There's a lot of daily chit-chat in here, too. So you may want to grab a snack. :)
Day 1 (Monday, January 19th):
Total weight loss: It's Day 1, so none to report yet!
Breakfast: Slim-Fast shake
Snack: Greek yogurt
Lunch: Slim-Fast shake
Snack 1: Carrots, Triscuits and Hummus
Snack 2: An apple and some blueberries
Dinner: Chicken Tetrazini (made with organic whole wheat pasta), followed by Big Slice kettle-cooked apples
Beer/Wine: No
Run: No (I ran yesterday, so I'll run tomorrow)
Workout: Day 1 of the 10 Week Workout Plan below (minus the cardio since I'm half training)
I was going to do some P90X today, but I couldn't find my DVDs, so now I'm wondering if I even have them anymore! I remembered that I had saved the Diary of a Fit Mommy's workout above to my desktop, so I just went with that. If I find my DVDs, maybe I'll do those instead.
Day 2 (Tuesday, January 20th):
Total weight loss: 1.2 lbs
Breakfast: Slim-Fast shake
Snack: 1/2 an avocado
Lunch: Slim-Fast shake
Snack 1: Bowl of black beans and Rotel
Snack 2: Greek yogurt, raspberries, bread & butter pickle chips
Dinner: Soup/Salad/Pizza bar at Portofino's
Beer/Wine: No
Run: 4-mile treadmill run
Workout: Day 2 of the 10 Week Workout Plan
It's only Day 2, but Snack 1 is proving to be the biggest struggle so far, because my body wants to EAT. I'm not necessarily starving by then, but portion control for my snack is definitely difficult. Today I heated up a can of black beans and a can of Rotel together, making myself a delicious spicy black bean side dish. I limited myself to one bowl, but I could have eaten the ENTIRE POT without batting an eyelash. Then I was counting down the next two hours before I could have Snack 2, which I ended up having an hour late because I hit the treadmill (so I managed to forget about it for an hour!). I really wanted something more substantial for Snack 2 (EAT ALL THE CARBS) but I knew that I needed to wait for dinner for anything heavier, so I curbed my extended craving a little with pickle chips instead. I should totally buy myself some whole dill pickles for snacks!!
On days when I eat lunch and have a shake as a snack, I may not have the same afternoon struggle with wanting to eat, because I will have already eaten. But at the same time, that also means I will need to watch my lunch portions!
Day 3 (Wednesday, January 21st):
Total weight loss: 1.0 lb (up 0.2 from yesterday)
Breakfast: Slim-Fast shake
Snack: 1/2 an avocado
Lunch: Slim-Fast shake
Snack 1: An orange and a single-serve bag of popcorn
Snack 2: Graham crackers with peanut butter
Dinner: Chicken Tetrazini (made with organic whole wheat pasta), followed by an apple and some raspberries
Beer/Wine: No
Run: No
Workout: No (I was going to do Day 3 at night but I was just SO TIRED that I went straight to bed!)
I'm pretty certain that I'm up that 0.2 lb from yesterday because of my dinner last night. We went to Portofino's right down the road, which is a place where we are considered regulars. I ate from their Salad/Soup/Pizza bar, making sure I focused on soup (navy bean) and salad. However, my salad wasn't necessarily the healthiest out there, and I did eat ONE slice of pizza. It was a really small slice, and I didn't eat the crust, but it was still pizza. Had I not gotten the salad bar, had I ordered a salad straight off the menu, I wouldn't have eaten as much, and I know this. But the salads on Portofino's menu aren't anything special, so the salad bar is always a better bet in that department.
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| Ok so it wasn't that tiny. |
Up less than a quarter of a pound is really nothing, though. Especially since I'm still down a whole pound from two days ago!
Day 4 (Thursday, January 22nd):
Total weight loss: 1.8 lbs (down 0.8 from yesterday)
Breakfast: Slim-Fast shake
Snack: Scrambled egg mixed with black beans and Rotel
Lunch: 1/2 Asian Salad from Cheddar's (that salad is DELISH, btw)
Snack 1: None
Snack 2: None
Dinner: 1/2 Asian Salad from Cheddar's
Beer/Wine: No
Run: 1.5-mile treadmill run
Workout: Day 3 of the 10 Week Workout Plan
Yesterday was the hardest so far, as I kind of expected out of Day 3. I was just SO HUNGRY from about lunchtime on. My Slim-Fast shake at lunch did curb my appetite briefly, it just didn't curb it for as long as the previous two days. I was ravished by snack time, and I really wanted to eat crappy food. The orange and the popcorn were good, but it felt like they did nothing to satisfy my hunger and I was counting the minutes until my second snack. I opted for graham crackers and peanut butter for my second snack, which was a little better at satisfying my hunger since the graham crackers had carbs and the peanut butter had fat. After dinner, though, I found myself scouring the fridge and cabinets for something else to eat, and I wanted something sweet. I eyeballed the bottle of cream soda in the fridge several times. In the end I decided to behave and I ate an apple and some raspberries.
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| We have 2 of these in the fridge left over from mixed drink experiments we were doing last month. They are SO good but SO sweet and SO full of sugar! |
A friend and I had a conversation this morning about meal replacement shakes and how 99.9% of the time, they are completely ineffective because as soon as people stop doing them, all the weight comes right back. And I definitely don't disagree with her. A Slim-Fast shake is only 200 calories, though mine is a little more because I use 2% milk instead of skim milk. But it would be downright impossible to have a filling meal for 200 calories. There are breakfast ideas for around 250 calories (half of a whole wheat English muffin spread with 1/3 an avocado and topped with a sliced hard-boiled egg and a little hot sauce, for example), and I do have a few 350-400 calorie meal ideas readily available that I pulled from a magazine, but let's be realistic - it's just not feasible to think that I would actually stick to a 250-400 calorie meal plan. For breakfast, sure, I can do that. But not for lunch and dinner. I'm not quite that disciplined, nor do I want to feel so limited.
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| Just seems like a lot of work...... |
(I just saw on a Google image a meal replacement shake referred to as a "barfshake". HAHAHA!)
However, I'm also determined NOT to pile this weight back on once I lose it. I'm hoping that running will become easier as the weight slips off, and so I'll be running more and for longer distances and be able to maintain my happy weight, all while eating healthier but not watching everything quite as carefully as I am now.
P.S. I found (well, Lucas found) my P90X DVDs.
Day 5 (Friday, January 23rd):
Total weight loss: 2.0 lbs (down 0.2 from yesterday)
Breakfast: Slim-Fast shake
Snack: Greek yogurt
Lunch: Slim-Fast shake
Snack 1: Triscuits and hummus
Snack 2: An apple
Dinner: A handful of chips and salsa and 1/2 a Steak Avocado Salad from El Meson
Beer/Wine: Yes - a beer and a few margaritas
Run: No
Workout: No
So yesterday I had the Asian Salad from Cheddar's. After I ordered it but before I ate it, I Googled its nutrition info. According to the My Fitness Pal website, the Asian Salad has 1,250 calories, 96 carbs and 76 (SEVENTY-SIX) grams of fat. Holy bejesus. That's my entire calorie count for the day and almost double the fat intake I should have. I wasn't overly shocked about the calorie content......a lot of large restaurant salads out there have enough calories for an entire day and sometimes more, but I didn't expect it to be quite that fatty. Ah well. I cut my Asian Salad down the middle, ate half of it for lunch, ate the other half for dinner, and skipped any and all snacks in between (not that I was even hungry to want them).
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| They don't actually stack it that high. |
I totally should have gone with the Hawaiian Chicken Salad (524 calories, 21 g fat) and dipped into a side of dressing. Can you imagine if I had split that salad between lunch and dinner? There would have been my 300 calorie meals for the day!
Lesson learned. Check food nutrition info before ordering. Don't order salads pre-tossed in dressing.
My in-laws come into town today for the weekend. We'll be going out to dinner tonight, probably eat out for lunch tomorrow, and then will probably eat out for either brunch or lunch on Sunday before they head home (I bartend tomorrow night so I'll make sure my dinner option is on point). I'm going to try to eat as healthy as possible, but I anticipate that this weekend will be a bit of a setback from my current progress (much like my Asian Salad choice!). But that's ok. There's always next week, and the week after that, and the week after that......I don't mean that I plan to procrastinate or start over, I just mean that I've got plenty of recovery time for a weekend of a little indulgence!
Day 6 (Saturday, January 24th):
Total weight loss: 2.8 lbs (down 0.8 from yesterday)
Breakfast: Slim-Fast shake
Snack: Scrambled egg and 1/2 sausage patty
Lunch: Farmhouse Salad from Urban Stack
Snack 1: None
Snack 2: None
Dinner: Slim-Fast shake
Beer/Wine: Yes, Pinot Grigio
*After-Dinner Snack: Some ribs, a smoked chicken thigh and some pulled pork from Sticky Fingers....and an apple (leftover from tonight's catering event, minus the apple)
Run: No
Workout: No
Last night we, my parents and my in-laws had dinner at El Meson. I knew eating out was coming (along with frosty beverages) so I stuck to my shakes during the day and only ate an apple for my second snack. I drank a Blue Moon at home when the in-laws got into town (they brought a cooler of beer with them) and then had a couple of margaritas with dinner. I ordered the steak avocado salad as my meal, and it was YUM. The server suggested that I eat it with salsa instead of dressing, so I did, and she was right - it was so good (plus salsa is healthier than dressing anyway!). I didn't purposely decide to eat only half of the salad, but it just worked out that way, probably because of the margaritas. I tried Googling the nutrition info for the salad, but I couldn't find info for El Meson anywhere. But the salad consisted of lettuce, tomato, onion (I think), avocado and steak (or the other choice, chicken). So it definitely wasn't an unhealthy choice.
For lunch today (Saturday), we ended up at Urban Stack. Urban Stack is known for their burgers, and I love their Good Day Sunshine Burger, because I love me a fried egg on a burger. I also love their onion rings. YUM. But today, I ordered the Farmhouse Salad, which consisted of oven-dried tomatoes, roasted beets, asparagus, sugar snap peas, roasted corn, diced strawberries, fresh greens and chopped grilled chicken. And I had it with their homemade Sweet Vadalia Onion dressing. And I did have ONE onion ring. Because who can resist? :)
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| Urban Stack's hot pimiento cheese dip is YUM, too. |
Tonight (Saturday night), I bartended an event at the Aquarium. The event was CRAZY all in itself and deserves a post all of its own (300+ people from Jasper all in one spot). It won't get one, but let's just say we nicknamed a woman "Toothless" and another wannabe-Toothless-lady "Lacy". And that we were convinced that there were going to be some shenanigans going on between Toothless and a much younger guy we nicknamed "Cowboy" in a hidden (or maybe not-so-hidden?) corner of the aquarium tonight. Well, no shenanigans were discovered or interrupted, so they at least made it outside of the building. And besides being drunk, "Lacy" didn't have any activities to report. But it was THAT kind of night. And they were definitely not the only ones. But since this post is about food and not about Jasper hookups, I'll stick to that.
Since we went out for lunch, I had a Slim-Fast shake for dinner. And had I gone to bed at 10:00, that would have been the end of the night. But since I went to work and we were still breaking down bars until midnight, I was hungry again by 10:30 or so. Sticky Fingers catered tonight, so there was a CRAPTON of leftover food at the end of the night that all ended up down in our kitchen. I was too hungry to care, so I had several ribs (probably 4 or 5), a chicken thigh and a handful of pulled pork. No sauce was involved, but the chicken and ribs were definitely greasy. I brought home a cup of spinach dip, but it's still untouched and now in the fridge waiting for another day. I had thought I'd be eating it right now while winding down, but I talked myself out of it and grabbed an apple instead. Part of me thought I'd actually come home and jump on the treadmill after work tonight. But that was just wishful thinking. If I had gotten home an hour earlier, that may have happened. But after midnight, that's definitely NOT happening. Even though now it's 1:00 am and I'm still up......a treadmill run was definitely NOT in the cards past the 11:30 mark.
Day 7 (Sunday, January 25th):
Total weight loss: 2.8 lbs (same as yesterday)
Breakfast: 1/2 waffle and 3 bacon strips
Snack: None
Lunch: Slim-Fast shake
Snack 1 (more like a late lunch): Chips and salsa, Chicken Tortilla Soup from Taco Mamacita (YUM)
Snack 2: None
Dinner: Smoked ham, homemade mac & cheese, strawberries and kiwi, and a homemade Rice Krispie Treat
Beer/Wine: Yes, Sangria from Taco Mamacita
Run: No
Workout: No
Today was definitely an unsuccessful day for sticking to my meal shake plan, but it didn't end up being as bad as I thought it would be. I did start the day off with some carbs instead of a shake, but it was only half a waffle. At Taco Mamacita I had the soup, because I wanted to stay healthy but needed a day of NOT eating a salad. Dinner was at my parents' house, where I ate more ham and fruit than anything else. I only ate a little mac & cheese and skipped the bread altogether. So overall I deem the day a win.
Day 8 (Monday, January 26th)
Total weight loss: 2.6 lbs (up 0.2 from yesterday)
So I'm one week into my weight loss challenge and down 2.6 lbs. Woohoo! I don't look any different or feel any different and I'm not out of my fat jeans yet, but it's a really good start in the right direction. I am this much closer to losing the 20 lbs I want to lose - only 17 1/2 more lbs to go. At this rate I'll hit my goal weight by the end of March. Realistically, though, it will probably be more like May.
Today I plan on hitting the treadmill during the kids' naps (or this evening if naps don't work out as planned), as well as doing Day 1 of the 10-Week Workout Plan. I also plan to start tagging consignment items, since drop-off starts in less than 2 weeks.
Here's to Monday!
I was browsing the web and came across your page. I also just finished my 1st week of slimfast and am down 1.1 pounds. I don't workout yet though! And I def don't do it how they describe at 1,200 calories a day. I aim for 1,500 because I get super cranky when I am hungry.
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