The new food pyramid

So the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (lovely department...mostly concerned with cows, chickens, and crops---the three c's) recently rehauled the mighty U.S. Food Pyramid. Now you can go to www.mypyramid.gov and type in your height, weight, etc., and it will spit out a specific food pyramid just for you. In addition to that, they have installed lovely tools. You can enter everything you eat in a day, and it tells you how much of your USRDA, and how much of the pyramid you are getting each day. Then, in case you're still bored, you can type in all of the activities that you do in a day, from sleeping, watching TV, typing, going to meetings, etc., and they calculate how many calories you're intaking from food vs. how many calories you expend in a day. This is a great tool. Mostly because I know that I stack up pretty poorly nutritionally, so I wanted to see it in action. Thanks to my wondeful, nutritious dinner from last night made by my friend Jen, I'm doing okay today.

Except for the Snickers. My king sized Snickers single handedly put me over the calorie limit by quite a large margin. Currently, I am about 400 calories higher than I should be for the activity that I'm doing today, and the site warns me that if I keep this up, I will gain from .5 to 1 lb each WEEK, with a total of 30-40 lbs. for the YEAR! This is insane. The Snickers are out of my diet, right now. And next week, I want to start exercising. This week, I'm still giving myself a break, telling myself that I am still on vacation. Next week, I go back to school, and back to exercising. This is ridiculous. Anyway, I'm sure all of you eat better than I do, so go check it out. Maybe it won't make you feel quite as icky as it did me...