James has pneumonia. He is not in a good mood. Other than James being sick, things are going well here. I went swimming last night and the pool was set up for 50 meters, rather than 25 yards, so it was a challenging night. The other two girls in my lane were both training for an Ironman competition, so they did great things last night. I just kept moving. I have found I prefer the 50 meter pool setup to the shorter course. Even though I sometimes think that I will never see the end of the pool, you can get into a groove that just doesn't happen in a shorter course.

If you remember, last week Spencer (my spinning instructor) said that he would look at a record of my activity and my food intake and see if there was anything going on that would result in my not losing weight. So, I recorded everything I did and ate and passed the information on to Spencer to see what he thought. He told me yesterday that I needed to eat more fruits and vegetables. I held off and didn't tell him that compared to when I was younger, I ate a TON of fruits and veggies. People out here eat very well -- many vegetarians and weirdos who look at fruit as being candy-like in its appeal. As you all know, I don't see fruit and vegetables in quite that way.

Spencer also suggested eliminating the "simple sugars" in my diet. He was delicate about it, but he wants me to skip all chocolate, cookies, etc., and see what happens. After he suggested this, I asked him why I couldn't have a chocolate chip cookie when I was burning about 3800 calories per week in aerobic exercise, damn it?? It just isn't fair. I am talking about having ONE cookie, not a dozen (though a dozen does have a certain appeal). He said that I could have one, but I should have it right after spin class so as to take advantage of the carbs in the cookie.

His final suggestion was that I arrange my meals to be between 300 and 500 calories apiece and that I have 3 snacks a day that are between 200 and 300 calories apiece. That would give me about 2000 calories a day. I have only used the Weight Watcher point system to diet, so switching over to counting calories will be interesting. Spencer also said that I should be eating every 3-4 hours -- this is very different from what I have been doing. Things get hectic and sometimes I don't eat for about 16 hours at a time (dinner last night, until lunch today), so eating more frequently will be a challenge. I am going to try this for two weeks. Today has already been trashed because of the chocolate I had to get rid of... did I throw it out, you ask? No way man! It was delicious. Sort of a farewell chocolate...