Holli Rausch

I’m trying to eat healthier. I started this in September. I lost 8.4 pounds in four weeks. I was keeping track of my calorie intake by writing down what I eat all day, and looking up how many calories each item was. I was sticking between 1500 and 1600 calories a day. And I was losing about 2 pounds a week with that amount of calorie intake per day. I wasn’t necessarily trying to eat *better*, just modify my portions and pay attention to what’s going in my mouth by documenting it on paper. I wanted to lose weight so that when we decided to have a baby, I could feel better about my body as it got bigger and be healthier, which is better all around during pregnancy. I also thought if I had lost enough, I could use some of my current clothes as early maternity clothes.

Then we found out we were expecting. I started trying to make healthier food choices - fruits and veggies at every meal, which helped to fill me up and I eat less of the main course. Less sodium intake (which seems nearly impossible to do). I’d have yogurt as a morning snack and something else for a snack in the afternoon. It felt like I had to eat all the time to avoid nausea and it’s hard to make healthy choices when you just need something in your belly. Crackers were a common snack at these times. I was extremely concerned about how I’d gain weight with the baby because I’ve never had a handle on my weight and Iwould be at greater risk for more complications during labor and possible complications with the baby late term if I didn’t manage my weight. A few days after we found out about my anembryonic pregnancy in early December, I weighed myself. I had gained 1.2 pounds since I’d found out we were expecting. I don’t know if that’s on course after the first trimester, and since there wasn’t an embryo getting bigger (though at that point, the baby would have been only an ounce or two anyway) or for how much it felt like I was eating and that I felt 5-10 pounds bigger, I was pleased to see I wasn’t far off from where I was before. I decided I need to stay on course and make better and healthier choices a habit. I can use the information I learned while pregnant and apply it to non-pregnant life. And if I’m even only a little bit healthier next time I’m pregnant, I’ll be 100 times better than if I had ignored it all.

I’ve joined The Daily Plate at Livestrong.com and am using their MyPlate services to keep track of my calorie intake. It’s a lot easier than when I was writing it down in a notebook. And if you didn’t have a whole serving, you can change your serving amount to a decimal. (Or, for the indulger, you can increase the serving amount by any whole number or decimal.) They allow you to search for specific brands and restaurants even. For instance, last night we ate with friends at Texas Roadhouse. On this site, I was able to find the nutritional information on the bread they serve and the side salad I had with my meal. (Unfortunately, they didn’t have my specific meal, but they have the information on most of the menu).

I’m not sure on how accurate they are - I think some of them are user created, so they might be listed wrong or they added things to it and didn’t label the food properly. On the things that I can, I double-check to make sure the information matches the product I used - like a jar of spaghetti. I’ll search “Prego” and find the traditional sauce we use and then check our actual jar’s nutritional label to see if that’s the right one. Sometimes it’s right on. Sometimes they vary 10 calories or so. And there are things I can’t double-check easily, like a restaurant meal or this specific sized banana. But it’s a guideline. If I don’t feel like looking up specifically my food, I’ll find something close. The coffee on the right, for instance, isn’t likely what I’m drinking. A cup of our coffee is probably around 20 calories and the creamer I use is like 45. So because I was lazy, I just found a coffee listing that was close to 65 calories - the rest of the nutritional information is probably skewed because of it. I should probably change that.

You can also make meals out of ingredients you’ve looked up. If you look at my MyPlate on the right, you’ll see that I had 4 servings of “Tuna Sandwich”. “Tuna Sandwich” is a meal I made that has the kind of tuna I use, Miracle Whip, pickle relish, and one slice of wheat bread in it. This way I don’t have to add each individual ingredient and their servings every time I have a tuna sandwich. This particular day, I happened to have “Tuna Sandwich” for both lunch and supper.

What I especially like about it is the fact that it also gives you fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrate, sugars, fiber and protein information (when available - sometimes items have only calories listed, so the information on the others is missing). It allows me to see how much fiber I’m getting. Or whatever. I’m particularly interested in the sodium intake because that will be important to keep low, especially while pregnant. And I’m amazed at the items that have so much sodium!

I have the free version of this service. If I wanted to upgrade, I would gain a more custom nutritional label, a week-at-a-glance feature, and many other features I have found unnecessary so far. I haven’t figured out how to add foods to the list. Especially recipes. I’d like to, so that I don’t have to add each ingredient and then divide by how many it serves and then add each ingredient to one of my custom meals. Maybe that’s only for paying participants. Or maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough.

I’m trying to stay at 1600 calories per day again, and I will track if I’m losing weight at that amount. It’s turned out to be plenty on most days, assuming I’m eating something that fills me. Since I weighed myself last, I lost 2.2 pounds, which is about a pound a week. The site has a weight tracker, and it’s quite fun to look at because it’s a line graph and visually seeing the decrease (or increase) in your weight is extremely rewarding.

The killer for me is exercise. I hate it! Always have, if it’s exercise for the sake of exercise. I’ll even go as far as be motivated all day at work to go home and work out, and by the time I get home, I have no motivation to actually do it. So instead of feel guilty about it, I will exercise when I have the energy/motivation to, I will focus on making good eating choices and once that becomes habit or close to, I will focus on introducing daily exercise. And did I mention that you can add your exercise and it will calculate the number of calories you burned.

We inherited our old couch and love seat about a year ago from my brother and sister-in-law when they moved into their house. They worked out great for a while.  Sometime last spring, the bottom of the couch started to fall out.  We just figured it was oldish because we had gotten it at least third-hand (my brother had gotten it at a garage sale). We can’t pinpoint it to a specific incident, but I do know it was after the LOST weekend, otherwise people wouldn’t have been able to sit on it for very long.  It became uncomfortable and I stopped sitting on it unless we had guests - and sometimes not even then.

Earlier this fall, Miles got fed up with it and flipped the couch over.  It appeared that the right side had never had any sort of bracing to help support it - it’s not that it had fallen off or broken off a few years ago, it was never there in the first place.  But there was one on the left side.  So Miles pounded in some of the nails that were pulling out and we braced up the back end with a stack of text books and figured that would get us through a few more months.  (We had planned to buy new furniture early in 2009.)  Unfortunately, last Saturday the couch completely broke. Any sort of support we were getting from the fabric fell out and it was no longer usable.  We put it out on our back patio to get it out of the living room and then felt sorry for ourselves.

Sunday, while eating with some of Miles’s family, we looked through the ads in the paper and found a great deal from HOM Furniture.  They had the financing we needed and also had a pretty big sale.  So we decided we’d check it out and see if we could find anything good.  We looked around the store, sat on a ton of couches (which ended up being really exhausting for me) and just when we had almost decided on one, I found the couch I was looking for.  And we bought it.  It came as a set with a chair and a really nice ottoman/table, but we decided we couldn’t afford to get a set and we settled with just the couch and will make do with mismatched furniture for now - we are keeping the original love seat because it’s still in good shape.

It was delivered on Thursday and we discuss the delivery timing in this week’s Dear Future Kids podcast. (Which, I no longer plan to plug weekly - but there is a link in my sidebar to it so be sure to check it out every week!)

I love this couch. I needed one that was comfortable to sit in and nap on. This is it.  It looks like leather but it’s actually microfiber and that’s obvious as soon as you sit on it or touch it.  It will be difficult to match to in the future, if we don’t get the same style of furniture, but people make it work and all you need is a couple of matching pillows to tie a room together so I’m not too concerned.  Now you must all come visit our couch!

Over two weeks ago, I read an article in Under Construction’s Brand New that Pepsi has rebranded itself.  I’ve tweeted about my thoughts and have said many times that I wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, but realized today that I had not said anything on my blog.  So here are my thoughts. Leave a comment with what you think of the new branding.

Now, while the Pepsi logo itself is memorable and distinct, I can’t for the life of me think of what the Mountain Dew or Sierra Mist cans/bottles looked like a month ago. Not necessarily because they were bad design - but they just weren’t memorable branding.  I think they often changed too, which would make it even harder to remember.

I have to say that this rebranding as a whole leaves me feeling “meh”. Turning the Pepsi wave into a smile (yes, that’s seriously what it’s supposed to be, smiling at you) is creepy and sets itself up to be negatively parodied quite easily.  It also destroys what little branding Pepsi had developed.

There are some good things from the design, however.  The fact that Diet Pepsi’s smile is a little thinner and Pepsi Max’s is a little thicker are clever - if you can see past the look of irregularity. While clever and unique to the specific colas, it isn’t different enough so it looks poorly constructed.  The simplicity of the labels reminds me of energy drinks, but just the one color background is appealing to me.

Mountain Dew, which has been considered for years as Xtreme! is now mediocre and appears to be as laid back as the feeling you get from the Mello Yellow branding. The switch from “Mountain Dew” to “Mtn Dew” seems to try too hard to be hip - because anything that’s easily textable is most definitely hip, right?  The label is no longer extreme and makes me think 70s.  Maybe Mtn Dew has given up on being extreme, since there are far more other drinks to choose from to get that energy “kick” that Mountain Dew once monopolized.  I do feel that this branding will translate nicely onto snowboards and other extreme sports gear - but if Mtn Dew is no longer extreme, are they relevant as a sponsor in those types of sporting events any more?

Sierra Mist has had the most unmemorable branding of them all. I seem to think there may have been a mountain involved in a previous label, but that may be as old as the very first one. In any case, I would have to say I mostly approve of the Sierra Mist can.  While it uses the most cliched effect in design (Gaussian Blur - or any other blur for that matter), I still feel it’s effective.  It doesn’t at all look like your typical pop can, which some would argue is bad.  However, why do we need it to?  While this design maybe would work best as an airfreshner branding, I applaud them for taking a risk on this one.  I think the Sierra Mist branding is the one most people are saying they either love or hate. No in-betweeners on this one.

All in all, I feel Pepsi did not need a rebranding.  The familiar Pepsi wave makes me think of pouring a Pepsi into a glass.  The new one makes me think of things they probably aren’t going for.  Business-wise, they probably did it because of a drop in sales. So logically, it *does* make sense to rebrand. But who’s surprised by a drop in sales? You can’t buy a can of pop at the end of the month after paying rent.  I’m not buying Pepsi - but I’m not buying Coke either.  Hopefully Coke isn’t as trigger happy as Pepsi is with their rebranding.

Photos courtesy of Brand New.

Check out DFK 002: Keep On Being Pregnant.  We discuss the baby’s development in Week 8, my symptoms and the use of skin care products during pregnancy.  Enjoy!

Introducing…Dear Future Kids, the podcast.  It’s a weekly podcast about a little something new coming soon. The podcasts will be put up on the Dear Future Kids site.

The first podcast, DFK 001: Fatigued, Bitter Superhero, talks about where the baby is in development, our preparations for the baby, the sharing of news with our parents, and much more! Enjoy, and keep visiting that site, as we will be posting and adding photos, etc.