**End of May Post

As I sit here, baking gluten free almond cupcakes*, I’m reflecting on my diet for this month.

My biggest take- away message: don’t make people measure/weight their food. It’s time consuming and WAY more complicated than it seems. I’m a fan of one pot meals, but to make the ratios work, I have to make each aspect separate and then combine according to weight afterwards. Another way its super complicated is that recipes are in cups and cups only truly convert to ounces in liquid measurements. It makes buying fresh veggies an exercise in mental math acrobatics and guesses. I’ve had to make multiple trips to the store a couple times because I can’t tell how many cups 2 bell peppers make.

Yes, but how many cups will you make?

Adhering to macros that hinge on weight measurements is really time consuming. I was really lucky I managed to make everything for the week on Sunday night. It was midterms and I was WAY too busy trying to keep up with my tests to bother about measuring and cooking. It also takes a lot of time and patience to plug it all into fit click. The site is overall good, but it’s a little difficult to make minor tweaks in. Oftentimes, I’d plug a recipe in, realize I needed a half cup more veggies or something, and have to start all over. It would often take me over an hour just to PLAN the meals for the week, not including shopping, prepping, and cooking.

This diet also made it near impossible to eat out spontaneously. And 9 times out of 10, my phone battery is dying by the time we are going out to eat, so I can’t look it up. First world problems.

So overall, I don’t think I will ever put people on such a strict macro style diet such as this. Granted, we did make things harder by tweaking my diet every week. So I couldn’t just reuse recipes from the last week. I also think that it would be easier if I didn’t want to dress my food up so much. If I just had my portion of meat, my portion of veggies, and my portion of carbs; all separate, it would have been easier.

On a somewhat related note, a friend of mine showed me this blog talking about this engineer that decided food was too complicated. He took all the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) and found powdered forms of all the simplest things we need to operate and combined them into a shake he calls Soylent (unfortunate name, I know).  I think he might be onto something, but I think many of the amounts need to be tweaked. Here is a link to the blog. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298

 

Not the Soylent I’m talking about.

Well, happy Memorial Day! Thanks to all those veterans who are serving our country! Enjoy the weekend and stay safe!

*Sidenote: I do not plan on binging on cupcakes. Baking is cathartic to me. I plan on bringing them to school Tuesday. Hit me up!

Almond Cupcakes with Almond Cream Cheese Frosting. 🙂

** Midterms week :P

So I’m almost done with this month. I won’t lie, I’m very excited to be finished with this project. The amount of time and frustration over measuring all my food and constantly tweaking my diet is a little ridiculous. We changed the diet again, so each and every week we’ve changed it, I have to go on fitclick and try new recipes. Or rather new versions of the old stuff. I’m culinarily challenged and a picky eater, so this isn’t easy. The greatest source of frustration is the time it takes to program everything into fitclick and see if it works according to my macros. Then, since I have no concept of size/space, I do something stupid like adding a cup of shredded zucchini to 2 eggs. It worked in fitclick, but not in real life. It’s been midterms week, and I’m exhausted. So sorry about the short post. You’ll get another one soon.

 

**Start at the start

It’s amazing how fixated we become on our flaws. I made the mistake of starting this diet journey by not taking proper stock of what my body was doing. So tip #2: take some time and when you undertake something, start at the beginning. What I mean is take measurements, and take a good hard look at what you are working with. And I’ll say it again: start at the beginning. Start fresh! Don’t compare to your old self, don’t compare to the last diet, exercise plan, level of activity, etc. Forget it. Realize you’ve come a good way just by starting!

I’m guilty of doing the opposite. I needed to take a GIANT step back to realize that in the past 2-3 weeks we’ve been tinkering with my diet, these changes have worked. Might not be as fast or drastic as what I want, but I am moving forward. Instead, I wasn’t focusing on my newly found deltoids (I’m pretty sure they didn’t exist a month ago), or the fact that I’m lifting more than I ever thought I could. I didn’t focus on the fact that what was a rough and ugly 1 rep max a couple weeks ago can now be done easily for 3-5 reps. I focused on the parts of my body that weren’t changing. I focused on the lifts I couldn’t do. And I focused on my failures and cheats during the week.

My paint stills weren’t up to par to get an arrow in there… Sorry.

Yesterday I ate some crappy food. I was out with family and starving. Granted, I could have left and got something decent; but that entailed giving up precious time with my favorite cousin. And it was pizza. Enough excuses… I made the choice. Strangely, it was this event/set back/ delicious mistake that brought me back around. I realized my “post pizza apocalypse” self still looked better and felt better than I did a month ago on a good day.

Mistake. Big, delicious mistake.

My take home message is this: do something at the beginning of a journey to objectively measure your starting point. It can be measurements, weight (which I advise against- scales are notorious liars/ jerks who don’t account for new deltoids), or even pictures**. Then, when you have your pizza apocalypse, you can go back to that objective measurement to reassure yourself that it isn’t so bad. That you are succeeding and changing and that all this is worth it.

** Side bar: I don’t believe in those “thin-spiration” pictures that are going around. Personally, they just make me feel badly about myself. However, you slap a picture of me 4 years ago (at my heaviest) in my face and I’m ready to go make stuff happen! THAT’S inspiration!

**Eating and lifting, and eating some more.

So week one down, three more to go in this adventure of diets. So far, it’s been so/so. My diet has been ok. I’ve had a couple slip ups and I’m realizing how hard it is to eat out while doing this diet. Fat is hiding EVERYWHERE! Even in the most “healthy” item on the menu, they manage to hide fat and carbs and sodium in it. Eating out takes a lot of effort, even more time, and perhaps more willpower than I have because I not only am frustrated at the menu for hiding fat in places I’m pretty sure it doesn’t occur naturally, but I’m frustrated that I have to take extra time, extra phone battery, and extra data (I could be Pandora-ing) on my phone to research each and every menu item. It’s honestly much easier to eat at home.

Blasting some Journey

I’m also combatting my sweet tooth. It’s killing me. I’ve started buying those skinny cow ice cream sandwiches. At first they were totally helping. Now they just make me want more- which defeats the entire purpose. So I’m trying to phase those out again. But first I have to finish the box 😉

Lastly, and unrelated (well kinda) I had an interesting interaction at the gym the other day. I finally got into a squat rack (I was hardcore stalking all three) and I started squatting in front of a lady doing some deadlifts. I get my first set done and she comes up to me. I’m forever surprised when people actually approach me at the gym. While I don’t wear headphones, I definitely make it a point to put on the most angry and bad ass body language I can muster so people don’t talk to me. She tells me I’m squatting wrong because my feet are turned out (which is ridiculous in the first place… what do ballerinas do?).  After an interesting interaction, I send my husband this text: “ A “trainer” just approached me and told me I’m doing squats wrong. As she deadlifts what I bent over row.” I normally don’t pay much attention to what people are lifting, I’m just stoked they are in the gym and having a good time. But if you are putting in serious work deadlifting 65 pounds, and you’re supposedly a trainer, I can’t take you seriously. I’m sorry.

A proper squat.