Day 3 - Battlefield: Midtown

Today's exercise: Walking

Breakfast: Oatmeal with 1/2 cup fresh blueberries and a little 2% milk (which we now have two containers of since we both remembered to pick it up) I know the oatmeal is getting a little repetitive, but I like it and quite frankly, in the morning my brain is not fully functional and not inclined to be creative.

Mid Morning Snack: 1 Red Delicious Apple (I get it from the fruit guy outside my office. I really want a banana but those are high in sugar so I limit those.)

Lunch: Another serving of the French Potato and Chicken Salad. (it was tasty!)

Mid Afternoon Snack: 1 Jello 70 calorie sugar free rice pudding. (I loves me the pudding!)

Dinner: Chicken Tagine with apricots and almonds over 1/2 c. couscous (Another Weight Watcher Recipe and three more servings to use this week.)

Dessert: Kozy Shack No Sugar added 60 calorie Bananas Foster pudding cup (just trying some new things to curb the sweet tooth)

This time of year is a good time to start a "lifestyle change" like this. Fresh produce gets better, farmers markets open up offering great locally grown fruits and vegetables. There is very little better in this world than a nice ripe Jersey Beefsteak tomato and sweet Jersey corn fresh picked from the fields. New Jersey isn't called the Garden State for nothing! Stop snickering all of you, there really is a lot more to this state than just the tour you get during the opening credits of the Sopranos. I'll be taking pictures on my hikes to prove it!

The unfortunate part of this time of year is that Midtown Manhattan, always dangerous to a diet, seems to grow a Mr. Softee or a Mr. Softee impostor on every other freakin' street corner. And I have to say, the one on the corner of 6th Avenue and 45th Street makes a damn fine chocolate shake. Prior to the start of this, I stopped at his truck once or twice a week. It was way yummy..... mmmmmmm..... chocolate shake.... Okay, sorry, I'm back. But in the two weeks leading up to this dieting adventure I started weaning myself off of some things like diet soda, bread, and chocolate milkshakes. In fact when I ordered my last one, I said to the guy, "I've got to break this addiction. This is the last one." And he replied, "You keep saying that!" But I've stuck to my guns and now there has been no chocolate shake for almost 2 weeks.

We have Mister Softee in Hoboken too. He's a really cute guy named Tony. Tony has been doing the Hoboken route as long as I've lived there (16 years!) He's very sweet and when ever I visited his truck (which was quite often in the early years) we would chit chat about life and such. I had crush on Mister Softee. I'll never forget when he told me that over the winter he had gotten married. I was a little crushed. So I paid him for my sundae and as I turned to leave, I jokingly said, "Well, I can't buy ice cream from you anymore, you just broke my heart." I got a couple of steps from the truck and he leaned out his window and yelled, "Does this mean we can't be friends?" And my heart melted just a little more. He's just a genuinely nice guy. And of course, now I'm very fond of Mister Softees in general.

Scott almost ruined that for me once by telling me about a guy he knew who used to run a Mister Softee truck in the inner city and often traded ice cream cones for... well, you know, attention for his own personal popsicle. But I resolutely hold on to my image of Tony as Mister Softee.

Since today's exercise is walking, I decided to put on my pedometer and see how many steps I walk in an average day. You know they say that you should take 10,000 steps a day for optimal health. I clipped on my pedometer as I headed out the door. As it turned out, by the time I get to work. I walked almost a mile (.93).

Living in Hoboken and working in NYC means a lot of walking. I walk from my house to the bus, from the Port Authority to my office and back again at night. I walk to the grocery store and carry those bags home. Often when we go out on our Friday night dinner date, we walk to the restaurant. In fact, if I didn't have a car, I could still live my life pretty much as it is now. (But I'd miss weekend diner breakfast at the Park West Diner, best diner in Jersey in my opinion) .

It's just such a part of normal life that I don't even think about it anymore. It never occurs to me that most of the country does not walk everywhere until I have someone come for a visit. I was leading a friend from Indiana out of the subway one day and when we got out onto the street. She looked at me and said, "You do those stairs everyday?" Again, it never occurred to me that this wasn't normal life. Now if I do all this walking, why am I still 60 pounds overweight? Because I ate a lot of crap and didn't do much besides the necessary walking. But I always said that if I didn't live where I lived and work where I worked than I would have ended up weighing over 300 pounds.

With the price of gas these days, I'm pretty happy being able to walk most everywhere I need to go!

When I got home this evening my pedometer read 2.64 miles and about 6200 steps. That's not bad for just everyday life. But if I want to lose the weight I've got to get more in. So I made dinner and then hit the pavement around 8:15. I find it so much easier to walk outside than on a treadmill. If I'm walking outside at least I feel like I'm getting somewhere. Plus the scenery changes. (I think I mentioned that I get bored easily.) So my walk took me up to the North end of Hoboken then over to the riverfront, then South along the river, then up the godforsaken wooden steps up the cliff to Stevens Tech, through the campus which has a nice incline, then back downtown to my house. I'd never measured before but it turns out the it is almost exactly 3 miles. Now at the end of the day, my pedometer reads 5.63 miles, 13217 steps taken, 10285 of those were "aerobic" steps, 551 calories burned. At least that's what it says, and I really want to believe it. Call me an optimist, just don't call me late for dinner... ba dum dum... Thank you folks I'll be here all week!