My new doctor has me keeping a food and exercise diary for a couple of weeks. I’m not new to the food diary, given my dedication to calorie counting a few years ago, but I haven’t written down my diet for quite some time. Of course, writing it down I notice that I really need to drink more water, and I could lay off the coffee, but I know these things anyway.
The first week of the diary, I was coming off the flu, and was pretty much eating what I thought would stay in my stomach. I am a weird case, in that when I am sick, I do best with greasy food and tomato based foods. High acid, high grease. I can keep it down. Bland? I will barf up jello and mashed potatoes so fast it would make Linda Blair’s head spin.
I only count actual intended exercise for calories burned. Although, since we worked non-stop on the house Sunday, I counted calories for that extended pace (using an activity calculator under the heading of “packing/moving.”)
In case anyone is interested, if I were a Great White Shark and you caught me, following would be the contents of my stomach for the past week:
Those are my logs. You’ll see calories in and out, and see about where I fall on the average day.
My eating philosophy is this: I make an intentional effort to eat fewer than 1600 calories Monday through Thursday. I can eat whatever I want on Friday, and then I strive to maintain balance over the weekend, but I don’t sweat it.
Because I felt bad last week, my caloric intake was much lower than normal, and I wasn’t cooking at home much. This week’s diary should look different, including homecooked dinners, instead of Babe’s (best chicken fried steak in the world!), Olive Garden (love the chicken parm, but who knew it was over a thousand calories per serving?!), and 7 Salsas.
Anyway, I’ve been saying that I don’t eat enough calories to maintain my weight, and feel like I am not absorbing proper nutrients from my diet. Hopefully, between the food diary, the new doctor, and the endocscopy/colonoscopy I have coming up next week, I’ll find out what I need to do to make my metabolism work.
The Outside Lane 