Day 1 of healthy eating

After thoroughly studying the nutrition section of my CSCS book, I've decided that if I do pass this exam and become a CSCS, I better practice what I preach and start eating healthier if I am going to be advising other people to do the same. This decision was backed up by the fact that I had to purchase size 8 jeans/khakis yesterday while shopping :( All the stress of CSCS and scholarly project have made me eat a lot of UNhealthy quick and easy foods, like frozen pizzas and nachos. I'm getting too old to eat those without gaining weight. So I've started a new diet plan for myself, which really isn't all that difficult...it's pretty much based on the food guide pyramid, but I'm trying to get in a lot of vitamins, minerals, and essential amino acids every day. Of course the downside to this plan is that eating healthier is more expensive and takes longer to make meals, but my goal for when classes start is to prepare a lot foods over the weekend that I can either refrigerate or freeze to eat during the week. Plus, with classes being later in the day, there are a lot of days that I won't have to pack a lunch, making it a lot easier to eat better. This could be a completely different story when I start my clinicals, but I'll work that out when the times comes. Here are a few of the changes I'm making:

• The first big change is that I am trying to stay away from liquor and beer. I am replacing these with red wine (I don't really like white wine). Wine has a lot of antioxidants that liquor and beer do not. It also has Chromium, which is good for lowering blood sugar. They say a glass of wine a day is good for you, so I'm going to take "they're" word for it. (My CSCS book does not give a recommendation on how often to drink it, lol).
• I'm trying not to worry about the "low-fat" or "low-sugar" craze. Some fats are good for you (pretty much any of them except for saturated fats / trans fats). Plus, a lot of low-sugar foods are loaded up with aspartame, which is questionable at best. Foods like peanut butter and cheese have a high fat content, but they are filling foods and are good for you in lots of other ways.
• I do not like milk at all, so I usually drink soy milk, but I hardly ever buy it. I'm going to try to keep stocked up on it from now on, as well as take a Calcium supplement, because I had no idea until I read my CSCS book that ALL the calcium in your body comes from EXTERNAL sources. We need calcium for our muscles to contract, so I've probably been a lazy bum just from the fact that I don't get enough calcium. Plus, I don't want to have osteoporosis someday.
• I'm trying to FORCE myself to eat fruit. I don't like fruit very much, but I'm buying it and telling myself that if I feel like I need a snack in the middle of the day, it has to be fruit. I know I'm never going to incorporate fruit into my lunch or supper, so I have to find a way to eat it sometime. The only way I've been eating fruit all summer is by putting a slice of lemon in my water. lol
• I'm also trying to eat breakfast. Apparently fortified breakfast cereals are one of the best breakfast foods you can have. Who knew? I'm trying to eat more cereal until I can someday force myself to eat eggs again. I have lost all taste for eggs and I don't know why.
• I have never been good at the "5 small meals / day" diet, but I am going to try 3 small-moderate sized meals / day with 1-2 small snacks and see how that works.
• I am not going to weigh myself because a) I don't even want to know what I weigh. It's too scary to think about and b) muscle weighs more than fat so if I gain more fat-free mass and lose a lot of fat mass, I will actually weigh more and c) I am only judging my success with how good my clothes fit and measurements of my waist and hips.
• The minimal amount of exercise I will do every day is walk 2 miles. I will do other forms of exercise, obviously, but that's the bare minimum. I may have to sacrifice sleep on busy days, but I'll do what I have to.

Wish me luck. If I can keep this up through the rest of the year, I will be ecstatic with my will-power.

Other than my new diet (which I have been following for about 5 hours now), I received an email today of our official fall schedule (with week 2 missing...nice). It looks pretty intimidating to be honest. There are a lot of extra little "things" besides class, such as guest speakers, scholarly project meetings, etc. And the due date for that looming scholarly project is October 12. I don't even want to think about it. I'm sure my advisor is going to want it finished by the time fall classes start and that is by far not going to happen at this point. Not unless I study CSCS all day and work on scholarly project all night and never sleep until classes begin. At this point, just doing my best with the time I have left is going to have to suffice.