For vital stats see the week 3 recap. I am not risking weighing myself again... I'll take whatever encouragement comes my way!

Eat Less:

Maintaining the photo food diary has given me a good visual punch of my eating problems. It's highlighted my cheese problem. (Did I just blog that I dream cheese? - Yikes!) So I need to set some rules for the cheese consumption! So for the Week Four Eat Less Goal I am only allowed hard cheese grated on a pasta dish, IF a pasta dish is The Meal. No cheese snacks, no melted cheese snacks unless the melted cheese is the meal. Cottage cheese, parmesan cheese, feta cheese in salad is okay. No more than 3 slices of cheese if going to use cheese in a sandwich or cheese melt as a meal, and not as a snack!  I think this is going to be the hardest next 7 days. Continue with eating 3 salads, and eat fruit 3 times this week. Continue with the Starbucks Savings Plan.

Move more:

Success at achieving the average of 4,000 steps per day! Now for this week goal is to average 4,500 steps per day.

I have been reading a book called, "Move Yourself, The Cooper Clinic Medical Director's Guide to All the Healing Benefits of Exercise (Even a Little!), by Tedd Mitchell, Tim Church, and Martin Zucker. It has some really great ideas and explanations about how even a little exercise and a little eating right can have enormous benefits. So I am going to take a page (or two) out of this book, to try and slowly increase the amount of activity and try to cut down on the food that is giving me more trouble. I want a healthy lifestyle not a diet.

The other thing that this book talks about is to shed our preconceptions that to be healthy you have to be thin, or lose weight. The big factor is waist measurement. The danger zones (for increased risk of serious illnesses) is weight measurement greater than 35 inches in women, and 40 inches in men. Since I am in excess of 35 inches, (see beginning) I really need to concentrate on reducing the old waist measurement. So I think I am going to start measuring the waist measurement, and use that as the way to track progress. So overall goal for the end of the year is to have a waist measurement less than 35 inches.