Food Demons

Food is a blessing and a curse! It tastes amazing and can fill you with lots of joy. It can also expand your waistline and make the numbers on your scale continually rise. I have come up with a few food rules that have helped me.

1. Read Labels
2. Following Serving Sizes
3. Measure
4. Write It Down
5. Stop When Satisfied

Labels are there for a reason! It will tell you the calories you are about to ingest, how much sugar there is, protein, and ingredient lists. This helped me to make better decisions. When you read the ingredients list they are put in order of highest amount to lowest. So if sugar is listed first, that means there is more sugar in that food item than anything else. Always make sure the "good for you" stuff is listed first.

Follow the serving sizes! On the food label not only does it list the nutrient information, but it gives you a suggested serving size. Now, some serving sizes may seem reasonable and others might seem ridiculous. Examples... Peanut Butter is usually listed as two tablespoons for one serving. However I only use one tablespoon for a sandwich. The serving size for ice-cream is 1/2 of a cup. Who only eats half a cup of ice-cream?! No one I have ever met. Except for my daughter who is extremely young. So I feel free to have two of the recommended servings.

A key to following serving sizes is to measure your food! I have a drawer devoted to my measuring cups and spoons. I don't have a food scale, but would love to invest in one. The only way to make sure you exactly know what is going into your body is to measure! It can be time consuming and you can look like a dork. But your eyes can deceive you. I've learned that what I think is 1/2 a cup... is not half a cup. It is more like 3/4. And when counting calories, it ends up being a lot extra!

Write it down! If you are using a food app this is where to do it. I mentioned in the last post that I use MyFitnessPal. This app makes adjusting how much you have eaten really easy! It does all of the math for you! So if you eat 3/4 of a serving, you write down 3/4 and the calories will be adjusted accordingly! It is beautiful! Writing down what you eat can also help you curb your eating throughout the day. Once I started seeing that I had eaten 5 Oreos a day... Well it helped me to cut down.

My last tip is to stop eating when you are SATISFIED. Not when your jeans feel like they don't fit, and not when you feel like you can't move. Not when you start to feel sick, and not when your plate is clean. Once you start to feel satisfied, put down the fork. You DO NOT have to clean your plate despite what you may have learned growing up. Eat until you are SATISFIED.

Watching your diet will help you get in shape faster than exercise alone. I have not stopped eating all of the junk food that I love. There is ice-cream in my freezer, there are Starbursts in my candy jar, and last week I indulged at Olive Garden. I knew that completely cutting out sweets would not help me at all. I eat them in moderation. Instead of having 5 cookies, I only eat one or two. I heard somewhere that the less you eat sweets, the less you crave them. That has held true for me! I haven't cut anything crazy from my diet. Some people will tell you to cut dairy, carbs, sugar, red meat, and so on and so forth. I can't handle crazy restrictions like gluten free, vegan, and whatever else is out there. Some people can. More power to you. But that's not for me.

I love this quote. This really expresses what I've tried to do with my eating habits. Little changes everyday. Life time changes. Changing my daily routine to fit into a healthy lifestyle that I can keep up. It's not about extreme changes that will be dropped in a few weeks. Permanent healthy lifestyle changes!

My Greatest Tool

When I was nursing for that year, my eating habits were insane. I felt like I was eating all the time! Constantly reaching for something to snack on. And not the healthiest things. I had a lot of excuses, such as my baby. She needed me and I couldn't imagine leaving her long enough to fix an actual meal. So instead of a sandwich, or yogurt, or something healthy I ate junk. Pop-tarts, granola bars, cookies, fast food etc. I felt like I needed that quick energy and something just HAD to get in me. Well after I switched my baby to milk and wasn't nursing, my eating habits didn't change. No surprise there.

Something that really helped me eat better was an app I found in the iTunes store. It's called MyFitnessPal. I am not being paid to promote this app and this is my own opinion. There are many different apps to track eating habits and exercise but this one was the best for me. The food database is huge! And it is really easy to add a food that you can't find. There is an easy to fill use form that you fill out from the label found on the food package. You can also set your own calorie intake goals, water intake, weight loss progress and more!

I found that when I was writing down everything I was eating, and how much I was astounded! I couldn't believe all the extra calories I was packing in, between my actual meals. I made sure I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But all of the extra eating I was doing around my meals was insane! Seeing all of my food logged in one place really helped curb my mindless eating. I have set my daily intake at 1,200 calories. Some days I eat more, some days I eat less. But it has been good for me to have a goal in mind when making my food choices during the day. I don't beat myself up if I go over my goal, and I don't try to stuff more in if I'm not hungry.

There is also an exercise section. You can look up lots of different exercises, put in the time you did them for and it shows you how many calories you burned. It will then subtract what you have burned from your daily intake. This is an awesome way to keep track of what you have accomplished through the day!

I love being able to keep track of my weight as well, I can record when I lose and it keeps track letting me know how much I have lost up to date. You can also measure inches.

One of my other favorite parts of this app is the My Recipes function. You can take your own recipe and add in the ingredients. Then you add how many people your recipe serves and it will tell you the calorie count in each portion! So now I know how many calories are in my cheesecake, pizza dough, and lasagna. That has been a real life saver!

Seriously. Explore this app and really make it work for you. There are lots of others like it. This one was free, but you should look around and find one that you like. This has been one of the best things I have ever done!

My Quest

I know what you're thinking, another fitness blog. I know what I'm thinking, another fitness blog. Great. Who needs that?

Well, turns out I did, do, and will. I am really tired of seeing all the ads in magazines saying take this pill, follow this diet, blah blah blah and poof! The weight supposedly disappears. That's not how it works. I'm not saying that there aren't exceptions for medical reasons, and all decisions should be between you and possibly a doctor if necessary. Ultimately it's your body.

Having said that, I went through first baby weight gain. A lot. I didn't put on an excess amount of weight during pregnancy, but after I had my baby I continued to gain as opposed to losing. At my heaviest I believe I was 190, close to 200. I nursed my baby, and then my weight settled around 175-180. My clothes didn't fit. I was sluggish and tired. I was not happy with my overall appearance. Despite my husband's assurances that I looked great, I felt that I didn't. I tried not to complain about my "extra lovin" left from pregnancy, but I was not happy.

I nursed my baby for a little over a year. I kept putting off working out and eating healthier because I felt that my focus should be on my baby. Not long after my baby turned 1, my in-laws (who are VERY fit) bought a new treadmill and gave us their old one. Extremely lucky right?! Not exactly my first thought. I'm ashamed to admit that I used it to dry some laundry for awhile. Finally I figured I should put it to use, at least once, because they kept asking how it was working and the guilt got to me.

The first night I walked one mile. I didn't push it, just walked and was relatively slow. The next day, I walked one mile again. For a week I walked one mile a night. After that first week, I thought I can really do this! For some reason I felt empowered. It could also be the drop in weight after the first week. So the next week I went up to two miles a night and tried to increase my speed.

Since then, my routine has changed. Also my eating habits have changed. Overall I feel better, happier and love how I am looking! I have had so many personal changes that it's hard to see why I didn't start this earlier! I wanted somewhere to record how I made these changes and what I went through to make my life better. Something to serve as a reminder for me, because I'm sure at some point other little ones will join this family. And when that time comes, I'm going to want to remember how I handled it. So read on for how I lost and am continuing to lose my left over lovin'.