Losing Weight and Feeling Great

‘dieting’

Keeping this blog and website certainly helps motivate me to not stray too far off my diet.  Still, there are days where it’s not enough.  There are days where I need a little extra help to keep on eating healthy.

Sometimes I get frustrated because my sciatica keeps me from doing any kind of cardio.  On a bad day, I can’t walk at all without pain.  On a good day I can walk a mile…if I do it slowly and carefully, and on a level ground.  Most days are somewhere between the two.  Because of this, my weight loss is pretty well slowed down.

Anyway, the point of all this is that a friend of mine, Lynn, told me about a website that is motivational, and helps you track your weight loss and fitness goals.  It’s for you if you just want to maintain your weight…and if you want to lose 100 or more pounds.

I’ve already been inspired by a lady named Annie, who has lost almost 400 pounds!  I’ll be doing an interview with her soon, and will let you know when it’s ready.

So what’s this place?  Called SparkPeople, it’s free.  If you want to take a look, here’s my profile page as an example.

If you decide to join, let me know so I can add you to my friends list!

Do you ever have bad days where your motivation and willpower are nil?  Where you don’t particularly care if you eat what you shouldn’t?

I had a day like that last week.  I had to deal with frustrating clients at work, which drained me emotionally.  I was tired from working overtime.  I didn’t want to bother with cooking.

So when David made the suggestion that we go to the nearby Burger King for a quick dinner, I said “ok”.  I knew it wasn’t a good choice, but I was too tired to care.

I’m actually glad I did, because it was an eye-opener.

Trying to be at least semi-good, we both ordered a chicken sandwich.  David added fries to his.  Instead of my normal water or diet soda I chose a small vanilla shake; David had a medium. When
our food was ready, we took the tray to a table and sorted the food.

Hmmm, there was a nutritional chart as the placemat on the tray, so I
started taking a look at it. Calories, carbs, fats, proteins — all
there in black and white.  Yikes!  What were we eating, anyway?

I started calling off some of the calories and fats to David as we ate.  Some of the burgers topped 1,000 calories all by themselves.  The fries had trans-fat.  Even our chicken sandwich had lots of fat, courtesy of the sauce and mayo.

(Actually the small vanilla shake was about the best choice of what we ordered, which says something about the overall health quality of the food.)

So David asked, “You mean to tell me that one meal could
use up almost all the calories I’m supposed to eat in a day?”

Yep, it’s true. For one of the king-size value meals with a regular soda, it could top 2,000 calories.  Even a whopper junior medium value meal with a soda was well on its way to 800.

Neither one of us finished our meal.