Progress...

So I've been doing really well with my eating so far but the exercising...not so much. I'm sure everyone feels like this but I need a few extra hours each day.

I weighed myself today and I'm down 5lbs. Yippee!!!

This past week I focused on being more active but I never watched my exercise tapes or took any power walks. We went to the zoo last Saturday and walked through the entire zoo (at a very slow pace with 2 kids) but at least we were outside being active. I also took the kids to the park twice after work and ran and jumped around with Zach.

My goals for this week are to do at least two exercise videos and take at least one walk. Hopefully if I have a plan it will be easier for me to stick to than if I just arbitrarily say I'm going to exercise...I'll let you know if this strategy works :-)

As far as eating goes, I'm not following a formal plan. Arie (thanks Arie) sent me a great website and I signed up for it and it gave me a daily calorie range for my weight and height. It gave you a meal plan and many other useful tools, but I don't really have the time to keep up with it though. I've been trying to stick within that amount of calories. I don't have a calculator out and I'm not writing everything down but I divided the total into 3 meals and 2 snacks and try to eat about that many calories at each meal. It has been fairly easy for me so far.

I know one of the hardest things for me is coming up with quick things to cook for dinner. A couple of weeks ago I was searching for dinner menu ideas and I came across this free website
Menus4moms. It has been really helpful with dinner planning. I don't follow the recipes usually but I love the ideas. I've stocked my freezer with the things the site suggests (I used 5lbs of extra lean ground turkey instead of the beef) and it has been so helpful with getting dinner on the table quickly and easily. This past week I made a 2lb pork roast like it suggested and then used half for dinner the first night and saved the rest for pork lo mein later in the week. I used real lo mein noodles instead of the ramen because of all the sodium in the ramen and I used veggies Joe and Zach will eat. It truly took only 10 minutes to cook this (not including the time to boil the water to cook the noodles) I just bought a bag of shredded carrots and then I chopped up some celery and green onions and threw it in the pan. Amazingly easy!!

Since we are paying for 2 children's childcare now we are also on a much tighter budget. It is much cheaper than take out or one of those places where you make a bunch of dinners ahead of time and take them home and freeze them. I got the ground turkey at Sam's for really cheap! My family goes through so much milk (2-3 gallons a week) and I also discovered that milk at Sam's is over $1 cheaper/ gallon than at our grocery store. We are really lucky Sam's is actually closer than our grocery store.

I know I rarely post and then when I do it is usually extremely long so if you are still reading this...thank you :-)

PS- I'm going to load the pics from the zoo tonight and I'll post about that later.