Pleased with myself :)

i just had to blog this because i am so proud of myself today!

back story: after weeks of sitting through reruns of the biggest loser every day, marlon and i decided to get serious about losing weight. after all, if these 300- and 400-pound juggernauts could literally work their butts off and get even thinner than us, what the hell was our excuse? marlon took some opportune downtime at work to look for online tools that we could use to help us. initially, he found us a calorie counter widget for igoogle on labpixie, but with some more digging he turned up this website called sparkpeople.

it seemed a little confusing and tedious at first, but basically what happens is that you input your current weight and goal weight (it caps your weight loss at a very healthy 2.2lbs per week), and it churns out a recommended calorie/fat/protein/carb intake, plus a meal and exercise plan for you. 

marlon and i opted not to follow their meal plans (which seem like the most boring, white-people meals on the face of the planet) and just input our own meals into their calorie counter. you can search through their database or input the nutritional info of the brands that you like.  

it then tallies up the numbers and helps you see how you're doing in terms of the recommended calorie/carb/fat/protein range for the day. yep, it helps you get that good old-fashioned balanced diet that you've been hearing about but never really believed worked. 

this is where i had all my breakthroughs, because i've always just starved myself (which actually forced my body to go into survival mode and cling on to the calories) or cut out carbs (which my body needs to burn calories). and i never even thought about protein (which my body needs to build muscle and pump up my metabolism), a bad habit that which became obvious in my first few days as i was always way below the minimum protein requirement. and fat... hah. it was off the charts.

ANYWAY. i could go on and on and on. but basically yun yung back story. the reason i'm so happy today is that after nearly two weeks of trying to balance my diet (and failing miserably on some days, as the spikes below will show you!), i was finally right on target today! 

the light green area is my recommended range. the out-of-bounds spikes reveal when i had a ton of olive oil in my salad dressing, or when we had a big vietnamese dinner with fried spring rolls and coffee jelly!

not only that, i was actually kulang calories and fat... even after eating a big (for me) breakfast, drinking apple juice (which i don't normally have) and having lunch with a full tupperware of brown rice. i actually had to rack my brain for a snack that would put me just within the ideal range -- and it turned out to be a midnight snack of parmesan cheese and ferrero dark chocolate! 

a diet that "forces" me to have chocolate and cheese? i never thought i would see the day. :)