Weighing In - Day 49

Today's Diet Tip:One of the biggest keys to sustainable weight loss is portion control. Unfortunately, if you are like me, it may not be a pleasant idea to think about attempting to decrease your portion sizes. American restaurants don't make this particularly easy as even their smaller portions can be larger than a person should normally consume of a given type.

I find that an easier way to decrease portion sizes is to increase the amount of non-caloric beverages you have during the day. The primary beverages I'm aware of are water and unsweetened iced tea. You could add non-caloric sweeteners if you feel the need to do so. By doing this you will not feel as hungry when it comes time to eat, and therefore will not desire to eat as much. This will result in a possible significant decrease in caloric intake on a single day.

Current Goal Weight: 194.2#
Current Goal BMI: 26.31
Current Goal Deadline: July 20, 2008

Today's Weight: 198.9# (+0.7 from yesterday)
Today's BMI: 26.93 (+.09 from yesterday)

Yesterday's Caloric Intake: 2249.25
Breakfast: 1110 calories - Einstein's

• Egg and Bacon Sandwich - 610 calories
• Chocolate Milk - 500 calories

Lunch: 419.25 calories - Jason's Deli

• 1/2 Chicken Panini - 419.25 calories
• Unsweetened Iced Tea - 0 calories

Dinner: 600 calories - Wendy's

• Grilled Chicken Go Wrap - 260 calories
• Small Fries - 340 calories
• Unsweetened Iced Tea - 0 calories

Yesterday's Exercise Time: 35 minutes (28 minutes aerobics, 2 minutes strength training, 4 minutes yoga, 1 minute balance)

Yesterday Post-Assessment:
Unfortunately, I ran quite over yesterday. I believe this is the result of suffering from a mild depression in the morning, and generally not tracking the calories that I was eating throughout the day. As it noted above, I had more than 1000 calories in breakfast alone. While I know that breakfast should be the highest caloric intake of the day, I do believe that I went over the amount I should have. In the future, I would replace the chocolate milk (which was 2% at this time) with water or tea, possibly even a juice. The sandwich, overall, was relatively low on calories, but I do believe I can decrease it further in order to better fit my dietary requirements.

Lunch, I believe, I did a reasonably good job. I had actually purchased an entire panini, but found it far too much to eat in one sitting. I've been learning lately to eat less than the entire meal, then wait to see if I'm hungry again. In this case, I wasn't and still have another half left to be eaten as a later meal. Drinking tea again instead of soda still provided me a flavorful beverage that is completely lacking in calories. At one point during the day I also purchased a can of iced tea from a vending machine at work, and was sad to learn that in one 12 oz can of that tea there was 120 calories, far more than I feel it should have.

Dinner would have been better for me without the fries. Coming in at 340 calories made them more than my meal, and was enough to push me over 2000 calories. Since my goal is to maintain regularly under 2000, preferably by a large margin, yesterday was a particular failure in the diet portion of my plan. It will take a fair amount of work to make up for this, and with my deadline coming up I'm not certain I'll be able to get clear down to my target by that time. I may have to decrease my caloric intake even further and up the amount of exercise I do on days when I can.

In summary, I have gained 0.7 pounds since yesterday, which caused a BMI increase of .09 relative to yesterday's results. This means that I would have to lose 4.7 pounds amounting to a decrease of .62 BMI in order to meet my goal by the deadline. I am not certain that it can be done, and I have known this entire time I'd be pushing it, but I will be doing my best over the next 12 days to achieve this goal.