Calorie Counting – Week 2

Another birthday has come and gone, and I don’t feel too much different for being another year older. 😉 Besides the race that I wrote about in my last post, I had a good rest of the day, too. As far as eating goes, I actually didn’t go crazy like I usually do on my birthday, and of course, I earned 600 extra calories from the 10K I ran that morning. Then, as soon as the race was over, we had to head right home to Jamie’s football game, and I spent two hours running back-and-forth along the sidelines, taking pictures. I definitely earned some calories there! (Though I did not actually track them.)

So, between that exercise and the race in the morning, I had a lot of calories to work with.  I definitely made good use of them, with one of my favorite meals:  Lemon Dijon Chicken Skewers. These have actually overtaken Honey Lime Chicken Skewers as my favorite meal.  (What can I say, I like skewered meat!)  After dinner, I obviously had to have some dessert (for my birthday!), but I took the easy route, and instead of making a fancy birthday cake or something like that, I just whipped up a batch of my favorite boxed-mix brownies, a la mode of course!

And yes, all my boys sang me happy birthday.  🙂

When I woke up Monday morning, I didn’t run, since I’d just raced the day before. I could’ve waited until Tuesday to weigh in, but why?  :p

That’s up .8 pounds since last week.  That might be depressing if it weren’t for the fact that it was the morning after my birthday. 😉 To only gain 8/10 of a pound after all that yummy food wasn’t too bad.

As far as the calorie counting experiment goes…

You guys.

I’m totally getting sucked into this. I swear, it’s just so easy. I don’t necessarily mean easy to lose weight, because I’m not far enough along in my experiment to really make an accurate determination on that front. But truly, the tracking…it’s so much simpler!! You can do it in your head! No more pulling out my phone and trying to calculate points in the grocery store.  Sometimes I would stand there with three or four different items, trying to do a comparison, and to enter all those values in the Weight Watchers points calculator was, well, honestly…a real pain in the ass!

On the other hand, nearly everything I buy has calories listed on it, and it’s so easy to just look at the calories and figure out if it fits within my allotted range.  It’s almost seductive, it’s so easy. 😉

Besides the ease-of-use, I’m also feeling really good these days. My pants are fitting better, and I haven’t been feeling that “bloated” feeling in my belly that I had pretty much all summer long. I’ve even managed to go up a notch in my belt!  Or is it down a notch? I don’t know! Whatever it is, it feels pretty good. 🙂

So, all in all, I think that calorie counting has definitely had a positive impact on my eating. If nothing else, it’s helped me come to the realization that I was eating a ton of sodium and sugar. Here are last week’s charts:

Pay no attention to the October 4th data. 😉  But overall, you can see once again that while I am perfectly able to keep under my calorie goal, the sugar consumption is just out of control. :/ This week, I’m really making a conscious effort to try to curb it, but it is so hard. Dear God, I love sugar!!

Here’s another example of why I’m liking the calorie counting more and more: Wednesday night, JJ had a hockey game way out in Waterford Township, which is about an hour and ten minutes from my house. (On a Wednesday night? Really?) Because we were in the car for close to three hours by the time it was all done, there was no choice but to have fast food. JJ wanted Jimmy John’s (maybe because they like to refer to themselves as “JJ’s”? 😉 ), so that’s where we went.

Under the Weight Watchers plan, I would’ve been forced into a lettuce wrap, because of course, all the bread adds a lot of points. But with the calorie counting, it was easy to look up calories and figure out whether or not they fit into my daily range. I tried to be smart, and to watch sodium and sugar is well, and in the end I ended up getting the BLT sub. And it was good! I had a lot of calories left over, thanks to a 3-mile run that morning, but instead of having ice cream when I got home, I had some leftover pork. See? I really am trying to make better choices!

Once again, I’m low on pictures for this post, but I did manage to sneak away from the hockey rink before the game started on Wednesday and grab a nice shot of the sun setting over Pontiac Lake.

It was tight, and I almost didn’t make the start of the game, but sometimes you just have to take a moment to appreciate the beauty of the world around you. 🙂

Thanks for reading!!