Woo Hoo!

by DMC

Well, I avoided going on the scale at the end of my week off because I made the mistake of stepping on it once during the hiatus, and it proclaimed that I had gained about 7 pounds! It should be nearly impossible to gain that much weight in only three or four days, which is what I told myself.

Well, this morning, after Day One of our new calorie-restriction program, I stepped on the scale and it was back down--way down to only 2.5 pounds higher than where I left off the last day of the food strike. So, obviously, I hadn't gained terrible amounts of weight during my week-long hiatus (and it was a bloaty time of month, which is what I'm pretty sure is responsible for the insane and temporary scale gain--TMI?).

This morning, my breakfast consisted of 1.5 ounces of deli cut, low sodium turkey breast with 2 slices of light bread, a few slices of garden tomatoes, and three or four squirts of the honey mustard salad spritzer--all for about 185 calories.

The good thing about having a target of 600 calories per day is that I don't have to be terribly concerned about being 100% accurate on my calorie count. Sure, this morning I weighed my turkey breast (on a postage scale!), just to get an idea of portion sizes, but when I go to my online calorie database, I don't have to sweat over finding the exact turkey breast brand. I just go with something general and look at the sodium level to give me an idea (i.e, carved off the turkey or pre-packaged, high sodium lunch meat). I do the same thing with the bread. All light bread has about the same number of calories (roughly 45-50 per slice). I just pick something that's similar (light, whole wheat bread).

If I'm off by 15% on everything, I've only missed 90 calories. That would bring my daily calories up to almost 700, which is still a highly calorie-restricted diet. This method gives me plenty of wiggle room to eyeball and estimate (with good faith) my portion sizes and let's me find suitable foods on the online calorie database without too much effort. The only thing I've so far had to manually enter was the Trader Joe's pasta from yesterday. It was an alternative pasta and not something in the calorie database. Even then, I didn't enter all the nutritional information--just the calories per cup.

If we kept our target higher--to something like 900 or 1000 calories--we'd have to be very conscientious about measuring our food and calories. That's too much work!