So I've been doing the diet thing for about a week and a half now, and I thought I'd update you guys.

I've been doing pretty well with the diet, but I could still be doing better. I've been recording most of what I've been eating on fitday, but homemade food can make that complicated, so a lot of what I'm doing is still guesswork. Plus, with work it's made it harder to update this week, so I've got to get on being better about that. But even the little that I have done has really opened my eyes about my eating habits. I've always thought that I was a pretty okay eater, but I've found out that I was actually eating fairly badly before. My day to day average eating is okay, but then when I get to sweets, I would pig out. For example, my mom makes these delicious pitachio bars- they're to die for- and I loooove them. I realized that when she makes them, I don't eat just one piece- I eat two when she intially makes it, and then all day long until they're gone. The same goes for other sweets- a woman I work with keeps mini twix and milky ways on her desk, some of my favorite candies, and I would easily eat a handful of those a day. I thought that I was doing alright with eating before because I figured those were select circumstances, but I'm realizing that they're really not.

I'm also realizing how many calories are really in everything that I eat. 1700 calories can go FAST if you're not careful. I also realized that there was a fundamental problem in the way I was thinking about exercise, which Primesuspect and Thrax helped me see. I was seeing excercise as a justification to eat badly- "It's okay if I eat this piece of pie, I went running this morning!" and that's an okay way to look at if you're trying to maintain a weight, but it's the ENTIRELY wrong way to think if you want to lose. I should be thinking "It's not okay for me to eat that piece of pie, because I went running this morning, and it would undo the hard work I did" Thinking like that has definitely made a change in my habits.

I still have a lot of improvements to make. I haven't been lifting weights like I said I would, which I need to do if I want to tone- though honestly, losing weight is more important to me than toning. I was doing the HIIT sprints faithfully until tuesday, when clumsy me decided to totally wipe out mid sprint. I scraped up my knee pretty badly, so I've been waiting for it to heal a little bit before doing sprints again. I'm also going to have to be better about my cheat days- not go overboard. I'm also realizing that eating out is going to be a MAJOR enemy of my weight loss. I LOVE eating out, and it's hard for me to say no to it, and hard to eat well when you are eating out.

I do think I have lost some weight though, so far, so I'm happy about that. I think I'm about two pounds lower, though that could be wrong, since for me two pounds could easily be water weight or something like that, but I'm going to go with losing weight since it makes me happy. I'm going to try and keep improving too!