What am I eating?

Since I need to get back to regular blogging, and I'm no longer doing Medifast, i thought I'd point out what it is I'm eating currently.

I'm still somewhat in a 'Medifast Mindset', in that I'm eating 5-6 times a day, and lots of prepackaged snacks, I'm just well over the calories that Medifast provides.

The bulk of my pre-packaged foods are:

Weightloss shakes (about 200 calories)
Protein Bars (about 200 calories)
Greek Yogurt with granola (150-200 calories)
Frozen 'light' lunches (200-300 calories)
Cheese sticks (85 calories)
Canned tuna (100 calories)
Nuts (75-150 calories)

these have taken the place of Medifast bars, crunchy snacks, hearty meals, and shakes. They run close to 2x as many calories as Medifast, and are higher carb. I'm ok with that though.

In addition to that, I'm eating egg white/egg beater eggs, and turkey sausage/turkey bacon for some breakfasts.

I'm having bagels 1 day a week for breakfast as well.

for dinner I'm trying to be reasonable without being ridiculous. We ate out a lot the past 6-8 weeks, so we're going back to healthier options, but not just 'chicken breast plus some mushrooms' like before, there's some other things on the plate.

I'm getting back into the swing of tracking, but it's not a solid habit yet.

Week 26?! Yes, week 26! Broke through my plateau.

Ok, summer has been horrible for my blogging. It's also not done a great thing for my diet plan, I was in a plateau for quite some time, but this week I have pushed myself to make the right choices and get back on plan.

This summer has been great. I feel better than I've felt in ages, and we're doing a lot of stuff outside. We're also going out to eat a little more, and even treating ourselves. Since the summer started I've been on a cruise (made reasonable food choices, but did not 'diet'). Spent a week with my family (more reasonable food choices but still no dieting). Since we got back we've gone out to dinner a few times (reasonable choices, staying as close to lean and green as possible). We even had a small celebratory night out at a hotel, with dinner (reasonable), dessert (fresh cannoli), breakfast in bed, then crepes for brunch.

Finally tonight, we've got one more kid-free evening before our daughter comes back from camp, and we're going out one more time on a date night.

The key to all of this is that despite all of this 'not on plan' eating and activity, I've managed to maintain, and not gain. And then once I buckled down, this week I had over a 4 pound loss! I expect this is because I've spent most of the summer eating enough carbs to have glycogen stored up again, and this week I've burned through some of it.

As of this morning, I was at 254 pounds. Seven months ago, I was at 332 and had put a goal of 250 pounds as a far future goal, nearly impossible to attain. Now I'm a stone's throw away. I reset my goal to 240, so that I would go off plan and regain glycogen and still stay under 250 and have that be my maintenance weight, but now that I'm nearly there, I think I can do a little better.

So, while I'm not to goal yet, it is time to take a pretty hard look at things. In a couple of weeks (whenever I hit 250, I think) I'm going to start transitioning off Medifast and start eating more real food. I want to do the transition properly and then shift into a standard 'IIFYM' (if it fits your macros) style of eating to focus on building muscle and losing fat slowly. So over the next few weeks I'll be looking into that and see where I think I need to set my intake on carbs, fats, and proteins. I expect I'll still be low-carb for a long time, but not quite so low carb as I am now.

I'd like to be in transition before the end of this month, and off Medifast sometime in August or September.

Medifast has been amazing, even with the last few weeks (they were frustrating at the time, but honestly, I wasn't on plan consistently for any of my plateau, so it's hard to complain with 'maintaining/slight loss' when you aren't actually following the diet!).

The biggest lessons I've learned are: consistent meal planning, cooking every day, bringing lunch to work every day. Those are huge, because of course you're going to gain weight when you grab a biscuit at Mc Donald's for breakfast, eat chinese buffet for lunch, and then order pizza for dinner because you don't want to cook. One of those as a special occasion? Sure. All three in one day, and multiple days a week that look like that? Bad idea.

Ok! Enough talking. Time to break out some graphs. I've been a slacker this summer, but it's time to end this thing with a bang, so it's back to daily blogging and weekly graphs and charts!

Click to embiggen!

Here you can see the tail end of my plateau. It started at the middle of may when I hit 260 and then started hovering, dancing between 258 and 262 for a few weeks. I started this week in a good place, 258.0, my previous low. Even with dinner at Blueberry Hill, cannoli, and crepes, I only went up to 259.9 and decided to knock it out of the park the rest of the week. I hydrated, followed Medifast, limited snacks, and broke through.

The 6-week plateau is obvious here.

Taking a look at the weekly, you can see the stall, hovering at 259-261. Despite that though, I ended week 26 at an even 3.0 pound loss week, and that's good enough. I still think I can manage to hit my goal by mid-August.

And here's my weekly graph. Still pretty impressive, even with that flat bit. Not much longer now!

Back to the blog!

From Wednesday-Sunday I was working the Geekway to the West board game convention, and never had a chance to blog. It was four days of hard work and tons of fun gaming! I did not really stay on plan for much of the weekend... I ate Medifast and tried to stay hydrated, but my meals included rice (with sushi), roasted potatoes, bacon and eggs, and even a sandwich during breakdown.

That said, I was only up .3 lbs after the weekend, and I know that even with the extra carbs that I was eating at a calorie deficit, so while I may have gained some glycogen and water weight, I didn't gain any fat.

I'll try to post a better post tomorrow, with more info and some pictures, but right now I'm still decompressing!

At the mall...

Tonight we took Lauren and her friend to the mall for dinner at CPK, and took them to go see the new Disney Bears movie.

While the girls were in the movie,  we walked through the mall and bought some clothes and Easter gifts for Lauren.

What we didn't do while walking through the mall was buy pretzels,  or cookies,  or Dairy Queen,  or Häagen Daaz, or cheesecake,  or anything like that.

We also talked about how when we hit maintenance and start eating that stuff again,  to make sure it was worth it... Only getting the treats that we really like.

Not too much longer and then we can look into earning some of those treats... And deciding which ones are worth eating!

Eating out on Medifast

My wife and I have been very good about not eating out on Medifast, but this weekend we finally had a couple meals out... dinner alone on Friday night, and then dinner with friends tonight.

Both meals worked out great, were on plan, and were a total success.

For Friday night we went to California Pizza Kitchen. I had Grilled Chicken Chimichurri, which was a 6 oz grilled boneless skinless chicken breast and a pile of roasted vegetables... broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, spinach, eggplant, squash, and carrots. It also had a spicy chimichurri sauce on the side.

Stock photo, but this is EXACTLY
what my food looked like!

The mushrooms and eggplant were good, and the cauliflower and spinach were edible in small doses. The carrots were nice and crunchy but not really on the diet so I only ate a couple, and the broccoli was atrocious, but I tried it anyway.

The full meal was under 450 calories and only 19 grams of carbs. Fit perfectly in my macros. It was tough seeing all the pizzas, and turning down the plate of bread, but it worked out in the end!

We'll have pizza again one day, though! And at the rate we're going, it will be pretty soon!

I had expected to cook tonight, but after we hung out at Citygarden taking some pictures, we ended up going to hang out with Zac, Inez, Ezra, and Rose. We wanted to go shopping at the outlet mall and decided to do dinner. We were going to go to Espino's, but the wait was too long and we ended up at El Maguey.

Normally Mexican food would be off the plan entirely, but I ordered off the a la carte menu and got grilled chicken and mushrooms. I ate it with green habanero salsa, and skipped the rice, beans, tortillas, chips, and queso. It was perfectly good, and was a nice change of pace.

El Maguey! I missed you, queso.

So! We managed to go out to eat, stay on plan, and keep our nutrition where it needs to be! We'll still be eating at home most of the time, but it's nice to have a couple of options out there for us that stick to our diet.

And while I'm here... NSV for the night, grabbed a sweater from Eddie Bauer. The XXL was too big for me, but I got it anyway, since I like my sweaters oversized. Woot!

Navigating our fancy night out!

I just got back from the hotel after we finished up our charity ball. While I weighed in a little late (and after having water and a Medifast bar), I wanted to get it in anyway, just to see... and I'm down over a pound. We'll see if that weight loss sticks around 24 hours for the day after though!

Preceding the night out, I had standard Medifast meals but with extra protein, since I wasn't sure what dinner was going to be. My wife and I agreed that we'd try to stick as close to plan as possible, but we weren't going to be ridiculous about it.

Once we got to the hotel, I picked up chicken fingers for our daughter from the bar and then we went to the event. The cocktail reception was great, we got pictures, chatted, entered into the raffles... and I drank water and had one little cup of shredded pork with a white bean ragu.

For dinner I picked at a salad, eating some greens, some pecans, some figs, and some pumpkin seeds. There was a walnut vinaigrette on the salad that was ok. After a few bites, I called it and patently ignored the bread and butter.

The main course was a piece of steak, a piece of grouper with a tomato puree on top, green beans with mushrooms, and potatoes. I ignored the potato, gave my wife my steak and took her fish, and ate the fish, mushrooms, and most of the green beans.

I would like to point out at this time that both the salad and the green beans were 'edible'. Neither was amazing, but they weren't really offensive either. I count this as a triumph. I'm making a note here, huge success.

Dessert came out and was a key lime pie with blueberry compote and an ancho chili chocolate flour-less torte. I had one bite of each, the key lime pie wasn't worth it and the torte was. I put my napkin over the dessert plate after one bite though.

After dinner we danced for a couple hours, and hopefully I burned off all those carbs on the dance floor. When we got back to the room at 1 a.m. I was ravenous and ended up eating a leftover chicken finger, as I expected it had more protein and less carbs than an extra Medifast meal.

I think I navigated the dinner well enough, and we'll see how this affects things short term, see if I drop out of ketosis or feel extra hungry. either way, this is a once a year event and it was worth it!

Medifast thoughts, how'd that social dinner go?

So, I ate my Lean and Green meal before going to Old Spaghetti Factory, and had a 'bulky' meal (lots of eggs and protein). When we got to the restaurant there was cheesy bread and t-rav on the table. It looked good, but there was no compelling urge to have a bite.

 I ordered my glass of tea and proceeded to have a great 'dinner'. I wasn't ever really tempted by any of the entrees I saw. The fresh bread and butter looked good, but it was Not Allowed so I was able to ignore it. All I thought about the bread was 'I'll need to keep an eye on how much of that I eat once I'm transitioning off this diet'.

Dinner ended and the conversation was great.

This is the first 'diet' I've ever been on. I've tracked my calories before, mind you, and was successful on Weight Watchers for a while. I think that this diet, which is a pretty brutal culture shock, will do more for me than 'just track!' ever did. Just tracking was frustrating for a number of reasons... I'd have Chinese food, or work out, and not drink enough water and the scale wouldn't move for days and days.

 Now I'm on a plan. The scale bumped up, but I'm on plan. I didn't drink enough water, and the scale slowed down. Then I pounded water yesterday, and shed a ton of water and I've got a big drop again.

 So what am I learning from this? How is this going to help when I'm off plan? Well, I know I need to hydrate more in general. I know I'm bad about that, and I just need to keep a bottle of water nearby and drink more. Not only will it keep me from retaining water, it really does help with hunger.

Also, I'm learning portion control. If I can be fine after eating a half cup of Macaroni and Cheese, then off plan I can eat a half cup of real mac and cheese, and not a plate full. If I can drink an 8 oz shake and be fine, I don't need a 16 or 24 oz shake. This is the first time I've ever stuck with a plan where portion control was actually monitored to this level.

Finally, I'm actually measuring and weighing. If I do that for a few months I'll get an accurate view in my head about how much food I'm eating. This will help immensely when going out to eat. 

 I really want to be one of the success stories that keeps the weight off after a diet. I can see how it would be easy to just say 'screw it' and go right back to bad habits instantly, so I'll have to actively work to avoid that.

In other news, the scale was good to me this morning, I finally dumped all the water weigh I held on to after working out.  

Medifast, Day 3 recap

I expected this day to be the hardest yet, but I navigated it pretty well!

 One thing, being a Saturday, I never had work to contend with. When I got hungry, I washed dishes, or did laundry, or played a game, or watched some TV. Doing things instead of eating certainly helped a lot.

Food choices during the day were based on what was convenient at the time, I ate one meal in the car, for instance. I also knew I would be going out for dinner and had to be careful there.

 Dinner was at a Tapas Bar, which was actually a great choice for the first meal out on the diet. I shared a grilled chicken skewer that i used literally less than a 1/2 tsp of sauce on, for 2-3oz of grilled chicken. Then I shared 'Wicked Good Shrimp' which was grilled shrimp in an amazing sauce. I guessed on the sauce (but think 110 calories is probably close) and added 4 jumbo tiger prawns.

I also had one bite of braised pork shoulder (I skipped the corncake it was on) and  one bite of fried jerk chicken breast.

I was worried I'd have messed up, eating a bunch of carbs I shouldn't, or gotten too much sodium and tanked myself, but I woke up feeling good and down another 4 lbs of water weight. That's 11.5 pounds of water weight in three days, which seems crazy until I remember the day prior to first weigh-in... Mc Donald's Sausage Biscuit for breakfast, Chinese Buffet for lunch, an hour long workout, and then Chick-Fil-A nuggets for dinner. Between the workout and the mass of sodium I consumed I probably had a ton extra water at the time.

 Today could be my first day of Ketosis, and when things are supposed to get easier on the hunger scale... honestly, I've not yet had any real struggles with hunger, so if it gets easier then I know I can keep this up.

 I'm actually interested in how today goes... I started the day with Cereal and Almond Milk (first time ever for Almond Milk, and it was great with the cereal!), I'm going to eat my Lean and Green meal right before D&D (1 cup of egg beaters, 3 oz of chicken, and a ton of mushrooms), then D&D... where I have to navigate the snacks at the table and then eat Medifast bars instead of real food. We'll see how tempted I am. Nick better not bring homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies.