BLTs

BLTs?  Like the sandwich?  Not exactly.  BLTs are "Bites, Licks and Tastes" and they have a sneaky way of sabotaging your daily nutritional and diet plan!  When logging my daily food on www.myfitnesspal.com I'm pretty diligent about tracking everything I eat at my meals.  I'm NOT however, very good at tracking all the BLTs and I have found that they can add up pretty quickly.  The other day I started to track them just to see how many extra calories I was really consuming and I was SHOCKED and quite honestly disappointed in how naive (or rather how deep I was in denial) to how these little samples and "meaningless" nibbles were truly affecting my health and fitness goals!

These little indulgences, when logged, paint an entirely different picture as to how your diet really is!  Don't leave them out.  Every bite counts and before you know it, you probably consumed more empty calories in all the BLTs than if you had just added another meal to your diet plan.  

I have to be honest, I don't want to obsess about every single thing I put in my mouth, so I can't say that I'm necessarily going to start logging every thing I taste, but having done so for just that short period of time gave me a very clear understanding as to what is REALLY happening.  It will definitely make me think twice before I say, "oh just a small taste" or "really, it's just a bite of a cookie".  Being at least AWARE is half the battle.  So if you're in maintenance mode like I am, have your BLTs, but keep in mind that they are part of the BIG picture too and if you find yourself having samples and tiny nibbles throughout the day...don't be surprised if your pants and your scale give you a not so gentle reminder to perhaps pass on the sneak taste test!