Valentine's Day celebration, a day early

Calories consumed: 1956

Calories burned: 2534

Calorie deficit: 578

Wow, it is amazing how many calories you can burn by just cleaning the house for a few hours. Granted, I did Zumba yesterday morning as well (I was only in class for about 45 minutes, so that burned a little over 300 calories), but I bet I burned over 200 cleaning the house. Not too shabby.

I ended up eating a lot more than I should have yesterday. I hate that this keeps happening. Notice that if I stuck to my calorie intake goal of 1550 calories, because of my high burns, I'd have as much as a 1000 calorie deficit on some days. At that rate, I'd lose 2 pounds a week. That would make me happy.

So where did I go wrong yesterday? Well, at lunch, we had ham and cheese paninis, which I made on the Foreman grill this time, and used very little light butter on mine. Overall, this lunch wasn't bad, except for the fact that I had a cup of the pasta salad I had made for the Super Bowl. That was an extra 200 calories. It was whole wheat pasta, with a bunch of vegetables, but pasta adds up quick. It's not fair. After lunch, I was craving sweets, again, so I had a Charms Blow Pop (60 calories) out of Lila's treat basket, plus I had a Weight Watchers chocolate frosted snack cake (90 calories). So between the pasta salad and treats, I had consumed an extra 350 calories that I really didn't need.

Then dinner came. It was the day before Valentine's Day, and we knew we weren't going to be able to celebrate on Valentine's Day as a family, so we went to dinner the day before. Jack chose Chinese food, and I obliged. We always get stir-fried General Tso's chicken, so at least it's not all deep fried with breading. And then we also get a vegetable medley. Oh darn, and I forgot to count the two steamed dumplings I had. Shoot! Anyway, I tried to be mindful of how much I was eating, but in the end, I bet I ate over 800 calories in dinner. And then after we got home, I had a cup of hot cocoa, plus a few animal cookies.

I'm having such a hard time sticking to a 1500 calorie meal plan. Well, some days I am. It's so frustrating. So for the upcoming week, I'm going to try eating the bodybugg suggested meal plans, which are all designed to provide me with 1500 calories a day. This gets to be a little problematic when I still need to feed Jack and Lila with dinners (some days, the bodybugg uses a meal replacement bar for dinner, and I can't feed that to Jack and Lila). Also problematic will be Tuesday when we're most likely going to Jack's mom's for dinner. And then lastly problematic is that Lent starts this week, so I won't be able to eat meat on Wednesday or Friday. Fortunately, the Wednesday meal plan has no meat in it anyway, but I'll need to do some substituting on Friday.

So wish me luck. I'm not sure if I'll be successful or not, but I've got to try.