The Ball & Chain is winning... for now

You may remember that last week I decided to try tracking what I eat just for calories and serving sizes if available. (You can read the blog here if you missed it - "Ball & Chain or Realisitc Challenege") Well the "Ball & Chain" is definitely winning. I wrote down Monday - Thursday breakfast last week, however, didn't really write in the #'s. There are a couple like 75 calories per hard boiled egg, however, I really didn't do a very good job. The difficulty is I don't want to look up all the calorie amounts and so forth. I also struggle when it is something homemade, how do you know what you ate calorie wise? I know you can add up all the ingredients and then divide it roughly by how many servings it makes - but that is sooo much work! Okay I'm making excuses I know, but it's the honest reason I am not doing this.

A good friend of mine, the same one that pushes my butt down in the gym Monday-thursday, which by the way we had a AWESOME workout today! I feel great afterwards, challenging, yet rewarding when finished, I liked it! Anyway, this friend told me about the DailyPlate on the livestrong website. If you haven't checked it out yet you really should it is actually a really cool website. (Click here to go to the LiveStrong DailyPlate) At first I was having a hard time finding the cottage cheese that I use, but if you type in the brand name, and then click on it when the results apear, it will give you all the liste types for that brand - pretty cool! Oh did I mention that you put in your information at the beginning, age, sex, height, weight, what your goal is (PS - one of the options is gain 2lbs a week here - I would like to meet the person, especially female that this is their goal!) and your daily activity level (excluding exercise) and it calculates the max amount of calories you are allowed to have - AWESOME! Apparently my target # is 1780 calories per day max. Wow thinking about what I use to eat, the 3000-3500 (read here about it - Behind theIssue(s)) that's soo little, but compared to what I did then and now I think that is probably right, I just have to readjust my thinking of what is "normal". We'll see how it goes.

So here is the plan, I am going to give the DailyPlate on LiveStrong a try this week and see how things go. So far today I have eaten 688 calories and burned 326 calories (granted the crunches aren't factored in because I can't figure out how to get them added in). I'm okay with today so far, could do better always though!!

I'll let you know next week how the DailyPlate goes!