Posts Tagged ‘WeightWatchers’
Business Trip Day 2
Breakfast: 4
English muffin
Peanut butter (less than 1 TBSP)
Snack: 3
Go Lean Bar
Lunch: 7
California Tortilla, Veggie Burrito Bowl with Spinach, no cheese, no sour cream
Snack: 2
Cheerios
Dinner: 16
Unagi maki (8 pieces)
Avocado maki (6 pieces)
Spicy scallop (8 pieces)
2 nigiri (one salmon, one tuna)
Total: 32 (23 daily points, 4 activity points, 5 weekly points)
Again, not too bad for being on a business trip. The snacking cost me those five points that I could have used for dinner, but I’d rather have a Go Lean bar and a couple of handfuls of cheerios than grab a cookie at the conference. I found the nutritional information for California Tortilla on their Web site, and I love this mid-Atlantic Chipotle-esque chain. For dinner, I stuck with sushi, mostly because I like the volume and that it takes a long time to actually eat it all!
Tomorrow is my final day in Baltimore. I have a flight home in the evening. Hopefully I can get through one more day so I have a few extra weekly points to have some drinks on Saturday.
Business Trip Day 1
And… we’re back. Here’s how the day’s eating panned out:Breakfast: 3 pts
Go Lean bar
Lunch: 9 pts
Great American Bagel, whole wheat bagel with light chive cream cheese
Dinner: 17 pts
Spicy Tuna Roll (8)
Rainbow Roll (8)
Unagi Maki (8)
Snack: 1 pt
Hard candy, 1 piece
Activity: 4 pts
28 min jog on treadmill
20 min strength training, free weights
Daily Total Consumed: 30 pts (23 daily pts, 4 activity pts, 3 weekly pts)
Overall, not perfect, but not terrible.
Lunch at O’Hare airport wasn’t the best choice, but before I went to the Great American Bagel, I found their nutrition information online at Calorie King (oddly, the Great American Bagel Web site does not post this information). Despite the fact the bagel was pretty hefty in points, I’d rather know all the facts then just randomly choose something from an airport kiosk and guess at what I’m actually eating.
Sushi is a great dinner option for me when I’m on the road. It feels like I’m splurging because I can eat it in mass quantities. And, bonus, it’s one of my favorite foods. I try my best to stick with rolls that are pretty standard. Special rolls tend to vary restaurant to restaurant making them harder to track.
Tomorrow will bring new challenges; first and foremost, avoiding the free breakfast available downstairs. However, I may scope it out to see if fresh fruit is available — good to steal for snacks. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s exciting report!
Old School
Yes, so I’ve neglected Reading Cookbooks for days… no weeks… fine, a month… but, I’ve done some thinking about the “creative direction” of this blog. First of all, I bagged the whole vegan thing, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I couldn’t experiment and talk about it without certain people (specifically my mom) making a huge deal about what they were going to feed me come the holidays. Seriously. Don’t ask.
So that was fun while it lasted.
But now it’s back to the reality of WeightWatchers, which I seem unable to follow for more than a week. I have decided to challenge myself to update this blog with my daily eating habits, new meal ideas, product finds, recipes, and my progress (numbers!) as much as possible, in the hopes that it will spur me to be a bit more motivated. We’ll see.
We begin this journey today with a big weight loss obstacle… the business trip.
I’m sitting in O’Hare Airport faced with three days of eating in a strange city, in a hotel room, in a convention center — a recipe for disaster.
So let’s get started, shall we?
The back story: I’m going to Baltimore for a marketing convention. This makes a few things a lot easier. First, I won’t know anyone, which means, as long as I keep to myself and don’t do any of that silly networking, I can easily bypass 1) happy hours and 2) group dinners. This makes eating on the WeightWatchers plan a million times easier — no appetizers, no alcohol, and no desserts. From there, it’s planning, planning, and more planning. Here are the business trip strategies I will try to live my next three days by:
- Workout - WeightWatchers’ point system has a simple rule: If you exercise, you get more points. Meaning… you can eat more. In reality you are supposed to limit yourself to four activity points a day. Running is the simplest way to earn these points, and lord knows I’ll need them on a business trip. Just 28 minutes jogging on the treadmill each day will do the trick.
- Research, research, research - Since I’m eating alone, I’ve already mapped out the restaurants within a few blocks of my hotel. Two words that will make dinner a snap: Takeout sushi!
- Breakfast - I brought mine with me. A couple of low point Go Lean bars will help me sidestep massive morning meals, and help me start my day off without blowing it before noon.
- Gum - Simple, I know. This is an old school strategy that used help curb cravings for sweets. The minute I want ice cream delivered to my hotel room, I know it’s time for a piece of gum.
For the record, I am allotted 23 points a day (27 if I manage to get a short run in). I’ll check in later today a day one report.
Controlled Freak
Sometimes I believe that if I could just control my environment, I could control my eating. For me, making healthy choices Monday morning through Friday afternoon is pretty easy. Sure, there are midday moments when I’d trade my firstborn for a cookie, but the cravings often pass quickly with the help of a piece of gum or some whole grain crackers. The truth is, if I grocery shop, stock up on healthy foods, and pack my lunch every day, I’m pretty good to go for the work week.
Enter Friday afternoon and life’s little variables.
No one wants to give up having a social life — friends, a boyfriend or girlfriend, events, restaurants, bars — for an all healthy, all the time lifestyle, but some days I think if I could just skip… well… everything fun… I’d lose weight quickly and without much effort.
So, that’s one issue.
Here’s another one: I don’t want to be the whiny friend-on-a-diet who makes requests of others — be it specific restaurants, or no dessert, or whatever. No one else should be “punished” because I think I need to lose a few pounds.
This is particularly a problem if you are dealing with people who love and accept you for you are, at any weight. Plain and simple, they just don’t get it. Those of us who are truly only ten or so pounds overweight, or ten or so pounds away from being comfortable with our bodies, probably have it the hardest. Sure, we may not be “fat” or “obese,” but our goals are our goals and sometimes I think I sabotage myself just because I don’t want to make “big deal” out of my weight to those who may say they support us, but don’t actually know how to support us.
It took me a long time to come out to my boyfriend that I am a WeightWatcher. I knew he wouldn’t be judgmental, but I think part of me didn’t want to bring it to his attention that I was unhappy with my body. Maybe I thought that if he knew, he’d suddenly realize I was overweight, and he’d be unhappy with my body. Considering that I’m not dating a complete ass, this was not the case. I broke “the news,” and he responded with a nod and, “OK.”
He tries his best to be supportive, but the situation remains the same: he doesn’t get it because he’s never been where I’ve been. Sure, I think there’s been times in his life when he hasn’t been particularly happy with his weight, but this is a guy who sneezes and gains muscle mass; this is a guy who, as long as he’s training for a marathon or a triathlon, can eat his body weight in meat and cheese and bread and sweets, and not gain an ounce.
But that’s just it. I can’t do that. Some people start working out and the weight — whether they were trying to lose it or not — just melts off of them. He’s one of those people. I’m not sure he had any weight loss goals when he decided to train for his first marathon six years ago, but — like magic — 30 pounds gone.
Sadly, when I started running and training for distance events, I initially gained weight, and no, my clothes didn’t fit that differently. But, for me, that’s reality. I cannot workout like a maniac, train for endurance events, and eat whatever I want. I just can’t. It sucks. Let me tell you.
I am reading Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt, which has nothing to do with weight loss, but this passage made me laugh out loud:
Gradually, I forgot what I knew and lost the confidence to try new recipes, nor did I ever learn to use any of the numerous appliances he collected: the espresso machine with cappuccino attachment, the Cuisinart mini-prep, or the deep-fat fryer he bought the day after I said I was going on a diet.
Now, the ex-boyfriend she’s referring to in this passage is probably a bit of an ass in real life, but it made me think about a day not long ago, when I was feeling particularly unhappy with body and my ability to motivate myself to lose weight. I spent a decent portion of the day making demeaning comments about myself and my body to my boyfriend, who decided at dinner, to order a piece of cake. I don’t think he in any way wanted to sabotage my efforts, but he wanted cake and frankly, he can eat cake without repercussions. I, however, cannot. It’s not his job to monitor what I eat, and I realize that, but it just makes it… harder… my weaknesses are exploited in those moments. And, it’s not always easy to rely on shear willpower and determination.
Tonight, I made plans to eat at a tapas restaurant. I’m preparing myself because going in with a game plan is really my only defense. It must be an amazing feeling to not have to plan to “be on the defensive” simply because you are eating out at a restaurant. And, I’ll be honest — this “defense” often fails. Regardless, I’m scouring the Internet, reading the restaurant’s menu, searching for nutritional content, trying to figure out what the best choices are, and kind of kicking myself for feeling as though it’s not my place to burden other people with my weight loss issues.
And, of course, I do love me some tapas.
Once More with Feeling
At what point do you consider a recipe officially part of your meal repertoire? I have decided – today – that I have to make the recipe three times, in a reasonable amount of time, like say a month or so, in order to consider it an old stand-by. The first time I made Chickpea Noodle Soup from Veganomicon, I raved about it on A View from the Park. I’m not sure anyone was listening, except perhaps, my sister, who now also makes this soup on a nearly weekly basis.
Seriously people, would I keep making the soup if it wasn’t fantastic?
Check out the original recipe.
This soup has so much going for it – beans, buckwheat soba noodles, veggies, the option to add some greens. It’s a no-brainer, health-wise, but for the sake of too many snacks pre-run tonight, I decided to WeightWatcher-ify the recipe tonight. Look at that, I made a new word.
Here’s what I did:
2 tablespoons olive oil –> I reduced this to 2 tsp, and to compensate, I used a few splashes of vegetable broth as needed to sauté the vegetables.
6 cups water or vegetable stock –> I actually up the amount of liquid in this recipe to approximately 8 cups, sometimes I use all vegetable broth (store bought), but last night I used half water, half broth. The effect was a somewhat lighter soup.
6 ounces soba noodles –> Soba noodles expand a lot once cooked. Six ounces isn’t necessarily too much, but I reduced this to four ounces and still felt like I had noodle-palooza going on in my soup.
Finally, I added a handful or two of spinach at the end of the cooking process (at the same time as the miso).
Based on six servings, the WW points value of this soup is 3. That’s approximately one and a half cups of soup per serving. Keep in mind, the original WW points value of this soup is only 5, still very low, so go on with your bad self and make yourself some soup. Either way works!
Adventures in Vegan
On and off since the New Year, I’ve been experimenting with a vegan diet. While I’ve given up meat (poultry, beef, and pork) entirely, I found myself shifting seamlessly from vegan to vegetarian to flexitarian depending on the situation. For the most part, I have been keeping a vegan kitchen, though a pint of the B&J finds it way into my freezer from time to time (who am I kidding… like it ever goes into the freezer… it goes directly into my face). I eat vegetarian out because I don’t really want to dissect menus and question waiters. And, I have continued to eat fish — but only for sushi or on the rare occasion I find myself at a steakhouse where the restaurant’s vocabulary excludes the word “options.”
But, after a week-long business trip where I primarily spent my time shoving every piece of food I could find into my mouth — sans the meat, obvi — I have decided to challenge myself to eat vegan for the entire month of April. Combined with WeightWatchers, I’m hoping to drop approximately 8 lbs before the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati.
[Road trip!]
Does that sound like a lot? Eight pounds in one month? Maybe it is. But if I hadn’t gone nuts on the cookies, rolls, ranch dressing, croutons, cheese, and God knows what else during my trip, I would be talking about wanting to lose 5 pounds. Not eight.
So eight it is.
I’ve found that the hardest part about eating vegan is reading the labels of every packaged food you buy. So many products include some form of dairy or animal products — buttermilk, eggs, cream, whey, whatever — slyly tucked away in the middle of a long ingredient list, between high fructose corn syrup and xanthan gum. You can’t just pick a product off the shelf and assume it’s kosher — so to speak. You have to go all detective on that product’s ass and investigate. Fo’ real.
Luckily, as I was wasting time on the Internet yesterday, I found this — Trader Joe’s Web site offers a list of the vegan products available in its store. It also provides lists of products for other types of restrictive diets: low sodium, fat free, heart healthy, etc. If you’re not interested in the vegan products, go here and pick your poison.
So, Trader Joe’s saves the day, per usual. If you don’t heart Trader Joe’s, it’s probably only because you don’t have one in your state, because if you did, you would pilgrimage there even if it was 100 miles away. Life must be unimaginably hard for the Trader Joe’s-less among us.
Dissecting My Decisions
I left a rambling voice message for my workout partner Meg yesterday afternoon. It was something along the lines of, “You know I think I’m going to skip out on the gym today. I’m just exhausted. And my throat is a bit scratchy. I don’t know… maybe it’s allergies. This usually happens to me once a season, but then I’ll take one Claritin, and I’ll be fine for the rest of spring.”
In reality, I wasn’t feeling great. I was completely rundown after a week long business trip, and I had every right to bypass the gym and head straight for bed last night. But, I knew the hidden subtext of the message I left.
I was looking for an out. Not just a “get out of gym free” pass from Meg, but an opportunity to convince myself that it was OK to say, “Not today, healthy habits; maybe tomorrow.”
As I pressed send on my phone to leave that long, rambling message for Meg, I was mentally mapping the quickest route from the train station to my grocer’s freezer case packed with pints of Ben & Jerry’s. I knew exactly what I was doing.
Has it really come to this? In my world, are there really only two options: workout and have a healthy meal or don’t workout and eat an entire pint of Chubby Hubby for dinner?
I walked to my apartment convincing myself to call Meg back. I knew that if I went to the gym, I’d go to Whole Foods afterwards, and buy the ingredients necessary to make a healthy dinner. Do not to stop at the grocery store before you get home, I warned myself, because if you do, it’s all over…
Moderation is not a word often present in my vocabulary… or my eating habits.
It’s this kind of behavior that has lead to me to define entire chunks of my life in terms of fat or skinny. And I’m smart enough (now) to know that if I don’t stop swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other, this sad fact is never going to change.
In the end, I went to the gym. Meg and I walked uphill on the treadmill for 40 minutes, a compromise since I wasn’t physically up for the full circuit workout we had planned. We went to Whole Foods, I bought carrots and spinach and other similarly healthy odds and ends, and I made soup for dinner.
One day. The battle won, but still… there’s a war to fight.
For some reason I never had the courage to ‘fess up on A View about my weight loss goals. I talked around it a bit, but I had issues with “going there.” But since this blog is a bit more focused, it’s seems as though I ought to start fresh.
I want to lose some weight. There. I said it. I’d be happy with 10 pounds. Delighted with 20. Ecstatic with 25.
And I’m going to give WeightWatchers a shot. Scratch that. Another shot.
