Living Room Snack Station: (and how to adjust your program when needed).

Setting Up a Living Room Snack Station to Achieve your Weight Loss Goals.

Last week was an epic fail. I'm 38 weeks pregnant. We live in a 3 story townhouse that feels like a mansion when you have to go from the bottom floor to the top. For about three days last week, I slept less than 5 hours a night due to the pains in my pelvis. I was exhausted. Jon helped out a lot by taking over my chores, then we would sit downstairs in the living room with me propped up on about a million pillows with my feet up. Twice last week, during these days I'd end up starving at about 8pm. When I say starving, I mean starving… Like, I could eat a cow raw. There was 0% chance of me going upstairs to make something (even though there were plenty of options), and Jon was just as tired, considering he works a crazy schedule and had to do most of the chores those days. So, when I casually glanced over and said “We should order pizza…”, he readily agreed despite having eaten dinner just 3 hours before.

Now, I'm not an expert on prenatal nutrition, but I strongly suspect that pepperoni pizza and cinnastix aren't really beneficial to our unborn child right now. Not to mention, we wasted $60.00 on something that didn't give us any pleasure at all. If this had happened once, no sweat. But TWICE in the same week? We had ourselves a problem. I didn't beat myself up about it, but I did brainstorm to try to think of ways to prevent the same thing happening in the future.

I could have easily said “Next week, if I get hungry I'm going to walk upstairs and make something healthy”, but I know that's not going to happen. I have to plan to handle myself at my laziest. So, I assume that I won't be able to change how I feel during those moments, and that I won't be able to alter my willpower and came up with a workable solution.

We had a mini fridge that Jon bought on clearance for about $30.00 at Walmart a few years ago. It was sitting unused in our bedroom from when we used to keep individual water bottles stocked in it. Jon brought it down to the living room for me, and I added a few healthy filling snacks to our grocery list this week.

We now have a mini fridge right next to the couch stocked with Stacy's pita chips, red roasted hummus, containers of chocolate milk, trail mix, clementines, pears, apples, baby carrots, ranch dressing and cheese cubes. We had mini paper plates, plastic cutlery, and napkins left over from the baby shower so we set those up as well.

Now when that 8pm starvation hits, my lazy future self will choose the path of least resistance. Much easier to grab those snacks than to call for pizza, find my wallet to pay, walk up the stairs to get the pizza when the delivery guy comes, and have to wait 45 minutes to an hour to eat. Hah… I've tricked myself! If I can parent baby Groner as well as I parent myself…We might just make it through this!