Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Click image to view food diary in a new link.  

I went home and pondered a healthy food relationship for my child and what I can do about that. My only conclusion is that I must a healthy relationship with food myself before I can teach her anything. So what's my plan? I think I'm off to a good start with my tracking on livestrong.com and with the public humiliation that I'm putting myself through posting my food diary daily. Seriously tarring and feathering myself and marching through the middle of town might be less humiliating than admitting to anyone exactly how horrendous my diet really is. But just like everything else in life this is about making choices. I can choose to remain ignorant about the damage I'm doing to my child, and ultimately to myself, with such unhealthy eating habits. Or I can choose to educate myself, hold myself accountable, make a workable plan and move forward. I'm choosing the latter. I don't want to spend her entire life on a diet and having her listen to me complain about fighting what seems like a losing battle. She's going to have problems, everyone does, and I sincerely hope that her questions about own her self-worth and self-esteem are not tied very closely to her weight. I don't want to be the primary example/source of her conflict with food and weight. Secretly I hope she has her Daddy's long legs and super-fast metabolism and that she never fights this battle.

Diet Observation: I'm actually kind of proud of my food diary today. It looks remarkably better than the previous ones. I planned my breakfast. I knew that I was going to lunch at the sushi bar today and planned accordingly. A coworker mentioned something about an omelet during lunch and BAM! my dinner plan was born. I also added an extra half hour of swimming today since I felt so amazing yesterday. I consider it a bonus that swimming burns just over 10 calories per minute. It might also appear that I didn't eat enough today because I'm so far under my allotted calories..I never felt deprived. I ate when I was hungry, drank lots of water in between, and stopped eating when I was satisfied. Plus considering I've eaten almost 3,000 calories a day for the past few days I'm thinking that baby girl and I are just fine. Now if I can just manage to get my sodium under control then I might actually be on the verge of a workable plan.

Diet trick I'm trying: Measurements..I'm trying to get into the habit of measuring my food. I think a lot of people completely underestimate the amount of food they eat..I know I do. When I set up my food diary for Sunday I pulled out my trusty digital food scale set the plate on it and proceeded to load it up with the recommended 2 oz serving. OMG! Have you ever seen a 2 oz serving of spaghetti? Its TINY. I'm very sure that it could efficiently feed a small child but I don't know an adult who could possibly feel satiated after consuming that amount of spaghetti. So I loaded my plate with the serving I wanted and it was a whole whopping 6 oz. Honestly, I was being modest with those 6 oz. All that being said, I'm huge fan of measuring food portions that I'm unsure about. These are my best weight loss tools (digital food scale, measuring spoons, measuring cups and my trusty water bottle), aside from my livestrong.com food diary.