Tag: Spread Sheet

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General Weight Loss Tips

More or Less

I hope you all had a lovely holiday and are gearing up for a new year tomorrow. I had a very spoiled Christmas, filled to the brim with good food, good company and more gifts than I deserved.

I’m ready for 2012, are you?  It seems there are two sets of people on new years, those that diligently create resolutions and goals, and those that are violently against it. I’m a resolution person, but if you’ve been reading any amount of time, you already knew that. Mostly, I just think it’s fun to create a spread sheet of what I want more of and what I want less of.

Right off the top of my head, I want more contentment in the small things in my life. This past year, I was not content with contentment. I spent the year worrying that if I wasn’t piling on the projects and giving light to all of my ideas that I wasn’t moving forward. I was eager to skip steps and make things happen unnaturally for the sake of making something, anything, happen. That was a huge lesson.

I believe my health suffered because of this. Most notably that I’ve had a cold and now getting over a stomach virus in just two weeks.

As I sit here in my safe and quiet house, I realize how important this stability is to me. What I do is wonderful, I love passion, but I love knowing that I’m doing all that I can to maintain a happy home life for myself and my husband. That I’m doing what I can to keep myself healthy. And in this I find myself retreating, a lot. This year, I see myself saying no and passing on projects. I see myself riding the waves as they come. Taking the long road to my goals, rather than the “Let’s make this happen now!” insanity that I put myself through last year. I see myself going with the flow and trusting that I can grow and move forward just while, and especially so, taking care of my home, health and happiness.

This year, I will be narrowing my projects down to one. business. which is my design/art/creative business. And working on my blogs. Other than that, I will be cooking more and eating more vegetables, and taking time to dance and have fun and most importantly, to just be.

I want more fresh fruit and vegetable juices.  I believe in juicing and how good it makes me feel.

I want  to complain and worry less.

I want more exercise.

I want to take the long road and be okay with the journey.

I want to stop worrying, finally, about what other people think.

I want more sewing, painting and illustrating.

I want less social media.

I want more cooking.

I want less driving.

I want to make realistic and attainable goals.

Happy New Year!

 

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Categories
General Weight Loss Tips

Sticker Challenge

I really love a good challenge, even if I’m the only contender. I’m determined for April to be the month where food tracking and exercise get married and live harmoniously. Yes indeed. They’re gonna be friends and I’m going to be better for it.

And because a challenge needs a system, rules and reward. I made a spread sheet. To get one sticker each day this month I will need to do three things: track my calories, post all food consumed on blog, and exercise daily. I will only get my reward if I’ve done all of these things everyday for eight weeks. I will get another sticker for each pound that I lose. It’s going to be awesome.

Yes, I’m slightly neurotic, yes I love stickers. And yes, I love a good challenge. I live for challenges. Need further proof? When I clean I have to set my oven timer for 35 minutes. I like to challenge myself to clean as much as possible during that time. I cannot do anything else, but clean for 35 minutes. And you know what? It works and I love it. No email, no kitty petting, no gazing out the window. Just focused time.

I also get a small reward for each week that I get all of my stickers. I really thought about these rewards and the one thing I got consistently excited about was a new book/magazine. I’m going to have to buy a new bookcase when it’s all said and done. I love going to the book store on weekends and I’ve decided that I want to earn those books and magazines that I love so dearly. When I buy a new book, I want to say “you know what? you worked hard for that.” Not just for the money to buy it, but for taking care of myself.

**********

This morning I woke up feeling hung over from food. I overindulged this weekend with my parents visiting, hosting a bridal shower, and date night with Josh. I just wanted something substantial, not too heavy, and delicious. I decided on 1/2 cup walnut, date, and raisin oatmeal (a package from Tina!) with 1 T homemade almond, peanut and cashew honey nut butter, 1 T all-fruit strawberry jam, and 1/2 C whole milk.


Nut butter! So easy to make and delicious.


Not sure who Uncle Matt is, but this orange juice tasted very fresh.

Lillies left over from the bridal shower decided to finally open up.

Total calories: 460

PS: I am not a nutritionist. I do not recommend that you eat like me to lose weight. I do know that fruit is a natural sugar. I do know that I could have eaten about 100 other things that would satisfy a number of other people, theories, studies or guidelines.

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Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Keeping a Food Journal for Weight Loss Success

Food Journal

Food Journal

Many of the better, and most successful, weight loss programs either come with a food journal or recommend that you keep one. If you take out a few minutes each day to write down what you eat, when you eat it, how you’re feeling, and other information you may like to include, you can have significantly more success with your weight loss efforts than people who don’t keep a food journal.

Why to have a Food Journal

It’s not necessary to keep a food journal for the rest of your life. After a couple of months, you should have an idea of which foods keep you feeling better and more energized, and which foods cause you problems. You should also have fine-tuned which amounts satisfied you and when you ate too much and how it made you feel.

Here is a list of some of the things you may want to track in your food journal. Remember, no one is going to see this journal but you, so be accurate and honest. That is the only way you will benefit from what you record.

  1. What you ate and in what quantities
  2. Calories, grams of fat, grams of protein, grams of carbohydrates, fiber
  3. Were you really hungry or just craving something?
  4. What time of day did you eat?
  5. What were you doing that may have triggered your desire to eat?
  6. How did you feel right after you ate? Satisfied, over-full, still hungry?
  7. How did you feel about two hours after you ate?

There are many food journals online that you can download and use if you do not have a diet program that includes one. A spread sheet, like those you can make with Microsoft Excel are also good. You can create as many, or as few, columns as you wish and expand the columns to fit any notes you might like to include.

What You Can Learn From a Food Journal

If you are subject to “emotional” eating, or eating when you aren’t really hungry, it is important to identify why. What was the emotional experience you were going through when you felt you needed to eat? Did you enjoy the food, or just bolt it down? Maybe you were having bad feelings that you wanted to suppress, and food worked to “push” down the feelings.

The important thing here is to tie the emotional eating with a particular situation. Then, when you are not caught up in this emotion, calmly think of a way you can satisfy whatever situation the food was solving for you with a non-food response. You may be amazed at how much you mindlessly eat when you are in the throes of an emotion and not really hungry at all. But you won’t get these connections if you don’t keep track in a food journal.

Keeping a food journal is not hard to do and it will go a long way towards insuring your weight loss success.

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