After more than 9 years with my LAP BAND and 250 pounds shed you’d think I had all the secrets for taking off another 10-15 pounds.  Especially since I now have a working band.  I have found over the last 2 weeks that this old dog can learn some new tricks and incorporate them into her lifestyle pretty easily.  All it took was recognizing that something was a little bit off and analyzing my behaviors, and voila…I saw the “problem” and I found a way to solve it.  Lots of nice words, now what do they all mean? 

After my port replacement, returning back to my full gym schedule, and refining my food plan to 1200 calories max, 80-120 grams protein and 72 to 100 ounces of water I was seeing a steady loss as I should.  All is great, but on the weekends, even with maintaining my food plan on calories/protein/hydration there was no change in my weight, and actually this past Monday I showed a gain of 1.5 pounds.  This wasn’t making sense to me, and my exacting Virgo nature required me to disassemble my weekends and see what was different from the weekdays.  Here are my discoveries:

• I do not go to the gym on weekends.  I have other physical activities such as walking, bike riding, house cleaning therefore I was not getting a sustained increased heart rate on Saturday and Sunday to rev me up
• I still get up between 4:30 and 5:30 am, but was not eating breakfast until my husband woke up, sometimes as late as 9 am…..again, no protein to rev me up although I had consumed coffee and tea and water
• I was eating 3 meals a day and possibly one snack instead of 6 small, protein packed meals throughout the day…apparently my body needs fuel more often to keep the fires burning

Here is what I am committed to doing to see if I can continue the “burn” 24/7/365:

• On weekend mornings, get up, have a cup of coffee, have a small protein drink (hot mocha latte with 65 calories and 10 grams protein sounds like a winner) and then have the rest of my breakfast with my husband when he gets up.  I think my body was slowing down because I “missed” my protein packed shake for breakfast.
• After my coffee and warm protein drink go for a 15 minute walk or bike ride around the neighborhood to rev my body.  If it’s raining (it doesn’t do that often in Southern California) I can walk rapidly up and down the steps to my second story for 15 minutes.  I don’t have to leave my neighborhood and go to the gym to wake up my metabolism.
• Keep on my weekday eating schedule (every 3-4 hours) to keep my body awake, alert and my metabolism in high gear.

If you’d like some more tips on keeping your metabolism in high gear you might find this interesting: How to increase your metabolism all day

I’ll let you all know if these “tweaks” in my lifestyle result in the changes I want to be.