The Good, Bad and the Ugly on my diet!

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

I have completed one round of Power 90.  I  enjoyed the process of it a great deal.  I was even able to lose 27 pounds.  I intend to continue doing Power 90 through the school year and then start P90X at the end of next May.  The one thing that I'm still really struggling with is eating well.  I could sit here and make excuses for why I haven't quite accomplished breaking my bad eating habits yet, but I'm not going to.  It's a daily struggle and I think I'm slowly getting better at making food descions.  Mostly.

About a week ago my wife and I started using Shakeology as a substitute for lunch at our jobs.   We love it.  It tastes great and its really good for you. We both love dark chocolate and Shakeology does a great job satisfying that craving for us as well. We did the math and figured out that it's actually cheaper for us to use Shakeology than to eat school lunch everyday.  Our school lunch program is very good as far as school lunches go, however, I still don't believe it's designed to really meet good nutritional needs.  I've been pleasantly surprised by how good I've felt the last week simply by changing what I eat for lunch.  Then today happened.

Today I decided to eat lunch at school instead of taking the 45 seconds this morning it takes me to mix a shake.  School lunch today was pizza.  I love pizza.  In fact pizza might possibly be my favorite food.  In high school I ate pizza everyday at school.  I worked at a pizza joint in the evenings and ate pizza most nights as well.  In college I memorized Domino's phone number, I think I still know it.  Even after all of that I still enjoy pizza.  A LOT.  Which is why I didn't make my own lunch today.

By 2:00 I regretted my decision. While lunch was really good, I didn't particularly great just an hour and a half later.  I wasn't really sick, but I noticed the energy I had all last week wasn't there.  Also my stomach while not really upset just didn't quite feel right. Then during my prep period at school a stumbled across this article written by David Zinczenko.   Talk about guilt and bad timing.  Now I realize some of this could be psychosomatic, but I really think after having eaten healthy lunches for a week my body was yelling at me.  I realized the pizza wasn't worth how I felt the rest of the day.

This morning I took my son to the doctor for his 24 month well check up.  He did great.  While waiting for the doctor to see us I read over and over a poster he has hanging in his examination room.  It says, "People who don't make time for diet and exercise now will have to make time for sickness and disease later."  Talk about the world conspiring against you especially since I read that before lunch.

I'm really starting to make exercising a priority, now I need to make eating healthy all the time a priority as well.

Can someone please tell me about a really healthy pizza?  I don't think I can give that one up just yet.

The Editor Weighs in on Shakeology

Aaron and I broke down and ordered Shakeology, in a lovely shade of chocolate.  It is a bit difficult to mix, but I was immediately in love.  It tastes as chocolatey as my chocolate creme brulee (see "Custard's Last Stand), but it's not nearly as sweet.

After our first round was a bit lumpy, I whipped out the blender.  I mixed up several servings and kept the extra in the fridge.  Elliot, our toddler and I, had it for lunch while Aaron was playing a gig in Ennis, MT.  It was so thick that Elliot had trouble sucking it through the straw, so he dumped it out and tried to lick it off his hands and high chair.

I've already noticed a severe decrease in the munchies, which the literature said would happen after a while, but I didn't really believe would happen.  I'm able to walk away from everything but my problem foods.  Not only am I able to walk away, they don't even sound good.  That could also be partially due to finishing a very stressful job, or some combination thereof.  We'll see how I do during the week when school is back in session.

I'm reservedly hopeful.  If nothing else, each shake is cheaper than school lunch and tastes great.  It does seem to hold me, unlike Slim-Fast, which was a phenomenal flop for me.  The only thing that makes me leery is that it doesn't fix overeating.  Will the good effects last after you stop the shakes for whatever reason?  I don't know, but I'm willing to try it for all of the promised benefits and the ones I'm already noticing.