1300

After much thought I've decided to really watch my calories. OK, so it was my husband's idea. He even made me a spreadsheet. Even so, I found my numbers getting pretty high. Then I had a blood test done a couple of weeks ago. My triglycerides are high. This is worrisome as issues with high cholesterol and heart problems are in my family's medical history.

At first, I got proactive and said I needed to change my diet. Or at least I pretended to when people were around. Whenever the idea of  a cookie or fries popped into my head. I ate it. After a week or two of saying I couldn't eat better I gave in. I took a look at how much I ate and tried to figure out what I really needed to eat. I realized I could easily shave off 300 calories and be OK.

For me the 1300 is the lowest number of calories I can eat. 1400 is the max for what I am trying to achieve.Today was my day to eat 1300 calories. I did fairly well. I checked into Livestrong.com and got an idea of how I should proportion my meals by calories.

Basically it's 300 for breakfast and 300 for lunch with 500 for dinner. Snacks can be 100 calories. Breakfast was easy as I usually eat bran flakes and soy milk with a cup of coffee. I forgot to add some fruit in there so I may have to make my cereal portion smaller next time. Roughly 300 calories.

Lunch was difficult because I wasn't sure what to do. My go to lunch is turkey and cheese on whole wheat. But, a slice of bread, even whole wheat is 150 calories. Hm, tricky. I finally settled on a tortilla with a quarter cup of reduced fat cheese and an apple. All for 290 calories. I then ate a banana, 110 calories as a snack before dinner.

Dinner required a little more help because it was homemade chicken noodle soup with whole grain noodles, squash, zucchini, carrots, onion and celery. After putting the recipe through Calorie-Count.com I figured that a serving of my soup was 316 calories. I had two servings. This made my total for the day 1340 calories. I am impressed and surprisingly not hungry. Hopefully I can keep this up. I plan to focus on my cholesterol and heart this time around. We'll see if that works because so far trying to trick the scale isn't working.