The Diet Naked Blog

Fitday Challenge: Day One

Here's my Fitday journal.  This is our first day of Ten Day Fitday Challenge.  If you are participating, leave the link to your Fitday journal in the comments section.

Good luck!

Official Thursday Weigh-In

I weigh 170.  I think this may be a one pound loss from last week, but the past six months of this diet have been a lot of up and down one, two, three pounds.  No significant losses. 

And so, with a bunch of you by my side, I'm going to embark on a 10 day Fitday Challenge.  Here's how it will work:

1)  Get a Fitday.com account, if you don't already have one.
2)  Enter your daily intake and exercise on Fitday.com. 
3)  On the bottom of the Home page, you'll find a way to make your journal public.
4)  Leave the link to your public journal in the comments.  I'll leave a link to my journal in a blog entry each day.

That's it!  The Fitday Challenge starts TOMORROW, Friday.

I must ask that we all refrain from criticizing what other people choose to eat.  That is one thing about using Fitday that makes me a little queasy . . . the idea that others might sit in judgment over my choice to eat popcorn instead of dinner some night.  This weight-loss thing is a journey and we do not need anyone throwing stones at us as we find our way along the path.   (I'm sure I don't even need to say all that, but be nice, okay?)

And now, weigh in!  And tomorrow, prepare to show us your Fitday journal!

Oh, and one more thing.  Someone here (Sarah?) told me about this site, Dietfacts.com, which allows you to look up a food item (including restaurant items!) and then automatically add them to your Fitday.com journal.  (Click on the food item and scroll down . . . see the button that says "Fitday"?)  This is so cool that I am actually looking forward to using Fitday in conjunction with Dietfacts!

Meal Planning

MJ asks:  How far in advance do you meal plan? I have the hardest time getting motivated to create menus for the coming week. I can't even THINK about what kind of lunches to make for my two kids that will be heading back to school after Labor Day. Where do you get your meal ideas?

Answer: I am terrible at planning meals in advance!  I tend to fly by the seat of my size-12 pants, as a matter of fact.  For instance, I have absolutely no idea what I'm cooking for dinner tonight.  Oh, wait, we have to go to a birthday party at 5 p.m., and my 9-year old has football practice at about the same time, so it's quite likely that I will toss some frozen chicken breasts in the Crock-Pot with some barbecue sauce.  I'll add some baked potatoes and . . . there you go.  I just figured out dinner.  (Obviously, I won't eat the potatoes, but I always have frozen vegetables I cook for myself.) 

I rely heavily on frozen chicken breasts and use them in a variety of ways.  I put them frozen in the Crock-Pot, add a sauce of some kind . . . I like to dump salsa in and then I can use the resulting meat for taco salad, soft tacos and then, the next day, use the leftovers for soup.

I use ground turkey quite a lot, too, and use it for soups, meatloaf and burgers. 

My kids also like pasta and sauce, so I make that as an emergency meal.  Of course, that means I have to come up with something else for myself (I'm not a big fan of pasta) and so I have vegetables cooked in egg-whites or something similar.  (My husband skips dinner if he's had a big lunch and has a bowl of cereal instead.  He's not a big factor in my meal planning, honestly.)

The site I posted yesterday has a bunch of recipes.  I also adore Allrecipes.com . . . you can search for recipes in so many ways (by ingredient, for instance).  The Weight Watchers site has recipes available, even if you aren't a member.  My favorite cookbooks are by Jane Brody. 

School lunches have always been a challenge for me.  I only have one student going to school (my twins do school at home and my daughter is too young, still).  Last year, he bought hot lunch most days, but he'd really rather take his lunch.  Yet, he's picky, so I'll give him the same lunch every day, I guess:  a salami and cheese sandwich (on whole wheat), a banana, maybe some carrots with ranch dip, Triscuits and cheese . . . and a treat.  (It wouldn't be lunch without a cookie, would it?)  All the fancy lunchbox ideas in the world will not work with him, as he disdains vegetables (except broccoli, go figure).

Anyway, so I have no ideas . . . but here are a bunch of great ideas for school lunches from FamilyFun. 

Awesome website

Check out Roni's very cool website which chronicles her weight loss (70 pounds) and tummy tuck (with pictures!) and which now features recipes.  I have a feeling I could sit here all day reading it!

This is Roni's Weight Watchen Page.

Fitday Challenge

I'm thinking that I ought to challenge myself to use Fitday.com for ten days and see if I could lose some weight.  Anybody want to join me in a ten day challenge? 

If you all say no, then I will rejoice because I am too lazy to do Fitday for ten days.  Then again, I am too lazy to exercise every day for over a year and I've done that, so you just never know what you can do when you put your mind to it.

Hope you had a great weekend!  My goal for tomorrow is to update everyone's stats here.  And I may even get really crazy and delete some of the team members who have never checked in.

Official Thursday Weigh-In

Dear Internet,

I am a loser and not in a good way.  If it weren't for you, I'd pretend this week never happened and use my "get out of jail free" card . . . wait, would that work to skip a weigh-in?  Anyway, I promised to Diet Naked and so here I am, all 171 pounds of me.

I'd like to believe I'm retaining water and that the alignment of the planets has caused gravity to increase, thus causing my scale to reflect a larger number.  Otherwise, I'll just have to pick myself up, brush off the muffin crumbs and carry on.

(And now, just because I'm lucky, I'm cleaning out my twin teenager's dusty, messy room in preparation for another year of school-at-home.  They're gone, so I can do this without fighting the urge to yell things like, "HOW CAN YOU LIVE LIKE THIS?!" to them.)

Okay, time to weigh in!

Answer to recent questions

Sue asked:  I love to hear favorites that you eat often (such as the rice/ground turkey recipe I printed off from you recently)....or what you eat in restaurants....just staple meals for you....meal ideas...favorite snacks. It seems if I could get in a habit of eating mostly the same things day by day and get into the habit, eating would be easier.

Answer:  Well, as you all know, old-fashioned oatmeal with frozen blueberries is my normal breakfast.  I love this breakfast more than ever, actually.  Someone here told me about using frozen blueberries and I really enjoy that healthy addition to my morning routine.

Snacks:  I started buying almonds at Trader Joe's that are prepackaged.  I have a tendency to lose track of my portions on nuts . . . and the calories really add up, so the prepackaged almonds are perfect for me, even if the cost a little bit more.  I like South Beach or Kashi granola bars--I pick the ones lowest in sugar and buy them when they're on sale.  I am in love with cantaloupe at the moment and eat it lightly salted.  Trader Joe's also has some whole-wheat hard pretzels that are truly whole wheat.  I like Triscuits, too, and the Ak-mak crackers.  String cheese is a perfectly proportioned snack, too.

Lunch:  I try to have prepared salad greens on hand all the time.  Then it's easy to add a can of tuna (Costco brand albacore tuna is the best, I think) or salmon, turkey or chicken.  I really like Cheese Fantastico dressing (the light kind) or I use light Italian.  Just be careful to note the sugar content if you're using fat-free dressing because sometimes you exchange fat for sugar without realizing it.  Better to have a little fat than a lot of sugar!

Sometimes, I have leftovers for lunch or Triscuits with shredded cheese melted on them.  But salad is the most reliable and best lunch for me.

Dinner:  I made a vegetable soup in the Crock-Pot for tonight.  Now that the weather will be getting cooler, it's a great time to start making more soups.  You can use whatever ingredients you have for a vegetable soup--I put in onion, zucchini, red pepper, celery, carrots and some browned ground ELK, no kidding!  (Someone gave us some and this is the first time I've thawed and cooked with it--it smelled just like hamburger and I don't think the kids will know the difference.)  Oh, and I threw in two handfuls of barley, a big can of diced tomatoes and a generous splash of Worcestershire sauce. Add water and voila, soup! 

I buy frozen chicken breasts (cheapest way to buy them) and cook them in the Crock-Pot all the time.  You can vary them by using different sauces . . . teriyaki sauce and make rice to go with it (brown, of course) or salsa and have taco salad . . .  the varieties are endless. 

Night-time snacks I like are fat-free popcorn and sugar-free pudding. 

I hope that gives you some ideas.  Anybody else have a snack or meal idea to share?

(Now, I'm off to cook scrambled eggs for my picky boy who refuses the vegetable soup!)

Bad day

Listen.  I'm having a bad day.  A bad day full of homemade muffins, as a matter of fact.  This folly is the result of my overzealous banana-buying last week and so today, when I saw those brown spots on the bananas, I decided to make banana muffins.  And then, when I accidentally sprayed an extra muffin pan with cooking spray, I decided to make another batch of muffins, this time blueberry.

All was well.  And then the kids started to drive me crazy.  (I am in desperate need of a break, but circumstances in our lives have prevented that for much too long.)  The repairman came again to look at the heat pump which continued to drain water three days after his first visit to fix that problem.  The house smells like mildew from the overflowing water which seeped into the carpet. 

My 4-year old won't stop SCREAMING.  The teenagers keep saying "whatEVER."  I didn't have time to eat lunch because I was doing laundry, battling mildew, baking muffins, screaming "STOP SCREAMING!", and then the phone rang and another mother asked if my kids were going to the pool and her kids wanted my kids to come and DRAT!  I didn't want to go, I had already said I wasn't going to go, but fine, okay, I'll go.  So much for lunch.

Would you believe we got to the pool, realized we were missing a life-jacket and had to return home?  And would you believe that an indicator light came on in the van?  (Underinflated tire, I guess.) 

Well, I ate too many muffins and I can't even confess how many because I don't know.  More than three, let's just say that.  They were good.  I do know how to bake a tasty muffin.

In the early days of my diet, I never had these bad binges.  Last year, I was militant about my intake and if I binged, it would be on carrots or something reasonable.  Two years ago, this sort of thing would lead to a month-long frenzy.  I've already stopped and set the reset button.  I'm eating quinoa, cauliflower and chicken for dinner.  I'll exercise later.  All will be well.  But it was a bad day.

Oh, and as a final hoorah tonight, I was vacuuming with my brand-new vacuum (you know you're a grown-up when you are thrilled by a new vacuum) and I noticed the ceiling in the family room looked weird.  I stood on a child-sized rocking chair to touch the ceiling to see if it were wet . . . and my fingers punched a three inch hole in the wet ceiling.

This is not good.  But I know eating a muffin won't make it better.

We called our handy-man friend and he sent over his son to cut a hole in the ceiling to see what's going on.  The shower drain is dripping ("Don't use the shower," he said) and theoretically, our friend will fix it for us.

Everyone has days like these.  Muffins don't prevent or treat them.  You'd think I'd learn and maybe one day I will.  (I thought I learned that back here, but I guess I'm a slow learner!)

About fat clothes

What do you do when you outgrow your clothes?  I used to save them because you just never know.  Right?  Well, this last (and I do mean LAST) time losing weight, I rid myself of fat clothes as quickly as I could.  I tried not to feel an emotional attachment to anything, even the sparkly black dress I wore at Christmas that I got for a such a bargain price at a department store.  Too big?  Too bad!  Bye-bye, fat clothes!

All the experts say to discard your fat clothes once you fit into smaller sizes.  Does it scare you?  Eliminating fat clothes from your closet means you have no safety net, nothing to wear if your jeans get too tight.  And yet, that's kind of the point.  When I was in college, working as a nanny, a size 6 woman I worked for told me her secret for maintaining the same size through four pregnancies:  she simply never bought a bigger size. 

Clearly, her strategy worked for her, but I never adopted it as my own.  When my jeans became too tight, I bought another bigger pair . . . not conceding that I truly wore a bigger size, but just admitting that I needed something "just until I lost the weight."  Ha.  Talk about denial!  And soon, I could only wear the big sizes and the smaller jeans didn't zip at all.

I did that from a size 10 to a 12.
Then a size 12 to a 14.
Then a size 14 to a 16.
Then a size 16 to an 18.
Then, I bought a size 20, after a pregnancy and the SECOND I could zip up the size 18s again, I got rid of the size 20.  And I laid on the bed to zip up those size 18 jeans, dying from how tight they were but they WERE NOT 20!  (Even though I was, really, truthfully, if I weren't lying to myself.)

Anyway, this time around, I have no safety net.  I don't have any jeans but size 12.  I didn't save any elastic-waisted pants.  I'm not going back, no how, no way.

My secret for transitioning from one size to another is this:  thrift stores and clearance racks at discount stores (Marshall's is my favorite).  I bought jeans at thrift stores (my favorite pair of Calvin Kleins cost me $9.99) and shirts at Marshall's.  No need to break the bank or invest a lot of money in clothing that is literally only for a season.  (And what fun to discover the improved selection of clothing I find in smaller sizes.) 

This week, I challenge you to sort through your clothes.  If something's too big, pass it along to someone who can use it or donate it to a thrift store.  If something doesn't fit and is no longer in fashion (believe me, I had some crazy distressed jeans from the 80s that I hung on to way too long), get rid of it.  Just save what you love, what fits and what flatters.  Don't hang on to ugly clothes, stained clothes, clothes that you don't want to be seen wearing in public.

And I'll do the same (though I'm not quite ready to let go of those velour pajama pants from 1997 because they are SO comfortable).

*  *  *

I wrote about this a year ago, just about.  Remember?  And you all told me NO LEGGINGS, even though I have great legs which look good in leggings.  Hmph.

100 Best Packaged Foods

I woke up this morning while it was still dark and through the open bedroom window, I heard rain pouring down.  I dozed off and on, considering what jacket I could wear for my walk at 6:30 a.m., and whether I could fit my gigantic head into my husband's baseball cap to keep water from streaming down my glasses.  (I wear contacts, but not that early in the morning.)  And while musing in this half-dream state, the phone rang and my walking buddy said, "It's pouring!  Do you want to walk tonight?" and I said with great relief, "Yes, we'll work something out!" and went back to sleep where I dreamed of oversleeping.  (You know, that dream where you dream you're awake, but late and stressed out?)

While getting ready later in the morning, I heard a segment on Good Morning, America that highlighted the 100 best packaged foods to eat.  I thought you'd like to see this list, too.  (I'm always thinking about you, faithful readers!)   And if you go to the Women's Health Magazine website, you'll find lots of other information, too, including recipes, which reminds me that I haven't thought of anything to make for dinner . . . and if I want to use my Crock-Pot, I better think up something quick!