The calories I never knew I ate…

Now that I’ve been at this for a week, I’m amazed at how many calories a day I was really eating. A little embarrassed too.

See, as much as the other competitiors want to tease me for taking pictures of everything I eat before I eat it, I have my reasons. I work from home and have toddlers. Now anyone who has spent time with toddlers know there are two things that happen with toddlers and food.

1.) They want to share it.

2.) They don’t eat it.

That means I ended up eating quite a few bites of “shared” food each day just to get my kids to eat. It also meant I ended up “cleaning up” their food pretty often. Emmitt leaves half a banana? Sure, I’ll finish that and throw away the peel. There are two bites of chicken nugget left on Nora’s plate? Chomp, chomp, swallow.

Until I started taking pictures (which meant deliberate planning of any food that went in my mouth) I had no idea how absent mindedly I did this. The first few days alone, I could count 300-500 calories per DAY that I would have eaten if I hadn’t been using my “take a picture” rule.

No wonder I’m overweight!