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?