Start of week 5

Goal updates:
Starting weight: 381.6

Current weight this week: 374.2

Loss or gain: -1.2 Total so far: 7.4 lbs. lost

Short term goal: Lose 5% of weight - 19lbs Lbs. to go: 11.6

Long term goal: Weigh 299 lbs. by Christmas 2010 - 82.6lbs. Lbs. to go: 75.2

My points for Today

Breakfast: Puffed wheat cereal w/1%milk 4pts

Lunch: Chicken Salad on white bread 7pts

100 calorie PB and cheese crackers 2pts

100 calorie yogurt covered pretzels 2pts

Dinner: Meatloaf 8pts

filling 5pts

Harvard beats 3pts

green beans with light butter 1pt

Snack: Fit and Active Orange ice cream pop. 2pts (yummy)

It was suggested by a follower that I post before and after pictures. I plan or posting every 25-50lbs that I lose. I will take a more recent full length picture of myself and post it this week. Then when I get to 25lbs. I will do it again and so on. It will be good for myself to see as well. When you are losing weight it is hard to see it on yourself while others may notice it right away. I think the pictures will give me a good sense of how my body is changing. I think it will also give me and incentive on doing more workouts and such as well.

Looking over the past week there is one HUGE thing that I need to do differently. TRACK ALL MY POINTS. As we know I missed quite a few days last week. BIG HUGE NO NO on my part. My bad. The first step to recovery is admitting your defeat and moving forward. That is my intent for this week. I just need to keep moving forward and stay on the right track. So far so good.

On a side note.......

Terri, thank you soooo much for your kind words and your post from what I posted yesterday (i think) It means a lot to know that other people care about me and how I do. This isn't meant to single you out so to say because I know others are there for me as well. But you, by far, have been my biggest cheerleader thus far on my blog and it means a lot to know that someone is out there listening. :-) Love you lots and thanks again.

Interesting read:
Obesity's Hazards And Mysteries
What research tells us about why we gain weight and how we can best lose it.
By Rebecca Ruiz, Forbes

Americans are fatter than ever and it's seriously harming our health. More than 72 million adults are obese, and that figure is expected to soar to 103 million by 2018. The problem is so bad that it could even cause life expectancy to start to decline, according to some demographers.
The good news is that basic research is helping scientists understand why we eat too much and how we can best lose weight. One major finding from earlier this year is that human adults have stores of calorie-burning brown fat, long thought to exist only in newborns and certain animals. But it turns out to also be present in small quantities in adults.

Stats: Obesity By The Numbers

Harnessing brown fat could make our bodies far more efficient at burning calories--someday. But it will be years, if ever, before researchers figure out a way to increase levels of brown fat in obese adults through drugs, surgery, or some other yet-to-be discovered process.
In the meantime, researchers are investigating the basic mechanisms behind metabolism and dieting (obesity is linked to several related problems, such as diabetes, which can lead to other problems such as kidney disease or stroke). One recent study in mice hinted that eating meals on a regular schedule may be as important as what you eat or when during the day you eat. The second linked compulsive eating to a stress molecule that is commonly triggered during the withdrawal-relapse cycles of drug abusers.

Watching the Clock
Dietitians have long recommended regular mealtimes for their patients. Satchidananda Panda, an assistant professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, now has laboratory data backing up this idea. His study, published in a November issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that mice on a regular feeding schedule have much more efficient metabolisms than critters who are allowed to eat whenever they want.
Panda let one group of mice eat freely throughout the 24-hour day while another group was fed on a rigid schedule. The second group fasted for 16 hours a day, but both groups of mice ate the same amount of calories for two weeks. Then he did gene scans on the mice to see what was going on in their livers.

In the mice on the uncontrolled feeding schedules, food metabolism genes in the liver were chaotic because the mice were frequently eating and nibbling. Overall, nearly 3,000 liver genes involving in burning fat and sugar were expressed in the freely-eating mice throughout the day.
While it might seem advantageous to have thousands of calorie-burning genes running throughout the day, this makes metabolism less efficient and can create a byproduct that attacks and breaks down DNA, Panda says.

By contrast, the mice on a controlled feeding schedule had a much more consistent pattern of liver gene expression. When feeding, the mice burned sugar, but fat-burning didn't occur until several hours after they had begun fasting.

Panda says the research supports the idea that people should abstain from eating eight to 12 hours each day. Panda's research also suggests that it's possible to reset the body's metabolism simply by changing mealtimes (and fasting periods) and sticking to them. The study results convinced Panda to eat only between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. He eats whatever he wants--with a focus on nutritious foods--and says he's lost weight since he started the regimen a year ago.

Addicted to Food
Pietro Cottone, pharmacologist at the Boston University School of Medicine, has laboratory data that may explain why some people---like himself--are prone to yo-yo dieting. If his rat experiments are correct, it may be that abstaining from sugary foods can actually trigger chemical withdrawal symptoms.

In Cottone's study, which appeared in PNAS in late November, one group of rats was fed "palatable", or high-sugar, chow for two days and then deprived of it for five days. Eventually, the withdrawal of the high-sugar chow triggered the release of a molecule known as corticotropin-releasing factor, or CRF, which causes anxious and depressive feelings and has been linked to relapses in drug addicts.

When exposed again to the palatable chow, the stressed mice overate compulsively in what Cottone characterized as "self-medication." After seven weeks, Cottone and his fellow researchers blocked the rats' CRF receptors. Only then were the rats able to restrain their anxious behavior and binging.

The scenario is no surprise to those who struggle with dieting. Cottone's goal is to prove that palatable foods are indeed biologically "addictive" and that dieters who flame-out are struggling with more than just a failure of willpower. (The threats of increased heart disease, cancer and arthritis risk sometimes aren’t enough on their own.) The only solution to the withdrawal and relapse cycle, he says, might be to avoid "palatable" foods in the first place.

Studies like Cottone's and Panda's give us much-needed insight into the biological mechanisms of metabolism and dieting, but they also require a forward-looking solution. Dr. Michael L. Power, author of The Evolution of Obesity, says humans evolved with limited access to food and have a biological drive to gorge when easy calories are available. How we cope with this is the challenge of our times, Power says. "We need to understand our biological adaptations and change our social reactions."