Bringing It Together

I feel confident that the processed sugar & caffeine abstinence has become a permanent lifestyle change. I know this because I had a diabetic friend over who is usually the recipient of my vacilating diet trends and I had very little to give her this time around. Usually I have an unfinished case of diet coke, plenty of treats with sugar substitutes, splenda, etc that I purchased, began to consume and then thought the better of it. My friend has no such scruples and is delighted to benefit from my chronic indecision. This time all I had was two sugar-free condiments (barbeque sauce & syrup) and some protein bars that my mom had given to me. Slim pickings now and it makes me feel great! Shawn's relieved too.

The exercise has picked up now that I have have settled into an after work/before dinner/before blogging routine that feels doable for the long run.

I have noticed however that my healthy, nutritionally dense diet has been exceeding my daily exercise expenditure. That's code talk for I'm eating more calories than I'm burning. This is due to 3 reasons that I can think of: 1) My food is more nutritionally dense (more calories) 2) My activity levels have been very low recently, even though now it's starting to pick up more and 3) I still have a fitness instructor's appetite! My 6P clothing is beginning to feel a little tight and my once-sculpted body is looking rather dough-boy like. Not the end of the world, but I have no desire to see the top my normal BMI range come and go.

Having conquerored some of my less-than-healthy habits and developed an appetite for more raw and nutritious foods, it is now time to make sure that I am staying within my daily recommended intake and exercise some appetite control. I can tell I haven't burned all the calories I've eaten at the end of the day just by the way my stomach feels when I go to bed at night. It's not a good feeling.

Perusing the hundreds of books at Chapters, I was searching for a diet & fitness journal where I could resume logging my daily food intake & workouts. I used to do this on my palm pilot but for some reason, I've always had more success with paper journals. I looked through countless diet books looking for meal plans that used the multitude of healthy foods I've been eating and couldn't find anything more than a week's example. The journals available typically reflected popular diets that had elements I wasn't interested in and/or needed a language translation to understand.

As we were leaving, I had one last thought. Go check the blank journal section of the store and maybe, just maybe, they'd have something generic there. I wasn't disappointed. I found a reasonably priced Diet & Fitness Journal that was small enough for my purse but detailed enough to contain & display all the elements of my healthy lifestyle. I began filling it out today.

This step is bittersweet for me. Most of the raw and nutritious recipes I've been trying don't display nutritional information so thankfully the journal has a general list of foods and their values in the back. I still have to use the internet to find information on items that aren't on the list. Writing things down is time consuming and I was kind of enjoying freedom from what has been an almost religious habit during my adult years. So why am I doing this? I guess, I need to make sure that I'm eating and exercising in balance.

Healthy, nutritionally dense foods, if overeaten or not combined properly, can contribute to unhealthy weight gain just like unhealthy foods can. I need to visualize what's going on so I can tweak my habits once again. Maybe if I get this worked out, I'll be able to put the journal away in the future or better yet, maybe I can fill the void on the wall of Chapters!