New day, new diet

I’ve tried a few new things as my depression ebbed in the last couple of years to try to lose weight. I’ve been on-and-off with weight lifting and swimming. I’ve tried straight calorie tracking. I toyed with a diet that prioritized healthy food choices.

Today I started something that caters to one of my major character traits – laziness. I’m putting all of my food into containers and labelling the container with the food and calorie count, then slotting the foods into my meals so that they fit into my calorie targets.

It doesn’t take long to do the containers, although I’ll probably invest in a printable calorie sticker strip at some point. I’d like to make an app to help with meal planning as well, maybe tie it into the labels.

I’m making one big simplification with this plan: I only have round number categories in a limited number of denominations. For now I’m using 50, 100, 150, 200, 400, 600, and 800. I don’t actually have a whole lot of foods in the larger categories, but they’re there for cooked dishes, so I’ll figure it out over time.

The nice thing about the simplified calories is that it lets me be pretty lazy in the morning, which is when I’m prepping my bag of food for the work day.  My daily calorie allotment breaks down like this:

• Breakfast – 800 calories. I tend not to eat breakfast in the normal sense so this gets broken down into “grazables”
  • nuts – 400 calories
  • fruit – 2-4 x 50 calories
  • grains – About 200 calories
• Snack 1 – 150 calories – pretty sure this will be a Coke most days; caffeine is good
• Lunch – 550 calories – right now aiming at 4-500 calorie mains with 50-150 in sides
• Snack 2 – 200 calories – right now I’m eating bran muffins, but I have lots of options here
• Supper – 700 calories – 600 calorie main, 100 calories in veg
• Snack 3 – 200 calories – probably something a bit cheat-ey, but really depends on the day.

So. That’s the plan. We’ll see how it goes.