Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Refine Tracking

A week of tracking my diet and I'm feeling good.  I made some decent decisions and remembered to write everything down that I ate.  I can already see that the weekends are going to be the hardest.  I have a difficult time pulling out my notebook and writing down what I'm eating around other people.  And on the weekends I'm pretty much always around other people.

Last Thursday, I had a rough evening.  I got through my PT session with no problems, but as I walked to the car I could tell something was wrong.  I was shaky and skittish.  I needed food.  I determined that chocolate milk would do the trick and headed out in my car.  I stopped at the first grocery store and there were no individual sized drinks.  Not quite comfortable doing so, I packed myself back into my car and headed towards home.

Thankfully there was a 7-Eleven on the drive home.  I went in and got some self-prescribed chocolate milk and downed it.  I felt so much better.  I picked up my girls and headed home for dinner.  The cycle of shakiness continued through the evening.  I'd get shaky, eat something and it would go away.  I was feeling rough and not really sure why.

Prior to PT, I'd eaten 911 calories for the day.  By the end of the day, I'd eaten 1391.  I counted and then fell asleep for the night.

This week my goal is to start tracking calories.  I joined SparkPeople again (dublythe) and determined my base calories.  Each day I should be consuming 1520 - 1870 calories.  I'm still going to keep my paper journal.  I find the searching for things to enter when I already know the numbers to be tedious and a time waste.  However, SparkPeople is good for helping me look up the value for things that I don't know.  It also can offer me more insight into other nutritional information I'm not tracking by hand.

I'm glad to have a direction.  Hopefully it is the right one.  I'd certainly like to avoid any more days like Thursday.  Of course, I am not looking forward to the day when all I really want in the world is a big unhealthy plate of nachos.  Seeing those calories is a definite deterrent!

2 comments:

  1. Yup. Front-load your calories on days with PT, chickie. You were crashing from more output than input, and not in a healthy way.

    (I agree that chocolate milk makes things better, though.)

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    1. Yup. I did better this past Tuesday. And I plan to do it again tomorrow. That is one of the nice things about working out early in the day. I don't have so much day to distract me from doing the things that I ought. Workout-wise, but also food-wise.

      And I really did love the excuse to down a chocolate milk. It was so good.

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