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Yay for both of us!!! It is not easy, but I find myself focusing less and less on food since I stopped dieting.
herfrds, congrats on your success!
Agreed about the no diets, though, at least for me. Awhile back, DH and I started buying differently due to the economy; we had to since we live on his Air Force retirement and it ain't much, trust me. Bags of stir fry veggies at
Walmart were $1.68. We did those with teriyaki sauce and/or soy sauce and added that thickened to whole wheat spaghetti. We liked it. It was very cheap! Those same bags are now $1.98, but still, not bad. We ate lots of stir fry, lots of grilled chicken, sometimes on a salad when the greens were on sale (our garden was a bust). It's easy and it's cheap since we only buy the boneless, skinless chicken breasts when they go below $2/lb.
I am hypothyroid so take daily meds for it. My cholesterol also went wacko the same time as the thyroid and those two are closely related, in spite of the fact that my diet was not high fat. It was just bad genetics, my doc at the time told me. Though high protein diets worked when I was younger, pre-hypothyroidism, they do nothing for me now with my current body chemistry. I gag on them anyway since I really hate high fat, high meat diets now. Blech. That thyroid condition makes it extremely hard to lose weight, even when it is supposedly controlled-don't let anyone kid you about that!
This summer, the heat was miserable, unusually so for our location here in the mtns. I can't take heat/humidity on an extended basis and didn't want to eat anything but ice cream. Not being able to justify that and having my son's smoothie maker here, we started making an ice cold smoothie for every lunch from plain yogurt, frozen strawberries and bananas (which we buy on the manager's specials, break up and freeze in baggies for future use). We'd drink those every day-they were very filling and brought down our body temps by 10 degrees, I swear! I even broke the smoothie maker, oops! Bought a stronger blender. Still do that.
So, now all we eat is whole grain pasta, whole wheat bread when we eat bread at all (found we like it much better than regular), we eat boneless skinless chicken breasts, almost no red meat, no pork other than occasional sausage or bacon with eggs at breakfast. So you see that we're not deprived if we indulge in
bacon! I eat oatmeal, sometimes a Zone bar for breakfast and eggs maybe two or three times each week. We each lost lots of weight. Not a diet at all, just healthier. And we actually liked it! My DH has a harder time letting go of his Southern roots, which is all starch and grease, but he's done admirably and admits he's liking the way we eat most of the time. Every once in awhile, he craves red meat, but he's doing well. His cholesterol has
always been low-genetics again!
Well, guess what? My cholesterol meds were reduced to the minimum after the summer, even though back when I was diagnosed, I had tried to lower it with diet for six months so I wouldn't have to go on medication. It lowered it 2 lousy points. This summer's "keep cool" eating program actually did the trick. I'm thinner than I've been in many years and still don't have much of an appetite. Can only afford a fast food burger on rare occasions and they don't taste all that good when we get them anymore, either, so we aren't missing much.
