Okay, so after 4 months of screwing around and doing nothing but waste my money, I’m finally getting serious about my diet and weight loss plan for 2011. My back is fricken killing me and I feel like crap. I watched my dad walk …er shuffle through the living room a couple of weeks ago and I realized that if I didn’t do something – that was going to be me. It’s bad enough that I have family traits that belong only to his side of the family; I am not going to have his hunch back too. Thank god Dad’s isn’t as bad as my Auntie Virginia. Ugh… the thought just scares me. So – I’m doing something about it. Seriously.
I’ve been on my new improved diet a week and I’ve actually lost 1 pound. To me, that 1 pound is a major victory considering that W-1 included a night of over-indulgenced of adult beverages with my gal pals from work and the Easter holiday.
The plan that I’m on is 1200 calories a day. It’s what the Web MD: Diet & Lifestyle tool considers the “eat less and exercise a little more” plan. I’m supposed to burn off (aka exercise) about 600 calories a day – which is a little intimidating to say the least. An hour of Jazzercise burns only 300 calories. Not that I do jazzercise, I’m just using that as a point of reference. I was completely freaking out about this until my co-worker Teri said that I have to include walking around the office and such. When I loaded all the movement I did outside laying in my bed sleeping, 600 calories didn’t look so bad.
I downloaded this app on my phone called MyFitnessPal. Basically, it’s a high tech food log. I loaded in all my vital information in the beginning, like weight, goal, measurements etc. Every day, I enter in the foods I shove in my mouth and it ticks off the calories until I get to zero or in some cases, negative numbers. I can scan foods that have a bar code on them – which makes logging really easy and every food item known to man is already loaded into the program – or you can find a similar item in there.
My “pal” also tracks my exercise minutes and converts it to calories. If I forget to track a day or two, my pal sends me an email reminder. When I’m done logging for the day and I close out the entry, my pal says “If every day was like today, in 5 weeks you’d weigh ### pounds.” I love that part because it makes the light at the end of the tunnel a little brighter. At the end of my first tunnel, a month from now, I plan to be 10 pounds lighter.
So here’s what I’ve learned since I’ve officially been on my diet a week and unofficially been logging my meals for 2 weeks.
1. Counting Calories Rocks! Its way easy to do with My Pal and in my opinion, I think this method is better than Weight Watchers because you’re more accountable for what you eat. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done WW before, successfully and I liked the whole points concept. But, on WW, there’s always a little leeway for those days when you feel like eating a plate of brownies. With only 1200 calories to mess around with, sure I can eat that plate of brownies – and then nothing else for the rest of the day. There’s no bank of extra calories that I can tap into on the days that I over eat. If I want to eat a little more, I need to exercise a little more to earn those calories back.
2. I’m a calorie freak now! Logging my meals and knowing exactly how many calories something has, has made me ultra sensitive to what I stick in my mouth! Did you know that a cup of chocolate milk has 170 calories!!! One Cup!!! I love chocolate milk – and in my pre-diet days I’m sure I drank multiple cups in one sitting – but not anymore. I need to save those calories now for something that has a lot more bang for the buck. Even my morning coffee has been jacked. Each tablespoon of hazelnut creamer that a person dumps in their coffee has 35 calories. I usually put 4 of those little creamer pods in my cup when I’m at Casey’s. That’s 140 calories just for the cream!! WTF!!! Soy creamer only has 20 calories a tablespoon. Soy chocolate milk only has 90 calories a cup. Soy has become my new best friend.
3. I have a carb addiction: My pall also tracks all the nutritional label stuff, like fat grams, carbs, cholesterol, sugar, salt, vitamins etc. It tells you what the recommended allowance is for the day and how your log stacks up against it. My carb “goal” is between 165 - 195 grams. That seems like a lot doesn’t it? Ha! Yesterday, I ate 233 grams of carb related food. 233 grams! Today it was 295! Besides water and diet soda, are there foods out there that don’t have carbs? Don’t even get me started on how much salt and sugar I consume. Ugh! That’s what I get for growing up in the house with a bunch of sweet-tooths!!
4. Not every suggestion from your family and friends is helpful. I hate when you’re on a diet and people say “should you be eating that?” Yeah, I get it that they think their being helpful, but unless I throw out of lifeline at over-eaters anonymous, I don’t need any unfriendly advice about what I’m eating. Basically I’m going to eat what I want to eat and I’ll deal with the consequences later. I’m okay with friendly suggestions from fellow dieters or those who stay fit – example: my friend Teri at work. She’s not exactly on a diet, but she works out all the time and tries to eat healthy. So when I was freaking out about how many calories I had to burn off every day, she made that suggestion to count all the walking around I do – that was helpful. Or when my friend Jolene said that eating spicy foods is good because it takes more calories to digest it, that was helpful. Being critical of what I eat – especially when you’re sticking a piece of Betty Jane candy in your mouth – isn’t.
5. Exercising is not fun: I’m just too lazy to do it. I’m not the athletic type – probably the one and only trait I picked up from my mother. Getting motivated to do it is a stretch for me. Once I start, I’m fine. Like tonight I was on Wii Fit for an hour punching at the TV screen, doing the hula hoop, riding my bike through the vacation island, trying to downhill ski, throwing snowballs at little Mii characters that look like my family members -- I actually forgot I was working out!! I was totally sweating! It was fun and I banked 250 calories for my effort. (which was good, because I ate 4 Pepperidge farm cookies today and totally blew out my 1200 calorie limit!) I might stay on that exercise roll for a couple of days and then, I don’t know, something will happen that will throw me off my game and it will take me 4 or 5 days to get back on the horse. I’d like to say I’m more motivated this time around to stick with it, but we’ll see.
6. Diet soda has become my best friend: Let me clarify that and say Diet Root Beer Soda. It probably tastes the most like regular soda than anything else on the market. And other than a little sodium, it has no calories – or carbs. It’s the one fun thing I get to look forward to lunchtime – or after work. I might even married Mr. Muggs Diet someday.
7. Water is my frienemy: I can drink a ton of water when I’m working out or shortly after I work out, but that’s about the only time of the day that I can swallow it. According to Web MD, I should be drinking 64 oz a day. Yikes, I’m nowhere close to that, at best I probably drink 30 oz’s … and that’s a step up from my non-diet days. It’s work in progress. Drinking water while I work out has some consequences that don’t necessarily appeal to me. Like using the restroom a lot especially since I work out at night. I usually have to get up to pee at least twice during the night. And, I think it makes me sleep walk -- seriously, I’ve caught myself doing this about 5 times since I started my little fitness plan – all on nights that I worked out and then went to bed. While I have no real proof that they are correlated – I know for a fact that I didn’t sleep walk on the nights that I didn’t work out or drink a ton of water before I went to bed. Coincidence?
8. Being hungry sucks: I hate the late night munchies, or the 10 am munchies, or the whenever munchies and your food options aren’t the best. It’s hard to be a dieter when there’s a huge jar of peanut butter staring at you – or the world’s biggest bucket of ice cream or worse yet, every candy bar known to man just 40 feet away in the vending machine. At times, willpower is a stretch.
So that’s my update for April. Crossing my fingers to be another pound lighter on Sunday.
No comments:
Post a Comment