Monday, October 29, 2007

A Cafeteria Classic

Growing up, Fridays were my favorite day of the week, lunch-wise at least. Because in mostly-Catholic Upstate New York, that meant the school cafeteria skipped the usual mystery meat and instead offered either fish fillet sandwiches, cheese pizza, or my beloved grilled cheese and tomato soup. Yum! Nothing says comfort on a cold day than a good grilled cheese sandwich and a big bowl of steaming, creamy tomato soup.

But, that childhood favorite is not exactly diet-friendly. So I've worked up a little WW-friendly update that I am slowly becoming addicted to...

The soup is still soup, but now rather than getting a regular cream of tomato soup (full of fat and sodium) I now get an organic, fat-free, low sodium version. It's very light, and a little bit sweeter, but still really tasty in its tomatoey goodness.

Instead of a greasy, crispy grilled cheese sandwich - with lots of butter and white bread - now I opt for a quick and easy quesadilla. Using just a little fat-free cooking spray, I warm up a whole wheat, fat free tortilla and fill it with about a 1/4 cup of shredded light Mexican-blend cheese, sprinkled with a little cumin. Really tasty, and perfect to rip into pieces to dip into the soup.

Yum! And it's all much lower in fat and sodium than the original... and about 9 points for the whole lunch. Not bad!

Progress.... The Kind That Hurts

Well, I just got a really good sign of the progress I'm making..... I've passed a certain milestone on the scale (yippee!) which means that WW has now reduced my daily points target (boo!). I knew it was coming, and this particular benchmark only means 1 less point (about 50 calories) per day. But still!

It's nice validation, though, cuz in the whole year-and-a-half plus that I've had this blog, this is the first time I've made enough headway in order to get to this next level of WW play. Finally!

That's a First!

Wow. I actually LOST weight on vacation! And this was a vacation at my parents' house - land of huge portions. Hooray!

I've been losing half a pound here and there over the last few weeks, so I've now passed 11 pounds lost total. The best thing is that I'm actually starting to feel it, cuz my clothes are fitting better. That's always motivating, too, to actually see visible progress.

I'm back in town now, and back to counting my points. Stay tuned.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Not So Bad

I did end up losing .7 lbs this week, so I've now erased all of that vacation gain and have started working on losing overall again. Good news! But I still feel like I've been hovering in the same range for weeks.... because I have! So I feel like jump-starting things again, and that means I have to be more disciplined. I've got 2 weeks before I go on another vacation again, but it's just to my parents' house again and I can ask them to keep my diet in mind when they're meal-planning. Back to work....

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Rough Week

This has not been a good week for dieting. I've had a stomach bug since Thursday... which I caught in either one of two ways:

(1) it's possibly something contagious that is going around our office. Now that we have all 12 of our staff sitting on top of each other in a single room during office renovations, we've become a pretty gross petri dish.... there's a head thing and a stomach thing going around, and I got the stomach thing.

OR

(2) something that I ate on Wednesday, a day which featured TWO catered buffet meals from two different caterers, majorly did not agree with me.

I have a coworker who came down with pretty much the same thing, but he also has both of these potential factors at work, so who knows? Maybe it's a bug that also didn't agree with that gross salmon I made the mistake of eating at lunch.

Either way, that's already way TMI for all of you folks, but.... that's the roundabout way of saying that my tummy's been upset, so I have not been eating normally. And, you know me, I use any excuse possible not to exercise, so there's that too.

So far, the scale is okay and it looks like I'll still just be hovering around the same place I've been for weeks on end now. Which is okay... but I sure would like to see the scale moving again. Which means I have to get moving again. Blech.