Food Diary 2010 Style

I (like most normal people I know) despise tracking everything I eat everyday, so I normally just guess at my caloric intake. Unfortunately, I suck at getting it close to correct, so we have started tracking our food. Since we are paying for the nutrition component of this program we get to use this cool program called Vitabot. It is an internet based vitamin and calorie tracker and it is pretty cool. If I need more of something in my diet (say Potassium for example) it will make suggestions of what I should eat. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a way to just buy access to their internet based program, seems they only sell it to nutritionists and personal trainers. I'll keep on my quest though and maybe I can find it before the 6 weeks is over. So, yesterday Garrett and I both tracked our meals. It is damn hard for me to eat the 2064-2264 calories they are recommending I eat.The number is so high since I am still breastfeeding Max. (They want Garrett to eat 2900, so at least I'm not in his shoes.) As long as I keep losing weight, I'm not going to fight them on that, but it is very difficult to eat that much since normally I eat somewhere between 1500 - 1800. In any case, we will see how much weight we drop this week while adhering to this caloric intake and tracking what we eat. There is a screenshot of my day yesterday below. On the report card the 'up' arrows mean I got too much of something and the 'down' arrows mean I should have gotten more. As you can see I completely scrambled at the end to squeeze in calories, but at least I didn't go grab Taco Bell to do the trick!

Nutrition

Just a quick note, we are doing the main workouts on MWF, so the other days are off days for structured workouts. On those days we are supposed to do 30 minute brisk walks, so that's what we did today. Both Garrett and I are sore in our legs from all the various squats from Monday, so the walk helped out with that a bit.

Now that that is out of the way, we talked to the nutritionist today and should have our meal plans all set up by tomorrow night. Really excited about this aspect since I feel that I eat fairly healthy, but Garrett could use some help. No real fault of his own due to his insane working schedule, but if the nutrition guy can teach Garrett how to eat well regardless of his schedule, that will be a great thing.

What I'm not too excited about is that we are going to have to pay to get this service. Don't get me wrong, I am fine with paying for people who are working hard to help me, but I was under the impression that this contest wasn't going to cost me any money. Now granted, we could forgo this aspect and not have to pay anything, but I don't feel that we would get as much out of this experience if we did. I just don't like being surprised with additional costs. Everyone else involved is either volunteering their time or being paid by the church, but I guess that deal just didn't work for the amount of work this guy will supposedly be doing for us. Presumably we will be talking with this guy several times a day, have personalized meal plans, and will be going shopping with us for food. We'll see how it all works out. If we can learn how to eat better and afford to do that, it will be worth the money. I'll update you more tomorrow about how all the meal plans work out.

** Update - The trainers emailed everyone to let them know that purchasing the nutrition plan wasn't mandatory, so I must not have been the only person who was 'confused' by this.