I have a really hard time remembering to keep my food journal. I pay something like $15/month (or is that per quarter) to the Weight Watchers website so I can keep it there, but I frequently forget to use it. I almost never get all of the food I eat in a week actually journaled. I've tried a variety of other options - paper journaling, a bead bracelet I made to represent points (like these), all kinds of things. I never remember to get it all down. And if I forget to journal, I wind up giving up on the diet for the week.

I didn't journal what I ate yesterday, and because I had a vegan club sandwich for lunch and some leftovers for dinner, I have no idea how many points I used yesterday. I will just have to start my journal today and hope I didn't go too far over points the rest of the week!

I only had a couple of points for lunch, so I think I will go get a snack. I want a Reese's peanut butter cup or a Slim-A-Bear Klondike bar, but if I can stifle that urge I will get veggies or fruit or cottage cheese.

Wahoo! I am down two pounds this week, to 170.5! That's pretty good considering I had a Thanksgiving meal in there. But I didn't have any leftovers. Okay, I have to run to work!

Well, I think I did reasonably well on Thanksgiving. I only went back for two additional helpings, one of my wife's mashed potatoes and one of my dad's sweet potatoes. I did finish a piece of pie that I didn't like too much, mostly because the person who made it was nearby. It's not like being in a restaurant where I am comfortable leaving whatever I don't want on my plate...this was a potluck, so I ate the rest of the piece of pie even though I didn't like it very much. I'm not sure how I'll end up doing in terms of gaining or losing this week. I ate a bunch of grapes today, so my tummy is not feeling too great right now.

Ooooops. This does not bode well for my eating habits today: I forgot my lunch money. I had gotten cash at the ATM yesterday, and for some reason I put the cash and my card into my pants pocket instead of my purse. Of course I'm not wearing the pants today, so I have no money and no card with which to get more money. I sent an e-mail to the only person in the building who I feel comfortable borrowing money from...hopefully she'll be willing to lend me $10 or so. I also left my water bottle in the car today (the bus was about to leave as I pulled in, so I grabbed my bag and jumped out of the car, forgetting the water bottle), so I can't even fill it at the sink! If I don't get money from somewhere, I will be subsisting on Starbucks cinnamon chewing gum and leftover Halloween candy until I can get home. Not what I'd like to do at all.

Added: Phew! After a scare this morning when I thought the co-worker referred to above wasn't here today, it turned out she was just running late. She's going to buy me lunch - and thank goodness, I'm getting hungry!

It occurred to me that once again I have not been drinking enough water. I am a diehard soda drinker, but I'd gotten used to water for a while. I haven't had any in a long time, though, so today I bought a one-liter bottle of bottled water at the snack bar. I'm finding it a real drag to force down. I polished off a 20-ounce bottle of soda in no time flat this morning, but now I'm only about a third of the way through this bottle of water. I've heard all the tips and tricks before, so I know how to make my water more enjoyable, but I still don't like drinking it. I actually rather enjoy mixing in a packet of Splenda, but I'm trying to make myself drink plain water. I quit biting my nails cold turkey five years ago and I haven't bitten them since, so I'm just trying to make the jump. (Doing fancy things to water is too much hassle, too. I like just buying the bottle and drinking right from it.)

Today I had some potatoes for lunch, with a small salad. I probably should have just gotten a big salad instead, but I was really hungry for those cooked potato wedges. They're not fried, but they're not just steamed...there's some kind of oil on them. Boston Market makes something similar, but theirs are cooked even more than these were. I wish the salad bar here at work was fully stocked - they only have carrots once in a great while, and they take away my sunflower seeds for a few weeks at a time.

I'm not thinking about exercise too much right now; that will come later. For the moment my focus is on drinking more water and eating mostly appropriately. I already had an apple as dessert with lunch, but I might get a Carborite cookie later in the afternoon. I'm not on a low-carb diet but it is significantly reduced in calories - only two WW points for the whole cookie.

It's a new week. I struggled at the end of last week, and we went out to a show last night so I had dinner out. (I got a salad and had the dressing on the side, but then I had a candy bar for dessert.) But Monday mornings start my new week on the Weight Watchers program (which I follow online only, and not very well at that), so this morning I weighed myself. I weighed in at 172.5, which is up from last week (bah!) but I'll take it. This week is probably going to be a total writeoff because of Thanksgiving, but I'm going to spend the other days trying to eat healthy to offset the holiday meal. I'm a vegetarian, so I won't be having big helpings of turkey with gravy or anything like that, but there is always plenty to eat at my parents' church's potluck dinner. I'm not into denying myself on the holidays - in fact I consider it almost rude to only eat a salad - but I will try to at least exercise portion control.

So far so good today, although I had a bagel for breakfast because I had to get up insanely early and therefore hit my snooze button and didn't have time for a more sensible breakfast. I don't feel too guilty about the bagel, and I didn't have any dessert after lunch (which happened kind of late, around 2:45). I'm getting to be in the mood for a snack (it's not quite dinnertime), so I will probably have some carrots. That sounds good right now!

I absolutely love Tradition-brand ramen. Unlike Maruchan or Top Ramen, it's actually low-fat! It costs about five times as much as the major brands, but I don't actually mind. I'm used to paying more money for vegetarian food (a package of veggie lunch meat costs more than actual lunch meat, for example), so I don't mind paying more for something that's healthier. It's a total of six WW points for the package, and I usually add in some frozen veggies. And that's what I had for lunch today! I am trying to resist the urge to have a chocolate-covered peanut butter heart from a box of candy. I am drinking straight from a two-liter bottle of Caffeine Free Diet Coke. Must resist candy!

I've had this Blogger account since February 15, 2001 and I have never done anything with it. Today I got an idea for an entirely new separate blog (this makes three that I run, plus a couple of mirrors) and I realized I could use this account for it. I deleted all of the old posts (they were archived elsewhere anyway) and I'm starting fresh. This also means that I get to use just about any design I want to, rather than fitting it in with my skinned site! Right now I'm using one of the lovely Kristine's designs, but once I relearn the Blogger template tags I may seek out an appropriate design for this blog's subject.

Which brings me, of course, to the subject: my diet. As a teenager, I kept my weight around 110 pounds and I could eat just about anything without gaining weight. I was cute at that size, and I have a lot of really cute clothes from those days. But a combination of factors (the most important being a stint on steroids for an immune disorder) has caused me to gain a significant amount of weight since then, and I've been trying to diet for a couple of years now. When I realized I needed to start dieting (prior to this I hadn't noticed the gain), I was 168 pounds. I made it down to 134 with the help of Weight Watchers, but I gained it back. My maximum weight now is 173, which I reached after a cruise in the second half of October 2004. Damn, they feed you good food!

I have major problems with self-discipline, just like everybody else. I lead an extremely sedentary lifestyle, so I've been trying to control my weight by controlling what I eat, but of course that's a difficult process. I beat myself up over candy constantly. I'm now going to use this journal as a way to be accountable to myself. I'm not going to record exactly everything I ate, but rather generalities (a salad, steamed veggies) and also emotions. If I have a piece of candy, I'm going to write down how I feel about that. I'm hoping to get friends and family to read this journal so they can keep me in line and provide feedback and constructive criticism. We'll see how it goes.