wavesoflife

I’ve been doing great with my diet. I’ve tracked my food every day in March (and I’m sure I will tomorrow, the actual end of March).

I managed to meet my March goal of 175. My April goal is 170.

I got confused in a past post about my year end and final goal. My year end goal is 135 lb. My final goal is 120 lb, with a goal of April of next year.

Tracking my food (with SparkPeople) has shown me a lot about what I eat. They have charts for things like calories, fat, carbs, protein, etc.

You can see that I went over my calorie range one day. That was the day we went out to eat for my mom’s birthday. I ended up under my range on four days, accidentally. I don’t eat enough protein and I sometimes go over on my fat range. I am almost always over on my sodium range, which is something I really have to work on since I have high blood pressure. You can see by my cholesterol chart the days I ate real eggs and not Egg Beaters. And even with my OTC potassium supplement, I never get near enough the amount of potassium.

Now that I’ve gotten down getting calories in range, I suppose it’s time to start working on others. Namely fat, protein, and sodium. I need to start replacing my empty calories (aka soda) with nutritious ones. While I am eating in my calorie range, I’m still not eating healthy options. My breakfast was okay, it was oatmeal. Plus tea at work. Instead of my tomato soup I brought for lunch, I decided to eat Cheez-Its from the vending machine. That was a rare thing, I normally don’t have cash or change on me. And for dinner I had Taco Bell. Two crunchy taco supremes, cheesy fiesta potatoes, and a small Pepsi. I’m at 1290 calories for today. I have 260 calories left if I’m hungry before bed and apples and oranges in the fridge. I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with the way I eat oranges in the past couple years. I have to make sure almost every bit of extra white skin(?) is removed before eat it. And I find removing it extremely enjoyable. But I have to be watching TV while I do it.

On my last update on March 2, I weighed 182. Today I’m down to 177. I hope to be at 175 by the end of the month.

Back in January of 2006 I weighed 145 lbs. I had weighed 135 when I got married in October 2005. I probably gained most of that ten pounds in Jamica. Free food…all you could eat…any time of the day…

Then in the winter of 2006 my doctor increased my Zoloft dosage to the maximum available. By September of 2006 I weighed 174 lbs. Since then my weight gain has been mostly eating too many calories in a day.

The weight has come off easily so far. I hope it continues to do so.

Tonight I bought the book The Spark: The 28-Day Breakthrough Plan for Losing Weight, Getting Fit, and Transforming Your Life. It’s from the site that I started using back in 2008 for weight loss, SparkPeople. I’ve been doing well on my weight loss plan, but I want to continue doing well. My goal is to be down to 120 lbs by the end of the year. I’m currently at 182 lbs, so there’s a way to go.

I also bought The CalorieKing Calorie, Fat & Carbohydrate Counter 2010. This is a great little book and very…enlightening. For example, my usual burger at Red Robin has over 800 calories. And that doesn’t include the fries and the Coke.

I like SparkPeople because it makes tracking food fairly easy. It’s the only site I’ve tried for it, so I can’t really compare it to other sites. There’s lots of food items already in the system and if it doesn’t have it, 99% of the time another user has added it and you can use that. You get points for various things and trophies when you reach a certain amount of points. I orginally signed up for that site because I read an article online compariing several diet sites. The author mentioned that Spark People had a long form to fill out to join. I love filling out forms, so I chose that site. This was several years ago, so I have no idea if they still have a long form or not.

My username on there is seafae, if you use that site.

Today I ate 1,246 calories. My calorie range is 1200 – 1,550.

Breakfast: (264 calories)
Quaker Instant Oatmeal, Weight Control, Maple and Brown Sugar with milk
Black tea with 1 sugar cube and honey

Snack: (110 calories)
Campbell’s Select New England Clam Chowder (wasn’t a fan of this)

Lunch: (463 calories)
2 sunny-side up eggs
2 pieces white bread toasted with Benecol (need to stop eating bread again)
1 Boca breakfast link (not a fan of these either)
8 oz. Coke

Dinner: (410 calories)
6 piece McDonalds Chicken Nuggets (BIG fan of these)
Sweet and Sour Sauce
Small Coke

I usually try to only drink one soft drink a day. The McDonalds food was unplanned, otherwise I would have had water with my lunch.

Also, my eating schedule is a little odd. I don’t get up till 11ish, so breakfast is then. Then I have a snack at work after about 3 hours. Two hours later, I leave for home and eat lunch at home. Then several hours later I either eat dinner or a snack. I usually call my lunch, dinner, since it’s around dinner time.

Since January I’ve lost about 10 pounds. I’ve probably lost about 15 pounds since October.

Rather than following any specific diet, I’ve been eating a lot less and making healthier food choices. Plus drinking a lot of water. I sometimes use SparkPeople to keep track of what I’ve been eating, but not always.

I suppose what’s made my resolve stick this time is the doctor telling me I was doing a good job, and to keep doing what I’ve been doing, rather than just saying as many tend to do “you should lose some weight”.

My calorie intake was way too high before. I was also eating larger amounts of food than I should have been. It’s been an adjustment…I’ve felt very hungry some days.