I guess the carb cycling thing is really working...I'm down another 0.8 lbs this week. It may not seem like much, but after months of losing 0.2 lbs in a week or gaining a little, back and forth, back and forth until I felt like screaming, this solid month of continuous loss feels like a major victory. The low carb days are not quite so torturous anymore now due to two things that I am totally and completely in love with:
1) Chocolate PB2. This stuff is so awesome. For those of you that haven't heard of it, it's basically powdered peanut butter with like 85% of the fat and oil pressed out of it. So instead of a serving of peanut butter that has 190 calories, this only has 45 calories! I mainly eat it in smoothies, but it's pretty good with apples and bananas too.
2) Cauliflower rice. I think this kind of take care of my psychological carb needs. I've eaten some kind of carb with dinner as a side dish for so long, it just feels wrong without one, like it's incomplete or something. Carbs complete me! Enter cauliflower rice. Simple to make, you just grate cauliflower with a cheese grater, put a little olive oil in a pan, and cook on the stove for around 8 minutes. Then it feels like I'm eating rice without the carbs!
I'm still having difficulty getting in enough calories on low carb days though. I'm kind of limited in higher calorie foods on those days, with my choices being meat, cheese, and peanut butter. I don't want to eat a large amount of any of those things because they're not great for my cholesterol. If anyone has any low carb suggestions, please let me know!
I'm also kind of conflicted on how many calories I should be eating period. I've been eating 1200 calories a day, which I know is the absolute minimum I should be eating. I used to eat 1500 calories a day, but that was when I was about 75 lbs heavier, so I figured I should cut back since I am smaller now and my BMR is consequently less. But I'm averaging about 7-8 miles of some kind of cardio activity per day, so I'm trying to figure out if I am eating too few calories for that kind of energy expenditure. I've tried to use different calorie requirement calculators online, but that made me even more confused because I got that I should be eating anywhere from 1300 calories a day to 2800 calories a day...quite a difference! I guess the internet doesn't know everything after all. I think I may go up to about 1400 calories a day and see how it goes.
In other news, I'm doing better with soccer. The first game I just felt like a total fool because it turned out that even though I signed up for beginner since it had been so long since I played, many of the girls played in college and are really good. A good example of this would be when the opposing team scored a goal by performing a series of 3 headers. It was insane. I don't know why they didn't want to play advanced but whatever. I felt like I needed to constantly apologize for how crappy I felt like I was doing compared to my teammates. But last week I decided to give myself a pep talk. It did not involve me telling myself that I did not suck, because the reality is that compared to these girls, I do. I am not at their skill level. It's just the truth. What I did tell myself was that I needed to go out there and do the best that I could do, and not compare myself to anyone else. I signed up for this team to have fun, not win the World Cup. I did feel pretty good last week because we had no subs and everyone had to play the whole game with no breaks, and I held my own with those girls. If anything, I was probably one of the less winded players. I knew running would pay off someday!
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