Well, it's been a productive day. I got up about 11:00 and was greeted by sleet bouncing off the windows and piling up on everything in sight. Fortunately, I knew it was coming and was planning to spend the day inside. I was in the mood to cook, so I spent the vast majority cooking and freezing truckloads of food. I started with oven-fried chicken tenders and tabouli salad for lunch. The tabouli was a box mix that I grabbed at Wal-Mart. It was disgusting - I just don't get along with Moroccan/Indian spice combos - my palate just doesn't think that mint and lemon go together. After lunch, I took a break then made some hummus, toasted pita chips and homemade tomato soup. I portioned everything out into individual portions and put some in the freezer. By then, it was time for supper, so I made a hamburger, heated up some leftover couscous and had some of the hummus & pita chips. Not a bad day's work, all-in-all.

As you all know, I have been doing the SparkPeople plan along with Shane, Rich, Mom and everyone else in our little cyber-community. I'm both loving it and struggling with it. It is the easiest "diet" that I've ever done - which is also why I'm struggling with it. I'm just not quite sure that it will work - although, it seems to be working very well for Shane. I am still able to eat fast food, chocolate, snacks and anything else that I want - as long as I stay within my prescribed limits. I've also been working out a bit - something I've been thinking about starting for a while. I actually began making some lifestyle changes about a year ago. I drink 3-5 liters of water a day and started eating low-calorie snacks twice a day to keep my metabolism going. I also refuse to eat anything after 8:00 pm. I'm enjoying tracking my food intake via sparkpeople.com - it really makes you think about every single thing that you put in your mouth. I tend to obsess over things and this week, if I didn't know exactly how many calories, fat grams and carbohydrates were in something, I didn't eat it. Today, as I cooked things, I tracked all of the nutritional information for each ingredient, added it all up, divided it into the appropriate number of servings, input it to SparkPeople and then portioned out the food accordingly. Math and cooking - it was great.

I was going to post my weekly summary, but Shane's going to have to show me how :-)

Ok, Shane told me. . . gee, why didn't I think of that? :-) Here is the week that was: