Bad economic news

I'm finding that the bad economic news is making any of my little recipes or dieting foibles seem silly today. I was just reading about Claire McCaskell's poignant but too late rant on the Senate floor. Go sister!!! You should have made such demands in September though.

So I will plug away unenthusiastically. Three people, including my mother commented on my progress today. It was extra nice for my mom to notice. Perhaps people noticed because I was wearing some smaller jeans. Now I bought them in August so this is no return to my 2000 body (not that my 2000 body was Heidi Kluhm-ish to begin with, but it was better than it is now). Of course these smaller jeans had to be unbuttoned in the car but it is a start. I live in fear of the dreaded weight loss "plateau"

I'm also cooking my mom's cabbage soup recipe right now. It's amazing how it smells exactly the same as it did growing up! 

food log (it's only 7:50pm, so I hope I don't snack later in the evening. I'm planning to just go to bed)

breakfast

whole wheat english muffin with 1tbs peanut butter 4pts

coffee with milk 1pt

snack

small yogurt 2pts

lunch

salad with 1tbs dressing 1pt

left soup home by accident - see below

oatmeal with 5 cashews 3 points (good use of emergency snack in desk)

snack

1.5 cups bean/veggie soup (this was really my lunch that I left home) 3pts? guessing

random mouthfuls of cardboard corn chips and soup testing...really must again stop mindlessly putting food in mouth.

dinner

bean soup was big so i had green beans roasted in oven with olive oil and salt. fabulous 2pts

3 mini meatballs - too fatty - 2pts

exercise

770 stairs, a few arm weights, a few crunches...kind of half-hearted

Mireille Guiliano would be proud

Today was a much better day!

I ate only food I like, tried something new, cooked some good meals and made my family all eat together, and eat the same adult food. What a success! I also discovered a new low-cal dessert. Exercise was a little lame, and I think I ate too much dinner because I was so busy worrying about what my kids ate that I forgot to measure my food.

Let's start with dessert. I experimented with the plain non-fat Greek yogurt, trying to make chocolate yogurt. How I got started liking chocolate yogurt in my thirties is the fault of my nephews, but that's another story.

So take one Greek yogurt (which has very little tartness, a ton of protein and is both extremely smooth and creamy, as well as being very filling), add a heaping tablespoon of Hershey's Dark cocoa powder, and a little sugar. I want to try it with the new supposedly natural sugar-substitute called Truvia, but I haven't bought any yet. At any rate, I only used a couple teaspoons. It was delicious! I made a creamy treat that tasted just like an Oreo! The chocolate was about 30 cal, the yogurt 90 and the sugar I guess another 40. But that whole concoction could definitely be two portions for a total of about 80 cal/portion.

I have also been cooking a lot lately, due to being stuck in the house. Even Alex noticed. In the car on the way to school today he asked me why I was cooking so much, which for some reason I found incredibly endearing of him. Today, upon learning of the dreaded two-hour school delay, I made a bean soup with added corn, tomatoes, onions, celery and carrots. The corn was to satisfy my kids but it probably made it much starchier. We made the kids eat some of it for dinner. Lots of grumbling but they ate it and eventually realized that they liked it and stopped their knee-jerk complaining at eating something healthy. I crumbled a bit of leftover bacon from last week and that really satisfied Natasha - and her daddy! I kept pulling bits of bacon from my bowl and dropping them into hers, like a true mama bird. A little bacon really goes a long way towards flavoring things so I realized I didn't need so much.

My favorite French lady Mireille Guiliano, is very into soups, because they are filling and healthy. I also was very against soups for a long time due to an extremely negative experience smelling turkey broth simmering in my house all day one time when I was pregnant with Alex. I swear it threw me off soups for years. But it is pretty hard to deny the usefulness of soups when dieting. They are filling, low-cal, easy to make and easy to put in a thermos and reheat in a microwave at work. 

Mireille also advocates cooking big elaborate meals on the weekend with leftovers that can be reconfigured as various kinds of quick home made meals during the week. I fully subscribe to these ideas, now that I have a little more time to undertake them. The first time I read Mireille's book I was still in sleep-deprivation hell and almost threw the book across the room. She also wants me to go shopping every day, which is kind of a death sentence when you have a 3 yr old and a 2 yr old (which thank God I no longer have!). But there are some good concepts in there.

Food log

breakfast

teff - an Ethiopian porridge-like substance, the smallest grain in the world

coffee with 1% milk

half an apple with 2 tsp peanut butter

lunch

salad with 1 tbs blue cheese dressing

3/4 cup bean soup

snack

strawberries and a few bites Oreo yogurt - the kids wouldn't give me any!

dinner

1.5 cups bean soup with 1/2 crumbled slice bacon (too much soup I think)

dessert

a few more bites of the Oreo yogurt concoction

exercise

20 min aerobics in front of tv while kid were in the bath

 

Expanding my reach

I'm not sure how many days people will be interested in reading about what I eat and don't eat.

Perhaps I should write about other things as well. That would make me a blogger-wannabe of the worst order!

Until recently, I have been seriously suspicious of the whole "web 2.0" revolution, blogging especially. I spent 6 years working on Internet technologies in the height of the tech boom actually making web sites that did things - like e-commerce. To me the web was about increasing efficiencies in business and personal transactions. Why on Earth would I want to read other people's opinions about some arcane news item or let people know what I fed my kids for dinner?? 

But of course now that my kids are older and I have some time to waste I'm finding it pretty fulfilling to have a sense of what my friends are doing that I lost touch with 20 years ago - and my friends are surprisingly interested to hear me confess when I serve dino nuggets for dinner. And as for blogging - I was just on the wrong side! I'm the queen of unsolicited opinions. Really, it is a daily struggle, one that I often lose, to keep my unwanted opinions to myself. Years ago when passing a vacant storefront my husband joked that I should open a store, "Opinions, $5." So blogging is perfect for me, and I don't have to pay to rent a storefront!

At any rate, it seems I should expand upon topics aside from what I eat. Surely this topic will grow boring. I only started posting that info as a way to be accountable. But I'm kind of in the swing of things now in terms of healthy portions, even getting good at determining real hunger from transitory hunger or boredom. For the record real hunger is when I start to get really angry AND it's more than an hour from a meal. I'm making wiser choices about the kinds of food I eat, snacking less, exercising more consistently. So it is kind of like Cheers after Sam and Rebecca get together. It's boring. 

Of course there are more struggles to come. I'm not at my goal weight - not even close, but I did lose 12 pounds, as evidenced by the scale in Bed Bath and Beyond today. What else would a person who has missed 7 days of work in the past two weeks do on her first day back but run to Bed Bath and Beyond to accomplish the suddenly vital errand of buying a new shower loofah?

I'm afraid to buy a scale as I feel it would lead to obsessive, unhealthy, twice-daily weight checking. Instead I come up with silly reasons to go to Bed Bath and Beyond to use theirs. 

But I digress from my point. My point is that I will try and address issues aside from my dieting foibles from time to time.  Tonight however, I will detail how pathetic my afternoon was. 

First of all, after eating only 4-5 points each for breakfast and lunch I was starving and looking for a snack. I was at work so I ate my plain yogurt with no flavor and was not enjoying it. It was just something with protein to fill me up. Now when I add a little honey and a handful of Go Lean Crunch it's quite tasty - a mix of textures, sweet, sour, etc. I felt kind of like an idiot wasting a perfectly good snack on just trying to get full. That is not a way to enjoy life!

Then at home I was just dying to eat dinner starting at about 4:30. I kept trying to eat bits of things like chunky salsa with baked tortilla chips and tea with a splash of milk. The baked corn chips were so cardboard-like that I just switched to celery. Then Natasha and her friend were hungry for dinner at 5:15. I was trying to wait until 6 but ended up picking at their food. I had some turkey with bad low-fat gravy, some of Natasha's plain potatoes and was still hungry. I was not sitting, was picking at things, and was completely unsatisfied. It was so pathetic. I could have made a nice sit-down family dinner but just ate standing up instead and we all ate at different times! I hate that!!! I did realize that trader Joe's prepared Cuban-style black beans have only 1 point for half a cup. I rounded off my meal with some of them - warm and filling. I'm not having dessert of any kind tonight except for 2 prunes because I'm annoyed with myself for not really enjoying my food today.

Food log - must eat more fruit

breakfast

whole wheat roll with egg white and tad sharp cheddar cheese

lots of coffee with milk

lunch

very nice salad with 1 tbs blue cheese dressing (delish) 2 slices procuitto, another small roll

snack

10 cardboard corn chips

1/4 cup black bean and corn salsa

celery

dinner

this was a really pathetic state of affairs. 

3 oz turkey

1/2 cup roasted potatoes with sweet mustard sauce (this I made the other day)

1/2 cup Cuban black beans

dessert

2 prunes

exercise

770 stairs with ipod - officemate not in due to weather

Snow Day

Ah snow days. So fun for kids and so tortuous for adults. Actually, this one isn't so bad so far - the kids are actually entertaining themselves. Thank God for my iphone game apps. The problem is that we don't really have enough snow for sledding, although maybe by the afternoon that will change. All I keep coming up with for ideas for things to do seems to be cooking. I really want to make that Alton Brown pretzel recipe. I wonder if I can substitute whole wheat for part of the flour. It seems like a project that would take up a lot of the day. But I can't imagine not eating several of them. I'd have to bring some over to my neighbors. One of my friends said that for "foodies like us it pretty much sucks all of the time." I haven't found that to be totally true yet, but that's only because I haven't been around too much good food lately. But as soon as I'm at a restaurant or other place with really good choices it does start to feel that way. But whatever, people certainly have much tougher problems than wanting to eat pretzels. 

Food log (fyi these are always from the day before)

breakfast

coffee and milk

cottage cheese and banana

lunch

3oz salmon

1/3 cup 7 layer dip (this poor choice was due to not being able to look at my reheated leftovers anymore, and coincidentally someone bringing this into the office. I threw most of my lunch from home away.)

dinner

multigrain lasagna, frozen from TJs with extra broccoli - one advantage to store bought food is that it is easy to determine how big of a portion to eat to attain a certain amount of points. I ate enough to be full, and then slightly hungry at 9pm but not starving - just like Goldilocks!

1/2 of a No Pudge Fudge brownie

exercise

770 stairs

15 minutes of arm weights and sit-ups.

First milestone - people notice

Since I work at the National Cancer Institute, I have been pretty open about my colonoscopy. Everyone is so supportive and proud that I had my screening done. It's so nice! My Nigerian friend asked me if I had "lost a bit of myself" At first, I assume she is referring to a holistic, cleansing aspect of the colonoscopy (perhaps cleansing is party of Nigerian culture?) , but in fact she just means "did I lose weight?" She says she sees it in my face. A few other people notice as well. My clothes are much looser, but I still have so many that fit me after Natasha was born that still don't fit at all - not to mention the ones from BEFORE my pregnancies. Why they're even still in my closet I couldn't tell you. A few people have suggested getting a tape measure to keep track of certain widths - hips, thighs, stomach, upper arms. Supposedly this is more helpful than pure weight, especially if you start lifting weights. This seems like a logical idea. Put on list of errands! Turning down sweets is getting harder, especially when they're baked at home with the kids. Even No Pudge Fudge brownies add up. Last night I succumbed to eating a BLT with 2 strips of bacon and real mayonnaise. I can't stand the low-fat kind. Those points add up so quickly when bacon is involved! Sometimes that point system just makes me furious! How can my two little strips of bacon be so many points!!! Goddam it can't a woman have a little bacon once in a while??? It was nitrate-free and from some supposedly very happy pig!! As far as Weight Watchers is concerned that counts for nothing. Michal Pollan can bug off. I guess the answer is yes, I can have bacon, but it uses up lots of points. I will say, that after eating a dinner with some fat in it I was far less hungry or craving of dessert later in the evening.

Food Log
breakfast
I can't remember! I think a banana was involved

lunch
arugula salad with 3oz salmon, 1 tbs pistachios, 1 tsp olive oil, 1/2 cup couscous, cherry tomatoes

snack
90 cal cottage cheese with tomatoes - really staved off hunger for a while

dinner
BLT on wrap with 2 strops bacon and 1 tsp mayo

exercise
30 min aerobics in front of tv with Sunday morning shows.

Jan 22-23 - Colonoscopy

About a year ago I decided to take care of all the physical issues that I had ignored through pregnancy, nursing and toddler-haze. This involved starting to exercise regularly again, which I did for a while, getting my vision checked, my varicose veins removed (messed up the exercise) and two cancer screenings, a special eye exam and a colonoscopy. I am proud to say that after today, they have all been taken care of. I am post-colonoscopy and don't have to go again for five years. No pollups. The doctor complimented my prep and was smiling at the results.

I am left with a stomach ache, which  I actually think has nothing to do with the procedure and everything to do with a mild virus in my house. Both Natasha and Dave have had similar pains in the past few days. 

Obviously my food intake yesterday was zero points. Last night I was beyond hungry and into crazy. I was screaming at everyone and snapping at the slightest infraction. I would be a very mean anorexic. Then  instead of going to bed early for some reason I decided to torture myself by watching Alton Brown make home made soft pretzels. I must try that. Then I stayed up to torture myself further with Iron Chef America. The ingredient was milk and it intrigued me. At any rate, I was dreaming of all the wonderful food I would eat today, only to be thwarted by a virus. I did eat 2 portions of my mother's fantastic home made soup which she brought for me, for lunch.

I got very hungry at snack time - 4:30 and allowed myself to descend into old habits of a big afternoon snack (really a meal). It's shocking how quickly old habits return! Carrots, hummus and a few (maybe 10?) of the kids' crackers. I really do have a weakness for Cheezits.

For dinner I made a delicious sauteed chard and mushrooms with camembert sauce. Not exactly dietetic. It's actually amazing how much cheese those veggies soak up without being the slightest bit greasy! 

Personal grooming has been completed - although I haven't had my hair cut since July. Now it's on to fixing this broken house.

Notice on inauguration posts

Hi,

Somehow I am unable to integrate photos with the story, so you'll have to view them at my photo site. I also didn't cull through and delete enough so sorry for the repetition.

These posts are newest to oldest, so if you want to read them chronologically, start with the Concert, which was Sunday afternoon, and then the Huffington Post Ball which was Monday night, etc. Sorry for the typos. Enjoy!

Jenna