Day 9

DVD - Pure Cardio

I have no major break throughs with the workout to report, and I figure anyone who is reading this will get tired of "I took fewer breaks this time" reports (however true they might be).

Instead, I will talk a little about food.

The first few days of the diet plan were hard. I was eating regularly, but somehow I felt an underlying hunger all day.I had a couple of extra "snacks" the first couple of days, but they were healthy. When doing insanity, snacks of a certain variety are called "food blocks" and you are supposed to add them in 100 at a time. Things like 1 small banana, or 12 almonds, or 1/2 cup of yogurt with 1 tbsp. of high-fiber cereal, or 1/2 an apple with reduced-fat cheese. When I snacked, I tended not to add the full 100 calories and only did so once per day (mostly because I still wanted to have a glass of wine later). A full apple. A banana. String cheese. By Thursday of the first week, I noticed that slight pang of hunger throughout the day had gone away and I wasn't needing an extras.

Today I went on a site visit to a hotel we are considering using for an upcoming conference at work. As part of the visit, I was treated to lunch in the hotel's breakfast and lunch restaurant (Park Grill in the Financial District). As you might expect, it's hard to stick to 300 calories when dining out. I made the best choices I could and tried to stick to a mixture of lean protein and vegetables: a mixed green salad followed by a Mexican seafood mixed grill with one bay scallop, two large prawns & a 3 to 4 oz piece of salmon served with broccoli and spaghetti squash (I am not sure what was Mexican about it). The food was fucking amazing, and worth every last calorie.

I don't beat myself up about this sort of "slip" when I am dieting. I know I'm never going to lose a pound a day. I'd have to somehow consume a net -3,500 calories a day to do that. Considering my base caloric in-take were I to lay in bed and not move all day is over 1,400 ... do the math. If you figure out how to consume and burn -6,000 calories a day and not keel over and die, let me know. Instead, I consider my caloric restriction as a cumulative weekly total. If I stick to the Insanity meal plan the rest of the week, even if I ate 1,000 calories more than I burned today (which I doubt, since I slightly adjusted the rest of the meals downward), I'm still going to burn roughly 5,000 calories less than I consume. And I also know that a regular but infrequent splurge, for me, will keep me more on track than if I try to give up everything I like for a sustained amount of time because I'm a fairly serious Foodie so it's hard for me to exist in food-as-fuel mode for too long without falling off the wagon, as it were.

The other pertinent thing about my site visit was that it gave me the opportunity to discuss my "boot camp" with a new person, which in turn got me excited about my plan again. Other people sharing my enthusiasm and being impressed with my effort is a nice little jolt of motivation. And I figure, the more people I tell, the more I'm going to feel accountable, like I have to stick to it. I'm doing this for me, ultimately, but I'm someone who sometimes requires a little help and external motivation. To put it bluntly, I don't want to have to explain why I gave up. Hence the blog.