Rough Week

This week has been very rough. I had my official weigh in Saturday and had not lost a single pound even though I was walking 16 miles a week, for 2 weeks. We measured me to see if I was smaller, and nope I wasn't smaller either. I literally broke down in tears because I was working so hard to exercise every single day, but had had no results. So we are starting over. It's been a year and a half since I counted calories and boy does it take the joy out of eating. I love food, obviously, so having to sit down and analyze every little thing that goes into my mouth is disheartening. But I have to do it if I want to lose the last 55 lbs. I visited the Mayo Clinic website and they have a calculator that tells you how many calories you need to consume to lose weight based on your current weight, height, age, and gender. Based on my stats of 220 lbs, 5' 6", 23 years old, and female, I need to consume 1200 calories to lose about a pound of weight a week. I never thought getting down to 1200 calories would be so hard. I was easily consuming 1800 calories, which isn't bad.....if I want to maintain my weight. One of my husband's and my favorite breakfast foods is chocolate muffins. I know it isn't the healthiest thing, but we both love chocolate and these were a semi-healthy way of getting it. After calculating my portion (3 small muffins with 1 cup fat free milk to drink) these are the stats:

560 calories
16.25 g fat
630 mg sodium
90 carbs
 20 mg cholesterol
16 g protein
488 mg potassium
3 g fiber

Needless to say, these chocolate muffins no longer have a place in my 1200 calorie diet. So I searched and searched and searched for chocolate muffin recipes that 1) would fit in my diet, 2) had as few ingredients as possible (I'm no chef!), and 3) would be quick, easy, and inexpensive to make.

I finally found a recipe, though, and I tried it out this morning. They were very good, very natural tasting. The only thing missing were a few chocolate chips. And the great thing is that they are so much healthier than our packaged muffins that I have the extra room to add some chocolate chips (the healthiest kind I can find of course). But without the chocolate chips, here is the new values for 3 muffins (my portion with 1 cup fat free milk to drink):

274 calories
.5 g fat
717.5 mg sodium
55 carbs
830 mg potassium
2 g fiber
13.5 g protein

I'll update the stats once I add in some chocolate chips, but if any of you are interested in the recipe, just give me a shout and I'll post it.