Day 1

So, because I want to be accountable to myself, here is the deal. I am going to type out each day exactly everything that I eat. Over time, hopefully I will be able to look back on this and be happy with the progress I have made.

Day 1 - July 11, 2009
Breakfast: 1 slice of whole grain bread. I was rushing to pick up a friend for a movie and thought, "I need to eat breakfast - what is quick?" We didn't have anything in the house so I just picked up a slice of bread, figuring it's basically the same as toast, just untoasted! It got something in my tummy.

Lunch: 2 whole grain blueberry & nut pancakes, 2 egg substitutes and 2 glasses of water. Me & friend had previously agreed to eat out at IHOP, which occurred before making the diet switch. I thought it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to get a feel for what it's like to make a "healthy" choice in a restaurant anyway. I stuck to drinking water instead of soda like I normally do and chose a meal off the "heart healthy" portion of the menu. I also used the "light" syrup provided which had no fat and a lot less sugar than the regular syrup, and scraped all of the butter out of the center of the pancakes. I didn't find a large difference in taste in the least, but I was not pleased by the fat content of the meal either. Eating out will need to be a treat from here on out.

Dinner: Two hard shell tacos with ground beef, shredded cheese sprinkled lightly on top. These were left over from a previous night's meal and needed to be eaten. In the future, I would like to look into leaner cuts of meat or keep such meals to a minimum. Although, I was proud of myself for keeping a lot less cheese than usual off the tacos.

Treat: A single lime bar. Very good and very tasty. Probably full of sugar, but considering that I am typically a 4-cans-of-soda-a-day person, I do not feel like this small indulgence was hurtful to my sugar intake for the day.

In reflection, I am not very pleased with this first day's fat content, an issue that I will need to address with my impending gallbladder doom. But this is a start, and the biggest baby step I made yesterday was my commitment to stop drinking Mountain Dew for 2 weeks straight. This will be very hard, as I am used to drinking soda at work and we start back with 10 hour days planning for the grand reopen on Thursday. However, I have decided that if it takes buying sparkling water to get my fizz fix, if it takes drinking Kool-Aid out of mugs or if it takes me popping Excedrin every single day to get rid of my headaches - I am not touching the stuff for the next 2 weeks. A drinks a lot of Mountain Dew, and I have told him that I will not attempt to change that about it, so that is another hurdle as well because every time I open my fridge, I am met with lovely green cans.

But I am capable and I am strong. And I am going to make this work.