Sodium Situation

I remember when my mom first started with My Fitness Pal and told me about sodium.  I said Ahh- don't worry about that.  My tracker didn't track that so it didn't exist in my head already spinning with the multitude of other things I needed to worry about when it came to my diet.  Well...now it has come to my attention since I have started using MFP exclusively.  I am often WAY over my sodium allowance for the day.  And by WAY I mean double or triple.  Free days of course are the highest (6000) and high carb days are around 4000.  I tracked it for the last week and those meals were pretty indicative of how I eat.  So this week, I am making it my mission to be under the 2,300 grams of sodium that is recommended.

This is NOT easy to do.  I thought I was eating clean before.  I found out I am NOT.  To reduce the sodium content you basically have to eat NOTHING processed including meat.  Dairy products  - yikes!  This is what surprised me most of all.  It shouldn't as logically I realize they are processed but I just didn't expect it.  Cheese, cottage cheese... high!

I went to the grocery store to grab something for lunch.  It took FOREVER.  After quite a look around I finally went with some Natural Choice Oven Roasted Chicken Breast which was the highest part of my meal.  I got some lettuce, grape tomatoes and swiss cheese as it was the best option.  Dressing.  DRESSING!  You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find dressing that didn't have 300 grams of sodium.  I finally found a generic honey mustard that had 140.  That was half of most everything else.  Without having a means to cook anything, that was the only option I had for lunch.  I looked at lunch meat and it was over 500 a serving.  I never would have thought to look at that.

I have a plan though.  Tonight I am going to go get a bunch of meat and cook it so I can have it there along with veggies.  I am going to try and eat very clean this week and see what my sodium content looks like.  I need to make sure I am still getting my calories in too.  Not sure if it will have any effect on my weight but it's worth a shot.  From the research that I am seeing, it doesn't really make much difference from a weight loss perspective but I am going to challenge myself this week to see if I can.