Wednesday Food Journal

Day Three and all is well.  I’m really like using E-Tools to track my points; I feel more in control of knowing what I’m eating because it lets me look up points values at the same time I record them.  And I”m basically lazy and am online all the time, so it’s easy for me to do.

Breakfast:  1 egg (was going to be eggbeaters but they turned out to be elderly) scrambled with roasted peppers and onions, 2 slices whole wheat bread with margarine.

Morning snack:  1 C. chocolate fudge pudding yogurt

Lunch:   Lettuce, homemade black bean/corn salsa, a can of light tuna, and a tomato.  An apple for dessert.

Afternoon snack:  Snack-size popcorn, clementine

Dinner:   Ground beef patty, Sweet potato/apple casserole, 18 Kashi TLC cheddar crackers, Clementine

All in all, I did pretty well.  I’m 5 points over my daily target but I have the flex points to cover that.  I also took a 20 minute brisk walk when I got home from work, down to the duck pond and back.  It felt good to be outside getting fresh air and moving.  Tomorrow I’ll go back to the gym.   Maybe I’ll bring my iPod to the office and try to get out at lunch, too.  I need to be sure I go to the gym, since I’m trying to re-establish the pattern of going regularly, but more exercise is better, right?  Certainly getting up in the middle of the day and breaking my routine of sitting at my desk has to be a good thing!

Using new tools

Since I’m off to a fresh start this week, I decided to take advantage of the online e-tools that come with my monthly Weight Watchers pass. I’ve used etools before to look up recipes mostly, and to convert existing ones to WW equivalents and get points values. But there is a points tracker option that I’ve never used. Since I’m online all the time anyway, it seems, and I’m not always so good about writing down in my paper journal (and hate the square format of the new quarterly ones), I thought I’d give it a whirl.

I like it! Go figure. I can do a Quick Add to put in things that I’ve already calculated out, say recipes I’ve made or things I’ve computed from labels that I don’t have handy. Or I can enter “wheat bread” and then select from the choices that come up, with points values. One nifty little feature is that if a food is Core, a green checkmark shows up next to it. I’m never totally sure what’s core and what isn’t, not that I’m following Core – give me Flex! – but it’s good to see, since I know that in general there are reasons why core foods are core foods and I should probably try and have more green checks than not green checks if I have a choice. Or not. But information is a good thing.

Vickie suggested in an earlier comment that I look at a T’ai Chi class if I could find one, and I’d actually been considering one at the adult ed center. So this morning I went back to their website, discovered that the new session starts next week, and signed myself up for a 7-week session of once a week classes. It can’t hurt and if I hate it, it will be over soon. I might discover I love it and since I’m also trying to reconnect with my body and get it limber and responding, this could be a very good thing for me to do.

Someone else some time ago – I think on the Amazon blog – recommended the DVD of Yoga for the Rest of Us. I don’t remember where that idea came from but I added it to my Amazon wish list and got it for Christmas, so there, too, I have some new possibilities of movement that is realistic for my physical limits. Hopefully they will change with time but for now, I don’t want to stay still.