30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet 1: Day 1

February 2, 2009 by Trevor Watkinson · 1 Comment »»

Today marks the beginning of my first 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet of the year.

This is actually my second weight loss diet of the year, but is the first time I have been able to follow my normal diet consisting mostly of lean meat, fresh fruit and vegetables.

I just completed my first weight loss diet of the year, my 30 Day Chef Boyardee Weight Loss Diet, where I ate nothing but 800 calories worth of Chef Boyardee canned pasta products each day for an entire thirty day period. I lost 13.0 lbs in only 30 days and dropped my body fat percentage by almost 4.0% in that time.

I also just finished celebrating my first “Free Day” of the year where my wife Lyann and I rewarded ourselves by having hamburgers and perogies.

I stated in my post My Focus For 2009 that I would be conducting twelve different 30 Day Weight Loss Diets on myself during the course of the year where I would alternate back and forth between “substandard” weight loss diets and healthy weight loss diets. I also stated that I would be continuing my practice of having a free day at the end of each 30 Day Weight Loss Diet in order to celebrate and have some foods that I do not normally include in my diet. Free days are a great reward.

I have now completed one of my “substandard” weight loss diets by finishing the 30 day stretch of eating nothing but Chef Boyardee food products. My first free day has also passed. Now I am headed into the first of my healthy 30 Day Weight loss Diets of the year.

This 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet will consist of me posting daily about what I eat each and every day for the next 30 days. The meals I eat this month will consist solely of healthy foods including lean meats, fish, fresh and frozen vegetables and fruit and some nuts. I may sometimes include a low-calorie dessert of some kind.

No meal that I eat this month will consist of more than 800 calories in total. How will I do this? Well, the secret to keeping your calorie intake so low while still enjoying a good volume of food is this: You never need to count calories from vegetables or fruit because you cannot get fat by eating them. You can eat all the salad you like, but unless you are dousing it in fatty salad dressings, you will never get fat.

I consider most vegetables and fruit to be negative calorie foods. A negative calorie food is one that requires your body to expend more energy in digesting it than it contained in the first place. These foods are free foods. You can eat as much of them as you like. The only fruit I do not include under the negative calorie umbrella is bananas. Too many bananas will make you fat.

Each post I make this month will be short and sweet, taking only the space necessary for an accurate description of what I ate during the day in question and what calorie count those items I consumed added up to. I will also offer my two cents on different products I try during the month such as pre-packaged 100 calorie snacks and the like.

I will be posting daily about my weight and body fat percentage, which I will be keeping track of with my Salter body fat scale. I am going to be keeping a chart of my progress much like the one I used to track my statistics during my 30 days of Chef Boyardee food trial earlier this year.

My ultimate goal in completing this and the subsequent five 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diets I will be conducting this year is to show you all how much more food you can have on your plate or in your bowl in terms of volume when you choose to eat natural, whole foods rather than processed, pre-packaged food.

One 425 gram single-serving can of Chef Boyardee pasta only just fills up a small cereal bowl. I can eat a lot more food than that and stay under 800 calories per day if I eat natural food. All this being said, let us get on to my first day of this particular 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet.

Here are my current stats:

Weight and Body Fat

Today was somewhat of a surprise to me. I had no idea what to expect when I stepped on the scale this morning. I weighed only 148.0 lbs when I started my free day yesterday, but I ate a lot of food that day and I was sure I would have gained five pounds. I was pleasantly surprised when I got onto my Salter body fat scale this morning and found that I weighed in at 150.2 lbs today. My body fat percentage reading had risen slightly from the day before, standing at 20.1% today whereas is was only 19.5% yesterday morning.

The reason I was not sure how the scale would read today was that although I had eaten what seemed like a ton of food yesterday, I spent about 45 minutes sitting on the toilet last night with one of the worst cases of diarrhea I have ever had. I wondered just how much weight I was losing as the liquid continued to pour out of me. I had been having a hard time using the bathroom at all during my 30 Day Chef Boyardee Weight Loss Diet, especially towards the end.

Last night, presumably from all the great food I ate yesterday, I had no problem relieving myself. My stomach started groaning uncontrollably as soon as I started eating real food yesterday. I had to get up in the middle of the night due to the gas that I had and the diarrhea came as a bit of a shock. Regardless, I am thankful to be back to having a regular bowel movement. It gets kind of scary when too many days pass and nothing comes out. You have to wonder where it is going.

I was pleased to see that my weight did not go up too far past the 150.0 lb mark, because this is the weight that I am going to try to maintain for the rest of my life. I may move a few pounds in the upward direction now and then, but I will seek to make 150.0 lbs my overall standard. I do not expect to lose weight this month even though I am holding onto the 800 calorie per day limit from my first weight loss diet of the year, where all I did was lose weight for the whole month.

The foods I will be eating this month are more solid and substantial than the Chef Boyardee food I ate last month. They also contain more nutrients and more water. These two points alone should play an interesting part in my weight maintenance this month. I feel great despite having such a piggish day yesterday and I am loving being back to my regular diet.

What Food I Ate Today

This was my least favourite part of the posts I wrote during my 30 Day Chef Boyardee Weight Loss Diet. Somehow, even the title 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet sounds infinitely sweeter to my ears. I got really sick of Chef Boyardee last month and consider myself lucky to be posting about better food items for the next 30 day period. Here is a great picture of what I ate today:

Homemade Vegetable Soup, Fresh Salad, Cheese, Cashews, Rice Cakes and Clementines

Okay, so you see the bowl that is holding my soup in this picture? It holds two full cups of liquid. One single serving can of Chef Boyardee pasta only fills that bowl halfway. Two single serving cans would fill that bowl and would add up to 800 calories in total. The food pictured here is a little less than 800 calories. Do you see the difference in the total volume of food you can eat when you choose fresh, whole foods over processed, packaged foods?

In the picture above, we have homemade vegetable soup (a recipe from my wife, Lyann) that contains no oil and is therefore a totally free food that you need not count calories for. The soup consists of carrots, turnips, cabbage, onions, peas, corn and a few red kidney beans, along with a lot of spice for flavour.

I enjoyed a generous helping of fresh salad today with 3 tablespoons of Kraft Signature Sundried Tomato and Oregano Calorie-Wise Dressing on top. We used Compliments Garden Salad Mix to make our salad and added some cucumber and cherry tomatoes to it. I rounded out my fruit and vegetable selections by having some Compliments Essentials Baby Dill Pickles and four clementines.

I had a 56 gram serving (yes, I have a scale that weighs grams) of Mexicana Cheese with Hot Peppers. I also had a 40 gram serving of Crown Nut Salted Cashews. The last part of my meal was two Quaker Original Rice Cakes.

The calorie content of my meal was as follows:

56 grams of Mexicana Cheese with Hot Peppers – 70 calories
Two Quaker Original Rice Cakes – 70 calories
40 grams of Crown Nut Salted Cashews – 250 calories
3 Tbsp of Kraft Dressing – 105 calories

These items brought my calorie count for today up to 495 calories. I also had one other item later in the day that brought me closer to 800 calories. I waited until later in the night to enjoy ½ of a bag of Compliments Natural Flavour Popcorn. A full bag of this popcorn has 480 calories, so I had to add another 240 calories to my total. My final calorie intake for the day was therefore 735 calories.

So I got to eat all the food you saw in the picture above along with a half a bag of popcorn today. That is a lot more food than two cans of Chef Boyardee pasta. It is difficult to believe that two groups of food with the same calorie counts can be so different in terms of volume.

The meal I presented here today is typical of the Save Your Sweat diet. Lyann and I eat this way almost every day, though we vary the particular items we include in our meals.

Summary

I want to make it clear before ending this post that Lyann and I only eat once per day. We do not eat breakfast or lunch. I do not know who first decided that we needed to eat three times per day, but I am willing to bet it was not a starving child from a third-world country. You would be surprised how long they can live without eating anything at all.

We have long since discarded the conventional wisdom about having three square meals per day. We find it far more appealing to keep our bodies and our appetites in check throughout the day in order to have a much more satisfying dinner together at the end of our work day.

Since this is the first post in this series, we will have to wait and see how my weight and body fat are affected by the change in my diet since last month. I expect my weight to hold steady at around 150.0 lbs, but only time will tell. At least I am sleeping better now knowing that my meals contain some substance.

Speaking of substance, I am taking a tray of our desserts from our free day into work tomorrow at the request of my co-workers. I am such a bad influence, but perhaps they will be inspired to follow the Save Your Sweat diet too and be able to join in our next free day celebration.

This post was recently featured in the Total Mind And Body Fitness Blog Carnival #88, hosted by FitBuff.com along with a number of other great self improvement articles! Drop by the carnival and check out all the great advice!

Technorati Tags: 30 Day Weight Loss Diet, Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet, 800 Calorie Limit, Healthy Meals, Weight Loss, Food, Personal Development

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 10:22 pm and is filed under 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet 1, 30 Day Weight Loss Diets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet 1: Day 1”

FitBuff.com's Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog on February 9th, 2009 12:38 pm

Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog Carnival 88…

Monday is Blog Carnivals Day. A Blog Carnival is basically a collection of articles or blog posts, all relating to a similar subject, that are gathered together for your viewing pleasure. You can quickly and conveniently see a list of Article Titles a…

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