Day 15

Today was a pretty stressful day.  Spent three hours on the phone trying to handle having cable installed.  Then had to work, plus my iPhone isn't actually making my music available since the new OS was installed and I can't seem to fix it.  Needless to say I was frustrated.  It's Day 15 of the challenge and cheating on the diet has never looked quite so tempting.

Luckily I was able to avoid it, so far at least.  However stress definitely seems like it's the biggest danger to the diet.  My food tends to be kind of boring, and therefore a lot easier to decide to get something different by going out and overeating someplace.  The real danger though seems to be the combination of needing something to "make me feel better," and a little bit of, "this day was just too much, I don't even want to think about cooking."  It's really easy to order the pizza, run out to the burger joint or go grab take out from the italian place. 

Instead of rushing to "get everything done," I took a bit of time after getting home and let myself calm down a bit.  Once I did that it was a lot easier to persuade myself to grill the chicken rather than find someplace that deep-fried it instead.  Would that work for everybody, probably not.  It might not even work for me next time, but trying to calm down and remind myself that the chaos didn't mean the day had to be a disaster meant I didn't make it worse by going crazy with food.

So what did I eat.  It was another egg and cheese sandwich for breakfast (300 calories).  It's the same calories as the cheerios, but for some reason it seems to last a lot longer before I feel hungry.  Another turkey sandwich for lunch (500 calories), also does a really good job of keeping me satisfied.  Snacks today included one mini-butterfinger and a piece of cheese (not at the same time, but probably about 150 on calories).  Dinner was grilled chicken, noodles and green beans (900 calories again, as most meals with similar ingredients are).

Today's Results:
Daily Food Total:  1850 calories
Exercise:  0
Points Earned:  1150
Total Points Earned:  20120
Points to go:  179880

Since I've passed 20,000 calories I'm going to make tomorrow morning my first formal weigh-in.  I'm going to try less formal ones every 10K or so, but I'll post the 20K results here.  I was persuaded that weigh-ins will help me to know what is and isn't working.