I've taken all of my baby food and sorted it into groups. I have fruits, oatmeals/yogurts, vegetables, meats and meats with vegetables. I split everything up evenly into 1040 calorie ziplock bags. I'm allowing 160 calories for misc items that may be needed to make the food edible. Each day I just need to grab a bag and if I only eat what's in that bag, I should stay in my 1200 calorie day. The bags seem huge but I estimate I will need to eat about 15 different baby food items per day to get enough calories. I'm going to try and eat every hour so I don't get hungry. Today is Saturday so I'm home so eating every hour should be easy. I will not drink anything during this diet except water and unsweetened tea or green tea with 1/2 tsp of Agave Juice (10 calories). I discovered this recently and it's really good. It's like a thin honey and it doesn't cause sugar spikes. It also takes a very small amount to sweeten tea. I use 1/2 tsp per glass of green tea.
9:30 a.m. is my first meal - Gerber Stage 1 Chicken with broth. I'm eating it first because I know I probably won't like it.
I was right. It's absolutely disgusting. I didn't think I would like the meats but I got a few because they are loaded with protein and I need to try and get all the food groups and eat what a mom would feed her giant baby. I ate about half of it and I'm getting used to it. I think I'm going to have to add a little salt. I never salt my food but this doesn't seem to have any salt at all in it. It tastes like a ground up chicken with no spices.
After adding a tiny amount of salt, it was edible. The stage 1 jars are tiny so it's not difficult to eat even if I don't like it. Maybe stage 2 or 3 meats will have some spices and maybe I should heat it up instead of just eating it straight out of the jar. I probably won't buy anymore baby food meat products in stage 1. I didn't notice if they had beans. Maybe there is a bean baby food that could take the place of the meat protein. I also bought some thing that looks like vienna sausages made by Gerber I think. Maybe those will be good. NOTE TO SELF: DON'T BUY ANYMORE STAGE 1 MEAT. TRY STAGE 3 MEATS AND HEAT
10:30 a.m. - Beech Nut Stage 2 Apples with Chicken. This is good. I could eat this several times a day. It has a little protein in it too. If it didn't say chicken on the label, I wouldn't know it had chicken in it.
11:30 a.m. - Beech Nut Whole Grain Baby Cereal (6 Months). I was expecting this to be terrible too but I mixed 1/2 tsp of raw sugar cane (10 calories) in it and it's pretty good. It reminds me of malt o meal. I might be able to eat this without the sugar but it's very mushy and the raw sugar cane adds crunch without adding many calories. This cereal is loaded with vitamins so even though it's not a favorite, I'm going to eat it everyday. NOTE TO SELF: MAKE HALF A SERVING TWICE INSTEAD OF TRYING TO EAT AN ENTIRE SERVING.
1:15 p.m.- Beech Nut Stage 2 Vegetables and Chicken. I missed my 12:30 feeding and it's almost time to eat again. It's hard to eat every hour. I may have to do some combining of meals when I'm busy. I just don't want to get hungry and be tempted to eat any of the goodies I have laying around for my family to eat. The Vegetables and Chicken needs salt but I've decided to try and eat it without adding any salt. The bad thing about Stage 2 baby food jars is that they are bigger than stage 1 so it's harder to eat it all if you don't like it. I'm going to pour this one in a bowl and heat it up. Ok. It is better heated up but it is going to have to have some spice in it. It's pretty disgusting. I've added a small amount of salt and it's still pretty gross. I won't be buying this one again. Hopefully I will find some vegetable and meats that I like eating. I think this might be worse than the Gerber Chicken with Broth and that one was pretty bad. I'm not discouraged yet because I am eating as much of it as I can and I'm not hungry because I'm eating a tiny amount constantly and I have over 40 more jars of baby food to try out. I'm sure I will find baby food that I like. Since I skipped 12:30 and I couldn't eat the entire jar of vegetables with chicken, I'm going to eat another jar of something that I know I will eat. NOTE TO SELF: DON'T BUY THIS AGAIN
1:30 p.m Beech Nut Stage 1 Bananas - Wow. These are really good. I wanted to do a taste test with a real banana since I liked this so much but won't eat a real banana. The label on the baby food says "Chiquita Bananas, citric acid and ascorbic acid (Vit C)". It tastes like they took a banana, mashed it up and mixed it with juice. I wonder if I will get the same health benefits from eating a jar or bananas as an actual banana. I had a banana in the kitchen so I mashed it up to see if it would be like baby food but it wasn't. If I'm gonna eat bananas, I guess it will need to come out of a baby food jar. I think eating a jar of baby food bananas is probably better than not eating a banana at all and if I weren't on my diet, I would have probably had chocolate cake that's in the kitchen so the jar of bananas is better than eating the cake.
I haven't had enough water. I'm going to drink a entire glass of tea and swollow 5 CVS fiber plus calcium pills (10 calories) plus a vitamin because this diet doesn't have any fiber and as an adult, I know I need fiber. The fiber also has the added health benefit of making me feel full. I haven't been hungry though. 3:00 seems to be my bad time when I tend to overeat so I'm trying to get my body prepared for that and do all I can now to make this a successful dieting day.
2:40 p.m. Gerber Organic Pear Juice (60 calories) with Gerber Cereal bar- This is very good. I bought the four pack of little 4 oz bottles. I noticed in the store that they have big bottles of this juice so I'm going to keep the little bottles so they can be refilled from the big bottle instead of buying all the little bottles. I've decided to keep the little stage 1 glass containers too. I think when I go off this diet, I might be able to put adult food in those little bottles and keep my portions very small. I can always throw them out later on if I don't need them. I could probably just buy 100% juice to replace to baby food juice but right now I'm sticking to the baby food plan and will continue to use Gerber juice. My thinking again is that the standards for baby products is higher than for adults. The cereal bar is good and it's nice to chew something. NOTE TO SELF: BUY IN LARGER CONTAINERS OF JUICE AND PUT IN THE SAVED JUICE JARS AND BUY MORE THINGS THAT CAN BE CHEWED UP
I'm thinking that this diet may be a good tool for learning to eat smaller portions more often. It really does seem to be working. I've eaten much less than I would have normally eaten by now but I'm not hungry at all. I'm going to make another big glass of tea because I not getting enough liquid in my diet.
I haven't had any desires to eat anything other than my baby food today. Usually by 3:00 I'm starving if I'm on a diet. The fiber pills probably helped. 1:30 seems like a good time to take those so I'll do that again tomorrow.
It's time for me to figure out what the family is going to eat for dinner. I need to cook something that I don't like for my family for dinner so I will be happy eating the baby food. I might be happy eating it anyway. It seems like I have a lot of food left to eat before the day is over. I have 7 more baby meals.
4:00 p.m. Oh No! More Meat! I have 2 meats left and there is no way I can eat another disgusting baby meat. I have 1 ham and 1 chicken stage 1 left to eat. I decided to not eat the chicken stage 1 at all and eat the ham on a piece of wheat bread (50 calories). I think that's really the only way to eat it. I heated it up and put it on 1 piece of bread. A lot of it dripped out because it's like pudding but it was actually very good. The piece of wheat bread took the place of the calories I would have got from the chicken stage 1. I think I could eat the meats on bread. It reminds me of deviled ham but just mushed up more. It actually tasted pretty good. That might be a way to turn it into a dinner.
I only had 1040 calories in baby food to eat so I needed 160 calories in other foods. I knew some of that would be sugar, honey, agave juice in drinks but I only used about 20 calories so I have an extra 140 and I'm not eating another chicken baby food which adds another 60 or 70 calories to that number. I may need to add another baby food or mix up some more baby cereal. I still have several items to eat so I might just not make it to 1200 at all. I don't want to slow down my metabolism so I don't want to do that all the time but with eating all the time, I don't think that's going to happen. I'm pretty stuffed after the bread/nasty meat sandwich.
5:00 p.m. Gerber Meat Stick? I'm not sure if that's what they are called. They tasted a little like vienna sausages but smaller. I probably won't eat those again either. I think the jar contained 7 sticks. I ate 4.5 of them.
6:00 p.m. Beech Nut Stage 2 Cinnamon Raison Granola. This was pretty good and very filling. It was thicker than the other baby foods. If it had any granola in it, it was ground to a powder. I will eat this one again.
7:00 p.m Gerber Organic Pear Juice (60 calories) with Gerber Cereal bar again. This will be a good way to end the day but I'm probably short several hundred calories short. I think I only had 800 calories today. That's not enough and normally I would be starving right now with only that many calories but since I'm eating every hour, I think it's tricked my body a little bit. I didn't eat all of the food I planned to eat today. I'll start earlier tomorrow or do some doubling up in the afternoon. I do want to shoot for 1200 calories. I'm going to have 5 more CVS fiber tablets with calcium to increase fiber. After I added up all of my nutrients it seems like this diet is probably much better than my old diet as far as nutrients go. The sugar is pretty high but it's all natural sugar from fruit. Protein is low because I couldn't eat the meats. I'm not going to worry about that since this isn't going to be a long term diet.
I will weigh myself everyday and get my cholesterol checked at the end of the month.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Day 1 - Going to the Store and Starting My Diet
Day 1 -
It's a New Year and like so many of my fellow human beings, I'm going on a diet. There are many reason for my diet and weight is just a small one. The biggest reason is I turned 40 this year and health is now starting to be important to me. I have high cholesterol and would like to drop about 15 pounds. I'm not going to go on a health food diet because I hate fruits and vegetables so that only really leaves sugar, meat and fat which I love. So what kind of diet will work well for a person that's not going to do what everyone says and "Eat more raw fruits and vegetables!" I do like mushed up fruits that are in baby food. Do those count? I would think that the standards for baby food would be very high so I'm going to eat more baby food. I've decided to shoot for 1200 baby food calories a day because I'm only 5 feet tall and that's supposed to be the minimum calories a person should get per day.
After getting to the baby food aisle at the local grocery store I read a few labels on the baby food jars and realized that I'm going to need to eat A LOT of baby food to get 1200 calories per day. Each jar has anywhere from 30-120 calories in it. I've decided to include anything a baby would eat so that I can take advantage of the juices and baby snacks. I think it might be hard to only eat mushed up foods so maybe adding those foods will help me stick to the diet. I purchased enough baby food for 3 days. When I got home I thought I'd just leave the baby food in the car. How would I explain 45 jars of baby food to my family? I'll have to see if this works before I let anyone else in on it. The cost for 3 days of food was $30.00. If I would have purchased it on sale I could have probably saved but I didn't look at price for day 1-3. I tried to buy a little bit of everything. I bought fruits, vegetables, meats, sweet potato puffs, baby juice, baby cereal and baby cereal bars. I didn't look at brand but tried to focus on what was in the jar. I bought stage 1, stage 2, stage 3...none of that matters to me at this point because I have no idea what I'm doing right now. I'm just getting ready for tomorrow.
It's a New Year and like so many of my fellow human beings, I'm going on a diet. There are many reason for my diet and weight is just a small one. The biggest reason is I turned 40 this year and health is now starting to be important to me. I have high cholesterol and would like to drop about 15 pounds. I'm not going to go on a health food diet because I hate fruits and vegetables so that only really leaves sugar, meat and fat which I love. So what kind of diet will work well for a person that's not going to do what everyone says and "Eat more raw fruits and vegetables!" I do like mushed up fruits that are in baby food. Do those count? I would think that the standards for baby food would be very high so I'm going to eat more baby food. I've decided to shoot for 1200 baby food calories a day because I'm only 5 feet tall and that's supposed to be the minimum calories a person should get per day.
After getting to the baby food aisle at the local grocery store I read a few labels on the baby food jars and realized that I'm going to need to eat A LOT of baby food to get 1200 calories per day. Each jar has anywhere from 30-120 calories in it. I've decided to include anything a baby would eat so that I can take advantage of the juices and baby snacks. I think it might be hard to only eat mushed up foods so maybe adding those foods will help me stick to the diet. I purchased enough baby food for 3 days. When I got home I thought I'd just leave the baby food in the car. How would I explain 45 jars of baby food to my family? I'll have to see if this works before I let anyone else in on it. The cost for 3 days of food was $30.00. If I would have purchased it on sale I could have probably saved but I didn't look at price for day 1-3. I tried to buy a little bit of everything. I bought fruits, vegetables, meats, sweet potato puffs, baby juice, baby cereal and baby cereal bars. I didn't look at brand but tried to focus on what was in the jar. I bought stage 1, stage 2, stage 3...none of that matters to me at this point because I have no idea what I'm doing right now. I'm just getting ready for tomorrow.
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