Fat Burnin' Friday

Well, I made it through a challenging week of birthday parties, eating out, and overnight travel. And, I'm happy to say I was triumphant! Nothing major, but I did lose 1#. I would have liked to have lost more, but knowing that I can party, eat out and travel and with constraint still manage to lose, is a good thing.

I tried to stick with simple foods when I ate out. I ate salads for a few of the meals, but otherwise stuck with chicken based meals. Keeping it simple made it easier for me to stay on Plan. I could more easily guesstimate the Points value for the foods and feel confident that I was within reason. Outside of the birthday party, when I was away from home, I did my best to resist dessert. It was good that my travel companions steered clear as well, as I was certainly tempted by a dish called Caramel Cobbler. What could there be not to like about that, except perhaps 899 calories (I don't really know, just making it up). I did have some at home, but I had everything I needed to figure out how indulgent a treat really was.

I also started to really use the Weight Watchers' eTools for tracking my points. If you have done Weight Watchers and haven't used eTools, you are missing out. They even have a mobile site that allows you to easily use most functions from your phone. This let me enter my points as I sat at the table or shortly there after, allowing me to better track Points and better understand where I stood. In addition to having a huge database of brand name and restaurant dishes, on the web version you can also calculate the Points for recipes. Enter all of your ingredients and the number of servings and Voila! a calculation of the points. I love this feature. I always hated trying to calculate everything by hand. This way, it pulls the details from it's database, combines it all together and determine the value for a serving. I used it to guide me as I considered what size portion made sense. I could play with the number of servings and make the serving size fit my Points available.

When I attended my class on Monday, my weight loss was 1.4#. Having two separate weigh dates is a little confusing, but I have always checked on Friday, so I will continue. It also is confused in that I weigh first thing in the morning on Friday and after dinner of Monday, so the time of day definitely creates a swing in the weights - another reason that I need to continue to use my Friday morning check as my standard. I guess I will meet my goal first in the morning and then will strive to meet that goal for my evening weight.

In the meantime, I have 34# to go to my target.