I'm trying to get healthy in 100 days with a combination of diet and exercise.
What I ate today:
Breakfast (9 a.m.)
Tuna on wheat bread with fat-free mayo
Lunch (12 p.m.)
Two lean pork sandwiches on wheat bread with fat-free mayo and mustard.
Snack (4:30 p.m.)
Several handfuls of baby carrots
Dinner (9 p.m.)
Can of Tuna, no bread.
Drinks
Three liters of water
One bottle of diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper
Approximate intake
1,300 calories.
Above you will see the newest feature to the 100 days quest. It is the food journal, noting everything I eat on the day in question.
We’ll get to the idea of this a little later, but first I want to take a look at the data. Two cans of tuna today, one in sandwich form. There are 150 calories in one can (60 per serving, 2.5 servings in a can). I also switched up the bread I am using, going from Sara Lee’s Country Potato (The best sandwich bread on the market in my opinion, but about 100 calories per slice) to Sara Lee’s wheat bread (still good, but only 90 calories for two slices). I had two lean pork chops left in the freezer, so I thawed them and slapped them on the Foreman for lunch. I forgot the nutritional information on the long discarded package, so a little internet research led me to estimate about 200 calories per chop. I figure that is right because I bought them on the initial shopping trip the day before I began this. I know I didn’t buy anything that was fattening. Although, I probably could have eaten only one today, but oh well.
I think overall 1,300 calories isn’t too bad. I also got a lot of protein in. I did some other calculations though and figured out that if I had replaced the two pork sandwiches with one tuna sandwich, I would have been down to 920 calories for the day. I know that there have been days like that so far, and that is almost astonishing. Honestly, there haven’t been any times during the first 13 days when I was arm-chewing hungry. That is a huge surprise considering I had to be eating at least 4,000 calories per day before this began. I still have urges to gorge myself on all things fried and melted, but the actual hunger I feel during those times is nothing more than normal. If anything, the overwhelming feeling I’ve had during this process is one of not wanting to eat. For my “dinner”, I ate a can of tuna at 9 p.m. because I had forgotten to eat earlier. Weird stuff.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
Judging from today's intake, there is a horrifying lack of fruit and veg in your diet. The recommendation in Britain is a _minimum_ of five servings a day. Perhaps you could add a glass of vegetable or fruit juice at breakfast - simple, no hassle, and with lots of vitamins and minerals?
2 - Scott
I don't know if you would maybe want to take a look at the South Beach Diet, Dan. While it is a carb counting diet, it's nowhere near as strict as Atkins so it's easier to stick with and the results are real. I dropped 15 pounds last August/September by following it and that's without any excersize to speak of. Plus, there's no limit on portion sizes. The only downside I see for you is you would have to stop eating the sandwiches, at least for a little while. I've found it's easy to follow without sacrificing stuff I enjoy eating. For breakfast I usually have a few scrambled eggs and a coulpe pieces of bacon; for lunch I'll have salami, ham, tukey or some lunch meat with cheese (no bread) and a cheese stick; and for dinner it's chicken or steak or sausage or something along those lines with a veggie. I've found that it works wonders.
So, is your plan to basically reduce calorie intake?
3 - htom
Good goal, no, excellent, great goal.
You really shouldn't expect to lose more than 0.5% or 1% of your body weight each week. (This is the one or two pounds a week that you hear so often, but if you're 300 or 400 pounds you can safely do three or four pounds.)
To maintain a weight loss, you're going to have to change your lifestyle and keep to that change, once to lose the weight, and again to keep it off. In some ways it is easier to just change to healthy exercise and good eating plan that you'll keep to for the rest of your life and let the pounds slowly slip away.
If you haven't read John Walker's The Hacker's Diet I highly recommend it (especially the computer tools.) Oblink: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/