The first 5 pounds

Goal - to get to a healthy BMI. (This is the kind way of saying I have a lot of weight to lose)

I have been eating so well. Yea me! I know I have to be extra good now, because when I'm in Ethiopia next week, I have no idea what kind of food I will be able to choose to eat. Now I'm working on what I want to eat, and next week, I'll probably have to eat whatever, but in much smaller quantities. Personally, I'd much rather eat a whole LOT of salad and vegetables to keep my fat and calorie intake down. But when traveling in Africa, I usually have to avoid eating any raw vegetables, losing a great source of healthy snack food. Happily, I can be assured that if choices are available, I have at least one colleague who likes to eat (out) as much as I do. We managed to eat our way through Cotonou, Benin quite well a few months ago...

So, in less than a week, I have lost about 5 pounds. I know that first week of serious portion control and healthy eating is a shock to the system, and the weight seems to slide away, giving all dieters and those committed to losing weight a great hope for the future! Guzzle the water, watch the portions, and write it down!

I even treated myself to a small ice cream sundae at home last night - 1/2 cup of Breyer's vanilla, 1TB Hershey's chocolate syrup, 4TB of whipped cream, and a cherry on top. I know that being too "good" is a recipe for pigging out, so it's definitely better to treat myself from time to time!!!

How's everyone else doing on the resolutions?

Resolutions Days 3 and 4

I started back at my fitness training program at the YMCA yesterday. I am really aching today. My abs are sore, my legs are stiff, and I find subtle aches and pains doing the simplest of things, such as typing on the computer! As soon as I got home from the gym, I changed into warm clothes, and the family went ice-skating. We are all at different levels of beginner, so we leave with a few aches and pains when we're done, and not much of a cardio workout. My husband took one hard fall, and either sprained or broke his wrist below his thumb. They have him in a splint today, and he'll follow up on Tuesday to see if he ends up in a cast.

I ate well yesterday and wrote everything down, until after dinner, when my delightful cousin made Bananas Foster for dessert, and I ate all of my portion, with decadent amounts of butter and brown sugar. Thing is, in terms of Weight Watchers points, I'm probably still ok since I have 35 points to eat as I wish for the week. I guess we'll see when it's January 8, and one week has gone by.

It seems Weight Watchers has a new program in place, which is supposed to be even easier to do than the points, so I may have to actually stop into a meeting to learn more about it. For now, I keep track of everything I eat on my FitDay account, and use the points to be sure I'm in a range to be losing weight.

Today has also been good. I'm feeling very dedicated to eating healthy food right now, and to writing it all down. Tomorrow, I get back to the gym for my Monday and Wednesday training, and hopefully can squeeze in a half hour at some point to begin my 12-week training program for my 5K! I have 4 doctors appointments this week, and have to squeeze them all in during my son's morning pre-school, so it doesn't leave much leisure for working out...

Resolutions - Day 2

The goals in focus today: Write down everything I eat AND get to a healthy BMI

With free babysitting available today, we're going out to dinner and a movie tonight. I've researched the calories and estimates of Weight Watchers points already for what I plan to eat, and posted it on my FitDay account. Today, I am resolved to stay within my " WW points" even if we are going out to dinner. So far today, I've done quite well.

Earlier, I took the kids to the movies and brought my own 94%-fat-free microwave popcorn and bottles of water for us to drink. This was healthier, and of course, cheaper than buying anything there.

On my FitDay account, I'm setting up ranges of healthy eating - carbohydrates, fats, proteins, etc with my goal ranges. The program will calculate the daily results automatically. But it was hard to decide what my goal ranges should be! Just how many grams of protein I should eat per day, or how much saturated fat? After a lot of hunting around on the internet, I found a good link to use, called "Healthy Diet: Do you know what to eat?" It's on the Mayo Clinic site. Thought I'd share the link, since I found it challenging to get good info on the subject today! Hopefully you will find it useful too, especially if you have any healthy eating goals for 2009.

Oh, and I know it's not significant, but it's a mental boost.... I "lost" 1.5 pounds yesterday. In one day. Nothing to get excited about, because I ate a lot of salty food New Year's Eve, and know I was retaining water the morning of New Year's Day. But still, it's nice to see positive progress on my little charts. :)

Resolutions - Day 1

After a low-key and fun New Year's Eve celebration with good friends and kids, today was the day to get the resolutions started. It didn't help much that we had a New Year's Day Open House to attend with many friends and delicious food, but I was determined to start the year honest. I'm not planning to write about my resolutions in such detail everyday, but I thought it was a good idea to start of 2009 like this. Soon I'll have a trip to Ethiopia, and will get back to blogging about Africa again.

1. Goal - I will write down everything I eat ----I actually asked the host at the party to find a scrap of paper for me, so I could surreptitiously take notes while at the party. Otherwise, I knew I could "forget" to write some things down. I drank huge glasses of seltzer water instead of wine, ate a lot of fresh veggies, and kept the more decadent food to small tablespoon-sized portions. Who in their right mind doesn't want to eat a lot of spinach-artichoke dip???? I chose the smallest crackers, thinking it would be rude to just stick in my finger (which is calorie-free) and scooped up a reasonably-sized gob of deliciousness.

2. Goal - Healthy BMI - In the end, I ate about 2000 calories today, or about 31 Weight Watchers points. (Ideally, I should aim for 23 points, with 35 extra points per week to eat as I please.) I could have done better, but at a party with good food, I normally do much worse! So I was pleased with my progress. I also took the time today to sign up for Fit Day, where my weight loss, nutrition, and fitness goals can be tracked. If you want to see how I did today, you can check out my FitDay public account here.

3. Goal - Run a 5k. I went online and found a "couch to 5K" program that I'm going to try. It seems I should be able to do it in 12 weeks. I didn't exercise at all today, but I'm getting mentally ready to start the program. And I also looked around for 5K races in April, found a local one in Reston, VA, and wrote to the coordinator to find out how to sign up. I got an out-of-office reply, but hopefully I'll hear from him next week, and I'll commit to my first run ever.

4. Goal - Save money for the family. We plan to cancel our cable. It should save us about $44/month. I'll let you know when we actually cancel it, though.

Saving Cash – Day 4 – Habits: Saving Money is like Dieting

Woo hoo! Without even making a conscious effort, my husband and I compared notes at the end of the day, and neither of us spent any money. I wonder how long it takes to make a habit… I think the two week experiment was a good way to kick-start a good habit (of not spending money) and also to be conscious when we do need to spend. Not spending any money for two weeks was a bit like the first two weeks of a new weight-loss diet. The beginning is very hard, and you have to think about every time you open the fridge. What will you eat? For me, there's a sense of loss at first, because bad habits must be faced and splurges must be curtailed. You have to be honest with yourself.

But then, there's the honeymoon stage. A high, of sorts. Every few days you see that you are losing weight. For a few days, you think, I can live without spending money. Look at the money I'm saving! This is awesome!

And then you hit a wall. There's something you must have, and whether it's saving money or losing weight, in both cases, I think what you want is FOOD. Not just any food. It's not something especially crucial to healthy living. It's probably a high-fat, high-calorie comfort-food. What will you do? Will you buy it? Will you eat it? How much willpower do you have? This is when I think it is important to have a goal in sight. Know WHY you have taken this challenge. Have some small goals, and have some big goals.

Whether you count calories, fat grams, Weight Watchers points, grams of carbohydrates or protein, the accountability involved is quite a bit like tracking your spending. Lucky for us, debit cards, credit cards, and checks can all be downloaded with great ease to software like www.Mint.com, Quicken or Money. All you have to do to see how much you spend is look at the pretty pie charts and bar graphs. However, you can live with your head in the sand if you never look at your finances… If you can keep paying all your bills, you don't feel the pain so badly. If you spend a lot of cash though, you have to track it the way you track food that enters your mouth when you're dieting. You have to write it down. I think we all know that it's easy to lose track. Three dollars here at the coffee shop, six dollars here for lunch or $19.99 for some new clothes doesn't seem like a big deal, until you add it ALL up. And then, you realize all of a sudden that you have spent $1300 on things you could have done without! Or if you are not watching what you eat, it's an extra spoonful of sugar here, pouring some random amount of oil into the pan, eating the bagel your son didn't finish at breakfast… It adds up. A lot of extra calories turn into pounds. There's no avoiding it. Or at least that's what happened to me.

So when you want to trim the fat, you have to do it consciously. Most of us won't save money by accident, and it seems that few of us will lose weight without doing so consciously. I guess I'll leave it there for today…