Day 5 - Food fight

This morning I went grocery shopping for the next week at my neighborhood supermarket.

(Technically, there are 4 grocery stores within spitting distance of each other in my neighborhood, but we'll just forget that fact for the moment.)

Let me tell you, grocery shopping on Halloween is a challenge. Everywhere I look, there are bags of heavily discounted candy intended for little-kid-mouths (but that could easily end up in mine!), not to mention all kinds of seasonal treats such as candied apples, caramel dip (in the produce section!), and fruity fall pies. I think I did well, though - I arrived armed with a list and was prepared to stick with it. 'Let's get in and get out, team', I said to myself (I'm the 'team').

I stuck to the perimeter of the store and stocked up on fresh veggies for salads, frozen chicken breasts, low-fat cheese, egg white-in-a-carton (kinda weird!), and non-fat greek yogurt (yum!).
I also took advantage of the 'Thanksgiving is coming' sales and stocked up on canned pumpkin. I started using canned pure pumpkin about a year ago after buying a cookbook and subscribing to e-mails that have an abundance of very low fat/low cal recipes using pumpkin instead of fat. I really like her stuff, so I'll be happy to share her website with you.

I'm planning to take the advice that I've been given on this blog and start to be more proactive this week about eating 5 or 6 small meals throughout the day to keep my energy and metabolism up. One of my biggest problems is that I eat so quickly. One of my work friends says that I'm the president of the 'fast eaters' club. She isn't exagerating. I tend to wait WAY too long to eat - I'm starving by the time I realize it and then I just start shoveling food in without noticing what it even is, or how much, that I'm eating. At work, I also often face the challenge of having my food stuck in a room that is frequently used at non-opportune times (such as 11am-1pm) for 'closed' meetings.

So my challenge this week is to do the following regarding food:

-Plan ahead for meals.

-Pre-prep for said planned meals. It's nice to plan to eat a big salad 4 out of 5 workdays, but do I feel like rinsing and chopping lettuce and cucumber at 5:45am? We all know the answer to that one. So I'll prep all the veggies that I need for the next few days today and store them in a big container that I can easily grab from while I'm stumbling around the kitchen half awake in the morning.

-Pack my lunch, or at least part of it, in a mini cooler bag so if I get 'locked out' of the sacred food storage room, I won't be tempted to sneak over to my co-workers desk and snag candy to appease my roaring stomach.

-Record everything I eat, all week long. Now this is a big challenge for me. I've used a variety of those free calorie counting websites and applications before, and they're oh-so-helpful. The issue is actually using them consistently. So let's try it for a week, starting today, and see how it goes.

And of course I plan to continue my little workout streak I've started. I walked around the lake yesterday with Tyler, and it was a lovely opportunity to get some natural Vitamin D and catch up on life. I think a key to continuing workouts is to schedule them into my calendar and stick to it! Let's embrace the irritating OCD planner in me and use it for good!

And by the way, I weighed myself today, and it appears that I am one pound lighter! Hooray! Now let's avoid the pitfalls of shoving Halloween candy into my mouth tonight and keep it in the little hands of sweet trick-or-treaters.

...well, maybe just one peanut butter cup....