Hello all, thanks for letting me be part of this group. I'm hoping that I can find here the motivation I need to get over my biggest diet hurdle. LUNCH!!!

There...I said it. Yes, lunch is the problem.

I work in a pretty stressful environment with some of the best people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. We get along very well and keep our customers machines in fine working order. We all take lunch together and that's where my diet falls off. I have a very rough time choosing healthly lunches when we go out. We go out almost everyday.

Every couple of weeks I make the case that we "need to bring our lunches to save money" but that will last a day or two at the most and then there I am eating a huge bowl of pasta or some big ol' burger. I always cave in to the "Cmon we gotta get out of here for awhile" speech. The fact is that I have so much fun when we go out that I can't say no. We have a riot. The problem is that when I get into a restaurant I very seldom think about ordering healthy until I'm done eating.

On the upside, I eat a very healthy breakfast everyday and my wife makes pretty healthy meals for dinner. I walk 30 minutes 5 days a week and I am adding crunches this week.

I honestly believe that I will lose my weight by cutting out the million or so calories I woof at lunch. This is something I need to do.

Perhaps you could integrate the lunch into your daily calorie intake. As I understand it, with Weight Watchers you could eat chocolate all day as long as you stay within your points for the day.

That said, it might be a good idea to have a light dinner in order to stay within your daily calorie limit. I love cottage cheese and vegetables on rice cakes - nice and only about 200 cals!

If eating lunch out is something you enjoy you could try compromising by doing what tlihel said, incorporate the calories into your day by having both a healthy breakfast (at moderate calories) and a healthy dinner (again at moderate calories) and lunch would just be your highest calorie meal of the day, which is better than dinner being the highest calorie meal. Also, if you increase your level of exercise, you can increase your calorie intake and still lose weight. Walking is fine, but all forms of exercise needs to be jazzed up here and there in order to remain effective for weight loss. So maybe adding in 5 more minutes each day, or walking hills, or trying intervals 2x/week would be something you can do to "pep up" your routine and increase calorie burn.
You can make the lunch thing work for you if you're willing to exercise a bit harder, make better choices where available at lunch (like medium fry instead of supersize fry) (hold the mayo and sub mustard instead)(turkey instead of hamburger), little changes all mean a lot, and just doing them here and there can make a difference.

Donna

Hi Scotnmar .. I know exactly what you mean. It great to go out for lunch to "get out"... but may be you can have someone that goes with you to remind you when your ordering and after a couple of times, it will be old hat for you... or carry a piece of paper that says "eat healthy".. but don't put it in your pocket or you will forget. :D