While I’m focusing on my 49-day journey challenge, I will be pulling up some older blogs and reposting them.  If I do that, I will put “redux” in the title!  Any additional changes will be in italics!

So I finally dug out my new electronic food scale* and my new handheld calorie counter (which I have done again today, 11/26/2010).  I think I was putting off opening my new toys because if I opened them, I was going to have to make a commitment I wasn’t ready to make.  If I don’t do anything else here at Little Black Dress Diaries, I need to at least be honest with myself.

I think I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t going to like the results of weighing my food and entering my REAL food and drink consumption into a hand-held computer that won’t cut me any slack.  I didn’t like it.  I had been wondering why, when I’d been logging my food and eating healthier than I ever have, I was either stuck at this weight or fluctuating up and down 1-2 pounds.

Well I found out why.  OUR EYES LIE TO US.  Our stomach will follow our eyes, too.  Our stomach is not a leader, it is a follower.  If our eyes say, “THAT is simply not enough food,” our stomachs will agree and whine accordingly until we eat more.  And guess what?  I was stuck at my weight because I could no longer SEE the truth about how much food I was eating even after cutting back.  What used to be a normal (slender-person) meal for me had slowly grown to where I could no longer see that I was eating too much. 

I think if you took two of your normal dinner plates (another entire blog post**), set them side by side and ran a little test, you’d be astonished how much food you’ve been eating.  Before you eat your next regular meal, take on eplate and put on it the servings you usually eat.  DON’T CHEAT and try to fool yourself.  Be honest.  On the other plate, place the servings of what guidelines say is a healthy and right portion size for your body.  Prepare to be surprised.

The “right for you” plate looks like there isn’t enough food on there to live on.  Yet the truth of the matter is that it takes very little “fuel” for our bodies to operate and function perfectly.  It is when we gorge on food that we create trouble for our bodies.  They will begin to fall apart and function incorrectly.

So as I was entering my food choices into the counter last night, I was getting feedback from the comic section in my house – Alpha Hubby.  “Hey,” he said, not realizing how close he was to a beating, “they need to make that machine say, ‘Oh ha ha, who do you think you are kidding? Put in what you REALLY ate, why don’t cha?’  It would be more accurate then!”  Or “Maybe they should have it say, ‘You are eating way too much; stop eating so much, tubby.’”  AND he is grinning at me while he’s making these suggestions.  Death wish.  He has a simple death wish.

So you want the truth?  Overweight people can no longer visualize proper food portions, yet we keep trying.  See, if we don’t face that our portion sizes are out of whack, we don’t have to change anything.  It’s just another lie we’ve told ourselves over the months and years of gaining weight.

Invest in a food scale – find out how much (or little) 3-6 ounces of lean beef really is.  Find out a serving of cheese is a joke (in our present mind-set) (and, by the way, an ounce of cheese is the size of two dice.  Really).  Make yourself measure everything – at least test it for one week – and discover what real portion sizes really are.  It is part of that mind-renewing I talked about.  You have to make your mind (eyes) REALLY see what is right portion sizes.

Retraining your eyes and mind takes time but in the end, you will see better results if you will do this!

*You don’t have to spend a lot of money on a scale; they have very inexpensive ones at Wal-Mart and K-Mart.  I have one that worked just fine but I never used it, obviously!

**The obesity rate in Italy and France is almost 70 percent lower than in the U.S. Why? Because “their standard plate size is still 10 inches,” says Alex Bogusky author of “The Nine Inch Diet”, compared with our USA size 12

Read more:  http://www.nypost.com