willpower ran as low as my metabolism. Crisis averted.
We really did talk a long time so after about an hour after my extended visit ended I was starting to get the twinge of hunger again. It was slight, but since I didn’t have any food available to me in my room or my purse I thought I had better get moving in search of something healthy before the food monster in my mind broke out of its jail cell. I got dressed for a healthy walk and ventured out into HOT St Louis. On my way out the door I grabbed an apple from the front desk. Since I didn’t have a big purse I had to carry the apple in my hand the whole time. Turned out to be a great reminder for me on my walk. As I passed restaurants and went into stores with aisles of junk food I felt the weight of that apple in my hand, a divining rod steering me towards better choices. I finally found a Subway and got myself a foot long veggie patty sub. (Cheaper and healthier!) I walked myself, my apple and my sub back to my hotel room. I grabbed a cup of lemon flavored water from the hallway and hit my room. After I had had my sub dinner and while I was tweeting away, watching TV and contemplating sleep, that food monster in my mind started whispering sweet nothings in my ear. One word. “Chocolate!” “Chocolate!” I am not kidding you. Over and over again that word kept permeating my consciousness. Now, I really was feeling a little hungry. I had not consumed a lot of calories during the day…well I hadn’t consumes as many as I have been normally, but I had consumed, I guessed, enough for my body. (Which at age 40 is between 1800 and 2200). But that mean food monster was taunting me. However, I fought the urge. I reached over to the bedside table and grabbed that apple, and I tweeted my intention to suppress my craving for chocolate, and instead eat my apple. And I did. Then I went to sleep, and so did the food monster in my brain
The moral of this story kids, An apple a day can keep the food monster away, and eventually the weight of your apple will be the only extra weight you have to carry around.
SMILE On!
ML
This is a Level 2 post, Miss Lori is a Go Red BetterU Program Ambassador for the Summer of 2010
Miss Lori can be found Musing from her Minivan at MissLori.TV , Wearetherealdeal.com , YoungChicagonista , and ChicagoMomsBlog. She is also the new Chicago Family Entertainment Blogger for Examiner.com and a Discussion Leader for MomsLikeMeChicago. You can also see her Activating to Be Great at Miss Lori’s CAMPUS on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
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