New Goals on Healthy Dose Friday

So after a brief though still ongoing email conversation with my WLS extraordinaire friend, Celia (I think all my WLS friends are awesome but Celia is like 10+ years out of surgery and doing great, so she is my long-term hero), I know what I have really known all along.

I can stop counting calories.  I need to reduce the carbs.  They are my weakness and I know I am eating too many of them.  They may be not be cookies, cakes and pies, but bread, cereal and pretzels can do close to the same about of damage in hindering my scale to MOVE! 

I have been researching low carb foods this morning and ran across a myth list on about.com.  Sure enough I had always bought into some of these myths about low carbing, such as:

2. Low-Carb Diets Discourage Eating Vegetables and Fruits

Because vegetables and fruits are mainly carbohydrate, people believe that they are not allowed on low-carb diets.

Fact: The opposite is true �- non-starchy vegetables are usually at the bottom of the low carb pyramids meaning they are the �staff of life� of the diet (replacing grains in that role) and people who follow a low-carb way of eating almost always eat more vegetables than the general population. For the most part, vegetables and fruits ARE the carbs eaten when following a low-carb way of eating.

This was the one that had worried me the most because especially in the summer months, I adore fruit.  I need to be careful of the tropical stuff though, like my daily banana, as it is higher in carbs.  That's okay though as I love berries and melon the most.

I'm not a huge fan of veggies, though I do prefer many of them raw with some kind of dip or dressing.  So I'm searching for low carb veggie dip and did find this suggestion:

The dry ranch mix has no carbs or less than one? Mix that with sour cream and cream cheese. Yumm!!!

I would use the low fat cream cheese and I always use Breakstones Fat Free sour cream as well.  Salad Spritzer may also be an option but I have to check the carb count on it.  Also read about mixing balsamic vinegar with italian herbs.

This would solve my need to crunch that tends to happen about mid afternoon.  I also need to replace my morning cereal with something else as 1) I'm getting tired of it and 2) because though it contains 10 grams of protein, it is still high in carbs and 3) I dumped off it this morning for some reason.  So, I'm finding recipes for low carb, high fiber muffins and the like, so I can work on changing things up. 

See, here's the thing.  What I'm doing isn't working anymore.  I can tolerate more foods now and I can tolerate slightly larger amounts now.  So, I need to make what I'm eating count.  High proteins, high nutrients.  This isn't really rocket science when I think about it.  It's just going back to the good food groups.  I may find that this doesn't work either (though I think it will.  Celia has preached the carbs to me since before my surgery), and if that is case I'll need to change things up again.  The biggest mistake would be to keep on doing what I am doing knowing I am only maintaining my weight and I'm not happy with that.  My scale number is not yet what I want it to be (I swear when that scale goes to 199, you will hear me yell no matter where you live!) but I am intent on getting there.  I didn't go through surgery to not be satisified where I am.  I'm happy here.  I feel healthy and can do all sorts of stuff I couldn't do before.  But I have a number in my head I want to see and I am hell-bent on doing what I need to do to get there.

You can do it too.