My High Fiber Challenge

So, I've been on an exercise kick since the beginning of the year and I have a target. I'm still a little off my target, but I seem to have hit a plateau. Nothing's changed much in the last 3 or 4 months, so I figure that I have to start making changes to my diet.

First I decided not to drink all my calories. Which means I had to cut back on soda and iced tea. That started out being a pain in the ass but now I'm used to drinking water. I even have Propel packet mixes to help trick me into drinking more water.

Now, I decided to add more fiber to my diet. This has become a hot topic at home. Joe and I are constantly looking at the nutrition values in our food items and monitoring my bathroom activity. At this point, I'm adding 2 new food items to my meals that are high fiber:

- Roman Meal bread- the whole wheat type. 5 grams per slice.
- Dried Turkish figs- 6 grams for 2 pieces. They taste like Fig Newtons except not so doughy. Mission figs are disappointingly only 2 grams per serving.

So in just a slice of toast and 2 figs, I can get 11 grams out of the recommended 25 grams per day.

Also, I'm going to add a link to Calorie King which is a handy website to look up nutrition values of restaurant and fast food items. What's really nice, is that they also post exercise recommendations that offset the food you eat. It's a real eye-opener. For example, I looked up one of the fizzy malt liquor beverages I was sipping and discovered there was 225 calories in one bottle. That means I need to spend more than 20 minutes running on the treadmill to work off that beverage alone. I was shocked.