Menus and Miles Tuesday August 3rd

Breakfast - Protein Smoothie (made with plain, homemade yogurt and some strawberries with Nectar protein, so higher in carbs than some protein drinks)

Lunch -Protein Smoothie

Dinner- Protein Smoothie

Snack- 1/2 cup of Cottage Cheese (full fat)

Calories-908
Fat-23
Total Carbs-48
Net Carbs-40
Protein-134 

Walked 50 minutes. Heat index here 115, so I sweated plenty, lol. 

I'm doing mostly shakes because I'm trying to break a plateau. Keeping my protein high because I'm distal. Any dietary suggestions are always welcome, as I'm losing super slow. I've pretty much tried everything, so now, I'm back on mostly pureed to see if that helps. If nothing else, it helps me narrow my choices so I stay on track better.

Vitalady is distal too and I think one thing she found that worked for her was the protein shakes, as you're doing, with Rockin' Roll bars in between. I guess the bars helped keep her feeling full in between shakes and they are low in insulin impacting carbs.

Thanks for the advice. I see Vitalady all over the board, so I'll ask her about her program. I use ice cubes and a Vitamix blender to make my shakes, so they are very large and thick and tend to stay with me a long time.

I was down two pounds this morning (finally), so I think it's working for me. I've been doing shakes since July 11th. I lost 9 pounds the first couple of days, but threw my electrolytes off from the extra water, exercise and lack of salt, and had to increase my calories and salt intake for a few days.

I stayed with pureed, and just began blending up some light veggie soup with a little cheddar cheese melted on top once a day. Started mixing unflavored Smar****er in my smoothies instead of regular water, and that seemed to do the trick. I'm doing well now, and not craving anything. Now that the scale has moved a little, I'm much more optimistic. I know I'm doing well with my eating and exercise, so I'm just going to have to wait it out.

Eventually, I'll change things up and probably do shakes except for one healthy meal a day or something, but I'm going to stick with this at least until my six month followup on August 20th because I feel like I'm playing catchup with my weight-loss. I had a case of Shingles a month after surgery. Not sure if it was the medication or the lack of exercise during the six weeks it took to heal, but my weight-loss came to a screeching halt. Now, I'm trying to pull some decent numbers for my followup visit and hoping to take advantage of the early benefits of my malabsorption. 

Maybe you should try Fage (Greek) yogurt.  It seems like that's a lot of calories for 3 shakes and 1/2 cup of cottage cheese.  Where are all of the calories coming from?

I love making my own yogurt. I doubt I'll ever go back to store-bought. I have been using whole milk, because I thought that being distal, I could probably use the extra fat. I just bought a gallon of 2%, so I'll try a batch with that and see how it turns out. The only ingredients in my yogurt are milk and some plain yogurt to start the batch with. I don't add any sweetener or flavoring of any kind since I'm only going to use it in my smoothies. 

I don't normally drink three of these smoothies a day like I did yesterday. Usually, it's just one or two of those since they are higher in calories and carbs. Then, I drink Nectar protein mixed in Poweraid Zero for my other drinks. 

I tend to overestimate my nutritional information. I'd rather do that than underestimate. I just went back and reentered my recipe to make sure it was right since I tweek my shakes from time to time. This one came up 50 calories more than the one I had been entering. I make my yogurt in large containers and just scoop some out. I rarely measure, but I imagine that I'm actually only using 4-6 ounces of yogurt in each shake rather than the 8 ounces that I logged in my recipe. I use five or six frozen whole strawberries, but log 1/2 cup to be on the safe side.

Still, at 300 calories, they are pretty high calorie drinks according to the calculator on Sparkpeople. Here is the way the recipe breaks down after entering 8 ounces of plain full-fat yogurt, 1/2 cup of frozen unsweetened strawberries, a scoop and a quarter of protein, and two packs of Splenda.



Ingredients

Protein
Water
Ice Cubes
Strawberries
Splenda
Yogurt

Nutritional Info

Fat: 8.1g Carbohydrates: 23.5g Calories:300.6 Protein: 37.7g

I'm not sure what the requirements are for distal.  We all have to do what works best for us and if you are losing and satisfying all of your nutritional needs then that's what's important.  I will keep this in mind when I read your posts.

(((HUGS)))