Living in the Present

Breakfast today was something new and I really enjoyed it :-)  I decided to give the Natures Path Pomegran Plus with Oatbran waffles a try.  I slathered them with some PB2 and a sliced up half of a banana and a few sprinkles of mini chocolate chips.  It tasted just like any regular waffle would taste and the staying power wasn’t all that bad, but not as good as oatmeal ;-).  That with my coffee with scotsburn blend cream was about 329  calories:

       

I thoroughly enjoyed my morning Snack because it was a bowl full of fresh berries.  I swear I’m keeping the berry industry going this winter all by myself *sigh*.  This was about 76 calories:

Lunch was the same as yesterday because I wanted to use up the other half of the can of Pacific Salmon Pate.  I spread it on a mini naan and topped it with some sliced cucumber, red onion and capers for about 290 calories:

The sun was shining today and it made me feel better right off the bat.  I decided to take a walk down the street at after that and sat at the coffee shop and enjoyed an Americano with a little bit of cream and a tsp of organic sugar.  This coffee shop is a fair trade coffee shop, so it makes me feel all “do-gooder”ish to go there :-D.  That was about 45 calories and later on in the afternoon I had a deep chocolate vitatop with 1 tbsp of PB2 on top for a heavenly 127 calories:

As soon as I got home from work I strapped up Lucy and she and I went for a 30 minute walk.  It was a mediocre walk and I didn’t get my heart rate up where I would have wanted had it been a longer walk, so I burned only about 85 calories, so said my HRM.  Although, I’m not sure it was reading properly at first because it kept saying “O” for my heart rate during the first 10 minutes quite a bit! Regardless, I know it wasn’t a crazy calorie burn or anything, I just wanted to get out and enjoy what was left of the nice day and get Lucy outside for a walk before supper and yoga.

Since I was a little pressed for time, I decided to thaw out another smaller portion of the Creamy Greens & Pepper Rotini combo I made a while back that I had frozen with the leftover of the Spinach & Beet Salad from last night which I sprinkled with a bit of feta.  Those two things combined were about 421 calories:

 

Then I munched a little on a few of those gluten free ginger snap cookies for another 79 calories  AND a Junior Yo-Granola for 50 calories and ran off to yoga.  This beginner class, as I’ve said is not a real calorie burner class, but I’d guess I burned about 75 calories if I were to guess.  So that paid for the ginger snaps pretty much! :-D  I’m tellin yas, at the rate I’ve been gobbling up bites and snacks lately, I’m REALLY GLAD I have these little low calorie alternatives and that I don’t have the high calorie naughty versions around because I’d be eating them in a second!  This is why it is so important for me to have my environment set up to stay on plan!

When I got home from yoga I ended up finishing off the rest of the Fox Hill Vanilla Yogurt that I had left which I have been having spoonfuls of here and there since Saturday!  The stuff is good!  there was about 90 calories left in the container. 

So that wracked my total up for the day to be about 1500 and my daily goal (having earned 160  from exercise was 1360 which put me over by 140.

The thing I really like about MyFitnessPal is that at the end of every day after you finish logging your food and exercise, there is a button you can click to “complete” your day and when you click it, it analyses how well you did for that day and based on today’s info, it says, “If every day were like today...   You'd weigh 167.1 lbs in 5 weeks”  So on the one hand you feel like you’re “finalizing your entries” so you don’t want to eat any more unplanned food, and you get an instant picture of how your day measures up to your overall longer term progress!  And ya know what?  I like that.  I was just thinking to myself that I feel like my problem these days really is getting my heart into the exercise department and that I don’t really feel like I can comfortably reduce my calories any more (aside from my recent indiscretions of course), so based on today, I could totally live with losing at this slower rate.  It’s especially nice to see that slower rate progress illustrated because it is something that is so slow, it’s hard to really appreciate the progress that you really are making when you’re not “perfect” ya know?

I want to be clear though that really right now I think that exercise is almost more important to my overall success right now because I know that I have work to do in the metabolism department with my body and the only way to do that is to step up the exercise on a more consistent and permanent basis.   Up to this point I’ve really gotten away with minimal exercise and was still successful at losing weight.  Originally this was due to circumstances beyond my control, but now I’m perfectly capable of doing it, of stepping it up and doing it.  Something is holding me back on the mental side of it and I don’t quite know what it is yet.  I will get there though, I’ll figure it out and I’ll get there!

Jillian said something that resonated with me today on one of her podcasts.  She said that many of us feel like we’re “battling” with weight loss and that we have “a story” about our obesity or about our being overweight and that it is really just our ego.  Feeling like we’re in “battle” with this journey is only a waste of energy and it’s likely only hindering progress making it harder.  I think there is so much truth to that, don’t you?  I mean we ALL have “that story” because most of us are here and reading this because we have/had a weight problem or have a desire to lose weight.  How many of us could have a long-winded story to tell about our experiences being “fat” or overweight?  Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in it that we become unable to separate from it and instead of living in the present, and living in what is in front of us today to make choices, we continue to think about the past as it is associated with being overweight.

For the most part I do feel like I live every day in the present.  I have experienced some major life events up to this point in my life that have shaped me as a person (as many of us have), but I have always chosen to draw positive things from them and I have always respected that those experiences shaped me as a person, as cliché as that sounds.  But lately, I have to admit, I’ve been living a little less in the present, so this was a welcomed reminder to me about how I normally prefer to live my life.

/end tangent.