.....

Sad to say, this diet has officially put us in the poor house. I have been spending anywhere from $50-80 every two days on groceries. Between my husband's dumb, unpredictable work schedule, and my dumb, unpredictable sales income lately, we just cannot afford to do this anymore. Sigh. :(

We have learned a lot of great tips in the short amount of time we have been on this diet. I've discovered lots of great healthy snack foods, and we have all developed a preference for fresh fruits and veggies, as well as for whole grains. We will continue to implement these tips as often as we are able, and I will continue to provide healthier choices for snack foods. I will continue to watch my caloric intake and hopefully to ramp up my exercise as the weather continues cooling off (running outside...).

We will try to continue the pattern of eating smaller meals more often (3 meals + 2-3 snacks a day), as that seemed to really help curb my hunger, which in turn helped prevent binging at mealtimes because of excess hunger.

I will keep this blog open, and I will post as I remember, but I make no promises. :)

Day 26

The Breakfast Menu:

• 2 cantaloupe wedges
• 1 whole wheat bagel with 2 oz. low-fat cheddar cheese

Bagels with cheese used to be a favorite breakfast. Nothing quite like a shiny white processed bagel with some nice shiny fake American cheese to get my day started! This is a much healthier (and tastier!) alternative. We all have definitely come to prefer whole wheat. It's such a shame that whole wheat breads are typically so much more expensive than white. These bagels, though, are only 60 cents each at the Weis bakery, which makes them only 60 cents more per 6 than the $3.00 I pay for non-fresh ones.

The Morning Snack:

I was running errands. Again. One of those errands was the grocery store, where I had just happened to buy a bag of apples. An apple was on my snack list today, so I ate that while I was out and about.

The Lunch Menu:

• 3 thin slices of roasted turkey breast on a whole wheat tortilla with 1 T. garden vegetable light cream cheese
• 1/2 oz. whole grain Wheat Thins with 1 oz. light cream cheese
• 2 T. cold edamame
• trail mix (this was supposed to be a part of my morning snack ... it's just 11 dry-roasted almonds, 1/2 T. dark chocolate chips, and 1 T. raisins)
• appletini Crystal Light :)  Water gets boring.

The Afternoon Snack:

• 10 baby carrots with 2 T. fat free ranch dressing

What I love about all these snacks is that it gets the kids eating healthy foods too. The little 2 saw me eating carrots and asked for some for themselves. Of course I gladly obliged!

The Dinner Menu:

I forgot to take a picture....

• 4 oz. broiled BBQ pork (center loin chop)
• 1/3 cup white rice
• 4 roasted asparagus spears
• 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

I was surprised by the white rice. Everything on this website is generally whole grains or whole wheat. The white threw me for a loop, but the kids do prefer white rice to brown, so they were pleased. It's mushy and flavorless, in comparison to brown though :(

The asparagus! I wish I had gotten more than 4 spears. Who eats just 4 spears of asparagus! I wasn't thinking when I bought the small pack. These were so good! And they were just asparagus, salt, and pepper. No oil. Well, cooking spray. But no actual fatty oil. Baked at 375° for 20 minutes. Yum!

The Evening Snack:

• homemade chocolate pudding with a few raspberries on top
• a Special K raspberry cheesecake granola bar

Ok. The granola bar wasn't actually a part of today's menu, but they are really good and only 90 calories. The chocolate pudding. Oh the chocolate pudding! I am so much happier with this website than I was with the book. Did I mention the chocolate pudding?? I don't think I have ever made homemade pudding. This was fabulous. And with the berries? Yum.

I might be pressing my luck with the berries. I had a couple yesterday and a couple today. That's it. No more until next week. I am cutting myself off.

I ended the day at just a hair over 1400 calories. That's a little higher than I prefer, and I really didn't actually get hungry at any point today. That's the nice thing about having 3 meals and 3 snacks. I do feel like I am constantly eating, even though it's just small amounts. I don't really get a chance to sneak in extra snacks (well, except late at night, which could be easily solved by going to bed at a normal hour), and I honestly haven't experienced any real cravings. I thought I would miss pizza or cheeseburgers. But I truly don't. Sure, I would love to eat a piece of pizza, but I'm not drooling over it or sad that I'm not eating it. It's just not a part of this diet. I don't desperately wish that it was.

Interesting how changing one's diet can so quickly change one's frame of mind, isn't it?
 

Day 25

The Breakfast Menu:

• 2 blueberry banana bran mini-muffins
• 1 oz. light cream cheese
• 4 oz. orange juice

I had my doubts about these muffins. They called for wheat bran or oat bran. I just bought All Bran cereal. I was also nervous about the berries, but I figured these muffins are so tiny, I really only ate about 4 blueberries between the two of them. I'm going to try to reintroduce berries into my diet, but only once a week. We'll see how that goes. If I don't have any problems, I'll just leave it at that. I miss them, so I don't want to eliminate them, but I obviously don't want to be miserable just because I ate some...

The muffins were VERY good! I would never have thought to put cream cheese on them, but that was good too. A whole ounce of cream cheese was a pretty thick coating on these two little muffins though...

The First Snack:

• 2 cantaloupe wedges
• "post workout" smoothie

Because the website called this a post workout smoothie, I didn't feel right drinking it without having worked out. lol. It actually spurred me to run on the treadmill this morning. It wasn't for long, and it wasn't fast, but it was more than I've been doing.

I was VERY nervous about the smoothie. It was 1/4 cup vanilla yogurt, 1/4 cup egg substitute, 1/2 a frozen banana, and 1/2 tsp. sugar. I wasn't sure how I felt about the egg substitute. Egg substitute is pasteurized, so I assume it's safe to eat/drink raw... But I had a really hard time taking that first swig, just knowing it had raw "egg" in it. But it was surprisingly delicious! Not just good. Delicious! It wasn't much, but it was just a snack, so it kept me satisfied until lunch.

The Lunch Menu:

• 1 cup chicken salsa brown rice soup
• 1 cup cucumber/tomato/balsamic vinegar salad
• 1/2 oz whole grain Wheat Thins
• 1 oz. light cream cheese

Again with the full ounce of cream cheese. It's just overkill. I absolutely LOVE the whole grain Wheat Thins. They are easily the best Wheat Thins I have ever tasted. The cucumber salad was much better than the last cucumber salad I ate. I made 2 servings of it and will definitely eat the second half tomorrow in place of something else that I had planned. The soup was very good.

I missed my afternoon snack, because we rushed out the door for riding lessons. When we got home (just in time for dinner), I was so hungry I forgot to stop and take a picture.

The Dinner Menu:

• 3 oz. sauteed chicken
• 1/2 cup brown rice with fresh tomatoes and cilantro
• 1/4 cup steamed edamame with 1 tsp. butter spread

The brown rice was decent, but I probably won't bother making it again. There are other things I would rather put in my rice. Or maybe if the tomatoes and cilantro were cooked WITH the rice. The recipe called for cooking the rice by itself, then stirring in cold tomatoes and cilantro. So maybe I'll cook it altogether next time.

The edamame was new to me. I liked it! I get more of it tomorrow :)

The Mixed-Up Rest-of-the-Snacks:

• 1 mango, chunked, frozen, and then pureed
• 1/2 oz. raisins

I had this snack at about 8, when the kids had their bedtime snack. The mango was supposed to be the afternoon snack, and the raisins were supposed to go with the evening snack. Things were just all goofy by this point, so I just ate whatever, whenever. Mixed feelings on the mango. I've only ever had one mango before, and it was nowhere near ripe when I ate it. I've had this one for at least 2 weeks, waiting for it to ripen. When it finally did, I couldn't work it into any of my menus, so I peeled and chopped it and threw it in the freezer. When I saw raspberry sorbet on today's menu, I knew this was the perfect opportunity to have the mango instead of more berries. It was JUST pureed frozen mango. No other ingredients. It was pretty good. I liked it more by the end of the bowl than I did at the beginning of the bowl.

The other 2 pieces of snack I was supposed to have today were 10 baby carrots and a 2 oz. chunk of reduced-fat cheddar cheese. I honestly wasn't very hungry, so I skipped the carrots and ate the cheese. Now I'm at less than 1200 calories for the day, so I suppose I might have one more nibble of something before bed, but nothing over 100 calories. I would love a banana, but we're out. Groceries tomorrow!