I’m Baaaaaaaaaaack…..

I know, I know…you’ve all spent the last eleven days sitting around your monitors trying to stifle sobs of anguish over the lack of photographs of my meals in your RSS feeds. You wondered what you’d do with yourself…how you’d go on.

Ok, ok, so actually, you REALLY wondered if I could stay on the Fat Fighting wagon while in London and Italy.

Now there’s no possible way I could take the time to post day by day breakdowns of everything I ate. (Though I’ll post a collage and link you to everything over at Flickr if you are curious.) There was also no way for me to know what the calorie counts of most things were. That meant I had to use common sense to try and make good food choices. I figure the first two weeks of this contest were good prep time for that.

So how did I do? Well, no official weigh-in until tomorrow morning, so I can’t tell you yet. I didn’t want to look back on my vacation and feel like I’d cheated myself out of enjoying good food, so I went into things with this plan…

1.) Wear my pedometer every day. 10,000 steps = roughly 400 calories burned. (At a normal walking pace for me.) I succeeded on this front. We only had two days that didn’t crack the 15K mark. Most days we cracked 20K and one day we hit 33K.  (That’s about 17 miles if you’re curious.) When all was said and done, we walked somewhere between 100 and 115 miles during our 10 days of vacation. Roughly 30 miles of that was up and down VERY strenuous hills as we trekked through Tuscany and the Cinque Terre.

2.) Only eat until I wasn’t hungry any more. This was a big one for me. I LOVE food. I’m not overweight because I have emotional issues that drive me to eat when I’m sad/happy/mad, I’m overweight because I think food rocks and I want to eat it. :)  Thus, if there’s something super yummy on my plate, I tend to finish it, even if I’m full. That didn’t happen this go round. I’d say I “finished” less than 20% of my meals. I ate less than half of 50% of my meals. The other 30% saw me leaving a decent amount of food on the plate. I ate what sounded good, but I ate much smaller quantities of it than I used to.

Now, I don’t know if I lost weight, but I know I’ve continued to build muscle and lose inches. My calf muscles are like rock now. I’ve already realized it’s time to introduce my favorite jeans (my Calvin Kleins) to Ms. Belt. Why? Because they’re falling down. (I discovered this yesterday while running through Heathrow airport as fast as i could with a backpack on…If you think that might cause a stir, imagine the stir if I hadn’t caught my pants before they actually fell off! And this from jeans that fit just a bit loose when we left for the trip.)

So, while I have a feeling I’m still going to be behind on the weight loss (I’m guessing I lost another pound, maybe a pound and a half and will come in around 188 or 189) I’m losing inches rapidly and may be able to go shopping for a size 14 jeans before SES NY.

Pictures and even some video to come…