Thoughts: Happy Halloween!

Except for the bit of low fat, no sugar added ice cream I had Saturday, I stuck with my BFL meals, so free day didn’t really happen. I guess that’s why I let myself have a “real” free day today.

Yes, we are talking about a greasy, typical American breakfast of a cheeseless veggie omelette, two sausage links, half a Belgian waffle with strawberry topping, some potato wedges, a mini cranberry muffin, fruit, extra scrambled eggs, two mini pancakes, a dinky mini blueberry cheesecake, and a biscuit with gravy. This was followed by a big bowl of white rice at my parents’ house with Chinese sausage, stir-fried napa with black mushrooms, some summer squash, and a bit of stir-fried omelette with scallions. Dinner was Hong Kong beef noodles. In between these lovely, salty meals were probably about 8 Hershey’s miniature chocolate bars of assorted varieties, a chewy granola bar, six waffle cone cookies, and 5 butter cookies. I don’t know why Mom and Dad have so many cookies around nowadays. They NEVER used to keep those things in the house when I was growing up.

My only redeeming action yesterday was drinking at least a gallon of water along with my excess, LOL.

So much for a controlled free day. I guess hardcore mode will have to wait until Monday! I can’t wait to hop on the scale Monday and see how much temporary damage I’ve done.

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Nutrition (1600-1800 calorie high/free meal day)
1: American style brunch
2: 2 butter cookies, 3 waffle cookies, 1 chewy granola bar
3: White rice with Chinese sausage, stir-fried napa and mushrooms, and squash
4: 1 butter cookie, 5 Hershey’s miniatures
5: Hong Kong beef noodles
6: 2 butter cookies, 3 waffle cookies, 1 fig newton, 3 Hershey’s miniatures

Supplements:
Multivitamin with iron
Calcium 500 + D
1 T. flax seed oil

Calories eaten and deficit for yesterday = 1461 / -678 (target -337)
Water: 18cups
Ratios: 44% carb / 34% protein / 22% fat

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Workout:
None (Rest day)

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The Awful Truth:
1. Erm…..see “Thoughts” above. (I’m not feeling guilty though; I’ve busted my butt all week with extra cardio, and it IS my free day.)

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Brownie Points:
1. 100% workout attendance!
2. Finished my Halloween costume in time Saturday.

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Short-term Goals:
1. Cook frozen chicken tonight.
2. Go grocery shopping again.
3. Clear out stack of papers on desk.

Thoughts: I’ve got to hustle and finish my costume for tonight, so this will be a short one. I went out last night for dinner, stuck with a very tasty and not too off-plan Moroccan salad (romaine, chicken breast, almonds, raisins, bananas, and a curry dressing) at the White Wolf Cafe, and saw a live production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show put on by the Downtown Theater. The female singers in the show were amazing. I wish I had their voices! It was my first experience with Rocky Horror, and I had a great time even though I wasn’t quite sure what was going on half the time. I’m told that I really need to see the movie.

I’m still finishing up the BFFM book this week–all of this stationary bike time is giving me plenty of opportunity to read–and am now toying with the idea of carb cycling. I tend to do it a bit naturally anyhow with free day since my carb intake always shoots through the roof on Saturdays.

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Nutrition (1600-1800 calorie high/free meal day)
1: Cinnamon raisin bran muffin and 1/3 Balance bar
2: 3×1 veggie omelette, 1/3 serving beef stir fry, and sweet potato
3: 2/3 Balance bar, 1/2 c. SF/LF ice cream, and cottage cheese patties with salsa
4: Cottage cheese with spiced apple
5: Kung pao chicken with brown rice
6: Chocolate peanut butter shake (might sub. a free meal here)

Supplements:
Multivitamin with iron
Calcium 500 + D
1 T. flax seed oil

Calories eaten and deficit for yesterday = 1540 / -895 (target -337)
Water: 18 cups
Ratios: 41% carb / 37% protein / 22% fat

========
Workout:
12:00 pm HIIT cardio–treadmill run
Warm up- 4 mph / 0% incline / 7 minutes
HIIT - 4.5, 6, 7, and 8 mph / 0% incline / 4 sets
Max - 9 mph / 0% incline / 1 minute
Cooldown - 4.0 mph / 0% incline / 6 minutes

12:30 pm steady-state cardio - bike for 30 minutes
1:00 Yoga sun salutations

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The Awful Truth:
1. Still need to work on the costume, ASAP.
2. Stayed out past 2 am for dinner and a live production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

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Brownie Points:
1. 100% workout attendance!
2. Survived several days straight of extra cardio.
3. Ate pretty clean last night at the restaurant…may not count that as a free meal.

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Short-term Goals:
1. Finish Halloween costume.
2. Cook some chicken for next week.
3. Pick up some bananas, greens, and corn starch at the grocery store.

Thoughts: Confession time on two fronts.

First confession: I just spent $103 on a POT.

Yes, just ONE pot.

I made the mistake of visiting my Amazon.com Gold Box, and suddenly there was a glowing vision of loveliness in front of my eyes: a 3 1/2 qt. Le Creuset cast iron French oven in Flame enamel. The price was $21.75 off the regular price of $144.95, plus an additional $20 off using a Kitchen and Housewares coupon code. I agonized over the decision for the better part of an hour, but eventually I bit the bullet and clicked “Buy” after my sardonic co-worker and expert on all things cultured and culinary Josh listed all of the myriad joys of enameled Le Creuset cast iron ownership. I’d been looking at the much cheaper Lodge Logic pre-seasoned 5 qt. Dutch oven for $23, but Josh pointed out that tomatoes and bare iron were not a good idea and I plan to make all kinds of stews and sauces in this thing, so I caved in and got the Le Creuset. Amazon was pretty speedy with the shipment, too…by the time I came out of a 40 minute meeting after ordering, it was already being prepared for shipment–no room for second thoughts.

Second confession: In addition to buying the Leanness Lifestyle ebook last week, I also applied for a 30-day trial membership in the associated coaching club web site, Club Lifestyle. I’m doing well on BFL on my own, but again, I was curious after hearing the rave reviews from several women using the club and reading about it on the Bodychangers.com site. I got approved for membership two days ago and have been exploring the tools available at the site. I’ve looked at the Workout Professor, the Activity Log, the weigh in, the Nutrition Analyzer, the Lean Account, the forums, and the downloads area so far. For the most part, I’ve already been doing most of the things that the site handles–calorie tracking, zigzag planning, exercise logging–but I really dig the Workout Professor since it lets me generate a bunch of new workouts based on my current strength levels, and the recordings in the downloads section are pretty nifty as well.

I even had a chance to do a live online chat with Dave Greenwalt, the founder of the site and author of Leanness Lifestyle. He gave me the depressing but honest news that to get the definition of a fitness model, I’d need to drop to 12% body fat, which based on my current stats (131 lbs, 18-19% body fat, 5′6″) is 120-122 lbs. Yeouch! Even more grim was the recommendation to raise cardio to 65-75% of my weekly exercise burn. So if I average 400 minutes of exercise per week, that is 260-300 minutes of cardio.

As we all know, BFL only requires 60 minutes total of cardio per week. LL would be closer to 50 minutes per day, 6 days a week. I’m already tacking on about 30 minutes of cardio a day to the BFL core workouts, however, so I’m not too intimidated by the addition of 20 more minutes. I am going to give this a shot through the end of the challenge on November 21 and see where it leads.

Before any BFL purists out there start freaking out and ranting about muscle loss and burn out, please note the following:

• I’m in perfect health right now. No eating disorders, no thyroid problems, no prescription medications. I’m not going to drop dead on the treadmill one night running at 6 mph just because I lifted weights or did 20 minutes of HIIT that morning.
• I’ve already been adding cardio for almost a month now. It broke me through a plateau and hasn’t affected my lean body mass.
• I am doing this as a personal challenge just to see if I CAN with a soft deadline of my 30th birthday in January, and then I will go back to a normal lean body fat range between 16-18% and just the core BFL workouts for maintenance.
• I have NEVER had any problems keeping my momentum or motivation up about doing BFL. I just don’t find BFL all that difficult to maintain. I like the foods, I had four years as an enlisted army girl to get used to almost daily workouts, and (Le Creuset cast iron pots notwithstanding) I’m not very susceptible to peer pressure about things I don’t want to do, like slacking off on workouts, eating junk, and drinking alcohol.
• I’ve done my research and reading, and will attempt this as safely and intelligently as possible. If I notice any legitimate health issues from this, I will dial it back down.
• I will be keeping my calories at the same level as they are now–an average of 1500-1600 per day. I will not be going into starvation mode.
• I do not plan on dropping weight unsafely or too quickly; I don’t foresee anything more aggressive than 1-1.5 lbs per week, just like most women on regular BFL.
• This is probably going to be my best shot at achieving this goal–while I’m unencumbered and accountable only to myself for my time.
• The Hussman site and many of the BFL champion interviews on Bodychangers.com mention that more cardio than the usual 20 minutes three times a week was used by the winners to achieve their results. The workout routines of every fitness model/competitor in Hers and Oxygen also include significantly more cardio. I’ve had 20 weeks to observe how I respond to just the BFL cardio. I’m going to spend the next four checking out the effects of adding a bit more and then reporting on my results.

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Nutrition (1000-1200 calorie low day with free meal)
1: Strawberry whey pancakes with SF blackberry preserves
2: Oatmeal tuna spinach salad with apple
3: Cottage cheese and strawberries
4: Oatmeal tuna spinach salad with apple
5: 3×1 veggie omelette with oatmeal
6: Free meal

Supplements:
Multivitamin with iron
Calcium 500 + D
1 T. flax seed oil
1/2 t. GNC Creastack (2.5 g creatine)

Calories eaten and deficit for yesterday = 1386 / -811 (target -337)
Water: 16 cups
Ratios: 34% carb / 44% protein / 22% fat

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Workout:
8:20 AM UBWO at Gold’s
7:00 pm Yoga challenge
7:15 pm (optional) steady-state cardio - 15 minutes bike (level 4), 15 minutes treadmill (5.2-6 mph)

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The Awful Truth:
1. Woke up a bit late this morning.

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Brownie Points:
1. 100% workout attendance!
2. Did the yoga again.
3. Did my extra cardio again.
4. Stuck with my meal plan for the day.

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Short-term Goals:
1. Finish the outer robe of my costume.
2. Make up a new workout schedule.
3. Make up a new base menu to use through November 21.

Thoughts: I’ve added yet another fat loss/fitness book to my reading list: Dave Greenwalt’s Leanness Lifestyle. Some of the ladies on the Body for Life Women’s Club Yahoo group were discussing LL last week, and I got curious about it. The consensus seems to be that LL and BFL are both based on bodybuilder nutrition with a mix of resistance training and cardio on the exercise end, but while BFL discourages calorie-counting with it’s palm-fist method of building meals and allows practitioners go hog wild for a full day each week, LL, like Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, stresses the importance of tracking food intake (at least initially) , zigzagging calories, and taking only two free/splurge meals a week. BFFM and LL also seem to encourage more cardio than BFL.

The more I read in these other two books, the more I realize that what I’ve been doing for both of my challenges is more like a hybrid of all three systems than pure Body-for-Life. The only thing missing up until the past month was the additional cardio, and I’ve been gradually adding that in since I started the eDiets Life’s Odyssey challenge almost 4 weeks ago.

I’ll post more about Leanness Lifestyle and how it compares in philosophy to Body for Life once I finish the book. I’ve still got about 5 chapters left in Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle as well, so look for a three-book review/comparison in about two weeks or so.

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Nutrition (1200-1400 calorie low day with carb tapering)
1: Strawberry whey pancakes with SF blackberry preserves
2: 3×1 veggie omelette with spaghetti squash and apple
3: Oatmeal tuna spinach salad with apple
4: Strawberry raisin bar
5: Asian beef stir fry with spinach
6: Chocolate cottage cheese with whey protein

Supplements:
Multivitamin with iron
Calcium 500 + D
1 T. flax seed oil

Calories eaten and deficit for yesterday = 1703 / -569 (target -337)
Water: 16 cups
Ratios: 35% carb / 42% protein / 23% fat

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Workout:
8 am Yoga sun salutations
8:30 am HIIT cardio–treadmill run
Warm up- 4 mph / 0% incline / 2 minutes
HIIT - 4.5, 6, 7, and 8 mph / 0% incline / 4 sets
Max - 9 mph / 0% incline / 1 minute
Cooldown - 4.0 mph / 0% incline / 3 minutes

7:00 pm steady-state cardio - bike for 15 minutes, treadmill for 15 minutes

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The Awful Truth:
1. Didn’t work on Halloween costume.
2. Got to bed way too late.

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Brownie Points:
1. 100% workout attendance!
2. Did my yoga sun salutations and didn’t hate them.
3. Got through the extra 30 minutes of cardio last night.
4. Ate very clean.

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Short-term Goals:
1. Finish the outer robe of my costume.
2. Make up a new workout schedule.
3. Make up a new base menu to use through November 21.

In the BodyForLifeWomenOfColor Yahoo group a woman recently posted a conspiracy theory rant regarding the government and the big-profit food industry in regards to the safety of artificial sweeteners. She also decided to blame those two groups and the food pyramid for the obesity problem in general.

> Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:52:07 -0000
> Subject: Re:(was: motivational article) artificial sweetners & sugar addiction
>
> I take anything the government and professionals regarding how food
> affects someone psychologically and physically with a grain of salt.
> Those same professionals you’ve quoted are the same professionals who
> along with the FDA and government have recently admitted 40 years
> later that they had the food pyramid wrong. Their recommendations to
> eat more grains/carbs over veggies ect since the 1950’s is why there
> has been such an increase in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other
> health problems.

This was my response:

Now as far as the food pyramid goes…I agree that a higher percentage of protein than was recommended by the pyramid would be beneficial to a lot of people, but I wouldn’t go so far as to blame “obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other health problems” on just an outdated food pyramid and governmental errors. How many of us even paid attention to the food pyramid in making food choices in our pre-BFL diets?

Be honest.

I know I didn’t.

I couldn’t even tell you what was on the pyramid now even though I used to walk by a poster of it every single day in the cafeteria in elementary and middle school. I doubt that the majority of Americans could, either.

I ate what I felt like whenever I felt like it before reading BFL, which was pretty much raisin bran, milk, and two eggs for breakfast, a quick 6″ Subway roast beef sub and chips for lunch, a bit of candy or some chips as a snack, and rice and a stir fry dish from my own kitchen for dinner. Looking back on it now, I’d guess that my average daily intake was around 2000-2200 calories, 60% carb, 15% protein, and 25% fat. Combine that with a sedentary desk job, no regular exercise, and a bunch of sit-on-my-butt hobbies and you get a 5′6″, 145 lb gal who fits comfortably into size 9-12 clothing. Not obese by any means, but not sleek or trim, either. My portion sizes were reasonable, and I didn’t have any eating disorders or food-related emotional issues. I was on the high end of “average” for a 29-year old working female in America. I know that many others would probably be happy to get to where I was back in May, but I knew I could be a lot more fit and a lot less fluffy, and I didn’t blame the fact that I didn’t look like a fitness model on anyone but myself.

*I* chose not to exercise for 4 years. *I* let the annual gym membership from my father expire without stepping foot inside the local World’s Gym. *I* decided to have Pop Tarts from the vending machine for breakfast and chips for snacks instead of fruit. *I* raised my hand for pizza when the bosses asked us what we wanted for dinner on late work nights. *I* let years go by without learning more about healthy eating and exercise. *I* elected to spend my free time reading books, working on the computer, and playing video games instead of hiking, cycling, or rockclimbing. *I* chose to eat entire restaurant meal servings even though I was already full halfway through the meal. *I* talked myself into a fourth, gut-busting plate at every Chinese buffet because I wanted to “get my money’s worth.”

ME. Not the government. Not the food companies. Not the food pyramid.

People become overweight and possibly ill through the exercise of their own free will in a dozen little ways each and every day from the moment they wake up until the second they drift off to sleep for the night with 3500+ calories in their bellies and nothing more strenuous than a walk to their car in their activity tally.

Obesity isn’t an external problem brought on by government/food manufacturer conspiracies. It is a matter of personal accountability and responsibility. Big Brother isn’t standing there next to us with a gun pointed to our heads when we gobble down our fried chicken, Big Macs, apple pie a la mode, homemade pork and beans, and Bloomin’ Onions. He isn’t blocking the doorway into the nearest gym either. We make our own choices. We make our own fat. You have to accept responsibility for your own condition before you can make a real change in your habits, because accepting responsibility is the same as declaring that YOU are in control of your body and can therefore change it for the better starting with your very next meal. If you persist in blaming your weight troubles on external forces like genetics, the food industry, the government, an unsupportive family, a busy career, and the friggin’ phase of the moon on the day you had planned to start your diet, you’ll never get a true handle on your problem because there will always be a reason to quit, to give only 50% effort, and to get lackluster results.

Thoughts: I am in love.

Hopelessly in love.

My new Lodge Logic Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Grill Pan from Amazon.com is my new favorite kitchen tool. I made some steaks the other night in it that were so tasty, juicy, and PERFECT that I shall never ever use the stupid Foreman Grill in my cupboard for anything other than heating up sandwiches again. The Foreman Grill NEVER produced any of those pretty grill lines that you see in all of the advertisements, not even once. Chicken breasts came out unevenly cooked, and everything wound up very dry and flavorless.

The Lodge grill pan, however, made my steaks taste like they’d just come off a real grill, and seared beautiful parallel lines right into the meat while letting the fat run off into the grooves below. I can’t believe I got this thing for free with an Amazon gift certificate I earned through their Visa card. Even if you don’t have a GC, at under $16 it’s still a great deal for a pre-seasoned, nearly non-stick pan that will last a lifetime and even add a little iron to any food you cook in it. It weighs a ton, though, so if you decide to get one, you would do well to pick up something else around $10 like the 10 1/4″ pre-seasoned regular skillet to get free shipping.

I can’t wait to grill up some chicken in it tonight. Cooking is so much fun when you have the right equipment on hand.

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Nutrition (1600-1800 calorie low day)
1: 3×1 veggie omelette with 1 slice WW toast (Chocolate banana shake)
2: Beef stir fry with apple (Chocolate banana shake)
3: Strawberry raisin bar
4: Strawberry raisin bar
5: Oatmeal tuna salad w/apple
6: Cottage cheese and strawberries

Supplements:
Multivitamin with iron
Calcium 500 + D
1 T. flax seed oil
1/2 t. GNC Creastack

Calories eaten and deficit for yesterday = 1392 / -563 (target -337)
Water: 16 cups
Ratios: 45% carb / 39% protein /16% fat

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Workout:
12 pm LBWO at Gold’s
8:30 pm steady state cardio - 30 minutes
9 pm yoga

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The Awful Truth:
1. Stayed up too late and will have to do LBWO during lunch.

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Brownie Points:
1. Finished all of the laundry, washed every dish in the apartment, hoovered the entire place, and emptied all the junk out of my various purses, backpacks, and bags.
2. Cooked a lot of food last night.
3. Went grocery shopping.

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Short-term Goals:
1. Do not skip extra cardio in the evenings.
2. Knock out LBWO in 40 minutes or less.
3. Make my Halloween costume tonight.

Thoughts: I’ve been thinking a lot about the trends in fitness and nutrition lately. It’s hard not to when one has subscriptions to Shape, Oxygen, Self, Health, and Hers, and is essentially living the “Body-for-Lifestyle.” Add in my most recent non-periodical reading materials–Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, and Dave Greenwalt’s Leanness Lifestyle, and you could pretty much say that I’ve been absorbing more than my fair share of health lore.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of the same issues and topics keep coming up. Everyone seems to agree that the best way to lose fat and get a fit, toned look is to combine a healthy, portion-controlled diet with a regular exercise program that includes both strength training and cardio, but that would make for a very boring monthly magazine. So instead, we get pages and pages of “Fat-Burning Power Yoga” routines and “Six Pilates Core Moves That Will Shape Your Abs”.

I still have a derogatory Army grunt mentality about stuff like yoga and pilates. I do enjoy tai chi, probably because of the martial arts aspect (”This move can be used to block an opponent’s attack”) vs. the “I’m a *girl* and just want to develop feminine, LONG and LEAN muscles like a dancer!” line that I always hear from pilates enthusiasts. The women I’ve met who swear by pilates and yoga fall into two categories–those who were fit and active before they even started taking classes (and swear that pilates has tightened up their abs and booties, possibly with some truth since they are lean enough for minute, subtle changes to show) and those who are not so fit and lean, but believe that they will get there by going to the same classes as the first group.

Reality check time.

You get a dancer’s body by being a dancer and practicing for hours and hours each day. No amount of stretching and pumping your arms up and down really, really fast while huffing like a woman giving birth with lamaze is going to transform a 250 lb woman into a waifish ballerina if she doesn’t rein in her diet, pick up some dumbbells, and work the cardio hard in addition to the yoga and pilates sessions. Also, have you ever really looked at a dancer’s legs? They are pure muscle. You don’t get those kinds of legs from activities that primarily have you sitting on your ass on a sticky mat while a relaxing soundtrack complete with warbling birds and a waterfall plays in the background. In my personal opinion there’s a place for those sorts of activities, and it’s at the very bottom of the fitness priority list after diet, resistance training, and strenuous, sweat-inducing cardio. Rolling around like a ball might be vastly entertaining, but it can’t hold a candle to doing a full-tilt sprint on a treadmill for a full minute if you are trying to lose fat.

Besides, do you actually want to look like the women in the pilates DVDs and tapes? I have a few of the Stott Pilates videos, and the instructors are all saggy-lean (the look I associate with skinny-fat vegetarians) and not at all defined. When the instructor with the short blond hair admonishes me to take it easy the day after such a “strenuous” core muscle workout, I want to laugh in her face. Strenuous is a full hour of push-ups, flutter kicks, and sit-ups without a break followed by a 2-mile run. It is NOT 45 minutes of rolling backwards and clapping your F$#@!$# FEET TOGETHER like a seal and other similarly asinine exercises while a lady with the voice of a librarian on Prozac tells you keep your spine neutral and engage your powerhouse.

PUH-leeeeeze!

If I ever decide I want to look like Olive Oyl, I might just turn vegan and do only pilates. For now, though, I’d rather look like Elektra or Psylocke of the X-Men, so bring on the protein, the free weights and the treadmill. Screw the long and lean. I’m getting strong and jacked!

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Nutrition (1200-1400 calorie low day with carb tapering)
1: Strawberry chocolate cottage cheese
2: Pepper-crusted steak with raspberry cabernet glaze, garlic spaghetti squash, and WW toast
3: Strawberry raisin bar
4: Chocolate shake
5: Asian beef stir fry with spaghetti squash
6: 3×1 veggie omelette with sauteed spinach

Supplements:
Multivitamin with iron
Calcium 500 + D
1 T. flax seed oil

Calories eaten and deficit for yesterday = 1578 / -310 (target -337)
Water: 15 cups
Ratios: 38% carb / 35% protein / 15% fat

========
Workout:
8:30 am HIIT cardio–treadmill run
Warm up- 4 mph / 0% incline / 2 minutes
HIIT - 4.5, 6, 7, and 8 mph / 0% incline / 4 sets
Max - 9 mph / 0% incline / 1 minute
Cooldown - 4.0 mph / 0% incline / 3 minutes

8 pm Yoga sun salutations
8:20 pm steady-state cardio - bike for 20 minutes

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The Awful Truth:
1. Subbed 2 servings of bubble tea for two of my carbs yesterday.
2. Skipped yoga and extra cardio.

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Brownie Points:
1. 100% workout attendance!
2. Am almost done with this week’s laundry duty.
3. Back down to 130.6 lbs this morning and a 19% body fat reading from the Tanita while dehydrated.
4. Organized my disaster area of a closet.

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Short-term Goals:
1. Do the dishes during lunch.
2. Vacuum the apartment.
3. Break down boxes in the living room.
4. Go grocery shopping tonight.

Thoughts: Once again I’ve come to the final four weeks of a Body for Life challenge. I’m not nearly as motivated as I thought I would be at this point. A while back I wrote that I’d stopped thinking in terms of “challenges” and “12 week cycles” and really just considered this a lifestyle. I’m a competitive person in general, but for some reason the whole EAS prize just doesn’t matter much to me anymore. Maybe I’m just tired of filling out the packets.

Anyway, my sister and I chatted a bit online last night, and both of us are locking down for the next 4 weeks. We tend to be a bit more lenient with the nutrition than many other women on BFL because we both track our calories and nutrients. If we choose to have something that is considered unauthorized, we make up for it by choosing meals with a bit more protein than carbs or fat in the next few meals. If there is an ice cream or baked Cheetos incident, we laughingly confess to each other and get on with our lives instead of beating ourselves up about it like so many others seem to do.

She is giving up alcohol for the next 4 weeks (except if the Red Sox win the series, in which case she is allowed to have TWO celebratory beers since she lives in Boston). I am moving my ice cream stash to the freezer at work so I won’t be tempted to substitute half a scoop of 98% fat free, no sugar added ice cream (great stats–90 calories, 20 carb, 3 protein, 1.5 fat, and 4 fiber–how can ice cream have that much fiber?–per serving) for an authorized carb. Both of us are going turbo on cardio, eating as cleanly as possible, and tapering carbs in the evenings on cardio days.

Tweaks for the last 4 weeks:

1. Increase water consumption to a minimum of 15 cups a day
2. Do 15-20 minutes of steady-state cardio a day
3. Keep free days at 1800-2000 calories
4. Keep second high day at 1600-1800 calories
5. Change weight training exercises
6. Develop a standardized menu to keep calories relatively consistent

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Nutrition (1300-1400 calorie low day)
1: Chocolate whey drink with apple
2: Raspberry-glazed pepper steak with spaghetti squash and apple
3: Strawberry raisin bar
4: Cottage cheese and strawberries
5: Szechuan beef stir fry with oatmeal
6: Chocolate cheese with apple

Supplements:
Multivitamin with iron
Calcium 500 + D
1 T. flax seed oil
1/2 t. GNC Creastack

Calories eaten and deficit for yesterday = 1463 / -466 (target -337)
Water: 10 cups
Ratios: 40% carb / 40% protein /20% fat

========
Workout:
8 am UBWO at Gold’s
8:30 pm steady state run - 5 mph / 15 minutes

========
The Awful Truth:
1. My meals weren’t spaced out very well yesterday since I was out of the apartment for several hours and had a late start to the day.

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Brownie Points:
1. Committed and focused on new behaviors for the next four weeks.

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Short-term Goals:
1. Tidy the apartment.
2. Go to the grocery store.
3. Install new Palm software on my PDA.