What? Eat that much?

I went to see a nutritionist today, because I couldn't stand not knowing how much I should be eating, and these 5 pounds that joined me in March and I have failed to drop, I just wanted to find out a ballpark number (sorry, all about #s, math teacher) of calories to eat. Anyway, I told her that 1500 was my number for a while, and I upped to 1800 a couple of weeks ago after I played around with some calculators. She got all of my info over email and number crunched and the # she found was 2369. She said the 1500 was basically putting my body into starvation mode with my activity level and making my metabolism very slow. It makes sense, I think. I'm afraid eating more calories (while maybe it could be fun) will make me a balloon, but it should be ok. 3 scoops of ice cream instead of 1!! Haha, just kidding. That's not what you are supposed to do. Instead of calorie counting though, she gave me a list of all the types (fruit, veg, carb, fat, etc) and I'm supposed to count by serving how many I'm eating and I have a goal (3 fruit, 5 veg, etc). It seems less intense and more healthful to count servings of types of foods rather than calories.

Today I didn't run, and it was kind of nice. Last week drained me from running even though it felt good when I was out there. It started to become a drag. I didn't some lifting and the elliptical at the gym. This morning, inspired by the Maine visit, I took a shortbread recipe and added tea leaves to it - first blueberry, then green +chai tea - they turned out so yummy! I ate way too many of them though and spent the afternoon not feeling too well. But, this is a great concept to flavor shortbread! I love to bake, but sometimes it is bad when I'm my own taste tester. I eat a bunch of these and THEN go to the nutritionist. I felt like crap!

Tomorrow I'm hoping to get in a 7-8 miler of decent quality. I kind of miss teaching - it gives me some purpose to life everyday :) and less opportunities to make and eat too much shortbread!