Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Day 7 - Good sweets

I contemplate breakfast and what Emily said about eggs. One egg is two points. Three egg whites is one point. I still have a hard time throwing away all those yolks. My dad instilled a Depression-era mentality about throwing away food, and then spent a week in bed with a gastro bug watching Live-Aid in my formative teen-age years. My husband literally didn't have enough food to eat growing up and often went hungry. He wastes nothing. So I don't like wasting food. Plus I buy expensive organic eggs. I finally give in and forgo the butter in the pan and spray the Pam, which she has also been suggesting. I put in the whole egg. It doesn't stick. I warm up a whole wheat dinner roll from Trader Joe's and make a mini sandwich. I also prepare a wonderfully rounded lunch of Greek yogurt, a high-fiber muffin and an orange. Unfortunately I leave it in the refrigerator and go to work, remembering to bring 5 other items, including my son's lunch. At lunch-time Emily gives me a 1 Point yogurt and some instant oatmeal. I measure the proper amount and eat everything. This is truely liberating! I didn't have to think about when to stop eating. I could have stopped earlier, but I want energy for those stairs.

My largest pants are finally a tiny bit more comfortable. But I have a long way to go. I must find a scale someplace. I have this comforting feeling that I am returning to sanity about eating and exercise. I may not always succeed, but I have retrained my stomach and eye to at least recognize bad choices. I search for and find a WW Points app for my iphone. Kind of an admission of having drunk the Kool-Aid.

A note on the food logs. I'm not necessarily counting all my points for the day. That's kind of a lot of work! Instead I'm trying to count points at each meal and only eat 3 meals and very small snacks. I'm kind of learning a new language where words are portion sizes. Putting those words together in sentences makes meals, and a day is a paragraph. I want to get good at writing these paragraphs without looking up words in the dictionary or referring to some book of grammar rules.

A note on sweets. I am staying away from sweets for now. WW has a lot of sugar-free, fat-free sweets that I don't want. I want to stay away from artificial and processed foods. My goal is to only eat sweets that would score a 10 on a "how fabulous is this?" scale. I know for a fact that when I eat less sugar I crave less sugar. That's a pretty well-known notion. 

Food log to Emily

Breakfast
-coffee with milk
-egg
-small roll

Lunch
-1 Point yogurt with splenda
-1/2 cup (uncooked) plain oatmeal

snack
sadly this in not until 4:30 and I'm grumpy. I'm hungry in the form of grumpiness, kind of like a Wonder Twin.
-2 slices sugary dried mango bad but only 60 cal
--1/4 cup hummus with handful of carrots

dinner 
limited options - I realize I must go shopping.
1/4 cup pre-made aloo matar (peas and potatoes) from TJ's Indian Fare
1/4 cup yellow dal (lentils and spices) from TJ's Indian Fare
1/2 cup biryani rice mixture (bad white rice) also from TJs
3/4 cup peas
I kind of forgo my rule on non-processed rules when it comes to TJ's. They have so few artificial ingredients that I count it more as take-out. Perhaps that's an error.

dessert
4 prunes yummy, sweet and energy dense. Emily wouldn't approve. 

late-night snack
1/2 cup chicken cubes

exercise
walk the stairs at work 3 times. That's 21 flights of 24 steps each. But still not enough. Only 15 min or so. Must increase exercise.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Jenny!
    Kudos to you! I admire your initiative and your honesty.
    Dan is doing WW right now and I should be, too. Why can't I motivate? Maybe you will help me!
    Jill

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  2. I'm so excited that I got a comment! Thanks for reading...at least some of it. I was motivated by having not a single item in my closet that fit me. it's kind of hard to be naked.

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