New Food Plan

So little man was not as ready to stop nursing as I thought he was going to be.  His one year birthday came and went and he still loves to nurse.  But I have finally reached a breaking point.  I need to take action.  I can no longer do nothing and wait.

One of the very expensive lessons I learned when I did Optavia was that I do better psychologically tracking what I should be eating instead focusing on what I shouldn't be eating.  So basically I have a chart that tells me how much of each food category I need to eat, for instance: three servings of protein, etc.  That way I get to see my chart fill up throughout the day instead of setting a calorie goal and watching my allowed calories go down and run out throughout the day.  This worked very well for me when I was following the Optavia plan.  It was mentally a much better way to track my food without actually meticulously tracking every calorie I was eating, I just checked off the food I ate.  It was also easier than searching through the hundreds of possibilities of how many calories might be in chicken lo mein.  Instead I know its 2 starches, 1 protein, 1 fat and 100 discretionary calories (I was just throwing out numbers, that is in no way is specific to any restaurant or recipe).

I am going to start this plan tomorrow, here is what I have: a goal of about 2000 calories per day (at 1800 calories a day my milk dried up in three days, so I'm starting higher and I'm going to be taking the remainder of my more milk plus supplement.  Might as well use it since I bought it).  The breakdown looks like this:

Protein- 3 servings
Starches- 4 servings
Fats-4
Fruits/Vegetables- minimum of 5, but allowed unlimited amounts
Dairy - 1 serving
Discretionary Calories- 200
Health food- 300 calories

What I have done is taken the Optavia nursing moms program and changed it to what I think could work for me.  For example, you are supposed to eat three Optavia fuelings in a day which comes to a total of about 300 calories.  So instead of buying Optavia fuelings (which are ridiculously expensive) I could have a protein bar, or an RX bar, or I could make peanut butter energy bites and have about 300 calories worth of those.  I wasn't sure what to name that so it got labeled "health food".  I like this option because I like to be able to just grab things out of the pantry.  Another big change I made was in the dairy category.  A huge problem I had on Optavia and a big reason why I quit was the required amount of dairy you have.  I'm lactose intolerant, and I was supposed to be eating three servings of dairy a day plus almost every fueling had dairy in it.  That was wreaking havoc on my digestive system.  So the one serving of dairy is my one cup of almond milk I have with my breakfast.  What I did was take the other two servings and put one into protein and bumped up my discretionary calories by 50 to cover the other two servings of dairy.

Discretionary calories are just that- I can choose how to spend them.  Since I know myself and I shouldn't trust myself around sugar, I am going to stay away from desert for a little while.  I'm a binge eater when it comes to desert.  I eat all the deserts and everything I can find.  It needs to be off limits for a little while until I can get it under control a little better.  Besides when I was doing Optavia I actually liked using my discretionary calories to add more food to my meals or to indulge in pancakes with my family instead of eating a piece or two of chocolate.

So this is the plan and I'm feeling good about it.  Also my favorite gym is having $0 enrollment right now (I'm hoping they are still offering it in the morning.) and I'm planning on signing up tomorrow (as long as they are still doing $0 enrollment) so I can do Zumba, run on the treadmill and take the kids to the waterpark.

Tomorrow starts day 1.  Here we go again!