Holiday Challenge: Week 3 Recap

Hello! First of all, I hope you like the new layout. I have all of next week off from work so I’m hoping to do some re-organizing around here, including better post categories (seriously, I have categories called “Food” and “Exercise,” which pretty much describes every post!).

Today marks the beginning of the fourth and final week of my holiday challenge. Here’s what Week 3 looked like:

I’ll post final progress pictures and stats at the end of the week (before Christmas festivities begin, obviously). The changes from week to week are so small that I’d rather just do a final before and after.

Week 4 has gotten off to a good start. I had the usual for breakfast – peanut butter and banana slices on toast with a glass of skim milk. At 9:30 a.m., I did an RPM class and ran a few errands afterwards (and by errands, I’m referring to all of the Christmas shopping I’d been avoiding). By the time I got home, I was hungry but it was too early for lunch. I needed a quick tide me over so I ate the rest of the banana from breakfast, bringing my morning calorie count to 410 calories.

For lunch, I cooked up a quick tofu and vegetable stir fry. To make the sauce, I mixed almond butter (3 tablespoons), soy sauce (2 tablespoons), rice vinegar (3 tablespoons) and water (2 tablespoons) and cooked everything in sesame oil – so delicious and I have lots of leftovers to eat for the week. I was too lazy to cook the soba noodles that go with this recipe so I got my carbs from an apple that I ate right after lunch. Total for lunch = 391 calories.

For my midday snack, I got a nice dose of protein from tuna and crackers (190 calories).

For dinner, I ate a falafel pita with a Vitatop for dessert (450 calories).

Total = 1441 calories  

Now that I’m reviewing today’s eats, I can see that my protein intake was wayyy too low, mostly due to lack of planning. Most days, I’ve been good about getting around 25%-30% of my calories from protein but some days (like today) I just don’t feel like tracking. I don’t know how vegetarians manage – on days where I don’t eat meat at every meal or consciously make an effort to increase my protein intake, I struggle to get even 20% of my calories from protein, even when I add other protein sources (milk, nut butter, tofu, yogurt, beans, etc) to my diet. That is something I need to work on.

Here’s to a successful Week 4 – I really need to kill it this week to compensate for all of the extra calories I will inevitably consume over the weekend!