The weekend has finally arrived!

TGI freakin F everybody! Like I said in my last post, super stoked it’s the weekend.

Anywho, I wanted to talk about my most recent purchase. This bad boy:

I am in love already. I love it so much I think I want to name it. I purchased my very first heart rate monitor a few days ago, from Academy. It ran me about $93 dollars with tax. It wasn’t the cheapest one, or the most expensive, but I had been doing TONS of research, and the brand Polar seemed to have the best reviews. I didn’t need the top of the line, because I knew I’d only use it to track my calories burned. I ended up with the woman’s bronze Polar Ft4 model. They had a red one and a hot pink one(which is what I usually go for) but it was kind of obnoxious, so I went neutral. It also comes with the chest strap, which is so comfortable you forget it's there almost immediatly. For my fellow big boobed friends, it fits under a sports bra easily.

 

I’ve hit a rut with no weight loss lately, even though I’ve been working out hard and eating right. I figured there was something off somewhere. After browsing the My Fitness Pal message boards, I realized how exaggerated their idea of calories burned is. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE MFP for calorie counting, I just don’t trust their estimate of calories burned. You also have to realize everyone is different, so these figures are purely guesses. Plus, if it wasn't hard enough to lose weight--after meeting with a nutritionist and running tests in May, I found out my body burns calories slower than the average person. WONDERFUL.  Anyway, I eat back usually a little less than half of my calories burned, if not more depending on if we go out to dinner or something. So let’s just say I burned 400 calories doing cardio, according to My Fitness Pal. In the past, I might have eaten back 300 of those calories. So what if according to a much more accurate figure from heart rate monitor, I really only burned 250 calories. If I ate back 300, that’s 50 calories over my goal for the day, which may be a HUGE factor in me not losing weight. I don’t always eat back calories, but if I have an intense workout and burn A LOT, I’m not gonna just eat 1200. My body just can’t do it. So I figured since I do eat some of them back, I needed the most accurate account of what I’m burning. I broke down and bought the monitor and was immediately excited to use it. So excited, in fact, that the first few times I used it, I completely forgot to track it in MFP to compare. This morning, though, I remembered.

Bless my husband’s heart…I told him I was bummed I wouldn’t have time to work out today. Side note, I get to work at 9:30 on Monday and Wednesday, 10am on Tuesdays and 8 on both Thursdays and Fridays. This means I work out before work Mon-Wed, but sorry, I just can’t drag my butt outta bed at 5:30 every day. Well thanks to ol’ hubby, we were up at 5:30 (in a surprisingly good mood I might add) and off to the gym. His annoying alarm is what did it, but thankfully he set it in the first place. I sure as hell wasn't going to. I did 45 minutes of cardio because that’s all I had time for. I walked/ran for 15 minutes and was on the elliptical the rest of the time. I calculated this exact workout in myfitnesspal and came up with this:

 

That's 539 calories burned

 

In real life, thanks to my handy dandy heart rate monitor, I now know I burned this:

 

Not a HUGE difference, but for someone who is trying to pull out all the stops to lose some ell bee’s, 100 calories sure help.

Last night, we grabbed dinner at one of our favorite hole in the wall spots. I got a grilled chicken plate with veggies and asked that they grill it in Pam instead of oil. I love this place for doing that! This gave me dinner last night and lunch for today.

 I gave S the bread, even though I wanted to shove it in my mouth whole.

 

Of course my husband ordered a burrito that was the size of the plate it came on, covered in cheesy goodness, ate the whole thing, and was down a pound this morning. I feel ya on this, Elle Noel.

Tonight, we are going to dinner yet again, because my in-laws asked if we’d go with them. No worries though, we are going to a local seafood restaurant, which is super easy to eat healthy at. I’ll probably get grilled shrimp or fish and veggies. Here are a couple of my latest eats:

breakfast quesadilla made with egg whites, low fat cheese, low carb tortilla and turkey bacon

This is my new favorite! I will make it on weekends when I have time for intense workouts in the morning because it's a little steep in calories, but SO delicious. I used to hate oatmeal, but this is like dessert. Old fashioned oats cooked with water, mixed in 1/4 scoop vanilla protein powder, 2 tbsp PB2, half a banana (or whole if you're starvin' like Marvin) and a tiny bit of sugar free chocolate syrup. It's so pretty before you mix it up, but I wanted to taste it all in every bite. So good!

Chicken and jalepeno pizza made on a Flat Out wrap. A little too thin for my liking but pretty calorie friendly. Next time I'll use these to make quesadillas as they are about half the calories of a regular tortilla!
 Hope everyone has a great weekend and I'll catch you all on Monday!