A Day Off & Trader Joe's

Weighed in first thing this morning after waking up.  I was happy to see that I was down 2.2 pounds!!!  Yay!  Back in the 170’s!!!  My next weigh in will be Saturday morning because I'll be out of town Sunday morning for the Rock'n'Roll half marathon!!!

I spent some time today plugging in what I’ve eaten over the past 6 days on the Shred Diet.  I think I said the other day that I was sure that I was consuming around 1200 calories a day.  Not so!  Here are the daily estimated calorie totals (I used Sparkpeople.com’s nutrition tracker):

•Monday: 1759 cals

•Tuesday:  1447 cals

•Wednesday: 1845 cals

•Thursday: 1161 cals

•Friday: 1458 cals

•Saturday: 1961 cals

Today I took a “day off” from the diet…but only in the sense of what foods I ate.  I didn’t eat much at all.  I went with my friend Denise and her hubby for lunch at Golden Corral.  I had 2 of their yeast rolls, a small taco salad (no salad items included…lol), some scrambled eggs with chorizo, bacon candy, a couple bites of meatloaf, a couple bites of lemon tart and I think a couple bites of something else.  Usually, when we go, I eat 3 full plates of food and a desert plate…plus about 3 rolls.  Today.  I ate one sort of full plate and about half of a sparsely filled plate.  I ate less than half of what I usually eat when we go to GC.  Nice!  Then, we went to the mall and wandered around for a while in and out of different stores.  We went back to their house where we watched some TV before I ducked out around 5pm to go grocery shopping at…drum roll…Trader Joe’s!!!

Or so I thought it was something to be excited about.  Meh.  I was not impressed.  Sure they had quite a few unique items put out by their store brand that you can’t find anywhere else…but the place was T-I-N-Y.  The produce section was incredibly lacking.  There was Asian cucumbers but no regular cucumbers.  What the heck?  They had exactly 3 types of apples.  I was happy that they had not from concentrate grapefruit juice.  I impulse bought some pumpkin butter that was on the shelf next to the almond butter I was buying.  I suppose I’ll add it to cottage cheese some time…because I imagine it would not work well in a PB&J sandwich.  Pumpkin and strawberry?  Yuck.  I also bought some store brand yogurts, one of which was pumpkin flavored…I ate that when I got home.  It was alright.  So, I had planned on taking a few pictures of the store while I was there…but since I was so underwhelmed by the store, I didn’t bother.  Besides, it was pretty busy…lots of people in the aisles.  I should have gone mid-morning on a weekday.  So, I took 3 pictures of things when I got home:

After I left Trader Joe’s, I had more than half of my grocery list left to purchase (they just didn’t have things), so I headed to HEB where I did find everything else on my list.  I bought some steaks which I seasoned and placed in a glass baking dish and baked at 375° for 17 minutes.  Oh wow.  I’m cooking all my steaks this way from now on.  They’re tender and juicy and perfectly cooked through.  I cubed the steaks and then weighed them into 5 ounce portions and placed them in Ziploc bags in the fridge/freezer.  

I also bought a 4 ounce lobster tail because one of the 100 calorie snack options is 2 ounces of cooked lobster.  Bake that up and spritz on some I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray and sprinkle a teensy bit of garlic powder…yum-o!  My fridge, freezer and shelves are now stuffed full of food!  I have a HUGE variety of foods to choose from to eat each day so I can continue to enjoy this diet as much as I have for the past week.

Now, I just need to figure out what to eat for right now that will help me kill it in the gym later on tonight when I go…I’m thinking one of the diet’s breakfasts of shredded wheat cereal with my almond milk and a stevia, a piece of fruit and a cup of juice should do the trick nicely.