What Did I Eat?

Some of you may be wondering that the heck I ate during the month of April to drop almost 14 pounds in one month. And, you may not really care what I ate. That's cool too. I wanted to do this blog post because I find that when I'm reading through my old posts I kind of wish I would talk about what I was eating in more detail. Recently I was reading through my posts from 2012 when I was doing really well on WW and I talked about points and having a "good" week, etc;  but I didn't really talk about the actual food I was eating.

Obviously everyone is different. I'm not writing this post so that people can tell me that I eat too many carbs or that I should avoid sugar, etc. Clearly, what I did in April worked for me. We're all adults. We can have different opinions. I'm not writing this post so you go and eat what I was eating. I'm just writing it so that when I re-read this when I'm struggling I can see what I did to lose 14 pounds in a month!

Breakfast

Starting every day with a smile :)

Homemade bagel, egg and bacon

I ate probably the same 3 or 4 breakfasts all month. I started the month with hard boiled eggs and a
banana. After following some people on Instagram I decided to branch out and try other things. Several days in April I ate 2 whole grain waffles, 2-3 scrambled eggs with a tiny bit of cheese (I measured out 12-13 grams of cheese), 2 turkey sausage links, and a banana. Then, after deciding to try the 2 ingredient dough, I made bagels and ate those with either laughing cow cheese on them (SO yummy) or as a
breakfast sandwich with eggs and bacon. Most days I also did not eat breakfast until around 10 or even later. I would not eat until after my workout so most days I probably fasted close to 14 hours without even having planned that out or thought about it.

Lunches

Lunch has always been my nemesis. I don't know why I have such issues with lunch, but I do. Lunch would often be the time that I would just run to McDonald's because it's close and easy. The first few days of the month I ate grilled chicken breast with brussels sprouts agratin. The sprouts were a recipe from the beginning of the year when I was doing low carb that I really liked. The problem with them was that they were actually really high in points because of all the dairy in them. After eating those for a few days I decided I wouldn't do that again because it was just too many points for lunch. That first weekend I made myself an egg salad wrap with some grapes and carrots. I probably ate this for lunch more than 50% of my month. It was tasty and I only had to count the tortilla. I sometimes had leftovers from the night before. But, even with a 14 pound weight loss there was one day I had my favorite meal at Chick-fil-a and 2 days that I chose to have popcorn for lunch when I met my mom to see a movie.

Dinners

Turkey meatballs with zoodles.

Sloppy Joes with zoodles and corn

Dinners were where I would get my variety. Each week I would take time to make a menu prior to going grocery shopping. We ate lots of chicken breast, pork tenderloin, steak, etc. But, we also had sloppy joes (I made them with ground turkey instead of beef and put mine over zoodles). We had spaghetti and meatballs a couple times and again, I used zoodles instead of noodles. But then there were at least 3 pizza nights. 2 of those nights were homemade with the 2 ingredient dough; but that 3rd one was pizza from Papa John's. There was also chicken sausages, chicken fajitas, turkey breast, and a couple of dinners out.

Snacks

One of the things I enjoy about eating my breakfast late (or fasting if that's what you want to call it) is that it leaves less hours in the day to eat. I often wouldn't eat breakfast until 10 or sometimes 11.  There would be no need or reason to have any snacks then before lunch. I'd eat lunch around 1:00. Dinner was usually between 5 and 6 most nights. What I did do was eat an Enlightened Ice Cream bar pretty much every night starting in the middle of the month. Most of my other snacks consisted of grapes, bananas, strawberries, oranges, light string cheese, deli turkey, hard boiled eggs, etc. I basically tried to focus on using mainly 0 point foods if I felt like I really needed a snack. I was trying to also focus on only eating when hungry (what a concept, right?). There were plenty of times I was legitimately hungry so I would choose things like turkey or a hard boiled egg to hope that it would fill me up more than some fruit (or some junk food). I frankly fit plenty of "junk food" into my month; but really focused on eating "clean" or "healthy" the majority of the time.

What's so interesting to me is that I found that I really needed to add some 0 point snacks into my days because if I was only eating the 23 points I was allotted, I wasn't even eating 1200 calories most days. I really think this new freestyle program is great; but I also think it could be easy to under eat. If I was "scared" to use 0 point foods because they still have calories, and I was only eating my 23 points, I for sure wouldn't be eating enough. There have been days where I have eaten 30 WW points, but I track my food into MFP and see that I'm still only at 1300 calories. As crazy as it is to be tracking in 2 places I find that it is helping me. I don't feel guilty for having those extra points because I see that in the end I'm still not eating too many calories. Or, I will enter my calories into MFP and see that perhaps I'm hungry because my entire calories for the day are only around 800. It shows me that even though I'm at 23 points I need more calories. That's when I grab some turkey or some eggs to satiate my hunger without adding points, but while adding calories.

So that's how I did it during April. Oh, I also worked out hard 6 days per week. 3 days I did an hour workout at Living Lean, which kicks my butt every time. The other 3 days were running and often were my "easy" days! I would spend Tuesday and Thursday on the treadmill working on running with no walk breaks. Then, on either Saturday or Sunday I would meet my mom for a long run that was between 5 and 6 miles.

There you go. That's what it took. It honestly wasn't that hard and there's NO reason why I can't keep doing this. Here's to a marvelous May!