Daily Food Tracking: First Month Review

The Daily Food Tracker was supposed to be a one-week experiment, but a month later, it's turned into a habit.

Some changes in my thinking and actions that have come from it:
1. I find myself reviewing it in my head just before each meal, forcing myself to remember if the meal before had any fruits or vegetables, and making sure I get some in if I haven't yet.
2. I look at my daily intake as a whole balance, and I try to make choices about what food group I've had too much of or not enough of already.
3. It's brought to stark relief my pizza and my peanut butter addictions (not that either were a surprise, but to see it written down day after day is another thing entirely).
4. I force myself to 'fess up on the bad days.
5. The turn toward more homecooked meals has begun at last, and I'm starting to enjoy getting creative in the kitchen again. 

Where I want to go next with it:
1. Continue tracking on the blog. I'm glad I named this Low Fat Dressing, and I said from the beginning that this blog would be a mix of fashion, food, dieting, and anything else. For a while there, I stopped talking about dieting as I climbed back up the scale after Medifast, and I'm not really following an official "diet" right now. But I am teaching myself to eat healthier for the long haul. To find a balance between the free-for-alls when I am not dieting and the smart but too strict regimens of Weight Watchers, Medifast, South Beach, etc.
2. To start to lose weight again. Even though it's not an official diet, the goal is to get healthier, in weight and in body. My knees and back are creaking under the weight of me, and I can't let that get worse. Plus, the weight came back so unevenly on my body, and in places it didn't use to be. I am lumpy, not curvy. I want to be curvy again. :) I actually went up a couple of pounds this month -- which isn't that surprising when I look at the trackers and see some the crap and extra food I was still eating -- but over this last week it's started to go down again. That is going to continue.
3. Practice more mindful eating. I need to get back to one of my favorite parts of the old WW Core plan: eating until I am satisfied, not full. I have made great strides in cutting down my portions of the bad stuff -- I eat only 1-2 slices of pizza instead of half the pie now -- but now it's time to eat more mindfully of everything.
4. Keep cooking and prepping foods for the week, but at a reasonable level. The last few times I went on diets I tried to be too ambitious about what I was going to cook each week, and most of my grandiose ideas ended up with the raw products rotting until they went into the trash. This month's plans have been smaller in scope, more in keeping with our work schedules and exhaustion levels; lots of chicken sausages for fast grilling, different salad types to keep me interested, and plenty of frozen pizza for Hubby.
5. Try eating more locally. The influence of Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" is sinking into my grocery shopping big-time. This is the time of year in the Chicago area to find fresh local foods everywhere, and I am going to take advantage of it.


So. That's the plan! Eventually exercise is going to become a regular part of my life again, but right now it's more important to me to continue to succeed in this area.

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Daily Food Tracker: Thursday
Breakfast: whole wheat waffle with syrup and strawberries
Lunch: Panera Pick 2: half ham-swiss on rye, broccoli cheese soup
Dinner: No snacks all day, and Hubby was out. I didn't want to cook, and after a stressful day I was so tempted to order delivery or cook a whole pizza and eat it. Instead I decided to let myself graze, as a "treat" to myself. I would just eat, a bit at a time, and not cook one big meal at once. I would eat during the evening at home if and when I felt like it. I ended up eating:
-bite-size chocolate almond granola (Hubby gets a box of them a week from Target. He loves them as a snack.)
-measured out bowl of a new Fiber One cereal (it's really good!) and skim milk
-unmeasured larger bowl of the same, about an hour later (probably not a good idea given how much fiber is in it, lol)
-clementine oranges
-slice of bread with BnPB and skim milk

That's the kind of treating myself I can live with.

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To answer some questions from yesterday, hahaha, no I do not iron all my cardigans! But I do wash them in the machine and let them air dry, so sometimes they get a little misshapen or wrinkly, especially the pure cotton ones. When that happens, I will iron it before I wear it. But it's not often, trust me!

As to how many dresses I have I am probably up to 15 in my current size, mostly all summer varieties. But since I can't fit into any of my pants right now, this is all I have to wear every day. Plus, they're all $20-30 at Target/Kohls/Old Navy; I just can't resist picking another one when I find a style I like!