Food and Exercise report - 11/6/09

One of my friends told me about something she and her husband do to keep each other accountable about what they're eating. Since one spouse or the other is often traveling and since my friend sometimes skips meals, just grabs crackers (or whatever's convenient) instead of eating something healthy, etc., they started a blog where they post pictures of everything they eat for the day. Now obviously eating too little and skipping meals is not my problem, but still I thought it was an amazing idea. With her permission I am stealing the idea and trying it myself. Day 1 of this experiment I met with modest success and a big challenge as I will explain below.

Yesterday I almost forgot breakfast. This is VERY unlike me, as I usually cannot function without it. Fear not, I decided to raid my go-to stash of Fiber One bars at work (one PB and one strawberry), and had 32 oz. water to wash it down with. Also, I had my pills (will post about them some other time).

For lunch I went to the Pizza Hut buffet (PHB). I was not brave enough to take pictures, and I texted my friend to tell her so. She sent a (loving and polite) text back that said basically "Suck it up and do it anyway!". I honestly did not receive this text in time and was embarrassed to post that stuff up here but I will report to you honestly what I had. I started off with a very large salad that had lettuce, onions, too much cheese (but I do love cheese), onions, croutons, and thousand island dressing. Their tomatoes are disgusting at the PHB so I don't put them on there and they didn't have broccolli which is usually a staple for my salads as well (very high fiber). I had about 6 pieces of pizza and two little breadsticks. If you're a PHB veteran (which for your sake I hope you are not), you know the pieces of pizza are pretty small. However, I would consider 6 pieces of buffet pizza to be equivalent to about 4 pieces of "real" pizza. Too much pizza by any objective standard. But there it is. No secrets. And it wasn't closeted eating either. Lots of fun folks from the office got together and had a nice ladies' lunch so they saw me eat every delicious but unhealthy piece of that pizza.

For dinner I also ate out because I had a concert that night at the Walton Arts Center. I had a #5 (Vito) with no capicola and extra vegetables, and the skinny chips from Jimmy John's with Diet Coke.

After the concert, I went to work out. I really was in the zone!! Unfortunately, it was late so I got kicked out at closing time and only got about 28 minutes in on the elliptical. However, I was at the highest incline and using a LOT of resistance (most of the time level 14 out of a possible 20 levels) so I made my time count. According to the machine, I burned 350 calories. Not bad for a half hour!

I came home (by way of Walmart to get stuff to make for the tailgate, which I am probably going to end up skipping) and picked up some groceries. This included some fat free whipped cream. If you haven't gotten that stuff, it is amazing/delicious. I got an extra can so I could eat it. The whole thing is less than 200 calories, which for a non-fruit dessert is quite a calorie bargain.

As I got ready to do the deed, I thought "Do I really need to take a picture of this? Do snacks count?" What a BS line of thinking! Of course they count! I did take a picture, and because I knew it would be posted for the world to see I only had half a can rather than the whole thing. For me, I consider that a victory!

I can tell that posting pictures is going to be a good strategy for me for awhile. In particular, I am pretty embarrassed there are not more fruits and veggies in my diet. If I have to be accountable for that, it will encourage me to eat more. I am looking forward to documenting my diet for awhile. Stay tuned.