The watch movies and eat popcorn diet

So I kept saying to myself, I should try to lose weight. I looked so much better twenty pounds ago. I could look that way again, if I would just do something about it.

So I had some diet cookbooks, but I hadn't used any of them. My husband's favorite thing is going out to eat. And it is hard to start a diet when your spouse insists on going to restaurants all of the time.

Then my husband had to go out of town for most of three months. So I am in the apartment, by myself, and I decided now is the time.

First, I just got a notebook and wrote down everything I had to eat or drink. After about a week of that I went back and tried to add up all the calories. Okay, so that told me I ate too many cookies and that with the soda calories added up to more calories by themselves than what I was supposed to have if I wanted to lose weight, and I hadn't added the calories for the actual meals yet. So the sodas had to go.

The rest of my meals weren't that bad, now that I wasn't eating out as much anymore. We used to eat at a lot of buffets, and I used to think if I was going to pay to eat at a restaurant like that, I might as well get my money's worth. So that was a lot of calories right there. A lot of calories used to come from my not wanting to waste money.

Other things changed when I had the apartment all to myself. I'd go buy groceries, and the cookies were on sale, buy one get one free. So I'd buy like four pounds of cookies. Now part of that was motivated by the sale, but partly I just wanted the cookies. But when no one else is home, I have to realize that I didn't mostly buy these for him, and I didn't buy these to share with someone. If I bought four pounds of cookies, that meant that at some point I would be eating four pounds of cookies.

The other thing about the cookies is that once the package is open, even if I only meant to get two cookies, I'd just keep eating the cookies. So I started putting two or three cookies in sandwich bags. So if there was ten servings in a package, I put one serving each in ten sandwich bags. That doesn't prevent a person from opening a second or third sandwich bag and eating nine cookies, but it at least makes you aware that you've eating three servings when you originally said you'd just have one.

The soda was restricted to half a can a day, sometimes less. I had to drink the whole eight glasses of water a day before I had anything else to drink.

I had turkey bacon and two servings of something made with Eggbeaters. That was less than two hundred calories. I had a bit of lite yogurt during my morning break, so that's about a hundred calories. At lunch I usually had pasta, but it was very light on the sauce and it had tons of broccoli and other veggies. I only worked mornings, and I tried to run all of my errands right after lunch, when I wasn't hungry, so I wasn't as tempted to stop for ice cream or anything while I was out.

Now, here is the movie and popcorn part. On the way home, I'd pick up a couple of videos. I'd make tons of popcorn, air popped, with a light butter flavored spray and lots of salt. All of the diet books say avoid salt, but I can't tell that the salt itself really has calories, and so far as I know I don't have one of those problems that forces you to give up salt. So, I watch the videos, and I eat the popcorn, and that keeps me from eating anything I'm not supposed to for the next four hours. Even if I finish all of that popcorn, at most it was four hundred calories, and I usually didn't finish it.

By the time I'm finished watching the videos, it is probably time for dinner, which usually meant more pasta with veggies, or sometimes chicken, and sometimes more turkey bacon and Eggbeaters. If I was still hungry after dinner, there was probably left over popcorn, otherwise I had cookies or pretzels or something that I had divided up into the sandwich bags, or maybe another bit of lite yogurt.

Three months later, I was a much happier and fifteen pounds lighter person.

Then I got a different job, went out of town a lot, had to eat big lunches to get me through the breakless work schedule, and put all the pounds (and then some) back where they were.