Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Diet update
Two months into the diet, I’m down about five pounds from my max weight. I’d like to lose another 14, so if I keep it up, I’ll be there by the year’s end.
My smart phone’s diet/fitness app (“My Fitness Pal”) charts my weight, adding a data point whenever I care to weigh in and enter my weight. It looks like a sawtooth mountain range, but the trend is generally downward.
What I think has been most helpful: bran cereals and bananas. Both are very filling, and for whatever reason, I don’t seem to tire of them. Apples work well too, but I get sick of apples after about two days.
Also important is sticking to the calorie limit (1700 per day). My Fitness Pal gives me the option to record the calories burned in aerobics (e.g. when I spend an hour on the elliptical trainer), and when I do, it essentially erases that number of calories from my daily total. Thus, if I were permitted another 800 calories for the day and burned 500 calories on the elliptical trainer, My Fitness Pal tells me that I can eat another 1300 calories. Um, no. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way, but for my body, it doesn’t. I see much better progress when I stick to my totals, exercise or not. I suspect the elliptical machine greatly overestimates calories burned.
I know a lot of people put great stock in drinking lots of water, but I find it doesn’t help with hunger. (Go figure!) On the other hand, I need to avoid salty snacks, because my weight almost always pops up a pound or more when I so indulge.
D.
Peaches!! I’ve been eating lots of fresh peaches – locally grown, not those rocks one find at the grocery store.
Fresh fruit is always a wonder to behold for those of us who have only had store-bought produce. I still remember my first “real” tomato — I ate it like an apple and it was a true OMG experience. Wild strawberries — similar story.