Hello Kitty Chewable Vitamins

Four Great Tasting Fruit Flavors!

or....

Yes, My Supplement Plan Needs A Little Work.

There's a good reason for this. I've never been much of a supplement taker, not because I don't believe in them, just because I'm terrible at swallowing pills and there comes an age (around 29) when taking Flintstones chewable mulit vitamins seems a bit, well, immature. Ever since I started reading the CR list religiously, I've been concerned about ruining all the hard work I've done on my diet by accidentally taking toxic levels of this or that. I'm hoping to get enough information at the CRS conference in November to figure out what I should be taking and answer some specific questions, including:

a) Do young women have different needs from the guys and grown up women who seem to be the majority of the CR Society?

b) Do we need to adjust amounts of things for our smaller sizes? I know that medications effect me much more strongly now than they did pre-CR.

c) Do redheads have special nutritional needs?

I'm sure that the experts will be able to answer all these questions for me and then some (and yes I am kidding about question c, for all of you out there who think very literally.) Meanwhile, I had been focusing on chasing the RDAs and not taking supplements, until for my thirtieth birthday, my mother gave me some Hello Kitty Chewable Vitamins.

Now if you're male, or you're female but over 40, you may not be into the whole Hello Kitty thing. You really had to be a young girl in the eighties to get the full impact, though obviously Hello Kitty is very important to my mother, who is almost sixty. My female friends and I are all about Hello Kitty these days. To explain as concisely as possible, Hello Kitty is about being secure enough in who you are: professionally, personally, etc., that you're able to embrace your girlish feminine side without the slightest bit of irony or apology. You know you can use a Hello Kitty pen with a pink feather on it in a staff meeting and people will still respect you because your work is just that good. You know that you can sip your drink with a Hello Kitty straw with a tiny Hello Kitty parasol on it at an expensive French restaurant because your dinner companions will think you're cool no matter what you do! The waitstaff will even ask where they too can acquire a Hello Kitty Parasol Straw, because they too are girls who grew up in the late seventies/early eighties!

So when my mother got me Hello Kitty Chewable Vitamins, I thought taking one every other day or so won't hurt and might help. Here's what's in it. Tell me if I'm Toxic Hello Kitty:

Vitamin A: 2500 IU
Vitamin C: 75 mg
Vitamin D: 400 IU
Vitamin E: 15 IU
Thiamin: 1.05 mg
Riboflavin 1.2 mg (toxic levels of this?)
Niacin: 15 mg
Vitamin B-6: 1.05 mg
Folate: 300 mcg
Vitamin B-12 4.5 mcg
Calcium 225 mg

Anything that looks really freaky is probably a typo. This stuff is made for children and I take it every other day. Am I killing myself?

Does AOR make chewable supplements? I am really terrible at swallowing pills.

On to what I ate yesterday:

Another super busy day. My calorie count according to Walford was 909.97, with 52 g protein and 43 g fat (of which only 7 were saturated fat.) Nutrients coming in not terrible, the two glasses of skim milk I got in along with my usual cottage cheese helped get me to 69% of the RDA for calcium, and iron was 54%. I think Kenton and Mary are right about the need for some supplements. I ate lots of yellow tomatoes, both my tomatoes with lemon herb olive oil and champagne walnut vinegar salad, and my tomatoes in seseme oil with a little soy sauce served hot. I also ate 70 cals of olives and the salad dressing on my shrimp salad at dinner. My co-workers and I got dinner out between meetings, and the best I could do was a shrimp salad that was rather meager but did include capers, which I love. I also had a glass of red wine (restaurant pour, I counted it as 100 instead of the 74 cals Walford says it is) and I think I already mentioned the two glasses of skim milk. And don't forget the cute little kiwi that I had with my olives and tomatoes for lunch. Way good on Vitamin A and C, as well as E yesterday. Low in the usuals, but not as low in the usuals as usual. I have to figure out how I can copy paste my nutrition table into the blog like Mary does... it's so frustrating to type everything in!

Today will be busy again of course with running hither and thither for work. I have packed: cottage cheese, eggwhite scramble, tomatoes in herb olive oil, broccoli spears (don't you think of Brittney Spears every time you write broccoli spears? I know I do, but maybe it's a Hello Kitty thing), and I forgot my baby kiwi oh I hate when that happens! Tonight will probably be a big old salad of some kind. I miss my kiwi so much when I forget to pack it. Kiwis are so cute and green and are desserts that naturally come in their own little cup! I love efficiently packaged food. I tried a new trick with my coffee this morning and instead of drinking it black, I had a cafe au lait, so it was a cup of steamed skim milk in a cup of coffee. I have to be creative about getting my calcium. It was a little dragon tickling though... one of the first things I did when I started CR was to cut out the sugar I had put in my coffee before. I actually like coffee black when it's good coffee. But I put sugar in the cafe au lait this morning, about two teaspoons, so 28 calories. Not the greatest use of calories but with my recently low appetite I can afford it. This heat needs to stop... it's so hard for me to eat when it's extremely hot. And when it's too hot for me to do my walk, then I get less exercise, which makes me less hungry... I can't wait till I move and have a fitness center right there! There's something so relaxing about zoning out on the treadmill while listening to horrible pop music on my Walkman (which yes in the ninties I did refer to as a "Walkperson.")

That may be all for today. Tune in tomorrow for how I've decided that I will now measure my weight loss in terms of Kieffers, because I realized that the weight I have lost since beginning CR would equal one and a half of my twenty pound cat.