Day Three

It's coming near the end of day three and there are a few things I've learned these past few days.

1. I HATE arugula! and 2. All salads are not created equal. A grilled chicken garden salad may sound healthy, but you might just end up with a bowl of chopped iceburg lettuce topped with a couple carrots and cheap shredded cheese. While it's not a candy bar, it's still massively lacking in the nutritional department.

All and all this whole CR thing is going well but I still need to sign up for a gold account on livestrong so I can really track how healthy I'm eating. Also, my wife might start CR with me as well. Yay! She loves cookies (and so do I!!!) so I'm hoping to find a way to tweak a cookie recipie to make it healthier and low cal so that maybe it'll be easier for the both of us to stick to this. We need a little (healthish) treat every now and then. :) I'm a terrible cook, but I'm fairly deccent at baking so if I come up with anything good I'll be sure to post it.

Day One

Ok, so it's the end of day one. I've decided that the diet itself will probably be the easier part of this new lifestyle. Being vegetarian for a good chunk of my life, and vegan off and on for many years, I think the restrictive diet and even social challenges will be something that I will be able to easily manage. The difficult part for me will be 1. diet coke and 2. sodium intake. I don't think either of these things are specifically touched on with a RC diet, but it just feels if i want to do this right, I really need to be trying to be healthy in all aspects. 

I did much better than I thought I could with sodium. I consumed 929 mg. I'm no expert on numbers yet, but according to the nutrition calculator I'm using that's only 38.73% of my dv. This is waaaaay better than I ever would have expected of myself. We'll have to see if I can keep it up.

My other downfall, diet coke.  Today I only consumed 8oz of diet coke (a great achievement verses my usually 3 LITERS per day). I did not however consume all the water I know my body needs. I drank a measly 16 oz. I feel like that girl on Baby Mama, who takes a big gulp of water then spits it every where yelling "what is that?! that's terrible!!". So....the end of day one and I'm thirst and have a bad headache, but I'm determined to kick my bad habits and start reaping the benefits of a truly healthy lifestyle.

Also, I did indeed pick up a book today before work. I couldn't find the Beyond 120 year diet book, so I picked up The Longevity Diet. I'm looking forward to reading it. I skimmed through it earlier and I can tell it will be very educational and helpful. 

I'm currently using livestrong.com The Daily Plate to record and track my intake, but I think I might have to look into one of the nutritional tracking tools listed in the book, since LiveStrong only tracks calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbs, sugar, fiber, and protein and does not take and vitamins or nutrients into account.

So here's my totals for day one: (unfortunately lacking in real nutritional data)

calories 1,142  fat 19g  cholest 40mg  sodium 929  carbs 218g sugar 110g fiber 42g protien 47g

Getting Started

Tomorrow begins Day One of my new lifestyle. I'm excited, but still pretty nervous and confused. I've been doing a lot of online reading about the Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition diet (lifestyle) but I still find myself a bit unsure of what exactly it all consists of and how to go about getting started. I think I might pick up one of the books on the subject tomorrow before work, hopefully it will help shed a little more light on things. 

I've used the CRON calculator, if I'm interpreting the data the correct way, it seems like a healthy plan would be to start with consuming 1,200 calories per day of nutrient-dense foods. This feels like a good starting place, but I may increase or decrease this after reading more tomorrow. The goal is not to lose too much weight too fast, so we'll have to see how it all goes. 

but it's super late so I'm off for now.  :)