I have lots of support in my life right now. These moms are real people but I interact with them virtually. I am so grateful to have this community. Oh and of course my actual mom, who came here to take care of all of us for a few weeks.
The graph above shows my weight. Between 18th of December 2019 and 18th of March 2020, I was still gaining weight because I was pregnant. That huge drop in March is when I had my baby. I was not logging food during the first six months of my son's life because it seemed like too difficult to be waiting for the program when my son needed my full attention. Apparently I did still weigh-in and add those datapoints and it was alarming to see the weight going up and up.
Thankfully, my mom came out for my son's half-birthday (6 months) around 18th of September 2020. She did a lot of cooking for us and that helped us eat healthier and not get any take-out food. That's when you can see my weight started a downward trend.
Around that time, I started writing down what to cook. Instead of cooking four huge meals on Sunday, I tried to focus on cooking one thing per day. I tried to find recipes that could be done from start-to-finish in 30 minutes or less of actual chopping and assembly. It was working OK to have meals like the Giant Turkey Meatball that baked for 1 hour because I could feed my son and let him sleep while it was baking.
What food logging does for me is allow me to focus on my macronutrients. I have no idea what was keeping me going for the first six months of my son's life. I know I was craving all sorts of crazy things like biscuits and gravy and trail mix with tons of nuts. I didn't question it, I just made it and ate it. After logging, I realized I had gotten pretty carb heavy (50% or more of my daily calories) and protein light (15% of less of my daily calories). That for me is a recipe for weight gain.
Once I realized how unbalanced my eating habits had become, I tried recipe-swapping with some of the moms in my Bumper group. I got some new appreciation for tofu and veggie burgers and a quick and easy way to add more protein to my days. But I did find it extremely exhausting to plan out the meals, plan out the grocery lists, program the meals into MyFitnessPal, log all the foods and keep up with my actual work and parenting responsibilities. It left me feeling drained and ungrateful, even though some of the foods were delicious.
I started drawing bubbles for the number of servings that the recipe generated as leftovers and then checking off the bubbles as I ate them. This way I could think about what to eat without opening the fridge and staring at the contents. I could plan ahead and log all the food I planned to eat throughout the day to balance my macros while my son was taking his morning nap. I could look back at things I had cooked and if there were unchecked bubbles, it meant we threw those away because it went bad before we had a chance to eat it OR we just didn't like it for whatever reason.
About halfway through November, someone recommended Mashup Mom as a place to go for meal plans. This woman is my hero. She posts grocery lists and what to cook each day. A lot of her recipes are keto and gluten free. The groceries cost less than $60 per week at ALDI. My husband was doing all the shopping with the baby during my classes, so that I could have quiet time here. He liked the way she has a lot of detail for each item including the brand name and price. So far the recipes have been easy to make, we both like them and my husband feels like he is learning new things.
We find that if we "team up" on the recipes, we can get everything cooked even quicker. There are some compromises that we make such as the ALDI packaging is sometimes not recyclable. They have convenient "steam in the bag" type stuff, which is a great time-saver, but also generates waste. The produce is shipped from who knows where, so we're not using produce from the Farmer's Market, but unfortunately we just don't have time for that right now.
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