The serious changes I've made started on January 13, just 6 short weeks ago (but man does it feel like longer, in a good way), and it has just been in the past two weeks that everything really started to click. Nutrition and exercise are habits for me now, and returning to old ways would be as challenging as it was to get to this point.
The main nutritional difference is how I choose my meals now--I think of what the ingredients can do for my body with taste coming in a distant second. I could certainly afford to splurge for one meal--a small frozen custard or a cheeseburger from my favorite diner--but I just don't want to. If the food is not going to put me closer to my goals then I'm not havin' it.
Here's one example--about a week ago I realized that I still had a lot of peppers in the fridge that needed to be eaten, so I put together a couple of things:
peppers and onions with scrambled
egg whites + 1 whole egg
Roasted the remaining peppers for
roasted pepper soup
And here it is: roasted peppers, onions, carrots,
celery, garlic and seasonings. Sooo good and
uber healthy! :-)
Because I'm so picky now, there are many days when I'll go for hours without eating because I'm so busy and on-the-go, and I refuse to eat anything from a drive-thru or convenience store. My trainer wants me to eat a minimum of 1,600 calories per day but I'm always in the 500-900 calorie range. It was fine until a week or so ago when I started feeling lightheaded, so I started making myself eat but that didn't work because I'd get sick to my stomache. Twice I wasn't even able to finish my Kind bar (a super healthy version of a granola bar), and that bothered me. On the advice of my trainer I'm trying something different--easing back into eating throughout the day. I was originally told that the bulk of the calories should come at breakfast with the lightest meal at night, but I've reversed that and so far it's working. I start with homemade fruit juice, move on to a Greek yogurt smoothie, a Kind bar for a snack, then salad or veggies with salmon or tilapia.
I've also started packing a lunch bag no matter where I go so that I always have something to eat. This really paid off yesterday, a day packed with back-to-back appointments, but I actually had over 1,400 calories. :-)
These are becoming my staples:
homemade soup, Kind bar, Greek
yogurt smoothie and homemade
fruit juice.
Finally, I've started dining out again. For weeks I didn't trust myself to make good choices so I banned myself until I could manage it. I'm happy to say that, because I choose meals based on nutritional benefit, I can even go to a buffet and make great choices.
I went to a buffet last weekend and I took the following pictures; guess which dessert is mine and which is my friend's:
Yummy!
Wow, the volume alone is crazy!
I went to another restaurant and spent a lot of time perusing the menu for a meal that would round out my nutritional needs and goals for the day, and this is the fabulous meal I had:
Grilled salmon, potatoes, spring mix salad
(dressing on the side of course)
and pineapple salsa (yuck! LOL)
Just 6 weeks into this life change has moved me through several challenges and rewards. There were several days when all I could think about was picking up some takeout and vegging out in front of the T.V., and the only thing that kept me on track was knowing that I'd have to answer to my trainer, no joke. I don't think he actually looks at my online food journal anymore, but he will use the scale to measure my progress. Thank goodness for him or I'd never be where I am now :-)
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