Somebody asked in a previous comment why I don’t talk that much about exercising. For me, exercising isn’t the problem.  It’s easy to go walk three or four miles and not blog about it, because that isn’t my struggle.  My issue is food, in that I have trouble making good decisions on what to eat and not letting myself eat bad foods because of stress.  I know most people were taught this growing up, but I’m still learning that opening a bag of cookies doesn’t mean you have to eat the whole bag before “they go bad.”

This is somewhat unrelated, but my parents used to give me milk and cookies right before bed when I was a kid.  What were they thinking?  Loading me up with sugar before I was supposed to be sleeping? No wonder I have horrible sleep patterns.  (True story: I used to get out of bed and sit next to my nightlight on the wall and read.  When they gave me a TV for my room when I was thirteen, I used to stay up until they fell asleep, then watch Picket Fences reruns with the sound off and the closed-captioning on.)

But that’s neither here nor there.  I have these bad habits and I need to break them. I’ve sworn off chocolate for the time being, because my friend Mango and I have a little bet going.  Mango recently had a relapse with her vice of choice: smoking.  The deal is that for as long as she doesn’t smoke, I don’t eat chocolate. Now I need three more friends with vices so I can also be held accountable for fast food, full-fat cheeses and Starbucks.  Sadface.

Regardless - 25 pounds down! 100 to go. Project status: 20% complete.

My roommate and I are taking a little weekend road trip to beautiful Temecula, California to visit the wineries.  Because I’m leaving in mid-May and I have been telling her we’d make this trip together for at least a year, and I figured there’s no time like the present.  Armed with the knowledge that alcohol is packed with 7 calories per gram, and the average 5 ounce glass has 100 calories, I am going to make this a wine-tasting weekend instead of a wine-drinking weekend.

At some point in the previous week, I stumbled across this disturbing image (not overly graphic, but probably NSFW). It is beautifully shot, no doubt, but it does portray a negative image of the American woman. Maybe I’m just disturbed by it because it hits a little close to the bone — after all, one of my first thoughts was “our KitKats don’t look like that” — but it also makes me wonder what other stereotypes we might be unconsciously perpetuating.

But these are concerns for another time… I’m off to watch some WineLibrary.tv in preparation for the Temecula trip.

I don’t know what it is exactly that threw me right back into my old habits, but on the way to an early morning Nutrition class, I got the bright idea to stop by McDonald’s.  Not only did I order an egg and cheese mcmuffin (bad!) but a sausage burrito as well (more bad!) AND a vanilla iced coffee (didn’t even taste good!).

In short, I didn’t plan well and I panicked.  Then, later in the evening when my roommate asked if I’d like to have Indian food with her, I couldn’t say no.  Indian food is delicious.  We took an impromptu road trip out to the middle of nowhere with our chicken korma and sat looking for Venus in the night sky.  It was delicious and fun, but I’m paying for it now.

My total calorie intake for yesterday was 2,577.

Also, thank you to commenter Funnygirl for the link to a WebMD article on the relationship between soda and osteoporosis.  That’s it! I’m switching to tea.  Bye bye, carbonation.

Now, storytime.

This semester, I’m taking a class on nutrition.  Most of the class is delivered online, but on Friday mornings I haul my ass to downtown Phoenix for the one-credit lab section.  Yesterday was this class’s first meeting, and I’m wondering what exactly I’ve gotten myself into.

In addition to learning the fundamentals of nutrition and finding out our body fat percentages, we’re also going to be doing blood tests to measure our glucose and lipid levels.  This is really, really scary to me.  Like many overweight people, I’m afraid of the d-word. Diabetes.  Luckily, I don’t seem to have any of the warning signs of diabetes other than carrying a lot of weight in my stomach area, but it’s also in my boobs and upper arms and hips, so maybe it’s not as bad as I thought.

I did have a bit of a scary episode yesterday after I’d been wandering around central Phoenix for three hours on foot.  While waiting for the light rail to take me back to Tempe, I felt myself getting dizzy and had to sit down on a bench at the train station platform and put my head between my knees.  I was lightheaded and I almost felt like I was going to faint.  I had eaten a turkey sub and some apples at Subway a few hours before, so I don’t think I was low on energy, but I bought a piece of cornbread from the soul food restaurant right behind the rail stop just in case.  About 15 minutes passed, and I felt a lot better, and everything I’ve googled is suggesting that this incident could be linked to being insulin resistant.

My solution for the time being is to stop googling everything that happens to my body and wait for results from somebody who knows what they’re doing.  If you want to freak yourself out, go for it.

The more research I’ve done on caffeine and its effects, the more I’ve decided that the caffeine itself is not detrimental to dieting when taken in small doses.  The problem surfaced when I looked at the calories surrounding the caffeine… the “caffeine accessories,” if you will.

Starbucks is probably the biggest culprit for hidden calories, so definitely check the nutrition facts on their website before you visit.  My drink of choice is an iced tall nonfat caramel macchiato, which is a happy 140 calories.  Definitely stay away from their white mochas, which are 270 calories each, even with nonfat milk and without whipped cream.  Starbucks’ whipped cream is a whole ‘nother ball of wax.  By itself, the whipped cream can be as many as 11 grams of fat when added to a beverage.  Skip it!

When it comes to sodas, my favorite is Cherry Coke Zero.  Unlike diet Dr Pepper, which uses the super-harmful preservative sodium benzoate, Cherry Coke Zero has a similar sweet taste and uses potassium benzoate, which won’t break down your mitochondria.

Mmm, yummy.

Tea seems to be the winner of the caffeine wars, especially as its popularity is on the rise with Americans.  However, on one of my recent trips to a cafe, I made the mistake of ordering Boba Tea.  For the uninitiated, boba tea (or bubble tea) is tea with little tapioca pearls.  They taste sort of like gummy bears, and they’re absolutely delicious and fun to drink.

Luckily, before I drank too many bobas, I whipped out my iPhone to check out their nutrition info. My blueberry rooibos tea was super healthy, so I wasn’t too worried.  Just take a guess at how many calories are in one cup of boba.

545 calories!

I have never felt so betrayed by a beverage before in my life.  Each one of those little pearls has 7-15 calories each, depending on the website you’re reading.  545 calories for a cup!  To put it in perspective, a cup of sugar has about 700 calories.  One cup of chocolate milkshake has about 250 calories.

So in the end, what have we learned?  Caffeine isn’t bad, it’s all the stuff that comes with it.

Now that I’m back, you should know that I’m writing this in a very sleep-deprived state.  I’ve been sleeping somewhat regularly, but on an incredibly odd schedule.  I go to bed at about two in the afternoon and wake up at ten in the evening, lather, rinse, repeat.  Basically, if I were to move the European time zone tomorrow, I would be going to bed at 10 PM and waking up at 6 AM, which would be ideal.  And I wouldn’t even have to worry about jet lag.

Since the beginning of the month, I’ve lost six pounds, which is good, but not nearly enough.  I was really hoping for some kind of drastic “omg!” weight loss this month, but this just goes to show that eating well isn’t enough if you aren’t getting regular exercise.  If only I burned as many calories feeling guilty about NOT going to the gym as I would have burned by actually GOING to the gym, I’m sure I’d be seeing results.

As you can see from the FoodFeed, I’ve been eating well, although I’ve been eating at completely random times of the day.  I had to stop saying “breakfast, lunch and dinner” because breakfast was at midnight, lunch was at dawn, and dinner was at noon.  Utter madness!

Disclaimer: I got a lot of the following info from Wikipedia, which isn’t good enough for English teachers but is good enough for me.

So, what is the correlation between sleep and weight loss? Apparently, there’s a big one and there have been a ton of studies done on it.  Like seemingly everything else in our lives, it’s all about hormones.  There are two big hormones that affect us: one is Ghrelin and the other is Leptin.

Ghrelin sounds like some kind of goblin/gremlin combination, but it’s actually the stuff that determines how hungry we are.  Surprise, surprise: thinner people have less Ghrelin in their systems than obese people do.  The more Ghrelin, the more hungry you’ll feel and the less you’ll want to sleep.

The other hormonal anti-sleep culprit is something called Leptin, which is the stuff that tells us when we’re full. If you don’t sleep a full night, your Leptin levels will decrease and you’ll have a harder time discerning when you should stop eating.  (Also, for the potheads out there: marijuana blocks your Leptin receptors, which is why you get the munchies.)

So, really, when we’re not sleeping enough, we’re eating too much because of these two factors.  Another cool thing that the scientists found was typically, when people who are height-weight proportionate are asleep, their Ghrelin levels increase and Leptin levels decrease overnight.  That’s why we all wake up hungry and want breakfast.  If you don’t sleep enough, your hormones don’t have a chance to “reset” themselves correctly.

Next post: is drinking all this coffee terribly bad for my diet?

This is probably one of the funniest things I’ve seen on YouTube in a while. MrChiCity3 goes to McDonald’s to “do something that’s never done before,” and orders one of everything on the dollar menu.  Being that I am on a strictly fast food-free diet, I wondered how many calories his order would be.  Here’s what he orders:

1. double cheeseburger (no cheese) - 340 calories, 15 grams of fat
2. small fries - 230 calories, 11 grams of fat
3. two pies - 500 calories, 26 grams of fat
4. three cookies - 480 calories, 24 grams of fat
5. parfait - 160 calories, 2 grams of fat
6. Apple Dippers - 105 calories, 1/2 gram of fat
7. small orange Hi-C with no ice - 160 calories, no fat
8. McChicken - 360 calories, 16 grams of fat
9. side salad with ranch dressing - 190 calories, 15 grams of fat

I did make some assumptions here: I watched a few of his other videos and he said ranch dressing was his favorite, so I assumed he got the Newman’s ranch dressing with his side salad, and I factored in the caramel dip with the apples.

Now, lucky for him, his McDonald’s was out of parfaits and only had one cookie in stock.  The grand total of all his calories (minus the parfait and two of the cookies) is:

2,045 calories and 81 grams of fat!

No WONDER I gained so much weight eating fast food all the time.  Look at that!  He may be a Dollar Menu Millionaire, but it’s like Biggie said: more money, more problems… like hypertension and high cholesterol.

P.S. If you liked the McDonald’s video, I definitely recommend watching the reenactment of MrChiCity getting a parking ticket. HILARITY.

I love SparkPeople.  If you’re looking for a way to track your diet, it’s the best free one out there.  I use it to track nutrition and workouts every single day.  However, when I scroll down to the bottom of my nutrition page, I see a box like this one:

HOW AM I LACKING THAT MUCH POTASSIUM?  I ate two bananas that day! What the hell is potassium, anyway?

If I’m understanding Wikipedia correctly, potassium is the stuff that keeps our cells from absorbing too much salt, and not eating enough foods with potassium can increase your risk for high blood pressure.  Apparently I’m not alone in low K consumption, as most people in the United States only get half the recommended necessary potassium.

In the pursuit of higher potassium, I went to the drug store last night to look for some potassium supplements, but it turns out that you can only get them in doses of 99mg, or 3% of the recommended amount.  The vitamin bottle says not to take more than one a day, so it’s not as easy as just eating 20 potassium tablets to balance out a deficiency.  I decided that buying a separate bottle wasn’t worth it, and switched from One-a-Day Women’s (which has no potassium) to One-a-Day Weight Smart Advanced (which has 99mg).

So how in the world do I make up the other 2,000mg of missing potassium in my diet? It turns out that there are a ton of foods that are high in potassium that don’t really seem to have any correlation to each other.  Apricots, peas, baked potatoes, veal, tomato paste and sunflower seeds are some of them.  There’s also a salt substitute which uses potassium as its main ingredient, and 1/4 a teaspoon is 10% of your daily recommended intake, more than the amount in my vitamins. I might have to give that a try!

All in all, 4,500mg a day may not have been as elusive as I originally thought.  You win this time, potassium.  This time.