At the beginning of the year I set a goal of reducing my body weight 10% which I have now done as of my weigh in last Monday morning.  Since I am planning on a maintenance range of 160 to 165 I am going to take a few more pounds off to get to about 162.5 or the middle of my goal range. 

I wish I could report that all my food choices were healthy and well planned in April. Unfortunately I cannot. What I managed to do was make healthy food choices most of the time.  

When I started using Calorie King a couple years ago I found the exercise portion of the diary a welcome addition. When I input my exercise for the day I was told that I could have additional food items. After a while, realizing I was not losing much weight and in fact having a hard time maintaining, I started putting in 50% of my estimated calorie burn.  My weight generally trended lower using this formula but was not satisfactory weight loss.

At the 1^st of this year, knowing my Basic Metabolic Rate (BMR) or the number of calories I burn in a day at rest to be about 1,700, I lowered my calorie target for each day from 1,750 to 1,650 and stopped recording exercise in my food diary.  As you can see from my weigh in information on the right, this change has produced the desired effect. 

On many days I have been able to do just fine within the acceptable calorie range. I think CK has a leeway of around 100 calories before it throws up a red flag. On days with high calorie burn such as bike to work days or long run days, my calorie total would often go into the red. On these days, I just tried to eat when really hungry.  I find with cycling and really any aerobic exercise, it is way too easy to replace more than the calories burned. 

During April I found a recipe in the back of Dr. Weil’s Natural Health, Natural Medicine that sounded interesting so I gave it a try.  I will share it below:

 

Cocoa-Banana Frozen Dessert

4 very ripe bananas

4 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Rum or maple syrup, optional

Peel bananas and place them in blender or food processor with 4 heaping tsp pure unsweetened cocoa powder. Add vanilla. If you like it, add a few tbsp. rum or maple syrup. Blend till very smooth. Pour into individual cups or small bowls and freeze until just frozen.

And the finished product:

 

Also in the Dr. Weil book is the suggestion to eat a large variety of foods. This serves not only to ensure that one is getting the nutrients provided by many foods but also that one is avoiding any possible negative effects or components of eating the same food repeatedly.  I found this to be a very reasonable suggestion and since I have been having processed turkey lunch meat at my mid-day meal for many years thought I might benefit from this advice. So, in April I set about adding variety to my mid-day meal. In addition to avoiding processed lunch meat I am trying to find meals that are not highly processed foods high in sodium.  I am having some success in this regard and may do a post on my mid-day meal rotation at some point in the future.

Now after sharing a good sweet dessert with you I will tell you about my project for May. I have long believed that eating sweetened food causes one to want or crave more sweetened food. I believe one of the chief culprits is sweetened beverages. Whether sweetened with sugar or corn syrup or artificially sweetened, I believe these beverages cause us to want more sweetened food in our diet. So starting in May, I plan to eliminate the main sweetened beverage in my diet which happens to be caffeine free Diet Coke. In June I will let you know how I did in this regard.