Here’s a dilemma I’m happy to have, but one I haven’t quite figured out how to resolve.  I’m hoping someone may have a suggestion for me.

As I said in Tuesday’s post, I’ve lost 32 pounds.  My problem right now is that all my clothes are getting to big.  I plan to lose more weight, so I don’t really want to spend a lot of money on a new wardrobe that I’ll hopefully be too small for in a couple of months.  I had hoped I could get away with wearing my old clothes for while longer, but some things, especially pants, aren’t going to work.  When I can slip the pants off with out unzipping or unbuttoning them, and I have to jerk them up during the day, it’s probably time to investigate new options.

What did those of you who successfully lost substantial amounts of weight do when your clothes got too big?  One option is belts, or having a seamstress do alterations and I’m considering those.  Another is to buy some bargain basement clothes to carry me through until I get closer to the weight I want to achieve.  I suppose I could find clothes at thrift stores and such, although I may not find anything I really want to wear.

Another option would be to buy just enough clothes to carry me through.  If I get creative with elastic weights and string tie waistbands I should be able to wear those clothes a little longer.  I can also try the clearance section of some of my favorite online shops.  Now that I’m down a few sizes I might be able to find more things that I like.

What I really need are some tips on how the rest of you handled this.  I you have any suggestions, please share them with me in the comments section.

As of this morning I have lost 32 pounds. I knew the weight was coming off, I could feel it in my clothes and I could feel it in the way I moved more easily. I could see my face getting thinner when I looked in the mirror. So I knew the weight was coming off. It is still, however, nice to see confirmation from the scale.

This is now officially the most weight I have ever lost. For years I lost a few pounds here and a few pounds there, but I’d always gain them back. I could never seem to lose the weight and keep it off. I also had trouble sticking to a sensible eating plan and exercise routine. Apparently, at almost forty. I’ve found my willpower and my drive. I’m not sure exactly how or why it happened, but I’m grateful that it did.

I still have a long way to go. Unfortunately 32 pounds is just the tip of the iceberg. Still it feels good to have gotten this far up the mountain, and to prove to myself that I can lose weight if I want to lose weight. I won’t say it hasn’t been work, and I won’t say it hasn’t taken some sacrifice, because it has been work and I have sacrificed some foods I dearly love to eat. Still, I know that losing weight will be better for my health in the long run and that’s what really matters.

I guess the next plateau will be 50 pounds. That’s only 18 pounds away, which is totally doable. I just have to remember to focus on the smaller, more immediate goal and not the larger goal which seems so much further away. If I can just keep taking small steps and doing the right things every day, I know I’ll get to where I want to be. I’m very excited by that thought. Getting thin has been a long and hard process, and I’m glad I finally seem to be getting it right at last.

Last night I wore an old pajama top of my Mom’s to bed. I’d had kind of a rough day and I was really missing her and wearing the top made me feel closer to her somehow. A nice side benefit was the fact that I hadn’t been able to wear the top before because I couldn’t fit into it. Last night it was too big. Still, while the fit was nice, it didn’t really matter. It was the comfort of feeling close to Mom that I was after.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do since I’ve been working to lose weight is to train myself not to eat when I’m feeling sad or stressed or scared. I’ve always been an emotional eater and I’ve always used food as a method of stuffing my emotions. When I was mad, I ate. When I was sad, I ate. When I felt any kind of emotion at all, I ate. For years I used food as a security blanket and a comfort. Eating was how I dealt, or didn’t deal, with what was going on in my life.

These last few weeks have been pretty stressful for me. There was the uncertainty about closing on the house. Then there was the closing. Now there’s moving with all the tasks and uncertainties that can bring. Add to that some issues in other areas and I’ve pretty much been a nutjob these last few weeks. I wrote about some of that on my other blog, Settling for More.

So far, despite all the stress and emotional nuttiness, I’ve been doing fairly well with keeping my eating in check. I haven’t dived head first into a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy. I haven’t eaten an entire bag of Dove Dark Chocolate Squares. I’ve been doing well with keeping my portions in check and I’m still losing weight. I won’t claim I’ve entirely conquered the problem, but I think I’ve made a good start.

I guess I finally realized that eating to reduce stress doesn’t generally reduce stress. In fact, it just gives me another thing, my weight, about which to be stressed. So, for now, I do my best to not let my eating get out of control, but I also cut myself a break if it does happen. Either way, it’s less stress for me and that’s good.

I have always been a member of the clean plate club. If it was on my plate, providing it was a food I liked, I was going to eat it. Whether or not I was still hungry didn’t matter. If it was put in front of me, I’d hoover it up regardless of whether or not I really wanted the food or whether or not it was too much food. I wasn’t one who believed that too much of a good thing could be bad.

One of the things I realized when I started really working on losing weight was that often my problem wasn’t that I was eating too much of something unhealthy. In my case the problem was that I was eating way too much of something that was good for me. If one pork chop was good, two would be better. Why have a small square of lasagna when you could eat a large square? If one piece of bread was a taste treat, think how ecstatic I’d be after three.

Since I’ve started losing weight, I’ve learned to attend to portion size much more carefully. I have a scale now, and weigh certain foods to make sure I’m not eating a large amount over the recommended serving size. I also work on eating more foods at each meal. My plate may still be full, but now it contains vegetables and grains and protein in proportional amounts.

I’ve also learned to push my plate away when I’m full. I may still overfill the plate on occasion, but now I’ve learned to listen to my body and to say call a halt to eating when my system says I’m full. That means there is often food left on my plate, but I don’t mind that so much. The results of pushing my plate away are showing up in the way my clothes fit and the increased stamina I have when I exercise. That, to me, is worth every bit of wasted food.

If you are struggling with portion size and knowing what is a healthy portion, here are some resources that may help.

Web MD

Portion Distortion Quiz

I know I’ve written about this here before, but I wanted to update everyone on how my new diet is going. I’ve been working to pay more attention to the glycemic index of foods, and I’ve been trying to eat so that I balance my blood sugar. I know, from my last doctor’s appointment, that my blood sugar was high. I’m not diabetic, but my blood sugar was apparently heading in that direction. I convinced Regular Doc to give me a few months to try and control my blood sugar with diet and exercise. She, as usual, wanted to stick me on another pill.

Since that appointment, I’ve been reading and studying and trying to figure this all out. I used to have what I called “jittery” days, where I’d feel shaky and out of sorts. As I read more about diet and blood sugar I realized that my jitters might well be caused by my blood sugar being out of balance. I decided to modify my eating habits based on what I’d learned in my research and see if that made a difference.

I started by pairing any carbs I ate with a protein. The idea is that the protein helps regulate the burst of insulin that the carbs inspire. Carbs tend to cause your body to release a big rush of insulin, which your body might not handle well if you’re insulin resistant. Eating a small bit of protein helps regulate that rush.

I also started eating more frequently. I now eat every two to three hours. I eat three regular meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner and then a small snack in between. Snacks are nothing major, maybe a slice of deli turkey or a small handful of almonds or an apple. The idea is to balance the blood sugar by never getting too hungry.

Finally, I started doing more strength training. Apparently lifting weights helps build muscles and muscles that are stronger are less resistant to insulin. I’m not sure I understand the entire process behind this yet, but study after study has proven it works. So, in the interest of getting the benefits, if there are any, I’ve upped my strength training to three times a week.

So far, things seem to be working. I’m much less shaky and jittery. My energy levels are higher in the evening. My heart rate seems to be more stable and normal too. I can’t be entirely certain that all this is due to the change in diet, but I’d bet that at least some of it is. Right now, that’s good enough for me.