Tweaking my habits

Well, clearly, I'm eating too much of the wrong things--I'm not seeing any progress at the scale, and haven't seen any progress in some time.

On the eating side, I can tell where my weak areas are. I do fairly well in my eating during the day,when I'm at work. It's when I get home that things become more difficult. I think it's that there are too many choices, and the kitchen is always open. Since I live with my husband and three kids, I can't totally strip the house of junk. However, I'm not eating their stuff, either. I think I'm just eating too much of the good stuff. I've always disdained measuring, etc., but I think I might have to do this for a while. The only explanation I can figure out is that I'm underestimating portions, and thus the calorie count. So I need to start measuring things more closely, especially when I'm at home.

The other challenge is eating out. I work outside the home, and part of my day includes going out to lunch with work colleagues. It's an important part of building work relationships, so I don't think I can bail out of that. Usually, luckily, there are pretty healthy choices for lunch.

However, I live in a foreign country, so in general it's tough to tell what's in a given food. For most of the Korean foods I eat, I'm pretty comfortable that I have the right calorie counts down. But if I eat something different--for example, yesterday was Indian food--I feel like the calorie counts are approximate at best. This is a challenging area for me.

I guess I'm concluding that since lunch is often a wild card, dinner needs to be more structured. This is an area that I'm going to have to work on also. We have a wonderful nanny who is a great cook, but unfortunately she fries a lot of things. I'm working with her to encourage healthier choices, but it's tricky. I don't imagine I'm going to get a lot of sympathy for this problem, but there it is.

But I should also focus on how far I've come:

I don't generally eat full desserts any more. No cake, few cookies, no ice cream. Usually when it's offered by hosts, I do not partake of an entire serving-- a bit is enough. This is big for me.\

I don't eat chips anymore. In general, I've cut way back on junk food.

I rarely eat fast food anymore. Chalk this one up to living overseas. No easy access to Mcd's, and I don't have much taste for most of it anymore.

I generally eat only whole grain or "original" carbs--no highly processed carbs anymore. Also don't eat much in the fried department--again, a big change for me.

I exercise at least a couple times a week, and I feel bad if I don't do more. I used to do nothing at all.

So you can see that I have modified a lot of behaviors--just haven't seen the results yet. I'M WAITING, but not very patiently.

Yesterday went fairly well. No snacking--largely because I had a marathon dental appointment in the afternoon. Hey, maybe that can be my weight loss strategy--wiring my mouth shut (kidding!) Went out for dinner with the family, but managed to keep the points fairly low, primarily because my mouth was still sore! The scale is still not budging, but I can't do much about that. Generally, I weigh every day, but look at Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, then choose the low from one of those three days to record in my weight tracker. Weird, I realize, but I've done it consistently and feel that it takes into account the daily fluctuations I have.

Here's to a good weekend!