Greg's Running Blog

Today I had some more steak for lunch and chicken for dinner. The sides were the usual rice,broccoli,veggie mix. Thanks to the generous amounts of meat I devoured I managed to peg the calorie count at 2006 calories. I was going to eat leftover steak tonight but instead I had the grilled chicken so I could keep fat down for the day by eating the leaner meat. I guess I’ll have to eat some more prime filet mignon tomorrow. What a horrible world I live in having to eat $30/lbs steak three times a week. It does help that I only eat 4.5-5 oz of it at a time. I think I’ll be eating ground beef the rest of the week though.

Today I ate out at Panera Bread for lunch and had Prime Filet at home for dinner. These two things really did me in on the saturated fat and Panera killed me on sodium. I’m ready to feel the water retention come tomorrow. Other than this, nothing to report.

Today we celebrated my son’s 5th birthday at one of those jumping house places. It was a pretty good party, the kids really seemed to have enjoyed it. I had my normal breakfast but I forgot to eat my fruit due to being in a rush. Then for snack I ate a slice of cheese pizza at the party which is a far cry from my routine fruit or power bar. So two fruits down by lunch I ate some clementines after lunch to make up for the fruit deficit.

Lunch contained my very tasty salmon, brown rice, broccoli and a new veggie mix with carrots corn and asparagus. It was quite good and very filling. For afternoon snack I kept it simple with the 50g of whey protein.

Then dinner kicked in and we decided to go out. We really like Red Hot & Blue, a Memphis style barbecue joint which is great because it’s a place where you can eat BBQ without country music. I usually order pulled pork and ribs as well as a side of potato salad and fries or fried okra. Total damage is probably 1500 calories for the whole meal. Not today though. I have tried to look up their nutrition guide on-line and I managed to find it but it’s pretty sparse. For one, it does not include the amount of protein in each meal, only fat, saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, carbohydrate and fiber. It does not list sugars or any of the vitamins either. It also misses my other favorite, turkey sandwich from the nutrition list so I didn’t order that one either. The turkey sandwich usually comes with a side of mayo which I don’t eat but I wouldn’t be sure if it’d be included in the total or not anyway.

I ended up ordering a pulled pork sandwich Memphis style which means it comes with coleslaw on the sandwich. For the side I gave up on the potato salad (510 calories) and ordered a side of green beans instead (43 calories). This way I managed to still get a good and tasty meal for around 500 calories. The only negative was the saturated fat content which along with my morning sausage put me over the 9% saturated fat per day limit.

Once I got home I was really close to eating some chocolate, something I haven’t done in 3 weeks. But instead I just closed down my daily calorie count and locked it in. No chocolate tonight. Maybe some other time. My wife thinks I’m going to go crazy by not eating any chocolate but every time I remind myself that the single serving of chocolate I’m about to consume will cost me 20 minutes on the elliptical I get disgusted and give up on the chocolate. The half a bar of Toblerone in my nightstand will probably not get eaten in a while….

I think my food intake is really getting down to a pretty basic system now. Here is the lowdown:

Breakfast (~500 calories):

• Either 3-6 slices of bacon or 3 sausages
• Either 6oz plain yogurt (preferably non-fat) and 0.5oz nuts (almonds, cashews) or 2 eggs
• 1 medium to large fruit
• If I really feel like it I might eat a slice of whole grain toast

Snack 1 (150-200 calories):

• Either a power bar with minimum 15g of protein or a large fruit

Lunch (~500 calories):

• Some kind of meat, 4-6 oz. Steak, lean ground beef, fish (halibut, salmon), turkey, chicken breast
• 1 cup brown rice
• 1-2 cups of broccoli or cauliflower
• 0.75 cup peas,beans,corn or a mix of them

Snack 2 (220 calories):

• 50g whey protein

Dinner (~500 calories):

• Same as Lunch

This pretty much gives me around 1800 to 2000 calories a day with a good distribution of fat, carbohydrate and protein. The only curve balls are when I’m forced to eat out either by the family or by work. I’m trying to manage those too and I think I’m doing OK on that front as well. I could barely finish tonight’s dinner which included 1 cup cauliflower, 1 cup broccoli, 0.75 cup of corn, green pea and green bean mix, 5 oz of turkey breast and 1 cup of brown rice. This is the second night this week when I’m having trouble eating everything that is in front of me. I’m pretty happy with my meal plan, it really fills me up and I have no real cravings. Tomorrow is my son’s birthday so I might have to eat some cake and pizza at his party but I’ll try to get out of it.

I have grilled salmon for the first time in my life. It turned out really nice, me and my daughter loved it. My wife wasn’t that impressed but I think she just doesn’t like grilled fish. She’d eat fried tilapia any day but she wasn’t a fan of the grilled salmon or the halibut the other day either. Maybe it’s the seasoning I put on it, it’s lemon pepper, I don’t know. Bottom line, I liked it and I better because I have two more portions for tomorrow so I’ll be eating salmon for lunch and dinner it seems, which is fine by me.

On a side note, my grill ran out of gas. I think I have used the thing more in the past 3 weeks than I have used it in the past year. I really enjoy the grilled stuff and it’s so easy to make. Side seems to be the standard of one cup brown rice and 1.5 to 2 cups of steamed vegetables of some sort. I just make up a whole big batch of rice for a couple of days, steaming the frozen vegetables takes about 3 minutes so I can whip together dinner ina bout 15 minutes. There is just no excuse not to do it this way.

The only think that I got red marks according to myfooddiary.com was cholesterol. As soon as you eat two eggs for breakfast there is just no way to stay under the daily limit. But everything else seem to be good as far as nutrition goes. It really showed that instead of some sort of protein source for my morning snack I just had a pear. It dropped my protein to 30% for the day but it upped my fiber by a good amount which I’m happy about. I managed to keep my sodium under control as well.

Today I ate pretty well. For lunch I bought my first ever Kentucky Grilled Chicken Breast. It was alright. I was kind of surprised to find the breast on the bone but I managed to get it off as well as discarded all the skin as I don’t like the skin too much.

For dinner I made quarter pound burgers from 93/7 lean beef, Worcestershire sauce, one egg and a bit of bread crumbs and used two portabella mushrooms as a bun, Biggest Loser style. I added tomatoes, lettuce and mustard as fixin’. I figured I could eat two whole hamburgers this way but I choked after one and a half. I just could not eat any more food. It is kind of weird to only eat 1800 calories a day yet feel like you’re completely stuffed. I clearly have been eating junk before. Another thing I just noticed is that writing these entries every night helps me with not even thinking about eating more food after dinner. Once I upload the post I’m done for the day, there is no way I’d modify the entry afterward and add more food to it.

Today was another day of eating out. We celebrated a co-worker’s birthday at lunch at On The Border and at night we partook in my son’s soccer team’s pizza party. Neither of these activities are good for my changed diet. At On The Border I managed to eat their Jalapeno BBQ Salmon with beans and steamed veggies. This meal was prety tasty to be honest. The hardest part was not to touch the chips and salsa while waiting. BTW a brownie sundae with vanilla ice cream clocks in at 1300 calories at On The Border!

For dinner I ate two slices of Little Caesar cheese pizza. My calories came in at 1869 which is pretty good with these two meals in there. I guess you can pig out as long as you do it in moderation. However, my saturated fats and sodium were through the roof again. Tomorrow I should do better, there are no more excuses, no more eating out this week.

Today I had lunch at McDonald’s. I ate a McChicken and a side salad. I used to eat a McDouble to go along with my value meal but today I cut it out. McDouble has trans fat in it besides the fact that it’s more calories than the McChicken. I also bought one of the fruit parfaits and ate it for the afternoon snack. That thing is heavy on the sugars though so I’m not sure if I’ll buy more of those. I’m still struggling with sodium. Eating smoked turkey from the local BBQ place is really not healthy. That stuff is loaded with sodium you just don’t know it. However, as soon as you start paying attention you can really taste just how salty that stuff is. Same goes for the one cup of egg drop soup that I have devoured at dinner. Throw in our good friend Uncle Ben and his “healthy” whole grain rice medley and you got yourself a meal that is over the daily sodium limit in itself. Not a good combo. I most definitely have to cut out this stuff if I want to go healthy about the food.

Today I ate a crème brûlée for my afternoon dessert with a bunch of saturated fat, but other than that I think the food was pretty harmless. Eating 275 calorie snacks really does a number on your daily calories though. Tomorrow I’ll start cutting back again on my intake a bit, although I’m excercising like crazy so having some food is certainly a good thing.

Today was tough. I “had” to eat my leftover Pei Wei Pad Thai for lunch, then I “had” to eat a cupcake for afternoon snack when we went to a birthday party with my son in the afternoon and I “had” to eat salad, bread and half a meal at the Olive Garden for dinner when we went out. My total calorie intake was a bit more than I wanted it to be but the real killer is the sodium in all this restaurant food that I’ve been eating. Today’s total was over 7000mg! It causes me to retain more water and makes my weight go up. I have gained 0.5 kg (1lbs) in the past 3 days and I’m sure it’s water as given what I eat and what I exercise it cannot be anything else. I hope it’ll go back down once I reduce my sodium again.