Because Making Good Choices is Hard

In all of life really...but in particular in the area of food. I feel like I have spent most of my life being displeased with my nutrition and fitness choices (because I wasn't really choosing nutrition and fitness period). A year ago, I got very serious about the fitness side though. It's made a huge difference from just being able to keep up with friends, to changing clothing sizes, to being able to run a 5K. The nutrition side sort of just came along without a huge amount of work. I counted some calories and chose more fruits and veggies over other stuff.

However about 4 months ago I got tired of counting calories and a little switch in my head flipped to where I started telling myself "you work out...you should be able to eat whatever you want to". That's probably true if I wanted to maintain where I had arrived but I don't want to maintain where I am right now and I was fooling myself into thinking that the nutrition side would be easy. All that to say, I've been 'stuck' at this point for a while so I've decided to go back to counting calories.

It's a little bit eye opening to count calories. Last night my roommate made our favorite Pumpkin Bran Muffins. We can seriously eat like 12 of these in 5 days or less, no foolin. They are so good and falsely seem healthy because they have flax seed, wheat flour, and wheat bran in them. Last night I decided I should know what the calories are on these things...it's 299 per muffin. Whoa, I don't think I would have guessed that because I was so sure they were healthy. Well, we have discussed doing some substitutions to try to make them a bit more healthy next time. If we substitute applesauce for the oil, splenda or some other no calorie sweetener for the sugar and cut the chocolate chips in half we can save almost 100 calories per muffin.

I feel like this week has been a turning point for me...like I'm back on the nutrition saddle so to speak. I'm planning to run a 2nd 5K in a couple weeks and a 10K at the end of May. My roommate wanted to go out of town for my birthday and I sort of turned her down because I want to run a 5K that weekend too (now there's a new side of me...choosing running over a fun mountain trip).