October 10 - going without a plan - birthday dinner celebration

I've decided, for the time being, to try going without ediets. I am dropping the weight of managing ediets and replacing it with the challenge of monitoring myself. My goal is to gain fewer than 5 pounds by the end of the month, and if in the meantime I actually find some new answers within myself about how to maintain or lose weight, that'll be a big bonus. So I need to stay in the 220s or below. I have been looking at Sparkpeople all day, tracking all my food there, and thinking about

Today I went a little over. Things started off pretty well. I didn't get out of bed for a few hours, and so breakfast was late, and breakfast wasn't really a problem. I had: an omelette of 1 egg, 1 egg white, 1 sliced mushroom, and 1 ounce of reduced fat cheddar cheese; 1 piece of whole wheat toast with a scarping of butter and a tablespoon of cherry jam; 6-8 oz of nonfat milk. I cooked the omelet over a scraping of butter instead of Pam or olive oil, too. I had missed butter, and I found just a little bit was enough to give me the flavor I wanted. I had also not had jam on my toast in so long. Honestly, it's not like I've had a bunch of toast and jam over the past 10 years - but ever since I've been on this meal plan and making my own breakfasts, I haven't had jelly and it seemed a shame. I was paying intense attention to my serving sizes and my food choices and I wasn't losing control.

According to sparkpeople, breakfast was 467 calories.

Then dinner - birthday dinner with Dad, and this time I joined in. We went to the Outback - relatively clean and healthy food. I ordered a 6-oz steak with their garlic mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables, and a Mai Tai, and also had a couple pieces of their bread with whipped butter. On top of that, I had given Dad some Whoppers candy as a bday present, so I wound up tasting about 9 of those over the course of the evening. And also we went home and had a very rich piece of chocolate birthday cake that even I wasn't able to finish.

Dinner was a little harder to quantify, but when I finished entering my foods in at sparkpeople, they figured my dinner was 1,928 calories, bringing my total for the day to 2,396. They reckoned I'd met my goals for carbohydrates and protein, but I'd had 90 grams of fat instead of the recommended 27-60 grams.

Now, I wasn't entirely "out of control" at dinner either, but I did splurge in celebratory fashion. The Mai Tai was 25% of my calories today, and there was 25 grams of fat in the garlic mashed potatoes alone. The chocolate cake alone reports itself as only 235 calories, and I have no way of knowing really how close that is. I had also got the lobster-and-mushroom topping to go with the steak, and even though I only ate about half of the buttery/salty stuff, it was still a major calorie addition - 196 calories, if that is to be believed (frankly I can't believe that the minute amount of lobster, mushroom, and butter I had could add up to quite that much.) Also a lot of sodium was ingested in that meal, which may not cause me to gain fat but it will show up on the scale.

So... tomorrow is supposed to be a day of hiking with Dad, but food is not important to the plan and if food is eaten, I'm sure I can manage to keep it to 1650 or less. Well, I'll do better than today, anyway. Have to stay below 230.