Five Minutes For Me

Today at lunch time I was making my sandwich with whole grain bread from my favorite bakery. It’s made with whole grains, nuts, and flax seeds. There are zero trans fats and no high fructose corn syrup.  It’s high in fiber and not too high in calories.

The loaf of bread is larger than a regular loaf of bread, so the sandwich is large. I piled it with fresh sliced vegies and a couple ounces of sliced chicken breast. When I put my sandwich on my plate, my very large sandwich looked so small. 

Normally I’d pile some chips on my plate and possibly a serving of fruit to go along with. Well, when I realized how large my sandwich was, but how small it looked on the dinner plate, I knew something is all wrong.

It’s the size of my dinner plates! They are huge… no really. They are absolutely humongous!   So then I got to thinking about my coffee mugs. Oh how I love my huge mugs. But there ya go… that’s just it. They are huge. 

Okay, so you get the picture… my entire dinnerware set is super sized. 

Tonight I switched out my dinnerware for my old corelle dishes. It almost looks like I’m setting out the kiddie dishes, when they are next to our big size dinnerware. 

I use to eat on our small corelle luncheon plates and that’s what I’ll start doing again. If my plate is full, there is the chance I may eat fewer calories and yet feel full at the end of the meal.

Last fall I went through the process of creating a healthy kitchen pantry and refrigerator. 

Well, since I decided to re-evaluate my plan, I figured one good place to start is by going through my pantry and refrigerator once again. During the past holidays, I set myself up for failure on any type of weight loss diet. Our pantry and fridge were stock full of bad things… sugary cereals, boxes of hostess goodies, Chocolate chip cookies, potato chips, chocolate candy bars, alfredo sauce,  almond roca, and the list goes on… and on…

I’ve managed to toss some of it, and restock my pantry and fridge with several healthier choices. I’ve also written up a modified menu.

I have found several of the recipe websites that list the nutrition for the recipe. A couple of my favorite websites for low calorie recipes are the recipezaar.com website and sparkpeople.com with the nutritional comparison chart. 

On the recipezaar website, with  just a few clicks on different recipes, it was easy to compare the nutritional info. I can choose lighter calorie versions of my favorite recipes. Southwestern Chicken is on my menu this week. Oh this sounds sooo good!

Well, this is one step toward a real diet plan… I have a long way to go, but I feel like I’m definately on my way to a healthier me. 

Okay, so here it is the end of the day…. and it wasn’t a very good day as far as any weight loss program goes.  Breakfast was okay, I had a bowl of cereal instead of our usual Sunday morning bacon, eggs, biscuits, gravy, etc…

My dinner choice was not too terrible… salmon with steamed vegies.

Oh NO… I Can’t Believe I Ate That!

• blooming onion - shared with hubby
• 2 pomegranate lemonades
• 1/2 a loaf of  fresh baked bread with butter
• vanilla cappuccino GRANDE!
• ice cream cone
• angel food cake with creamy pistachio icing
• 24 oz cherry limeade
• doritos

All day I kept thinking  I could have made a better choice. Then I’d eat something else I knew wasn’t very healthy.

So I have a couple of choices now.

1. I can see this as the beginning of a long week, which is how I was viewing it as I logged into wordpress tonight.
2. I can see this as the end of today… and tomorrow is the beginning of a whole new day.

 I think I’ll chose option two.  It sounds like I have a brighter future ahead when I look at tomorrow as a whole new day. I’m off to bed, before I eat anything else that I have to add to that list.

A friend from my childhood came over today, because I’m going to have a partylite party, and she’s my consultant. Sounds like fun huh? Anyway, we got to talking about our weight and exercise. What can I say… having all my exercise equipment in the middle of the room makes it somewhat of a conversation piece!

She’s been on Weight Watchers along with a walking program for over a year.  WW sounds like a great program, and she is so excited about it, she actually got me excited about it! She’s about to reach her goal, and then she will be on the maintenance program. 

I’m not on any program at all, other than my five minutes for me plan. I’ve been paying close attention to what goes into my mouth, but I can assure you, I don’t plan on counting calories.  That just sounds like a bum deal if ya ask me.

I don’t want food to be my focus. That’s no fun. I was at an all day wedding on Saturday and oh the food…  It was all so tempting! And just my luck, they started serving shortly after the ceremony. In fact, I think the servers were walking around with trays of bite-size goodies before the wedding ceremony was over.  

Ohmy goodness!

I held off until the buffet was served. When I saw all that yummy food on the buffet, I thought to myself, this is it… I’m done.  But as I looked at each dish, I came up with a new name for each one, calories… calories… uh-huh… more calories and lots of fat… more fat. Oh yummy, Saturated fat. 

So that’s how I handled it this time… but my problem with it is, my focus was on the food. Not necessarily where I want my focus to be when I’m at a big family party!

I can’t go through life like this. I know it’s not all about the food, but it seems lately, it’s all about the food. That’s all I think about. Food… calories… fat.

I’m reading up on the Atkins program, now I think I’ll pick up a few Weight Watchers books too. Maybe I’ll get my focus off the food now, and get back to the five minutes for me plan.