Ended up eating much more than I'd intended to last night. I was very hungry when I got home from work/HST rehearsal by 10:30pm. I'd eaten pretty well all day, but I somehow only had a few points left for dinner, including APs I earned at the gym. Kevin had prepared tacos for us (yum!). And we cracked open a bottle of wine to share. Our friend Daniel came over for dinner too. I started by mindlessly eating some chips becasue I was ravenous and made myself a huge taco with lots of veggies and avocado and other yummy stuff. And then I had several pieces of salt water taffy, some almonds, and some bing cherries for dessert. It wasn't, by any means, unhealthy food. It was all very nutritious and filling and "whole," (aside from the taffy which is basically hardened corn syrup) but calorie wise, it was too much food. I used 17 of my flex points for the week in one night! And on the first night of a new week, no less! Certainly not the first (or 500th) time that's happened, and won't be the last. But it surprised me when I added up all my points this morning to discover that I'd used so many. Surprised me and irritated me.

So I'm going to begrudgingly try an experiment for a couple days and see if it helps me curb the extra munching - I'm gonna go relatively sugar-less. Sugar in my life: I stay away from cereal entirely unless it has less than 5 grams of sugar per serving (and you'd be surprised, even super healthy kashi cereals sometimes have 14+ grams of sugar) and I never have sugar with breakfast, if I can avoid it. I'm usually pretty good at lunchtime too, but I always want a sweet treat after lunch. And if I have one, I think it tends to derail me. I get munchy in the afternoon/early evening and then I end up with only a few points for dinner, and I have a larger dinner than I intend to and/or I snack after dinner on sweet stuff. So I'm going to see if I can go sugar-free (for the most part) for a couple days. Just to see if it will help curb my hunger. The main thing I learned from the Dr. Oz/"You On A Diet" craze is that if you have sugar early in the day and/or before a meal you're just setting yourself up to eat more, because your body is busy working on the sugar and can't process the rest of your food properly and you won't feel full or satisfied. If you drink wine with dinner, for example, Dr. Oz suggests that you eat some of your meal before you even take a sip of the wine. Because if you drink the wine first, a habit most of us probably share, your body will actually not register fullness from your food in the same way it would have if you had food in your stomach before drinking the sugary wine. Your body is too busy working on the empty sugar calories. And you will be hungrier and have a desire to keep eating or a desire to eat more than you actually need, even after you've finished your meal. If you just wait until there's some food in your system before drinking the sugar, it doesn't have the same negative impact on your body.

So I'm going to try to get through the days without any sugar filled snacks and I'm going to keep the sugar content in my meals very very low. And if I successfully get through a day without sugar snacks, perhaps I can have a small sweet something at the end of the night, after I'm full and satisfied, assuming I think I can handle it without indulging in 5 other snacks after that. We'll see!

Hoping to get a run in at lunchtime today but it might not be in the cards. Tomorrow after work I should have plenty of time for a great workout - I have no plans - so I think I'll go home, stretch out, go for a jog around the park, and come home for some pilates. And I hope to get in another workout on Friday evening. That might also be tough to fit in, but if I don't, I'll be charged with the goal of working out both Saturday and Sunday. Actually - that might not be so bad. This will be my first official weekend entirely to myself without a single performance related obligation of any kind. And that is the best news ever.