30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet 2: Day 6

April 10, 2009 by Trevor Watkinson · No Comments »»

Each day of this second 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet of the year seems to be presenting its own little challenges for me to overcome.

I got a little frantic when supper time rolled around tonight because I discovered that we were out of fresh salad ingredients, all the stores were closed and I had no idea how I was going to fill up my plate or maintain the usual volume in my meals.

I like having a big salad so much that I can put it on my plate each day and never get tired of eating the same old thing. Sure, I will switch up the kind of dressing I use once in a while. Maybe I will even go out on a limb and try a new type of cheese on my salad, but I never get tired of having it on my plate.

I never really modify the main salad ingredients either. I am not a big fan of spinach, though I will eat it if it is mixed in with other ingredients and broken down into small pieces. I find that spinach has a rubbery texture that does not agree with me and I absolutely hate trying to stuff full-sized spinach leaves into my mouth.

If you are going to put spinach in a salad, it should be broken down into bite-sized pieces. It should never be left whole with the stems still attached too. Leaving the spinach leaves whole makes them really hard to manage and usually makes me end up spreading salad dressing on my face.

I much prefer to just use iceberg lettuce in my salads because it can be broken up so easily. I never leave any big pieces of iceberg lettuce in my salads either though. If a piece cannot fit into my mouth whole, then I tear it up. I also do enjoy having romaine in my salads, as long as it has been cut or torn to the appropriate size. Romaine does not have the same offensive texture that spinach has.

Running out of salad ingredients and not even having a pre-bagged salad to eat presented quite the volume problem for me (or at least I thought it did). One of the reasons I get so full when I eat my healthy meals is that I have a lot of volume with which to fill up my stomach when I eat a big fresh salad. We did not have anything in our home that I could replace the salad with, so I naturally assumed that I would walk away from the table hungry.

I know that I had mentioned in a previous post that I had been getting over-full due to the size of my meals. It was not the lack of volume that was bothering me in terms of my hunger, but the lack of choice I think. It may not have been the fact that we were out of salad that was bothering me, but the fact that I was forced to go without it rather than freely choosing not to have it.

Regardless, I ended up being happy with my meal despite the fact that I had to find a new way to make my meal appear abundant for the camera. I really am a creature of habit though. I get used to having all of my food items set out a certain way and I get grumpy if things get all changed around on me. It was not until after supper was over tonight that I realized I had been so totally wrong about not getting full without my tossed salad. Here is a picture of the meal I ate tonight:

Homemade Vegetable Soup with Knorr OXO Beef Bouillon, Quaker Original Rice Cakes, Kraft Reduced Fat Smooth Peanut Butter, Eggs, Tuna with Miracle Whip & Hot Sauce & Chopped Onion, Cucumber, Green Pepper, Tomato, Mushrooms, Dill Pickles, Olives, Green Seedless Grapes, Blood Orange, Choco Cherry Wagon Wheel

Just so you know that I was not eating a bunch of dirty stuff tonight, the black specks on my eggs and vegetables is pepper, okay? I needed to do something different because I did not have my usual helping of salad dressing to flavour my vegetables with.

I did not notice this until I went to write this post tonight and edit the pictures I was going to include, but I find now that my tuna mixture looks a little bland. The last time I had a tuna mix like this, I put some chopped up banana peppers in it and they made it a little more appealing because of the colour. I do not think I will be leaving them out of the mix again.

In the picture above, we have 2 cups of Homemade Vegetable Soup with Knorr OXO Beef Bouillon, 3 Quaker Original Rice Cakes, 3 Tablespoons of Kraft Reduced Fat Smooth Peanut Butter, 3 Eggs, one can of Tuna with Miracle Whip & Hot Sauce & Chopped Onion, Cucumber, Green Pepper, Tomato, Mushrooms, Dill Pickles, Olives, Green Seedless Grapes, a Blood Orange and a Choco Cherry Wagon Wheel.

The next time I take a picture of one of my meals with a Wagon Wheel included, I will most likely place something white underneath it so that it will show up better in the picture. It almost completely blends into the colour of our dining room table here. You might not even see the Wagon Wheel if not for the packaging surrounding it.

The calorie content contained within the meal in the picture above is as follows:

2 cups of Homemade Vegetable Soup – zero calories. We have this same kind of soup every day. It is made with only water and bouillon for a base, so it is considered calorie-free.
3 Quaker plain rice cakes – 105 calories
3 Tablespoons of Kraft Reduced Fat Smooth Peanut Butter – 240 calories
3 Eggs – 225 calories
1 can of Tuna with 3 Tablespoons of Miracle Whip & 1 Tablespoon of Hot Sauce & ½ of a Chopped Onion – 240 calories
Cucumber, Green Pepper, Tomatoes, Mushrooms, Dill Pickles, Olives, Green Seedless Grapes and Blood Orange – zero calories. All these fruits and vegetables are free foods. We do not count their calories.
1 Choco Cherry Wagon Wheel – see below

The total calorie content associated with the meal pictured above while not including the Choco Cherry Wagon Wheel is 810 calories, with most of the calories other than the meat coming from the eggs and peanut butter. I was surprised to see how quickly I could push up my calorie total with just the addition of an extra rice cake with peanut butter and one egg.

The lack of volume with my meal tonight due to the absence of tossed salad from my plate did not affect the way I felt once I was finished eating. I thought that I would have a difficult time feeling full because I had no side dish to round my plate out with. I was totally wrong. I was absolutely stuffed after I finished my meal tonight.

I had the same problem I usually do where I do not have the slightest bit of interest in having a coffee because I feel so bloated from my meal. It is hard to understand how this is possible when I ate less in terms of total volume tonight than I usually do. I guess if you keep your total calorie intake the same, then you are bound to feel just as full. I would have thought that volume differences would have a greater effect on my total satisfaction.

In order to finish off my meal and bring my satisfaction level up to its maximum point, I decided to try a new dessert tonight. I mentioned in an earlier post in this series that I had bought three different types of Wagon Wheel desserts during my last grocery trip. I was really disappointed with the size of the Wagon Wheels I bought.

I remembered them being much bigger than they are now. You can click the link above to go to day 3 of this series where I included a size-comparison picture of a Wagon Wheel and a Canadian Twoonie. Here is a picture of the Wagon Wheel type dessert I had tonight:

Choco Cherry Wagon Wheels

This is the second type of Wagon Wheel dessert I have tried during this second 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet of the year. The other kind that I tried on day 3 of this diet was the Raspberry Wagon Wheels. The Raspberry ones were good, but I could not really taste the flavour of the raspberry filling.

These Choco Cherry Wagon Wheels are delicious. The cherry jam filling they contain has a really strong flavour that I find compliments the chocolate flavour very nicely. I tried to take small bites of this dessert but ended up piling it into my mouth and savouring the flavour. Here is a picture of the calorie content for Choco Cherry Wagon Wheels:

Choco Cherry Wagon Wheels Nutritional Information

The 160 calories from the Choco Cherry Wagon Wheel I had for my dessert tonight brought my total calorie intake for the day up to 970 calories. I figured that in order to average out to 1000 calories per day for this entire 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet, I would have to have some days where I was under as well as over the 1000 calorie limit. I made today one of the under days since I had been above for the preceding few days.

It really is tough to get your head around there being between 150 to 170 calories in these puny little Wagon Wheel desserts. I urge you to check out my post from day 3 of this series if you have not already done so, just so you can get a look at how these Wagon Wheels desserts compare in size to a Twoonie. That is a lot of calories for something so small.

Weight and Body Fat

I got a little psychological boost when I stepped onto the scale today. I found that my weight had taken a bit of a nose dive. This was nice to see after having gained some weight the other day. My Salter body fat percentage scale showed me weighing in at 151.6 lbs today, making for a drop of 0.6 lbs since yesterday. I am still not back down under 150.0 lbs like I was before my last free day, but I expect to get back there soon.

My body fat percentage reading showed 20.6% this morning, which was down from 20.8% the day before. This number will soon be back down under the 20.0% mark where it was before our Nachos and Chili free day on April 4, 2009.

One of the things I found during my first 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet of the year was that my weight stayed incredibly stable for the entire 30 day period. It may end up that I stay at around 151.0 lbs for the duration of this 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet. My lowest weights of the year have come when I have been conducting my 30 day substandard diets.

Summary

It was a nice thing for me to discover that I could get the same satisfaction from a meal that was made without a tossed salad included for volume. There had been a few times in the past where Lyann and I would cut up some fresh veggies and just have them with a dip rather than having salad, but those meals always seemed a bit too light to me.

That may have been due to following a different set of rules though. Back then, I was following an 800 calorie per day intake limit as opposed to the 1000 calories per day I am allowing myself now. You would not think that 200 calories would make that much difference in how full you feel but I can testify to the effect.

I just hope that I do not get so used to having 1000 calories per day that my body adjusts and learns to just feel satisfied that way. It may be that 1000 calories feels like so much to me just because I spent so long at the 800 calorie per day level.

I have no idea how so many people go out and eat the super-sized portions available in restaurants these days. I doubt that I would be able to make my way through any of the entrees offered at casual-fine dining establishments around Halifax or elsewhere. If Lyann and I ever decide to go to a restaurant for our free day celebration we will probably end up splitting our dessert because we are so stuffed.

The key to teaching your body to want to eat less is to force it to eat less for a period of time. We started our business over two years ago when I wrote my quick weight loss ebook and have been eating less than 800 calories per day ever since. Only 12 weeks are needed to get you to the point where you will never want to go back to eating jumbo portions of food again. Take it one day at a time and you can train your body to get by on much less than the marketers of the world would have you believe you need.

Technorati Tags: 30 Day Weight Loss Diet, Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet, 1000 Calorie Limit, Healthy Meals, Weight Loss, Food, Personal Development

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 3:13 pm and is filed under 30 Day Healthy Meals Weight Loss Diet 2, 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.

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