Svelte Mommy

not new info....

2011-03-04T06:06:00.000-05:00

This is not new information, but I like how it's formatted and organized-it's kind of helpful, especially since one of the weight examples is very close to my own weight. Calories burned in 30 minutes......

When my big project at work is over (March 10), and the wave of illnesses leave my house (when????), I will compile some articles on recent studies on the effects of exercise that I've been reading lately and post them here - as well as some nutrition articles. But the bottom line I'm gathering is this - exercise is important, especially exercise at a high intensity - and moving often, not becoming completely sedentary in the day or evening is also important, although just how much movement and for how often is not known yet. The list above shows just how few calories are burned by say, sitting at a desk. The studies don't all look at weight loss, many look at health outcomes instead. I may ask for help from an epidemiologist friend at work to make sure I'm conveying accurate information. Not all studies are created equal and my professional epi buddies help me sort that out.

Trying to get back on track

2011-02-18T06:52:00.000-05:00

I actually need to lose a few pounds. The one downside to having a whole new wardrobe of clothes in my new size is that I have no "fat clothes" to fall back on. I am noticing now that my clothes are tight and uncomfortable. At first I didn't even put two and two together. I just thought that after work I was tired and who wouldn't want to slink into yoga pants. But I did notice many months ago, that when my clothes are loose and comfortable, I often come home and get distracted starting dinner, etc. before changing. I had to remind myself to change so that I wouldn't soil my work clothes while cooking. I made a mental note to myself that next time I experienced the "I must change now!!" feeling regularly after work, I would know it meant things aren't fitting right and I should do something about it.

So here I am working towards that goal. I knew for the past few months that my weight was a little higher, but I didn't see it as a big deal, and it is a normal occurrence in winter. Now we've passed that "little bit higher" mark. A couple days ago I quickly tried on a couple dresses at lunch time, as I'm attending a party next Saturday, and the 6s were really too tight. At first I attributed that to them being a really young style - I didn't like how they looked anyway - but in reality they were just too small. The shopping trip actually did light a fire under my behind. I was so turned off that I got more serious. I had also had a bit of a pizza debacle the day before that kind of shocked me. Since when do I even like white crust-big chain pizza?? Ick! But I ate lots of it and happily. This all sounds so dramatic! It is not.

So I'm trying very hard to control any extraneous snacking, and to really watch portion size. I'm also tracking. I find, as do some friends, that in the end it's just easier to be really stringent, as not being stringent opens the door to wanting things, and starts that constant battle in the head of, "can I have some of that?" I'd rather not feel tempted at all.

I am also finding that reporting my food intake to a few friends does make me more vigilant. I actually spit out some gummy bears - they were hurting my jaw anyway - thinking, "I can't email this to my friends."

So the more the merrier. Here is what I ate yesterday:
I still use the old WW points system. Goal is 23 pts or 24 on a big exercise day. In reality I should eat 21 but i find that unrealistic and I don't want to be constantly disappointing myself.

breakfast 1
few bites oatmeal and strawberries while chatting with my cousin and making lunches - we were going to exercise but the kids got up early and we were all talking. Highly unusual morning due to house guest. 1 pts

breakfast 2
cereal, milk, yogurt 5pts

lots coffee with milk 1pt

lunch
spinach salad with turkey breast, healthy homemade dressing, 20 almonds (part-pre lunch snack), other veggies. 5 pts - I was craving some carbs but didn't have any in my desk drawer.

20 min run with buddy. first time in a long time! Should have done post-run push-ups.

afternoon snack
orange
plain non-fat yogurt with berries 3pts

dinner 1 - got home starving. tried very hard to contain myself and make dinner but a contractor was in house. warmed myself up some food so as not to go crazy.
4 low-fat triscuits, many pickle slices 1 pt
natasha's leftover dinner of my homemade pizza with white-bean infused pizza sauce, ww crust, minimal cheese, 3 pepperoni slices, broccoli 3 pts (very small portion was left)

dinner 2 - after contractor left
sauteed spinach with leftover bacon and tin of sardines and orange zest. I really did learn something by watching/reading so much Jamie Oliver - 3pts

dessert - started eating gummy bears while dolling out kid desserts and stopped. Not worth it and not necessary.

22 pts before exercise!! It really is possible to not eat that extra 200 calories a day, if I just make the slightest effort to really track, feel like I have a real, strongly desired goal in mind (making my clothes fit), and if I feel accountable to someone (my blogging audience). I was not having one of my hungry days - I did only a little exercise and that makes a big difference appetite-wise. Let's see how long I can keep this up. btw, I just spent all my exercise time blogging. getting up now.

Clam pizza

2011-01-23T16:14:00.000-05:00

I would call this Jamie Oliver-inspired, although it's not his recipe.

Whole wheat crust with:
pesto, cherrystone clams, navy beans, lemon slices, artichoke hearts, fresh parsley, parm flakes, pepper, olive oil - applied in that order. It kind of took a while to assemble.

What makes is Jamie-inspired is the addition of red pepper flakes, the more liberal use of olive oil, and the lemon slices with peel. I also was very generous with the parsley and the man is seemingly obsessed with fresh herbs. But when I saw him make clam pizza he used a slightly different recipe. And he put whole clams on there!

The pizza was also inspired by the new products display at Trader Joe's. They had whole cherrystone clams in cans. I bought 3.

What makes is a very Jenna pizza is:
-whole wheat crust of course
-using up leftover bits in my fridge - in this instance parsley-walnut pesto and two big artichoke hearts as well as half a lemon (i could have easily used a whole lemon)
-added navy beans to make the pizza have more fiber and protein and have a keep the crust to topping ratio weighted more towards the topping side.

Here are my take-aways.

DELICIOUS!!!

iPhone there for size comparison:
notice how big clams are

The few Jamie inspirations really did kick it up a notch. I think using a bit more olive oil made all the difference. It made all the ingredients really gel together and the flavors fuse. Quite literally - flavors travel in fat molecules and I have made this pizza while being more stingy with the olive oil and it tastes like disparate parts. It may also have had to do with the pesto base, even though it was a thin spread. I didn't go nutso with the oil - it was probably 3-4 tablespoons for the whole thing as opposed to 2. But the pizza has very little cheese on it as I really don't like melted cheese with seafood. Gross. The parm is tangy but not gooey.

I'm not a fan of spicy foods - they often give me a headache. But I know a little heat is meant to also enhance other flavors and in this instance the bit of dried red pepper flakes did just that. Jamie would have used fresh hot chili of course. Same is true of the parsley - it just added to an overall flavorful-ness and interest in the mouth.

I really should invest in a pizza stone.
This pan is an embarrassment.

First, hats off to Trader Joe's. I believe the big whole clams made the whole thing more sophisticated. Kind of strange to say anything in a can is sophisticated but I guess it's all relative. The navy beans were a great enhancement - not just a bit of heft and health, they were creamy and delicious against the chewy clams. Additionally, the artichoke hearts were really finely chopped up and spread out. I think the helped a lot - they made the whole thing more...um....vegetably (to make up a word)....in a good way. And finally - I loved having the bits of roasted lemon. I picked off the actual pieces but squeezed them before eating each slice. If I were serving this at a party I would also serve fresh slices and additional parsley on each plate as garnish. The brightness was fantastic. Jamie would have doused the whole thing in more olive oil at the table. He seems to do that. I found it just greasy enough as is.

My main take-away, more than anything else, is to extoll the virtues of watching cooking videos - either on television, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, whatever. I almost never make the recipes from the shows, but bits of information and techniques do sink in. Ideas percolate that were inspired by something I've seen but were not an exact recipe. And I believe that being familiar with those techniques and ideas also breeds confidence in the kitchen and a proclivity to experiment. My husband certainly appreciates it...the kids - I'm not so sure.

Pitch for Bob Harper Inside Out Method series

2011-01-06T18:03:00.000-05:00

I'm sure I mentioned this set before, but I'd like to revise my opinion.
Bob Harper has a 4-DVD set which is a complete bargain. It's on sale for something like $30 with a discount code of "getfit".

The first couple times I tried the DVDs I found them boring and repetitive. But now for some reason I find them zen-inducing and super-fabulous. Each DVD has a 1 hr version or a 20 min version. I only do the 1 hr version and I basically only do them on weekends or if I happen to get up with Dave at 4:30 am. They have been reviewed in detail in many places - just Google "Bob Harper inside out method" so I won't reiterate here. Bob also has some new kettleball routines which I have not tried. I haven't wanted to purchase kettleballs, although I probably should. The trainers are hot and ripped, although Stephanie makes weird faces and I don't like the outfits on Zach. Who wears tall black socks and v-neck t-shirts to the gym?? It makes me a little crazy. Francisco is a hottie but Bob is constantly yelling at him for not keeping up with the girls. Bob also has a lot of mini "challenges" on his youtube site and some of them are actually pretty good.

I find his over-positive veganism kind of a bit much. And the green drink Nazis make me crazy. How loony does this woman sound?? But His workouts are really a great deal.

Recipe browsing

2011-01-03T13:35:00.000-05:00

I've been distracting myself with a lot of recipe browsing and cookingchannel tv watching lately.
For some reason I'm completely intrigued by the Veg Edge which focuses on really crazy-amazing vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Some of the stuff, like tempeh bbq looks gross, but the more refined, richly infused veggie dishes look amazing. Even the vegan recipes sound pretty interesting - using coconut milk instead of regular cream. I can use the lactose intolerant pills when I have dairy, and so far they do work, but I imagine it helps to keep the overall amount of lactose down to a minimum. So I'm open to alternatives.

I really want to try this Jamie Oliver recipe as soon as I get home from my trip. SO much so that I already bought the pomegranate! It's meant to be a post-Thanksgiving - leftover turkey recipe, but the dressing sounds so interesting. Three fruit juices and soy! I'll be making it in a week or so so stay tuned.

And while I don't like baking, the below does look fantastic. The recipe is from Shape magazine of all places. I have no idea if it's good but I think the idea of covering a brownie recipe with a cup of hot water is kind of a funny concept.

Full disclosure - up eight pounds

2010-12-13T22:35:00.000-05:00

In light of this annoying post about how maintenance isn't so hard after all, I realize why things seemed so easy - I was eating too much and on my way to gaining eight pounds. I would say three of those pounds were probably an improvement, but the other five were unnecessary. So I decided to stop eating so much at night and quickly lost one, with the goal being to lose four more. The plan was to (1) add back the stairs at work most days, (2) eat smaller dinners and (3) engage in less mindless snacking-picking at sweets. I kind of did ok with 1 and 3 but not so well with 2. Then work got busy and I've only done the stairs twice a week or so lately. I also have become lactose intolerant in the past few months (!!!!) - which means I can't fill up on non-fat protein. This is a huge adjustment for me. I may get the pills to take with dairy because it makes me sad not to eat it. It also means I'm eating more calories for the same amount of satiety. And then there were the 6 lbs of latkes I bought for a party we never had. SO after a good start I kind of got lazy. My clothes are kind of on the cusp of tight. I like them loose.

I'm not really whining about gaining weight - more just fessing up in the interest of full disclosure. I look fine and feel healthy. (I may be whining about the dairy - Greek yogurt specifically - but I'll adjust.) I think it's almost funny that I can't lose four pounds after all the weight I lost before. Where is my discipline? What happened to my motivation?? Why does it take 5+ pounds to even notice I've gained one?

Today my stair-climbing friends RAN up all 56 flights!! Tomorrow I'm joining them.

calamari in padella con limone e pangrattato

2010-12-10T18:53:00.002-05:00

I got Jamie's Italy out of the library. It's really fun to read but kind of infuriating to try and use. I can't quite say why. I think the recipes are really simple sounding but either involve complex ingredients like octopus and squab, or massive quantities of cream and butter - and I just can't bring myself to make fettucini alfredo. And everything involves fennel. I don't know why, but I just enjoy reading it more than using it.

But the above recipe seemed simple enough. Saute breadcrumbs in olive oil and a few other ingredients - then cook up the squid and lemons and top with parsley and the breadcrumbs.

At any rate - I thought it was delicious - and fast - and not too expensive. I think Dave and I ate $11 worth of squid. Of course the kids had pasta and a bowl of cereal. It just wasn't worth the battle. Natasha ate one ring and said she didn't like it but she did eat the whole thing. I think Dave was less impressed than me...

I am picking up on a few tips though - use a lot of fresh herbs, lemon zest and put a new twist on old things. I do want to try tuna meatballs but they seem a bit labor intensive. I guess it's not a week-night cookbook.

I don't see why I can't make these...

2010-12-06T16:22:00.002-05:00

Perhaps I'll buy some dumpling wrappers and try making these...I do need a working food processor. But they really do look quite simple.

Food rut

2010-11-30T20:27:00.000-05:00

Despite the embarrassing amount of time I spend perusing recipe sites and apps, it appears that I'm in a food rut.

I can't think of anything I want to cook. And I'm not the only one noticing.

Natasha has been complaining lately that I make the same dinners over and over again. And I can't say she's wrong. And she specifically said that she doesn't want the same old ingredients recombined in different ways. She didn't use that exact phrasing but that's what she meant. I have the same problem with Cooking Light magazine, but that's another story. Natasha wants new ingredients, or ingredients so artfully combined as to make their original components unrecognizable. We could try venison. Not likely. So perhaps I need to make some more robust sauces.

I roast veggies, I sauté chicken or ground turkey breast, I pan fry fish...blah blah. I'm bored too. I think what she's getting at is that she wants a more exciting sauce. I had pulled away from sauces as someone in the family always has a complaint. They're accused of being too caloric, too spicy, too sweet, too time consuming, too goopy, too full of objectionable green specs, too healthy, too boring, too disgusting. (I wonder if you can figure out which complaints are whose!) Someone has a problem with all of them.

As a result I stopped using a lot of flavor when I cook. I got used to this and now I prefer it. I like the individual flavors of the main ingredients to shine through, unencumbered by lots of overpowering herbs and condiments. With little kids, this is a pretty good strategy too. They don't like their different meal elements to even touch each other, let along simmer together!

But here we are in boring land.

Tonight I had to go grocery shopping after work. I didn't get home until late, and was not interested in starting a meal from scratch. So I cobbled together a beef brisket pre-made TJs dinner. I buy one pre-made dinner a week for times like this, and some plainer-looking pulled chicken from the local grocery store deli. The beef brisket was doused in a super-duper exceedingly greasy, salty, sweet bbq sauce. I warmed both meats (separately) in the microwave, made some whole wheat toast and had instant sloppy joes. Dave and I had pickle slices on our sandwiches. I made the kids eat some sweet pepper slices on the side as their veggie. Dinner was fast and everyone was happy. The sweet beef was pretty unhealthy, but the chicken wasn't bad. It was in a light vinegary/pickle sauce. Natasha was dreamily remembering the sloppy joes from sleepaway camp. I was happy not to cook and liked my lower-fat/sugar version. Dave and Alex enjoyed the rich flavors. I guess that's a fair enough compromise once in a while.

So I'm not going to buy that pre-made, sodium/sugar/fat filled beef brisket all the time. But I do think I need to add more flavors to the foods I make. I'm going to start with this. I've had it before and it's pretty flavorful and versatile.

It's really good on salmon.
Mongolian BBQ Sauce

Coincidently, I had recently bought this book by Rocco DiSpirito. It's kind of everything I hate, but I decided to buy it anyway. Next thing you know I'll be voting for someone who says, "nucular". OK maybe not. At any rate, the book purchase started with a quest for a good-tasting, lower-calorie cookie. The book is full to the brim of heavy, greasy, gratuitous foods redone with lots of ingredient substitution to be lower-fat, lower calorie versions - things like chicken-fried steak with sausage gravy. It advocates lots of swaps like add navy beans, remove butter, use Splenda instead of sugar, corn starch instead of butter, low-fat dairy full of guar gum. You know, everything I despise. I'm ok with some ingredient substitutions, removals or additions, but others makes me nutty. I've made a few things so far. Most of them are ok, but just not my type of food. Very traditional American- type foods. Creamed spinach, chicken pot pie. It comes out ok, not super- heavy, but just not the way I like things. But I do think my family has appreciated the change of pace. See chicken pot pie photos below. I have to say, I have a new love in the form of Ian's whole wheat panko bread crumbs.

But all in all, I think rules were made to be broken. I can't live by hard and fast dictums. Cornstarch here we come!

_______

I wrote that a week or so ago and didn't get around to uploading the photos so I didn't post it. I was trying to be open-minded but I really don't like that kind of food. It turns out to be kind of time consuming and the kids aren't really interested. Dave was pretty happy though. The chicken pot pie I altered a fair bit and it came out pretty well. It was a big hit with my cousin and mom. Tonight I went back to plain chicken tenders. I made a plain batch for the kids and a slightly more complex batch for me and Dave - at the end I put some blue cheese crumbles and balsamic glaze - for a delectable sweet-salty combination. Alex helped me make mashed potatoes and I made some plain peas. Back to plain food, but the kids are more amenable to individual ingredients, and I like being able to figure out how much I'm eating of each ingredient. I do like the whole wheat panko-encrusted baked chicken tenders, especially served with a crudite and some blue cheese dressing (I make equal parts mayo, blue cheese and non-fat Greek yogurt, and then I add a bit more yogurt to cut the calories a bit more. Just make sure to really spend time working the blue cheese into the mixture so it's a smooth and incorporated). The problem is that Alex responds with, "Why is there stuff on the chicken, Natasha grudgingly eats it but isn't all that impressed and Dave and I have trouble controlling ourselves from eating massive portions dipped in dressing. Even with the yogurt it's still pretty caloric. So I don't really see the point, unless I'm craving a Cheesecake Factory-type meal. That does happen, but in terms of creating a healthy family-friendly dinner it's just kind of a waste in my house.

I also tried a cookie recipe. I added beans instead of flour which is fine, and against all my instincts but owing to curiosity, I tried Splenda. At first I thought it was a dream come true. Low calorie sugar! But then I had a horrid chemically aftertaste in my mouth for hours and hours. I will never use it again. Some background on the cookie experiment....

Each school day, Natasha and Alex get a "packet" in their lunch each day. It's a terrible commercial 100 calorie pack. I give it to them to control their overall sweet intake, to try and help them develop a sense of what a normal portion is and also so that they don't feel like I never allow them to have any junk. I don't want to have kids who go nutso when they go to a friend's house who has junk it it....So I know the packets are full of chemicals and additives, but I'm ok with that in a small quantity.

Natasha asked if I would bake treats instead of buying the packets. I think even she thinks they're kind of gross and fake-tasting. So I should try. But I can't stand having fresh, home made baked goods in the house. It's way too tempting for me. I'll have to work on that.

2010-11-30T19:55:00.002-05:00

2010-11-30T19:55:00.001-05:00

If I were to succumb to the cupcake craze...

2010-11-17T16:11:00.000-05:00

If I were to succumb to the cupcake craze...and I'm not saying that have. In fact I have not. I would make these....still high in sugar of course. I think sugar could be reduced...but they still have quite a few calories I'm sure.

I definitely want to try the orange ones...i'm just so curious about the result of boiling oranges for 2 hours and then putting them in the blender....

Slightly healthier cupcakes....

eggplant-tomato roast

2010-11-16T15:08:00.000-05:00

A beautiful dish for a party - not really for kids...but not everything can be!

I think the photos tell the story. I should have used more olive oil under the buffalo mozzarella, but oh well. I also made couscous separately, but probably could just put it in the pan. and the onions would be better browned, but that seemed to take away from the one-pot elegance.

Lots of interesting stories on NPR yesterday related to food and health

2010-10-26T16:48:00.000-04:00

Here are some links - all stories can be listened to.

Not from today - but I want to eat at this French school

This morning - some interesting stuff happening in Fairfax County VA - taste tests to get the kids interested and hiding veggies for middle-schoolers - not a bad idea for that age group and that environment. Meaning - they are unsupervised and highly influenced by peer pressure -so hiding white beans and veggies in the nacho sauce isn't the end of the world.

And this one about how we are no longer the tallest population. Another sign of America's decline...

Sake Salmon

2010-10-21T14:16:00.000-04:00

Nigella Lawson's delicious sake salmon over rice.

I intended to write a super-quick post to reference a recipe I like and had kind of forgotten about....but it ended up being longer and more introspective.

I know I've blogged about Nigella Lawson's sake salmon in passing before, but this recipe is so good that even I concede to stick to the recipe and I use various measuring spoons to make both the marinade and sauce (not without getting annoyed though). It's pretty and a great party pleaser too, as if it's done properly it is one big dish of fluffy rice (of course I switch from white to brown), glistening seared pink salmon and bright green cilantro clippings all over the top. It's kind of dramatic to put it in the middle of the table and dollop out huge spoonfuls to eagerly awaiting guests. And it's totally delicious. I didn't get to that part in my first post. It could use a tad of something sweet, like a drop of brown sugar, in the sauce, and it certainly needs to cook longer than she says for my liking, although you can see in her photo that she serves it pretty raw.

OK - now on to the more introspective part...

I just read the post where I originally referenced it. Kind of an unhelpful post as I hadn't even tried the recipe I referred to. But more noticeable to me is my overall challenged tone. It's strange now to remember how much I was struggling - that was at the -25 lb and 3 month mark. It was right around the time where I made the decision that I wasn't going to go below 21 points (I can't believe I went below 23) and I wasn't going to add points back after reaching goal. Somehow that comforted me. It made me feel like I could do it. I could stay plodding along at the B+/A- pace I was at - all my life I was that kind of student.

The truth is, I did add points back into my diet after I reached goal weight. I also upped the exercise. But I did so quite slowly, over a long period of time. Eventually I got much less restrictive and haven't really gained weight (+/- 3lbs from 140), except for a period last winter where I was snacking a lot and in my usual winter sedentary-ness. I don't count points anymore, although I did for a good long time after reaching goal. I do have that intuitive sense of what a normal portion is but I still must often consciously try and stick to that. If I'm still hungry I eat a little more. I also try not to snack too much but that is still a challenge. I do taste the little goodies around the office much more often than I did while losing, which was almost never. It's also possible that one could say I'm still really restrictive but it doesn't bother me as much anymore. Meaning, I still don't eat a lot of things that are tempting and caloric but that just seems normal to me now. Usually. I am surprised at how little I pay attention consciously anymore. Yesterday I did have to eat the home made jelly-shortbread concoction that wasn't even left for my branch at work. I wrote a series of posts on "what I did right" about 10 months ago, which was 1 year after I started losing and 6 months past goal weight. I think even since then I've let my guard down a fair bit, and perhaps more importantly internalized portion size a lot more. At that point I thought I had done all the changing I would do, but as it turns out, it takes a REALLY long time to become an intuitive eater. Of course I still make mistakes - getting overly full, or overly hungry. But I rarely count points.

I suppose now I eat an average of 24-26 points and I probably do about 3 points of exercise a day. Certainly the exercise varies from 2-4 points but I bet 3 is the average. I also have much more muscle mass, which burns calories all throughout the day. I think back when I wrote that post I was eating 21-22 points a day and doing 2 points of exercise. But of course, that was before I hit the 150 lb mark. Once you get there it gets a lot harder to earn exercise points. Weight Watchers is kind of ingenious that way - upping exercise alleviates plateaus.

It got easier over time for two reasons. 1. In reality I don't have to be as strict as when I was losing weight and 2. I don't want treats in the same compulsive way I used to.

I did eat a lot of that salmon last night- way more than the 3 or 4 oz I would have had while losing. It was good (good meaning tasting and good meaning healthy) and I was hungry.

Two new Jackie Warner DVDs

2010-10-14T19:47:00.000-04:00

Somehow I missed this - but not surprising since she has a new TV show out called Thintervention and we're almost in the holiday season. It got great reviews on Amazon. I really have no need for a new DVD. But I'll buy it at some point for sure. I am enjoying watching Thintervention. I am only so-so on Bob's new DVDs. Kind of a waste of $40. Had I known about these two Jackies I would have skipped the package deal.

One out now, and another for abs out in Dec.

At any rate - back to Thintervention. First I should note that I am a Bravo junkie. The only TV I watch these days is really bad reality programming. Or news. Or maybe they are the same thing. I can't even take the news anymore.

But it was Jackie's first show, also on Bravo, called Workout that was one of my motivators. I think I blogged about it at some point, but I used to lie in my bed all smug and superior because I was not obese and wasn't a whiner like the people on the show. Part of me was wondering if I could handle her workouts...I assumed no but I still felt slightly superior. But in reality I was overweight, and I was a bit of a whiner. There was something slightly self-loathing about watching those people struggle. I guess deep down I knew I wasn't really superior to those people. I didn't have the deep-seated emotional eating problems they had, but I was not in control of my body or my health. Hmmm....

At any rate, I bought the DVD. I did it once with light weights. It was fine. It went fast. It was almost fun. Had I realized then how effective it was I might have done it more than once! Inconsistently doing exercise along with paying no attention to food intake is just a waste of time. At least that was my attitude. It was more than a year later that I started actually dieting and then another several months before I added jackie's DVD into my repertoire. Now here we are. It's interesting to me to watch the new show. Now when I watch Thintervention I don't feel superior to the contestants. I feel hopeful that they'll get it. I want more converts on my team! Of course they will eventually, or at least they'll fake it for long enough for the show to be filmed. But it is nice to be on the other side of the battle. While I may not have been obese, Thintervention is not Work Out. The people on Thintervention area all losing 60 lbs or less. They're a lot like I was. I hope they succeed.

Spaghetti tacos

2010-10-12T16:03:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure I can make spaghetti tacos, although if they had some protein and veggies on the side or on top, I guess why not. The originator of the idea, iCarly, is a favorite show of Natasha's for sure. I just can't believe such a long story was squeezed out of the notion of spaghetti tacos. I'm just so done with smiley faces and hiding vegetables. My kids aren't even remotely done with arguing about what they eat, and but I just don't have the willingness to make dinner a game. They eat what I feed them or they fight about it. Usually the latter and then the former. Last night we had turkey burgers and roasted cabbage and cauliflower. Natasha ate her burger with some sugary ketchup, because she knew half a Georgetown Cupcake awaited her. First she screamed and protested when she found out the flavor of the cupcake (chocolate peanut butter) and that it was to be cut in half. Two big disappointments, but that's how the free GC giveaway works - one per customer and only the flavor of the day. Alex was not feeling well and refused both the turkey burger and some tomato-y couscous that was perfectly delicious. I allowed him that reheated left-over as I know he doesn't like burgers of any sort, and I didn't either as a kid. He basically didn't eat dinner but he did eat about 20 sugar snap peas so I allowed him his half a cupcake. By the way - the sugar snap peas were an alternative to the roasted vegetables. I knew that fight was going nowhere. They do eat cauliflower sometimes, but not when it's so browned.

The following slideshow of foods kids like annoyed me to no end. Most of the food is gross. See below example of farina.

Peanut butter sandwich

2010-10-01T17:22:00.000-04:00

Recently a friend said to me something about wanting to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Her larger point wasn't so much about the pb&j but more that she likes food, isn't willing to eat rabbit food and more importantly isn't willing to restrict herself unduly to lose a few pounds. Well there is some rabbit-food eating that goes on in my house, and sometimes I do it when I really want something else. But I also eat a lot of foods that are indulgent (more now than when I was losing for sure0 but I eat them. And I eat peanut butter and jelly all the time. I can't restrict myself from all the foods I like either. And one shouldn't have to.

So using peanut butter and jelly as an example, here is how I handle the classic (I don't mean the tone to be overbearing. it's just how i do things):

I eat it on good bread. Good to me means, whole wheat, fresh, not enriched wheat flour with a bunch of fiber additives, no or very little added sugar.
I use nut butter with one or two ingredients: the nut and optional salt. No added sugar.
I use a lower-sugar jelly. I actually compare the labels for this one. As posted earlier sometimes I use fruit slices altogether.
I'm generally reasonable with the amount of peanut butter and jelly you use, but don't skimp so much that it's not really good.
I eat it as part of a set number of calories, more or less, that you eat in a day. I don't just add it in as a little extra snack.
I recognize that a pb&j is enough calories for a full meal in and of itself, but I can eat it so quickly that I'm not full right away...as such....
If I'm starving I try and eat one with a glass of milk or coffee or a bowl of yogurt and fruit. It is very easy to eat one, not realize that was enough and then eat another one and then end up with a brick in my stomach. I of course learned this the hard way.

Some Weight Watchers advice...A pb&j is a calorie-dense food. WW is very anti calorie-dense foods. I understand why, although now that I'm more in control of my food intake I do eat them. But the reason that WW is against calorie-dense foods is because they are way too easy to overeat. WW tries to direct you to water and fiber-rich foods, so that your stomach gets full before you overeat and then when real fullness sets in you haven't overeaten. This is a pretty good theory in general but, as my friend pointed out, sometimes a sister wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich! So ultimately you need to be able to control yourself with a reasonable portion size. I tend to eat a regular-sized sandwich but for breakfast, right after I've exercised. If I eat it as my afternoon snack I eat half a sandwich.

OK - that's enough about a sandwich. Must go try to figure out what to do with spaghetti squash.

Nice idea - but overpriced

2010-09-29T13:35:00.000-04:00

I am sure these help with portion control. But the price is ridiculous! I do love my Weight Watchers measured serving spoons, which were also outrageously overpriced.

Veggies get big lily pad, then carbs, protein and on down to fat. I would reverse carbs and protein.

Below are bowls for cereal, pasta, etc. with little ridges for portion sizes, 1/4 cup, etc. But it's something like $30 for two! That being said, they may be available someplace else for less, and if they really work, they may be worth it....

Quinoa

2010-09-23T13:14:00.000-04:00

I wrote this post weeks ago, but I'm having an issue with roatating my photos. But since Martha Rose Shulman spent the entire week posting recipes about quinoa, I decided to just post it, crooked photos and all.

First of all, I have quinoa flour and I have used it in baked goods. I'd like to try the muffins...I have made something similar to the oatmeal-like concoction above, but she cooks her dried fruit - fancy!

I made the salad below. I will not write a long explanation or detailed recipe, but just say that it is bright enough to make you happy on the most depressing day. I realized the hard way that it is more like a fruit salad with some grains, not a grain salad with fruit - so the first time I made it I used some grapeseed oil and it was gross. The next time was just acid and it was much better.

Mix together - cooked quinoa, chopped pineapple, sweet onion, basil leaves, pomegranate seeds, lots of fresh lemon juice, some rice wine vinegar, and lime juice. It's not as tart as it sounds. Also add lemon and lime zest. Delightful! I made it with chicken and portobello mushrooms, but it is also good over arugula.

Below are the other dinner components and final plate. Sideways....

Soon to be released DVDs

2010-09-05T06:42:00.000-04:00

Sorry in advance for the bad writing. I just can't seem to get this post done and it's not even that interesting!

I don't need any new DVDs right now, as I'm still deeply in love with my Jan and Lin Johnson series, I still frequently pop-in my original Jackie DVD and I have a ton of perfectly good Jillian and Bob DVDs already, but here are a few coming out soon by Bob and Jillian, but not under the Biggest Loser brand, that might be good....and I might buy anyway - certainly as it gets cold I will.

Bob has 4 new DVDs coming out - strength, cardio, yoga and "my (meaning Bob's) workout". They look hard. At $13 on Amazon they violate my greater than $10 rule but you can get all 4 for $40 including shipping on Bob's web site which is so much better of a bargain I'll probably do it even though I won't use the yoga one for sure. Bob has one workout that is an hour. I'm not sure who has time for that...but I think they're the fast-paced weights movements of old-school exercises.

At any rate, from the preview videos it seems much rougher than the Bob Biggest Loser DVDs. Rougher in the sense that they're really in hard-core workout mode and the backdrop is a kind of industrial-looking gym with a couple toned clients. He uses the word "raw" on the web site. While I do think the Biggest Loser DVDs have good workouts, especially Bob's Biggest Loser Boot Camp, I just can no longer watch the tubby people outperform me. Their bodies are not inspiring and the fact that they can do more push-ups than me is deeply annoying. But I really do like Bob as a trainer so I will get at least the strength DVD if not the whole set.

Jillian has one new DVD coming out momentarily. It is "Shred it with weights" so I'm assuming it's a lot like her 30 Day Shred DVD. It was widely reviewed on Amazon but not released yet but now all the reviews are gone. Seems suspicious. I know it involves a kettle ball but you can also use a single dumbbell. I don't understand how there are so many reviews of DVDs that aren't released yet, but so be it. It's $10 on Amazon. I'm kind of tired of Jillian's mean attitude, but usually on her non-Biggest Loser titles she isn't nearly as obnoxious. And I do like the variety she puts in her routines.

Tried this and liked it....

2010-09-01T12:54:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to cook more vegetarian recipes. Mainly for economic reasons but also for health reasons. I don't want to be a "french fry vegetarian" and I've heard American vegetarians called. These people eat a lot of cheese and soy sausages. I'm trying to be more Indian about it. I'd like to use chick pea flour and lentils and yogurt as protein sources. This change requires a lot of research and frankly reaching for those ingredients is not at all intuitive for me. I'm working on it.

At any rate, while this is not Indian, I have long thought I should use tofu as a thickener in the blender more often. I found this recipe and tried it (aldulterated of course) It's pretty good. Dave loved it. I didn't make the deep fried tofu croutons - that seemed inordinately messy. I just actually made the vinaigrette as a sauce/salad dressing. It's good on broccoli slaw, which is pretty hearty. I reduced the sugar to 1 tbs, and the oil to 1/2 cup. I have no idea with sambal oelek chili paste so I used what I had which was harrissa. I also used Chinese cooking wine instead of sherry vinegar, which probably didn't taste as good, but I had no sherry vinegar and I added in some fresh basil leaves I had that were getting dark spots. I also used tahini instead of sesame oil but I can't see how that made any difference. It really is filling and quite tasty...but it's a flavor with, as they say on Project Runway, a "strong point of view". One could easily get sick of it after a whole batch.

The first night I dumped it on a hot meal in a bowl. On the bottom was brown rice, followed by a mixture of onions and a few leftover green beans and the rest of the tofu sauteed in plain soy sauce and a little canola oil. On top of that went some black beans I had simmered in the morning and then the sauce over it all. The next day I used it as a salad dressing.

here are the ingredients:

For the tofu-soy vinaigrette:

1 cup silken tofu
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons sambal oelek chili paste
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 cup canola oil
For the radishes and beans:
1 pound radishes, preferably a mix of different kinds, trimmed and thinly sliced
Salt
2 pounds fresh beans, preferably a mix of three kinds, such as green, yellow wax, and Romano, or haricot verts, snow peas and sugar snap peas, trimmed

All in all a good way to step out of my cooking comfort zone.
(next up i'm going to use tofu as a thickener in a dessert, like with cocoa powder and soy milk.)

Jackie's back!

2010-08-25T11:51:00.000-04:00

Jackie Warner is back on tv with a new show called, "Thintervention".

I can't say how excited I am about this. Very pathetic I know, but I really do love Bravo and of course Jackie. And to think an OC housewife is one of the contestants! I'll have to read extra articles in the New Yorker to regain some brain cells....

Seafood chowder

2010-08-24T22:13:00.000-04:00

I will preface this by saying that I sadly don't have a photo. I had one but no one liked how they looked in it. At any rate, the impetus for this was to use up 10 ears of corn I had made and cut off the cobs. I kept eating it by the handful in the fridge. I also had cooked green beans in the fridge.

I found a recipe on Epicurious that I kind of followed, but only partly. Here is what I did...And for the future I would halve the recipe, unless serving it to a LOT of people, like 10.

Saute some onions and celery in butter in a big soup pot. (one is supposed to use pork salt but I forgot to buy it. I probably used 2 onions, half a package of celery and 1.5 tbs butter.

Add a box of fish stock and cut up 5 or so medium red bliss potatoes (preferably organic and skin on) and simmer until potatoes are about half done - or maybe 15 minutes.

I then added 3 pounds of cod and two plastic pint containers of fresh clams and their water. Here is where it gets a bit dicey in terms of recreating the recipe. I bought the seafood at Stop and Shop, not a fancy fishmonger, but I was on Cape Cod after all. I wonder if it was extra good because it was local, and if this whole recipe would be horrible if I didn't have such good seafood. I actually don't know. And all this seafood cost $40, which seems like a lot, but it made an enormous amount of soup.

The seafood is simply placed on top. After it starts to steam and break up it can be stirred. Eventually, after another 15 minutes or so, it all breaks up and basically disintegrates, along with about 50% of the potatoes. At this point I added about one and a half cups of half and half with the burner turned off. The result was a thick stew, more than a soup.

A few notes:
I used as much butter as I felt was necessary, which in reality is not much, but seems like a lot in a big hunk. After a lot of practice I can kind of eyeball how much is needed to add flavor without adding too many calories. As for the half and half, I did use a cup and a half, I think - I was just pouring until I liked the look of the consistency. I estimated that at 400 calories, but again that's over 10 or so servings. So all in all it was a low-fat, low-calorie, extremely healthy stew. Full of starch, yes, (corn, beans, potatoes) but very low in calories, low fat, and full of healthy seafood. Traditional chowders start with a roux and have tons of butter or pork fat and some flour. When I tasted it after it was done I thought it was not rich enough, but as it turns out, you could eat a whole bowl, or even two, without feeling overly full. I also didn't find any recipes that called for both fish and clams, but I decided to try it and it was delicious.

I added salt and pepper as I cooked, but not enough and people added more. I don't see this as a problem but done on purpose to allow everyone to adjust the soup to their own tastes. I also used veggies I had in the fridge but frozen would work fine. I meant to add carrots and forgot - that would have been pretty as I had yellow, green and pink flecks already.

Perhaps the best part about this dish was the clean-up. It was a one pot dish, and I even put the whole pot back in the fridge after we ate it - it was still so full! The stove didn't get splattered during the sauteing as the veggies were cooked in the high-walled pot.

I was happy because I took a traditionally dense and fattening food and made it healthy while still retaining a lot of flavor. I don't always succeed at that. I often make things too healthy and not rich enough, or I throw caution to the wind and make things unnecessarily caloric and greasy. So when I get it right I'm quite pleased with myself-and so were all my guests for 3 days!

Summer posting

2010-08-23T15:09:00.000-04:00

Obviously I haven't been posting much lately. This is due to two main reasons: 1. I had a very hectic summer. 2. All things diet and exercise were just not on my mind that much. Number 2 is good, as it is evidence that I'm able to maintain my weight and healthy life-style without being obsessed, but also reflects that I was extremely pre-occupied with other angst - child care inadequacies, sibling rivalry, long-term planning (or lack thereof) and the time-consuming reality of a adopting a puppy. I certainly had time over my two week vacation, but was feeling decidedly not like posting. I just wanted to veg out and walk on the flats - which I did, every day. As a note - my kids were arguing over who got to hold the dog leash when this lovely picture was taken.

I will post again, hopefully soon. I would like to share my seafood chowder recipe. It was quick, easy, healthy, and delicious. I served it to three different groups of guests! I'll try to make that top priority, as soon as I get back on track in other areas.

Crunchy salad

2010-08-04T14:44:00.001-04:00

I found this product at Trader Joe's. It's called "Healthy 8 Crunchy Salad" It includes carrots, broccoli, jicama, green peppers, cabbage, radish and some other stuff. It is very crunchy. It is pretty good with just olive oil, lemon and salt, but super crunchy. Not so great for TMJ sufferers. But I decided to make a meal with quinoa and chicken.

Pictured left is the plain salad. I think it's less than $3.

Pictured here is my dinner. Blogger is rotating my photos but for food it doesn't matter much. At any rate, I cooked quinoa, didn't wait long enough for it to cool, mixed it in with the salad and as little olive oil as I thought necessary, as well as some rice wine vinegar. I also added a good amount of salt. You could certainly add any number of other spices or use different oils or vinegars. I like the mild flavor of rice wine vinegar. After this photo was taken I added some beans. Edamame are good, or black beans. Beluga lentils (available pre-cooked at TJ's) are also a nice companion to quinoa.

The hot quinoa softened the veggies a bit, which I kind of enjoyed, especially with my TMJ issues, but it does make the jicama not quite as crisp.

I pan cooked chicken breasts with a heavy top on a non-stick skillet. I then deglazed the pan with a bit of butter, balsamic glaze, mustard and a little water. Very tasty. Somehow, I find these very healthy salads to be not so filling. I guess my portion size is just unrealistic. I had to go eat more later in the evening.

But that was a pretty fancy looking and tasting dinner that took just about 15 minutes to make.

Worth a listen

2010-08-03T21:24:00.000-04:00

I really generally don't like diets that advocate a specific nutrient, but I would like to read this book, or at least browse through it. The other day I heard a nutrition episode on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU and I couldn't turn it off. I brought it into my headphones on my iPhone in the supermarket. A lot of what was said wasn't exactly news to people who have read the Omnivore's Dilemma, What to Eat, etc. but those books were written and researched a few years ago now so it was interesting to hear the new studies, especially from an NIH researcher. There was a lot discussed about Omega 3s and depression. I found one study particularly interesting where they went to an army base and used all the same recipes that the base normally uses but switched out higher Omega 3 / lower Omega 6 ingredients like grass-fed cow milk and beef and olive oil instead of corn oil and violence was reduced on the base. Now as I have often said, working at NIH has made me wary of all studies. There's always a new one around the corner, but it was certainly worth a listen and some of the articles may be worth looking-up.

Here were the guests:

Joseph Hibbeln

Acting chief, Section on Nutritional Neurosciences, NIH; Captain, U.S. Public Health Service

J. Thomas Brenna

Professor of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University

Evelyn Tribole

Registered Dietitian; Nutritional Counselor; Author, "The Ultimate Omega-3 Diet" (McGraw-Hill)

At any rate, while I don't like the idea that one nutrient is the key to life, as this hypothesis seems to suggest, but I do like reading about those theories, even if I don't totally trust them.

Non-recipes

2010-07-17T07:24:00.000-04:00

Generally, I find salad recipes to be non-recipes. Rather they are instructions to throw a bunch of obvious vegetables together with some garlic, olive oil and something acidic. These recipes annoy me. I often find Martha Rose Shulman's recipes to fall into that category. However, even boring recipes can make a person think, and she has some good points as well in the following article on summer salads. She certainly had some ideas I wouldn't have thought of myself.

Anyone can cook these things. They are not cooking so much as assembly. And of course I love the fact that she promotes my long-touted idea of cooking a big batch of starter ingredients (quinoa, brown rice, wheat berries, beans, sauteed veggies, roasted peppers if you're feeling adventuresome) on Sunday and either refrigerating or freezing them (don't freeze the veggies). Then defrosting and assembly is a snap.

I think some key points to keep in mind.

In the summer, for the refreshing aspect, add a lot of crunchy veggies. She dictates the ones to use but any crunchy veggies that hold up well in a vinaigrette. Any root vegetable is crunchy. I don't have radishes in my repertoire but maybe I should.
Fresh herbs help brighten any salad.
Never underestimate the power of lime juice!
A little juicy sweet corn goes a long way. I know it's starchy but it's not like eating a Big Mac!
Experiment with low-fat creamy dressing ingredients such as Greek yogurt and buttermilk.
A salad dressing is basically 2 parts oil and 1 part acid, with a little water thrown in.
Rice vinegar is NOT just for Asian foods. It has a mild tangy flavor that goes really well with a light oil like grapeseed.
Have fun buying lots of oils and vinegars.
I often skip the called for goat cheese or feta. I only add it if I think it's really necessary to the taste.
It's ok to estimate on the calories on these big amalgamations. This used to make me crazy. You can either let it go, or try and make the salad 50% grain, 50% veggies and then take 1 cup of salad or so. Or you can measure the ingredients for the whole dish and divide by number of servings. I'm too lazy for that.
I usually up the veggie content and reduce the grain content to change the ratio.
Sometimes making a big batch of the salad with the dressing can get a little soggy, or just too repetitive. So mix a smaller batch but keep the dressing and other components separate but ready to go.
Almost any ingredient can be substituted for a like ingredient.
Always have frozen bags of edamame, peas, chopped spinach and corn in the house. Of course at this time of year there are great fresh veggies, but having a stocked freezer helps enormously with dinner emergencies.
These kinds of salads are always a hit at potlucks - and inexpensive to make.
Have fun experimenting!

Huevo Rancheros: Two minute, 5 point breakfast

2010-07-15T16:47:00.000-04:00

I've been eating this simplified version of huevos rancheros a lot lately. Totally delish. No photo sorry to say.

Fry two eggs (and extra egg white if you like). Use Pam and don't turn up the heat too high.
Warm some whole wheat naan in the microwave, or toast an absorbent piece of bread if you remember.
Learn how to flip eggs. When kind of cooked on one side, lift pan off heat and quickly jerk towards you. Don't worry, the worst that happens is you clean a little egg off the floor. It's a great skill to have under your belt.
Serve eggs on plate, put two or more tablespoons of salsa on top, maybe some black beans if you have them.
Mop up egg yolk/salsa combo with bread. I think the key here is a pretty good salsa. I tried a new green tomatillo one from Trader Joe's which is pretty good.

Butter and cheese are not necessary on this breakfast as the flavors are already rich and satisfying. I save the calories for something else like a mid-morning snack or an afternoon snack.

Boot Camp!

2010-07-07T17:35:00.000-04:00

I'm loving Jay Johnson's Boot Camp. I guess he's all the rage in Dallas and on CMT. He's a former Army drill sergeant and now runs this boot camp fitness program with his wife Lin. They have two reality shows, neither of which I've ever seen. At any rate, their workouts are hard, the demonstrators are in crazy good shape, and he talks a lot about fine-tuning your body because in the end it's the only thing that really matters. He's talking about improving fitness, not hotness. I like his message. A little over the top but I like that he's not talking about looking hot in a tank top. He does a lot of pyramids, where you do 20 reps then 19 reps then rest 10 seconds then 18 reps etc. What he calls cardio I almost skipped, as I have been running a lot lately but due to the 100 degree weather, I'm now inside so I decided to try it. It's really hard-core plyometrics, jump squats, etc, not some sissy jogging in place. He has the demonstrators each do a variation, and work at their own pace sometimes, which can look quite chaotic. In the advanced mode he tells you to just do as many reps as you can in 30 seconds. This would be hard for Dave I'm sure - it's very self-challenged. He expects you to have a guide-book which explains all the exercises so he explains nothing - just launches into - do your tricycles!

I sort of made a mistake and bought one DVD, instead of the whole set - one is $15 and the set of 9 is only $50. It was $45 but I missed that price. I eventually ordered my set and now I'm going to sell a bunch of DVDs on Craig's List I think - kid DVDs as well as a few exercise DVDs I just don't like. Time to clean out the beginner stuff!

pizza tarts

2010-07-07T16:37:00.000-04:00

Here is some decidedly non-dietetic food I made last night. I made some of the pizzas without all the buffalo mozzarella, but it wasn't as good! I just tried to control my portion size, but only did ok at that. The mini tomatoes were grown by Dave! The big ones from the farmer's market. Alex refused to eat it for a while but then gave in. I think that this is a good example of something that is fine to eat once you've gotten your portion sizes under control or as a bit of a treat. I eat this about once a week. I know that 1/8 of the pizza is 120 cals or so, and I'm not sure about the cheese. From what I read one ounce is about 60-80 calories, and the balls were half a pound, perhaps cut into 8 slices, so each slice of pizza was probably 200 calories or so. I probably ate 2 slices worth. Not horrible for sure. I should have eaten a nice salad with this too...but I wasn't in them mood.

For those of you who say you "don't cook". this was barely cooking! I stretched out some dough I bought, sliced up some beautiful tomatoes and mozzarella and sprinkled some other Italian-sounding items on top. A drizzle of olive oil, salt, pepper and voila!! Anyone can do that. I did pre-bake the crust for 5 minutes - for watery toppings like tomatoes it works well.

Pizza 1: whole wheat crust, sliced buffalo mozzarella, Parmesan, pine nuts, prosciutto (right half has no mozzarella)

Very Italian Pizza

Close up of Pizza 1: Very Italian

Pizza 2: Margarita: whole wheat crust, sliced buffalo mozzarella, tomato, basil

Pizza 2: just tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella

Check out the nice close up by my new iphone G4.

What would Alex eat?

2010-07-06T22:26:00.000-04:00

Kids are funny. We all have our, "my kid loves xxxx" story.
Alex is an ok eater. For years he seemed to on subsist on bottles alone. Even now he would happily limit his diet to Cheerios (Trader O's to be precise) with milk and strawberries. On the side. I let him eat that pretty often as while I prefer he eat "grown up" meals, oats, milk and berries are a pretty healthy meal. He does eat lots of other stuff but he still loves most things dairy. And he reflexively doesn't like to try new things if I suggest them, which makes me insane. Lately though, he has gotten really into pea shoots. I buy them for myself, and didn't even imagine offering them to him but he was intrigued by their shape and asked to try them. So now, I make his favorite sandwich of cream cheese and American cheese (my idea for some dumb reason - I was trying to use something up) with some pea shoots on it too. He says they don't taste like anything they just make the sandwich crunchy. Fair enough. Really he prefers them plain and messy: trying to stuff the long unwieldy shoots into his little mouth. He loves making a mess with them as they bounce along the sides of his mouth and fall back onto the plate, table, his lap and sometimes the floor. Kind of like Cookie Monster. It kind of annoys me and then I think, "he's eating pea shoots!!!"

The other day he decided this weird experimental sauce I made with lentils, pepitas and olive oil was the best thing he ever tasted. I found it kind of flavorless actually. I tried to serve it a second time and he was bored by it. But I take his glimmer of open-mindedness, and, dare I say, curiosity about new foods as a good sign. He still can put up quite a fight, especially when he is out playing soccer until basically bed time and he comes in exhausted, cranky and too hungry to function. Um, that is pretty often since World Cup started...

If you are still struggling with a picky toddler...don't take it too seriously. You have so many meals ahead of you. It will get better - probably starting around age 4 and improving over time from there. It takes an enormous amount of work and often struggle. It's frustrating and infuriating. It takes a ridiculous number of years. But over the course of many years, kids can become healthy eaters. My kids are still junk food junkies, and they still argue for the sake of arguing sometimes. I wonder if I never pushed the veggies at all - would Alex have been curious about pea shoots anyway? Perhaps! I often think parenting techniques for young kids are just stalling tactics until the kid grows out of whatever egregious habit is making the parent crazy. But in this case, I kind of doubt it. I think all those carrots, and broccoli did make veggies seem normal. Either way, I'm glad he likes the little crunchy sticks!

Please make the cake go away! And the movie popcorn too!

2010-06-29T17:10:00.000-04:00

Me with two birthday cakes

I'm not sure the point of this posting. Hopefully it's funny. there is a good DVD recommendation at the end.

Recently I have been to multiple social events, all with really good desserts. I can't take it!

Let's just say I contained myself somewhat but did taste "slivers" of some good cakes over the past few days. Last year I probably wouldn't even have wanted a sliver. I'm annoyed that I am finding sweets so appealing again, as opposed to being kind of grossed out by how cloyingly sweet most of them are. This is mainly a function of being surrounded by really high-quality desserts, and partly as I've been eating more sweets in general and as we all know, sweets beget sweets.

The last item to put me over the edge was a chocolate cake from the Jessica Seinfeld - how to hide vegetables in your desserts cookbook. Natasha had an obsession with making it for Alex's 6th birthday party last Sunday, and after arguing with her for days about it not being time yet, I finally made it with her on Saturday. The entire escapade was kind of embarrassing. I'm such a bad baker, even with the fancy Kitchen Aid mixer my mom insisted on buying for me when I got married. I had some purchased, already cooked beets, and sent Dave out for the rest of the ingredients. I even instructed him to buy "1 SMALL bag white flour"!!! Heresy!!!

I decided to double the recipe and experiment. Of course. So I made one cake by the book (minus a bit of sugar) and another where I removed the white flour and put in a mixture of whole wheat,
soy and quinoa flours.

I ran into a little trouble with the chocolate. I tried to melt it in the microwave, with Natasha's help, and ended up burning it and making it chunky. I got really frustrated and started getting mad at Natasha but even I couldn't find a reason why this was her fault. I mean she did pester me to make this cake for her brother when she knows I hate baking, but is that such a crime? So I decided to make the cake a chocolate chip cake. Easy enough solution. And it didn't taste that burnt. Then the brown sugar wouldn't dissolve and was in huge balls. So I just mushed it by hand over about 10 minutes against the side of the bowl with the back of a wooden spoon . At this point I came REALLY close to throwing the whole concoction into the sink but decided that instead of wasting the wet ingredients I would give it one more try, add in the flour and only risk throwing away the ingredients plus the evil white flour. Ok...after a lot of mixing, it turned out good enough for me to try baking it.

The cream cheese frosting was so ridiculously easy, there is no excuse not to make it. Cream cheese, confectioners sugar, unsweetened cocoa in a blender for a few seconds and voila! As a side note Natasha found it too rich, but whatever.

After the cake was done, I had Natasha decorate it with some Dots candy and a bunch of sports themed candles I had bought. It actually was adorable. Unfortunately it was small and more kids were coming than I expected so at the last minute (I mean literally at 9:40am, party at 10am.) I had my sister-in-law buy a cake at the Giant. They even wrote his name on it, which is more than I managed.

As a side note - the kids ate both cakes. There wasn't too much complaining about the lack of sweetness in the chocolate one. I only cut down the sugar a bit. But it wasn't nearly as sweet as the supermarket cake. I sampled both. You certainly couldn't taste the beets. And as a super side note, Alex loved the third quinoa flour experiment cake. That one had no frosting and I had put it out as a kind of breakfast tea cake before the party - with chocolate chips from the unmelted chocolate. He loved it! It had a little sugar and canola oil, plus the chips, and then beets and the whole flours.

During the party I just kept eating. I was trying to be cognizant of what I was eating and not go overboard, but I was starving. I ate several pieces of a super high-fat cheesy bread pudding that I had made, tons of fruit and some whole wheat bagel with chive cream cheese. (my local bagel bakery makes whole wheat everything bagels at my request). I just couldn't get full it seemed. I also ate tons of fruit and ice coffee. Then the cakes came out, and of course I was in charge of cutting and serving them, covering my hands in rich, creamy chocolaty frosting in the process. Impossible! I even at the candy Dots!

After the party and the clean-up it was so hot and Dave was so tired from running around with the kids for 3 hours (very good daddy and husband - I stayed inside by an AC vent, supposedly making more ice coffee for the poor parents who decided to stay) that he asked me to take the kids to Toy Story 3 while he watched World Cup in our basement.

At the theater I decided to buy popcorn for some reason and fell into the whole, the extra large tub is barely more expensive than the massively overpriced mini tub trap. I thought I could control myself and eat a normal amount and take the rest home and put it in the kids' lunch boxes for camp. After all, I've been successfully controlling myself for 18 months with nary a slip up! I should note that movie popcorn is a trigger food for me. I gave each kid a small paper cup and filled them with popcorn. Alex barely at half his tiny cup. Natasha ate about 3 tiny cups (mind you she had had 2 big pieces of birthday cake already). I stuffed my face with probably 30 handfuls of non-buttered but still massively greasy popcorn. I had absolutely no self-control and was eating it with the wild abandon of my old self. I didn't even get that "Oh lordy I ate too much popcorn" feeling. I just kept eating and wanting more. What the hell was going on??? Mercifully, when the tub was about 60% gone I knocked the remaining whole thing on the floor by accident. Thank GOD!!! Natasha asked to eat the popcorn on the top of the pile not touching the floor. We each had a piece from the still heaping pile and then I said no more.

I decided to call the popcorn dinner, even though it was 4pm, and it more or less was. I had a little more of Jessica's beet cake but just a bit. Then I went to bed, woke up in the morning nauseated and with a headache and got my period. Ah ha.

PMS is over but the cake is that it's still in my refrigerator and I had some for dessert last night and breakfast today. This is a problem! I mean, really it's fine, I am plenty thin and I'm having small amounts - and it's not such a horrible cake. But I haven't craved sweets so badly in a long time and it's now not just hormones. It's all the little slivers of this and tastes of that getting me back into craving sweets. I do have some self control in general, but my preference would be to not crave the things in the first place. Oh well. This is my second posting on this topic in a week...hopefully it's my last for a while!

To compensate for two days in a row of not exercising and three days in a row of eating chocolate cake, I am letting the couple on the right train me...No just kidding, I actually like this DVD. I like hard DVDs.

Two interesting Bitten entries

2010-06-23T14:10:00.000-04:00

Well the first one is about supper co-ops. An interesting concept but I am way too picky to participate. But basically you take turns making dinner for each other. I wanted to do a soup exchange in the winter - like a good old fashioned cookie exchange, except much more useful. But I didn't find many takers and I generally don't trust the cooking of others. I still may try that one winter.

Supper co-op article

The second one I'm just posting for the same reason people look up in the sky and daydream....just because it's lovely. Alas, this is not my life.

Travels in Italy

Avocado dressing

2010-06-23T14:01:00.000-04:00

This morning I was making my salad, and needed to immediately use 2 avocados or else throw them away.
I cut a whole one into my salad, which I know is a ridiculous amount of fat and calories, and then with the other one decided to make an avocado dressing. I opened the fridge, found a left-over container of buttermilk and blended it up. It needed something sweet and tangy. Vinegar. Duh. I was looking for balsamic, and put a little in but it kind of ruined the color. Before the vinegar it would have been a lovely bedroom color. Now I know this shouldn't matter, but it annoyed me a little. I also added some salt, but a bit too much by accident. I was going to add Greek yogurt as well, but it was already so creamy, it didn't seem necessary. While eating it at my desk, I did some internet searching and came up with a better recipe, I imagine, from Emeril. It uses lime juice so the color will stay nice at least. I would replace the sour cream with Greek yogurt....and I think it would need the slightest touch of something sweet, just to bring out the flavors. I might skip the raw pureed garlic as I am a bit sick of it (as is I'm sure everyone around me) after a homemade tzatziki expedition.

His recipe goes along with a lobster salad...I don't think something as flavorful as lobster needs such a robust dressing. I just put it on a salad with chicken and arugula.

I found a few other recipes. One from Paula Deen that called for a full cup of mayo. Her recipes are ridiculous. And one with lemon juice and olive oil instead of sour cream from Rachel Ray that annoyed me for some reason. I can't say why exactly, but she always annoys me. I think it's the club-sandwich as salad concept, complete with rotisserie chicken that I find so cutsey, even though in actuality it sounds yummy and I buy prepared chicken all the time. Who am I kidding??

Anyway, it is a lot of fat, but it's good fat and it's filling. And it's a good way to not throw away avocados. I didn't take a picture.

Weekend planning

2010-06-14T19:01:00.000-04:00

Some weekends I spend a fair amount of time cooking. During the weeks that follow I almost only use the microwave, clean-up is pretty quick, and if I'm not home the family manages to eat without any instruction from me. It is super easy and low stress. On the weekends that I don't do that I am increasingly finding that found I'm much less happy at the 5:30pm hour. Recent cooking expeditions to follow - these were not all done in one weekend but 2 non consecutive weekends, with more stressful non-cooking weekends in-between.

Weekend 1-about 3 weeks ago.
Saturday I roasted two heads of cauliflower and a bag of broccoli tips. Sunday I also actually planned out meals on a piece of paper before going to the grocery store. This is a step above normal for me, but I didn't want to be thinking at all. I ended up buying a lot of frozen fish and making my bill really enormous.

I decided on a night of mushroom pizza, which I make for Dave and myself on Natasha's night to choose (it's usually frozen white crust pizza unless she convinces us to go out for sushi or Peruvian chicken) and I purchased the stuff for the nights the kids get to choose (assuming they don't change their minds). I also made a big batch of sautéed greens. I did a lot of sautéeing because the veggies keep and reheat really well, and they tend to make a splattery mess, and take some time the night of. Not a huge deal, but I had no chopping, garlic pressing, pot monitoring or olive oil splatter clean-up to do for a few nights - and the house won't have that fried onion smell. And when making the mushroom pizza it really helps to have the mushroom mixture done in advance - that way it really is a 15 minute meal.

One night during the week I made the seafood stew. I was craving it and decided to make it even though it's kind of messy and takes a while for a weeknight. I cooked all the frozen fish into a fish stew. I looked up three recipes and decided the main ingredients for the broth were tomatoes, white wine, clam sauce or fish stock, some sautéed veggies, and something spicy. Then you basically dump in a lot of sea food and let it simmer. I also put in potatoes and a bag of frozen spinach. I put a bag of frozen chopped spinach in basically everything I cook that is a bit spicy and saucy. It turns off the kids but makes the dish much heftier and more nutritious, and they don't eat spicy food anyway.

Weekend 2 -
This past weekend I made a huge pot of bolognese sauce for Dave and Natasha. I don't really love it but they do. I got on a sauce-making kick because Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver are always telling me it's so easy and when I look at the labels of the store bought sauces they are filled with added sugar and oil. I barely add any oil except to saute veggies and no sugar is necessary, even with canned tomatoes. It is a bit of a mess, although not a huge one, and takes some time so I decided to make a big batch this week. Ingredients include sauteed onions, garlic, green pepper, ground beef, then simmered with pureed tomatoes, beef broth and at the end some red wine. It's pretty rich-tasting and frankly kind of wintery. But the hubby loves such Northern Italian dishes. And if I never said this explicitly we kind of come to an understanding about food. He really wants home cooked food all the time and I feel like I should provide it for him, as it's one of the only consistently nice, thoughtful things I do for him. But he has to be willing to eat home cooked left-overs with some regularity, which he is, and on the not-too-often occasions I make him eat some frozen TJs dinner he can't make a big deal about it. Sometimes mommy doesn't have her act together or needs a break. We have never actually discussed this in such detail but 11 years later that's about how it has worked out.

Natasha eats it like soup, probably because she wouldn't want to let me "win" by eating the whole wheat elbow macaroni I made for it, or maybe because she just likes soup. She told me it was too thick. Of course it's too thick it's not soup! But she ate it all up, chopped up green pepper, onion, etc. in there and all. Last time I made this both kids refused it so this time I chopped up the veggies much smaller and I think that actually made a difference. I should use ground turkey until I get my sustainably raised Polyface farm beef delivered, but used the factory meat instead. I really cannot bring myself to eat that any more (Mainly thanks to Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma) and don't love the idea of Natasha eating it. Supposedly this kind was not administered hormones or antibiotics but it was from Giant. I froze some of it for future dinner emergencies. The moral of this story is that it is just as easy to make a big batch of a many-ingredient sauce as it is to make a small batch and most sauces freeze beautifully.

At any rate, the elbow macaroni for some reason gave me a hankering for spicy peanut noodles, so I found a nice recipe on the Bittman app and made that as well. I threw in some black beans - Alex actually liked that. Since the kitchen was already a disaster and it was too hot for me to have any fun outside, I made the mushroom/onion/garlic topping for mushroom pizza (we eat that pretty often). I also made a big batches of plain quinoa, black beans and broccoli and have some leftover ginger/carrot salad dressing.

Finally I made some crunchy mustardy cole slaw. It came out of an attempt to make non-green lettuce salads. I bought a bag of shredded cabbage and thinly sliced a fennel bulb. I was going to make a non-creamy dressing - something asian, but after browsing lots of uninspiring recipes I somehow ended up making that buttermilk ranch dressing again, only I used less buttermilk powder (next time I'm using none) and I added mustard. I added it to the crunchy veggie mix and felt it needed some apple, in kind of a Waldorf salad kind of way. I skipped the walnuts. The result is very crunchy, sweet, salty, and satisfying and Dave calls it coleslaw, which, despite the addition of some more exciting ingredients, it basically is.

This week should be easy!

Hopefully I won't cook anything all week except the big bunch of bok choy I have sitting in my fridge.

Sorry I didn't post actual recipes or pictures. The red sauce looks like red sauce, the peanut noodles like peanut noodles and the cole slaw looks like cole slaw! If you want recipes just let me know.

The "love" part of my love-hate relationship with Mark Bittman

2010-06-09T08:12:00.001-04:00

I find that Mark Bittman can be that dorky kid from high school who is suddenly famous when older and is still trying to act cool. That makes me crazy. See "On the Road Again" series on PBS for this nerdy-ness in full swing. But I love his easy-going, nonchalant relationship with making ingredients into a dish. This article summarizes that ethos perfectly, and has a great message for anyone afraid to just look into the fridge and invent dinner. To do this you need good ingredients - and lots of them. But you also need a repertoire of past experiences that give you some innate confidence. These include eating, helping your mom/dad roast chicken, watching Jacques and Julia sear fish on PBS, eating brothy mussel dishes during study abroad in Spain, experimenting countless times and having things turn out ok (usually, although beware of rosemary's overpowering dominance), browsing countless cookbooks like they are People magazine. Any number of life experiences can lead to good ideas in the kitchen. Cooking shows teach a lot of techniques, experimenting and tasting leads to a better understanding flavor combinations, following great cooks offers some basic competence.

But Bittman summarizes this whole idea perfectly today. If you read his article before reading the rest of this post, my post will probably make more sense.

I basically cook that way, but with far lesser skill and experience of course, and I'm sure cheaper, less worthy ingredients. Below are a few of my recent experiences.

As noted previously, I am trying to make more of an effort in the arena of salad dressings and sauces. This weekend I went to town.

First of all, I tried Bittman's real ranch dressing recipe, from How to Cook Everything app. I made a few substitutions. For one thing, the recipe called for a cup of mayo. I can't stand low-fat mayo and I can't bring myself to use a cup of full-fat mayo in any recipe so I used half Hellman's regular and half non-fat Greek yogurt. The recipe turned out ok, but I found it far to sweet, probably from the powdered buttermilk it called for, so I squeezed in the juice of a lemon. Pretty good. Still a bit sweet. I liked the fresh herbs in there.

I used part of it as a marinade for grilled chicken thighs, which was fine, but kind of boring. Honestly, I just like salt and pepper on grilled things and that saves me a lot of time.

I used the rest as a dressing for a salad with said chicken on top. Pretty good, but better with Parmesan flakes added on top for more depth.

Also perusing the Epicure app I found a recipe for a Moroccan sauce, based on a search for the ingredient "preserved lemons" I had bought on a whim at the mammoth new Whole Foods in Friendship Heights. This was interesting sounding to me, and turned out great, I thought, even though I totally played around with it based on my lack of anchovies and parsley.
The basic idea was this....

6 tablespoons red wine vinegar

6 garlic cloves, minced

3 tablespoons minced fresh Italian parsley

2 tablespoons minced anchovies

2 tablespoons minced cornichons

2 tablespoons harissa paste

Peel from 1 preserved lemon, rinsed, minced (about 1/4 cup)

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 cups vegetable oil

1 cup olive oil

I started this - very excited as I had a tub of harissa paste from the farmer's market (which is an oily paste of hot peppers) as well as the preserved lemons, and some peeled garlic in desperate use of being used up. I had no parsley, nor did I have anchovies or cornichons. For a minute I forgot what cornichons were but rememberd they were pickled something so threw in some pickled peppers. I also added half a jar of artichoke hearts in water for some heft, and some pistachios, to make it more like a pesto. I did not add nearly that much oil. I used maybe 1/4 cup. I was looking for a dip, not a flavored oil, which is what the recipe called for - you can eve see that in the picture - that pic is from the web site. Mine looked like red pepper hummus, but a bit more greasy/watery and less-fiber dense, since it had no beans. I also did not bother to peel the preserved lemon but instead chopped it in half, pulled out a few seeds and threw the whole thing in. Thank goodness for my nanny's 60 year old blender.

Anyway, I think it's delicious. The parsley would have made it more green, the anchovies add a depth at best and a fishiness at worst, so I was fine without them. I wish I'd had more pistachios to make it more pesto-like but I only had a 1/4 cup or so. It's spicy. It would be a great marinade, salad dressing, or dip. I highly recommend the preserved lemons (supposedly they're easy to make) as they add that lemon flavor and brightness without ever tasting not so fresh.

A success, despite really messing with the ingredients list a fair bit. It is kind of reddish.

Finally, the tahini bean dip. I bought the tahini (sesame paste) and was craving that watery, white richness of a tahini sauce. I looked around at a bunch of recipes and found they mainly call for tahini, lemon juice, hot water and garlic. And of course tahini is usually drizzled on falafel, which is obviously made from beans. Well I had no falafel, but I did have a bowl of pinto beans I had pureed with some garlic and water that I wanted to use up so I decided to make more of a tahini-flavored bean dip instead of a sauce. So I used the basic tahini recipe, but added more of the preserved lemons instead of lemon juice, the parsley I bought intending to integrate into the above Moroccan dip after the fact, but didn't, the beans I wanted to use up, and some cilantro I put in by mistake thinking it was the parsley. It's delicious! I don't have a photo but it looks like herbed hummus. I took the bean dip and doused some plain (embarrassingly store bought, already cooked) chicken chunks into it as my little dinner. I was going to eat it with some flatbread I made out of pizza dough but I couldn't even wait for that to cook and the protein-rich and sesame oil-filled dip was so filling I didn't need it. Then when the flatbread finished but Dave's pizza was still cooking, and he was complaining of hunger pains, I gave him the flatbread with a bowl of the dip and proclaimed it his appetizer. Some sliced veggies, such as baby carrots, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers. Next time I'll make a proper meal out of it but the neighborhood picnic depleted my veggie drawer. I also thought about crumbling some feta on top, as I actually had that on hand, but it really didn't need it. An addendum...as a leftover, this doesn't taste good. I'm not sure why. I think it's just meant to be served immediately.

My point to all this is as follows. This is the only way I can really cook. I'm not organized enough to really plan and follow recipes, and additionally, I find messing around to be a relaxing creative outlet. I also love to indulge my cravings and if I waited to have every ingredient in a recipe before doing so, whatever I was craving would probably go bad in my refrigerator. Cooking this way I rarely throw food away. If you know a little bit about flavors and techniques, and if you keep your pantry and fridge well stocked, it's not so hard to improvise. Mark Bittman says so!

In this instance, I had a goal of making some dips and dressings. I had a secondary goal of trying out a new ingredient (preserved lemons) and a tertiary goal, which I always have, which is to use up what is in my fridge. Things turned out fine, through a combination of a little research and some ingredient-substituting intuition.

The worst that can happen is you throw a few dollars worth of ingredients away and buy a rotisserie chicken for dinner.

Summer socializing is hard!

2010-06-08T09:38:00.000-04:00

This little guy is the Weight Watchers 'hungry' gremlin,
but I think of him as a 'cravings' gremlin too.

All the summer socializing is really hard. There are temptations all over the place and of every variety. More temptations means it's harder to say no. And as soon as I start giving in to sweets, I crave them more and more. Three parties in three days left me eating Krispy Kremes, some homemade lemon pancake things, and lots of tortilla chips. I was hungry! I should eat a lot of yogurt first so I don't go to those things starving. A few of the sweets were really over the top sugary and unappealing to me but the Oreo cheesecake was calling my name. I only had a little. A little of this, a little of that.

Similarly, I used to have a "no free samples" rule for the supermarket when I was losing. I loosened that a bit for maintenance, but lately, I felt that uncomfortable mental pulling when I walked in to my local store, "What samples does the bakery have? I can have one. It's small and I will just have one." Now all those things are true, but I really don't like the monkey of "WHERE IS MY FREE SAMPLE???" calling to me as soon as I get in the store. I haven't felt that in a while and I'd like it to go away. It's just the letting-my-guard-down in general that leads to this sweet craving, especially when I'm actually hungry as well.

When I was losing I instilled a "Saturday Splurge" rule. Kind of self explanatory. For a while I had really managed the Saturday splurge quite well. It took a long time to get there but I was able to relax, enjoy what I wanted, not really overeat, but eat more food and calories than normal. I was getting so good at managing splurges that I really stopped doing the Saturday splurge thing at all. I was just modulating my intake during the week and adding in little mini-splurges as and without much struggle.

But the sea of end-of-the-school-year, start-of-the-summer social events is challenging me. So Saturday I had a real traditional splurge. I was hungry and ate whatever I wanted, including a Krispy Kreme donut and a Chipotle salad for lunch - in that order. That's fine, and since I lost so much weight when I was sick last month even gaining a couple pounds wouldn't matter. But I am feeling that "I want food all the time!!" gremlin creep into my head and I definitely don't want to return to that state of mind. I don't want to be engaged in a mental battle in my own head about every baked good I see. I do not want a cookie to have power over me!!! And more importantly, it's just a losing battle. The food will always win. So I need to cut back on the sweets and indulgences in general. In the long run it's just easier.

I know many of my friends also continue to struggle with handling splurges and socializing (two separate but connected issues as it makes sense to save splurges for social events). Suffice it to say we're all in good company.

All my favorites....made easy.

2010-06-05T08:41:00.001-04:00

Lately there has been a rush of people asking for my advice - what do I cook, which DVDs do I do, where do I shop. I love it! I have tried to summarize the products I use here. All can be purchased on Amazon but almost all the items are available at either a library or Netflix. For the sake of full disclosure Amazon will send me a few cents if you purchase them through my blog, but I just put the list in place because it seems convenient for shoppers. Personally, I bought most of the DVDs but got most of the books from the library. In all categories - workout DVDs, cookbooks, apps, nutrition and food system books - there is just so much out there. It's impossible to review it all and I don't pretend to even try. There are plenty of web sites devoted to reviews, and I also like the Amazon.com reviews on the product pages.

Rather than being a comprehensive review of dieting products, this list just represents some of the items I found helpful. I also did a bunch of things not listed - a million web searches for recipe ideas and nutritional info, pestered my PhD epi colleagues about nutritional epi studies, browsed tons of other books in the library or book store, downloaded free exercise videos on on-demand exercise-tv, exercised outside, in the stairwell....there is no magic bullet except to decide you will workout, you will cook and eat well and you will count your points or calories. That decision is 80% of the battle. Logistics are the other 20% and the list below may help.

Workout DVDs

My all time favorite - and my friends pretty much agree. Most effective way to spend 20 minutes, hands down (up to 60 minutes if you want). I still enjoy listening to Jackie tell me what to do, how to correct my form, why each exercise is important and joke with her trainers.

I have recommended this to umpteen people and we all love it. I have been doing it for a year progressing from 3 lb weights to 10lb weights. I can just now do the core routine. Lots of modifications for advanced and beginners. Jackie is big on not doing a lot of cardio as a weight loss tool. To lose weight you need to build the big muscle groups and up your metabolism - this DVD will do that for sure.

Not bad...I prefer the first one because it has cardio and weights mixed together, but others find it fast-paced and efficient. Hot trainers and calm demeanor. Less chit-chat and more formal. Stomach section is kind of repetitive and boring. I find this DVD goes slowly but my friend Indya thinks it goes really fast. Go figure.

Really hard in a good way. Jillian is not as bombastic as she is in some others but of course has her moments. Professional trainers, lots of motivational speaking, all over body work out.

I love Bob. I really find him positive and demanding at the same time. I don't love working out with the tubby Biggest Loser contestants, but this is a great workout. The pattern is harder to discern than the other DVDs, thus making it seem long - I can't figure out what's coming next... but maybe I'm just being thick.

I don't love this one, but I only tried level 3 one time and never tried levels 1 and 2 - I gave it away to a friend. I do like the idea of her 3-2-1 combo of weights, cardio, core, but I find her personality grating. However, I know several people who really like this one so I'm listing it anyway.

I love this one, for winter especially. It's pure cardio/plyometrics. Lots of jumping, squats, etc. Very hard. No weights. All you need is a few square feet of space and a TV for a great workout. Typical Jillian personality issues.

When I first got this I was totally addicted. It's very fast-paced, every exercise is 30 seconds long so you can't get bored. There is a pattern to discern but it's not repetitive. It's also really hard, especially if you do all three segments. Now I still like it, but it's definitely more about burning calories and less about building muscle, than say a Jackie DVD - but it's still good. Same old problems of unappealing Biggest Loser contestants and Jillian screaming, but this time she's so over the top she's almost a little tongue in cheek about her meanness.

Best integrated yoga DVD I've done, but of course I still don't love it. But she takes yoga poses and adds some movement into it, thus making it faster-paced. Yoga-lovers might enjoy, or might find her grating personality incompatible with the practice altogether.

Books
I did a lot of reading on the topic of health, weight loss, nutrition. It helps to make the sacrifices go down more smoothly when the greater health benefits are understood. The quest becomes less about vanity and more about leading a long healthy life. Your kids need a healthy mother! I tried to put the books in the order in which I recommend reading them, but of course it doesn't really matter.

A bible of sorts. Very helpful reference about just what the title says - what to eat. Are organics worth it? Is fish safe? When every other study refutes the one before it helps to have a sensible expert distill the blather. Her main thesis is that there is no natural food group that is particularly evil or especially essential. You can find any nutrient in more than one food. It's an extra helpful book for moms trying to feed families as kids are so susceptible to toxins. I wish I had read this first but didn't learn about it until a few months ago.

A long read. Parts are boring, but it will get you thinking for a long time and will probably change some habits. Kind of a necessity for anyone really wanting to learn about our current food system. All of Pollan's books have been endlessly reviewed so I will not add to the fray, but I would put this in the must-read category.

I read this years ago and have eaten few hamburgers since. It's a pretty tough read, but an important one. This book was quite influential when it came out and covers a slew of interesting topics. Highly recommended if you haven't read it already.

A short read, but certainly worth it. Important to read What to Eat first, as this book left me confused. Confused but thinking more analytically about what I put in my body. Still it's one of my favorites.

This book focuses on the neuroscience of food addiction, and why we overeat in general. Sounds corny but you probably really are addicted to sugar salt and fat. It is possible to break the addiction. The end of the book suggests how (create rules, want something else more, follow a program, keep track of what you are eating, replace food with exercise). This book was so interesting to me because it came out just as I was finishing losing, and I read it and realized I followed the directions of the book to a tee - even though it hadn't been published when I was doing it!

This book explains epidemiological trends around the world towards obesity. The author teases out causes. He looks at where the extra calories eaten and not expended actually happen (soda, snacking, portion size of pizza). He looks at this country, Mexico, India and China mainly. It's really interesting and pretty sad. It's hard to think about all those obese kids around the world-and the starving ones too.

This is a great book if read with a grain of salt. Not literally! I don't like the basic concept, that 14 foods will change your life, but it's more 14 food groups, and the nutritional information is interesting. I also find the portion size information in here helpful as well. He's kind of a traditionalist - not into red meat, animal fat in general, but there is lots of good information mixed in with a bit of overzealousness.

Kind of dumb....really bad recipes.....but has some useful exercise tips. Worth browsing in a book store more than an actual purchase. Jillian has some equally dumb but worth-flipping-through books.

Cookbooks

Used this at a friend's house and every recipe was delicious. After making a few recipes some ideas about getting lots of flavor from minimal calories starts to click in (fresh citrus, lots of spices). This is just one of a genre. There are a lot of fancy spa cookbooks.

This is a TV show. The recipes are available online at the Lifetime TV channel if you don't want to buy the book. I find the recipes a bit too complicated but there are some good, transferrable ideas about ingredient swapping.

I tend not to use cookbooks but rather to do web searches, or searches on foodtv .com. I look up a lot of recipes and cobble together how I want to make something. But if you do like cookbooks, there are SO many and some of them are even good. I am sure there are great cookbook review web sites out there. Read some reviews and treat yourself to some new ones.

Movies

Similar to Fast Food Nation in its impact. Well done and extremely effective. Much has been written about this as well. I'm sure you can find reviews with a quick Google search. Even though I wasn't a fast-food junkie, this book certainly had long-term impact on my thinking.

This movie is a short cut of Fast Food Nation and the Omnivore's Dilemma. Since I had read both books I found it kind of boring, but it gets the point across faster than reading two books!

iPhone apps/websites
With the exception of cookbooks, most apps have a corresponding website. You can create an account and sync up depending on if you're on the go or at a terminal.

"Cookbooks"
I put cookbooks in quotes as these apps are so much more than cookbooks. They integrate with web sites, auto-generate shopping lists, create favorites. They really are a huge step up from cookbooks or even cooking web sites as you have access to them in the grocery store. The advent of bar code scanners built into the 3Gs is just mindbending! I need to upgrade now!

How to Cook Everything
Best cookbook app I've tried. Integrates with a shopping list - has lots of variations, simple instructions.
If you like cookbook apps there are tons more out there, but I tend not to use them. But it is a nice idea to see an artichoke in the store and instead of wondering what to do with it - you just look it up, find a recipe you like and buy the ingredients right then.

Epicurious
This app is free and excellent. It's just every recipe you would ever need.

Counting/tracking apps
Counting your calories, writing down every thing you eat...admitting that you need to take this step is a huge impediment for many people, myself included, but there is ample evidence that not taking this step will result in meager results. Turning this treacherous, onerous task into a video game is the best thing to happen to dieting in a while!

FatSecret
Best of breed, I think. Calorie or POINT counter, bar code scanner for easy inputing, huge wiki-library...lots of nutritional info...endless features. I believe calorie tracking is essential for real weight loss and this is the easiest way to do it hands down. Integrates nicely with a web app, and syncs. The bar code scanner enters everything for you (supercool!) - just pick the portion size - but only works with 3GS.

Livestrong
Similar to above, but no POINTS, and as far as I know doesn't have a bar code scanner. Does have lots of great nutritional info though.

There are so many more...the Spark has some apps.

As for what to buy at the supermarket - that will need to be another post.

Youth

2010-05-16T14:42:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I was home with the kids on one of their many days off from school. I decided to take them to the mall to get some spring shopping done. We were about to go someplace warm for spring break and they needed some clothes that fit. I was feeling really run-down from a nasty, but certainly not out of the ordinary combination of viral and bacterial infections. I had my hair in a particularly severe and unflattering half-pulled up, kind of position. I was dragging myself through the mall, propped up on unhealthy doses of Advil, sporting an oversized black t-shirt and yoga pants.

Natasha, on the other hand, was at her youthful, uber-confident, excited best. I tried to recreate the image above, but she looked even sassier with the Gap sunglasses - the ones above are mine, and more sedated. She had picked out a sleeveless black dress with silver adornments, and was wearing it already while we were looking for bathing suits. I was ok with the black, but vetoed a leather jacket and she was of course angry with me about that. She found some sunglasses and put them on too. In the dressing room she looked at herself in the mirror, instinctively pulled the neckline into a stylish mock turtleneck. She conveyed an image of pure confidence and style. We all stared in the mirror. There we were, a contrast in everything. She looking beautiful, vibrant and diva-ish...much more mature than 7. Me looking old, haggard and a shambles. I did not look fat. But that was little consolation. Alex was just goofing around and admiring his cool sister.

I decided to get my act together: go to the doctor, get some antibiotics, insist upon some rest, and pull myself together by showering, styling my hair, and putting on half-decent clothes. And I vowed to treat myself to a pre-vacation pedicure.

I don't really have a larger point to this post. It was just one of those out of body moments where you realize life is imitating art. It really was a stereotypical movie-like moment. The contrast between young and old, the odd camera angle of the fitting-room mirror. The no-words-are-necessary turning-point image that speaks 1000 words. The image staring back at me in the mirror is seared into my brain. I was really pretty shocked with my appearance. And it didn't matter that I'm massively fit and at a great weight. A person still needs a comb and some make-up and to get out of the jog bra sometimes! I don't always look like that. Today I'm healthy, my hair is clean, I'm wearing a nice bright colors, my outfit is coordinated and even, shockingly for me, well accessorized.

And as for Natasha, I wonder how many more years of bathing suit shopping we have before she starts over-criticizing every part of her body. Currently she is only interested in the pattern and cut of the suit, the skimpier and flashier the better. I had to veto a black and pink leopard-print bikini at Lord and Taylor. When will she imagine fat thighs and a big booty? She may always be happy with her body, as she does a lot of exercise and her self-confidence is remarkable. But that would be the rare exception and I don't expect it. I don't think she'll hit the 9-yr-old self-confidence dip that is so well documented. But you never know. If she does, I will imagine that diva image of her in the Gap dressing room throughout her tween and teenage years and hope it returns when she hits the more reasonable age of post-adolescence. By then I'll be old and just wanting grand kids.

Some random helpful links....

2010-05-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

Just some stuff I've come across...

Back to the granola discussion...this recipe actually does not have much added sugar or fat - pretty ingenious making a banana into a binder for granola. Still has a fair amount of calories, but much better. And why not get your calories from a banana and walnuts, which have so many nutrients, as opposed to canola oil and sugar.

An article about meal planning and coupons
I found it interesting, even though it's obviously not for me. I'm way too lazy for all this planning.

Finally - for all the iPhone geeks - a timely roundup of recipe apps.

At goal weight...

2010-05-10T11:46:00.000-04:00

From March:

Most women have a variety of sizes in their closets. They have "fat" jeans and "skinny" jeans. I really don't have that any more. I waited as long as possible before buying winter clothes, to see if I could maintain the weight I'd reached in the summer. But it got cold quickly this year, in October, and I was freezing. So now I have two sizes of clothes, but only a few items in each. I have found it frustrating to try and remain exactly at the smaller size (size 4, 137 lbs). When I bought the bigger pants (6) I was going to have them tapered at the waist. Basically my thighs are a bigger size than my stomach. But I didn't out of fear, and thank goodness for that because now I need the room.

So I have decided to stop being so adamant about staying at one particular size. It's too difficult. I gained a few pounds (5), mainly due to my refusal to be hungry any more, and to a very sedentary winter. I still do my morning exercise, but after that it's butt to minivan, desk chair, a couple hours in kitchen, and then relaxing in bed. In the warmer, lighter months I'm likely to take a walk at work in the afternoon, take a walk in the evening after work, etc. I did start doing stairs again in the afternoons with some colleagues, so that should help, but winter is just a more sedentary time than fall, spring and summer.

I wrote the above post a couple months ago, but didn't post it as it seemed kind of bordering on obsessive to me. I think the reason it seemed slightly not-so-healthy mentally is that I wasn't really there yet and was typing the words to convince myself. Now rereading it, it doesn't seem so bad. I believe the difference is that a) I lost a couple pounds due to the increased spring activity I predicted and b) I've just come to terms more with the fact that I had reached a pretty unsustainable place. When I wrote the above I still felt a little like I should get back to a 4. I was irritated that I had wasted money on some size 4 clothes, especially since I had stayed there for a good 5 months or so. I didn't like the love handles Natasha so helpfully noticed had come back (I wasn't just imagining them). But a loose size 6 for someone who is almost 5' 8" is plenty thin. And truth be told my face and neck looked too chicken-like at a 4. And I can do a boat-load of military-style push-ups!

So now I feel I've really made it - not just physically, but mentally too. You know how reformed alcoholics or smokers or gamblers will say that they are still addicts, but just in remission, or whatever term they use? I don't feel like that. Getting there mentally wasn't too much of a challenge, luckily enough. I never had an eating disorder, and I wasn't an emotional eater. But now I really feel very comfortable around food. Parties and other social events don't stress me out. When I overeat I know I'll get back on track. I still loosely track but I don't get tense if I can't determine how many points my soup is. I don't have lots of pernicious cravings. I hate feeling overly full. I love working out (although not to the level of I-want-to-throw-up, like my husband). I'm not intimidated by physical challenges. I don't expect that I will put the weight back on. Maybe I really did turn into "one of those skinny girls who can eat whatever she wants".

I didn't really start out with a goal weight. I just kept at my regimen until I stopped losing and plateaued. Then I went back up a bit, after deciding I would no longer accept being hungry, and because it was winter. Now I have, and am at, a goal weight, of 140 lbs. I truly don't want to weigh less than this, and that is a good feeling.

The more I learn the more I follow Jackie

2010-05-04T16:58:00.000-04:00

I have a pretty good rotation of DVDs, as well as jogging, kickboxing, running up my hill, etc. Here is what I have come to believe. Let's assume you're eating an appropriate amount...say 1300-1600 calories a day depending on your goals and situation. To compliment that, in terms of exercise, I believe Jackie Warner is the best, in terms of getting a toned muscular body. Jillian/Bob/Biggest Loser in general are good at burning calories. I like to mix things up as much as possible. But I do make sure to do the intense but short JW upper and core to make sure to keep those muscles very defined. I think it's her "the right function, with perfect form, working to almost complete fatigue" motto that works so well. Even almost a year later, I kind of like listening to her narrate when doing the DVDs.

Lately I'm even more of a Jackie cult member. Last week I saw Jackie on the Joy Behar Show (a very embarrassing sentence for so many reasons) and she and some other doctors were discussing Jillian's comment about never wanting to put her body through pregnancy. Jackie said this. "It's simple, if you exercise before you get pregnant, eat properly and exercise while you are pregnant and exercise after you have the baby you will take the weight off" Now she didn't say your boobs won't sink and sag and your skin won't be stretched out, but she had a good point. One I REALLY wish I had followed!!! But I am where I am, saggy boobs and all-Bra-llelujah by Spanx helps a lot!

She also admitted that after a certain age, really lean people do tend to wrinkle more in the face and she even noted that her grandmother told her that at a certain point you need to choose between your face and your body. Joy quipped that we have Botox for that, implying it's better to stay thin.

OK so this whole post is a little Hollywood but it was timely because I had been assessing the differences between the various workout approaches, and all in all, I do think Jackie is the fastest way to the best results.

Before and after part 2

2010-04-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

I was looking for this picture when I did the initial before and after pages. For years, I kept this picture on the side of my car door, hoping it would one day be my before photo. I wanted to cry every time I saw it. I was so unhappy with my body there. I weighed more than my husband. I was kind of annoyed at the person who took it. Why was she doing that to me? I knew it would be bad. I picked up Alex to try and cover myself up. I should have just let him stand in front of me.

At any rate, I found it recently when looking for another photo. I thought I had finally torn it up in frustration and despair one time - I kind of even remember the conversation I had in my head..."This will NEVER be my before picture so why not accept that fact and stop torturing myself?" But obviously I hadn't. Or maybe I had multiple copies.

Well the contrast speaks for itself. The first picture got a little stretched in a file conversion, but it's pretty accurate. I have to include the after bikini shots again so as not to gross myself out. I look almost identical to the pics from last summer now but of course, another year older...and maybe 2-3 lbs heavier but I'm not sure.

Salads...

2010-04-27T16:07:00.001-04:00

I usually find recipes for salads to be kind of silly. In general, I am satisfied with the combinations I think of on my own, and moreover, I believe salads should be based on the conditions of the day. Meaning, a salad should be a some combination of expressing a craving for a specific ingredient as well as reflecting what is in the kitchen and needs using. But I can get into ruts and additionally, often enough a recipe comes along that I would never have thought of myself. Or they can re-inspire me to pursue an odd-ball ingredient. One example is above. I will try this shortly, as I think it looks lovely. It is from Not Eating Out in NY, which has a lot of very delicious, but far too complicated-sounding recipes. The woman who writes it cooks/blogs for a living and has no kids, so she has all day and night to peel turnips into perfectly symmetrical ribbons. One place where I could really benefit from some good recipes is with the dressings. I'm very uncreative and lazy about dressing. It's practically a New Year's resolution of mine to improve every year, and I generally fail. But often the dressing is really the flavor you take away so it's really the most important part. And salad dressings, like baking, really do benefit from some exact proportions. I should work on my dressing-making proclivities.

As for my daily lunch salads I just try and have a whole host of add-ins available in my pantry and refrigerator. It always surprises me when people comment that my salads look good, even though it happens all the time, and has been happening since the high school cafeteria salad bar days. Isn't making a salad just putting things in a bowl? If I do have a knack for making extra-yummy salad combinations it may be due to my overzealous food-shopping habits, along with my tendency towards bulk weekend cooking. When I go to one of those fancy salad-bar restaurants I often note to myself that I have almost all the ingredients from their 20-foot prep table in my own tiny kitchen. But good salads also come from balancing sweet with salty and sour, and mushy with crunchy.

So the following could be either blazingly, irritatingly obvious or somewhat helpful...here goes....

Lettuce:

I buy all kinds, and this week splurged on a $6 bag of mixed greens at the Bethesda farmer's market, feeling kind of silly. However, upon eating them this morning, I found them to be so tasty and fabulous that I'll go back each week. I didn't even want to cover them in dressing and I was eating various pieces with my fingers so as to better enjoy each individual flavor.

In the winter a shredded cabbage is nice and hearty. The low-water content makes it pretty filling. Sounds rabbit-like, I know but I've come to like it with a strong citrus-y or Asian dressing. I have also been enjoying pea shoots and other funny overpriced micro-greens. If I buy romaine lettuce I usually chop up 3 days worth on Sunday or Monday. I need to start trying more things like shaved fennel and other overlooked root vegetables. Somehow pulling out a mandolin seems overly labor-intensive for a weekday morning (do I even have one?), but it can happen sometimes...

Protein:
I always have some cooked chicken, pork, hard boiled eggs or fish, as well as tofu, lentils or beans. I also have cooked frozen shrimp in the freezer that just thaw during the morning if I put them in. I often use more than one protein.

Grain:
I also usually have something like quinoa, wheat berries, couscous, or brown rice cooked and in my fridge. If not or if I want something separate, I'll add a nice hearty whole wheat bread on the side, with a slice of cheese or peanut butter.

Veggies:
Lately I have been not using many other veggies aside from the greens, except for a bell pepper. I've been turning my attention to some added fruit.

Fruit:
I love a little fruit in an otherwise savory salad. Orange wedges perk up salmon and hold their own to a mustard vinaigrette. Apples are a nice sweet and crunchy balance to plain chicken and a fruity vinaigrette. Pineapple and mango are fantastic as well, especially with a grainy salad. The other day I had a salad that was almost equal parts quinoa, arugula and mango. It was fantastic even though it had a bit of an identity crisis appearance to it...kind of not a grain salad, and not a green salad. I don't usually put dried fruit in my salads as I find they are added calories that I don't taste that much. The juiciness of actual fruit seems much more special in my sad little office.

Nuts/seeds:
I have a huge selection of seeds and nuts on hand at any time: pistachios, walnuts, almonds, cashews, peanuts, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, soy nuts. I usually prefer to keep the nuts separate - so better to really taste and crunch them, but seeds in the salad for an extra crunch. Perhaps it's just mental game-playing, but a handful of walnuts on a salad seems like a salad, whereas a salad with a handful of robust walnuts on the side seems like two separate dishes, and hence a bigger lunch.

Cheese:
Generally I don't put cheese in my salads. Perhaps a bit of blue or feta but not usually. I like to savor the cheese on its own or with some bread.

Dressings:
Again - I'm admittedly bad at making dressings. I do however, have a plethora of flavored vinegars and various oils at my disposal that I sprinkle (ok, pour) on top. I try to match the flavors to the ingredients in the salads. I have pomegranate glaze, balsamic glaze, rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar, orange champagne vinegar, olive oil, grapeseed oil, sesame oil, truffle oil, peanut oil, etc. I try and make creamy dressings with real mayo and non-fat Greek yogurt sometimes. I love homemade blue cheese dressing when I get around to making it. It's kind of labor intensive to mush up all that blue cheese but well worth it (mush equal parts blue cheese, yogurt and mayo together, thin with milk as needed). The other dressing I make sort of regularly is a kind of Thai peanut/lime/soy staple (peanut butter, soy, brown sugar, lime, rice vinegar, ginger-check online for ratios).

_______________________
For an upcoming party I'm making a bean salad I made up. Dead simple. (That's my Jamie Oliver impersonation)
Equal parts black beans, edamame and red kidney beans. Dressing is grapeseed oil, orange champagne vinegar (from TJs - other light vinegar would do) and some cumin and lime. Delish, beautiful, cheap and a real crowd-pleaser.

Mark Bittman app

2010-04-27T13:27:00.001-04:00

For those of you who have iPhones...

Mark Bittman has released an app of his "How to Cook Everything" cookbook I have been enjoying - even Dave says he will use it! Even as a recipe non-user, I do refer to recipes and cook books to figure out how to put things together. This app is great to have in a supermarket - suppose you decide to try cooking fennel...just type it in and get a bunch of recipes, and save yourself a second trip to the store...or if you're at home and decide you want to pick a few recipes for the week, you can easily drag the recipes into the "grocery" list and refer to that at the store. It may add silly things like salt, but it's of course easier to ignore extra ingredients than forget the vital ones. I also like that he has a range of types of cuisine in his cookbook, with plenty of Asian choices. There are all sorts of other useful components too, such as a "basics" section, including 16 simple tofu sauces, and some dishes he considers standards. Certainly $1.99 well spent!

State of confusion

2010-04-13T11:06:00.000-04:00

I haven't been posting much lately, mainly due to feeling like I don't have a lot to say. But Natasha's soccer season started again and the snack situation brought a lot of incidents of confusion about what constitutes a healthy snack to a head. A good bit of this confusion is caused by misleading food labeling.

Much as been written and lamented about the pathetic current state of American food labeling. The First Lady is trying to get front-of-the-box labeling, and less confusing labeling in general. There is a lot about it on Marion Nestle's foodpolitics blog, as well as the First Lady's Let's Move site.

I believe food labeling confusion takes two main forms.
1. confusion caused by deliberate obfuscation of facts on part of food manufacturers on actual food labels.
2. erroneous pre-conceived notions of what are "health" foods that block our ability to discern obviously unhealthy foods. (I believe #2 is caused by previous cases of #1 as well as public health initiatives gone awry, e.g. 'Snackwells')

Let's start with #1. The food industry does everything it can to hide the amount of sugar in products, and to promote the healthy aspects of the things it is selling. So they will use multiple sugar products so that "sugar" is not the first ingredient listed, but rather spread out throughout the ingredient list. They will say, "made with whole grains" on the front, when the product is made with mainly processed grains but a small amount of whole grains. They will say, "low-fat foods lead to a healthy heart" or something like that, even though the food is stuffed with tons of insulin-havoc-wreaking sugar. I could go on, but other people have literally written whole books about this.

There is also no standardization in how things are described. So for example, the only wheat flour you want in your food is "whole wheat flour" listed with exactly those three words.

Any of the following are processed white flour.
-enriched flour
-enriched wheat flour
-unbromated unbleached enriched wheat flour (I didn't even know what "bromated" means but now I do)
-unbromated unbleached wheat flour
etc.

The word "whole" MUST appear before the word "wheat" or else it's junk. The word "wheat" on its own does not mean "whole wheat" but rather the wheat plant - which just means white flour. Please remember this...and ignore any other words you see. It makes label-reading much easier.

The fact that this is so confusing is criminal in my opinion.

OK - on to sugar. There are tons of otherwise "healthy" foods that are so stuffed with added sugars that they can't possibly be considered good for you. The main offenders in this arena are yogurts, breakfast cereals and granola/granola bars. The problem here is that as a culture we have internalized certain foods as "healthy" including yogurt and granola. I like to look at things this way.

flavored yogurt=low-fat ice cream
granola/granola bars=candy bars with some nutrition
energy bars=candy bars with some protein
sweetened cereal=low-fat cookies
fruit juice=soda with some vitamin C

I'm not saying I never eat those foods - just that when eating them I consider them as treats. I changed my thinking to reflect the equations above and now I view them differently. I forget sometimes how entrenched those foods are in our heads as "health foods" but I've had several conversations with health-conscious people lately that made me remember.

A couple weeks ago I was thinking of making my own granola. I looked up some recipes.Basically, granola is a way of taking high-calorie but nutritionally valuable foods and coating them in added oil and sugar. This results in overeating foods that should be eaten in moderation and then adding in tons of oil and sugar to boot, and resulting in a tub of impossible to resist, massively caloric food.

Here are the two I came close to making, but couldn't bring myself to have around the house.

Alton Brown granola recipe

Ina Garten granola recipe (reviewer comments suggest reducing oil)

I do eat granola sometimes, especially on top of plain shredded mini-wheats and unsweetened cheerios, or as a dessert...it's a treat, not a health food. But I find it really hard to stick to a small serving - I just want to find one more almond or whatever - the variety makes it all the more hard to eat in moderation (ala Kessler's directive to not have too many choices)

So back to soccer. First soccer game, first snack was yesterday. The parent brought 4 things all from Trader Joe's: apple juice boxes, fruit roll-ups, brown rice crispy treats and fruit-filled granola bars. All were healthier than their uber-processed relatives, but stuffed with tons of sugar. I believe the mom felt she had made healthy decisions, and in some ways she had, but the total sugar content was through the roof-and the game was over at 11:30am so the girls were starving. (ps Here is where I would really love to see the difference between natural sugars and added sugars but manufacturers don't do that yet.)

Some facts:
(calories, sugar grams, fiber grams)

Brown rice crispy bars (130c, 11s, 0f)
100% fruit snack (50c,11s,1.5f)
box apple juice (110c, 18s, 0f)-guessing on this one based on bigger serving size
This apple walks into a bar (140c, 17s, 1f)

I'm least concerned about the 100% fruit snack as the TJs version is actually mostly real fruit - lots of natural sugars but also some fiber, generally small, only 50 calories, and I don't think many added sugars. The apple juice is by far the worst with tons of sugar and no actual food. The oat-apple bar is lots of calories disguised in something with oats, which is really nothing more than a candy bar.

My point is that these foods which have the moniker of being healthy are actually so filled with sugars as to make them one step above a Snickers bar. And I believe the mom thought she was making healthy decisions. They are in fact all products I myself used to buy, and now sometimes still do, but as treats. It took me a while to internalize that Trader Joe's fruit and oat bars are actually sugar-filled candy bars. I don't buy them any more.

The video I posted previous to this post explains the biochemistry of how we deal with sugar in our bodies - but put simply too much sugar leads to weight gain, which leads to any number of health problems. Sugar, whether it be maple syrup, apple juice, brown rice syrup, glucose, honey, high-fructose corn syrup, organic apple juice - it all needs to be consumed in moderation. The one place where I still overindulge, is with fructose in the form of fresh fruit - fruit has so much water and fiber that it's hard to really overeat it.

Anyway, Natasha was so hungry that she ate a rice crispy bar, an apple juice, a fruit roll-up and then a little while later she ate two (12 pieces) salmon makis (I know, the mercury) and then grabbed my two salmon sushi off my plate and ate those too. I don't think it's a big deal that she ate all that sugar after soccer (I should probably be more concerned about the mercury, but we don't have sushi very often). She ate a lot of other food too, and did run around a lot. I am more frustrated that it's so hard to find snacks for kids, even from relatively healthy stores, and even by well-meaning parents, that aren't filled with dozens of grams of sugars. This mom was trying to be healthy and still brought a truckload of sugar.

It shouldn't be so hard...

Interesting lecture

2010-03-29T12:52:00.000-04:00

If you have a couple hours....this is an interesting lecture about sugar and obesity. I have only listened to part of it so far. If you don't want to listen to 2 hours of this, you can take the shortened Jackie Warner motto of, "Sugar is the Devil!!!"

Sinuses!!!

2010-03-26T16:35:00.000-04:00

I'm better now, but a virus that turned into both a sinus infection and bronchitis put me way out of whack for over a week.

I didn't even remember that I had a blog, let alone post.

But now that it's over I am reminded of a few things....

Being sick makes it hard to focus on things like eating well and exercising. When I started my diet I stated that when my kids were younger and I was getting sick many times a winter I never got in the swing of exercising and being healthy. While that is in the end just another excuse, it was a pretty good one!

Now I try and always exercise, even a little bit, when sick, if for no other reason than to feel like I'm not just a feeling-sorry-for-myself lump for two weeks. The last few years I tend to hold on to my illnesses for a really long time and that can easily become two weeks of dragging myself through the day. My ENT encouraged exercise too, and I think it does help break up the stuffed up sinuses. It's almost impossible to exercise with bronchitis-type symptoms...it's hard enough to breathe without being winded.

It is so easy to find quite valid excuses as to why it's too hard to eat well and exercise, but usually, there is a way to push past the excuses and get it done. It means prioritizing those goals above a lot of other stuff, which can get almost ridiculous (obsessive? yes, maybe). But in the end it does feel good to be in shape.

I'm also having fun with the new Blogger templates!

New Jillian Yoga DVD review

2010-03-12T12:08:00.000-05:00

So I don't like yoga, but I was really tired and not in the mood to work out this morning. I got up late and didn't want the kids whining about waiting for me to finish. And I was just tired. I decided to do a short onDemand bit. But I found this new Jillian yoga DVD when clicking through my onDemand options this morning.

I am not sure if I did level 1 or 2, but I think it was 2. I just looked up the reviews on Amazon and tend to agree with much of what I read. Much softer side of Jillian. Even her hair is softer (see image below). I think she had some facial work done - she looks less horsey. But that aside, she was less bombastic and egotistical. Her side-kicks have beautiful lean yoga bodies-and Jillian doesn't condescend to them. And I really liked the swanky new studio!

I liked the quick flow and added reps she puts in there. I still don't think yoga is right for me overall, but this was a nice change. I find I can't do the really hard poses, and there is no cardio to get the heart rate up so what happens is it's not hard enough for me. If I could do those chatteranga push-ups it would be hard, but I end up falling and not exerting myself. I like fast reps of things and will push myself with lots of movements like squats with overhead presses, but somehow I can't force myself to hold static poses. Anyway, I tailored the workout to my own personality...so I added in jumping jacks to the slow parts of the sun salutations, I added 5 lb weights to some of the warrior poses, and I added in some plain old cardio moves during the cool down. Jumping jacks are not very yoga-like I know, but I enjoyed myself.

Back to counting

2010-03-11T12:51:00.000-05:00

I am returning to some more careful counting and measuring, as my pants are tight and uncomfortable. I don't think I look "fat" but I'm not enjoying feeling my pants pinch my waist at my desk. I tried simply adding in a bit of extra exercise, but alas, I have been sneaking in crackers while making dinner, lots of sweet handfuls of cereals and fruit roll-ups after dinner and nuts when I'm hungry. Those calories add up so quickly!!! And mindless snacking on carbs isn't the best habit anyway. I believe the difference between losing and maintenance is almost imperceptible. Sad. I'm also buying a few things one size up in case I find I just can't keep myself at the smaller size. I think it's just unrealistic to expect to stay within a 3 pound range. Most women have at least 2 sizes of pants in their closets. Three sizes is not necessary, but 2 probably is. I'm just doing this for two weeks until our vacation. I imagine vacation will be some extra eating and lots of extra hiking. Then after vacation I'll reassess. My spring capris are bigger than my winter jeans anyway, so that should work out fine.

I thought by this point I could follow my hunger cues a little better, and do less counting, etc. but that is turning out to be super tricky for me.

Morning shakes

2010-03-10T09:20:00.000-05:00

I used to make a power shake in the morning. It consisted of frozen berries, frozen bananas, yogurt, milk, protein powder and flax oil. I stopped making them as they left me hungry a little while later. Now I realize that between the natural and added sugars, those shakes are really high in sugar and don't provide enough heft to be filling. I also read somewhere that the act of chewing somehow stimulates satiety signals in the brain. Something to do with saliva I think. At any rate, I decided to try again today, a year later. My findings were kind of interesting. First of all Natasha begged me to make a chocolate one. I did, but was guessing at amounts and used way too much cocoa powder. Even she expressed surprise, teeth and lips covered in brown goop that something could be "too chocolaty". Then I tried my more traditional fruit shake. This time I found the shake way too sweet, based mainly on the sweetened vanilla protein powder. The milk, bananas and fruit make it plenty sweet enough for my new palate. I actually had to spill half of it out. I will have to try it again tomorrow without the heavily sweetened protein powder (the theory was that it would keep me fuller longer) and just add a hard boiled egg to the meal. I may reduce the banana ratio as well. I skipped the flax oil as I eat plenty of flax in other things.

But I was happy to see how my sugar tastes have changed.

Hesitant to post lately

2010-03-07T07:32:00.000-05:00

I had sort of a bad experience during the snowstorm. I ended up reading a bunch of posts from some 20-something women, mainly married, working, no kids. They kept talking about "balance" and posting pictures of complex meals like grilled cheese sandwiches with a slice of tomato. Now I get we were all stuck inside for a while, but I found their sites so off-putting. First of all, what on earth are you balancing?? You have no kids! I know they meant, balancing making healthy choices and being fit, with not being neurotic. But that struggle seems so self-indulgent to me, and even seemed so when I was that age. Of course I had bad habits then but that's not the point. I just found these blogs boring and self-indulgent and out of touch with people who actually might be trying to balance things. And I'm not talking about myself. Some people really have no money, no help, bad spouses, sick kids, etc.

The whole process of reading these blogs made me not want to post. But alas, I made such a yummy cioppino, with some help from Trader Joe's that I decided to share.

So here is my larger point, before sharing my experience. It's an extremely healthy, filling and forgiving recipe. You can make it in a big batch, tailor it to your likes, and it is one of those "better the next day" recipes. I just had it for lunch.

OK I'm a fish snob, having grown up around Cape Cod, and I hate frozen fish. But good fresh fish is just prohibitively expensive here. So I was craving cioppino once, and bought the frozen pre-made TJs package - really low standards for someone who used to only eat fresh seafood. Then I made it and of course augmented it. It wasn't bad! Yesterday I tried again but kind of doubled the recipe. And in a quest to clean out my freezer, which is overflowing, I threw in any number of random ingredients. The more the better. It was really good. Not amazing, made from scratch, spent $75 in ingredients good, but really worth making again. And it was so low-cal and super filling.

So today, at lunch it was much better, as is often the case with stewy things. I went online to look up some recipes. Emeril and Giada do a similar recipe, many spices, many ingredients, kind of a pain, but it made me realize, if I just had fish stock I could have totally made mine from scratch altogether. It' supposed to have fennel and all sorts of dried herbs but I got that from the package. If I made from scratch I would have needed to add some spices in. But my point is the combination of fish stock, wine, tomatoes and all that seafood, even frozen sea food, makes up the base of the dish and it's really flexible beyond that.

Here is what I did...literally throwing into pot.
-started with a can of crushed tomatoes
-4 medium cut up potatoes
-1 cup water
let simmer for 20 min (alternatively just pre-microwave potatoes first) then added
-1 bag frozen scallops
-1 bag frozen de-veined and de-shelled shrimp
-1 package frozen halibut cut into chunks
-1 can artichoke hearts in water, chopped
- half a jar olives, chopped
-1 can tomato paste
-1 can whole plum tomatoes
-1/2 bag frozen spinach
-1/2 bag frozen peas
-3/4 cup frozen roasted and pureed cauliflower from a few weeks ago
-1 cup or so wine - didn't measure but needed a fair bit.

The halibut literally disintegrated, and that with the cauliflower puree, whole can of tomato paste and chopped spinach made for a thick broth. The shellfish handled cooking for a while better than I expected. It didn't get so tough, but I should have waited to put the shrimp in perhaps. The dish would have worked well with white beans, or even pureed beans as a thickener, but it was thick enough anyway.

Any cioppino is super flavorful and healthy - no fat to speak of, except the parm shavings, and shellfish is really low in calories. Since it took a while and I was starving I ate Triscuits with cheese while it was cooking so I picked out the potatoes and skipped the cheese on top. For lunch today I had huge parm shavings on top and it was really good.

Dave ate 2 huge bowls. I could barely finish one. Alex ate some washed off scallops with parm cheese on top. Natasha ate some washed off shrimp and washed off, mashed potatoes. God forbid they ate something in a multi-colored broth. But they ate. I should have given them some carrots but kind of let it go, figuring scallops were enough of a challenge. Yes, I took the pieces out of the stew, washed them in the sink, and put them on the kids' plates. Not ideal, but kids really like their foods separated out, and this pot of shellfish and greens was just beyond the pale.

At the risk of stating the obvious....

2010-03-02T12:44:00.000-05:00

I read somewhere that this was called, "adult peanut butter and jelly"

In this case I used whole wheat naan, almond-flax butter, and sliced jarred peaches. Very good!

I wouldn't qualify this as a "recipe", hence the title of the post, it's more TJs product review, but it was tasty and I especially like the almond and peanut flax butters from TJs. They do seem kind of grown-up-ee, as my kids would say. And the jarred peaches I used don't seem too sugary. Of course fresh would be better, but it is winter.

I found a Trader Joe's cookbook in the book store. It was pretty good actually, and I'm thinking this blog is kind of a Trader Joe's only recipe archive too. The TJs whole wheat naan is very doughy and hearty (and caloric but I eat a big breakfast), the peaches cool and juicy without being too sweet, and the almond butter is salty and crunchy. It makes for a nice mix of textures.

Pondering Tracy Anderson

2010-02-20T14:04:00.000-05:00

So thanks to Gwyneth, I'm pondering the Tracy Anderson Method. Sounds very haughty. I guess it involves lots of fluid dance movements on the DVDs. In her studio it seems much more complicated. Madonna, Courtney and Gwyneth seem to think she's the Second Coming.

I can't find it on Netflix and on Amazon her new DVDs are $30 each, which I find outrageous. I've never seen another one for more than $15. So I'm kind of not buying one just on principal. Who the hell does she think she is??? But I've been reading the reviews on Amazon and watching her little video clips online and it does sound intriguing. She does advocate working out over an hour a day, which I think is unrealistic. But I can do 1 hr DVDs sometimes if I get up really early or on weekends.

Supposedly the dance routine is too hard to learn but the mat one seems to be well-liked. And the videos online of her studio are really cool-looking - like adult monkey-bars. Maybe I'll ask for a session at one of her studios for my 40th birthday.

Just discovered this today: Not Eating out in NY

2010-02-19T14:09:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I'm wildly out of touch, but I just discovered this blog. Thanks to an article in HuffPost.
Cathy Erway seems to be quite an accomplished cook and food writer, but I like her because I believe she is at heart a tinkerer...she gets interested in a certain ingredient or flavor combination and then pokes around the fridge hoping to make a meal out of it (at least that's how the blog reads) - for the fun of experimenting as much as for the eating. Perhaps beyond that though, we like the same foods - lots of cabbage, beans, whole grains, dark greens, simple combinations. She uses butter and cream in her recipes but in pretty small quantities - enough to add some flavor without making the dish really rich and heavy.

Her recipes do seem a bit labor intensive for me but interesting reading nonetheless.

I want to try her sweet potato gnocchi, pictured above.

Label confusion

2010-02-18T11:00:00.001-05:00

I decided to treat myself to a cafe Americano this morning. While on line, I was reading the labels of some snacks Starbucks is promoting. They have all sorts of new, supposedly healthier snacks. In my mind many of them are better than say a huge slice of marble loaf, but they are all pretty much stuffed with added sugars and high in calories. I was reading the label of little light baggies of cookies, from Dr. Lucy. The package says they are intended for people with food allergies. They are nut, gluten, dairy, and egg-free. The package didn't say anything about being a "health" food per-se, but it did say it was trans-fat free and formulated by a doctor. I can't remember if they are organic.

There were so many annoying things about these packages that I didn't know where to start. First of all, the little package was what you would put in a lunch box, or eat with your coffee. It was maybe 3 or 4 small cookies - I think 4 for reasons to be explained below. The little package is 1.25 ounces. The package claimed that it contained 130 calories, and 1.3 servings. This leads me to believe there are 4 cookies in the package for a total of 173 calories or so. Why on Earth would the serving size of an obviously single-serving package be not the entire package, which is all of 4 cookies!!! So thumbs down for being confusing. Secondly, the cookies had 12 or 13 grams of sugar, depending on the variety (sugar, cinnamon, oatmeal, choc chip). This means the package had 18 or so grams of sugar. This is normal for a cookie, but IN NO WAY a health food. Now all this is fine, if the cookies are marketed as cookies/a treat/not-healthy. People with food allergies deserve treats like the rest of us. But using my new formula learned from Dr. Nestle, I worked out that the cookies get about 40% of their calories from sugar. 173/(4cal x 18g). I didn't have time to do the fat math.

All fine...they are cookies after all, even though they have a very healthy looking mommy/doctor inventor named Dr. Lucy on the front. But then I did go to the web site, and the cookies are promoted as "guilt-free" treats. This is not true.

I know many people with allergies and I'm glad their needs are being served. But Dr. Lucy should not equate allergy-free or organic or even trans-fat free with a health food. Foods high in sugar are not health-foods. They may be a realistic part of a healthy diet, but they are not health foods themselves. Same is true for organic sugar-stuffed Stoneyfield yogurt, Cliff bars, sweetened, vitamin-enriched cereals, etc. Sugar provides calories free of nutrition, period. And I don't like how Dr. Lucy is cagey with portion sizes.

Any why can't the labels be easier to decipher!

The serving-size game is being looked-at by the FDA.

Issue explained in depth in NYTimes.

Food news and politics

2010-02-16T09:39:00.000-05:00

To anyone who is interested in food politics and news, I have added two links on the left, for blogs I like. One is Marion Nestle's blog - called, Food Politics. It's really full of helpful information about what is going on in the world of food safety, regulation, etc. It's updated often and she puts in her two cents, which are more trustworthy and valuable than most people's two cents. She always mentions both sides of any issue even when promoting her own opinion.

The other is something I was alerted to over the weekend called "Food News Journal" and is a list of recent food articles from various media sources. I already like it.... saves me a lot of searching time. The topics are all over the map but just choose what you like...

Bittman's pizza

2010-02-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

I have a love hate relationship with Mark Bittman. I really do like many of his recipe ideas, the simplicity with which he thinks, the way he throws ingredients together, without ever noting a measurement. I especially love his long lists that make me want to make 100 different salads or whatever.

But I found his book on being green to be both sanctimonious and late to the game. Kind of an insufferable combination.

That aside...I saw his mushroom white pizza recipe this morning and decided to go for it. And it was fabulous. OK - so it's the Bitten blog but the article is not by Bittman. I didn't know he had guest bloggers.

At any rate I mainly followed the recipe - here were my adulterations.
1. whole wheat pizza dough from TJs
2. both button and sliced baby bella mushrooms, and onions
3. I used about 2 tablespoons butter/olive oil combined total
4. I added a touch of truffle oil because I had some
5. I sprinkled just a bit of parmasean flakes on the top
6. used half and half instead of heavy cream based on what was in fridge
7. I used up some cut up yellow pepper by sprinkling them around but that was just because I had them sitting around.

The only thing I would change is that I should have been far more generous with the parm flakes - I could barely taste it and needed the sharp saltiness to balance out the creaminess of the mushroom sauce and sweet caramelized onions. Other notes...the veggies take a while to cook to the point of being "dry." That could be done in advance. You don't need much cream but it makes a huge and positive impact on the taste. And I probably doubled the veggie portion. I like a high veggie to dough ratio.

I ate it with a salad with a light orange vinegar and olive oil dressing. It really was screaming for toasted hazelnuts but I was so hungry and I so often burn nuts I'm trying toast that I just had to forgo them and eat. But the fancier salad and the pizza would make a nice vegetarian dinner, maybe with a little roasted squash on the side as well. Oh by the way, despite the dainty looking photo I had about 3 pieces. Normally I only have two but I hadn't had an afternoon snack so I was very hungry.

For his Monday dinner pick, Alex requested yellow pepper white pizza, which he stayed at karate too late to eat, and I made regular pizza with the remaining dough.

What if I had this body as a teenager?

2010-02-15T09:27:00.000-05:00

I wish I had relayed this story when it happened, as now I forget most of it. But it's kind of personal so I hesitated. But I haven't been blogging much lately as I'd like to have something noteworthy to say, and I think this story is pretty relatable....and a tad funny.

About the time I reached my goal weight I was trying on workout clothes, admiring myself, or some other such vain activity and I was thinking about how I'm still the same person now, but how odd it was that the whole huge element of my life of being insecure about my weight had just evaporated. In recent years I hadn't been "insecure" in the teenage sense of the word, but rather self-loathing, disappointed, worried. But of course I spent years if not decades, as many women do, probably starting from age 8, wondering if my thighs were too jiggly or my butt looked bad. I was pretty secure in general, once I got to be 17 or so, but not about that one issue. But men sniff out insecurity like a dog looking for a bone and I think that lack of physical pride made me not as much of a "catch" and limited my dating. I barely had boyfriends most of my life. I also think I was picky but you get the point - self-image was an issue. We all know not-so-attractive girls who had men clawing at them because they carried themselves with confidence and prowess.

Of course I've been with Dave for 11 years, 10 of them married so I haven't thought about this dating insecurity stuff in a very long time. But there I was thinking about my newfound liberation about the size of my butt. So I considered what my life would have been like as a young woman, if I'd had this more fit body and the confidence it engenders. Now of course most teenagers are insecure - Currently I still have wobbly thighs and a big butt and I don't really care - but...I'm sure I would have at 18 and I'm sure I would have seen them as much larger and wobblier than they were. But that aside, I was partly worried about my ass because it was big in reality, not just in my head.

So I had this stream of thoughts in my head which was, "I can't believe all my body insecurity is just gone, poof! It's so relaxing and I am much more confident. What would my teens and twenties have been like if I felt and looked this way then? All those hours of worry and disdain - just never would have happened! I would have been one of those confident popular girls who had the world at their feet! What on Earth would that have been like???"

I was so excited to share my new revelation and fascinated at the topic so I ran over to share this idea with the only other adult in the house, and the only person I can say vain things to - my husband. Never mind that he's a guy and couldn't possibly have understood what teenage girls are like. So I said to him, kind of forgetting that this might be insulting,

"Can you imagine if I looked like this my whole life?"

He and Alex were just getting out of the shower and needed an extra towel, which I was negligent in bringing them, so distracted was I with my fantasy of having been one of those girls who looked good wearing cut-off jean shorts with the pockets sticking out the frayed edges while jumping off the ferry at Oak Bluffs.

So he was standing there dripping and said something like, "Stop thinking about all the hotter guys you think you're entitled to now and get me a towel."

I hadn't really gotten that far in my fantasy. I was just thinking about how fabulous it would have been to be one of those teenage girls with uber-confidence but at his suggestion I stopped and thought about all the great guys I could have dated back in the day. He took one look at my far-off distracted expression and read my mind as I pondered my "what could have been" thoughts and I think got a little offended. I realized what I was doing and snapped myself out of it. Oops.

What he didn't get, is that I wasn't thinking I would have married someone different. I love my husband enormously and he's a perfect match for me, but I was just thinking about how much more fun I would have had before I met him - how I would have dated lots of smart attractive men, taken trips to Vermont with them, gone to dinner etc. I barely dated for 10 years before I met him which was a real shame. He had a serious girlfriend starting at age 13. I was thinking about the hot 22 yr olds in tight jeans with thick leather belts and long thick hair who just looked sexy and cool and confident and immediately attracted the hottest guy in the room. In reality, I never would have been that girl. I was not cool or snarky or alluring or pretty enough, even without a butt. But my head didn't get that far. This whole story took place in the span of 30 seconds. A person can think a lot of thoughts in just a few seconds.

Dave has always been in better shape than me so the idea that he was jealous or insecure, even in jest about my body was shocking and hilarious to me at the same time. I skulked back into the bedroom and felt badly for a few minutes. Then we all moved on.

The next day I called a close girlfriend and she giggled uncontrollably as I relayed the story to her and got to the part where Dave told me to stop fantasizing about all the hot guys I was entitled to. I thought she might drop the phone. I still can't quite tell if it's universally funny or she just knows the two of us so well. But I'm hoping the former.

Lots of lunch ideas

2010-02-11T18:03:00.001-05:00

Clicking around and found easylunchboxes.com

I think these are meant for kids, but I like the photo gallery - and they're bpa free. Not sure what other horrible chemicals are in the plastic but these are safe by today's standards.

What took me so long?

2010-02-10T07:35:00.002-05:00

For someone who has read as much as I have about food and nutrition over the past year or so, I have no excuse for not realizing that Marion Nestle is the wisest sage on the topic before now - and really should be anyone's starting place. One reason is that I just chose books from my local library and they did not have her books. But after seeing her referenced by so many of the people I respect I ordered her books for pick-up at my library. So far I have read most of "What to Eat" and haven't yet started "Food Politics" but with the continuation of snowpocalypse I should be able to make a dent in them both.

What to Eat is almost 600 pages, before the notes start, and probably 800 total. I'm about 400 into it and kind of losing steam. However, I highly recommend it. In fact, it's probably a good book for purchase and it's available in soft cover. I saw it in a Barnes and Noble window perched on a display with 20 other recent diet books. I couldn't believe they sullied her academic work by placing it next to "Skinny Bitch" and other such atrocities which tell you how to get skinny by cutting out whole food groups.

So let me explain why I love it. OK - for starters, Dr. Nestle is perhaps the most respected nutritionist in the country, so I trust her. ( I also like Dr. Katz from Yale) She looks at every study, understands epidemiologic methodology, nutritional chemistry and biology, is skeptical of everything, and has no bias towards one food group or another. She's not a weirdo - she has no "food agenda". She also does not come at the topic of food nutrition from one perspective - and this to me is her most valuable asset - she is a clinical nutritionist, professor, policy advisor (maker) arguably a journalist and perhaps most importantly, in addition to all the other hats she wears, she's also a mother. This is a problem I see with Pollan. He doesn't seem to get the difficulty of dealing with all these issues as a parent trying to put food on the table. He has one teenage kid and he and his wife both have uber-flexible jobs (professor/artist). I'm sorry, but that is not the same as having both parents work full-time and try to impart healthy nutritional habits to 2 or 3 kids. Marion Nestle describes rushing through supermarkets with whiny kids trying to throw Danimals in the cart, etc.

So she describes at the start how no matter where she is, or who she's talking to, everyone has the same question: "What should I eat?"

This book is like taking a walk around a grocery store with Dr. Nestle answering your every question, providing just enough science to help you understand (although I still seem to have trouble absorbing it for some reason-honestly I don't know what happened to my brain-I think it has to do with the fact that every time I read there is a part of my head that is thinking I should be doing 10 other more productive things, so I'm not really concentrating) and offering even more ideas you hadn't thought of.

My favorite aspect is that she debunks all the "cut out this food" and "eat tons of that food" reactionaries. I have always said, you can find a study to prove anything and being a person who understands just enough to read the studies is kind of dangerous. You have to be able to discern if the methods were sound, and put the study in context of all the other nutritional studies out there. So for big groups like dairy, fish, meat, grains, she says, they're healthy in moderation, especially the low-fat versions, but they are not essential or evil. You can get your nutrients from other places if you don't add in that group. Her main tenet is, and I'll put this in bold, Don't eat so much. Calories are calories and you probably need to eat a lot fewer of them.

She more or less gives similar advice as Pollan, but with more definitiveness on what is actually worth purchasing (are organic eggs worth the money?) and more non-chalance about what this study or that study says. She is very concerned about fish safety, high-fat, high-sugar foods, and is vehemently against marketing junk food to children. On this point I find myself in more and more agreement - especially as, Alex begged me for Fruity Pebbles, while I was reading and he was watching Spongebob. My kids know that stuff is off limits, but they really want it-and love it.

She also confirmed many of my own conclusions that I reached by doing lots of reading - namely that refined flour (anything not 'whole wheat') is basically eating sugar, sugar in general is pretty bad and over-eaten, that fish is sadly problematic, that corn/soy subsidies are basically ruining the health of the country. She confirmed that most granola/power/energy bars and flavored yogurts are full of sugar and nonsense. She also explained how milk is processed, and believes that skim milk is almost as nutritious as whole and much better for you, and she's still suggest limiting saturated (animal) fats, even in sustainably raised animals (here I think she and Pollan differ slightly, although he does say to use meat as a 'flavoring'). The reductions in cholesterol are pretty limited. She also very carefully explains how to read labels, and figure out the nutritional qualities of foods yourself. I knew a lot of this, but I realize many people don't and either way it's really time-consuming.

She does write a lot about the various ways that the food industry uses money and politics to confuse the public, especially children and their parents. I have to say, the amounts spent on marketing to kids are extremely alarming (billions of dollars) and she has me convinced. I don't see why food companies need to market to children any more than cigarette companies do. Before I had kids I didn't really get the need to protect kids from so many of the things that adults are exposed to, but needless to say, now that I'm a parent, I completely agree with that. She finds the practice of adding a bit of whole grain or vitamins to junk food cereals and then selling it as nutritious to be especially insidious.

Pollan has a gift for elegant one-liners, "Eat food. Mostly greens. Not too much." or "Don't trust anything that tells you on the package that it's healthy."

I think the second rule actually summarizes several hundred pages of her book. If you just follow that advice, it cuts out all those sugar and chemical-laden "fiber bars", sweetened yogurts, and perhaps 80% of processed foods in general. If you want to know why, you can read her book - but if that's too much reading (and I admit that it's a lot) then Pollan's advice works fine too.

I also really like her blog, Food Politics as well...

A little bit too hungry

2010-02-03T16:34:00.000-05:00

So this week I was trying to limit my morning snacking. I had gotten out of the habit of being strict - and eating just enough, to stave off hunger. I no longer will accept being really hungry. But then of course that is a slippery slope and I started eating lots of walnuts and pretzel sticks and soon enough my pants were a tad tight. So back to being pretty strict - only eating outside of meals when REALLY hungry. So today, I was trying to wait until lunch as for breakfast I'd had an enormous bowl of cereal, with yogurt, a huge banana, several cups coffee. At 10:30 I couldn't stand it and had a small snack of walnuts (about 5 were left) and some roasted squash from my lunch. But I was still hungry. Just like the caterpillar.

So I decided to force myself to wait, and then was engaged in an incredibly tedious and confusing task of pulling numbers out of huge binders and adding them up in various combinations when I just lost my mind. I was so hungry I couldn't concentrate and was freaking out at not being able to focus on the page in front of me. At first I attributed my lack of concentration to the difficulty of the task and my decreasing brain cells, but then I realized I was starving. I was at that low-blood-sugar loony person place. I had eaten a good-sized dinner the night before, as well as probably 500 calories or so for breakfast/snack so I'm not sure what the issue was. Maybe new Violet Zaki Carkio Kick workout video was harder than I realized...But at any rate, I ate my lunch (arugula salad with salmon and pomegranate seeds, half a whole wheat tortilla, and the rest of the squash). It was something like 11:20am. Brain capacity returned to normal (which is still far below 1990s levels). Been fine the rest of the day. Must remember to listen to body.

As for Violet Zaki...kind of a nice change - very cardio with just a bit of sculpting...I kept 5 lb weights in my hands when she said to just keep hands up, like in photo - I bought it because I wanted to work on my kickboxing forms....she doesn't really explain form too well though. She does have a pleasant demeanor and a lovely Australia accent.

A little overboard on the veggies....

2010-02-03T12:13:00.000-05:00

Problem 1
Too much steamed and boring broccoli....kind of a flavorless batch.
Solution:
Turned into soup.

Sauteed miropoix (onions, carrots, celery) and added...

2 boxes bought chicken broth (not ideal)
3/4 cup half and half
2 cups pureed baby lima beans
several cups broccoli

Simmered a few minutes and used immersion blender.
Turned out better than I expected. The beans easily cut out most of the cream and make the soup filling and nutritious. Some cream good for richer flavor. Alex even ate a few bites.

Problem 2

Roasted 2 heads of cauliflower. Turned off oven, finished dishes and then forgot about the cauliflower - and left in oven overnight. Kind of soggy. And gross.

Solutions

Puree, use as thickener and even fake mashed potatoes. See below

Problem 3

Not really a problem, but looking to make an interesting sauce with bacon.

sauteed bacon-whole package!
added miropoix
added ground turkey breast
at this point I would have been happy - I like my food in still distinct parts...but below isn't really a sauce.

hemmed and hawed about making it a tomato sauce, which I don't really like, and then decided to make sauce for husband - this was both ironic and fortuitous as he was becoming increasingly annoyed with me because I didn't stop Alex from bothering him while he tried to sleep off a cold. I actually didn't realize it was happening as I was so involved in the sauce - like that couple in the NYTimes article a while back (I can't find it). So added crushed tomatoes.
added tin anchovies. Should have kept it to half a tin but always hesitant to waste. Half a tin adds richness, whole tin makes kind of fishy. Husband not so picky though.
wanted more thickness and had huge bowl of problem 2 so added in 2 cups cauliflower puree.

Served over whole wheat angel hair pasta with some asagio cheese on top. Husband forgave me!

Feeding the kidlets

2010-01-30T13:33:00.000-05:00

First Lady Press Release

The other night during the SOTU address, President Obama mentioned that Michelle Obama was starting a campaign to combat childhood obesity. I'm interested to see what she rolls out.

It's really hard to curtail the sugar/salt/fat cravings of my kids. I have done pretty well at it, but it's tricky.

I am looking forward to what the First Lady rolls out. In the mean time, I thought this press release was a nice read,- especially the part about "running up and down the stairs to annoy me" ...that was funny.

She mentions things she did with her kids that seemed small but made a big difference. I already do most of those things, but I just like the way she explains how she did it. I am particularly interested in how she frames the issue in terms of living a healthy lifestyle, and providing the kind of traditions around the table where kids naturally develop healthy eating habits, rather than forcing them down their throats (I do some of that when frustrated-bad!). And she's not just talking about the obese teens who end up with gastric bypass surgery - she's getting at a more fundamental struggle to find the time as busy families to make sure nutrition is as much of a priority as say, piano lessons, or homework.

If I were a baker...

2010-01-28T15:46:00.000-05:00

If I were inclined to bake I would certainly buy this book.

I do warn against baking for people in serious dieting mode. Good cakes around the house are just REALLY hard to resist for most people. And sweet foods are high in calories, whether it's from organic sugar or agave syrup. I guess agave syrup is so sweet you don't use much of it - I don't totally get it. But anyway, I don't bake for 2 reasons:

1. I'm too lazy - baking always seems complicated to me
2. It's too tempting to have home baked goods in the house

However - for those of you who do bake - whole grain is better than not - so this book seems quite useful - lots of information about the history of grains, 300 recipes, all categories. And it got really good reviews.

After reading the reviews I think I might like to have it as a reference source, even if I didn't use it all that much.

I want it!!!

2010-01-27T15:03:00.001-05:00

I want one now!!

Apple's site....

Everything you're doing is wrong....

2010-01-27T06:48:00.001-05:00

When people ask me if it was really hard I usually reply that "most of the time no, but sometimes yes."
The main reason it wasn't hard is that I wanted to be successful more than I wanted the food. And the main reason I felt that way is that I had a health scare. Not an actual health scare but a psychological one. I approached the age that my dad was when he had his first cancer and coincidentally that same winter two people my age were diagnosed with cancer. As they went through their horrible ordeals I read their blogs, growing more terrified and heartsick by the day. One ultimately died. Losing weight is not a cancer-prevention guarantee but it is a risk factor I could control.

So as I have reiterated often I have been doing a lot of reading and some things are starting to gel.
Here is my summary. All the books/media I have really found compelling are getting across the following message to the average American:

"Everything you're doing is wrong and everything you love is bad for you. Stop."

Most people react the following way,
"What??? No!!! But everyone I know eats that way. I can't deal with that. What am I supposed to do, eat cabbage and rice for the rest of my life? Never go out to dinner? Measure portions all day? That sucks!!! I'll never be able to do that."

So many of our leading healthy eating advocates are understandably trying to soften the blow. Pollan uses modern anthropology, Kessler uses neuroscience, Oz/Roisen use biology, Biggest Loser uses humiliation, Weight Watchers uses sympathy, nutritionists use big words (phytochemicals anyone?). I oversimplify of course. But that's the basic idea.

But how does one accept such a depressing idea??

I can speak to my own experience on that one.

I came to terms with that statement, incrementally, as I plodded through my first few months. It sucked. It was depressing. It was hard to accept. It seemed unfair. Impossible. Wrong. It involved letting go of lots of former sources of fun and pleasure.....but it does get easier over time...food is replaced with other obsessions - exercise, fashion, blogging - I'm half kidding. But the brain does stop focusing on food so much.

One equally successful friend suggested her still heavy sister was not ready "give up food" - She didn't mean her sister should starve herself, she meant her sister was using food as a mindless pleasure source regardless of it's health effects. I still enjoy food, but it's not my constant little pick me up.

I actually read where Oz talks about his own epiphany in this regard. He said he used to tell his patients exactly why their diets and behaviors were killing them and what steps they needed to take to feel better. But his heartfelt lectures didn't penetrate. It was too hard a message to hear so his patients just used the "head in the sand" method of dealing with their health. He decided to work towards understanding his patients' feelings. He strove to explain the biology in a way that empowered people to take control of their own lives, rather than alienating them with overwhelming directives. Hence his antics on Oprah displaying sickened lungs and livers, and his in-depth depictions of colonoscopies, etc. But his ultimate message is the same. Don't eat anything with "enriched flour" or more than 9 grams of sugar. That's still a tough sell.

To elaborate a little on the "everything you're doing is wrong" statement - it can be stated with more detail...

unless you get your weight and overall health under control you face pain, disease and even pre-mature death - potentially leaving your family and friends devastated.
the traditional American diet/lifestyle is almost uniquely unhealthy, and can even be conceived of as "poison" in that it kills us over a long period of time (processed foods, lack of veggies, too much volume, not enough exercise, etc.)

I had internalized those facts before I started - partly because of the cancer around me, partly from working at NCI, partly from all my reading. That is why it wasn't all that hard for me. What I did not know then, but do now is this last essential and extremely comforting point.

eating right and exercising is not as bad as it seems at first. I swear. You will eventually come to like it most of the time. (Most - not all)

For me, accepting the first two points made the turkey club with bacon and mayo really not all that appealing. I even began to see large portions in the same unattractive light - just like the mindshift about cigarettes that Kessler describes. When you want something else more than the food (like being healthy), and you see most "American" foods as a slow poison then the food loses it's power over you, "Should I have a cookie? I really want one. They're so good. But I shouldn't. I ate a big dinner. But just one. But I didn't exercise today. Oh well today's a waste anyway. I'll be better tomorrow."

For years I was tortured with that dialogue, but now I almost never am. I either don't want the cookie or I eat one, knowing I am usually pretty careful and I can control myself and eat just one.

And now, I like my new body and I want to keep it this way. And I want my clothes to fit comfortably. So those are strong additional motivators. But most importantly the cravings are largely gone. I'm free. And I like exercising. My brain now releases more positive endorphins (?) when exercising than when eating ice cream.

I never would have believed that one year ago. I know not everyone who loses weight feels this way. Some people find reaching their goal weight to be the toughest obstacle of all. I was lucky in that regard. At least so far.

I'm such a geek I find this fascinating

2010-01-26T16:54:00.000-05:00

Somehow I missed this...and as an avid label-reader I find it fascinating. Labels are so confusing, misleading and plain old hard to read. This really does help. I would add other things as well such as requirements about standard portion sizes or at least easy to decipher portion sizes - how big is 1/13 of a cake?? And while they add the "High" warning in red, I'd like to see even more helpful "good choice" type information, although I know that is near impossible politically. Anyway, worth a read.

Direct link to before and after pdf...

Last Chance Workout

2010-01-25T07:18:00.001-05:00

I shouldn't be this excited about a workout DVD - especially one with "The Biggest Loser" in the title. But alas I am. I tried "The Biggest Loser - Last Chance Workout" from Netflix and I love it. It goes really fast and it's really hard. The contenstants are from season 8, which is the one I watched with Natasha. She came downstairs and said,

"There's Amanda!"
She really loves getting to know the contestants.
The DVD was obviously made quickly - there are mistakes, Jillian is in a more relaxed form. I like that better actually - seems more real. She messes up her script all the time, which makes her more endearing and less annoying than normal.
Here are the deets
-5 min warm-up - nice and long
-25 min main section - very fast-paced 30 second intervals switching between cardio and weights with repeating themes - like 3 kinds of jumping jacks interspersed with 3 kinds of push-ups
-10 min upper body weights (hard)
-10 min lower body weights (hard)
-5 min cool-down. I always skip this.

I fluctuate between 10, 5 and 6 lb weights. Can't do all the push-ups but I'm trying to force myself a little more.
$8 on Amazon. Hoping to pick 3 from Netflix and get free shipping.
Next up to try is Bob's Weight Loss Yoga - despite the fact that I don't like yoga I kind of want a change. I just noticed that Jillian has her own Yoga DVD coming out in March as well.

I always felt this was true...but must move more during the work day

2010-01-21T07:36:00.000-05:00

Get off your behind!
I do try and walk around the office instead of sitting all the time but it's hard. I used to exercise on the stairs at 2pm but now that I do it in the morning I should work in a few sets of stairs in the afternoon as well. The above article doesn't explain all the possible reasons why sitting is bad - and how to mitigate them...perhaps the original study has that. Any number of risk factors could be at play...but it seems pretty obvious that the human body was not meant to sit in one position for hours on end.

Recent cooking....

2010-01-20T19:30:00.000-05:00

I meant to post these as I took them but didn't get to it....so here is a long posting of various meals over the past couple weeks. All photos can be enlarged if clicked on...

I love apple pie filing but don't really need or even enjoy the crust. The above is simply sliced apples sprinkled with cinnamon and roasted. No butter, no sugar. I'm sure adding a few drops of butter would not add that many calories, but I didn't even miss it. I like my butter in places where I really taste it, like on toast. These apples are delicious fresh out of the oven and very good rewarmed in the microwave - on oatmeal or just plain. I didn't even bother to peel the apples so prep was literally spraying Pam on pan, putting 6 apples through the slicer and sprinkling the cinnamon-then roasting with my weekly veggies (squash, zucchini, cauliflower, etc.). Why didn't I ever think of this before???

I often talk about using baby lima beans. Soak overnight, simmer in morning before work/starting day. Puree some for thickener. I put the whole beans in any number of dishes, like the greens below, or have as an afternoon snack with a little sesame oil and soy sauce.

Bag of mixed Southern Greens, with various mushrooms, onions, peppers. Perhaps a bit too watery with all the mushrooms. Also added chicken broth and white wine. Pretty good, but this batch seems to need more oil for some reason. This keeps in the fridge REALLY well and can be an accompaniment to almost anything. I do so many variations on this - adding tomatoes, pureed squash, various meats, beans, as a pasta dish at room temp.

Big batch of TJ's whole wheat pizza dough. I bought two packages this time and made various pizzas, including individual ones for the kids. They used to really complain about the dark crust but are getting more accepting. Not really sure why. Partly because of the "kid's choice" nights each one gets. This pizza is really hard to control myself around. I try and make the crust thin but end up eating a lot of bread and cheese.

Close-up of ground turkey, artichoke heart, cheese, vodka sauce on left and arrugula, blue camembert, turkey on right.

Alex eating "white pizza" with small chopped up yellow peppers. He finally admitted that roasted peppers taste good and since admitting it, eats them without complaint.

Natasha eating pepperoni pizza - turkey pepperoni but super-processed-industrial grossness. But yummy! Not sure why she didn't have a fit about the brown crust. Her complaints are mainly vestiges of toddler control issues, but she of course honestly prefers white crust to brown in addition to liking to control her food. On her night she often chooses frozen white crust pizza, which I grudgingly oblige her. I could have put some peppers on her pizza too but figured she had the tomato sauce.

Ok, I know I'm a Pollan junkie

2010-01-20T15:10:00.001-05:00

I know - I'm in the "groupie" category when it comes to Michael Pollan, and I don't have the new book yet, but I really liked this interview on On Point.

His main advice is to cook. He also suggests planting a garden. We have no sunny spot for that. Bummer. Perhaps the most disturbing segment is about "pink sludge" in fast food hamburgers. He also says it really doesn't matter what you eat as long as it was found in some traditional cuisine. I find that interesting as I kind of poured over IDOF trying to figure out exactly what to eat. Finally I gave up. He says to use meat as a flavoring, which you have to do if you buy the kind he advocates. It's so expensive! But ultimately, I believe he's right.

I think I like Jane Brody

2010-01-13T09:28:00.000-05:00

She uses the same, "exercise should be like brushing your teeth" line that I do.

Pretty common wisdom, but nice to read in a succinct article.

Pork with balsamic reduction

2010-01-12T18:53:00.000-05:00

Last night's dinner was so delicious I really couldn't believe it. It was all an accident. I started making greens so my mom could have some leftovers today - she's babysitting and loves them. Then I decided pork goes well with greens and that turned into a mini-masterpiece. It was a complicated dinner for a weeknight but since Dave and the kids were out and I got home kind of early I was able to pull it off.

Sautéed greens with yellow peppers, onions. Finished with a little truffle oil.
Pork with a balsamic reduction.
Whole wheat rigatoni, just drizzled olive oil and salt on top.

The greens are a standard dish of mine - sauteed peppers, onions and garlic, put aside, greens also sauteed, and simmereed in chicken broth. Everything added back together at the end. Sometimes I finish with truffle oil. Sometimes I add pork or beans or even a can of tomatoes.

The pork was the standout. For some reason I decided to pan-fry the meat instead of roasting it, mainly due to time issues - I decided to add it to the greens at the last minute. So I drizzled a little olive oil, browned it on both sides, then turned it down and kept generously adding chicken broth to the pot. I left it medium rare, which is now safe, and results in an entirely different pork eating experience than the traditional well-done tough version. Then looking at my pan of pork drippings and chicken broth I decided to make a proper sauce, and added 1 tbs (only!) of butter. I really should have doubled the recipe but didn't realize how uch a person needs on his or her plate. Anyway, butter in, pan deglazed and then since we had no wine I squirted in a tbs or so of a balsamic reduction I've had forever. It's nothing fancy, from Trader Joe's. But the combination of those 4 ingredients was simply sublime. I really couldn't believe how professional it tasted. I highly recommend!

At any rate, I've watched a lot of cooking shows in my day and I remember learning "how to cook like a restaurant" and the answer is real stock (I even heard on The Splendid Table that veal stock is life-changing but I don't eat veal, let alone make stock). I used boxed stock but the Trader Joe's stock is very opaque and full of stuff. Other tips were use real butter, brown meat first, don't overcook, deglaze pans and salt generously. I did all of those things and sure enough it tasted like a restaurant.

I ate first, unable to wait for my delinquent family to arrive home from karate. As soon as Dave got home I started chasing him around the house.

"YOU HAVE TO TRY WHAT I COOKED!"

But he was busy changing, putting things away, taking out the trash for this morning. He was getting more and more irritated at his chores until eventually he finished and I set the beautiful plate before him seen above. One bite and he really was instantly madly in love with me all over again I swear....

As well he should have been!

Side note 1: What did I eat? The above is Dave's plate. I didn't eat the greasy pasta, but saved my calories for the buttery sauce (2 tbs?), which in reality wasn't even that buttery, and about 4 oz of the really superior pork (maybe 5 with picking?). I also consumed an enormous portion of greens (2 cups). While I always eat a lot of grain at breakfast and 1 serving at lunch I do sometimes skip the rice/pasta option at dinner. This is mainly because I don't prepare rice/pasta in a particularly interesting manner. Often times it's the sauce that is really the compelling taste so I focus on sauce for veggies and meat. By the time I realize I need to make a grain for the kids I'm creatively all tapped out and the grain ends up boring.

Side note 2: Is this a diet meal? So the meal was relatively healthy - It could have been lower fat - but it could have been a LOT higher fat too. I could have used slightly less olive oil and butter, but I actually didn't use all that much - perhaps 3 tbs olive oil and 1 tbs butter for 5-6 servings of food. Just enough to sauté the various veggies. It all adds up, but food needs to taste good, and veggies need some fat for mineral absorption. But you don't need 6 tbs oil for that. I would add that when a meal tastes extra good it's even more important to be able to control your own portion size. I can do that pretty easily now, but it took a lot of practice/evenings of tortured restraint to get to that point.

Side note 3: What did the kids eat? It was Alex's night to "choose" which he LOVES so he had asked for my home made macaroni and cheese with broccoli chopped up in there (recipe will come later). He actually requested a vegetable on his special night! We MADE them taste the pork in the sauce and they rejected it, purely on principal I'm sure. We kind of had a "your loss, more for us" attitude but next time I'll insist that they eat some.

Check out my famous friend!

2010-01-12T11:01:00.000-05:00

I think this is so fabulous.

Amazing accomplishment, Indya. And now to be paying it forward is doubly exciting.

For those times when you MUST have something sweet

2010-01-09T08:06:00.000-05:00

The problem I have with baked goods on a diet is that even low-fat, low-sugar brownies still have 176 calories. That's kind of a lot. And they often don't taste very good. And indulging in sweet tastes just increases sugar cravings.

But I thought this recipe looked ok for those times you REALLY need something sweet. I would recommend individually wrapping the brownies in tin foil and freezing them. Much easier to eat one small portion that way. And I would make them smaller - these have 176 cals each, for 12 brownies, so I would cut 20 brownies instead, if possible, for a treat of about 100 calories. Also the recipe has 6 tbs of chocolate chips. Removing those would make them a lot less caloric - without the chips you could probably cut 16 for 100 cals each but I'm kind of guessing.

And I thought this woman's story was kind of crazy. She lost 212 pounds and is a size 6!

Brownie recipe.

The girl on the elevator

2010-01-08T19:08:00.000-05:00

So I will start out by saying that my pet peeve is when someone who does not look disabled presses the elevator button to go one or two floors. It ties up the elevators, which are extremely slow to start with, wastes electricity, and is not a particularly healthy habit. I feel it is emblematic of laziness in general but I know that's not fair and unproven. So the other day someone did that and while silently cursing her I discretely looked her up and down a bit. She was well dressed, put together-looking in general, very young - maybe 22-24. She could maybe have stood to lose 5-8 pounds, but was by no means heavy. Yet. I couldn't tell if she looked like she was an exerciser or not. She looked like a sweet person. Regardless, she had gone to the first floor to get a Coke and a bag of Doritos and took the elevator back to the 2nd. Somehow, assessing this young woman made me really sad for our country. Young people! What is wrong with them today??

She was doing so many things wrong I was just irritated - not at her but at our society that produced her. For some reason I thought she was a nice person. But why was she eating that crap? I don't even think those things taste good. Why didn't she walk the one floor? What was going through her 22 yr old mind? Doesn't she read any of the guilt-inducing media I suffer through daily about our planet and our obese society? Doesn't she care about those of us who work on the 7th floor!? For the record, I do walk often but not always. It depends on what I'm carrying and how energetic I'm feeling. But 7 floors is a lot in an overcoat and with heavy bags.

If we can't get NIH employees living healthier habits then what hope is there?? I mean, I'm kind of kidding, and a lot of NIHers are healthy but there is some truth to the idea that employees of the largest public health institution in the world (I think) should know what healthy habits are and the impact of not partaking in them. There are programs for HealthyFeds, etc. but they're not working well enough.

OK. I will stop now. This is a big topic that I can't even begin to cover. Time to move on.

One year ago today!

2010-01-07T12:19:00.000-05:00

Or maybe it was one year ago tomorrow. Either way I can't believe it's been a year since I resolved to become a healthier person. That was a very low point. Uncomfortable in my too-tight jeans, feeling badly about how I looked to my husband, worrying about becoming a health statistic as I prepared for my first colonoscopy. I remember dodging cameras, hiding in baggy clothes, feeling resigned to premature middle-age (at least looks-wise).

I feel so much better now in so many ways: more energetic, attractive, strong, on the right track. I still worry about genetic diseases, with good reason, but I'm doing everything in my power to reduce any unnecessary risk. I lost more weight and become more athletic than I anticipated. And I certainly never thought that I would be successful enough to inspire other people.

Mayonnaise

2010-01-06T18:43:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that I don't like most low-fat foods, dairy aside.
I especially can't stand low-fat mayo. But mayo is so caloric it's ridiculous. Now I could eat it more often, but I just tried to wean myself off of it in general so that I don't expect it with every sandwich. But sometimes a girl wants some mayo! And I ONLY eat Hellman's. Unless some one makes it from scratch, but that doesn't happen often.

So my compromise is flavoring low-fat mayo. Before continuing I will note that I still don't like the concept of fake foods, and don't eat a ton of them, but even I reach my limits with beans and rice with Swiss chard. Sometimes a girl wants a burger with mayo! See last post. Usually I just eat the real thing in a small portion, and I will do that with real mayo but when eating flavored mayo low-fat works just fine.

So my two stand-bys are:

mayo with pesto (I use bought pesto usually)
mayo with curry paste

I think it's about 2/3rds mayo to 1/3 flavoring.

These are just a couple choices. It works with anything - the more intensely flavored or spicy the better. I wouldn't even qualify this post as a 'recipe' posting, but flavoring mayo - full-fat or low-fat is one of those things that is simple and delicious but very often forgotten about. I forget about it all the time.
I should try making my own mayo but that seems hard. I can barely make a vinagrette that doesn't separate.

OK - off to scramble eggs for the kids for dinner.

Hamburgers!

2010-01-06T18:28:00.001-05:00

Last night I ate too much. No big deal, I don't usually do that but the story of how and why is kind of instructive.

I decided to make burgers. I do this often, and usually I eat a turkey breast burger. I know, some of you think it's dry and bland but I like it. Really I do. For me the burger is more about the whole burger experience - bun, toppings, condiments. And I've gotten to the point where I find plain ground beef too rich and overwhelming.

At any rate - I have an exception. Trader Joe's makes these frozen buffalo patties, complete with mushrooms and cheese all mushed in. They are bad for so many reasons - not local, frozen, shipped across country, stuffed with cheese and God knows what else, 270 calories and 18 grams fat per patty, processed. I mean the list goes on. But they are DIVINE! My whole family loves them.

So I haven't made them for a while, due to lack of grilling in general, seeing as my grill is still covered in snow. I was craving them and decided to make them in the oven on broil. I cut them in half because they're huge and I had little whole wheat potato buns and little kids. I caramelized some onions and made some curried mayonnaise. I reheated some broccoli. I assembled a burger and took a bite - while waiting for others to arrive home, ostensibly to see if the curry mayo went well with the already highly flavored burger. "Oh my God. Sometimes I'm such a good cook, I just kill myself," I thought. I mean that's not really cooking, more assembling, but whatever, I was impressed with my last-minute dinner preparation.

Within a few seconds the mini-burger was gone. Half a patty 135 cals, bun 100 cals, mayo/onion another 40? (it was low-fat mayo - I know, see next post). I was not even close to satisfied. When I made these during my losing period I would eat that amount and then add lots of veggies and maybe eat another bite or two of a leftover kid burger and force myself to stop - and then eventually I would be full. Or more likely, I would grill both the buffalo burgers and the turkey burgers and eat a whole turkey burger and a few bits of buffalo. They are very rich. I always wanted more but would control myself. This time, I was not close to full, nor close to satisfied. One mini-burger wasn't enough eating for me. I decided to eat a second concoction, but this time substituting the patty for broccoli. Really, it was all the flavors and textures together that were so good. I didn't need that high-calorie patty! So I compiled my broccoli,onions and may onto my mini bun and started eating. This was just not working. I grabbed another greasy patty half and started eating that with my fingers. Soon enough, I had eaten both the healthy broccoli burger AND the patty. This is something like 10 points and I usually eat 7 (when losing I ate 5-6!!!).

OK so what happened? Why was I not full? Why couldn't I control myself? In theory the full-fat burger should have been more filling than the low-fat turkey burger. Even later in the evening I wasn't super full.

Here is what I think happened. First of all, I was just hungry. I had had a pretty light day. So the 300 calorie dinner really wasn't enough. I needed at least 400. But why wasn't the fatty/caloric burger more satisfying than the drier turkey one? Here I think is the essence of why most doctors recommend low-fat protein for dieters, (aside from cholesterol). After eating what was basically a slider, I just hadn't enjoyed the visceral pleasure of eating for long enough. Not only was it not enough food, but it was not enough relaxing, chewing, enjoying. It was also certainly not enough time for my stomach to tell my brain I was full. Or whatever that saying is. Back when I was losing I had a crazy amount of control - and even then I would usually use a floater point or two on buffalo burger night...but now, I'm not used to eating such tiny portions nor to eating dinner with such strictness. The biggest difference between maintenance and losing for me is my dinner consumption.

OK - to extrapolate up a level, away from my experience...most people don't want to change their habits. They want a diet to fit into their current lifestyle. They want to eat a burger, not half a burger. So by far the path of least resistance is to use low-fat mayo and cheese (yuck) and use turkey instead of beef and put a big hamburger on your plate.

I have tried not to take that approach, as it results in a lot of bad guar gum-filled substitutes, and can lead to bland, not-filling eating. But no rule should be hard and fast, and I see the merits of trying different things different ways. It is also especially important to recognize that high-fat foods are extremely high in calories. and if you're going to eat them you need a fair bit of control. That does come over time, thank God. Now I eat 4-5 walnut halves instead of 15 and it's actually a very healthy snack. I even can have a tub of them in my desk drawer. But when starting out, the control is difficult. It's easier to substitute out ingredients.

ok...next post is about low-fat mayo. Can you even stand waiting??

Premium jeans conversion chart

2010-01-05T17:04:00.001-05:00

To anyone who buys premium jeans....supposedly you can use this to order online and get a good fit. Hmmm.
I'd be afraid to do that but I thought some of you might like this anyway. What the hell is a -4???

Original context...

Yay! Finally a useful book...

2010-01-05T16:37:00.000-05:00

I've been waiting for this book for a while. An interesting concept that should have been written long ago. Perhaps it was but probably not by such a good writer. From the examples it seems too high-level and like I already know the stuff but hopefully there is more useful stuff in the final version.

I like how Pollan worked with doctors on this book. I especially love the notion of the health insurance companies putting pressure on the food industry. Awesome! Editorial on Huffington Post here.

This looks fun too...gotta love Stewart...although something seems weird with the video...

No sweets

2010-01-05T11:16:00.024-05:00

A bit of a caveat - this will be repetitive for long-time blog readers, but I know I have some new readers out there recently....900 hits in the past few weeks!

There are lots of serious, well-researched, scientifically sound books on sugar. These books explain sugar-addiction (slightly frightening) and insulin-levels and all sorts of biological reasons why sugar is bad for the body and how the body metabolizes food. It leaves the body quickly and you end up hungry and craving more of it. I won't add to the blather as another un-trained voice but rather just note that sugar consumption leading to weight gain is a pretty well-known phenomenon. Here is a quick quote from Dr. Oz's website:

When you eat sugar, it stimulates the release of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens, which makes you feel pleasure. The brain recognizes and likes this feeling and begins to crave more. It may startle you to learn that heroine, morphine and sugar all stimulate the same receptors in your brain.

It takes 28 days to detox from most addictive substances, and sugar – hidden in fast food, low-fat options and condiments – is certainly an addictive substance.

...or you can read David Kessler's book, "The End of Overeating" for lots of detail.

I have read different suggestions as to how much sugar should be acceptable in a "serving". Dr. Oz says 5 grams of sugar, Jackie Warner says 9 grams. Either of those knocks out a ton of foods, especially sweetened yogurts and granola bars. I found a petition on the FDA website from 1999 urging the FDA to set the recommended daily allowance at 40 grams of added sugar (there is none now). I think that means in addition to the sugar found in dairy and fruit, but I'm not sure. Artificial sweeteners are just gross to me and do nothing to diminish the cravings, although certainly in my life I've had a fair share of Diet Coke. We all have our foibles. I'm a bit confused about the whole idea of honey, maple syrup and especially agave nectar. Those natural products seem better than high-fructose corn syrup for some reasons. But at the end of the day, too much sweet stuff is too much sweet stuff. Honey doesn't keep you full even if it has some natural enzymes that are healthy in another way. A drizzle is fine, but 3 tablespoons is probably too much for someone trying to break those sweet cravings, stay full and limit calories.

I'm not usually a fan of baby-steps. They don't result in large amounts of weight being lost, but rather 5 lbs or less usually. But it can be hard to take on everything at once, and reducing sweets is a great starting place, especially at this time of year when it's easy to have re-calibrated your sweets intake to be higher than normal.

Furthermore, the truth is, most sweets aren't that good anyway. So after holidays are over a starting place can be to put the cookie down and get the sweets out of the house so you're not torturing yourself. You don't need 7-layer dream bars and gingerbread cookies covered in M&M buttons calling you from the cabinets. A "once a week" sweets rule to help deal with the temptations (or twice a week if you need it) works well.

It's not as bad as it sounds, I promise. In fact, getting that sugar monkey off your back can feel quite liberating.

As a note of disclosure, I still eat sugar - probably more than I should. I usually limit my sweets to sweetened whole grain cereal, "diet" cookies and gummy vitamins. I eat those daily, but only after I did my own little "detox" experiment to get rid of the constant sugar cravings.

DVD preview

2010-01-03T07:59:00.000-05:00

For some reason it never before occurred to me to look on Netflix for exercise DVDs. Not only do they have a huge selection, but many of them are even available instantaneously. Of course I need better equipment for that to happen. But while exercise DVDs are cheap to begin with, I have bought a couple that I didn't like. I should have thought of previewing them a long time ago.

Finally, a BMI alternative that is simple and makes sense

2010-01-03T07:33:00.000-05:00

I have long advocated a pair of jeans as a BMI alternative, but that's not really scientific enough for most of us, me included. I read a second article by Dr. Oz last night, having ignored it for days assuming it was the same article as the first, but on a different web site. I think he generally focuses on older, more obese people, but he is probably the best person out there at putting difficult medical information into layman's terminology.

So in this second article on New Year's resolutions, he suggests that a simple comparison of your height, in inches to your waist (waist being the spot that creases when you bend to the side according to shopping web sites) is a better health predictor than bmi. Your height should be more than twice your waist. I'm happy to report I'm 67.5 inches tall and have a 29-30 in waist (how tight should that tape be??). So I'm healthy! Maybe I'm measuring at the wrong place though as he says my waist should be at least 32.

At any rate - it's a really good article - positive and makes sense. His show on Jan. 4 promises to be about exactly what we should be eating. I'd like to see that. I have no DVR so someone watch it for me!

My body would never look like hers even if I starved myself.....

2010-01-01T06:28:00.000-05:00

young female athlete

I used to think that thin people were more willing to pay attention to what they ate and how they exercised, because they had bodies that easily responded to eating well and allowed them to be thin. That is, I felt that I was hungrier than most people and would always have a big butt and thunder thighs so what was the point of really trying? In order to be thin I'd have to starve myself and run 5 miles a day. Or so I thought. Well I think in reality I was eating way more than I realized and agonizing about when to go on that run for much longer than the actual run took - and I did no weight training. I knew all these girls who could eat french fries every day and end up thin as a wisp and of course they didn't seem to try at all.

Well this may have been true in high school and college but it's rarely true anymore. And I think those girls probably snacked less and exercised more than I realized. Reshaping one's body seems impossible to face from the outset. It takes a the better part of a year, or at a minimum six months for a body to really change. I think my body continued changing through September, which would have been 9 months, and perhaps my skin even got a little tighter after that, although I'm not smaller in clothing size or pounds than I was in September.

I was never thin and muscular before. I think if I had been, I would have felt more inclined to try and get back to that place. Now if I were to gain weight, I would know what it takes to get it off and get my body back. It wouldn't be some abstract idea that seemed an impossible feat and not realistic for my particular body.

I don't know if I have a bigger appetite than most people or a slow metabolism. Some days I feel like I do and other days I'm satisfied eating 1400 calories pretty handily. I see how much more my daughter is focused food than are some of her friends-and always has been-it's not something she learned recently. Maybe I was born interested in food also. Now that I eat and snack less I think about and am distracted by thoughts about food much less than when I ate all the time. It does get easier.

I think people look at me now and assume I exercise 90 minutes a day or starve myself. I don't do either of those things. I exercise about 30-40 minutes a day - but every day. And I think I eat about 1400 calories a day but I don't totally count anymore. No foods are totally off limits but I don't over-indulge very often.

What I'm saying is, after watching 2 hours of the Biggest Loser and thinking about my own body, I think I was wrong back then. I didn't just have a slow metabolism or a big impossible-to-shrink butt. I may have been right that living the thin life didn't come naturally to me, but it wasn't out of my reach either. It just seemed so hard to achieve and to come at such sacrifice that I didn't really even try. But those girls I grew up with who had the naturally athletic figures always tried because they always knew what was on the other side of that effort. It was never an abstract notion to them. Now though we all need to do the work more or less.

But if you think you don't have a body-type that could ever be 'svelte' you're probably wrong.

Wisdom from Dr. Oz

2009-12-31T15:54:00.000-05:00

Dr. Oz makes me want to jump up and down in agreement or scream in frustration. His goals are high. He suggests people eat nothing with more that 5 ingredients. I have to say I agree in practice, but that's hard! I guess that's easier than Michael Pollan who wants people to stay out of grocery stores altogether. These people have very high expectations!

Normally I ignore New Year's resolutions articles, but I think the man had some good points. Full article here in the NYTimes. I hear his point about the breathing, but I still don't like yoga. But he gave the most compelling reason yet for doing it.

Julie/Julia

2009-12-31T13:47:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching Julie & Julia and I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised. Everyone said the movie was plotless but well-acted and kind of boring. For some reason I found it utterly compelling. I don't think it was plotless, but rather just a true story. How could that live up to Hollywood expectations of plot? But it is of course two real-life fairy tales. Each woman did something remarkable and unique, and ended up famous. Of course one person way more famous than the other.

Maybe I was just warm and happy in my basement at 5 am knowing that it was so icy that we'd all be home today and I could happily watch a movie, neither rushed nor exhausted and all alone - at least for most of it. Natasha came down to snuggle with me at the end. Maybe I was just happy to watch a movie period. Our Netflix queue is mainly Buffy the Vampire Slayer disks (those of you who read the book will get the irony there). Or maybe the particular fantasy of a food/cooking blogger with a dead-end government temp job becoming an author and then selling the movie rights to a group of people involving Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, Nora Ephron and Amy Adams just hits a little too close to home to ignore. Either way, from the opening scenes of the Eiffel Tower I was smitten.

It's rather delightful watching the parallel stories unfold, knowing the happy ending, enjoying the sweet husbands. And I'm generally an ultra-critical, anti-sap kind of movie-goer. I hated Titanic with a passion. My favorite movie is still Sophie's Choice. I do agree the ending was kind of poorly done...and Julia Child's accomplishments were far more revolutionary than is let on. Nora Ephron just assumes everyone knows what they are and that the very accomplishment of her getting her book published stands on its own for all that is to come. I would argue she is showing her age and that many young people raised on the Food Network have no idea about Julia Child's full impact.

But that criticism aside, Julie, Julia and I had a lovely morning curled up together in my basement. Next up, on demand re-reruns of The Biggest Loser. I decided to work-out for 30 min while watching. Seemed like a good choice.

After eschewing the very concept of the show for years, and for the entire time I was losing, I have finally come around to see some of its finer points. I still loathe it for the original reasons I found it un-watchable: the tortuous workouts and endless crying seem designed to exploit the contestants (who are oh so willing to be exploited) and the silliness of the "game" aspect undermines the importance of the very real and serious topic morbid obesity in this country. I know I'm a kill-joy. Plus the people are kind of gross all naked with their bellies hanging out. Sorry - not a very politically correct thing to say.

Lately, after purchasing a few Biggest Loser workout DVDs and liking them I began to pay attention to the pervasiveness of both the Biggest Loser brand and the Jillian Michaels brand (Bob isn't quite as aggressively out there). Marketing-wise, they seem to dominate the weight-loss space, more than Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Canyon Ranch, Atkins, South Beach etc. Such a funny concept, as TBL didn't start out as a weight loss plan, with monthly subscription costs, but rather as a tv show. But now, due to aggressive marketing, licensing and merchandising, it's hard to escape that hokey logo and Jillian's admonishing scowl. They have an online club, a resort, music cds, workout dvds, books, cooking equipment, exercise equipment, etc. So here is what I'm learning....

First and foremost, what I didn't get when i just watched snippets of people looking like they were about to die is that the main focus is on building self-esteem through having the contestants complete extraordinary physical challenges. While I just saw this as exploitative, the "I felt like I was going to die" aspect is vital for these people, who REALLY need their self-worth brought up a few notches. For me I was able to get to an "I can do this" place in my head by reading some books and cooking a lot. But these people have serious issues and need major intervention. I mean, I always got the irony before of the title, but now I see, these people really did think of themselves as losers in the beginning.
The leaders view changing these peoples' lives as an emergency, like the contestants are on the verge of having a heart attack, which I'm sure many of them are. It's not a long-term, gradual type of affair, but rather an extreme boot-camp. I originally found this unpalatable, but I see where they're coming from. Time is a-wasting and these people are in serious trouble. To the one-third of Americans who are obese this point seems to be well-taken...hence the popularity of the show and it's brands.
Their program is very exercise-focused, rather than food focused. I know it's both, but they push the exercise as the primary component. I'm beginning to see why. I think some of it is physiological - building muscle speeds up the metabolism as opposed to just burning calories while it's being done. But Bob and Jillian are dealing with morbidly obese people. People who weight over 300 lbs generally have an emotional reason why they're eating and it seems to revolve around low-self esteem at some level. They all seem to have some breakthrough somewhere during the series where they come to realize they do have self-worth and are worthy of living a healthy lifestyle. So by pushing them to their absolute physical limits Bob and Jillian are building their self-confidence as much as their pecs. Probably more.
According to the doctor, who by the way is the same doctor Jackie uses in her fitness camp, TBL group claims to be the first fitness establishment (fat farm) to push obese people to undergo professional athlete-style workouts from the get go. I don't know the validity of this. Certainly they're the first people to do a reality show about it.
From what I've gathered, the diet is very high veggie, many low-fat proteins, few carbs and fewer fats. I don't know how this is sustainable. I see how it results in very fast weight-loss, but I wonder what their long-term food plan is. I couldn't have lost the weight without eating lots of egg whites, chicken breast and non-fat yogurt, but I also ate a fair amount of whole wheat breads and fats as well. I certainly upped the fats after I reached my goal weight but I haven't read where they allow for this (mostly in the form of nuts and some cheese). This being said, I was not obese-far from it. My BMI was 28, with obese starting at 40. According to the show's doctor - people who were once obese have to be even more strict than those who were merely overweight, and for example, need to exercise 60-90 min/day, 5-6 days/week to keep the weight off. I would like to know why this is true.
I also read that the program caused a lot of people to end up in the hospital and is way over the top/dangerous. I'm sure this is true and I still find that aspect of the show rather repugnant. I can't seem to find the original article....obviously people who are obese and willing to walk around in bathing suits on tv have issues with fame and will go to any lengths.

This morning I watched a special that reviewed the whole show. What was telling is that every person who lost and kept off the weight seemed to have a career change and become a trainer of some sort, either full-time or as a way to help their communities. These people each lost over 100 lbs and are now really fantastic athletes. A couple of them even did full-fledged triathalons (2.5 mi swim, 112 mi bike ride, 26.2 mi run). This is amazing.

Anyway it was a morning of watching people find a new lease on life, and success through passion. Kind of a fun way to spend an icy morning.

Early to bed

2009-12-27T18:45:00.000-05:00

I suppose this should go in the "what I did right" post from last week. One big problem that I know many people have is late night eating. I go to bed really early and that helps enormously. It causes other problems, such as not having time to do things and not spending time with my husband, but I get so tired and grumpy in the evenings that sometimes it's better for everyone if I'm asleep. It seems to me we are born with a certain proclivity for being a morning person or a night owl and there is little that can be done to change that.

At any rate on the rare occasion that I am up later than normal, such as last night, and end up being awake 5 or so hours after eating dinner of course I'm starving.

I wouldn't tell the whole world to follow my lead and go to bed early. But it would help to space out meals during the evening just as you do during the day so you don't go long stretches between meals. So if you do stay up really late as a habit, then plan an evening snack for a certain time for before you get out of control where-is-that goddam-ice-cream-scoop-hungry - something reasonable and high in protein such as yogurt or a hard boiled egg. You just need enough food to get you to finish your tasks and fall asleep, it doesn't need to be a whole meal - I would say something like 100-150 calories. And of course it helps to differentiate between stress eating and actual hunger.

For me planned meal and snack times combined with planned calorie amounts really helped me stay on track (eg breakfast, 8:30am, 6 points). I know it sounds really regimented but it eliminated the irritating guess-work and doubt and let me focus on picking the kinds of foods I wanted to eat instead. So instead of feeling regimented it felt kind of freeing. I was free from doubt-filled conversations in my head...I rarely had that "well if I eat this, will I be hungry later? Is this too big a lunch? Should I eat a snack now?" discussion in my head. It was more, "Well for 2 more points (100 cals) I can have a slice of cheese or a banana or a piece of bread." If I were a nighttime person, I would have added that evening snack in as one of my planned eating times and tried to structure night time eating as opposed to purely fighting it.

Despite the above post (which I wrote this morning) Today of course, I completely messed up - getting over hungry, not planning well and eating way too much pizza at lunch time. But now I can handle the over-run and control myself for the rest of the day. Partly because my stomach is so used to eating a certain amount of food that I'm still full hours later, and partly because I've been doing this a long time now so I can be slightly more flexible about what I eat when than I was during my 'losing' period. I'm more confident in my ability to sort it out by the end of the day.

Better than before

2009-12-26T07:58:00.001-05:00

Dec. 1998, Key West

I found these two pics recently taken when was at my thinnest and most in shape before now. I was 26 and rollerbladed a lot. My most recent diet had been the "love" diet. Fall in love and get too nervous and excited to eat. It works! But obviously not sustainable. My diet previous to that was the "gallstone disease" diet. Also not sustainable. Eventually I did recover and was able to eat more than a handful of food at a time.

Last February I scanned these so they could be my "inspiration" pictures with the idea being that I would never look like a model so me at my most in shape was the most realistic inspiration I could think of. I was going to take a pic in the same position, twisted like that, of my stomach in Jan as a before/after comparison for the refrigerator and blog, but chickened out at the thought of exposing rolls of stomach fat to all of cyber-space (or in reality, my audience of 5). Back then I agonized over whether or not I should post my actual weight. Now I'm posting mortifying before pictures willy-nilly to this blog and even Facebook. They're still embarrassing, but not nearly in the same way. I have accepted the idea that my body transformation is a good motivator for my friends colleagues and even mild acquaintances. For my close friends, it's personal, but for others it's not that way at all. I'm just one more 'before and after' reality show.

I did tell a story about the hat pic in February but at that time I was having trouble uploading photos-now it's there.

Anyhow it was nice to re-read it today. Now when I look at that picture I think I look soft and out of shape. Had I never heard of a bicep curl or triceps kick-backs???

BTW - I just threw those tan shorts out recently. I had kept them for years as something I aspired to one day wear again. I wore them constantly back then - they fit perfectly and were quite flattering. They had a low waist, which I need, and which was quite hard to find in 1998. Anyway, there was a time mid-diet where I tried them on and they fit and they were so horribly out of date and ridiculous-looking that I immediately put them into my huge 'donate' pile. Do not save old clothes!

One of my favorite breakfasts

2009-12-24T13:21:00.000-05:00

sorry pic is a bit blurry

Microwave a couple handfuls of frozen chopped spinach, served with fried egg + extra egg white on top and a home made pretzel bun. I like egg yolk to run into spinach as pictured above. I also sprinkled a bit of parm cheese on the top as it tasted too low-fat. And I even added butter to the pretzel! But just a bit. I give this 5 points without the butter/cheese and 6-7 with, depending on generosity of fats. I used very little cheese. I am not a huge fan of cheese/egg combination. Strange lady I know. I do like cheese on bread, but this was hot out of the oven and screaming for a bit of melted butter. I made it from Trader Joe's whole wheat pizza crust dough. A great thing to have on hand for many reasons! If I were just eating something boring like an English muffin I would have probably put a slice of gouda or something instead of having such a big roll. Anyway, point is, I make these decisions in my head, trying to keep the meal to a certain number of points/calories and splurging on the good stuff. So in this instance, the hot roll was more enticing than cheese. But in other instances, like if there is soft brie available, I'd rather have that and have a smaller serving of bread or meat. So rather than being low-carb or low-fat I try and be high-craving and low-overall calorie. In maintenance it's not as big a deal, but when I was still losing, that's how I thought through things.

Jenna and Indya

2009-12-23T12:59:00.001-05:00

2006? and Dec. 2009

Click on image to see bigger.
For more of our little photo shoot, see here:
Thanks Dave for getting dragged out of bed to be our photographer!

Interesting to see how the camera angles affected things if you look at all the pics.

This is actually a really big deal to both of us, I think, although I am totally speaking for Indya here. We got together last January, and I think it was maybe a few days into me having started. We were both really overweight and demoralized and it was sad to be with one of my dearest friends with us both feeling that way. I think we were both in the mid 180s.

So we went our separate ways (we live 8 hrs apart) and Indya read my blog and heard about my progress. She started her own plan. At about May I had lost maybe 30 lbs and she had lost 10. Then she stagnated and I kept losing. She had picked off all the low-hanging fruit in terms of behavioral changes and that's as far as those changes got her. By July Indya agreed to do things differently.

After a few defeated-sounding emails she just decided to agree to count what she was eating and instill a few rules about sweets and portions. She was already exercising a lot, but added in more weight resistance. She's a fellow Jackie/Jillian follower like me now. But the biggest difference, I think from an outsider perspective, was in tracking what she ate. She downloaded Livestrong to her iPhone and tracked every single thing she ate. This was a huge leap for her. Agreeing to track all food intake is an admission of failure of sorts for anyone. It means you cannot figure things out by intuition alone. It was a hard admission for me, as I documented here, but a completely essential and momentous one. In fact, if someone comes to me asking for help but refuses to track her eating I pretty much know she's not serious. I haven't been proven wrong yet.

So she started losing. Now she's down another 30 lbs. It wasn't as simple and easy as just tracking, and not eating sweets except on Saturday, but the details of her 'journey' for lack of a less dorky word, are for her to tell.

Last night we got together again at my house, almost exactly one year later. We are both 140 lbs. She looks fantastic!

Indya and I have had a very similar path in terms of tracking, reading a lot, exercising every day (I don't think she's missed a day since July), trying to eat whole foods, planning, taking Saturdays off. We differ a bit on the carb/fat intake but not wildly any more. At this point I eat more fat and she eats more carbs than say we each did 5 months ago and we've come close to meeting in the middle. We both eat a lot of eggs and wilted greens.

It's so funny to stand next to her in the mirror. We are the same exact height but have very different frames. Her shoulders are a full 2 inches above mine. I have a long neck. I'm much bigger framed with wider shoulders and hips and even wrists. (I have the frame of someone who is 5'9" and if my back weren't curved in a big 'S' I'd probably be that tall.) So physically we are different.

I gave her a bunch of clothes to try on for our much anticipated 'photoshoot'. It felt like college. We went over our remaining flab and our newly pronounced facial lines (negative consequence of losing weight when older) in our 'dressing room' (formerly known as Alex's room but he had fallen asleep with Dave in our bed while Indya and I were gabbing). Dave called us 'girls'. It was getting late and our photographer wanted to go to sleep but otherwise I could have done a lot more of the outfit-making. Anyway, outfits chosen, we dragged Dave out of bed and forced him to take our picture.

Neither of us had make-up or brushed hair, and indoor shots bore me to tears, but it felt so good to finally take that after picture of us together. The original one had haunted me for years. It was one of those photos that really made me see how bad I looked, even when I thought I had camouflaged every thing under baggy clothes. I always blamed unflattering photos on the angle. But now I realize that I don't look fat from any angle - no matter how candid the photo is. Old maybe, but not fat.

I think we both wanted that 2006 image banished as a bad old memory. So now it is. And good riddance!

Tower of temptation

2009-12-22T15:43:00.000-05:00

Why is this at the front of my office???

I think what is so hard about the holidays is that the temptations just keep coming and coming. One after the other - if you stave off the chocolate covered cherries then there is that crazy popcorn moose munch to torture you. Day after day after interminable snow day.

I had developed a mindset where I really consciously thought about every thing in my mouth - is this really good? Am I just eating it because it's sweet? Do I even like things so sweet? And now I'm slipping. I am taking little tastes of the cookies Natasha's friend brought her, the whipped cream that went on the Snow Day Sundae (and Monday) dessert I let them have, the hazelnut/chocolate truffle whatever sample at Trader Joe's. I used to bypass all of it, and easily. But not recently. Oh well - at least we're all in the same boat.

I'm trying to be more conscious, not let my guard down, be more discriminating. This is where the limited social life comes in handy.

Mindless snacking

2009-12-21T08:48:00.000-05:00

By far my worst pre-weight loss eating habit was mindless snacking. I think I may have eaten half my calories that way. It's so easy to do and so hard to break for the very reason that it's mindless. Meaning, it's hard to stop doing something you don't even realize you're doing.

I worked very hard at breaking this habit, but STILL, I find that when I'm not paying attention I walk through the kitchen grabbing handfuls of Mighty Bites or picking at the kids leftover apple slices, or grabbing a handful of peanuts. It's a constant battle with me. Going on day 3 of a debilitating snowstorm, I'm realizing just how much harder it is when at home all day. I have my computer near the kitchen and this makes it much worse.

I'm also exercising more, both inside and out, mainly to avoid cleaning/shoveling, but the long days are hard. I would think that almost 1 year into this I would have totally broken the habit, but instead my mindless snacking ebbs and flows. I certainly don't do it with high-cal foods like dried fruits and nuts without noticing. If I take a handful or dried cherries or peanuts I'm cognizant of it and it's usually because I'm really hungry and want to stave that off with something satisfying. But the lower-cal items like cereal and left-over kid items I eat without thinking sometimes.

I think part of the problem is that while at first I tried to cut the habit cold-turkey, eventually especially when hungry and cooking dinner I would allow myself to munch on carrots and sugar-snap peas or tomatoes, maybe even with a little hummus if I was really hungry. So "NO SNACKING" is not a hard and fast rule. I just don't think I could ever get there and I'm not sure I'd want to. There is really nothing wrong with eating carrots...except that it triggers my TMJ and a horrible headache. So I'm left with a slippery slope rule instead, which is the worst kind.

Soon we're going outside to shovel our street and try and slide our cars down the hill. That should keep my fingers out of the cereal box!

Thai chili

2009-12-20T07:02:00.000-05:00

This is what happens to non-recipe-using, non-shopping-list-using cooks...bad planning but a good result.

I had bought 2 packages of chicken thighs, planning on making the white chili for my mom. She loved it at my house and I thought I'd give it to her to take home for after her heart surgery. I got home and realized that I had no white beans, dried or canned, and couldn't make the chili. As it turns out chili for mom was a bad idea in the first place as she had a horrible stomach virus two days before and then obviously had surgery so she was eating things like toast and jam not beans and peppers.

A couple days later I figured I should deal with the chicken. So I put one batch in the freezer and browned the other batch, with some salt, cinnamon and nutmeg, based on cinnamon being a superfood...(I eat all those foods regularly by the way except sardines and maybe turmeric)

Anyway, I was going to freeze the chicken cooked but I decided to simmer the chicken in coconut milk for a while just because. Then I decided to throw some other things in the pot. I had some leftover roasted squash, which my Filipino nanny had once told me to simmer in coconut milk so that went in. I had just sauteed peppers and onions to have on hand during the week so those went in..then I decided I would call it Thai chili and threw in a can of black beans. I tasted it. It needed something bright, tangy...so in went a half a can of tomato paste. Still not bright enough...I remembered my tube of minced ginger from the fridge, and a squeeze went in. At this point how could I not add Thai chili paste? A bit of that went in as well-perhaps a bit too much actually.

OK - enough ingredients. A bit more simmering and we were done. Very good! I would have preferred a better chicken/squash/bean ratio (I prefer a 1-1-1 for meat/bean/veggie ratio in chili), but I only had one can of black beans and about 1.5 cups squash. If I make this again I'll actually plan and make sure to have the right ingredients on-hand.

I'm not crazy...or maybe I am???

2009-12-19T17:59:00.000-05:00

No sooner had I written a post about how I'm not crazy.... than the following two things happened....

1. I hit "publish" on the "not crazy" blog post and then immediately checked my email. I had an email from Dave with no subject line. Inside it said, "I'd like to try the last one on the page." Below was a link....

Was it a new restaurant? A vacation spot? Something else....hmmm.....click...

I clicked and I was immediately bombarded with this image of this horrifying man!!! He scares me!

If you scroll down far enough some more normal-looking people appear, doing plank rows, which both Jackie and Jillian do...but still!!!

Now for the record, I never go to any exercise sites or look up special push-ups etc. I just sit passively in front of my DVDs and do what they say. Dave researches different moves and then types up his routine on a spreadsheet and executes his plan, counting reps, planning combinations of body parts to work-out...pushing himself without Jillian chastising him. He will always be way more hard core than me. I don't want to do research and I don't want to go to any web site where that man resides!! The way I see it Jillian and Jackie have been practicing this stuff for 30+ years between them. That's enough knowledge for me.

OK - score 1 for me in the "not crazy" category. Not so sure about my husband though....

and then - completely unrelated to the above occurrence...

2. I read a fun article by David Pogue (I love him) about little fitness gizmos, which included the following quote:

And that business about manually entering everything you eat and drink is well-meaning, but come on — how many non-obsessive compulsives are really going to make that effort day in, day out, for months?

Ha ha ha! Score 1 for me in the "crazy" category.

For the record I never really did that - I just used the apps to determine point values for individual foods and then tallied up a daily total in my head and typed it into the blog in the evening - arguably a hair less tedious and OCD than scrolling through menus finding exact food items - but perhaps not. Sometimes I entered a few foods into Livestrong, but not every single food.

Anyway - funny timing. I guess I'm even.

Before and after

2009-12-18T11:55:00.005-05:00

I think no words are necessary.
How did I allow myself to look like that??
I tried to combine like poses.

Alex was not quite 3, CA, 2007 and Dec 2009.

Same CA trip on first one, Sept. 2009 in TX

Oct. 2007, July 2009

OK - a little not fair - I had a 6 month old (Feb 2003), and June 2009

Puerto Rico, March 2006 and Cape, July 2009

Cape, July 2005? Dec 2009

Super-fast high-protein red pepper fritatta

2009-12-17T17:03:00.000-05:00

I can't seem to turn the image. It's turned the right way on my hard drive but not when uploaded...hmmm....

Anyway, 6 eggs, 1/2 cup egg whites, 1/3 cup purchased red pepper spread, 1/2 cup nonfat Greek yogurt, all mixed together and then cooked on stove top on low heat and flipped once - I'm a good flipper. When done I sprinkled Parmesan cheese, freshly ground black pepper and drizzled a little olive oil over the top. Obviously it would be better broiled at the end instead of flipped but I was rushing to work. Also - sometimes I have little bowls of sautéed onions and peppers, chopped up small, ready to put in eggs or on pasta - ready to go in fridge. I was wishing I had some the day I made this - 5 min before leaving for work. Since browning onions is kind of messy and smelly they're great to do in a big batch, just with olive oil, salt, pepper, and throw into dishes during the week, even at breakfast!

Very good but goes down fast! I ate some for breakfast and the rest for lunch - with some bread. Good room temp too.