Have you been tempted?

No, not by all the Thanksgiving leftovers (I have none! since we went out for dinner), but by all the sales, sales, SALES! Advertising bombs are going off everywhere you look, if you are even remotely "plugged in."

I'll admit I've clicked through to check prices on laptops, bedspreads and chairs, three things I'm looking for to add to my collection of stuff. Actually, the bedspread and chairs will be replacements for sadly worn-out stuff. We keep putting off replacing them because, well, just because.

The laptop, on the other hand, would be quite a luxury for me. I have a mini-mini-teeny-weeny laptop (the BlackBerry), and have decided that sometimes it's just too hard to do what I want to do on that two-inch screen. And I usually decide that instead of trudging over to the second-floor office in the garage, I'll just wait until later. And then I never do that thing I was going to do on the BlackBerry.

I'll be talking myself out of the laptop pretty soon. Who wants to bet?

Thanksgiving was the perfect day to begin the Great Calorie Experiment. According to this calculator (and thank you again, Shauna, for pointing me to their podcasts) here's the range of how much I should eat at different activity levels. I walk for more than an hour every day, but it's not what I would call 'hard exercise,' so I've put myself in the Moderately Active category.

 

I haven't even come close to eating that many calories on a daily basis. Thursday, Friday and Saturday I managed to eat around 1650 per day. Yesterday I didn't even make it to 1400. I had no idea it would be so hard to eat! That's never been my problem. Heh.

I'm going to keep at it, though, mostly because I have so much more energy! Yesterday, for example, was another hands-and-knees floor scrubbing, this time the hallways and kitchen. I moved furniture in the main living area and mopped all of that floor, as well. It took four hours from start to finish, no breaks, and then I walked four miles outdoors when I was done.

I can't do that eating 1200 calories or less per day. I'll admit I was pretty beat last night, but I'm almost 60 and that much activity probably should wear me out. I'm grateful I can even get down on my hands and knees; I know too many people younger than I who can't.

Weigh in is Wednesday, and I'm anxious to see what happens after the first week. My husband is very skeptical and only marginally supportive. Sometimes I feel like I have to sneak-eat, so he won't see me chowing down on that apple with peanut butter, for example, a couple hours before dinner.

That's another thing: I'm not eating crap to get those extra calories in. It's not difficult to eat healthful food in my house, because I don't buy crap. But I do have some baking supplies and it would be very easy to dig into that bag of Hershey's Kisses I bought to make Peanut Butter Blossoms, for example (nine Kisses are 200 calories). That doesn't seem like a good way to spend calories.

Hey! Who kidnapped the real Debbi, and when are you bringing her back? Heh.

It all comes down to this

D's comment on yesterday's post ended with this: "I guess we know better, but it is so hard to do better."

And that pretty much says it all. But you know me, I'll say more anyway.

Yesterday was another starting-over Monday at Chez Diets-a-Lot. Since my BlackBerry is in my pocket all the time anyway, I decided to use a calorie-tracking app to record my intake. Lord knows there's been no expenditure of calories around here lately.

I ate 1193 calories yesterday, including two Tootsie Pops. I could have spent that 120 calories much more wisely, I'm sure, but I'm not one to waste food (are Tootsie Pops food?). Like a squirrel preparing for the winter, I have a month's supply of them in the cupboard. Savoring one mid-afternoon is still kind of comforting.

And maybe this is the secret. If I allow room for something that was formerly forbidden when I was trying to lose weight, maybe the whole plan won't come off the rails a couple weeks from now.

Although, seriously, while I wasn't tracking calories this year I also wasn't eating out of control, especially when the garden was producing. (I still have tomatoes, albeit tiny ones. Perfect for topping angel hair pasta, garnished with fresh basil and a whisper of Parmesan. That's tonight's dinner, along with some grilled chicken. 370 calories, approximately.) I was eating reasonable portions of healthful food and hoping it would result in weight loss. And it did, just not as much weight lost as I hoped for.

But I don't want to go backward. I gained two pounds over the past two and a half weeks. Isn't it amazing how weight comes back so much faster than it goes away? It'll be Thanksgiving before I'm back to where I was at the end of August. Sometimes I wish I had a different job, this losing/gaining/losing weight is getting old.