Tag Archives: food

Bad Sleep = Bad Decisions

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For me, there’s nothing worse than a bad night’s sleep.

You wake up 20 times in the middle of the night and shift around in bed, hoping to find a position that will keep you stationary for more than a half hour. Your alarm goes off and you want to chuck it against the wall, but it’s OK because you have a couple backup clocks in your nightstand. While lying in bed, you think of all the possible lies you can say to your boss for not going to work. You decide it’s not worth missing work, so you get up and almost fall over because you are so tired. You basically just stand in the shower and let the water hit you while you think of how you can nap while standing up. Conveniently, your commute especially sucks today, so you arrive to work pissed off, and of course you proceed to have a bad day at work because a client is super annoying, or a customer yells at you, or your boss finds multiple ways to criticize you. You come home and your head finally hits the pillow, where you proceed to have a great night’s sleep. It’s a brutal, vicious cycle.

Today, I have not had one of those drastic bad sleep days, but I definitely did not get good sleep. Bad sleep can really mess up your weight loss plans. On bad sleep days, I don’t really look forward to working out later that evening, because all I want to do is sleep when I get home. I also dread the 30 minutes that I have to put in toward exercise…I wish I could just do 5 minutes and get the benefits of a 30-minute workout. On good sleep days, I feel a lot more energized and psyched up for workouts, and I feel like I can go for 45 minutes or longer, even if the workout itself is particularly exhausting. On bad sleep days, I don’t really feel like cooking anything for dinner because of my tiredness, so I just want to get something fast and easy. Unfortunately, food that is fast and easy is generally super fattening. On good sleep days, I can cook a Thanksgiving turkey with all the fixins. Bad sleep can also be a huge downer for your psychological health. You just feel more rundown, depressed, blue, angry, and frustrated.

However, I have generally found that exercise and eating healthy during the bad sleep day remedy the harmful effects of a bad night’s sleep. As much as I don’t want to do that 30-minute workout or eat a healthy, home-cooked meal, I’m usually glad that I did those things, because I become alert, refreshed, and generally happy. If I have a bad night’s sleep, but I eat a healthy breakfast and lunch or find some sort of activity to do in the morning or at lunch, then I usually get lifted out of the doldrums of bad sleep and proceed to have a great day and night. Granted, this can be a very hard thing to convince yourself to do, and exercise can be particularly tough when not fully rested…but sometimes you have to silence your own negative thoughts, and if you can win the psychological battle, then you can usually win the physical battle too.

As of this afternoon, I’m winning the psychological battle, so tonight’s schedule of a healthy dinner followed by exercise doesn’t look so daunting at the moment.

Weigh-In Day #1: That Was a Close Call

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In the words of the immortal Johnny Drama…Victory!

I was a little nervous about this morning’s weigh-in, because I did a stupid thing and checked my weight last night. Whoo boy, that was not good. It was basically the same weight as last week. I was flabbergasted…I ate under my points target the entire week, I worked out 6 out of 7 days, and I didn’t lose?

But this is why I need to weigh myself at the same time every week. The morning came, and all was right in the world…I was down 3.9 lbs. to be at a weight of 301.3 lbs. Good thing too…I probably would have gathered all the fat people in the world and started an uprising against God to demand an answer to why I didn’t lose any weight. I’m glad it didn’t come to that.

I had a little mini-celebration by going to the British Beer Company for dinner with the wifey. I ate less than I normally do there, but it was a lot compared to my dinners over the past couple weeks, and I felt so full that my stomach almost went Boom Boom Pow. It’s OK though…I needed some sort of mini-reward. Besides, I basically ate a cardboard sandwich for lunch.

My friend Rich sent me a great link to the Couch-to-5K Running Plan at the Cool Running website. This is exactly the plan that I’m going to follow once I’m ready to run on a regular basis. Cool Running has lots of other great articles and a gigantic amount of race listings, so I’m sure I’ll be checking there regularly in the future.

Onward to Weigh-In Day #2…hopefully next week, my weight scale and I will hug it out.

Monday Looms Large

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Mondays are my weigh-in days for Weight Watchers Online. It just kind of naturally happened that way; I signed up for WW on a Monday. Mondays can be a tough weigh-in day: if you have a bad weekend, then your Monday weigh-in might be bad. You can change your weigh-in day, and many have suggested that I change it to Wednesday or Thursday, so that I can recover from a bad weekend by having a couple days to get back on track. But I have found that a Monday weigh-in allows me to stay focused on the weekend, so that I don’t go on points overload.

I expect to be down around two pounds. For the first two weeks, I lost a lot, but I expect that to slow down. The beginning always starts off well, but reality eventually sets in, which means a more normal weight loss pace of 1-2 pounds per week, or those wonderful things they call weight plateaus. However, if you know the possibilities of what could happen, then you can better prepare yourself for when it happens…and then move on and work hard for next week’s weigh-in.

To get ready for Monday, I had a thoroughly enjoyable Sunday. Had some breakfast at the best breakfast place in town, but it was tough picking out a healthy option. I went with two eggs scrambled and some wheat toast…not so bad, I guess. Worked out on the Wii Fit for around 30 minutes. I got paranoid about my weigh-in day being tomorrow, so I only had yogurt for lunch. Attended a wonderful birthday party for my three-year-old niece, Lyla. MAN it was tempting to eat the cheese, the chips, and the cake (aka the Three C’s of Food Doom), but I held off the hunger pains by repeatedly filling up and sucking down tap water in my giganta-SmartWater bottle. Made a nice dinner with my wife, Laura. Chicken and pasta with peppers and onions in a pesto sauce…yummay.

I want to pass along a couple of interesting sites. Wii Fit Routine provides workout routines of various difficulty and length for the Wii Fit. The website also lets you generate your own routines depending on your goals, and there are some good fitness articles. I use this site regularly, since Wii Fit doesn’t have any preset routines. My friend Jackie recommended an iTunes podcast called Fat 2 Fit Radio. The description of the show says that it advocates “weight loss through lifestyle change, not quick fixes – they simply do not exist.” Couldn’t agree more with that statement. I have not yet listened to it, but I plan to during my weekly trips to Connecticut.

Bring it on, Monday. I’m ready for ya.

Can You Eat Healthy at a Red Sox Game?

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I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t been to Fenway Park to see a Red Sox game for a few years. Tonight’s game will be the first time where I have to be conscious of my eating habits. I used to get a couple hot dogs, a small pizza, popcorn with lots of butter, multiple beverages, and some sort of dessert, but clearly I can’t do that this time around.

So are there any healthy options there? I’m guessing you can’t buy a salad at a concession stand…nor would I want to, since it probably wouldn’t be that fresh. Also, I can only imagine the laughs I would get as I sit in the stands and eat my dainty salad. Popcorn is probably a reasonably alternative, as long as I don’t get it slathered with butter. One hot dog is decent…but will that suppress hunger? Maybe if I eat it slow.

Surprisingly, the Red Sox website has a list of its concessions and where you can find them throughout Fenway (Fenway Park Concessions). One of the food products is rather ambiguous: “Healthy Options.” What does that mean? That could be anything…a piece of lettuce, a veggie burger, a fruit cup, couscous. I’ll have to investigate that if I can. Besides “Healthy Options,” the only other semi-healthy foods on the list are a chicken sandwich (don’t know if it is grilled or fried), kettle corn, and water. We’ll see how it goes…I can’t afford a recovery day tomorrow.

Question for the reading audience: I woke up and weighed myself this morning and I was UP nearly a pound, and then I weighed myself about 90 minutes later, and I was DOWN around two pounds. I’ve eaten healthy all week…can someone explain to me what is going on here?!

UPDATE AT 2:24 PM: A friend sent me a link of a great Weight Watchers article regarding how to eat healthy at the ball park. Thank you Meghan!

The Weekend Is Here…I’m Happy and Scared

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The weekend is usually a time for celebration and relaxation. The work week is over for most people, the weather usually cooperates and brings the most sun, and people are generally in better moods and more willing to participate in various shenanigans.

But for me, and perhaps others venturing out on the diet journey, it can be a scary couple of days. The weekend can bring out some seriously tempting foods, especially in the summer. Lots of grilling outdoors, lots of parties with food, lots of late-night fourth meals. It can be extremely intimidating to dieters…one bad weekend, and you might fall off the diet wagon.

During previous dieting escapades, I would have a great week of eating healthy. But then there would be some sort of party or spontaneous get together on a Saturday. I would arrive and see the appetizers all neatly laid out, and I’d stare longingly for a few minutes, but I would eventually snap out of it and try to distract myself by talking or drinking water. Then the pizza arrived, or the lasagna/stuffed shells were done cooking, or the burgers were done grilling. I would tell myself, I gotta eat something…so why not one small piece?

Bad idea. I turned into Food Hulk, or Frankenfood, or Foodenstein, or Foodzilla, or [insert scary food-eating monster here]. I would eat that small piece, but then I would follow it up with a large piece, which would be followed by four more large pieces, which would be followed by all those appetizers that I didn’t eat earlier, which would be followed by multiple desserts. I would eat as much as I could possibly fit, without looking stupid or weird.

The recovery day (usually Sunday) would be a wash. I would feel so bad about my food craziness that I would eat terribly all day. All that hard work during the week was wasted: I’d go to weigh myself on Monday morning for Weight Watchers, and I wouldn’t lose any weight, or worse, I would have gained some. All because of that Saturday. One day.

So, as the weekend approaches, I’m trying to remind myself of my past food craziness, and I’ll hopefully keep things in check. I have a weekend that includes a birthday party and a Red Sox game. Sounds like a daunting task…but I believe I’ll make it through, hopefully avoiding that dreaded recovery day.