Ups and Downs

LastLittleBit

LastLittleBit

New member
I just started on my latest attempt to get in better shape and lose some weight. This time I have definite goals though, so maybe it'll work out better.

In any case, I started up a new food/calorie tracker in Excel on my laptop, and I plan to use it every school day. I'm not really sure how I'm treating weekends, but I guess I'll just still eat in a health-conscious way but give myself the illusion of freedom by not writing anything down. I used an online tool to determine what the ideal amount of calories to maintain 130lbs on my frame would be, so my goal is to get in somewhere under 1300 calories every day I track. It'll take willpower, but I feel that it'll be worth it in the end!
 
Day 2

So far so good. I haven't given into the temptation to grab a donut at Tim Horton's, although I did get a steeped tea with milk (still well within my calorie limit for the day). I packed my breakfast and lunch for school in advance, and I'm very glad my school schedule gives me time to make dinner and pack food for the next day. If I make it, I can control what's in it after all :)

I brought about half a cup of defrosted frozen mixed berries with a little mango and topped with cereal, about 3/4 a cup of baby carrots, a bag of All-Bran snacky crisp things, a small can of pineapple juice, a small yogurt, a small can of veggie cocktail, a bottle of water, and two boiled eggs with mixed greens and just a teensy bit of balsalmic dressing (makes a decent salad). The one problem is I'm going over to my fiance's tonight and I don't know what's for dinner there. Hopefully I can stress the salad, maybe skip starch and trim my meat without making it obvious. And hopefully there isn't butter on the veggies before they even reach the table LOL.

I just learned that if I put whole eggs in the same container as salad greens, walking around the campus will cause the eggs to squish the salad into greenish-purple mush :p I'm also wondering if I should choose one of the nutrition courses next year as an option, might look good when I apply to med school too!

I really will probably not be hitting the gym today, but it's entirely possible that I could convince my guy to hit the pavement with me and start on a beginner's run-walk program :)
 
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Day3-4

Well...turns out being with my guy isn't very good for my diet LOL
He really didn't feel like doing dishes or cooking friday night, so we went to the Alberta Hotel pub for dinner. I got caesar salad (no garden salad on menu!) and a burger (trust me, not much for healthier options).

The next morning I had a couple slices of raisin bread for breakfast, then we somehow ended up going to the casino with his parents and my guy and I had lunch threre. Garden salad, french onion soup (light on the cheese). If we'd gone home for dinner I probably would have still been okay, but we went to Boston Pizza instead. Even though it was on the "healthy" sub-menu, it turned out my dish was still about 500cal by itself when I looked it up! Didn't help that I had a daquiri with it either :( I think I'd set Saturday as a "relaxed" day (if I keep it under 1600 cal I still won't gain weight, so that's my max allowable for now), but that ended up getting pretty darn close to going over the limit.

I'll be a bit more careful and look up the info for restaurants I go to most often so I know what to order in advance.

Today me and some university friends are getting together for a BBQ, so I guess I'll be hogging the fruit and veggie trays and seeing if there's any light hot dogs/soy dogs LOL
 
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About that BBQ...they turned out not to have any regular hot dogs, just cheese smokies, so I had one of those...and I had 1 more s'more than I had planned on having...and some chips...so even if I apply the 1600cal weekend limit I still went about 600 calories over. BAD CAIT!!! :(

Next time maybe I should try to grab a snack before or after, as I doubt the frisbee, catch or croquet burned off quite that much (although it was fun). I've decided the best way to handle this setback is to divide 600 by 5 and take an average of 120 cal from what I intended to eat each day next week...I see a lot of veggies in my near future.

On the other hand, I worked out that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I'll run and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I'll go to the gym after school. I know I can keep up an exercise routine for at least two months, so this time I'll try to be consistent for longer than that :)
 
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Oh yeah, about that 3lb drop...143lb was from the last time I weighed myself, which was before my SQ (soldier qualification), so I guess I dropped a couple pounds in training, which makes sense as I lost weight during army medic training, which was longer but less intense.
 
Congrats on your 3lbs weight loss!

Sounds like you're doing good so far! Don't stress too much about the days when you're out with friends or family and you eat a little more than you like. As long as you go for the healthiest option available and don't over eat you'll be fine. Remember, it's not a race! If you stay sensible you'll get there for sure. So a couple of "over" days might mean it takes that little bit longer, but what's a few days or weeks in the grand scheme of things eh? Once you get there you'll feel great! No need to torture yourself on the way!

Good luck!
 
Days 5-6

For a holiday, labour day was pretty easy to handle not even going over the reduced limit I set for this week (1180 cal/day) in order to compensate for Sunday. It was one of those mornings where I never got around to really eating breakfast until I fixed myself a smoothie, and my mom's now on a diet again so we had a good salad with a bulgur/veggie dish for supper. I really want to cook fattening-but-delicious food after seeing Julie&Julia though.

On Tuesday my guy picked me up after me only class of the day, and we went to get my engagement ring resized. Usually I don't put too much thought into things, but I let him have what he wanted when we got a snack (he wanted to eat lunch at 2 and I hadn't had breakfast yet) around 1030 and I got a small strawberry-banana drink at Orange Julius. We both went out for salad at lunch (which is a great idea, after tax we each only paid $12 for food all day) and played a round of mini-golf instead of seeing a movie, and I somehow beat him for once. Since everyone else was out of town, he and I had a quiet dinner at home and watched a movie. I just cooked some chicken thighs in the oven with marinara sauce, and when they were done I just took the chicken out and tossed some whole-wheat pasta with the chicken-flavoured tomato sauce. Ta-da! two dishes from one: fall-off the bone chicken marinara and whole-wheat pasta with veggies in chicken-tomato sauce. He thought it tasted very good, and I never mentioned the part about it fitting in with my diet (I bulked up my pasta with a lot of veggies so it looked like I took the same amount as him :p ), so he didn't have to remind me I'm being silly.

I need to find a good brand of light beer though, because I am going to miss having a cold glass of good beer, and I usually drink Big Rock Traditional Ale or Honey Brown, and I haven't seen any light versions of those styles around.
 
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Day 7

So, I kinda decided that the whole "reducing what I'm allowed to eat for the rest of the week if I go over the limit on one day last wknd" thing was annoying me, so I went back to the 1300cal/day target. The excel spreadsheet I'm using as a food journal now has an extra column informing me of what my net # of calories above or below that target since I started, so now if I overindulge a bit, I can cut back over a longer period and see when it gets around to balancing out.

So far, I have eaten about 600cal that I was supposed to overall, but a lot of that was due to social events and my fiance's dad cooking breakfast (it tastes delicious, but pretty calorie-heavy), and by cutting back a bit I went from 800cal over to 600. I should be at my target or even slightly below next week.

I didn't eat much Wednesday, just not feeling great, but supper was good. Mom told me to make supper, but I hadn't defrosted any meat, fish or poultry, and I needed some protein before I went to work (we did a 5km or so ruck march around the city). Since grain+beans=complete protein, I combined some canned beans with bulgur wheat, seasoned it with chili powder, added a LOT of fresh cilantro and some jarred salsa, a squeeze of lemon juice and topped it with just the tiniest bit of smoked gouda (more flavourful, so I don't need to use much) and served it hot with a green salad. The result was filling enough I didn't even feel like I was missing out too much when I had to go back home instead of heading out after work for pizza and beer.
 
Day 8

I did a calculation for what my BMR (basal metabolic rate) would be online, and apparently it's about 1460cal. So basically, if I were to just sleep all day, I'd need that amount. In other words, I'm probably making some progress as-is. I don't expect it to be lightning-quick, but I'll get there--it's only ten pounds, right?

On Thursday I had a pretty good day. Breakfast was actually the lunch I had packed the previous day, but didn't eat because I didn't feel well Wednesday morning. Fresh strawberries, a bit of leftover bulgur-bean salad, juice and one of those 90cal packs of Quaker Oats crispy minis. I went home for lunch, made myself a smoothie with a cup of frozen berries, a cup of water, 1tbsp of skim milk powder and 1/2 scoop of protein powder. I was worried it would taste weak, but it was pretty good and pleasantly thick with the frozen fruit. For dinner I had an M&M meat shop marinated steak (240cal per steak), about half a cup of "oven-fried" baby potatoes with green salad. I went to the farmer's market after dinner for fruit and jam, and had a juicy ripe peach with cinnamon sprinkled on it for dessert.

I was planning to go to the gym, but just as I was packing my stuff Mom called and told me to clean the floors, kitchen bathroom etc because her boyfriend was coming over for dinner. I suppose I could go either later today or after work on Saturday. Maybe both? My sister and mom just started a fitness class this week and they're already very sore, so I'm feeling lazy now.
 
I still hate that scale though, according to BMI calculations, I'm overweight and I don't have any body fat measurements so it's not like I can prove otherwise. I'll just get down to within the "normal" range and try to stay there. Last night I figured out that if I got down to at least 132 I'd just barely make it into the healthy BMI category.

Mike's starting to worry about me a lot, even though I keep telling him I'm just cutting calories by eating healthy foods and leaving out a lot of unhealthy (albeit very delicious) ones. He's a young man with an enviable metabolism, and he certainly eats like one, so I guess the contrast between our diets must look alarming to him. If only I'd taken better care of myself last year and not put on weight, I wouldn't have to worry him.
 
Days 9-10

I kind of blew my diet a bit on Friday. I went over to dad's for supper (which I brought myself and cooked there), and he had strawberry rhubarb pie and vanilla frozen yogurt, which put me 200 cal over what I had planned on eating (it was good though!)

On Saturday I was at the armoury from 0800-1600 and it was one of those physical labour-y days, so I will admit I probably got a bit of exercise running around and doing up-tent-down-tent all day and moving and lifting heavy things, so perhaps I deserve a little slack for Friday. I was trying to have a light breakfast to atone for Friday, but I guess I should have had a bit more--I felt like I was about to pass out every time I lifted the mod tent frame by the end of the work day! As a reward for doing more than they actually thought we were going to get done, the Sgt. ordered in some pizza, and I had two slices (this place cuts it into tiny squares) and a glass of Sprite (I made sure to gulp some water) before getting back to work. Went to dad's for dinner and had roast chicken and potatoes, veggies and a slice from a mini chocolate truffle cake for dessert. It tasted all tasted good, and the total was within my range for the day.

Oh, and dad got this fancy new scale in his bathroom that has a body-fat %sensor built into it so that once you program in your height, sex, age etc and stand on the scale, it uses an electrical current to figure out how fat you are. Anyway, my %age according to that measurement is 25.6%, which falls easily between the acceptable range of 25%-31%.

I did a little research into the bioelectric impedence method (which this scale uses) and apparently it tends to overestimate sometimes, but unless one is severely dehydrated (decreasing conductivity) it rarely underestimates. So I guess I'm not a totall fat ass LOL
 
Days 11-12

Sunday was a good day. Woke up, had a nice little breakfast with some egg beaters, a couple strips turkey bacon and some homemade hash browns, then helped my dad with some of the moving stuff (the army is posting him to Winnipeg), had a light lunch of some home-baked thin-crust veggie pizza. Using lighter cheese really doesn't make it any less tasty, I don't understand why most pizza restaurants make theirs so greasy. I had dinner by myself at home, so I just had some fruit and a pizza pop. Not the worst day by health standards, but not the best I guess. I was still under 1400cal for the day.

I blew it a bit on Monday. I was feeling stressed-out and then I found out I'd lost my driver's license and $40 dollars somehow from my wallet, so I had a grande caramel macchiato and a ginger cookie from Starbucks. I don't even like Starbucks!!! I had dinner out with my fiance and I got the lunch-sized portion of the spinach-stuffed chicken, with veggies and rice on the side (I ate the veggies and just under half the rice), but I can't find calorie info for that restaurant. I had some cheezies earlier in the day (250cal/bag) and my lunch and breakfast (230cal pizza+fruit+juice+50cal of popcorn+yogurt) was already a little more calorie-heavy than usual. Approx 1800 cal for the day...epic fail LOL
 
Hey there. :) I thought I'd come check out your diary.

A quick tip for you ... to figure your maintenance calories, multiply your current weight by 14 (that's a good average for a moderately active, adult female). Then to figure out how much you need to eat to lose, subtract 30%.

So for example, for me, my current weight is 167.
167 * 14 = 2338 calories to maintain my current weight.
2338 * 70% = 1636 calories to lose weight at a reasonable rate.

Obviously it's an estimate - because everyone is different - but it gives you a starting place w/out having to do a whole lot of math (BMR, and Harris-Benedict, and so forth).

Hope that helps some! :)
 
thanks for the tip, having a bit of trouble figuring out what number to use. Actually that method gives me a little more wiggle room than my previous estimates.
 
Days 13-14

Tuesday was easy as heck. I went to school and then straight home for the rest of the day. Brekkie was a whole-wheat English muffin with light strawberry-rhubarb jam and a glass of milk. I pretty much just had little snacks from then until dinner. Mom wasn't going to be home in time for supper, so I just heated up one of those Uncle Ben's rice-and-chicken-in-a-bag things. I think I was actually under my limit for the day.

Wednesday...well it started out with me forgetting to pack breakfast, so I ate the lunch part of my food for brekkie, but then I got hungry around lunch and bought food at the cafeteria---big mistake! I did the math and I probably ate about 600cal easily (and it wasn't even like I got a lot!). Dinner is turkey helper made with lean ground turkey and 1% milk, but I still went over my limit :(

On the bright side, I'm registering for yoga (ashtanga) at a local studio, so hopefully I can get some help with relaxing and get a nice butt while I'm at it LOL
 
Day 15

Thursday was sort of so-so. I found the yoga studio alright, and I start class next Tuesday. I had a low-fat cranberry muffin and tea for breakfast, and chicken noodle soup, a donut and coffee for lunch (don't yell at me--the donut was 250cal, which isn't too bad for baked goods). Problem is, I didn't get home in time for supper, so I didn't get a proper meal. Stopped at Subway instead and thought that the meal that came with the cookies was better than the chips...bad move. Chips would have maybe been 250-300cal on top of a 320cal sandwich (just within my daily limit), but the cookies were over 400 (nearly 450cal!), which made my dinner almost 800cal. How I only went over my daily limit by 180cal I don't understand.
 
LastLittleBit;642324 I need to find a good brand of light beer though said:
Hey girl! I enjoyed reading through your journal a good bit.... good for you for wanting to be healthy! are you planning to lose 8 mor elbs total or is that just your goal for now? Eiether way best of luck!!

light beer.... the best ive found so far ( calorie wise) was Miller Genuine 64. It only has 64 calories in it. Tastes alot like Miller lite and coors lite.
Click to expand...
 
No, I'm just planning to lose the remaining amount (8lbs) and stay there. I'm really not particularly overweight, and dropping the 13lbs from my starting weight would put me safely in the "normal" BMI range, so losing more would not really be necessary.
 
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