Even though the Gold's Gym Challenge started on Saturday with measurements, I didn't get my meal plan from my trainer until Sunday, and didn't get out to the grocery store till Monday, so today, Tuesday, is really my first day on the meal plan. It's a weird meal plan and it's the same every day, which I'm not terribly fond of, but I'm giving it a try. An edited, personalized try.
It's a pretty intensive plan, calls for four meals a day and two protein shakes, one after breakfast and one after my workouts. I bought some Rule 1 Protein Shake from the gym because it pretty much has no ingredients besides protein and weird artificial chocolate flavor, and is considerably lower in cholesterol than the other stuff I looked at. That's the biggest problem with the meal plan so far, actually, the cholesterol. I'm trying to lower my bad cholesterol and I've got a lipids panel coming up this week, and suddenly I'm supposed to be eating two eggs, ground turkey, chicken breast and even lean ground beef _every day_? I mean, I know cholesterol isn't a bad thing in moderation, and some studies show that eggs are such good cholesterol that they don't really affect your LDL levels long-term at all, but that is still a lot to be dumping into my body when the threat of Lipitor is still looming. My normal menu includes some chicken and some turkey, but very few eggs and almost no beef at all. I wonder if she'll let me sub in some fish, because I got a very good deal on some frozen swai fillets this week.
Anyway, I cooked up my very first meal this morning, and whoo boy. The meal plan from the trainer is something like this:
- 2 eggs, 5 egg whites (!)
- 1 cup baby spinach
- 1/2 cup oats
- 1/2 cup blueberries
and then a protein shake. This didn't look like that much (except for the crazy egg part) when it was on the paper. I'm very leery about the egg business, so for this morning I decided to just do the egg whites, which I'd gotten a carton of at HEB. Turns out just four egg whites is an entire cup, so I went with that many. Spinach and egg just screams omelet, even without cheese, so I wilted the spinach in the pan, then added the egg white, garlic salt, pepper, and some fresh dill that is still growing against all the odds in my January garden. It made a very large egg white omelet. While it was cooking, I zapped the oatmeal in the microwave and stirred in some blueberries. I didn't use the whole half-cup because a six-ounce clamshell was nearly two dollars this week at the store and that is ridiculous. I may need to find more seasonable fruits and vegetables if I want to do this plan long-term. And I made the protein shake in the blender.
So my first meal ended up looking something like this:
- 4 egg whites
- 1 cup baby spinach
- 1/2 cup oats,
- 1/4 cup blueberries
- protein shake
And I have been eating it the entire time I've been writing this and I still have half the oatmeal to go and I do not want it at all. Way too full. Even if this diet is boring, I suspect it will discourage cheating by making me work to fit all its ingredients into my stomach. My next meal, which is ground turkey, sweet potato and broccoli, is already barreling down on me, and it is the last thing I even want to think about.
So how does all this work with Weight Watchers? Not too bad, actually. It's a fair amount of veggies and a little fruit along with all the protein, and those don't count for points on WW at all. I took the entire menu and plugged it into my meal tracker and came up with 37 points (including the whole eggs I didn't eat today). That's one point over my daily target, but the challenge also involves a ton of exercise. It's nothing at all to swap a single activity point each day to make things balance. If I can get the cholesterol business sorted, it seems like a nutritionally sound short-term diet.
But if I know anything about myself it's that the monotony is going to get to me sooner rather than later. It's what I like about Weight Watchers in the first place, that I can have infinite variety so long as I count my points. And sure some weeks I'll eat the same lunch four days in a row, but I don't have to. I need to come up with some way of jazzing this up or mixing it up, lest I fall off plan in the first week.
Here is my in-process omelet this morning. Yummy, yummy!
