Week Six Saturday

What a blissful rainy fall day.  I love the changing of the seasons, and, man, has it changed with a vengeance!  Today Paul had rehearsals downtown all day and it was my goal to get the freezer crockpot meals all put together for the week, to get all my breakfasts done, all my snacks done, and just get all prepared for the week.  When I started working in the kitchen, I decided to re-organize the pantry and the shelves.  Don't laugh, but after deep cleaning and organizing the pantry, I alphabetized the spices so we could find things easier, and then rearranged the pans and bigger things that I've never really been happy with how they were arranged.  I did a load of dishes and then was ready to start on the meals.  Sad day.  We had no ziploc freezer bags.  I decided to work on the nitty gritty details of my menu instead.

So here has been my dilemma- I need to make sure I'm getting the right balance of carbs, proteins, fats, and calories in my meals.  When I select from the meal options Curves has- no problem.  However, when I make my own meals, I don't know how they shake down in those categories.  I've been trying to go by the "whole foods" principal until I had time to do the detail work.

It took me a couple hours to look at the exchange meal options on Curves, translate them into how many carbs, proteins, fats, and calories each option contains.  Then I went through ingredient by ingredient on the bean salad and all the crockpot dinner meals I had planned, and added it all up.  Since it didn't translate directly, I looked at the exchange information and made a "ranges" list- I should have between X and X amount of carbs, etc.  It looks like the meals will work, but that I'll need to tweak the bean salad a bit and find a way to get more protein in it.

Here's what my eating looked like today:
Breakfast: 2 slices whole wheat toast, 1.5 TB peanut butter (carefully measured out), and 6 oz. cottage cheese
Morning snack: 1 oz. almonds (oh- I went through my bag of almonds and weighed them out into 1 oz. portion baggies.)
Lunch: 1 can chicken breast meat, 1 TB miracle whip, 1/4 cup cheddar cheese, 1 whole wheat thin bun, 1.5 C light chips
Dinner: 2 pieces of pizza, 1 piece cheese bread, 1 package M&Ms

Today I had 8 glasses of water- 4 of them regular- 4 of them with apple cinnamon herbal tea in them with a couple of spoonfuls of raw honey.

Steps: 4026

Tonight I was able to put together 6 of the 8 meals that I wanted to for the freezer.  I'm excited to see if we like these recipes.  They're pretty close to what we've been doing already, so I think we will.  It will be so nice to have meals ready to go that I don't think we'll be picky. :O)   Tomorrow I'll make my breakfasts, brown rice to freeze and go with the meals, and put together my salad.