Back to Basics: Tracking

Hello, cats and kittens! Another Monday, which means the usual "back to work" blahs. However, I have my awesome cardio kickboxing class tonight! Before that though, here's how my last week on Back to Basics went.

Brooke's challenge for us this week was tracking. This was my week to rock it for sure because my main goal for the month is tracking everything. Going into the week, I was perfect for the month. I had tracked every meal, snack, sip of green tea at work, and workout. As a result, I was consistently under my 1610 calorie target every day, and had lost two pounds the first week of the challenge!

This week had four challenges:

1) Track the good, bad, and the ugly.
2) Set a goal to track more than you are at the moment.
3) Find a new way to track if the current way isn't working.
4) Track those bites, licks, and tastes! They add up!

I'm not on a set program (i.e. Weight Watchers), so I use an app on my iPod/phone called MyFitnessPal. It saves foods you eat frequently, lets you save meals, and even has a nifty barcode scanner to enter products. It also lets you adjust your numbers based on your goals (lose one pound, gain a half pound, maintain, etc). It's easy to use, and best of all, it's free! It's the app I've used the longest in my four year journey, and has worked the best, so I'm sticking with it.

This week was mostly great in terms of both my eating and workouts. I had soreness on Tuesday night, so I skipped my full spin class, and kept it to the half and core. I put together a solid hour in the gym versus two of crap. Don't worry, the rest of the week made up for it.

I cut out sweets during the week as part of this challenge, and felt awesome with that all week. I found that smaller portions of my favs (fro-yo and Italian ice) actually satisfied me MORE than larger ones. I think that this was what I needed for a long time. I was taking "moderation" to mean "once a day." No bueno.

However, one thing I did notice was that I tend to eat quite a bit of food at work. I usually go for half salads (most of which are under 300 calories, less than 500 if you include the bread). However, I eat a lot of cream based soup. Granted, it's all I eat for a meal, and it satisfies me, but I could do better. Hey, at least I'm not eating 800+ calorie sandwiches all the time, right? ;-)

For those of you who are wondering, I did splurge a little. I ate pizza on Saturday, because I was out doing laundry and the best pizza place in town was right next door. I capped my serving at two slices. I also ate fro-yo the same night, and even that was small. Craving satisfied, tracked, and moved on.

I weighed in on Saturday, and saw another pound gone! Two weeks of tracking and being part of the Back to Basics challenge led me to a three pound loss! Only two pounds to goal! So close!

This week's challenge is "Good Health Guidelines." I'm feeling strong going into week three!!