Day 5 of 84

Greetings again! I have been a little MIA, but I'm finding a lot of time goes into planning executing this process, so I have set aside the blogging to make time to do things like talk to my husband. ;) It's very nice to have the first week all spelled out for me, but I feel like all I do is make food and eat food, especially since I'm eating every 2 - 3 hours. My plan to curb a little of this time is to cook a few chicken breasts (or something) at a time and live off them for a few days. While I appreciate the variety, I don't know that I have time for it. But I digress... Here's a recap of the past couple days:

Day 3 - my day of rest from working out. I had planned to take a walk that evening to still fit in some activity, but it didn't happen. I got home from work at 8, and still had to make and eat dinner and prep all my meals for the next day. But that's okay because I still got up bright and early the next morning to workout, and I'm on track for my 5 or 6 workouts this week.

What food did I eat day 3? Hmmm...well, let me just check my handy food journal!

Meal 1 was a protein shake, peanut butter smoothie. This was good, but I'm not sure how I feel about drinking peanut butter. I think that's a mental block though, so I'll keep with it.

Meal 2 was two corn crisps and 1 1/2 ounces of reduced-fat cheese. Okay, so technically the plan was just 1 crisp and 1 ounce of cheese, but the crisps are super thing, and the cheese packets come in 3/4 oz. pre-packaging, so...oops! But it's back on today's list o' meals, and I only brought 1 corn crisp with me, so improvement. I did still bring 2 cheese packages, but man, I love those little cheeses! I'll do my best to just stick to a third of the second package though.

Meal 3 - tuna salad on a bed of romaine and a tomato with 2 melba toasts. This was great! Just 6 ounces of water-packed tuna with 1 tablespoon of light mayo - no dressing or anything, but it didn't need it! I will confess to adding a little salt and pepper on the tomato though...this isn't a no-no, but it's not in the recipe. I took the liberty of saying it was okay.

Meal 4 - 2 celery sticks and 2 tablespoons all-natural peanut butter. Yummy, as always. I really dig the all-natural PB - it's literally just mashed peanuts, no extra oils or anything. Very thick and delicious!

Meal 5 - Turkey taco salad! This might be the winner so far! The only cheating I did was that it calls for 1/4 of an avacado, and I had 1/2. I realize this is fat, but it's good fat, and what the heck am I going to do with 3/4 of an avacado!? Those things are like $2/piece - I'm not throwing it away! The other half is my snack for this evening. And the salad itself was great - lettuce, tomatoes, baked corn chips, cucumbers, low-fat cheese, ground turkey with taco seasoning and ketcup. Yep...ketchup. I about did water instead because the idea of ketchup in my taco salad grossed me out a little, but I tried it and it was good. It added a little of the moisture that you would otherwise get from...in my case...sour cream.

I didn't do meal 6. I'm finding the 5th meal is really satisfying and I don't usually need the 6th one. Today will be the exception to that, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Brief pause...time for my a.m. snack...be right back...

And, I'm back! 1 ounce of almonds in hand.

Day 4 - I think this was the "if we don't give her some fat, she's going to quit on us day," and they might have been right! But yesterday's food was really good! Here's a rundown:

Meal 1 - "Devilish Eggs", 1/2 apple, 1 corn crisp. Again, I substitued the corn crisp for the rice cake that looks like some hippy baked it in his kitchen and threw it in a baggie to be sold at supermarkets, but other than that, I stuck right to it. Oops - I lied. I added a touch of horseradish to the eggs for kick. But other than that, I was really good!

The Devilish Eggs were regular deviled eggs, but instead of mashing up all the yolks, I hard-boiled 3 eggs, cut them up, and only mashed one yolk. The third egg, I mashed the whites in the yolk, added the horseradish and a tablespoon of light mayo. A dash of paprika, and voila! Devilish Eggs! You do throw away 2 perfectly decent yolks, but I am personally okay with that.

Meal 2 - strawberry smoothie/protein shake. So, I lied. This sort of sucked. But it wasn't horrible, and it was very filling, so... not so bad. Good enough to fill the need for protein and some calcium, and quick.

Meal 3 - Terragon chicken salad and whole wheat pita - in the words of Rachel Ray - YUM-O! This salad was great! Cut up 3 ounces of baked chicken breast, mix in 1 1/2 tablespoons light mayo, 5 grapes cut in half, 1/4 cup chopped celery and 1 tsp. terragon. Put this on a bed of romaine and tomato, and you have a great meal!

Meal 4 - 100 calorie yogurt and 3/4 cup high-fiber cereal. I only ate a 1/2 cup of the cereal because I was full after that.

Meal 5 - Lemon chicken, 1 cup steamed asparagus and a mixed green salad with 1 T low-cal vinaigrette. Again - yum! But this was an adventure. The Chambers family does not saute meat. We grill. Or we bake. We do not saute. But I did, and I filled the apartment with smoke, and made a horrible mess of the kitchen. I will say it made for some yummy meat! This is where they really kicked in the fat - I got to saute it in olive oil, which is one of my favorite flavors ever. And the lemon was real lemon (no lemon pepper here, folks!) and you added some capers in for salt, which were good as well.

Today's food looks pretty good - a second dose of the low-fat cottage cheese, berries and walnut mixture for breakfast, the afore mentioned almonds for a morning snack. We repeat Monday's chef salad for lunch, and the corn crisp/cheese snack this afternoon. I'm throwing my last couple meals out of order - usually I'd eat a bigger 5th meal, and then do a small 6th meal, but I am singing in a wedding this evening, which really cuts into that plan. So instead, I'm going to grab a 5th meal/snack before that (the 1/2 an avacado) and have my bigger meal later. The "big" meal is roasted halibut, which looks promising.

Yesterday's workout and today's were great! I really do enjoy The Firm programs. On the 4 DVDs you get with the basic package, there are a total of 8 workouts (and one instructional "don't fall off the wave video"). So far, I've only repeated one workout - score for variety! - and they're all somewhere between 20 to 40 minutes. Plus, they totally kick my butt, and if I'm going to go to the work of working out, I better get some results!

I'm not sure if it's the workout or the food (I'm guessing it's a combo of both), but I feel terrific! I have been sleeping like a baby (I haven't woken up once this week, which is unheard of!), my wedding ring comes on and off with no pulling (no seriously...my hands gain and lose weight like nobody's business), and I woke up at 4:57 this morning, 3 minutes before my alarm, feeling ready to go for the day! In fact, before arriving at work at 8:40 this morning, I had worked out, washed the dishes and cleaned up the stove from last night, ironed today's clothes, got the frozen fish out of the packaging and into the fridge for tonight, organized the music for the 2 weddings I'm singing in this weekend, put a load of laundry in the dryer and started another load in the washer! And I ate breakfast and got ready for work in there - not bad!

Now, this part might be crazy, but I swear my clothes are already fitting better. I think it's not that I've lost that much weight, or any for that matter, but I think it's that I feel stronger from the workouts, and thus, I'm holding myself better. Posture is a wonderful thing!

I'm feeling good with 4 1/2 days down. That's not a lot of out of 84, but it's better than I was a week ago!

XO ~
Nicole

**If you're missing the pictures, I'm sorry. I keep forgetting to take them, and they take forever to load. I'll try to get pictures of the really delicious looking meals though - you should have seen last night's!