Accountability!

I realize I am accountable to myself first and foremost. I am looking for an email buddy to communicate with me regularly about upadating my food diary. If I look up food before I eat, I make wiser choices. I found carb counting works best for me but the food diary really is an eye opener. rhondabruno@yahoo.com

I sit down in the morning and plan the whole day of eating. I decide if I can eat what the family is eating for dinner or I need to make something just for me. I grill alot of chicken breasts and have them in the fridge. I have even told myself on occasion that if I'm starving I can sit down and eat a whole chicken breast and it's OK. If I don't do that, I pick at whatever is nearby and end up eating alot more than I should. Plan to eat, don't plan to fail! Good luck to you.

yes planning does help. make a menu of what you want to eat for the week and post it on the fridge. I also post the recipie for the day. There is lots of recipies on this site print and post on your fridge. It has helped me. Good Luck...

Wow! I wish I was organized enough in the morning to do that kind of planning.

I do something similar; I eat pretty much the same thing for breakfast every morning (just different flavors of yogurt and different varieties of Kashi cereal), so I know that breakfast is taken care of, easy peasy, no worries. Then I decide before lunchtime how the rest of the day is going to go. Do I want to splurge a little bit on lunch, and have a slimmer dinner? Or do I want to have a smaller lunch and have a bigger dinner with my family in the evening? Some days it depends on what the rest of the day holds (will hubby be home for dinner, or is it just the kids and me? Can we go to lunch with friends?), while other days, it is more about what ingredients I have on hand for either meal. So I try to balance it out then, early in the day, and that helps determine what I can snack on in the afternoon.

I love the piechart at the bottom of the food diary. I use it to juggle things around and get my percentages right. I can see how I need to eat more of this and less of that each day. It is disconcerting to see how just one food item can throw off the whole balance!