Back to Basics

I read a fantastic blog post yesterday from Lori at Finding Radiance.  She’s lost 100 pounds the old fashioned way – watching what she eats and exercising.  No short cuts, no diet pills, just dedication.  She’s redoing their bathroom and she made the analogy between renovating and weight loss. 

The last line of the post is what struck with me the most:

It is a complete change in life to lose weight. You must do the full renovation to have permanent lifestyle changes to not only get the weight off, but keep it off.

I realized that while I started off strong in January, a few of my bad habits came back without me even realizing it.  And extra glass of wine, a piece of cheese eaten when I was looking for something else in the fridge.

I realized I have to go back to basics again.  I bought a journal yesterday. 

If I bite it, I must write it.  I also found a cool new nutritional website.  While I do like fatsecret.com because its free, this one has a price tag of $7.95 a month, with the first trial week free with no credit card to “hold” it.

What I like about it is that it’s super easy to navigate and the recipe builder is super easy to use.  The only thing I can’t figure out is how to get a total for each meal, it just keeps adding it up together.  But when I put in my weight, and my goal weight, they said I should eat 1653 calories a day.

Breakfast was a Chobani parfait – this one with a new flavor to me, apple cinnamon.  I loved this parfait in the beginning, but again, by the time I got to the last 1/4 of it, it was just too sweet.  I will eat this yogurt, but it will have to be by itself.

I went to the gym at lunch.  I did a 5k – this time running 7 minutes, walking 3 minutes.  I am trying to build up my cardio strength again after my 21 days of running a 5k last fall.  Not a bad time!

Lunch was leftover black bean soup from last week, but I added 1/2 cup of Mexican yellow rice and a cup of chopped baby spinach.  I added some buffalo Tabasco and it was spicy delicious.

So I put in my breakfast, lunch and my 500 calorie dinner into the nutritional data on the new site, and I was still only at 1200 calories for the day!  So I made a snack of the last of my marble rye (recipe coming soon!) with a teaspoon of strawberry jam, and half an apple.  (and yes, I did take a bite before deciding to take a picture!)

Dinner was Tony’s famous fried rice – so.fricken.good!  He gave me this huge bowl and I thought, I’ll eat about 1/3 of it.  Nope!  I was hangry and ate half – which my estimate is at about 500 calories.

And after dinner I ate 15 almonds.  My totals for the day?

• 1543 calories, 73 protein, 245 carbs, 31 fat and 23 fiber

What I learned is that wowza, that was a high carb day for me.  And guess how many milligrams of sodium I had??  3700!

So my plan is when I get my act together this weekend, is to not only plan out my meals, but enter them in this site to see how I can make my nutrition better each day.  I’d like to stay around 150 carbs, and watch the sodium intake.

I did great drinking my water – I bought this water bottle because its 1 liter (33 ounces) and I drank three of these before leaving the office.  I just need to drink more water at home.

I have some more link love today:

So proud of Amanda at Getting to Goal – she just PR’d her last 1/2 marathon – running in Chicago in January!!  Great job Amanda!

Now that our temps are in the single digits with wind chill advisories, today would be the perfect day to try Bonnie’s pumpkin spice lattes – they look amazing!

And why have I never thought to pickle my own jalapenos?!!  Jane has the perfect recipe that I can’t wait to try.

Alright, time to get my food together and get out in this frigid weather – and in case anyone is wondering, I will be wearing a winter coat today!

Make it a great day!