Yard Work

So, I told you that my next post would include a more detailed breakdown of my calories, and I will do that, but I am also going to tell you about my Saturday that I had with my husband.

Calorie counting, at first is really tedious and hard.  But as you get used to it, it actually gets easier.  For me, I eat a lot of the same snacks and I have the same thing for breakfast every day, so it is easier to just plug in the info and then just keep using the same info... At least that is what works for me.  I am using the MyFitnessPal app and you can also sign up and use it on a regular computer at www.myfitnesspal.com.  I really like it because there are a lot of people using it, and you can just scan the barcode on whatever you are eating and the information is all there for you.  So, I am going to show you what my day starts out as...

... And what my first day looked like.  I have learned what things I can have and what things I cannot have, as I have mentioned in previous posts, but this is just a basic breakdown, and is very real when you think about what we are eating and how many calories we are actually putting in our body.

Monday July 20
Breakfast - 231 calories
Multigrain Cheerios (Canada) - 1 cup - 120 cal
2% Milk - 1/2 cup - 65 cal
Coffee - 1 mug - 0 cal
2% Milk - 2 tbsp - 16 cal
Granulated sugar - 2 tsp - 30 cal
Lunch - 812 calories
Unsweetened apple sauce - 1 snack cup - 50 cal
Peach Snapple - 1 bottle - 160 cal
Ripple Potato Chips - 25 chips - 173 cal
Green Grapes - 1/2 cup - 31 cal
Spaghetti and Meat Sauce - not quite a full serving - 398 cal
Dinner - 531 calories
Mixed veggies - 1 serving - 31 cal
Enriched American Rice - 1/2 cup - 320 cal
Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast - 1 breast - 150 cal
Guinness BBQ sauce - 1 tbsp - 30 cal
Snacks - 99 calories
Fresh Watermelon - 3 cups chopped - 99 cal

You can also log your exercise and how many glasses of water you drink in a day.  The exercise part of it is awesome because you can put in things like "Walking" and you get lots of options like, "Walking 2.0 mph, slow pace" and "Walking, 3.0 mph mod. pace, walking dog" and then you put in how long and it will calculate your calories.  For 15 minutes of each one is 56 cal (slow pace) and 75 cal (dog walk pace)

Today, I ate WAY more calories than I could have, but that is because of the ammout of activity that I did.  According to my gardening (4 hours - 1411 cal), lawn mowing (80 minutes 646 cal), and swimming with the kids (25 mins of leisurely swimming - 220 cal) I burned 2277 calories with activity today. So, even though I ate over 2000 calories, I still burned more than I ate. Whoohoo!!!

So, this morning Sean and I got up fairly early, for a Saturday, and started working on our yard.  When we started it looked something like this...

I mowed the lawn while Sean got the trailer from work, and then he loaded dead branches from the hedges we trimmed almost a month ago, and I finished mowing the lawn... as mentioned before, it took me 80 minutes...  Then, once the lawn was cleaned up I started digging out flowers... lots and lots of flowers.  We have this giant flower bed in the middle of our yard that has kind of taken over, and so we decided to win once and for all... We dug it all up!  It was 4 long hours of digging, pulling, raking, and more digging.  Our neighbor came over to help us too, and man was that a blessing, because we got most everything done today that we wanted to get done.  Yay us!

So... now it looks like this...

And our whole yard looks something like this...

Needless to say, I am so thankful for all the hard work that Sean and I did on the yard with help from our neighbor, and now we can bite off smaller pieces for the next few projects.  By the end of the summer our yard will be what we are hoping for and hopefully a fraction of the work to keep up.