Count me in

I want to say thanks to Keryn for giving me food for thought, as it were. I told her offline that I'd never go back to counting calories because I can't bear to live my life that way ever again. After years of concerted effort to change my eating habits I don't see the point. I've done everything you can think of - Jenny Craig, Richard Simmons, Susan Powter - and none of them did a damn thing for me because they all focus on stuff like portion control and making healthy choices, things that were never a real problem for me. Because of all the wasted money and effort and hating them in general, and because I've always connected the concept of tracking my eating with those programs, I never wanted to count calories again.

I'm here to say I'm gonna eat those words. I thought about it long and hard, and I realized that this plateau wasn't going to end if I didn't change something. So as of yesterday, I started writing everything down and counting all the calories.

As a test yesterday, I ate whatever I felt like, when I felt like it, without overtly making every meal a healthy choice. Even treated myself to a little piece of Dove dark chocolate at 9:00 last night. I was quite curious where I was at, calorie and portion wise, on an average, casual day of eating.

I'm thrilled to report that I was right on the money. 2200 calories for the day (at my weight, what's recommended, but I'm going to talk to a nutritionist about limiting to 2000 to see what happens), less the 300 I burned at the gym. Even better, my portions were just about perfect. For instance, for lunch I had half a sandwich and a few chips. I got out the ol' diet scale to measure the chips I'd normally have allowed myself (a perfect 1 oz serving size!), and the cheese I put on my sandwich (less than an ounce). And no, I don't usually eat chips. I actually had them instead of an apple or pickle just to see how badly they charted.

It's a bit of a hassle to keep up but I think it will help me figure some things out. Worst case, I find out that I'm doing ok with food and just need to kick up the exercise a notch, which has been my theory all along. I'm hoping it will help me understand how my nutrition correlates to the weeks I gain/lose so I can make some progress.