or “praying: dear God, please help me find my collar bones. amen”

or “keeping my beach ball under water”

So I had a follow up appointment with the nutritionist. We are working on answering my prayer to find my collar bones, which is excellent.  But more importantly, we are working on me making better, more thoughtful food choices.

See, my old job was fun and exciting at times, but it often required me to eat many meals (sometimes 3) at my desk.  Food became my reward and the primary source of joy during my day (since seeing the sunshine was often not possible).  Oh yeah, and the dark chocolate Dove bars brought a lot of joy.  Yeah. Those were good, too.

So now that I have a job that is a little bit more reasonable in terms of time demands (although it has been a bit hairy recently), we don’t have a lot of food available to graze on, which is awesome.  The only tricky things are Monday nights when we have food catered in… sigh, but hey, you can’t win them all.

That all being said, I’m having an easier time managing what I eat.  I need to keep going to the grocery store on a regular basis and buying healthy snacks and foods.

Interesting (somewhat common sense) insights from the nutritionist:

eat breakfast – it helps boost your metabolism and prevents you from getting over-hungry and making bad decisions.

weigh yourself regularly – studies show people maintaining their weight did the best job when they were weighing themselves regularly.  It helped them keep from back-sliding.

honor your hunger – don’t let yourself get too hungry.  if you are hungry an hour before lunch, eat an apple to tide you over.  if you are hungry two hours before lunch, try eating both a carb and a fat/protein (like an apple and string cheese) to help keep you sustained to lunch.

meal mix – try to make each meal part carb, part protein and part fat keep you from getting hungry too quickly after eating.  a carb heavy meal can often lead to a sugar spike and a corresponding crash, leaving you hungry before it’s time to eat.

sleep!! – lack of sleep correlates to weight gain.  people who work overnight shifts or have inconsistent sleeping patterns are shown to gain weight dramatically.

… so speaking of that – it’s late and I need to sleep.    I did lose a little bit of weight on this new eating plan, so I’m going to keep doing it.

Oh, and the nutritionist described losing and maintaining weight like trying to hold a beach ball under water.  And I thought that was pretty accurate.  If I’m not careful, the beach ball might pop back up… which it did… so here’s to getting the darn beach ball back under water… during the holidays… yeah… awesome.