This had to be the shortest weekend I've ever experienced and now beginning another Monday. AARG. Thankfully my work has been good and not as annoying and frustrating as it often is, so I take comfort in that, while I knock on wood and throw salt over my shoulder in fervent hope that I didn't just jinx my work life. It always cycles back and forth between ridiculous and decent, so it's inevitable that at some point I'll be again lamenting "the idiots" here. Right now they're mostly good co-workers and even a few friends.
Talk about digressing! Mainly I just want to note that I completed my food journal through yesterday with the exception of derailing a little on Saturday to the tune of not tracking after lunch. My eating hasn't been perfect, but it's been incredibly better and I'm making choices on a daily basis of what to eat based on my daily calorie allotment. I may go in and fine tune some of the breakdowns of carbs, protein, fats, etc, because MFP recommendations would have me eating over 212 grams of carbs daily and just 59 grams of protein. Definitely not how I roll - I've dabbled with low carbing so much over the years that I tend to lower carb intake and much higher protein - UNLESS I'm in crazy binge mode and then all bets are off.
Yesterday morning I got on the scale and was surprised/delighted/motivated by seeing that I'd lost 4 pounds! Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.....! I really wasn't sure what to expect because I'm not noticing much difference in my clothes, except hooking bras on the next row in is comfortable, and it wasn't about a month ago. It's a little thing, but in the comfort realm, a BIG thing.
Over the weekend I had a right calf strain that is beginning to feel better. I didn't do anything different than usual and don't recall a twist or a torque. I did do a pretty hilly power walk on Thursday afternoon that was about 3.5 miles and used my right leg/hip/side to try to move an occupied wheelchair I didn't realize was locked, so that was likely the source, so Saturday I didn't exercise at all, but did do my baseline 45 minute walk and was fine. Have an after work walk planned for today as well - hopefully longer.
That's all. I'm trying to stay accountable here for now - for myself. I'm really loving
MFP and feel guardedly optimistic that I can sustain the tracking. My goal is every single day, but I can only do it one entry at a time.
Here's to a good week for us all. I'm looking forward to reading about FitBloggin that happened this weekend!
Monday, September 24, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Wheels still on
Yesterday I tracked every molecule that went into my belly, and I stayed just under my daily allotment! Made wise choices to enable that and ate nothing after 7:30. Striving for 7pm being the end of the affair, er eating for the day, but hubby often doesn't get home until almost 6:45 and if I'm being social I wait. I told him last night that I want to eat by 6:30 when possible and he was fine with that. For some reason he likes to eat dinner with me!
Why My Fitness Pal? As I said yesterday, it is the most user friendly tracker my feeble brain has found, and it doesn't feel too full of itself. I'm still getting to know my newest friend, but the entering of food, and particularly portion sizes, is so much easier than any other I've tried. I'm feeling the pull to write it BEFORE I bite it (thanks Helen) and then have a couple minutes where I think that I need to catch up with what I've logged! A mind game, but I'll take it.
What a world, where you can document this stuff anywhere, anytime! Reason alone to have a smart phone. That, and Words With Friends, my other addiction.
Hard to believe it's Thursday already - this week has flown by. (Yikes, did I just jinx the last 2 days of this week?) Tonight I'm going to dinner with a friend, and I'm going to suggest Panera, where I can preview the day's soups and menu online and have it all tallied before I even get there. I also have a power walk scheduled for right after work with another friend, so it should be a good day.
On a different note - this morning at 5:45, I checked my email and also checked to see if our son Mark (who is in the republic of Georgia) happened to be on Google chat. I try several times daily and rarely find him there. Today he was on, and we had a wonderful 45 minute talk. He was talking to his girlfriend at the same time (who's in a village about an hour from his), so that's likely why he stayed on so long. It was an amazing gift, and I learned more about his life and the country.
I'm off to eat my already logged Fage )% with strawberries - have a good day friends!
Why My Fitness Pal? As I said yesterday, it is the most user friendly tracker my feeble brain has found, and it doesn't feel too full of itself. I'm still getting to know my newest friend, but the entering of food, and particularly portion sizes, is so much easier than any other I've tried. I'm feeling the pull to write it BEFORE I bite it (thanks Helen) and then have a couple minutes where I think that I need to catch up with what I've logged! A mind game, but I'll take it.
What a world, where you can document this stuff anywhere, anytime! Reason alone to have a smart phone. That, and Words With Friends, my other addiction.
Hard to believe it's Thursday already - this week has flown by. (Yikes, did I just jinx the last 2 days of this week?) Tonight I'm going to dinner with a friend, and I'm going to suggest Panera, where I can preview the day's soups and menu online and have it all tallied before I even get there. I also have a power walk scheduled for right after work with another friend, so it should be a good day.
On a different note - this morning at 5:45, I checked my email and also checked to see if our son Mark (who is in the republic of Georgia) happened to be on Google chat. I try several times daily and rarely find him there. Today he was on, and we had a wonderful 45 minute talk. He was talking to his girlfriend at the same time (who's in a village about an hour from his), so that's likely why he stayed on so long. It was an amazing gift, and I learned more about his life and the country.
I'm off to eat my already logged Fage )% with strawberries - have a good day friends!
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
On track
"Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there." Will Rogers
This post is less about reporting that I'm literally "on track" with my food and fitness programs, and more about reflecting on finally tracking my food - every bite - everyday. I'm an authority, you know...having religiously tracked for the last 2 days. But really doing it 100% has already opened my eyes in strange, horrific, but also interesting ways, and that's what I want to reflect on here.
Brief background: I've made lukewarm to thready attempts in the past to track everything. A few times since starting this blog in 2009 I had brief stints with on-line tracking - most notably Spark People and Calorie Count. I never once (in the vast 4-5 days total that I pursued these) put in everything that went into the temple. Either I couldn't get my info into their various tracking systems accurately, or I couldn't find items in the databases, or I didn't want to own the 50 Rosemary Olive Oil Triscuits eaten at 9 pm. (Yes. 50.)
A dozen or so times I started hand-written food journals, with pretty notebooks and flowery new pens in jewel tone inks, doing a Leslisimulation of the on line sites. Problem: I still had to look up calories, or carbs, or something that was as user-unfriendly as the attempted activities mentioned in paragraph 2. And without meaningful data (even as opposed to the simple discipline of logging the food only), it became another exercise (no pun intended) in futility, and was unsustainable for my eating disordered, screwed up mind.
Fast forward to Monday, September 17, 2012 - aka the first day of the rest of my life. (Um, isn't every day that?) I'd already been dabbling with My Fitness Pal for awhile (only in terms of bookmarking it, adding the app to my phone, and entering in my stats and goals as they request/suggest. I started out good - breakfast and lunch logged in with the running totals of the big categories (calories, carbs, proteins, and most important - WHAT IS LEFT TO EAT for the rest of the day) while at work. I'm always good at work, except when I'm not. Usually I am. When I'm not it's going to be a very bad (read: high intake) day. I digress.
I let it go after getting home. My conscious mind says I forgot about it. My Freudian mind says, "cut the bullshit, Leslie". I didn't finish the day so don't know what my totals were or what it felt like sticking to my goal intake or a little less. So my first paragraph claim to have tracked for 2 days was not entirely true. 1.5 days.
Yesterday the rubber met the road - almost. There were sparks, but firm contact didn't happen until this morning when I completed yesterday's logging. In went breakfast, lunch, after work snack. My total indicated that left me something like 450 calories for dinner and beyond (though beyond is not a requirement - I get that but I've been going beyond a lot and know that after dinner is my toughest time so I wanted to leave some room for that possibility - though it became an eventuality yesterday).
Harumph! Want more. So I went back into the tools and recalculated my weekly weight loss goal from 2 pounds to 1.5 pounds. Your daily amount is calculated according to your weight and how fast you want to lose. (There is no option for higher than 2 pounds a week or you can bet I'd have selected it, and then been even more disgruntled over how fast my daily allotment dwindled!) Anyway, the increased amount of calories (I think about 150) made it much more palatable - HA - another pun.
Well - I got through dinner and an after dinner snack at about my exact amount. Well done, and done by changing a few things along the way, like having spaghetti squash instead of cauliflower rice (which has olive oil). This was starting to feel like making smarter choices - ding ding ding!
In trying to shorten this, I will say that I ended up having a couple more "snacks" last night, telling myself to log them, even if I went over. I couldn't bring myself to do it last night, but I did it this morning. Eye opening, to say the least, and I was absolutely honest in amounts, if anything overestimating a bit. It was truly startling. I'd managed to consume almost 700 calories over my limit. But it was there in black and white.
I feel like I am already getting the wisdom of tracking week in a way I never have. Obviously this is a dubious start and it's unlikely I'm going to be made tracking poster girl any time soon. But I learned a few things: 1) knowing exactly what I'm eating makes me think about it a lot more 2) watching the calories pile up (or drain from the daily allotment) enables me to make choices and I assume more responsibility and accountability for my eating 3) my disordered thinking about eating and my disordered eating are alive and well 4) if I let my guard down and decide to just "wing it", I will start an up-the-scale crawl that I know I don't want.
Today I intend to do it again, and try to leave out the after-after dinner snacks. But at least I commit to logging them in the same day, because even that will be progress.
This post is less about reporting that I'm literally "on track" with my food and fitness programs, and more about reflecting on finally tracking my food - every bite - everyday. I'm an authority, you know...having religiously tracked for the last 2 days. But really doing it 100% has already opened my eyes in strange, horrific, but also interesting ways, and that's what I want to reflect on here.
Brief background: I've made lukewarm to thready attempts in the past to track everything. A few times since starting this blog in 2009 I had brief stints with on-line tracking - most notably Spark People and Calorie Count. I never once (in the vast 4-5 days total that I pursued these) put in everything that went into the temple. Either I couldn't get my info into their various tracking systems accurately, or I couldn't find items in the databases, or I didn't want to own the 50 Rosemary Olive Oil Triscuits eaten at 9 pm. (Yes. 50.)
A dozen or so times I started hand-written food journals, with pretty notebooks and flowery new pens in jewel tone inks, doing a Leslisimulation of the on line sites. Problem: I still had to look up calories, or carbs, or something that was as user-unfriendly as the attempted activities mentioned in paragraph 2. And without meaningful data (even as opposed to the simple discipline of logging the food only), it became another exercise (no pun intended) in futility, and was unsustainable for my eating disordered, screwed up mind.
Fast forward to Monday, September 17, 2012 - aka the first day of the rest of my life. (Um, isn't every day that?) I'd already been dabbling with My Fitness Pal for awhile (only in terms of bookmarking it, adding the app to my phone, and entering in my stats and goals as they request/suggest. I started out good - breakfast and lunch logged in with the running totals of the big categories (calories, carbs, proteins, and most important - WHAT IS LEFT TO EAT for the rest of the day) while at work. I'm always good at work, except when I'm not. Usually I am. When I'm not it's going to be a very bad (read: high intake) day. I digress.
I let it go after getting home. My conscious mind says I forgot about it. My Freudian mind says, "cut the bullshit, Leslie". I didn't finish the day so don't know what my totals were or what it felt like sticking to my goal intake or a little less. So my first paragraph claim to have tracked for 2 days was not entirely true. 1.5 days.
Yesterday the rubber met the road - almost. There were sparks, but firm contact didn't happen until this morning when I completed yesterday's logging. In went breakfast, lunch, after work snack. My total indicated that left me something like 450 calories for dinner and beyond (though beyond is not a requirement - I get that but I've been going beyond a lot and know that after dinner is my toughest time so I wanted to leave some room for that possibility - though it became an eventuality yesterday).
Harumph! Want more. So I went back into the tools and recalculated my weekly weight loss goal from 2 pounds to 1.5 pounds. Your daily amount is calculated according to your weight and how fast you want to lose. (There is no option for higher than 2 pounds a week or you can bet I'd have selected it, and then been even more disgruntled over how fast my daily allotment dwindled!) Anyway, the increased amount of calories (I think about 150) made it much more palatable - HA - another pun.
Well - I got through dinner and an after dinner snack at about my exact amount. Well done, and done by changing a few things along the way, like having spaghetti squash instead of cauliflower rice (which has olive oil). This was starting to feel like making smarter choices - ding ding ding!
In trying to shorten this, I will say that I ended up having a couple more "snacks" last night, telling myself to log them, even if I went over. I couldn't bring myself to do it last night, but I did it this morning. Eye opening, to say the least, and I was absolutely honest in amounts, if anything overestimating a bit. It was truly startling. I'd managed to consume almost 700 calories over my limit. But it was there in black and white.
I feel like I am already getting the wisdom of tracking week in a way I never have. Obviously this is a dubious start and it's unlikely I'm going to be made tracking poster girl any time soon. But I learned a few things: 1) knowing exactly what I'm eating makes me think about it a lot more 2) watching the calories pile up (or drain from the daily allotment) enables me to make choices and I assume more responsibility and accountability for my eating 3) my disordered thinking about eating and my disordered eating are alive and well 4) if I let my guard down and decide to just "wing it", I will start an up-the-scale crawl that I know I don't want.
Today I intend to do it again, and try to leave out the after-after dinner snacks. But at least I commit to logging them in the same day, because even that will be progress.
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