Tired of Weighting Around...

I have to admit, I've had a little trouble with those last few pregnancy pounds. They really like me and want to stay. I really want them to go. I've told them this several times, in between bites of the Chocolate Chip pie I so recently blogged about.

Then I realized I was talking to my extra pounds. So I said to myself, "Self, you must stop this. You must make a plan of attack." So I sat down to do just that. To aid in my attack-planning I popped a bag of Orville Redenbockers (sp?) Ultimate Butter Popcorn, because anyone who has ever done any decent attack planning knows you must have snacks, and the word "snacks" does not incorporate the healthy, unbuttered, mini bags of popcorn that masquerade as such in the junk food aisle. But I digress...

So aided by my popcorn, and a Mason jar of ice-cold Mountain Dew (my inner dental hygeniest cringes at that, I'll admit), I set out to plan my attack.

Before I divulge said plan of attack let me just clarify that my motive for weight loss has less to do with vanity and more to do with being comfortable. The bottom line is, I want to be able to fit into all my old clothes. By "fit" I do not mean suck in until everything is buttoned and zipped and then pray it holds. I long ago came to terms with the hard fact that having babies changes your body and I am probably never going to fit into a size 2 like I did in high school. I'm okay with that. My husband is okay with that.

So my motive is not to look like a supermodel. And let me just add here that the so called super models hold us to completely unrealistic expectations. Kate Moss recently came under fire from some health organizations for revealing that one of her favorite diet mantras is , "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". She apparently has never had my grandmother's Hundred Dollar Cake. Her loss. (literally).

I keep going off on tangents.

First I thought about doing the Soup Diet. This is a plan where you make a vegetable soup, and pretty much eat it for seven days. With fresh fruit added certain days, salad on certain days, etc. That looked good at first, I like soup. Till I looked at the recipe. It has cabbage in it. I don't like cabbage. Or mushrooms. And where are the potatoes?! No potatoes...

That's stupid.

Then I considered the Atkins diet, which my father had a brief (albeit successful) encounter with some years back. I remembered him eating lots of bacon. I like bacon. I like to fry it and crumble it up on my baked potato...oh, but wait, you can't have potatoes. Or pasta. Or bread. For crying out loud, what are you supposed to eat? Can a girl live without potatoes?!

So finally I decided to simply limit my caloric intake. I decided to measure all my food (for a day) and record the calories in it, and try not to go over a certain number. I decided that number should be 1200.

Why 1200? I really don't know. I just picked it. A friend later informed me that 1200 calories isn't even enough to really keep your basic metabolic functions going properly. I didn't know. I'm an idiot. (nutritionally speaking).

So for breakfast the next day I got out my pen and paper. My granola bar was 160 calories. My coffee was 4. The caramel flavored creamer was 30, but I wasn't giving that up! So far, so good.

Lunch was a can of tuna fish (100) with crackers (105) and diet pepsi (0).

For a snack I had more coffee with creamer (34) and a 100 calorie snack pack of cookies. (100!)

Dinner got a little more challenging. I was running low on groceries, and had decided to go the easy route that day, and have some popcorn shrimp and fix a box of macaroni and cheese. The shrimp wasn't too bad, 210 calories for 15 shrimp. But the macaroni was like 380 calories in 3/4 a cup or something ridiculous like that.

3/4 of a cup is just enough to make me mad.

So I made the mac' n'cheese for Kenneth (who can lose weight with annoying ease thanks to his stupid male metabolism) and Bella, and I made one of those Birdseye Steamfresh bags of rice and vegetables that you cook in the microwave. 190 calories per cup. So I had 10 shrimp, and 2 cups of rice, and drank water. The rice and veggies were actually really yummy!

For a snack before bed, I had a cup of Special K cereal (dry), and ended up with like 27 calories left.

It was very educational. For example, did you know that for 2 calories you can have 8 fluid ounces of coffee (wonderful, marvelous, aromatic, caffeinated coffee!), or one measly tic-tac. Or that there are more calories in two tablespoons of peanut butter than a whole can of tuna? I learned a lot.

I went to bed a little hungry.