Daily Food Report #23

Forgot to take the picture of my shake again, but since it was identical to the one I had for breakfast the day before, we'll just use the picture I took of that one.

Then it was snack time.

This sad little lunch is the result of not having enough time to get everything ready.  We had some leftover hamburgers from Sunday, but I didn't have time to get all the other ingredients together.  So, no lettuce, tomato, cheese, onions, mayo or any of that.  Just a hamburger patty that I cut into pieces and dipped in the bowl of BBQ sauce.  Then there's yesterday's salad that I never finished, because I was feeling yucky, and some mixed nuts.

I probably could have gotten by without eating these, but I wanted to see if I could do it and still control myself, so I got some.

Then it was snack time, so I ate my snack.

At dinner, I had another hamburger.  This time I figured out a way to make it a little better.  I took lettuce and tomato chunks from my salad, speared them along with a chunk of hamburger on a fork, and put a little bit of mustard and mayo on them.  It tasted great.  Had all the important parts of a hamburger on it.

I also had the rest of my lunch salad and some mixed nuts with it.

I also had one last handful of M&M's before the end of the day.  It worked out pretty well.  I lost back some of that weight that I gained from the pizza.  Hopefully, I can manage to get it all off soon, and start making some forward progress again.

Daily Food Report #22

I went running yesterday morning.  I need to get going on that more heavily.  Especially since my sister and I are committed to running a marathon this year.  She's getting on my case to get going on our training.  It was only two miles, but I'll be running a five-miler this weekend.  Working back up.

For breakfast, I had a protein shake.  Protein powder, frozen strawberries, frozen blueberries, spinach, avocado, and water.  It makes a pretty tasty thing:

I had my usual snack, although my stomach was feeling icky by snacktime for some reason.

There were some donuts in the breakroom today, and this one looked particularly tasty.  Somebody had gotten a knife, and cut the majority of it off and eaten it already.  So, I ate the last quarter of it.  I guessed that it wouldn't be the day that I started with the M&M's then.

By lunchtime, my stomach was feeling awful.  I hoped that eating something might help, but I mostly just picked at it.  I ate the corned beef (which actually turned out to be more meat than I had thought it was when I packed it), and the nuts.  But I barely got into the salad before I couldn't eat any more.

I just had gas (full disclosure I guess), unfortunately, it was just hanging out in my innards, making me uncomfortable, instead of blasting out like it should.  It made me feel awful, and I never did finish my salad, eat my second snack, or the dinner that I packed.

Which is probably good, because I was going with Rish to meet Marshal Latham and do some podcasting while he was in town, and we decided to eat at a pizza place.  Their deal was to charge the same $7.99 price for everything, and let you buy as much or as little of it as you wanted.  By this point I was pretty dang hungry, having skipped all my meals, so we each ordered a small pizza, 12 inch I believe, and ate them.

There was a point that I assumed I would have some leftovers that I could save for later, but instead, I ate the whole damned thing.  Rish and Marshal did the same, so it prevented me from feeling like too much of a glutton.  I guess I should be allowed to splurge now and then, right?  My splurges tend to be on the nights I go out with my wife and the nights I go out with Rish.  Maybe, since I overdid it so fully with Rish, I can manage to scale it back when I go out with my wife on Saturday night.

I weighed myself this morning, and I was up a couple of pounds.  Hopefully, I can chip that back down quickly, and continue to lose the rest of the week.  Wish me luck.

Weigh-In Day #6 And Daily Food Report #21

Okay, I'm getting bad again.  Two days in a row I forgot to take pictures of my food.  This omelette is not the omelette that I ate for breakfast, but it's really similar, so I'm going to use the picture of this one to represent the real one I ate.

The sliced ham that I've been using for snacks ran out, so I got out a new bag from the freezer.  Only it was still way to frozen to peel a piece or two off.  So, I had to bring cheese sticks for snack instead.  We've got fruit again.  I brought strawberries.  And I went by the store last night and picked up more nuts.  So, my snack is more or less complete.

Lunch was Costco rotisserie chicken thigh, nuts, and big salad.

I had a similar snack for between lunch and dinner.

Then at dinner, I had another one of them there legs o' chicken, along with what was left of my salad and a serving of mixed nuts again.

I've done pretty well all week long.  It's been pretty hard.  A person wants a treat every once in a while.  I'm thinking of adding in a small treat each day, something really low in calories.

A week or so ago, I was really early to meet Rish, so I wandered through Target, looking at this and that while I waited.  I found a really good deal on one of my favorite things in the world, mint M&M's. So, I bought two bags, thinking I could incorporate them into my diet routine in small doses.

That was the week that I didn't lose any weight at all, though.  And I was too discouraged/determined to be perfect and lose something to incorporate them that week.  But I think it might be time.  Here's what I weighed this morning:

That's a good weight loss this week, so I'm back in business I guess.  That's 5.8 pounds down from my stagnancy of last week, and if we look back to when I first started this whole thing back on February 4th, I weighed this:

So, fifteen pounds down, exactly, in total.  And all of it in the last three weeks.  Actually more than fifteen in the last three weeks, because I dorked around doing a lot of nothing those first few weeks after I started, and three weeks ago, I was actually higher than what I started at...I think I was at 279.8 then.

But we'll stick with the overall weight loss, since everyone who started with me, started at that time too.  So, my totals, for the whole thing are, 15 lbs. lost, which is 5.69% of my body mass.  I am really excited about how it is going, and am motivated to keep it up.

So, I think I will give myself a few M&M's each day.  I figured out that a serving of them is approximately 24 M&M's.  That makes 210 calories.  So, dividing that up, it's about nine calories per M&M.  I think, if I keep it to only four M&M's each time I eat them, and only once or twice a day, it should make no difference to my progress.

My trick is to keep them in the trunk of my car.  That way, I have to go all the way out to the parking lot any time I want to have a treat.  If I limit myself to four per trip, I should do pretty well, I think.

It worked for me the last time around when I lost all this weight.  I think it will work again.  Help keep me from going berserk.

Daily Food Report #20

We were out of a lot of groceries yesterday, and I was being dumb still as well.  So, today's food is going to look a little sparse, and that's because it was.  First off, I completely forgot to eat breakfast.  I got ready, and ran out the door, and on the way to work, my stomach rumbled, and I realized why.

But we were out of everything, so I didn't even have a snack.  We'd eaten all our fruit, and hadn't gotten to the grocery store to replace it.  Same goes for the nuts.  So, my first meal of the day came at lunchtime.

I had my usual salad, and one of those Costco chicken thighs for lunch.

For snack after lunch, the only thing I had from my usual snack was three slices of ham.  So, that's what I had.

You'd think taking a picture of the stuff I eat would be an automatic thing by now, but I still space it here and there.  For dinner, I had some barbecue chicken that was leftover from our family dinner on Sunday.  I spaced the picture, and have none.

I do have a picture of the corned beef that I had though.  It was St. Patrick's Day, so my family decided to have corned beef, cabbage, and Irish soda bread for dinner.  I'm not a fan of cabbage, and I'm trying to avoid carb heavy breads, but corned beef I will never avoid.  I'll walk a mile, hell, several miles for some corned beef.

So, these are the two strips of it that I ate upon arriving home from work.  It was so good, but I controlled myself, and didn't eat any more of it.  Hopefully, the rest of the leftovers will still be there when the time comes to have them for lunch.  I'm not too optimistic about that happening though.  I'm not the only one in my family that loves corned beef.

Daily Food Report #19

One thing I've discovered when it comes to losing weight, is that you cannot skip a bunch of meals and expect to lose weight.  It doesn't work.  You'll not lose any weight, in fact, you'll probably gain weight. I think it has something to do with blood sugar levels and how your body can lose weight when it's at the right level.  Basically, you don't want to skip meals or snacks and allow your blood sugar to get too low.

I was not successful at this today.  I missed breakfast altogether, and was absolutely ravenous at lunchtime.  My wife was making hamburgers on toasted ciabatta rolls for lunch.  Normally I would have skipped the bun, to avoid the carbs, but I just couldn't do it today, because I had missed breakfast and was too hungry.  In fact, I had a hard time not eating everything in sight while I waited for the hamburgers.  I managed to satiate myself with the cheese stick until my burger was ready, but just barely.

It wasn't a healthy burger either.  I put mayo and guacamole and cheese on it, but no tomatoes, because we had run out...our last one in the fridge had gotten moldy.

I was busy assembling some Ikea shelves all afternoon long, so I managed to not eat a bunch of other garbage.

I'm excited, because now my bookshelves go all the way to the ceiling.  I've always wanted a cool study like that.  I started collecting books back when I first got married, then stopped, because I got tired of hauling them around each time we moved, and besides, I had no cool study to put them all in anyway.  Now, I've got the study, but I need to get back to collecting books, because a lot of those shelves are bare.  We plan on putting some crown molding across the top of them, to make them look built-in too.  He he, I can't wait.

Today was family dinner week.  My brothers, sisters, and parents who live in the area get together for a big group meal once a month.  This time, we were having chicken salad.  My salad was pretty darn healthy, although it was huge.  I think it couldn't have done me too wrong.

At our family get together meals, we always celebrate the birthdays of whoever was born during that month.  Strawberry shortcake was the dessert.  I asked my sisters if I could have some of the strawberries without having them put into the sugary sauce.  They obliged.  My dessert was strawberries with some whipped cream on top.  It was pretty tasty, and probably not too bad for me.

If only I'd eaten more regularly, it could have been a really good weekend day for me.  Hopefully, I at least didn't backslide into a worse weight.

I really plan on weighing less this week.  No more of this standing pat, despite a long week of deprivation.

Daily Food Report #18

Saturday is where everything tends to fall apart on me, but for some reason, I was determined to not allow that.  I think it was just the leftover snack from Friday in the fridge.  I guess, since I had the snack already prepared for me, I figured I had to stick to my normal routine or something.  I tend to be lazy at breakfast time on Saturdays, but this time I made my usual omelette.

Unfortunately, things started to go awry from there.  I made a bowl of cereal for my two-year-old, and he ate it vigorously and asked for more.  When I gave him more, however, he wanted to get down from the table instead of eating.  So, I had a whole bowl of cereal...not very full because it was for a two-year-old...but I was loathe to throw it away.  Probably because it's my favorite cereal perhaps of all time, Honey Nut Chex.  So, rather than dump it, like a dad, I ate my kid's leftover cereal.

It's like a dad's duty or something.  I don't know how many times over the years I've been called upon to finish up after my kids.

Anyway, a while later, it was time to eat my leftover snack from yesterday.  That went well.

I went on a little hike with my daughter in the afternoon, so I got some exercise in, and when we got back, I had myself some lunch.  Again, like a dad, I decided I would eat the leftover salad that my daughter hadn't finished from last week.  Along with some chicken strips and, now that I was out of nuts, some peanut butter.

Sadly, the salad had just gotten too old.  The lettuce was pretty gross, so I didn't eat much of that salad. I ate the rest of my lunch though.

I didn't have a snack between lunch and dinner, because I knew I would be going out to eat with my wife, and going out to eat always means extra calories.  We chose an Indian restaurant for dinner, and I had their chicken tikka masala with some paneer naan on the side.  I should have skipped the naan, because it only added carbs that I could have done without, but it was sooooo damn tasty that I couldn't do it.  We really enjoyed this restaurant, and will probably be back again in the future.  So good.

My wife wanted a dessert from the bakery next door to the Indian restaurant, so she bought this thing.  Not even sure what it was called, I forgot.  But it is cake that is dipped in some kind of caramel sauce with chocolate mousse on top.  I only ate a small amount of it.  My wife would give me forkfuls here and there as we drove.  It wasn't very good either, which was sad, considering that it surely did its share in killing my weight loss progress.

Date night is always hard, because it derails my forward motion in the weight loss area.  Hopefully I can still manage to lose some this week.

Daily Food Report #17

So, I had another protein shake for breakfast.  I don't know what your experience with protein shakes is, but these that I make are really good.  The strawberries and blueberries make them taste amazing.

When I got to work, I discovered that Friday, March 14th is Pi Day.  Well, I already knew that actually, because I've been to Pi Day parties in the past.  But I discovered that today was Pi Day.  That much I didn't realize.  I hadn't even sent out any cards or bought any gifts yet this year.  I'd really slacked I guess.

Anyhow, there's a guy I work with who makes the most amazing food.  The last time I did a successful diet two years ago, I'd had to deal with him bringing in five amazing cheesecakes to work to share with everyone.  This time, he was charged with bringing in a bunch of pies.  I just can't turn this guy's stuff down, so I did my best to minimize the damage, cutting the narrowest slivers of pie that I could manage.

But I still ate pie, which is obviously naughty.  A funny thing happened though.  I immediately felt sick to my stomach, almost nauseous.  I felt as if I had taken a syringe and injected sugar straight into by blood stream or something.

I don't know what that means, maybe since I've been so good recently I can't handle sweet things like I used to.  But I don't think so.  I'm guessing more of a freak occurrence, like a whole set of circumstances that created a perfect storm.  But, nevertheless, I couldn't make myself eat my snack.  So, I left it in my bag, and didn't eat again until lunch.  Which might have been good.  The calories from the pie surely equaled the calories of my usual snack.

At lunch, I had one of those Costco rotisserie chicken thighs, my big salad, and my mixed nuts.

When it was snack time again later, I was able to eat it.  I had grapes, nuts and some deli-sliced roast beef.

Then, for dinner I had chicken again, nuts, and the last of my salad that was still hanging around.  When I got home from work, I was sorely tempted to eat some other things, but I managed to avoid it.  I'm hoping that he pie didn't do me too much harm.