The road to hell, revisited

let's talk about food, shall we?

If you've been watching my daily stats posts (which, you know, are ooooh so riveting), you may have noticed that I can't seem to keep the calories very low. While I'm not exactly mystified, I'm getting a little frustrated by this.

Take yesterday, for instance. Yesterday, my planned food was a completely acceptable 1533 calories. I had absolutely no problems following this plan until about 12:30. I walked into the lunch room after my run, grabbed my lean cuisine, started to nuke it, and then the trouble began. The trouble spoke in the voice of the office caterer.

"Do you want one of these salads? I'm not going to sell them, and I'll have to throw them away otherwise."

Apparently, she had seen me give the salads a once-over as I walked by toward the microwaves. They had caught my attention because they used different packaging this week. I didn't have any money with me, so I had no intention of buying one. But if they were giving them away...that grilled chicken one looked pretty tasty. And my protein count was low for the day...

"Sure." I chose the grilled chicken salad, thanked her profusely, retrieved my fully-cooked Lean Cuisine, and went back to my office. Once there, I dutifully entered the salad into fitday. Hey, it barely brought me up to 1800! I can totally handle that. And if I ate it right before I went home, I wouldn't need to eat dinner! I deleted my planned dinner from fitday and commenced to feeling smug.

Then came the training class. There was cake at this training class. Cake! I ate some cake. And then I sampled from the candy dish in the middle of the table, thinking, "well, now I won't need to eat my apple and peanut butter. I'm not hungry anymore."

The training class was over by 4, I resisted the apple with peanut butter, and packed it into my bag to go home. Soccer practice and a trip to the store later, we were running through the McDonald's drive thru...it was nearly 8:00, and American Idol!

I wasn't going to get anything at McDs. But then, I was a little bit hungry and I thought maybe a burger. But I don't like the regular burgers, so what the hell...let's go for the quarter pounder! But just the sandwich. After all, I didn't eat my apple & peanut butter.

Of course, you have to sample the fries on the way home, even if they're not YOUR fries, right? So I had a couple fries. Then a couple more at home. And the burger, of course.

Oh, and did I mention I bought cake at the store? No? Well, I bought cake at the store. After the burger, I ate a small slice of cake.

By the time I got back here this morning and totaled up the damages, my 1500 calorie day had morphed into a 2000+ calorie day. My 22g of fiber were reduced to 13g, my 54g of fat became 77g. My ratios turned out okay, but it was sort of in spite of myself.

I understand the reasons this sort of thing happens--disorganization, rushing from one place to the other, eating at irregular times, shopping while hungry, my aversion to saying no to anyone (including myself), my affinity for chocolate. Still, knowing why doesn't change the fact that my planned menu seldom matches my actual menu. If it did, I'd probably be at goal by now. If not for the amount of working out that I'm doing, my current eating habits would have put the first 30 lost lbs back again.

I've decided to concentrate all my efforts toward sticking to my plan today. Part of this is going to be listing my planned menu here, and reporting back tomorrow on how I did in sticking with it. So, here it is...the ones in italics are things I've already eaten:

Fiber One Honey Clusters w/1% milk

Pistachios (single serving packet)

Snickers Marathon low-carb bar (I'm not doing a low carb diet, and usually don't like to buy into the whole low-carb, low-fat, fake-food thing, but these energy bars are tasty, and have a decent amount of healthy packed into them...beats an actual Snickers, nutrition-wise)

Balsamic chicken w/mushrooms (I totally love this, make it once or twice a week.)

asparagus

1% milk

jello sugar-free pudding cup

Total calories: 1427
Breakdown (c/p/f): 38/27/31
Protein: 98g
Fiber: 39g (all hail Fiber 0ne)

I contemplated adding a can of tuna to this menu to get my protein up, but decided against it. I may still do it, though, so that would be an acceptable variation if it does show up tomorrow. The calorie count would go up by ~200 calories in that case, which is still in the good range.