Wellness Warriors: Week 5

We are already on week 5 and I can't believe it!  Many of the group members have already seen totally awesome results.  I on the other hand  have not.

So that has left me wondering what I'm doing wrong.  After careful examination I believe the issue is my eating.  My first challenge to myself is to give up my night snack.  This snack was started last April in an effort to rein in my morning numbers while pregnant.  It did the trick, as they came down and things were great while pregnant.

But the season for the night time snack is over.  During our session on Monday Chantel said you will be hungry at some point.  It is part of loosing weight.  Your body is communicating that it is switching to burning the fat, since it doesn't have any current fuel to use.  She said "I'd rather be hungry while sleeping, wouldn't you?"  Of course that made total sense.  I already knew that the night time snack really needed to go.  After working so hard to develop the habit, it just seemed kind of funny I needed to work on stopping.  Know what I mean?

So this week my focus has been to stop it.  Monday after the meeting I was sitting in the living room with a bowl of fruit.  I was telling William how I thought I needed to give up my night time snack.  He candidly pointed out the fruit in my hands...and it was enough of a reality check that I haven't had a nighttime snack since.  (That would be 2 nights...for those checking calendars! ;-))  I'm pretty proud of that. 

Other things we talked about were healthy dinners.  I actually believe that our dinners aren't really that bad because I've been working on them for so long.  But even healthy meals have calories and you can still eat too much.  ;-)  So I've been working on reducing the caloric intake.  The biggest things I look at are a) are there plenty of veggies (calories in veggies go a lot further!) and b) are there many carbs?  If so what kind?  Complex carbs aren't as easily digested and go through your digestive track.  This means for those with diabetes, that it doesn't affect your blood sugar as much as a simple carb.  So any carbs we have, we really need them to be complex for the sake of William's health.  AND - we can't really have too many.

You won't see any white potatoes at my house! ;-)

I also rarely cook pasta dishes, white rice any kind of chips and such.  (I've found brown rice doesn't affect William too much.)  These were all things that would send my blood sugar through the roof.  I am actually thankful for the "trials" I went through with gestational diabetes, because it really taught me a lot about how it works.  It was way better than trying to get second hand information from my dear husband.  (Anyone who is a wife will know what I'm talking about! :-P)  It has equipped me with some important knowledge to be able to help guide William through his diabetes struggles.

There is also one more thought we discussed that I wanted to mention.  The idea of cheating.  Claiming some foods as bad and labeling them as cheating is a dangerous road to head down.  The problem is the guilt that follows with eating one of these labeled foods.  Because once you cheat - why not cheat again?  There is that guilty feeling already there - and so a little more guilt piled one all feels the same after awhile.  However, if there is no cheating...and you learn to eat the less healthy food in moderation (i.e. instead of eating 10 cookies because you already ate one, eat 1 cookie and be OK with it) you'll be much happier in the long run and have the tools to live in a healthy fashion.

So no cheating. ;-)  No really...no such thing!

This week's assignment, by the way, is to eat a healthy 350-calorie range dinner.  My biggest struggle is calculating my dinner calories.  It is fine if I measure out items from packages.  But what about all the fresh foods I cook with?  (I try to use fresh as much as possible.)  How do I calculate those?  I need to figure that out.  And find the gumption.  A lot of my cookbooks have calorie averages for the recipes - so that is at least a starting place! 

For the next meeting we are to weigh ourselves again.  I'm hoping I've actually dropped some pounds (I'll even take pounD) and plan on weighing myself on Sat.  Of course, I'll update my grand total so far. ;-)