Tips to Dieting Sanely

Didn't weight this morning. No real reason.

Weekends can be so difficult for me to diet! Add to it a holiday weekend, and typically it is Sabotage City. So, I feel pretty good about how things went over the weekend. Last night got a little rough as I was pouring chocolate sauce onto my Weight Watchers popsicle... Oh well!

For my first week on this journey, I guess we can agree that I lost 3 lbs. While this is good, we will really start cooking with oil when I reach 214. (I was just 214 a few weeks ago before backsliding.) I haven't been less than 214 in over 5 years.

Here are some tips that tend to work for me when losing weight:

1. Cooking can be laborious. I never know what to do with chicken, pork chops, etc to make it enjoyable. So, yesterday we grilled out a bunch of meat. Since there's just two adults here, grilling out is a waste if you're only doing two or four items. We put out pork chops, pork ribs, chicken, and fat free hot dogs. We ate some of the ribs last night for dinner, while my hubby took the rest to work for lunch today. Tonight I will use the grilled chicken to make a grilled chicken salad with lots of veggies! For lunch today I ate one of the hot dogs in a White Wheat bun by Nature's Own with some of those Lay's potato chips made with O'Lean, or something like that... the stuff that makes you sick if you eat too much. Fat free hot dogs are around 25 calories. You don't even have to count ONE point for that, and when grilled outside, they are tasty. The bun... ONE point. The chips... ONE point! Not completely healthy, but not gonna kill me either! A two point lunch! (We froze the pork chops.)

2. My husband and son love bananas, banana pie, banana ice cream, banana pudding, you get the picture. So, last night I made instant sugar-free vanilla pudding, put in some banana slices, then topped it with a few vanilla wafers and fat free cool whip. Very satisfying and a good alternative to the kind my mother makes, the good old-fashioned banana pudding that gets baked and has all sorts of sugar and yum in it.

3. Snacking is my favorite thing to do when I'm bored. Not the kind of snacking where you really cut something up or sit down to eat it, but the kind where you shove a cracker in your mouth and walk away... forgetting all about it when tracking your food input, though you've done it five times that day. So, here's what I do. First, I lower the amount of points I'm allowed to have a day by one or two and definitely do not count my exercise to allow for the extra points. This way I'm mostly safe.

Okay, that's all I have for now. More to come. Do you have any tips or favorite foods for dieting sanely? Please share.