So today continued another poor day of diet choices, even if I decided to blast away at my exercise choices.

If yesterday was a serious of unfortunate events, Day 5 was all about bad decisions for which I can only blame myself, learn from it, and move on.

Exercise

In terms of exercise, almost as soon as I arrived back from the airport to my house, I headed right towards the gym to get in a cardio workout. Today should have been a weights workout, but the gym and the weights section are so crowded that I wouldn’t have been able to work out according to my strength training plan. So I decided to move the weights to tomorrow and blast in a cardio session on the elliptical trainer. I find it hard to get bored on the elliptical, so long as I have my music, I am good. Because I can see strides per minute, calories per minute, have various workout settings, and other data, I tend to break down the hour into what must be achieved in 5 minute blocks, or every 100 calories, etc, etc. I find ways to keep it interesting. The other thing I am finding which is cool is that at the end of the exercise, my Fitbit Charge HR and the numbers on the machines (calories, heart rate, etc), are within 5-10% of each other (and both methods switch between providing the highest/lowest numbers). So I go with my FitBit since it is continuously monitoring me.

Diet

Again, not a day to be overly proud of myself, especially at breakfast. I just made poor choices. It was entirely possible to have a South Beach Phase 1 breakfast, but I felt like I was starving. Beyond starving. I felt I wanted – and deserved – the things I was avoiding. I saw myself making bad choices and feeling awful about it, but not awful enough to stop. To be transparent, here is the damage I did to myself:

Breakfast

• Omelette with ham, onions, tomatoes, truffle mushrooms, peppers. They probably used 4 eggs whereas I would only have used two. I am pretty sure that they probably used milk in the omelette as well.
• Waffle (Scandinavian) with jam and powdered sugar, but I removed the jam and most of the powdered sugar
• Orange juice – one glass of it

So let’s face the facts, I completely fucked up breakfast. I was hungry and I let myself down by giving into cravings. Lunch was only slightly better in my view…

Lunch

• I had a bowl of tandori chicken soup and a salad (only lettuce and tomato). I grabbed it from the SAS lounge because it was all I had time to get in between phone calls and waiting for my flight.

Whether the soup was a better choice than the reindeer meatballs they had on offer I don’t know. I looked for some nutritional information, but did not find any. In the end, I decided that the soup would be better than the meatballs.

Dinner

• “Entree” (post-workout snack whilst preparing dinner) – ½ an avocado, 15 cashews, a stalk of celery
• “Main course” – Baked salmon and (leftover) oven roasted vegetables

So foodwise I feel like it was another mixed day. I am hoping that deciding the put in a really aggressive session on the elliptical trainer will blunt some of the damage, but I don’t know. I will make sure the weekend is what it is supposed to be. And I will have to extend Phase 1 for a day or so.