Weekly Tip: Food Snapshot

I've been getting a lot of questions from people about what I'm doing in terms of diet throughout my challenge.  People are asking me if I'm following a strict diet and what I eat, so I decided to give you a snapshot of what a typical day's worth of meals looks like for me.  I'm not actually following any specific diet plan, I just try to stick with lean proteins, veggies, and whole grains.  I also am trying to stay away from a lot of processed and pre-packaged foods and I started learning how to cook so that helps a lot.  To give everyone an idea of what I usually eat, here is my food snapshot from this past Tuesday:

7:00am - Breakfast: Oatmeal and a banana

280 calories

10:15am - Morning Snack: Vanilla greek yogurt with blueberries and granola

240 calories

1:30pm - Lunch: Turkey slices and a Laughing Cow cheese wedge on whole wheat bread with carrots

230 calories

4:30pm - Afternoon Snack: Granola bar

140 calories

7:00pm - Dinner: Chicken breast, sweet potato, and sweet peas

335 calories

9:00pm - Evening snack: Trail mix

160 calories

As you can see, I actually eat quite a bit, and I'm eating totally normal things!  My total calories for that day was about 1380.  Eating a bunch of smaller meals throughout the day means I don't get the urge to binge on something really unhealthy, and this way I never eat too much in one sitting.  This has been a really helpful way for me to watch my portions and also satisfy my snack cravings.  I have fallen in love with trail mix as a low calorie snack in the evenings that still gives me the sweet & salty combo that I love.  I also try to include fruit or veggies with almost every meal.  Chicken or fish are easy enough to make in the evenings for dinner in order to get lean protein.  In terms of drinks, I drink water all day long, so no added calories there!  Usually I have at least 8 glasses, sometimes more.  I also might have a cup of coffee or tea once in a while, which have almost zero calories.

Have you made any changes to your diet that have worked well or not so much?  Tell me about it!  As always, feel free to send any questions my way.  Happy eating!

Weekly Tip: Portion Control

I'm a firm believer in the idea that it's not necessarily what you eat that impacts your weight, but how much.  Everything in moderation, right?  A lot of people struggle with portion control, including myself, and no matter how much working out you do, if you're still eating too much you won't be able to achieve your weight loss goals.  Understanding what 1 serving of something actually looks like can really help.  Learning how much food is appropriate to eat in one sitting can be a challenge, and one of my main goals for my weight loss journey was to adjust my concept of portion sizes and what's appropriate, so I've come up with a list of tips on how to train yourself to eat less.

•  Track your food!  I've said this once and I'll say it again: tracking my food has been the single most helpful change I've made since starting my challenge.  I had no idea how much food I was actually eating until I started recording every bite, and it really opened my eyes to the fact that I was eating way too much.  If you start keeping track of your food intake, you automatically start thinking about your food choices more, which can lead to better eating habits.
• If you're a visual person, use smaller plates.  You have to trick your brain into thinking that a full, albeit smaller, plate of food is the appropriate amount.  Especially if you feel the need to finish everything that's on your plate, this trick will allow you to do so without overeating.
• Put your fork down in between each bite.  We all need to slow things down a little when it comes to meal times.  We're always so rushed to shovel all our food into our mouths like it's going to disappear, but guess what: it's not going anywhere.  If you slow down your eating, you give your stomach time to send signals to your brain that you're full, so you end up eating less.
• Don't put more food in your mouth until you've swallowed your last bite.  Why must we constantly try to fit as much food into our mouths as possible?  Waiting until you've swallowed to take another bite of something works on the same principle as the last trick, it slows you down.
• Read nutrition labels.  Any food that comes with a label will give you a serving size, and this is what you need to be paying more attention to.  Not only does reading the nutritional information help you get a better idea of what you're putting in your body, but sticking to the serving size listed on the package means you're eating the proper amount.

In order to break bad habits, we have to create new ones to replace them.  These tips will help you retrain yourself into understanding how much food is the right amount to be eating.  Let me know if they work for you!

Weekly Tip: Cheat.

I know I've mentioned this in previous posts, but I am definitely a big supporter of the CHEAT DAY!  Taking a cheat day, or even just a cheat meal, once a week is a way to keep your body guessing and give you a break from your (hopefully) normally regimented diet.  Since your body can adjust to pretty much anything, the cheat day allows you to surprise your body and change things up a bit.  It's also a nice chance for you to enjoy some of the foods you wouldn't normally eat as part of your weight loss plan.  I'm not saying healthy foods can't be delicious, but it's hard to get excited about veggies and lean proteins all day, every day, for weeks on end.  Since a cheat day lets you indulge in some of your less healthy preferred eats, it keeps things interesting for you and makes you more likely to stick with your long term plan. 

It's important to remember that you can't use the cheat day as an excuse to eat whatever you want, whenever you want.  For example, a friend invites you out to dinner and you decide, "Sure, I'll spring for the burger with everything on top and the chili cheese fries, this can be my cheat meal!"  Then 2 days later someone brings cupcakes in to work and all of the sudden, you're having another cheat meal, and another, and another.  That kind of thinking can snowball and quickly ruin all your hard work.  You need to plan this ahead of time.  Pick one day a week when you know you're going to be a little more lax with your food choices, and keep it the same day every week.  For me, my cheat day is always on the weekend, since it's easier for me to keep a regimented meal plan during the week on a full time work schedule.  Also, you're more likely to be going out with friends to dinner and drinks etc. on the weekends, which is when you want to loosen up and be more lax about your choices.

Cheat days, while enjoyable, can also be very dangerous for people who don't have the right amount of self-control.  If you're the kind of person with the "once you pop, you just can't stop" mentality, then taking a cheat day might not be the best idea for you.  For some people, once they've cheated it's hard to then go back to their healthy meal plan and they just give it up completely.  If a weekly cheat day is too frequent for you, it might be better to time your cheat day with milestones, like for every x amount of pounds you lose, or once you're able to run x miles.  That way your cheat meal isn't quite as frequent, but you still have something to look forward to along the way.

Also really important: even on your cheat day, always remember that ultimately, you have set weight loss goals for yourself and you can ruin them by making poor food choices.  The cheat day should not be a free pass to go crazy and eat things that will completely undo all your fabulous progress.  Keep your portion sizes in check, and try to still include fruits and veggies along with the more unhealthy things you might be enjoying that day.

Most importantly, do what works best for you.  What works for some does not work for everyone.  Know your limits and stay in control of your food, your choices, and your goals.  Enjoy!

Week 1 Update

Happy Monday Everyone!

Week 1 is officially over and I have to say I think it went pretty well.  First things first, step 1 is complete:

my brand new Gold's Gym keytag!

 I finally joined the gym, so now I can workout whenever I want.  They have a lot of classes that I'd like to start trying out and lots of cardio equipment for me to use to whip my body into shape!

I did 3 workouts during week 1; here's a recap of my activity:
-2/2/13: ran on the treadmill at the gym for 45 minutes
-2/5/13: swam laps freestyle for 30 minutes, did a total of 600 meters!
-2/7/13: ran on the treadmill at the gym for 30 minutes

*A note on swimming: WOW is it hard!!!  When my friend suggested we go I was thinking "yea, swimming, sure, I love the beach!"  Needless to say I was in for a big surprise when we went to swim laps.  The workout was really tough, but it felt great!  I definitely want to incorporate swimming into my workouts at least once a week, if not more.

Making myself workout during the first week was actually the easy part.  I know that I need a lot of cardio to make progress with weight loss and the excitement of the first week motivated me to get moving.  I also had some workout buddies to help encourage me to get active.  The hard part actually had more to do with food.  I have a huge problem with controlling my portion sizes, and I know there are a lot of other people out there who have the same issue.  I think in general people tend to eat more than they really need to because our idea of portion sizes are totally out of whack.  It doesn't help that I was raised under the 'you can't leave the dinner table until your plate is clean' system, so I've been programmed my whole life to eat everything that's on my plate, even if it's too much.  This week I tried to start re-training my body to be satisfied after a smaller portion, and not just when all the food is gone.  One of the tricks I used to start doing that is splitting every meal I eat in half.  Then I save the other half for a few hours later, turning one huge meal into 2 small ones.  Typically you're supposed to eat 4-5 smaller meals per day anyway, so this trick also helps me spread out my meals better.

An excellent resource that I've been using is the livestrong.com MyPlate food log.  Once you register on the site you input all your information pertaining to your weight loss goal, and it will tell you how many calories you should consume each day to achieve that goal.  Throughout the day you enter in your food and it tells you all the nutritional information, including calorie count, etc, so that you know when you've hit your limit for that day.  This system is beneficial to me for many reasons, but mainly it keeps me honest about what/how much I'm eating.  The only downfall is that when you eat out or eat things other people have cooked, it's hard to know all the nutritional information, so usually I just guesstimate.

So now here's the moment I know a lot of you have been waiting for....the numbers!  I was very nervous for my first weigh-in.  15 weeks is a long time and I think it would be hard to stay motivated to continue if I didn't see a difference in the beginning.  I also recognize that weight can fluctuate a lot, especially when you're trying to lose it, so there will be weeks when I lose weight and other weeks when I don't, but that's okay.  That being said, this week my weight loss results were, drumroll please....

2 POUNDS!!!

I've lost 2 out of my 15 pound goal and I'm very pleased with that progress, I'm hoping to keep up the momentum as the weeks continue. 

I know some of you out there are trying to follow along with me throughout this challenge, and many of you have set fitness goals for yourselves.  I want to hear from you!  How are you doing with your own personal challenges?  What parts of your plan have been especially challenging?  


Stay tuned this week for tips and tricks, and my workout song of the week!