end of the day: i won by not losing

Driving home snack: ounce of salted nuts (170) and a bottle of water.

Having been hungry and tired all day, I knew if I didn't make a plan, I would surely blow it, and blow it big. Lovely daughter was feeling pretty much the same. Thinking of new ideas was beyond me in that mode, so today, I didn't shoot for making my 1876 calories. I made a plan just to stay within my maintenance number, which is 2376. And I'd indulge myself within reason, to avoid sending me off to binge land. The plan: tacos!

Now here's the trick with that: in our family, we eat tacos fast and hard. So what we did was divvy up what we could have into our own bowls, rather than eating "family style," other than practically-free stuff like onions, lettuce, and tomatoes. My personal stash of stuff that made up my tacos consisted of:

1/3 lb meat (very lean ground beef w/chili powder) 263
1/3 can of refried beans (not the lowfat kind) 163
1 oz cheese (the crumbly goat cheese kind) 80
1 soft flour shell 150
3 hard corn shells 50 each for a total of 150
1/2 cup tomatoes 18
1/2 cup lettuce 4
1/8 cup onion 16
1/3 avocado, chopped (106)
tabasco sauce, negligible amount

And a bottle of water, of course.

My surprise for tonight: a small study on taco shells. My daughter and I had discovered awhile back, to our horror, that flour tortillas had a lot more calories than we'd have guessed (in all those many diets in my life, I had not learned this). One flour tortilla, the medium size that is kind of standard, runs between 110 and 260 calories, according to some informal research we've done. ONE TORTILLA. It seems like 1 tortilla should be like, half the value of a slice of bread, doesn't it?

Furthermore, I had always presumed corn tortillas (not the flat kind that need cooked, but the shaped, crunchy, ready-to-eat ones) were pure junk and nonsense. They seem like just an oversized tortilla chip, don't they? Here's what surprised me: they are only 50 calories each! Hmmm tortillas....

Crunchy, shaped, corn tortillas.... Flour tortillas
50 calories each.....................110-260 calories ea.
no sodium at all..................... 450 mg sodium each
1 gram fiber each................... no fiber at all
2 grams fat each.................... 3.5 grams fat each

Now, admittedly, the flour ones are bigger...but hey, this does NOT look like any kind of easy or obvious choice to me!

Calories for the day: 2319. I am still 57 calories under maintenance, and need to shoot for 500 under to lose. Rather than saying that I failed, I'm naming that a victory, on a very hard Monday.