the veggie paparazzi

Newer Blog

2008-01-24T21:22:00.001-05:00

I still log in to Blogger so that I can comment on people's blogs when they have Blogger-only comments set up, but I don't blog here anymore. You may visit my current blog by clicking on this link.

Time for the big switcheroo!

2007-10-16T14:26:00.000-05:00

The last few months have seen some major changes for me, especially concerning food.

Since January, I've been writing this blog and talking about my work towards eating heathfully most of the time and reasonably the rest of the time . . . about working through the various emotional and psychological issues I have around food . . . and then about working exercise into my life as well.

In June, I was diagnosed with food allergies to a large number of foods. A couple of weeks ago, I learned that instead of just allergies, I also have atypical celiac disease. Atypical because I have to give up cow dairy (which has casein, very similar to the gluten in wheat, barley, rye, etc.) in addition to gluten, and atypical because it's not necessarily my small intestine that's carrying the brunt of the effects of my consumption of gluten and dairy. . . .

Before this year, I had already cut out some foods while trying to deal with interstitial cystitis. Then I got on some amazing antihistamines that helped with that condition. More recently, cutting out my food allergens has dropped my IC to its lowest level since I first developed it.

In any case, over the past few months, I have not only appreciated the weight-loss blogging community but also the food allergy/intolerance community as well. Both have buoyed me as I have worked towards being a healthier me.

At some point I started thinking about combining my interest in the two in a blog. When you can't have dairy, tomatoes, wheat (or other gluten-containing grains), soy, almonds, eggs, and a few other foods, you realize you have lost the ability to eat about 90% of what most Americans eat. And as you start to figure out food, you want to be able to share that with others.

And honestly, the restrictions are not all bad. Trying to make foods unhealthy without any butter, wheat, soy, or eggs is not impossible, but it's more difficult--especially when you consider that I try to eat whole, organic foods and eschew artificial additives and preservatives. I walk into grocery stores and find myself untempted by a huge variety of foods that would have called to me two months, six months, or two years ago.

So I'm taking my weight loss public in a way that I have not done before now; my full name and photo will be attached to what I'm writing. (Of course, I do know my sleuthing Turkish reader found me out a while back!) I'm adding in doses of how I'm dealing with food allergies/intolerances for good measure on my new blog, including recipes that my friends who can eat all those foods say are genuinely good. (And plenty of those recipes are normal ones that just happen not to have any allergens in them.)

I have, in the last year, not spent time counting anything and have been able to lose weight that way; part of what I have been doing is trying to prove to myself that I can trust myself to make good decisions without strictly rationing what I eat. However, I do recognize that other people find it very important to count what they eat. So on my new blog, I'm plugging each recipe into a program I bought before I post it so that I can offer an approximation of calories per serving, and WW points as well.

My new blog is called "Aprovechar," and if you want to know why I picked such , you'll have to head over there and read the first post I wrote there. (Of course, I'd love it if you'd link up to me, too.)

As you can see on my new blog, I'll still be tracking my weight loss there, and I'll still be writing on the same topics. I'll just be adding more topics and trying to keep a focus on getting the most out of life every way I can.

Because of some posts I have written on here, I am not linking this blog to that one. I wrote on this blog with the intention of keeping it private and unattached to my name, and that remains. Please keep my privacy intact by not referring to this blog by name if you comment there. I won't, at least for now, be announcing the new blog to many people I know in my day-to-day life, but I'm sure I will tell some of them at some point.

In the meantime, I hope you will join me at my new blog and add a link to it in your blogroll. (Yes, right now! Won't you forget later? I often do. ;))

Oh, and I may still be posting comments to you from this blog, since some of you have Blogger-only comments enabled.

New site: http://aprovechar.danandsally.com

One more post before I go

2007-10-11T09:50:00.000-05:00

Jessica Seinfeld was apparently on Oprah recently talking about hiding veggies in kids' foods. I thought the ways to include veggies using purees were ones we could all put to good use, kids or not. I love what different vegetables and fruits add to meals; my chocolate zucchini bread is one of my favorite foods.

Anyway, check it out if you want to increase your veggie quotient easily.

Away

2007-10-11T09:04:00.000-05:00

I'm headed to my best friend's wedding in our hometown this afternoon, so it's unlikely I'll be blogging for a few days.

I'm fully expecting a small gain this week, as I will have greatly reduced control over my menu on the trip. And I'm okay with that.

I hope you all have a lovely week!

Half-Way Mark!

2007-10-06T09:46:00.001-05:00

177.4--down 1.6 pounds! And that's been my approximate weight every morning for the last 4 mornings, so I know it's real.

That also means that in this year's weight loss, I've reached the halfway point in my overall weight loss goal--26.2 pounds. (From my highest weight, I'm down over 45 pounds.)

Reaching the halfway point means I get to reward myself if I choose to. My husband and I set aside a small pot of money for my weight-loss rewards, so now I need to think if I want to spend any of it. . . .

C25K Update

2007-10-05T09:43:00.001-05:00

I ran 29 minutes straight this morning, and honestly, it didn't even get hard until about 20 minutes in. It never got unbearable. (I don't do pain.)

The funny thing is, that run, even though it's the longest I've done, doesn't even feel miraculous anymore. But it is amazing if you compare my health and stamina now to what it was six or nine months ago.

I took a week off of running prior to today--first to recover from an overexertion injury (I also got a massage to help with that, mmmmm), and then because of rain. It actually did drizzle during part of my run today, too, but I ran on anyway.

I think taking a week off is good occasionally. Today, I felt much more rested and recovered when I started my run. The first 10 minutes or so were almost, well, easy, which is crazy.

This was my first day of using an iPod instead of my cute little former mp3 player, may it rest in peace. (The eulogy: it served me well.) Since my husband got an iPhone (his school bought him one), he uses that for music and everything else now, so I get to use his "old" iPod Nano and don't have to worry about buying a new one with the death of my old one. I got a red, wide armstrap from Nike (I don't care about brands, but I did not want a narrow thing that would feel like a tourniquet) to hold the iPod while I ran, and I have to say it served me well. It stayed in place, it was not too constricting, and it sheltered the iPod from the misty downpour. I think the earplugs on the iPhone (I borrowed my husband's) are great; they fit in my ears and block out other noise without hurting my ears like most in-ear headphones do.

I have two weeks until my first 5k (attempt 2, last spring's attempt having turned up to be up the side of a freaking mountain and back down). So I have about .75 mi to increase my run in two weeks for that 5k. Does anyone have any supportive words or stories for me about that kind of increase?

Feeling better

2007-10-03T10:38:00.000-05:00

Well, I don't know what happened to me yesterday, but it was just one day. I feel better today--slept a bit late and came into work a bit late, but now I feel better . . . just empty after all my tummy troubles!

One aspect of taking care of yourself is that, if you mess up for a day (purposefully or not), you don't have to punish yourself. You just have to go back to taking care of yourself. So today for breakfast, I ate an allergen-free pumpkin muffin (from a batch I made and froze this weekend), and for lunch, I brought several cans of organic soup to pick from to have something that will go easy on my stomach. I'm not beating myself up at all. That's quite a change from how I would have reacted a year ago. I love being in this process for the right reasons and in the right mindset!

Urgh

2007-10-02T19:59:00.000-05:00

Oh boy. Yuck.

Today has not been a good day for me with food.

I met the dietician at 9:30, and we had a great visit until about 11:15. However, due to a test she did on me, I was only allowed to have water before we met.

By the time I got to work at 11:45, I was ravenous. I heated up my lunch right away and ate about 2/3 of it.

But I felt weird--shaky, strange. And tired--I slept terribly last night.

For some reason I thought I wanted chocolate. So I had one ounce, and then another.

A couple of hours later, I got this euphoric idea to make macaroni and cheese for dinner--to figure out how to make mac'n'cheese that I can eat (that has no cow dairy in it). When I left work, I picked my husband up from his job and headed to Whole Foods. I asked the guy at the cheese counter what sheep and/or goat cheese he would recommend for mac'n'cheese, and he gave me a sample of one. It was delicious. I bought it and another kind.

When I got home and was ready to grate the cheese I had sampled, I noticed that--so random!--it contained egg whites. Egg whites in goat gouda? Yep. Eggs are my worst food allergy. I sent my husband back to exchange the cheese for another kind and fretted a bit over whether the sample I'd eaten would upset my stomach.

While he was gone, I ate bits of the other two kinds of cheese I used. Finally, I was concerned I wouldn't be hungry for dinner if I kept eating, so I stopped.

At one point while my husband was gone, I thought, Is mac and cheese what I really want? A wave of exhaustion hit, and I thought, No, what I want is sleep.

But I didn't listen to my body. I thought, Well, I have to make dinner anyway. I decided to make the mac and cheese with butternut squash soup and sage added so that it would be tasty but a bit healthier.

Then I decided I would drink a fruit-juice-sweetened soda from the fridge. Why? I don't really know. And after one sip, I didn't want more. But I kept drinking it. I didn't listen to myself. Why?

My husband and I invited over my best friend and her fiance; my best friend had asked for my help with something, and I was making a huge pan of macaroni, so I thought they could just eat with us. They brought a salad of greens, dried cranberries, dried banana slices, and sunflower seeds, and we ate poppyseed dressing on it. I ate a salad, and then I thought, Hmm, I don't really want very much mac and cheese now. So I took what seemed a moderate scoop of it--1/2 c. to 2/3 c. maybe (it was the main dish, right?)--and ate that. Everyone else ate seconds, which made me feel a bit ill just to watch. I felt so full of fat, so full of dairy, even though it wasn't the cow dairy I'm allergic to. It was so rich and . . . then I had to go to the bathroom.

My stomach got upset and is still upset. I didn't get to help my friend; I just went and lay down on the bed face-down. Her fiance stayed with my husband to wash dishes.

Was it the macaroni and cheese itself that made me sick? The amount of dairy fat I had? The sample of cheese I ate that had egg in it? What role did my exhaustion play? Who knows? But the rare times when I feel this way strongly reaffirm to me that when my body speaks, I should listen.

And now I'm listening by going to bed early.

.6 pound loss

2007-09-29T08:57:00.001-05:00

I'll take it! 179.0--it's the lowest number I've seen on a scale since probably my sophomore year of college. So yes ma'am, I will take it.

True stamina

2007-09-28T13:15:00.001-05:00

Do you ever read stories like this one and think, "Good Lord, that is a woman of strength"? How many people would have died not only from the injuries, but also just from giving up, if they were in her situation?

If people can withstand things like that, I think, surely I can manage to hold out on little things that require a bit more stamina than is comfortable. Our lives tend to be so physically comfortable that it knocks us for a loop when life requires fortitude and exertion that we aren't used to.

I think occasionally of a story one of my professors, who had worked in Haiti, told me when we were talking about the word "womanish" and how it means "strength" instead of "silly girlishness" in the Haitian creole. There was a woman she knew in Haiti who was very pregnant but needed to go to the market, which was about half a day's walk away. She walked about half the way to the market, but on the route she went into labor. She gave birth, cut the cord herself, rested a couple of hours, got up, and walked back home again. How anyone could have that strength, I don't know, but it sure is amazing to me.

It's true!

2007-09-27T20:41:00.000-05:00

The pants in size 14 fit me in several stores. I didn't love the fit of all of them, but I did love the fit of some of them. In fact, I bought two pairs of pants as a result, one of which I will wear tomorrow. How exciting!

I was also able to wear size M or 12 in every shirt I tried on. When I put on a smaller shirt and size 14 pants, I went, "Oh" when I looked in the mirror, because I could actually see how I've gotten smaller. I tried on a gorgeous silk size 12 dark blue slip dress that looked great, too--if only I had somewhere to wear one! I tried on another size 14 dress that was too big.

So hurrah! I am still shrinking even if the pounds aren't. It's nice to have confirmation.

Nutrition Calculations for Chipotle

2007-09-27T12:45:00.000-05:00

I don't eat typical fast food anymore, and there are very few chain restaurants that hold appeal for me. One that does is Chipotle, but holy hell, if you eat the whole thing you order you are consuming a lot of calories and fat, even if you get a burrito bowl.

There's a great Chipotle nutrition calculator on the web that comes in handy for planning. Today for lunch, I went to Chipotle but told them I only wanted three (not the standard four) crispy tacos even if I paid for all four. Then I got chicken, lettuce, salsa, corn, and guac--but no cheese or sour cream (which I shouldn't eat anyway with my food allergies). As you can see in the sidebar, I ended up eating about 575 cal, which I consider a reasonable lunch since my dinner tonight will be a light one. (And it was so tasty!)

Getting a bit of help

2007-09-27T11:26:00.000-05:00

There's a nutritionist/dietician I went to see after I was diagnosed with interstitial cystitis. She helped me figure out what I could eat that would be healthy and would avoid the various foods that I need to avoid. She's very skilled, reasonably priced, and also nice. She questions the wisdom of many things that the mass marketers tell you (like to eat a lot of dairy), just like I do. I really trust her.

I emailed her a couple of days ago to ask her whether she thinks my weight loss stagnation, which seems strange to me given my eating habits, could really just be because I am gaining so much muscle. We decided that I would meet up with her to do a test that measures my metabolic rate--that measures how many calories my body burns in a day. I offered to do a week's food diary as well so that she can see what I have been eating. Despite having purposefully not calculated the calories/fat/points/etc. of anything I have eaten in the last nine months, I think it makes sense to go in to visit the dietician with as much information as possible. So on my sidebar until she and I meet, I will be recording what I eat to the best of my ability.

After emailing her in frustration a few days ago, this morning I woke up and pulled on a pair of pants I've only worn 2 or 3 times since I bought them and had them altered. They are really big on me in the waist and are sliding down on my hips! In the last few days, too, everyone has suddenly been telling me I look smaller again--even people who see me regularly. My husband says he can definitely tell I'm smaller when he wraps his arms around me. So tonight, I'm taking him to the mall with me (getting him to agree to go clothes shopping is a big deal), and I'm going to try on some 14 pants in the mall. If they fit, I will know that I am on track even though my weight isn't dropping.

Honestly, I wish I had measured my various body parts--upper thigh, waist, etc.--a long time ago with a tape measure so that I could measure progress in inches as well as pounds. I would encourage any of you who are taking on an exercise regimen to consider measuring yourself once a month in addition to weighing in case you get at a weight loss stagnation point like I have. I guess I should start measuring myself now, anyway, since I can still see progress over the coming months!

Thanks for the inspiration, y'all

2007-09-25T20:32:00.001-05:00

Today at lunch and yesterday before dinner, I read your various weight-loss blogs to keep myself on track with making good decisions. At lunch, it was reading your blogs (on my laptop at a restaurant) that prompted me to pay attention and push my platter-size serving away when I just reached the satisfaction point.

So thanks! I have to say the wl blogging community is an amazingly inspiring and supportive group.

In the 170's--and a question for you

2007-09-22T08:25:00.001-05:00

179.6

It's not an enormous loss, but I'll take it! Running is giving me awesome muscles (the leg ones are nice, but the ab ones are more impressive to me), so my husband pointed out that I may not be able to expect a big drop at a time when my muscle mass is visibly, palpably increasing pretty rapidly. I wish that weren't true, but maybe it will be--and I'd rather have the muscles than have a more quickly reduced weight. I will be thrilled if I can drop .6 pounds per week at this point, honestly. Doing that would still get me where I need to go.

Of course, I'd be thrilled with a good, old-fashioned 2-lb. drop in a week, too.

I had started doing upper-body exercises in our living room on the mornings I don't run. Then we had a friend from out of town sleep in our living room for a week, so that put that aside. But he's gone now, so it's time to get back on track with that!

Last night my husband, two friends, and I went out to dinner. At dinner, I got a side salad and split an appetizer order of homemade chips with blue cheese and bacon with a friend. (I'm not supposed to eat blue cheese but decided to do it anyway for once.) I was really excited about the chips, but after I ate one, I thought, "These aren't as good as I was hoping they would be." I ate a few more, and my nose started itching--my first allergic reaction to most foods. I ate a couple more, and then I thought, "These also really aren't worth the calories." Instead of just blue cheese, they had a gooey bechamel sauce on them--and not a very good one, honestly. The bacon was nearly nonexistent. So I mentally pushed the plate away from me and tucked my hands under the table--feeling mildly full but not stuffed, and glad I stopped. If they had been fabulous, they would have been worth the calories . . . but they weren't.

One very cool non-scale victory occurred last night. After dinner, the four of us were traveling down a busy street when we saw two dogs dart in and out of the road. I suggested that we stop and see if they had collars to call their owners. One had a collar--with no tag--and the other had no collar. But they were sweet, cute, well-behaved dogs who clearly belonged to someone and also clearly did not have street smarts. (Where I grew up, a wandering outdoor dog was common, but in Midtown Atlanta, it's definitely not.) We spent the rest of the night walking the dogs to a friend's fenced yard, walking all over the area to ask if anyone was missing a dog, and finally taking the dogs to a late-night vet to get checked for one of those subcutaneous tags people put in animals now. At that point, we got a call from another friend who had joined our search that while putting up posters, he had come across the dogs' owner. Apparently the guy had taken off one dog's collar to bathe her and let the other one outside as well. He went back inside for a few minutes, and someone opened his fence to let the dogs out. (Sadly, this doesn't surprise me.) But anyway, my point is this: I went all over the place on foot, sometimes gripping a very strong, big blond lab, sometimes running to catch up with someone--and I never got winded or tired. My body was just capable of doing it, as our bodies are meant to do. It's always exciting to realize that something that would have been a struggle for me previously is easy now!

Back to weight: I've lost 24 pounds this year and I'm 2 pounds from my halfway mark, because--unless I decide I want to stop before I get there--my weight goal is 150 pounds, which will mean a 53 pound loss from my recent high weight (and a 76 pound drop from the highest weight I measured--wow!). I am sure that my weight goal is a lot higher than many other people's goals, but I have no dreams or desires to be a size 4 or 6. A 10 would make me perfectly happy and would, I think, not leave me stressing over each bite I eat like trying to maintain a smaller size might.

I would also, next spring, love to be able to wear a bikini and feel good in it. Not a string thing--I can't imagine something skimpy holding up my boobs without hurting my neck and back--but something that shows my stomach without me feeling entirely self-conscious. (By the way, despite all the talk about her being fat, I think Britney Spears had a pretty awesome body at the VMAs. The outfit wasn't very flattering, but I think a small amount of belly on women is attractive. I would love to have a body like she had at the VMAs. I think holding someone up to the ideal of how she looked at 17, before two pregnancies, is crazy.)

What are your long-term goals? What do you envision for yourself six months or a year from now, health-wise, weight-wise, looks-wise? Are you already planning for a celebration of when you reach some goal you have? Are you saving money for the splurge you may do when you reach a certain milestone? I'd love to hear what you are thinking.

170s, I'm coming back to you! And then I'm leaving you for the 160s!

2007-09-20T13:30:00.001-05:00

I'm determined that I am going to lose weight this week and break this seemingly endless plateau. Going through the various w.l. bloggers I read to see their progress has inspired me. I have also gone back through the VP archives to read up on my previous efforts. All of those have combined to make for a back-to-basics week for me--the obvious stuff that it's easy to have slip away from me over time:

1.) I'm eating until I am just satisfied--basically, until I first feel the food hit my stomach. If I stop then, within 15-20 minutes, I'll feel very happy with the meal I've eaten, and generally I'll have consumed a reasonable number of calories. The bonus of eating this way is having lots of leftovers when we eat out!

2.) I'm exercising on a regular basis--both the hardcore kind and the lesser. By lesser, I mean that the little bits of exercise we do here and there add up, so I'm parking farther from the store, getting up from my desk at work more often to move around, grabbing my husband to dance in the kitchen while the green beans are steaming, carrying the few groceries around the store instead of putting them in a buggy. (The bonus with the last one is that it's much more difficult to impulse buy when you have to carry your impulsive purchase along with everything else.)

3.) I'm giving myself a smaller serving at meals and then waiting 15-20 minutes to see if I want more. This is partly a home-eating corollary to #1. If it's already on my plate at home, I'm more tempted to eat it; somehow, putting aside food for later if it has been on my plate at home never occurs to me, even though it's no different than getting a to-go box at a restaurant. At home, it's easier if I just put less on my plate to start with.

4.) I'm keeping desserts as an occasional, once-or-twice-a-week treat instead of indulging regularly. Indulging regularly in desserts can be a total downfall for me. And quite honestly, since I discovered my various food allergies, this has been an area where I have really struggled. I haven't gone completely nuts like I would have 1-2 years ago, but I have eaten dessert more often than I was earlier this year . . . emotionally/mentally as some sort of, "Well, if I can't have that, I can have this" thing. Ultimately, it doesn't make me happy to indulge too often; it takes much of the pleasure out of it.

5) When I eat dessert, I'm starting with a small portion and then waiting to see if that satisfies my craving for something sweet. Often, that's all I want; the first two bites are heavenly, and the rest are just so-so. So one cookie may be the perfect treat. If I want a second or third one after that, fine. But starting with one cookie (or one very small slice of cake, or whatever) seems to be helping me out. I keep the cookies I make in the freezer now to keep me from the on-the-counter snacking syndrome. Out of sight, out of mind? Not exactly . . . but I'm back to telling myself, "It will be a real treat when I eat it--if I only eat it a couple of times a week."

6) When my first thought is that I'm hungry (like right now, for instance!), I ask myself, Do I really want food, or am I actually thirsty? It's amazing how often my body gets those two confused. I don't set any particular water goals for myself these days as I know I get plenty of water, but I definitely feel less tempted to snack if I try out water before eating.

7) I have recently officially been diagnosed as being hypoglycemic--a mild case, I think? I've guessed I was for a long time. If I start to feel that anxious hungry feeling that comes with hypoglycemia, I eat a small snack (a granola bar, or 2 T of nuts) when I first start to feel it coming on. (Also, I find avoiding corn syrup, honey, and sugar early in the day helps me to avoid the hypoglycemia in general.) If I wait until my blood sugar has dropped really low to eat something, I feel panicky in my shakiness and will gobble down way more than I need to fix the problem.

8) I'm planning my meals a week at a time--which I always do--but I'm back to including only one starch at each meal. Serving potatoes? Don't need bread then. Having burgers on buns? Grilled, herbed squash is a great side item. I grew up in what was definitely a 2-starch-per-meal household (bread and one starchy veggie or pasta), and when I eat that way, I definitely consume more calories than I would otherwise.

9) I'm trying to make our meals 2/3 vegetables. This was easier to do with vegetarian eating than it is now that I am allergic to so much vegetarian protein, but I'm keeping it in my mind as I plan meals.

10) I'm focusing on how much oil I use when I'm cooking. It's all too easy to add an extra tablespoon (or two or three) when a food really doesn't need it. With my great Calphalon nonstick pans, I only need to use a little bit of fat for flavor in most recipes.

I'm going to get back into the 170s I so briefly visited, dammit. If it doesn't happen by this coming weekend, it will happen by the next one.

Just a bit farther

2007-09-19T11:12:00.000-05:00

As I just emailed one of my friends, I really love running in the early mornings. I hate getting up in the early mornings, as I have never been an early morning person. But there are several factors that make me run in the morning: there's a lower amount of smog then, the weather is cooler, and my stomach is empty or nearly empty without me making any special schedule arrangements for it to be that way. (Running on a half-full or full stomach equals bad cramping problems for me.) When the alarm goes off and I make myself roll out of bed, I usually haven't slept well, and I always think, "I am too tired to do this." But by the time I fasten up my awesome sports bra for women with big boobs and lace up my shoes, I am awake. By the time I am done stretching, I have pumped myself up to go. I get out to the park when it's still dark outside--I can even see a few stars, or, more likely, satellites--but in my first few minutes out there, the bands of gorgeous, muted color that signal sunrise form on the horizon. It's a glorious thing to be outside moving my body through the darkened trees while the sun pulls itself above the horizon.

Yesterday morning when I was running, I decided to push myself to run faster (and therefore farther in my alloted 25 minutes). I was trying to balance pushing myself with not making myself miserable and not pushing myself so hard that I had to walk part of the way. When I got home, I was really excited because of the extra distance that I had traveled. I got my husband to look at Google Earth with me to measure my distance.

And then I was a bit disappointed. I hadn't run as far as I had thought I had. All the curves in the path are tricky, and I'm not good at guessing distances anyway.

My husband was a bit surprised when we discussed it last night over dinner. "But you nearly ran two miles! That's amazing!"

"But I should be running 2.25 now to be on track."

After he asked me how I felt on the run and afterward, I admitted that I feel like I could have pushed myself a bit harder. The problem was, I was afraid of having to switch to walking at some point and then feeling disheartened because of that. But after the run, I was barely sore. (You know, really sore is bad, but a little sore is good indicator of growth.) And today, I can barely tell I ran that hard yesterday.

So tomorrow morning, I am going to push myself a bit harder again and see what happens. I'll still be one of the slowest (if not THE slowest) runner in the park, and that's okay. But I'm going to see if I can do the whole 25 minutes at the pace I started with yesterday. If I have to stop to walk, that's okay; it's a day when I'm testing my limits. If I succeed, I'll know I can get that much of a better workout and get that much closer to my 5k length.

It's one month until my 5k, too! I'm so pumped about that.

In other news, we may move my blog location soon. I've been ruminating on that for a few months. My husband has had two major papers he's been working on for his Ph.D. thesis, but those are both due today, and we may pursue the change once he finishes those.

Back to the bootcamp issue

2007-09-18T19:17:00.000-05:00

Apparently I should clarify my post from earlier today.

I was talking to my best friend about the bootcamp issue. She--who runs in the park as I do, though on opposite days--doesn't get the same feel from the bootcampers as I do. She tends to think people are having a more positive experience with it than I do.

Maybe they are.

I asked her, "So how many people do you know who have had success with bootcamp getting them on a roll to get in shape?"

Answer: None.

"What good do you think it does in their lives then?"

She thinks it could put certain people on a path towards exercising regularly by jolting them into it. And if it does, hallelujah--more power to them. If it sets them on a path that they can then cling to, that's great!

But no one I know, and know one she knows, has had that experience. I know several people who have bootcamped at one point or another. What has happened to each and every one of them is that they are in constant pain while they are bootcamping. They aren't a bit sore; they are really, constantly sore. They hate the exercise while they are doing it. They hate getting up in the mornings to go. But they think they should do it because they think "someone has to get my lazy ass out there." I am not making up that statement; I've heard it before from someone in boot camp. "I don't have enough will power to do it on my own." That's another. They think someone has to be yelling at them for them to keep going.

What happens when bootcamp ends? Well, the external controls have evaporated. They haven't found exercise they enjoy. They are tired of early mornings. They are tired of being sore. It drops off immediately or fades out. Some of them do it all over again six months later.

Melissa, in the comments from the last post, thinks I am being unsympathetic or unempathetic to people who are doing bootcamp, and sardonically wants me to know that I am "not more self-actualized" than the people who are doing the bootcamp.

Far be it for me to say that I am more self-actualized than anyone else. As these unnamed people are not living my life, and I am not living theirs, I could not say. But I can say this: I am more self-actualized than I was when I thought that getting my life in order required someone else to play the adult in my life. I am the adult. I had to get my money in order, and that took me a couple of years. I am getting my weight and health right, and that is also taking a couple of years. I am further along in the process of living a good, solid, inwardly rich life than I was when I thought that Weight Watchers or my boyfriend or anyone else was better at knowing what was good for me than I could figure out with my own research, experimentation, and self-knowledge.

Melissa thinks I am not empathetic to others on their weight loss journeys. But I am--boy am I. I have been overweight since about the 4th grade, and I know what it's like to struggle and struggle and struggle.

The truth is, I'm so empathetic that if people are wondering if struggling and struggling is all there is, I want to say, "Maybe that's not all there is."

Since 2005, I've lost over 45 pounds in a slow, gradual process. It has not been painful; it's been joyful.

What I want to share, along with my own struggles (of which there have been plenty), is what I have learned, and that is that we can do this weight loss thing and this getting healthy thing and not have it be such a frustrating struggle where we feel bad about ourselves whenever we make an 'off the plan' decision. We can make this whole process about taking control of our lives in a purely positive fashion and not let it be something that belittles us in any way. I want all of us to come out of this process feeling stronger and more capable--not more controlled by outside rules and forces but more able to take on the world knowing we can take it on successfully.

So let me say: if bootcamp does that for you somehow, have at it, and I hope you enjoy it--really! But if you have tried bootcamp or if you have tried other methods and feel like a failure, you are not a failure. You just haven't found the way that offers you your power back yet. You are a wonderful person who is still searching for a way to take control of her own health. And it is in you to do so in a long, gradual, possibly lifelong process.

Living like I have respect for myself

2007-09-18T09:28:00.000-05:00

"I told myself I needed to eat like someone who respected himself." That's a statement that HalfMan made in a recent blog post when he was talking about his weight loss.

So true, isn't it? We don't need to eat like we're ashamed, and we don't need to eat like we have no respect for what food does in our bodies, like we have no respect for who we are and what our years of life are worth. We need to eat like we have self respect.

We also need to exercise like we have self respect.

We're hitting the time of year when it's cool enough in the mornings for those crazy fitness bootcamps to go on in the park where I run. So when I walk into the park these days, I hear fitness instructors yelling, "Come ON! Come ON! Come ON!" I see huddled groups of exercisers trying to hold themselves in push-up position, and then dropping one knee down when they can't hold it, looking around embarrassed or keeping their faces down. I see grimaces. I see bodies covered in work-out pants and long-sleeve t's, with short-sleeve t's over them. Why such coverage for a work-out? I'm out there in shorts, a sports bra, and a sports tank, and I know they have to be getting at least as steamy as I do.

Whenever I am passing one of these groups, I get this overwhelming sense of negativity. What are they thinking about my body, about this pudgy girl who's walking (if I'm warming up) or running through the park? What do the instructors think of me--that I need to have my ass worked over like these people in their boot camps?

I work on letting it go. Every single time I pass them, I doubt myself: doubt my ability to take care of myself, doubt the appeal of my appearance, doubt my methodology.

And quite frankly, I realized today, that's absurd.

I am sure there are dieters who have found bootcamps helpful. But when I see those people crouched on the ground or huffing through plyometrics while instructors blow whistles at them, I realized today that I feel it is the opposite of everything I am trying to do with my weight loss and fitness goals. I want to take care of myself. I want to nurture myself. I want to feel good in my skin and good in my life. I want to feel alive and happy and hard-working. I want to set up my life so that I am happily in my life's driver's seat, knowing I'm a competent driver.

I do not want to feel ashamed or belittled or punished. And when I'm passing the people in the bootcamp, with the instructors standing still screaming and the overweight people all in motion, I feel like that is what those overweight people are doing to themselves. They are saying that they do not have the skills, the willpower, the stamina to create a better life for themselves without being punished or controlled by someone else. They are saying, "Here, take my power, because I don't know what to do with it, and you must know better than me."

Is that really sustainable in the long run? How can we succeed at having a healthy, long life if we won't take control of our own actions within that life? If the only controls upon us are external ones of what a bootcamp instructor says during a workout or what a spouse thinks of us taking another bite? What happens is we rebel against those controls at some point. We don't show up for exercise. We sneak food. We eat a potato, and because it's not 'on the plan,' it throws us off entirely.

You have the power within you to lose this weight, to flip the magnet of your life so that instead of being repelled from what you want to be come, you stick to it. I have that power, too. It's not about making any huge sacrifices, giving up entire food groups because we can't 'manage' to eat them without going crazy or having someone force us to exercise until we are in pain. It's about a gradual approach toward taking care of ourselves, toward believing we really are smart enough and capable enough to learn to run our own lives and really, truly love ourselves. That doesn't mean we won't need guidance and inspiration from bloggers, personal trainers, friends, dietitians, or anyone else, because most of us will. But it means we need to take that information and support to empower ourselves, not give that power away.

Way to go, Kim!

2007-09-18T08:35:00.000-05:00

I just have to say I am so proud of Kim at Kim Under Construction, who recently ran her first 5k. When my alarm went off so early this morning for me to run, the first thing I pictured was the photo of Kim running in that 5k! It was great motivation.

Another one for the wl blogging world

2007-09-14T10:32:00.001-05:00

My friend Lesley has decided to go public with her weight-loss challenge for herself, so please pop over to her blog and show her some support. In addition to her main blogging page, she has a separate page for her weight loss work. Lesley's a marvelous person, and if she embraces the baby steps that can bring on the health, I know she can do this!

Busy and RUNNING

2007-09-12T12:42:00.000-05:00

I promise I'm not avoiding you! Really!

It's just that I feel like I've been working 90% of the time and trying to recover the other 10%. I felt the pricks of tears forming in my eyes as I told someone yesterday that I will be less busy by January--and then went on to say that what I mean is, if I am not less busy by January, something will have to give. I'm doing what I have to do at work to get things done right now, and some of those are exciting things that are my creations. (And I'm not really working 90% of the time--just feel like it.) But this is unsustainable in the long run.

However--however--I have been determined not to lose my focus on exercising during this period of stress. I ran 25 minutes straight this morning (plus stretching, a 10-min. walking warm-up, and a cool-down walking period), so I am definitely back on track with that! It makes me feel so much better all day when I have gone out and busted my ass with exercise by 7:30 a.m.

My weight has spiked this week with the early arrival of my period. EARLY, for the second month in a row! Not okay. I plan to go to the doctor when it ends, because with the symptoms I get, having a period every third week is unacceptable. I'm going to see if I can use Seasonale without getting depressed. (Most b.c. makes me depressed.) Anyway, my weight spike is not a big one--about 1.5 pounds. It will go away when my hormones calm down. And already my body fat percentage is decreasing again with my runs. I am going to see if I can get up at 6:15 not just to run but also 2-3 other days a week (nearly all 7, then) to work out in my living room before going to work. I want to do arm/chest/upper body stuff to work on more than my legs and core. (Honestly, though, I am surprised by how much I get changes all OVER from running.)

I hope you are all doing well. I need to go take a stroll through some of your blogs.

I'm running again!

2007-09-04T12:41:00.000-05:00

Trying to give my life a sense of balance, I created a calendar of things I want to do over the next 16 months. I made the calendar several weeks ago and put "Start running again" under the first week of September. Today was my deadline to start.

Several days ago, I went through the Couch to 5k plan to see where I thought I should try to pick up. I decided to start with week 6--close to where it's running only, but still with intermittent walks in the runs. I wasn't sure how much stamina I had lost since I stopped running in the July heat. I set up my mp3 player with the music and beeps for Run 6A.

Yesterday, in anticipation of the run this morning, I set out my running clothes and shoes on my dresser. I put my mp3 player on top of them. Whenever I saw them, I mentally psyched myself up about going for a run today, and I could feel it working. I felt excited about getting back to that part of my life.

I woke up at 6:30 a.m. The room was dark, and I was disoriented about why the alarm was going off when it was still dark outside. Then I remembered the exercise, and I inwardly groaned. Luckily, my husband has decided he's going to work out at the gym when I run this fall, so as soon as I rolled out of bed, he did too. He turned on the lights and made the bed while I was in the bathroom, so when I got back to put my running clothes on, I felt less tempted to crawl back in bed.

I worked on pumping myself up with positive thoughts this morning. That might sound silly, but I find the frame of mind around exercise can be just as important as the physical elements. "I can do this." "I'm up this morning taking care of myself." Things like those statements were going through my head as I turned on my mp3 player and began stretching.

Ten minutes later, I went outside. I had been worried about the dark, but with streetlights, there was enough light, and there were other people exercising in the park. There was never a time when I couldn't see someone else exercising near me, which was good for safety reasons. A number of homeless people were also present in the park; living in Midtown Atlanta gets me hit up for money regularly, but people leave me alone when I'm running. And anyway, it was early enough that the homeless people were mostly (sadly) stretched out on benches sleeping.

I walked my 10-minute warm-up and then started a slow jog for my first run. After the 5 minutes of the first run were up and my mp3 player beeped for me to switch to a walk, I was amazed at how good I still felt. "I could run more!" I thought excitedly. But I stuck to the program. At the end of my exercise, I actually kept running for a couple of extra minutes and increased my speed a bit.

I'm definitely a bit sore now, but not painfully so. I'm very excited about getting back on track with my running! I am aiming for a 5k at the end of October now to give myself plenty of time to get ready.

For those of you who have been thinking about doing C25k, if you are in the US, you would be hard-pressed to find a better time to start than with the temperature drop of fall. (Atlanta is not cool right now--it's 90 degrees at the moment--and it's very humid. But it's much more comfy than it was even a week ago.) I walked daily for a couple of months before I started C25k, and that gave me a decent base level to start from. I'm excited about finishing the program this time, and with winter in GA being mild, I should be able to keep running through the year. (Until NEXT July, maybe--we'll see.) As I get more fit from running, I also have other fun stuff in my schedule for later, like hiking, weight lifting, rock-climbing, and kayaking. I plan to keep at this program--even if I have to take intermittent breaks for whatever reason--until I am comfortable in my body like I was as a child.

Zero sum game

2007-09-02T12:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I haven't lost any weight this month--0 net loss for the month of August.

But.

0 net gain for the month of August.

And sometimes that's what we can hope for. My clothes are not tighter; in fact, it seems my smaller clothes fit me better even without an additional loss. I'm buying 12s in tops and dresses, 14s in pants.

I've been holding tight at 180-point-something.

I've been dealing with a lot adjusting to my food allergies, and now I'm being tested for celiac disease as well. And I have not been exercising, as I mentioned before.

So I'll take holding on to my current weight. This week is when I begin to run again, and even if that doesn't make my actual weight lower, it will make me feel better, be healthier, and look better. I'm pleased--if a little nervous--to get back on track with the running. I know I can do it, since I was doing it just a couple of months ago.

Yay for cooler weather!

What I'm hoping for is to average 5 pounds a month still. That's a much slower loss per month than most people are going for, but I'm finding slow and steady is what works for me. And to think about being 20 pounds smaller by Christmas is amazing.

However, seriously, I will take 5 pounds smaller by Christmas, or 10 pounds. Or 5 pounds with a 4% drop in body fat. (It's dropped 5-6% since January, after all.) Or if I have to, I'll take maintenance while my body and brain figure out better how to deal with these food allergies/intolerances.

It's been about three years since I was at my highest weight--almost exactly, actually. I tipped the scales at 223 at one point, and then I got bigger--but I refused to weigh myself past that point. I was miserable in so many ways, and it took breaking up with my first fiance for me to shake me up to start dealing honestly with my life. Financially, professionally, personally--I had a lot of work to do.

After I met my husband, I started eating healthier and working out regularly. I got my weight down to about 187. After we got married, though, I stopped working out and started eating lots of sweets. Seriously, lots of them. And eating until I didn't feel good on a pretty regular basis.

By last Christmas, I weighed in at 203. Since January 1, I've lost--and kept off--23 pounds, and this time I am not planning to let that weight start creeping back up. Barring something terrible like an illness that keeps me bedridden for months, I am going to keep this weight off, keep the level of health I have attained.

One of my friends was laughing recently about another friend of ours who gained 5 pounds and was dieting to get it off. This dieting girl is thin. I laughed too for a second but then grew quiet. "Well," I said, "I guess that's how you keep the weight gain from becoming a real problem." If you deal with it while it's 5 pounds, you're doing a whole lot better than if you wait until it's 20 or 40 or 100. So if I'm maintaining for a while, that's my goal. If I'm losing, even better. I just don't want to lose heart, period. I and my health are too important for that.

Stepping away

2007-08-25T13:45:00.001-05:00

I've been absent three weeks! That is a long time.

This week has been better, but the two weeks before that were pretty awful. I'm not talking about my weight, though that did pop up a pound; I'm talking about my outlook on life in general.

I started sublingual allergy drop treatments for seasonal/environmental allergies, and they made me sick at first (as happens with a minority of patients). Trying to figure out how to avoid food allergens while still feeling the full effect of allergies (while not feeling any better from the effort) was extremely frustrating. Then I got my period; it came with bad cramps and a nearly unprecedented (for me) level of sudden despair. Simultaneously, I was working full-time and then staying until late at night 2-3 days a week while learning my new job and training my new employee. Let me tell you that all of that is a bad combination.

I wanted to hide from life. I was scared--as I get when I feel really down--that I was headed into a new bout of deep depression instead of just having a mini-phase.

Instead of entirely hiding from life, I backed away from the social part of my life and only accomplished what I needed to at first. Then I focused on what I could change to make my life feel more right again. That involved some compromises with how I normally try to live.

I am someone who seeks out local, whole foods whenever I can. I like to eat foods close to their natural state, knowing they are better for our bodies in the forms they take when they are closest to the earth. That's also better for the Earth because eating whole foods avoids packaging, shipment, waste from additives, etc.

But when I am adjusting to these food allergies, I can't suddenly make everything from scratch with my new restraints as easily as I could before them. I also can't eat your typical packaged food because, besides not being very tasty to me now, it almost all contains things I can't have.

What I realized I could do is find well-reviewed sources for allergen-free foods on the web and buy some mixes--cookie mixes, bread mixes, etc. A bad gluten-free, egg-free mix bakes up to be something you would only feed a significant other that you want to get rid of. But a good gluten-free, egg-free mix can make food that is tasty, sometimes very tasty. I read up on the internet to find ones that were well-rated, and then I ordered $100 worth of those mixes.

I decided that this week at work, I would leave by 5 p.m. each day--and I stuck to it.

I postponed a doctor's appt. that I was supposed to have this week that was making me feel overwhelmed with visits to doctors.

My period ended, of course, and that helped me get on a more even keel hormonally.

I cut back (just temporarily) on the amount of local foods I am buying to give me time to adjust to the allergen-free recipes I am starting to use. I am still serving 1-2 local foods per night for dinner, but I'm not, at this point, striving anymore to get as many local foods as I can. I'll pick that up again when I feel more adjusted to my food restrictions.

I made a schedule of things (only one thing per month and one other thing per season) that I want to do and try in the next sixteen months--to keep myself from trying to jump into too many things at once, but also to remind myself that the feeling like my life is in a bad place is only a temporary emotional locale that will pass. Now I'm excited about the various things I am going to try. I put them all in my Google calendar with reminders that will get emailed to me to keep me on track.

I increased how often someone is coming to clean our apartment. Having a housekeeper come for vacuuming, bathroom-cleaning, etc., is a splurge that my husband and I agreed to after our apartment got really dirty after my husband was hit by a car last year. We pay the housekeeper well (she makes more per hour than I do!), but we have the money, and it's well worth it right now for her to come in with her all-natural products and clean once a week instead of once every two weeks as we were having her do. That will continue until my husband finishes the two experiments/papers he is currently working on for his thesis at the end of next month.

I have also been trying to take the time to calm myself down emotionally, to talk myself down from the ledges that I can climb to when I begin to get worked up over how X is going in my life. It's so easy to think things are dire when really they just need a few adjustments.

I grew frustrated two weeks ago when I gained 1 1/2 pounds (at the start of my period) and then could not seem to get it off. Then I realized that I have been exercising very little (even incidental exercise, like parking far from a store) because of how hot it is outside. I also, due to the food allergy frustrating, have been eating more at a sitting than I was doing. I have been eating until I'm full, occasionally until I'm unpleasantly full, instead of stopping eating when I first feel the food hitting my stomach (which I find usually means I will be satisfied after a few minutes). That weight is gone now except for .2 pounds because I reminded myself to pay attention to how I feel when I'm eating. I am trying to remind myself, as I often say and mean when I say, that I am in this weight-loss thing for the long haul and not a short fix.

(Meanwhile, I realized two days ago that a pair of my size-16 dress pants are now certifiably too big. I saw my reflection in a mirror by chance and thought, These look horribly droopy on me! A bad realization when you can't change out of them at that moment, but a good realization overall.)

When you feel bad, it's not good to shrink away from your systems of accountability and care, and both of those are part of what this blog is to me. But I do think I needed a short break from doing anything beyond what I needed to do. I'm back to posting now, and while I am going to be taking it a bit easier, I will try to post at least once a week and get some of my new, allergen-free recipes up here. I still love reading your blogs and having you read mine.

14 pants!

2007-08-06T15:57:00.000-05:00

My husband and I have been visiting his parents in VA for several days now. Today, we popped over to the mall, and I decided to try on a pair of size-14 pants to see if they fit me at all. They fit great--perfectly, in fact! I was so excited at how cute they were that I decided to buy them despite the $60 price tag that would normally make me say, "Um, no." They are dressy and they are a nice brand (Ann Taylor Loft), so I know they will be useful and last a long time. I'm so excited! I haven't worn a 14 in pants since my junior year of college, perhaps my sophomore year even. That's . . . 6-7 years ago now!

Usually these days, I weigh myself every couple of days. I don't write it down; I just like to keep a general check on what is happening. I haven't been able to do that since we've been here, and it will be interesting to see what my weight is when we get home. It could be down or stagnant--I really have no idea. I guess it could also be up a pound. One thing about never counting anything is that it works as long as I trust myself and keep the idea of taking care of myself in mind. But I can never be 100 percent certain that I'll have a drop at any time, so I do like to weigh myself often enough to keep in mind that I can't eat loads of potato chips or things like that that make me feel gross and make my weight pop up.

I'm in the 170's!

2007-08-01T09:09:00.001-05:00

I've been terrible about posting lately, but I have NOT been terrible about being conscientious about what I'm eating. I am officially (just barely) in the 170s today! This is a land I have not visited for many years. I am soooooo excited!

In other happy weight news, when I was at a thrift store a few days ago (where they had crazy bargains on nice stuff--I haven't been in years), I fit into size 14 jeans. I wouldn't have bought them (they were too tight--I'm sure my husband would have loved them on me), but I could zip them without feeling like I was dying, and that's awesome! As you may remember, I mentioned that I wore a size 12 dress to a wedding recently; when things are A-line cut, I can wear a smaller size over my hips and thighs. But with pants, I am still a size or two up. Last night, I got inspired to try on my last remaining just-barely-too-small pants at home, and one pair now fits me well. The others just don't look great, but I ordered them off the internet, and they may just not be cut for me. We'll see how I'm feeling when I'm down five more pounds!

I met my goal of 5 pounds in July (slow and steady wins the race, right?), and I am just thrilled with how the weight loss is going lately. I think I am going to set another 4- or 5-lb. goal for August.

Some days when I weigh myself, my weight will suddenly show a brief upswing or will not be lower when I am expecting it to be lower. I just remind myself it's an off day and don't let it throw me off track. That's one major way this round of weight loss has been different from previous attempts. (Then, I would have gotten stressed and angry and given up; I was 'restricting myself' for nothing. But now that I have flipped the mental/emotional switch so that I am taking care of myself instead of restricting myself, it doesn't make sense to eat myself into misery if my weight happens to be up or flat.

Since I learned about my food allergies, I have been terrible about exercising. There is only so much energy to go around in a given day, and I have spent a lot of mine on figuring out what to eat. Now that I am beginning to get the hang of dealing with that issue, though, I am going to make it a priority to start back with regular exercise this month.

Happy weight loss times

2007-07-22T14:36:00.000-05:00

As you can see from my tickers, I've lost four pounds this month toward my five-pound month goal. It's going to be crazy if I have a weight of 180-point-something by the end of the month. If it happens, I will be so close to--just a week or two away from!--the 170s, a land I haven't visited since perhaps my sophomore year of college.

My husband pointed out that if I continue to average about 1 lb. a week (which has been close to my average this year), by the end of the year I will be a couple of pounds away from my goal weight. Isn't that a crazy idea? "I want to lose 50 pounds in a year" isn't a goal I have said, and when you break it down by the weeks, it doesn't even sound like much per week. But it sure adds up. Will it happen? I don't know, especially with all my food juggling that I'm doing with the food allergy issues now. But what an exciting thought it is! I told him it would be like moving even further back in time to my 10th grade or so weight. (I thought I was fat then in a size 10. Boy, how wrong I was!)

One thing that has been interesting lately is that I find myself feeling my face with my hands, noticing how strange it feels to have my facial bones emerging from the veil of fat they had been hidden behind. My husband has noticed the same thing about my knees, ribs, and other various bones. Not that I'm suddenly super-skinny--nor would I want to be, really--but now we can feel bones that before were so cushioned that they weren't able to be easily felt.

In the spring, I tried on sundresses at Ann Taylor. None of the sizes fit just right, and the dresses were about $150, so I didn't buy one. I tried on one of those dresses again this week, on clearance for $60, and got a size 12! It's going to be perfect for the wedding we are attending next weekend. (I still wear a 16 in pants, though I think I might be in some 14s if I tried them now. My top and bottom used to always be the same size, but that ended when I had abdominal surgery a few years ago.)

These are happy weight loss times. Even as I am feeling down about food and stressing over the food allergies, I am trying--trying--to keep in mind that I should eat reasonable portions, watch my sugar intake, and eat lots of veggies. Fortunately, those actions have at least partly become habit these days. I'm still not counting or tracking anything specific, and I feel good about that.

Delicious Cuban Rice & Beans

2007-07-19T08:32:00.000-05:00

One of our friends emailed me today to ask for the recipe for the Cuban rice and beans I served at our last simplicity meeting. Nearly simultaneously, Dan IMed me, “I’m so in love with these beans and rice you made.” I took those two things as a hint to post the recipe. The recipe comes from the wonderful (milk-free, egg-free, wheat-free, soy-free, peanut-free, tree nut-free, fish-free, and shell fish-free) cookbook The Whole Foods Allergy Cookbook. I’ve modified it a bit.

Cuban Rice And Beans

(Serves 8)

1 large Vidalia onion, diced
4 cloves of garlic, pressed/minced
2 bay leaves
4 T olive oil
2 tsp. oregano
1 T cumin
4 15-oz. cans black beans (about 6 c. of beans)
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/4 c. cider vinegar
1 T honey
2 cans of veggie broth

2 c. white rice or brown rice
enough water to cook the rice
salt to taste

Saute onion, garlic, and bay leaf in olive oil over med. heat until onion is soft. Add oregano and cumin. Cook about 2 minutes. Add black beans through veggie broth; cook 30 minutes at a simmer.

In the meantime, cook rice in water according to bag or cooker directions (30-50 min., depending on rice).

Toss the rice and beans together thoroughly. Add more salt and pepper to taste. Let the flavors combine for 5 minutes, and serve.

80% of my energy is taken up with figuring out food--but not dieting

2007-07-17T15:17:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I hit a low. I got a phone call from my allergist that my new round of allergy tests came back . . . with low-level allergies to crab, pork, beef, lobster, lamb, avocado, peppers, pecans, grapefruit, pine nuts, walnuts, and eggplant, and slighly higher-level allergies to almonds and oysters. (Oysters?? I don’t even eat oysters.)

I hung up the phone and started crying. Adding those allergies to gluten, dairy, soy, corn, tomatoes, apples, eggs, and peanuts overwhelmed me. When those tests came back, it became apparent to me that I am one of the small minority of people with food allergies who develop allergies to nearly any food they eat regularly (and some they don’t). I called Dan and cried and cried. “I can’t eat anything,” I sobbed. I heard him zipping up his bookbag, and he told me he was coming home.

Dan found out the contact info for a doctor in Chattanooga, TN (US) who uses sublingual immunotherapy to treat food allergies. It’s Krys Alimurka with Allergycare of Chattanooga. My insurance won’t cover part of the cost, but I’m going to go see her to get on food allergy treatments. They are no panacea, but they can make allergies better over a long period of time (sometimes somewhat better over a short period of time), and having hope with food allergies is a big deal.

(Some people on message boards find these drops very controversial. I say let’s try them and see if they work. What harm comes if they don’t? The people who are completely opposed to them simply because a doctor told them to be remind me of the people on the IC chat boards who lament that nothing works to fix IC yet never stick to any of the remedies long enough to find out.)

In the meantime, I’m going to have to rotate through foods, continuing to eat ones that give me only a mild allergic reaction or no reaction. I spent 15 hours this weekend–really, no joke–planning my breakfast, lunch, and dinner for each day this week. It was frustrating. I sighed a lot. I keep feeling guilty for feeling frustrated, and then feeling frustrated for feeling guilty when this situation does suck. I’m dealing with it, but it sucks, okay? Always having a good attitude is not possible for most of us, and I’m certainly no exception. Sometimes the glass seems half empty, and sometimes it seems half full. Right now I’m torn about which way it is, but it depends on the moment you talk to me.

There have been bright spots, of course, and some big ones. I feel better. That’s huge. It would be difficult to overstate it. My skin is also clearer.

Several people–friends in my ‘real’ life and people who read my blog–have contacted me to offer suggestions on foods they have found that they think I can eat. A few of them: my friend Nikki left me a voicemail about a flour mix she saw that might work; I just bought some of it. My friend Margaret managed to make cookies with none of my allergens (well, the known ones, anyway). Another blogger sent me a link to a company that sells gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free chocolate cake mix that’s also organic and fair-trade. (I bought two boxes, and two batches of their frosting, for my birthday party next weekend, and they were nice enough to ship it to arrive more quickly than it would otherwise–and the proprietor sent me a nice email with other icing suggestions.) My friend Lesley has sent me a lot of links to allergen-free blogs and websites she has found. A professor at my husband's school who has children with allergies met with me to talk about how to handle them. I could keep listing the people who have sent me helpful suggestions for a while, and there have also been a lot of people who have emailed or commented just to offer support.

I have found local, sustainable sources for beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey, duck, and possibly bison now, as well as the usual organic vegetables, fruits, grains, and goat cheese I buy locally. Dan and I are planning to purchase a small (7 c.ft.), energy-efficient chest freezer so that I can put away additional allergen-free meals and always know that there are things at home I can eat; that will help keep anxiety at bay. We bought a small, very well-reviewed gas grill–a Weber BabyQ 100 grill that I got at Sears (where I got excellent customer service–props to Sears)–that has made us able to make tasty foods fairly quickly without using allergen-containing sauces. Pattypan squash and zucchini slices on the grill with salt and smoked paprika on them were delicious.

So what am I eating? I have gotten a lot of questions about that from people who realize that if you cut out all foods that have proteins in them from corn, soy, dairy, eggs, wheat, and tomatoes, you have just cut out 90% of what Americans today typically consume. Our reliance on a few foods is a bit scary, really. What I have realized is that, for the most part, I have to stick to whole foods–foods in forms that are close to how nature created them.

But to answer the question, let’s see. . . . Recently for dinner, we had grilled chicken breasts, grilled squash and zucchini, roasted garlicky potatoes, and cantaloupe. For a light lunch recently, I combined salad greens, nasturtium blossoms, feta, olives, and pistachios with a dressing of lemon, olive oil, and a variety of Italian herbs from our little porch herb garden.

For lunch, I tend to be eating leftovers, though I am going to have to be careful about eating leftovers of the same foods multiple days in a row. For the simplicity meeting (another great meeting!) on Sunday night, I made slow-cooker mojito pork with Cuban beans and rice, and other people supplied side dishes, drinks, and desserts. The directions for grilling pork chops here made for absolutely incredible pork that was not at all leathery; we ate the pork chops with mashed sweet potatoes and Indian spiced butterbeans.

For breakfast, I’m having gluten-free muffins I made, or granola (have to careful about what kind), or amaranth flake cereal, or other random things.

It’s still a juggling act. And when I get home and am hungry and want a snack, I have been struggling with what to eat. At restaurants, I have found that unless I order things completely plain, there will be an allergen snuck in there somewhere (not intentionally, just because one of them is in something). I’m determined to figure this out because my health is incredibly important. But it is taking an enormous amount of energy to avoid lots of foods and to try to strictly rotate others.

Working my way through this allergy thing

2007-07-06T10:29:00.000-05:00

In a way, I guess this gluten-free thing can (at least at times) be a back-to-basics kind of meal planning system. After all, it has only been in relatively recent history that people have relied on regularly having flours—and wheat flour specifically—to get them through meals. If I just rely on alternate flours, which can be as good as wheat or more authentic than wheat in a recipe . . . but not commonly, I can have as flour-y a life as ever, but there are catches to that:

1. If I consistently rely on the same flours over and over on a day-to-day basis, I’m likely to develop an allergy to those flours as well. It’s much better for the sake of allergies to eat a diverse diet that does not include the same foods day after day. (I have a book coming from Amazon that delves into this topic in greater depth–this process is called having a rotation diet.)

2. I’m likely to be disappointed, often, with the quality of previously-consumed-with-wheat-flour baked goods, as they will not resemble my memory of what they should be like.

3. A lot of gluten-free flours are low in fiber. I eat a lot of vegetables, so fiber is not my biggest concern, but I don’t want to be eating nutritionally bankrupt foods very often either.

4. If I eat good-for-me whole grains, like millet, that are gluten-free, I will get fiber and learn to eat something new without delving into previous expectations of how that food should taste and what the texture of the food should be.

All of that said, of course I don’t intend to give up baked goods entirely. It’s going to be a balancing act. I think ‘balancing act’ is my favorite phrase lately to describe everything–my job, exercise, healthy lifestyle, simplifying, healthy eating, and now gluten-free eating, as well.

I came home half a day early on Tuesday. I’ve been working too much and was antsy to be away from there long enough to make today count, especially since I worked last Saturday and will be working this coming Sunday.

I came home after going back to the salad restaurant Dressed for another meal. I had intended to eat soup at work—Dan looked at the ingredients and thought the soup I packed was fine for my allergies—but it turned out to be tomato-based. Oops. (I HATE that I found out I’m allergic to tomatoes right as the tomato season kicks in. Tomatoes are one of my favorite foods!) I went to Dressed for lunch, ate a Cobb salad with no egg, and came home . . . where I was pleasantly surprised to find that I did not want to go to sleep. Last week, I went to my primary care physician and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but something is. I am getting headaches every day, and all I want to do is sleep.” I also told her that my balance was off, that I had scared myself falling down the stairs, and that I wanted to be certain nothing was really wrong. She ran a bunch of tests, but she told me she thought maybe my years of sleep problems were just finally catching up with me. This is my third day with no headache, though, and it was so miraculous to get home yesterday and not climb in to bed to take a three-hour nap and wake up still tired. (Yes, I know taking naps can sometimes make you more tired, but in the last couple of months, I have come home so tired I can do nothing but sleep.) I don’t know if all of this is attributable to allergies, but from what I’ve read, all of those symptoms can be—including my sleep problems! Someone from the town where I grew up who has the same allergies emailed me to say that, among other issues, her nightmares had stopped when she did an elimination diet. Isn’t it strange that food allergies could cause such diverse reactions in our bodies?

Speaking of which, other than the typical symptoms of allergies like nasal congestion, here is a list of some of the symptoms that allergies (some environmental, some food) may cause:

headaches and migraines,
abdominal bloating or cramps,
frequent diarrhea or constipation,
eczema or other skin problems,
painful swelling of joints,
unexplained mood swings,
depression or anxiety,
swollen hands, ankles, feet, eyes, face,
unexplained weight gain or loss,
constant fatigue.

Fascinating, I think.

Oh, and because there is a doctor at our church who swears by gluten-free diets for the treatment of a whole range of illnesses (gluten increasingly being a problem due to the enormous increase in gluten that is found in the strain of altered wheat grown 90% of the time these days), here are the symptoms of gluten intolerance and/or celiac disease:

Weight loss or weight gain
Nutritional deficiencies due to malabsorbtion e.g. low iron levels
Gastro-intestinal problems (bloating, pain, gas, constipation, diarrhea)
Fat in the stools
Aching joints
Depression
Eczema
Head aches
Exhaustion
Irritability and behavioural changes
Infertility, irregular menstrual cycle and miscarriage
Cramps, tingling and numbness
Slow infant and child growth
Decline in dental health

Undiagnosed for long periods of time, food intolerances have been found to contribute to diabetes, bowel cancer, anemia and osteoporosis.

As far as allergies go, you have to find a doctor who will do a blood test for IgG (not just IgE) if you want to find out whether you have latent/delayed food allergies. And you have to find a doctor who uses a good laboratory that is careful about their food samples and runs tests to replicate findings.

The tests for gluten intolerance may be a bit more complicated. The doctor at our church sends off stool samples to a particular lab for testing.

Now that I’ve brought up stool samples, I think I’ll write about food in a separate post. On to that now. . . .

20 pounds down: a photo!

2007-07-03T21:29:00.000-05:00

I did a 10-pounds-down photo, so here's a 20-pounds-down photo.

Of course, I have the advantage of a great photographer for a husband. He showed me how many Hollywood portraits are taken like this one--a bit overexposed--to get rid of the appearance of fine lines, pores, and flaws. Women just look luminous like that. Here's another, less exposed one.

He took about 100 photos of me--no joke, really--when we were messing around with his camera yesterday. It's interesting to see what I look like in photos and how that is different from what I look like in my own head. Occasionally when I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in a mirror, I'm surprised to see myself looking thinner. On other days, I can be feeling thin and catch a glimpse or see a photo and think, Ugh! It's funny I can be that judgmental about my fat, because I sure don't feel that way about my family and friends!

This really sucks

2007-06-28T14:40:00.000-05:00

I just got a phone call from my new otolaryngologist’s office. (Wendy Smith in Blairsville, GA, is the doctor, and she is GREAT–which I rarely say that about any doctors.) It turns out I have regular and/or latent food allergies to eggs, dairy, tomatoes, soy, corn, and wheat . . . among other foods. If I remember correctly, she (the nurse) said my egg, wheat, and soy allergies were the worst food ones. She told me that I was very unusual in that I tested positive for everything she tested.

I know I’ll figure this out, but the question right now is . . . what the hell am I going to eat? And yes, I do realize, practically speaking, that I have options like rice, oats, etc. I think Dan and I are going to have to start eating meat at home again– meat from well-treated, no-hormones-added animals from sustainably practicing local organic farms, but meat nonetheless–because I don’t see a way around it. I have a tendency toward anemia as it is, so I don’t know what else to do for adequate protein if dairy, soy, and eggs are out.

Doing It the Bob Greene Way

2007-06-26T08:01:00.000-05:00

You know, it's funny. I was getting pretty frustrated with myself about this whole weight-loss thing lately. Then I realized a few things:

1. Despite a pretty large stress load lately, the way I have been eating, I have been maintaining my weight loss, which is about 20 pounds lower than I was in December and about 40 pounds lower than my highest weight.

2. I tell everyone else that sometimes you have so much going on in your life that you can't expect yourself to exert a large amount of energy on weight loss as well as handle the other stuff--and I need to accept that I get into that same place sometimes (not long-term, just for now!).

3. Although running has been great for my body in terms of how I feel and how I look (even Dan's Ph.D. advisor, who is normally rather oblivious to me, recently commented, "Your training is really looking great on you"), when I started training for running a 5k, I went from exercising 30-45 minutes daily to exercising 30-45 minutes every other day. If you look at people who keep weight off long-term (according to the National Weight Loss Registry), over 80 percent of them exercise about an hour a day. I'm definitely not there at this point. Moreover, that's okay! Running has been moving me into a better appreciation of my body and its abilities. It's also done a lot for my self-esteem. But if I'm going to gear up for long-term weight loss and weight-loss maintenance, I will have to keep moving forwards into being more active in the long term.

I'm the kind of person who likes to act quickly. Sometimes I jump head-long into things just to realize they aren't right for me or won't work with me/for me. When I realized that I need to be exercising more to jump-start my weight loss, my first idea was to figure out something RIGHT NOW and start on it RIGHT AWAY.

Then I checked myself. The reason this post is entitled "Doing It the Bob Greene Way" is that in The Best Life Diet (the last diet book I read--in January--and the last one I intend to read for a long time unless I'm researching exercise), Bob says that one problem with many diets is that they have us jump into dieting in exactly the way I often respond to things (the way I have tried not to do it this time). We get really gung-ho, we go at the diet and/or exercise passionately for a short while, and then we start slipping up. We start slipping up because the diet/exercise we are doing isn't really sustainable in our lives; it's too restrictive, or too hard-core. When we slip up, we feel like we are failing, and when we feel like we are failing, we give up--either gradually or quickly. For us to create sustainable weight loss, he says, we need to ease into the process of losing weight instead of trying to jump-start it. Make a few changes, he says, and watch the weight start to come off slowly. Once you are used to those changes, make a few more. Work your way into being someone who exercises regularly. Work your way into being someone who eats meals that are high in veggies, fruits, and whole grains. Treat yourself gently and lovingly, not as someone who needs to be beaten or whipped into shape at a frenzied pace.

It works--it's just not a quick fix, and that's hard for people. But think about it: would you rather be 20 pounds lighter at the end of this year, or would you rather stay where you are now? Would you rather lose 15 pounds in three weeks, but then gain it back six months later? Would you rather be reliant on a diet or exercise plan that makes you miserable?

I sometimes think to myself that if I had lost something like 5 pounds a year from the time I was originally overweight, I would have hit my goal weight by now. Even now, I'm like, But 5 pounds?? That's tiny! And I am not suggesting that it's a huge loss. But a slow loss of 5 or 20 or 40 pounds in a year is a much better situation to be in than sitting somewhere, miserably thinking how you have failed at yet another extreme or odd diet (or how you have gained back that weight yet again).

I remember when one of my close friends was 185 pounds and trying to lose weight. I was somewhere like 215 and trying to lose weight. 185 seemed like a distant, nearly impossible dream. Now I'm the girl at 185! That is NOT a bad feeling.

My life right now is like this: I was promoted recently and am learning that job as well as taking on the stress and responsibility of being the head of my department. There are people who clearly think I should not have the position I have at 26 years of age--I don't let them stress me out, but I know they are there waiting to see what happens. I am working two jobs until I find the replacement for my previous job, which means I am juggling the paperwork, the office visits, the phone calls, the questions from homeowners, etc., that two people normally handle. I am interviewing for that previous job I held. I have worked a pretty decent number of late nights lately, and even when I get home from work at a normal time, I am completely exhausted--completely exhausted. I, who normally enjoy cooking, have come home too tired to cook or do anything day after day. I have gone to bed at 8 p.m. several nights, 9 p.m. on others--and still have felt too tired to get up to run some days, choosing instead to sleep 10 or 11 hours a night.

So is now the time to try to push myself to a new level of exercising to make sure my weight loss shoots up? No, it's not. I can--and have been trying to--be aware of what I eat on a regular basis, continuing to keep sweets in check as an occasional treat, not using enormous levels of fat in foods, not eating fried foods too often, focusing on having at least 5 fruit and veggie servings a day. In other words, I can and have been trying to maintain my current level of commitment to my health. But that's the limit of my energy when it comes to weight loss right now. I'd still like to lose weight by my birthday (a month from today), so I have changed my ticker from 10 pounds (which ain't happenin', honey) to 5 pounds. If it happens, great. If not, but I maintain or lose a bit before my birthday, I will certainly consider that a success. Sometimes maintaining your pace is an enormous success; I know that all too well from the times I've dieted and given up! . . . I know all too well that feeling of anxiety and sadness when the weight starts creeping back up and you go, "Oh, here it goes" and don't feel the energy to stop the upward change. If I maintain or lose just a bit now, I'll be doing very well. It's going against my personality to think that way, but it's true.

In a few weeks, I will have hired my replacement for my previous position. I will train her (all the final candidates are women), she will start to attend some of the evening/weekend meetings I currently attend, and my stress will ease. Some of the stress will ease in the coming month, and the rest of it should ease up some in 2-3 months. If I have to wait a month or two to gear up my exercise to a higher level and start seeing a regular drop on the scales, that is okay.

C25K Update and a Party!

2007-06-24T11:51:00.000-05:00

First of all: last weekend's 5k. The course was advertised as easy, but it turned out to be up the side of a mountain! (I'm not joking--my running shoes were sliding on the steep inclines.) I made it halfway before I--while very upset--gave up. But my mother, husband, and hard-core-runner sister-in-law all told me that running half of that course was an awesome accomplishment. Still, I'm ready to finish a 5k now. That will be this coming week!

I have a-whole-nother post to write about my life and stress and food and exercise lately. But before that . . .

Last night, my husband and I hosted a “Summer Harvest” party. Each guest was asked to bring a dish or drink that featured locally produced foods. I had asked Dan to take photos, but he was too busy helping me host. We all had a great time, though, eating dinner–slowly working our way through appetizers, then soup, then drinks, then the main course, then dessert–and playing a couple of rounds of Apples to Apples, a very fun party game when people get into it.

Here were our locally inspired items:

Sweetwater Road Trip (Atlanta microbrewery beer)

Mojitos with AL cane syrup (in lieu of simple syrup) and local organic mint leaves

Bruschetta with local organic tomatoes and herbs from our kitchen (windowsill) garden with French bread and Bulger Creek chevre

Sweet Grass Dairy Green Hill cheese with my mother’s triple-berry jam and whole-wheat crackers

Koinonia (South GA) cinnamon/sugar pecans

Yellow pepper soup (a pureed soup with yellow peppers, potatoes, and other ingredients I can’t remember–delicious!)–I forgot to ask my friend Becky which of her ingredients were local

Tofu quiche with local organic broccoli, tomatoes, and herbs and crust made from local buckwheat flour

Tomato/cucumber salad with local organic tomatoes and cucumbers (from the Saturday farmers' market in the town where I grew up!)

A zucchini/squash/garlic medley from my friend Melissa’s garden

Cheesecake with a raspberry sauce

And peach cobbler made with Georgia peaches and a local flour mix crust

We certainly did not feel deprived by eating locally derived foods!

Did you know that food in the US, on average, has traveled over 1500 miles to reach us? That means that the foods we buy in the grocery store have used a lot of gas, created a lot of pollution, and often have required a lot of long-term refrigeration to reach us. Locally produced vegetables and fruits are often higher in vitamin content when they reach us, their short trip times are far less polluting, and their freshness makes them taste a lot better!

If you are interested in finding local food sources near you and you are in the US, I encourage you to visit Local Harvest to check out CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and farmers’ markets in your area.

Then you can host the next harvest party. . . .

Blah! So busy! (And local foods)

2007-06-22T12:52:00.000-05:00

I promise I will write a real post this weekend. I have been working so hard, and I'm so tired when I'm not working. I went to bed at 8 p.m. last night and slept over 11 hours!

Back to work now, but in the meantime, here's an article about the benefits of eating local foods.

C25K--5k registration!

2007-06-11T12:40:00.001-05:00

Back for another crazy workweek, but . . . I registered for my first 5k today! It will be next Saturday in Blairsville, GA (up in the mountains where my mother lives). I felt a little thrill registering for it!

Happy low-fat cookbook times

2007-06-10T11:39:00.000-05:00

As a way of enjoying the season and having a bit of peace, I sat down with Julee Rosso's cookbook Great Good Food on Thursday night and Saturday morning. It might sound a bit odd to many people for me to sit down to read a cookbook for pleasure, and it's not something that I usually do except the day I first get a cookbook. But Rosso's cookbook--which is divided up by seasons and holidays--is full of anecdotes, quotations about food and the seasons, edifying blurbs about healthy eating, and lots of food/plant/kitchen-related pen drawings. It's a beautiful book, relaxing to read. It reminds me of the relationship I am trying to develop with food--a celebration of healthy, seasonal eating. Seriously, go look through it at the link I gave, and you will see what I mean.

I've made a few recipes from the cookbook but have never made the cookbook a staple. That may be changing! After looking at it on those two days recently, I decided to cook recipes out of that cookbook all week. Because I shop in the farmer's market here on Saturdays, using a cookbook that's divided by the seasons works well for me. Rosso and I don't have exactly the same produce in season at the same time--she's in MI, I'm in GA--but there's enough overlap to make our seasons and produce match up well enough. (You could also just use the index to search for the ingredient you need.) I was also intrigued by some of Rosso's ideas for healthy eating, like using what she calls her "low-fat blend" as a staple. The low-fat blend is just equal parts nonfat yogurt and nonfat cottage cheese put in a blender (not a food processor), but Rosso uses it as the low-fat basis for a variety of dressings, sauces, and recipes in her book. I wasn't at all sure I would like it--I'm not a yogurt person--but I decided to try it out anyway. The first low-fat blend recipe I made was a reduced-fat blue cheese recipe. I wanted a blue cheese recipe but did not want to drown my salad in gobs of fat. Here's what I made (altering her recipe a bit):

Reduced-Fat Blue Cheese Dressing

1/2 c. non-fat cottage cheese
1/2 c. non-fat plain yogurt
1/4 c. Roquefort or other strong blue
2 tsp. grainy dijon mustard
few grinds of salt and pepper

Blend it all together in a blender. Store in a closed jar in the fridge for up to a week.

Two tablespoons of dressing, tossed in well, was plenty in our meal-size salads (butter lettuce, onion, tomato, and cucumber with garlic toast on the side). My husband and I were both really impressed by how blue-cheesy the dressing was without being overwhelming.

Last night, preparing to take a dessert to a party tonight, I mixed together some GA-grown berries I picked up at the farmer's market yesterday morning with a bit of raspberry wine and honey. Then I put together this low-fat blend mix for a topping, per the book's suggestion:

Maple Cream

1 c. nonfat yogurt
1 c. nonfat cottage cheese
2 T. maple butter or maple syrup

Blend in blender until well-mixed. Store in a covered container in the fridge until you are ready to use it.

I was concerned the mixture would taste too yogurty for me, but I was very pleased by the only slightly tangy, sweet, rich-but-not-overwhelming combination that was so tasty my husband and I just couldn't resist trying out on the berries once I'd made it. Delicious!

This morning, we tried a third recipe for a peasant tortilla--a layer of pan-fried potatoes topped with beaten eggs and vegetables, baked until firm, and then flipped over. It was also great.

So right now, I'd say I highly recommend this cookbook.

The only caveat with it is that you do have to look at the intended serving sizes, which we find to be on the small side sometimes. Nutrition info is given, though, so it's easy to figure out the new calculations.

2007-06-09T13:56:00.000-05:00

What a long week this has been. Twice, I came home from work and went to bed by 8 p.m. The first night, I tried that thinking that maybe exhaustion was the real reason behind me thinking I wanted chocolate even when I wasn't hungry. I went to sleep almost immediately. . . .

Today, I am taking the day to just enjoy life and not think about work one bit. My husband and I are going to see Knocked Up now, and maybe tonight I'll actually have time to do a real post! I'm also going to make us a vegetable plate for dinner--delicious.

I've added a new ticker to my blog to count down until my birthday. My weight has been fluctuating--yet hovering around 185--since early April! It's time to move past that stage, although from a positive standpoint, I'd much rather hover around 185 than shoot back up to 200 or higher.

Off to the movie now. . . .

Brief Update

2007-06-05T08:22:00.000-05:00

I got the promotion.

Oh, and while my weight fluctuation is driving me a bit mad, my body fat is down 2% more.

Good times.

Back to doing 2 people's jobs now. . . .

Crazy Days

2007-05-30T19:25:00.000-05:00

These times, they have been a'crazy.

I decided to launch my wedding planning blog. Great! So much hard work, but so much fun.

Then my boss put in her notice within the week.

So I've been learning my boss's job--as well as doing mine--and trying to juggle normal life and still commit enough time to my wedding blog. Then I realized my wedding blog can be cut back for a few days where the other two cannot. I tend to be a go-hard-or-don't-go person, but I can post every 2 or 3 days for a couple of weeks--it's not the end of the world.

Then our internet went out at home for a few days--a router problem--so I wasn't writing anywhere at all.

I told the director of my organization last week that I want my boss's job. I was very proud of myself. I made a list of the things I have accomplished at my job that are above and beyond the requirements. It was quite a list. I sat him down, gave him the list, and told him honestly that I wanted the job, that I was told that I would move into that position when I was hired (should it be vacated), and that if I did not get the promotion, it would 'put me in an awkward position here.' Clear enough, right?

He told me he would get back to me today but did not. I asked him about it again this afternoon, and he told me that he would get back to me by the end of the week and that he hadn't had time to think through it yet.

But tomorrow afternoon, we'll be driving to Pensacola, FL, for a wedding I'm in. So I asked him if he can talk to me about it before the workday ends tomorrow. He told me he didn't know because he's been so busy. So we'll see.

I deserve that job. I wasn't even nervous about it until today when he put me off again.

Last weekend I hosted a Pampered Chef party. I served a cheesecake that I bought at the weekend farmer's market down the street. This week, I proceeded to eat two more pieces of cheesecake after the party. Cheesecake=lots of calories. Oh, I also ate two of the chocolate raspberry 'muffins' (icing-less cupcakes) I made. Other than that, this past week I have been eating too much cheese; eating past when I am just comfortable into when I am really full; snacking at times I haven't been terribly hungry; and having wine or beer almost every evening.

I haven't been sleeping well. I wake up thrashing my arms as if I'm fighting through cobwebs. My allergies are terrible, despite our best efforts to fix offending elements in our apartment. (I found out how bad they could be when we went somewhere that was not clean last night, though. I couldn't breathe at all, and my eyes kept tearing up.)

I think I have been trying to feed away my overwhelmed feeling that I have right now. Yesterday I thought, What am I doing? I'm not paying attention to myself even though that's what I preach. I mean, I haven't gone completely nuts, but three pieces of cheesecake in one week (with caramel and nuts and marshmallow cream added twice, too) is too much--it's a sign of either avoiding something or taking on too much. I also think that eating dessert daily on my vacation threw me off, reminded my body what that was like (sugarsugarsugar), and I'm still recovering from that.

So this morning, I took the leftover cheesecake to work, along with the leftover chocolate muffins. No alcohol tonight. I ate a big salad with a very small portion of mac'n'cheese for lunch We had a healthy dinner. I am going to eat dessert once this weekend, or have 2 bites of dessert twice--not eat dessert after several meals.

Small diversions from the path don't kill you if you correct yourself. They only throw you off long-term if you let them. And I'm not going to let that happen this time, because this has been the most sensible, gentle, exciting, empowering weight loss I've ever experienced.

C25K Update

2007-05-26T19:53:00.001-05:00

I ran 27 minutes straight today.

Happy news

2007-05-22T15:25:00.001-05:00

What was that happy dance in the bathroom yesterday morning? Oh yes, that's it--it was me realizing I have now lost 20 pounds!

So I've reached my first major goal. What should my reward be? Hmmm.

By the way, 20 pounds down now means 40 pounds down from my highest weight. Woo-hoo! Pretty soon I'll be in the magical 170's, a land I have not visited in a vast number of years.

New Sustainable/Affordable Wedding Planning Website! (And a contest!)

2007-05-20T20:30:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen (Gentleman? Any guys out there at all?), in a post completely unrelated to weight loss, I am proud to be able to direct you to my new wedding planning website. It's been in development mentally and in conversations with my friends and husband for over a year. The goal of this wedding planning blog is to provide information and support for real-life brides and grooms--people who want something special on their wedding day but who can't spend a fortune, people who want elegant or fun or zany but who want to avoid tacky. The average family income in the US is $45k, which means that the so-called average wedding budget of $28k is unreasonable for most people, despite what the wedding magazines would have you believe. My wedding planning blog is also designed for people who want to have beautiful weddings while being cognizant of different social issues (child labor, pesticides, high fossil fuel use, etc.) that often go into wedding-related items and activities. The site is explicitly written in support of both straight couples and gay couples who want to plan a lifelong commitment to one another.

I've kicked off the website with a currently on-going series of posts about learning to budget, so those of you who read my financial post and thought, "That's how lost I feel!" may want to start with this post.

In general, if weddings or sustainability or money management interest you, please go check out Commitments Unlimited.

And for those of you who love weddings or who need some relationship support or who need some financial advice or just love books, there's also a contest at Commitments Unlimited that may interest you, so go enter the giveaway today!

Curried braising greens and veggies over rice

2007-05-19T12:38:00.000-05:00

From what I understand, a combination of collard greens (or other braising greens) and coconut milk is common in some parts of Africa. When I first saw that combination, I thought it sounded quite strange--I'm used to salty or bitter collards. However, I realized there's a plethora of recipes on the internet combining the two, so I thought I would give it a try. I decided to make it Thai, though, by cooking the collard greens in fabulous coconut-based Curry Simple Thai red curry sauce.

This is the kind of meal that would have horrified me as a child. Where's the meat? What's all this green stuff? My husband and I loved it. Here's the recipe.

Curried Braising Greens & Veggies Over Rice
4-5 servings

1/2 lb. of collards or other braising greens (turnip greens, kale, etc.)
1 onion
optional: a mix of other vegetables you want to use (carrots, potatoes, turnips, tomato--I used 2 carrots, a handful of new potatoes, and 2 turnips)
1 bag of 3-serving Curry Simple Red Curry Sauce
1 can of light coconut milk (NOT sweetened coconut drink mix)
6 T of cashews
3 c. of cooked brown rice

Start your brown rice cooking. (The kind we use takes about 50 minutes.)

Rinse your braising greens well (dirt tends to cling to them--I soaked mine in bowls of water three times), and tear off any large stems.

Chop your onion.

If necessary, peel any additional vegetables you want to use. Chop them into bite-size pieces.

Pour the curry sauce and coconut milk into a large pot, and heat on med-high until boiling.

Add the greens, onion, and any other veggies.

Let boil 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

In a small, dry non-stick saucepan, toast your cashews for 3-4 minutes, tossing once.

Serve the cashews over the curry over the rice. Yum!

Welcome, Calorie Lab readers!

2007-05-17T20:56:00.001-05:00

To any new readers from The Calorie Lab's profile of me: Welcome! (And thanks, Calorie Lab!)

My blog is lately full of me learning to run, but I have a consistent focus on learning to make healthy food that tastes great and helps the planet be healthy, too. (Oh, and losing weight is nice, too. :))

Please read on, and email me at veggiepaparazzo@gmail.com if you have any question.

Thoughts from a former financial fool

2007-05-15T15:48:00.000-05:00

CSMC at My Own Superhero's latest post has encouraged me to finally finish this financial post, which has been sitting in my draft box for several months.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm trying to think how far back in my life I should start this post. I want to be thorough, accurate, and honest, but I don't want to lose all of you after you quit reading halfway through an hour later.

It's just going to have to be a long one. Okay.

I grew up not really understanding money. I was a generous person; when I made money--and I did, starting a small part-time job at 14, and working every year since--I would often buy friends, boyfriends, and family elaborate gifts . . . as elaborate as gifts get when you're a teenager or college student working part-time, anyway. Beyond a few months, I never saved any money. I have nothing left from the money I made from the first eleven years that I worked. Eleven years! That's a long time to have no savings to show for it.

I grew up in a household where, theoretically, there should have been plenty of money. The household annual income was between US$100k and $140k, growing as I got older. My father made a good living as a judge. My mother did not make a good living as a private school teacher, but she was able to drive us kids all over town to activities and mostly avoid childcare. My parents did not drive expensive cars. Our house was modest for the income. But my parents never seemed to have a grasp of money--how to use it, how to save it. My father will be fine in retirement because of a (one of the last ones!) pension from the state for his years as a judge. My mother . . . well, she has not been in the best financial shape either, to put it mildly.

But I digress. As you can probably tell, I grew up in a family where money was not understood and not readily discussed. At one point, one of my sisters had a homework assignment of discussing with my parents their savings, their debt, and their credit ratings. They were absolutely appalled and refused to do the activity. I understand that some families believe children should not be embroiled in money problems, but children do need to understand money.

My father left my senior year of high school. I had applied to a prestigious, expensive college, and when I got in, I had no idea in my mind that I would not go there. But they expected my father to contribute to my education, and when he did not, I took on an enormous debtload to go to school there anyway. At the same time, I had developed no money skills. I knew (theoretically) how to balance my checkbook, but I didn't do it. I blew through money when I got it, and the lean times were very painful. My mother had no additional money to give me; she was foundering with a too-high house payment after the divorce. I remember one time when I went weeks without buying contact solution that I needed because I was overdrawn, completely broke. I messed up my credit by not paying the two credit cards I had gotten. I didn't realize it was okay to make only a minimum payment if you could afford nothing else. I was a smart kid who was really stupid about money, and I didn't see any way out of it. My dealings with money were a big source of shame for me, and I avoided anyone realizing how badly I was handling it.

The other thing is, I made one of the two prime mistakes that people tend to make about money: they think money is completely unimportant, or they think it's everything. I thought that if you were concerned with the good of the planet, the good of other people, the important things in life, money shouldn't matter to you. I was wrong . . . terribly wrong . . . but it took me a long time to realize that.

I did transfer to a less prestigious, less expensive school eventually--one that offered me more scholarships. I spent a lot of time doing volunteer work and was paid for part of it through a scholarship program, as well.

Six months before I was to graduate, I had surgery. It turned out to be ovarian cancer. I had tests and treatments; I had insurance, but I still had co-pays and had things the insurance wouldn't cover. My debt burden deepened.

I started full-time work with a non-profit organization the summer after graduation. I bought a new car right away--thought I was smart because I got a 0-interest loan through the dealer. I still bounced checks but not as many. My boyfriend lost his job and moved in with me when he couldn't pay rent at his apartment. His mom gave us Dave Ramsey's book The Total Money Makeover.

I got really excited about the steps in the book, and I worked toward step 1 of developing a baby emergency fund of $1000. The week after I got the money saved, we learned that my cancer had returned. More surgery, a long time out of work, more tests. More debt. The $1000 sure was handy, but it didn't come close to covering everything.

My boyfriend, who became my fiance in all of this--well, bless his heart . . . he did not help things. He was basically a loser in most aspects of his life. He seemed like such a great guy when it came to dealing with my cancer, although that faded in time. He could not keep a job to save his life. He needed someone to run his life (which he has, now, having joined the Navy). He smoked a lot of weed and hid it from me. He cheated on me and tried to hide it from me. Then I found out and the game was up. I don't put up with that shit.

So he moved out. I had stupidly (see a theme here?) agreed to sign a truck loan for him; his credit wasn't good enough for him to get one on his own. So I was left with his truck and its loan, my car and its loan, the rent for the apartment we'd just moved into, and all of my normal debt. I felt as though a house-load of bricks of debt were stacked on my back. I got behind on car payments. I bought stuff to try to make myself feel more normal. I paid my rent on time; I paid his truck on time. But other than that, I don't know if anything else got paid on time. I wanted to hide from money.

Oh, and in the midst of all that, I tried running a Mary Kay business on the side. Let me tell you, that doesn't work if you don't handle money well. When an order got messed up, I ended up owing several people money that I simply did not have.

By this time, I'd started dating the guy who would become my husband--a guy who lived off of his very small student salary without accruing any debt: he paid off his credit card balance in full every month. I knew that I could trust him when, a month or two after we'd started dating, I broke down and, in sobbing, gasping tears, told him the state of my finances. The total amount of money I owed people and companies and corporations overwhelmed me; it was as much money as I made in a year, if I remember correctly. He responded by creating an Excel spreadsheet, inputting the different amounts I owed, and saying, "But they'll take payments, right?"

Oh, well, yes, I guess they will. I always thought of the big picture and didn't think of the little steps I could take to remedy things.

I started paying everything on time. I sold the truck. I moved to Atlanta and moved in with my husband when we got engaged. I paid off my annual-fee credit cards and left them paid off. Eventually, I got an offer for a credit card with no fee. I took it.

However . . . my husband-to-be had always lived where he put charges on his AmEx and then paid them off every month. Once he was dating me, though, his expenses for dates and sweet nothings increased. Suddenly he had a balance at the end of the month. And then we planned our wedding, and that balance grew. Helping me get the truck fixed (it had broken down) to sell it increased it, too. I went with him to visit Japan; we thought we had enough money for the trip, but we were wrong.

With all of that going on, we approached our wedding date with the realization that we had accrued $17,000 in credit card debt while we were dating. My husband was as close as his laid-back self gets to panic. I promised him that we would start working on it the week after we got married--that we would eliminate credit card usage, that I would match his thrifty spending habits. Still, the amount we owed astounded and appalled me.

I had my husband-to-be read The Total Money Makeover to see what I thought we should do. He agreed. Despite what some money gurus will tell you to do, TTMMO starts you paying off debts with your smallest bill first. Well, actually, first you create a budget, cut your lifestyle down some, and save a thousand dollars for emergencies. But then you pay the minimum on your other bills and throw all your extra money at your smallest bill until it's paid off. Then you roll the money you were using for that payment into a snowball for the next smallest bill. You pay off every bill--regardless of interest, regardless of who lent you the money--from smallest to largest. Some people will tell you to pay off your highest-interest bill first, or not to worry about loans (like personal loans) with no interest. TTMMO recognizes that money is a very emotional thing for many of us. Starting with the smallest bill and working your way up gives you bills to cross off your list pretty quickly as you go . . . and, as my husband discovered, at least for us, we were on track to pay off our debts in the same month as if we had paid off the highest-interest one first.

It took us a couple of months to get the hang of budgeting, but we did it. The credit cards were completely off-limits at first. (Now, we use them when we want special protection for a purchase, but we only use them if we can pay off the balance as soon as the charge shows up on our online statement three or four days later.)

And then we discovered that a friend of a friend needed expertise that happened to be part of what my husband is an expert in. He was hired by the guy to do some work, and other than the 1/3 of it that my husband set aside for taxes each pay day, we put every cent of that money into our debt. We did not let it touch our budget; we did not increase our lifestyle at all. All of the extra money--plus some from our normal work lives--went to our debts. Without that money, our income was around the average for American families--$45k a year total. (Remember, my husband is in school.) With that money . . . well, I don't even know, because I never considered it part of our income.

Between April and November of 2006, we paid off $12,000 in debt. I still bought plenty of stuff that I/we needed, but I stayed within my boundaries with buying things I just wanted. I began to realize that a) I had the skills to control my money, and b) I could trust myself with money.

In the meantime, realizing how important safety is when it comes to money, my husband and I began to pay $50/mo. for a $500,000 term life insurance policy for him for 35 years of coverage. No one would cover me due to my cancer history, but it was more important that I be covered anyway. My husband could leave school at any time and make a lot of money. It would be hard for me to make much more than twice what I make . . . and if I were pregnant and he died, well, it'd be a complicated thing. So we knew term life insurance was a good idea for us.

In early November, I messed around with our Excel sheets and realized that if we stayed "gazelle-intense" (a Dave Ramsey phrase), we could pay off all of our debt before our first anniversary. I was so terrifically excited that we would have paid off $17k in one year's time.

Then November 19 arrived. My husband was hit by a car that was going 35 mph. He was in the hospital for 10 days. I took off 12 days of work. My husband couldn't work. Having our emergency savings was a life-saver, and I felt pretty peaceful that things would work out financially (a huge change from a year earlier), but I couldn't see how we would end up paying off that consumer debt by March of 2007.

We dug our heels in a bit more, learned to sacrifice a bit more. We sold my car and learned to use one--that was the biggest change, and it saved us about $350/mo. in my car payment and insurance. We gave people homemade Christmas presents. We cut back here and there.

As it turned out, thanks to a marvelous (really) attorney, we then managed to settle with the insurance company of the guy who hit my husband within a few months. (It's not uncommon for that stuff to drag out for years.) I had always felt that lawsuits to insurance companies were very often stupid, but an attorney friend explained to me that money was the only way for the insurance company--which was, after all, insuring the driver and his car--to pay for the permanent damages to my husband's body. My husband will live with those physical issues the rest of his life, and it was the least (and only) thing the company could do to provide some monetary compensation as we dealt with it. That made sense to me. And when we settled, we were able to pay off the rest of our consumer debt (we do still have student loans) and look toward beginning to save for retirement, finish fleshing out our emergency fund, etc.

These days, we live on a budget, which we spend a few hours reviewing and altering every month. We live within our means. We save for vacations; our anniversary trip to Oregon was paid completely in cash. (And there is something extra special about a vacation that incurs no debt, let me promise you.)

So . . . what does this have to do with weight loss? Well, I can't pin it down for you with any incredible precision, but I can tell you this: having peace about money--having dealth with that huge weight, that swirl of emotions--freed my mind up to be able to deal with other issues in my life. I'm losing weight in a way that feels measured and positive for the first time in my life. I'm relaxing into a new way of living instead of obsessing over calorie counts. Perhaps dealing with our money on a month-by-month and day-by-day basis helped teach me how much small changes over time add up to big ones. I'm not sure. But I think it's worth telling you all of this because I feel that changing my financial habits has been a large factor enabling me to lose weight, to keep my focus, to be stable enough to cope with the weight issue on a regular basis.

Occasionally a friend will lament to me having difficulty with weight loss or an exercise routine. But what I've realized is that sometimes it's not the right time to make big changes in those things. Sometimes life is overwhelming, and putting something else on your plate will just stuff you too and fill you with acidic worry. Sometimes you have to figure out what else in your life needs to change and work your ass off on that before you come back to giving your focus to food/weight/exercise issues. You can only focus on changing so much at once before everything starts to fall apart. For me, one issue I had to face was getting my finances into reasonable shape, whatever it took. (The peace of mind far outweighed not always being able to buy what I wanted at the moment I wanted it.) I know by the statistics about debt in the US that a lot of other people may be in financial holes similar to the one I was in. Other people may have other glaring issues in their lives. Don't get me wrong--I'm all for everyone gettin' healthy at any time they can manage it! But I think it's important to be honest with ourselves about what's going on in our lives and how we see or think it is affecting us.

Reality Check

2007-05-15T14:30:00.000-05:00

I love this link that Salma at Perfuncto put up; it shows what new celebrity-designed (or so-called celebrity-designed) clothes look like on real women.

Thanks for sharing, Salma!

C25K Update

2007-05-14T08:09:00.000-05:00

I did one day of Wk. 6, Day 1, and two days of Wk. 6, Day 2. Day 2 was running 10 minutes (about a mile), walking 3 minutes, and then running 10 more minutes. The first day I did it, it was really hot, and I had some difficulty. Today, it was hard, but I just did it. It was awesome and strange to be out there today knowing I was running about a mile at a time when 8 weeks ago I couldn't run even a minute! I'm going to wait two days until starting Day 3 of Week 6 . . . and from then on out, I will only be running, not walking anymore (except for warm-up and cool-down, of course), starting with 25 minutes at a time.

Crazy!

I have to start waking up earlier to go out. Even at sunset it's really warm in Georgia right now, and though I was raised here, I don't love the heat, and if it's hot when I run, I feel ill easily. I'm hoping I'll keep adjusting to the heat as I get better at running. But I'm also going to have to start waking up early to make time for it in the mornings on a regular basis, I think.

Delicious, healthy pesto veggie soup

2007-05-12T18:12:00.000-05:00

Do you remember the terrible WW no-point soup? I'm sure for some of you it's fresh in your memory, was perhaps mentioned to you recently. It's full of no-point vegetables in a beef/tomato broth. That's it. No protein, no bread or pasta. I'm sure there is a small minority of people who actually do really like the soup; maybe it reminds those people of something their grandmother made. I made it when I was on Weight Watchers a few years ago and found it hideous; it left my stomach acidic and growling not long after I ate it. (No wonder--it had no calories!) Yech.

I was thinking about that soup while I made us dinner a few nights ago. I was making a vegetable soup again . . . still with crushed tomatoes and broth (veggie now) as the basis. But this one had about 2/3 cup of whole-wheat cheese tortellini in each serving and a spoonful of pesto to stir into each bowl. I can't tell you the calorie count of it--it certainly would not qualify as a no-point meal. I can tell you the soup was healthy and easy--and delicious enough that we happily ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Veggie/Tortellini Soup with Pesto
Makes about 4 servings

a mix of vegetables, chopped into bite-size pieces and separated by how long they normally take to cook (I used a couple of carrots (10 min. to cook), a bunch of Swiss chard (7 min. to cook), two handfuls of frozen broccoli (6 min. to cook), and a yellow squash (3 min. to cook))

1 can of crushed tomatoes (I used Muir Glen fire-roasted tomatoes)

2-4 c. of veggie broth

4 garlic cloves

2-3 c. of frozen or refrigerated cheese tortellini (one pckg.--I used whole-wheat tortellini)

salt and pepper

~2 T. of pesto (we used pesto my husband had made that we froze in an ice-cube tray, but refrigerated or shelved store-bought pesto would work fine)

Dump your can/jar of crushed tomatoes and 2 c. of veggie broth into a large pot, and turn the burner to med-high. Crush the garlic cloves into the pot. Heat to a boil. If you have any vegetables that will take a long time to cook, add them to the pot and let them boil a few minutes. I added my carrots for about four minutes before adding my tortellini. When you are ready to put your tortellini in (mine took about 8 min. to cook--just what the package said), you will need to turn the heat on the burner down so that your soup only simmers; a fast boil would blow apart your pasta before it's cooked. Add tortellini and other veggies according to about how long they will take to cook. Add more veggie broth if you need to in order to keep everything barely covered by soup. You should time it so that everything in your soup will be ready at the same time. (If one veggie stays a little bit crunchy or gets a little bit soggy, it's okay.)

Ladle the soup into bowls; add a bit of salt and pepper. Put an approximately 2-tsp. dollop of pesto into each bowl; let the person eating that bowl of soup stir the pesto in right before consumption.

The pesto adds a rich flavor to the otherwise simple soup.

Enjoy!

Enjoying Food on a Diet

2007-05-12T10:49:00.000-05:00

I remember standing in line in Subway soon after the Jared craze. Two of the three women in line in front of me had come in from their office together for lunch. They had run into the third woman, whom they both knew. All were overweight, though not obese by much, if at all; they were about the same size as me. One of the two women who were together was explaining how their lunches worked.

"We eat a 6" on white or wheat every day for lunch--no cheese or mayonnaise or oil. On Fridays we celebrate by adding a bag of baked chips." They proceeded to discuss how many WW points the meals were.

I was in Weight Watchers, too. I was struck by how depressing I found their meal plan. Can that really be what it takes? I wondered. Boring sandwiches on only wheat or white, meat and vegetables and vinegar--nothing else? And a bag of cardboard-tasting chips to celebrate once a week?

I was thinking about those women's conversation this morning as I walked home from my run. The answer is clear in my mind these days. No, that is not what it takes. It might work, but it's not the only way or, in my mind, the best way to do this weight loss thing.

I don't eat sweets incredibly often anymore. If I do, it's usually just 2-3 bites. I've realized that when I eat sweets, I'm usually nearly full from a meal beforehand. And I hate feeling stuffed these days, so I eat enough to get a taste and stop there. But if I go somewhere and get a really incredible dessert--like the banana-hazelnut-chocolate tart I had recently from Chocolate Pink--if I want the whole thing and am not full by the time I eat a couple of bites, I eat the whole thing. (With the pastry from Chocolate Pink, it actually happened to take me two sittings to eat it all.) When I eat it, I feel no guilt or remorse, just genuine pleasure and appreciation.

I used to not understand that concept at all. I thought people who talked about enjoyment in moderation were crazy. If someone lets me have a go at ice cream, I'll eat the whole tub, I thought. My days were filled with the diet substitutions that I thought would provide external controls to keep me from expanding. Baked chips, low-calorie bread, non-fat ice cream, Cool Whip, diet soda--you get the idea. After I had cancer and started researching what I could do to change my chance of getting it again and/or dying from it, I realized I was ingesting a whole lot of really messed-up chemicals. Later, I realized that the artificial ingredients in, and the acidity of, most of those foods made me feel ill with stomach aches and bladder pains anyway.

Then I realized, too, that eating those foods often drew me in to eating twice as many of each kind in my desperate attempt to get some satisfaction from the crap I was ingesting.

Do you not find 1 tablespoon of real whipped cream far more satisfying than a quarter cup of fat-free Cool Whip? I do. (And what is Cool Whip made of, anyway?)

I changed my life.

I don't drink sodas anymore--period. I've had maybe two in two years, and both of those were special kinds (no corn syrup!) on special occasions where I really wanted them. Do you realize how irrational it is for people to drink such sweet drinks as a staple of our diets? It's crazy. I was as 'addicted' as anyone, and I just quit. Feeling ill, feeling like you're on a constant sugar feed, isn't worth it. I cut out almost all corn syrup. I cut out all artificial sweeteners. I started eating only sugar/honey/molasses as sweetener . . . eating sugar in delicious forms like real maple syrup on homemade waffles, petit fors from a local bakery, a small scoop of chocolate-java-chip icream, etc. Not crappy Little Debbie cakes--even the full-fat kind of that dessert is not fulfilling. If I want dessert, I want something incredible. Something I make myself, or something that comes from a store or restaurant that specializes in good desserts.

At first I just went nuts, really. I ate lots of sugar, and I gained weight. But over time, I've gotten my cravings under control, as I've discussed previously, and these days, I eat real food (homemade food) that is good for me 80-90 percent of the time, and the other 10-20 percent of the time, I revel in what I am eating instead of feeling any guilt about it.

Even that 80-90 percent of the time isn't about deprivation, either--I think that's important to note. My healthy meals are about balancing things out--lots of vegetables, some healthy fats, some healthy proteins, some great grains, and always (always always always) wonderful seasonings and sauces. If I eat a higher calorie lunch, I have a lower calorie dinner. Breakfast stays pretty much standard to keep me from accidentally sneaking in calories I don't mean to eat. I try not to let myself get ravenous, which is when I make bad food decisions.

Do I spend more on food than some people do? Yes, absolutely. And I know that I'm 100% worth it. I don't believe in living in debt, so my husband and I make sacrifices elsewhere, but we eat well. What will happen in your life is what you make a priority, and a long, healthy, satisfying life is a huge priority for me.

If I think I want dessert, I remind myself of everywhere in Atlanta (and in my house) I can find all sorts of amazing desserts, and I ask myself if what I have in mind is actually what I want, or whether I am feeling something else emotionally that I'm putting off on food. I craved a cupcake intermittently for two weeks a couple of months ago and finally went and got one. I got a cupcake from the top-rated cupcake spot in Atlanta, and it was perfect. It was incredible and just hit the spot--partly because I knew I could thoroughly enjoy it with the knowledge it was exactly what I wanted.

I'm all for people realizing that we can do this, we can all do this--really, we can. We don't actually need diet gurus to restrict our lives in painful ways. We just need to get back in touch with what it feels like to make healthy foods that also taste good, to eat reasonable portions, to let ourselves enjoy things in moderation. You, too, do have the ability to enjoy things in moderation, just as I do even though I once didn't realize I could.

Of course, we also have to deal with the psychological and biological issues related to cravings, weight gain, etc. I have definitely learned a great deal from reading articles and books that go into the psychology and biology of dieting, eating, etc. Bob Greene's recent Best Life Diet and the book Mindless Eating, along with many O Magazine articles, come to mind first. My husband and I eat off of salad plates for every meal; there are no wide open spaces on our plates that we will feel we need to fill with food. We serve ourselves out of the kitchen instead of off the table, and we don't go back for seconds until we have finished our plates. (Usually, we don't go back for seconds at all. Having a plate that's usually 2/3 of veggies helps keep us full from early on in the meal.) When I see a high-fat food, I know that my body will kick in the desire to eat it because of humans' ingrained biological tendency to think that we must eat high-fat foods whenever we can to fend off the seasons of famine that have been so common throughout human biological history. I can deal with these things much more calmly when I understand what's going on behind the curtains of my mind when I'm faced with food issues.

Additionally, it's been helpful to learn--starting with my anti-cancer research--that there is an imperative for our bodies and for this planet for us to take better care of ourselves and refuse to eat food that has been produced in really awful, wasteful, polluting manners. I had a professor who also owned a cattle farm tell me that I would, like she, no longer eat fast food burgers if I went to a cattle auction and saw the diseased cattle fast food restaurants chose to use for their meat. Reading Fast Food Nation was a great nudge in that direction for me as well, and I recently finished and highly recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was a very in-depth look at our various eating habits in the US. (Did you know that, indirectly, we eat more corn than Latin American countries that rely on corn for 60-80 percent of their diets? That's crazy!) These books are fascinating, very engaging--not dry at all--and they take you behind the scenes of America's food production to make you think about what you really should and should not be supporting with your consumption.

I was thinking about those women at Subway because I was thinking about WW no-point soup versus the soup I made a couple of nights ago. That's a different post for later, though.

Vegetarian Stir-Fry

2007-05-08T15:27:00.000-05:00

Easy-peasy stir-fries I made in my childhood (a frequent affair) went something like this: Dump frozen chicken/veggie mix into flat non-stick pan. Add some soy sauce and a little bit of oil. Make some boil-in-bag rice. “Stir-fry” (more like boil) until veggies are cooked and soggy. Dump over watery rice and add lots of (sweet-from-corn-syrup) teriyaki sauce. Despite how unappetizing it sounds, I loved those meals.

But my tastes have evolved, and I’m eating local, fresh, organic (grown-without-pesticides if not officially organic) food whenever possible. Last Saturday, I picked up a mix of vegetables that were tucked in a basket and asked the farmer what he intended purchasers to make with it. “Stir-fry,” he said, and then after thinking a moment, “Or soup. Or salad, actually.” I went with stir-fry, and I added a few other local veggies, so that my stir-fry mix was zucchini, yellow (summer) squash, red onion, broccoli, bok choy (first time cooking bok choy!), carrots, radishes, and broccoli. Chopping it all and separating it into the groups I’d add to the stir-fry took a while, and the whole process of making stir-fry from scratch made my kitchen quite messy, but it was worth it. I served it over red quinoa, an heirloom variety of this high-protein, nutty grain that has been eaten in South America for thousands of years.

It was a great lunch to make today when I had plenty of time to chop. Here’s how I pulled it all together.

Tasty Vegetarian Stir-Fry (simple but for the chopping)

A mix of vegetables

1 block of tofu, preferably frozen, defrosted, and squeezed or pressed for 20 minutes under something heavy (or tempeh)

Several tablespoons of soy sauce or Bragg’s Amino Acids

1 piece of fresh ginger, preferably frozen (Freezing it makes it easier to deal with)

1 tsp. or so of molasses

2 cloves of garlic (more or less, depending on your love of garlic)

some grain for cooking (brown rice? quinoa?) and whatever it needs with it to cook (I often cook mine in veggie broth)

1-3 T of sesame oil (or canola oil in a pinch), depending on how much stir-fry you’re making

Tasty additions or changes, such as adding toasted sesame seeds at the end . . . or exchanging honey for the molasses–whatever you feel inspired to do!

Stir-fry is a meal it is important to prepare your kitchen to make. The French term for this is mis en place–everything in its place. What that means is you go ahead and chop your veggies, pull out your spices, mix your pre-made sauce, etc., before you ever start cooking. In stir-fry, your meal comes together very quickly on the stove, and if you are chopping another vegetable or searching for your ginger while your first veggies are cooking, you’re going to end up with a soggy or burnt meal–not what you are going for. Many chefs use mis en place regularly to make meals cook more smoothly. It does make for more dirty dishes many times, but it also makes for better end results.

Back to the recipe:

Chop your vegetables and protein into fairly uniform, bite-size pieces, and separate them into bunches based loosely on how quickly they will cook. I had onion, radishes and carrots in a bowl; chopped, pressed tofu in a bowl; broccoli and bok choy in a bowl; and zucchini and squash in a bowl–to go into my stir fry in that order.

Peel and grate a 1/2" piece of ginger (or more, if you love ginger.) Mix the soy sauce, ginger, molasses, and garlic in a small bowl or ramekin. (You could also stir-fry the ginger and/or garlic in the stir-fry with the first veggies instead.)

Start the grain of choice cooking. (Of course, if your grain takes 50 minutes to cook and can sit once it’s done, you can start it while you are still chopping your veggies or even beforehand. Mine only took 15 min. to cook, though.)

Put on an apron if you want to avoid getting splattered.

Heat a tall pan–preferably a wok or other slope-sided pan–on medium-high heat. Add your longest-cooking veggies; stir regularly for about 2 minutes. Add your protein and your next veggies. Keep stirring and tossing the veggies. Continue until you have added all your veggies, with 1-2 minute intervals between additions. Add a bit more oil if your veggies start sticking to the bottom.

As soon as you have added your last vegetables, pour in your sauce, and stir well. Cover, and steam for 1-2 minutes. Stir your vegetables again. They may be done at this point; if not, keep stirring for a couple more minutes.

Serve over your grain.

I like this simple sauce in the stir-fry because it lets the vegetables’ flavor shine through while still adding something to them.

Mmmmm deeeeeelicious!*

*Dan recommends serving this meal to any spouse who has had surgery that morning to provide super fortification against any bad things happening post-surgery. The fresh, local veggies provide lots of vitamins, and the tofu, Bragg’s, and quinoa all provide protein.

A Momentous Day

2007-05-05T09:28:00.000-05:00

(Thanks, Google Earth! We were able to measure the route of my 20-min. run and then add my warm-up and cool down to it . . . so here's a photo of my path!)

I did it. I ran 20 minutes straight this morning. Twice on my curvy path of my run, I ran into my best friend, who was also doing her C25k run (she's on an earlier week), and she ran with me for a minute each time. That was good because talking to her (and realizing I could talk while running my 11th and 15th minutes) was good support for me to keep going.

TWENTY MINUTES! And I could have run 21, possibly more. I can't say it was fun, exactly, but it gave me a feeling of accomplishment. And it was/is really cool to the feel of my muscles shifting into different gears for uphill and downhill run. It's fun in the same way it's fun to admire how your car engine feels shifting from one gear to the next. (Cleary, I am a total nerd in this way (among many other ways), but that's perfectly okay. I love driving a stick shift.) I love feeling how things tie together.

At the end of my run, when the beep to stop surprised me because I thought I had 1-2 minutes more, I was thinking of what's next. A fire truck went by with its siren screaming, and I thought about joining a volunteer fire department some day. I thought about being in good enough shape for something like that to be a possibility. Then I thought:

I can never again let myself get out of the habit of engaging the physical side of me.

As a person who tends to be very intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally based, those are the elements of myself that I engage most often in my life: in choosing my work, in getting impassioned, etc. But there is a physical element to me that is interconnected with those other elements, and when I remember that and give the physical part of me reign sometimes, I am a happier, healthier, more successful person.

Week 6, Day 1 will mean going back to alternating running and walking before committing to only running from then on. I am so excited now to know that I really can do it!

Part 2, Dinner-for-one Miniseries: Pasta Primavera with an Egg on Top

2007-05-03T17:59:00.000-05:00

What I remembered this evening is that I had whole-wheat linguine in my refrigerator. Refrigerated pasta--which I buy at the grocery store, though I have an eventual goal to start making it myself--is so much better than dehydrated pasta that I can't even tell you how much better it is. Homemade pasta is that much better than refrigerated pasta, too, but since I'm not doing that yet, I do love some refrigerated pasta pasta.

I use whole-wheat pasta most of the time I make pasta. The trick with it is to be very careful not to overcook it, checking to see if it's al dente about one minute before the package directions say it will be ready with refrigerated pasta and two minutes before the package directions say it will be for dehydrated pasta. You can't let it just sit before you serve it, either, or it will start to break down and be gummy. Avoid overcooking it and leaving it to sit and you'll be okay.

As I've mentioned previously, I keep sundried tomatoes in oil in my fridge at all times. They stay good a lonnnnnng time and add a lot of flavor to a dish with the addition of only a small amount. That flavor formed the basis of this meal.

Pasta Primavera with an Egg on Top
(I thought this would make 2 servings--one to eat and one to freeze, but it made about four, so I just had extra to freeze! Of course, you could shrink what you make to be only one serving as well.)

1 pckg. refrigerated whole-wheat pasta (makes 2 to 2.5 c.)
1 zucchini
1 summer squash
1 heirloom tomato
(OR USE whatever vegetables are in season where you are)
4 T. sun-dried tomatoes in oil
3 T. olive oil
few dashes of Mrs. Dash garlic-and-herb seasoning
Lawry's seasoning salt or regular salt
pepper
2-4 T. of high-quality cheese (I used a hard cheese with peppercorns in it)
2 eggs (or 4 if you want to plan on 4 servings)

Put water on to boil for the pasta, and salt that water.

Chop the vegetables into small pieces or slices.

Grate the cheese, if necessary.

Heat the sundried tomatoes with the olive oil on low heat for a couple of minutes in a large, non-stick pan. Stir together. Toss the vegetables into 2 T. of olive oil and turn the heat up to medium. Cover, but remove the cover to stir every minute or so. Put some Mrs. Dash (or garlic, or other herbs) and Lawry's (or general salt) in a ceramic or metal bowl. When vegetables are lightly cooked, dump them into the bowl, and stir the seasonings into the vegetables.

Put the pasta in the water to boil. Be sure to quickly pour it into a collander in the sink as soon as it is done.

One minute before the pasta will be done, put your remaining tablespoon of olive oil in the veggie pan and heat it on medium. Crack the eggs into the pan, pouring them from very close to the cooking surface to keep the yolk from breaking. Cook about two minutes, spooning some hot oil onto the egg yolk as you go to partially cook the yolk. You want the eggs to be ready right before you are ready to serve the meal.

Put the pasta in serving bowls topped with veggies, then eggs, then a sprinkle of cheese and a grind of pepper. (I don't mix the cheese into the vegetables because I prefer bursts of cheesy flavor over a well-mixed, barely-there cheese taste.)

After you have served the dishes, each person can break the yolk of the egg in his/her bowl to add to the sauce in the pasta.

Delicious.

Crazy week

2007-05-03T16:24:00.000-05:00

My 100th post! How nice.

I have to tell you that this week has not gone the way I anticipated for this week to go. Tuesday, after work, my car broke down. It's now fixed; I just have to go pick it up . . . and pay $850. Thank God for our emergency fund, but it's still irritating, of course.

One of my friends was in town for a medical appointment, which turned into a longer, bigger ordeal than we had realized it would be.

All of that leads to . . . I had long days the past two days and ate out the last two nights instead of eating at home.

Then I got sick. Food poison? Or a stomach bug? I'm not sure. But ick.

Feeling mostly better by 11 today, I decided to go try my 20-minute run. What was I thinking? The longest run I've done with the sun beating down straight overhead and the temperature climbing into the 80's? I felt ill a few minutes into it and realized my lunacy. I felt bad enough to just quit and walk home . . . and it appeared to reinvigorate how bad I had felt. Ick. Back to the bathroom and bed.

Now I'm pondering dinner. I've been at home all day in the silence. I've read Bel Canto in the last two days. . . . Great novel. I read very quickly and even more so when I am home alone. I've read three novels in the last week. Even though I've spent time with wonderful friends, I'm lonely. I'm ready for my husband to return from his conference.

I just went into the kitchen a few minutes ago and put on my apron to make myself dinner tonight. But I left my book with my list of meals I was going to make at work yesterday, and the only one I can remember is . . . oh wait, I just remembered another one that will be easy. Well, good. I'll have a meal for one to post tonight and I will keep myself from going out for dinner.

I'll go make it now before I have time to reconsider.

Oh, but I forgot to mention that after I got off the plane from our trip, the scale said I had gained six pounds on our trip. SIX POUNDS. That's truly insane--I mean, I figured two maybe--I ate well mostly but ate delicious gourmet breakfasts each day--but gaining six pounds in a week would take something like 3000 extra calories a day, and I sure didn't do that. I told myself that it was probably a water-weight issue from flying, and sure enough, four days later, I'm down 4.5 of those pounds.

Dinner for one: Night 1 in my mini-series

2007-04-30T21:35:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, you only get to see one of my blurry test shots from my dinner, as my camera battery died before I got set up for better ones! Oh, well, it'll serve to give a general idea.

I wasn't terribly hungry tonight: I'm still a bit jet-lagged, and I exercised my upper body tonight. (The bands/ball exercises are working; I was sweating! More info on that when I hae the routine down better.) Sometimes hard exercise has the nice effect of making me less hungry afterward.

Of course, eating a salad for one is hardly a unique dinner. And salads can be so horribly boring, especially when you are used to filling a salad with tasteless iceberg lettuce coated in high-fat items like boiled egg, bacon, cheese, fried chicken, buttery croutons, etc., drenched in a high-fat dressing that leaves a shiny pool at the bottom of your salad bowl when you're done. If/when you then try to switch to a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and vinegar alone (or something similar) to make your salad have nearly no calories, well, yech. All of your textures the same, all of your tastes melding into one . . . that's not fun at all. All of that former stuff can be lovely (even the iceberg lettuce, if it's very fresh and in just the right salad), but of course, a salad full of bunches of fattening food is no healthy meal at all.

I've found that putting more unique ingredients in my salads makes me enjoy a light meal very thoroughly. Each bite is deliciously flavorful; with a variety of textures and tastes, the salad stays interesting to my palate. When one of my college roommates graduated, I made her a cookbook of recipes I'd made that she enjoyed. One thing I included was a whole page of pick-and-choose ingredients for salads, everything from sesame seeds to roasted red peppers to strawberries to cilantro. Nearly anything can be good in a salad--I love roasted vegetables in a salad . . . or hot dressing that wilts the greens a bit . . . or pan-fried tofu. It's all about experimentation.

Tonight's salad consisted of spring greens (I'd rather use local organic ones, but I didn't have any, so I bought a bag at Whole Foods), sliced red onion (very thinly sliced, about 1/8 of the onion--too much red onion in a bite can knock out your taste buds), dried mixed berries (about 1/8 c.), pistachios (1/8 c.), and my easy homemade Meyer lemon dressing. That's it. I had planned to use feta as well, but the feta in our fridge was ancient and had developed green mold. My salad was delicious without it. The onion was crisp and pungent, the pistachios were crunchy and salty, the berries were chewy and sweet, the greens were fresh and peppery, and the dressing was slightly sour but also a bit sweet. The combination was simple and wonderful.

I've written out my dressing before, but here it is again. It's a great dressing for people who are recovering from Irritable Bowel Synrdome or Interstitial Cystitis (or people whose stomachs get easily upset in general) but still want a salad dressing that tastes like salad dressing. I never use vinegar in dressings because of my body's issues, and I couldn't have eaten this dressing without pain at the worst of my IC, but I love it now that I'm in the process of recovering.

My Old Stand-By: Meyer Lemon Dressing (No Vinegar!)

1 Meyer lemon (a Meyer lemon is a cross between a Mandarin orange and a regular lemon)
~3 times as much good olive oil as you got lemon juice (just eye it--it's really okay)
~1 tsp. Mrs. Dash garlic-and-herbs seasoning (or brown or spicy mustard, or your own seasoning mix)
couple of grinds of salt, or 1/2 tsp. Lawry's seasoning salt
1-2 tsp. of honey

I juice the lemon into an old jelly jar that has a lid. Then I pour and sprinkle all the rest into the jar, put the cap on, and shake it well. If I'm thinking ahead, I make it a day in advance, but I've made it and served it right away, too. With the lid screwed on the jar, it stays good in the fridge for a week or longer.

If you have any salad ingredients you love that some other people find strange, please share! Or . . . what's your favorite salad combination in general?

C25K Update . . . and a bit more

2007-04-30T19:09:00.000-05:00

I did Day II of Week 5 again yesterday, and it was fine. It was hard, but it was fine! I could certainly feel my muscles working on the running sections, and I was slightly sore, but it was nothing worth stopping me. I ran two 8-minute segments with the end of the last one being a pretty steep incline. Talk about talking yourself through it! But I did it, and I'm very proud of that fact.

I realized this morning that I actually only have to do 20 minutes (ha! only . . . 20 minutes) once this week before dropping down to a lower level for the beginning of next week. I guess that's to push my muscles and then rest them some? In any case, I'm planning to do that on Wednesday, weather willing, and then move on to Week Six.

Do you know what? This was so cool to me. The skills I'm developing in C25K and with my healthy eating attitudes are paying off in other ways. Let me share. . . .

A few years ago, I developed a case of acrophobia (fear of heights), and it's never gone away. I went from being a fearless adolescent to being a very fearful adult rather suddenly. My parents had a very sudden separation and then a long, horrible divorce. My financial world fell apart. My emotional world fell apart. It seemed like I was just waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Then I got sick, several times, and then it turned out I had cancer. Then my first fiance and I broke up. Of course, plenty of good things happened in the meantime, but what it felt like was I was just holding my breath waiting for the next earthquake. I've let a lot of that go, but the fear of heights has stayed with me. When we were in Oregon on vacation, we were crossing, on foot, a bridge that was high over a rushing river. I felt woozy glancing down. I clung to the railing with each step. I had wanted to stop to take photos, but suddenly I felt like I couldn't do anything but be afraid. Then I thought (as I have used with foods I have craved but haven't really desired), "What if I just don't?" Only this time, I meant, "What if I just don't let myself be afraid?" And suddenly, I wasn't. I was able to look down, look up, walk without holding the railing, and take a great photo of my husband on the bridge. I was so excited that my diet trick worked. It's so basic . . . yet it worked.

The other thing is that I have decided to develop 3-4 blogs simultaneously for the next year to year-and-a-half. I am going to do them more professionally than I have done any blogging. I'm excited about it, and I find it a bit overwhelming. When I feel overwhelmed, it's easy to just STOP thinking about whatever is overwhelming me and do nothing. Today, instead, I thought, "Why don't I break this down the way C25K breaks down running? I can do anything in little pieces." So I emailed a very successful blogger I know to get some advice, and I broke through the paralysis.

What I find so completely refreshing and exciting about all of this is that I have never found losing weight contributing anything except resent-able restrictions on my life. With this path, instead, I really am learning to take care of myself and to move toward my goals slowly, with purpose and pleasure.

Meals for One (or Two)

2007-04-29T18:37:00.000-05:00

I have five minutes until I get dressed to go for my run, my first run in a week since I didn't run on my vacation. This is going to be interesting, I have a feeling. . . . But I'm going to do it. I'll feel better once I've done it.

I went to Borders today, looked at a couple of great new cookbooks and came up with a plan for the meals I'm making this week . . . meals for one, except for the night one of my friends is in town visiting, and even then the meal could have been for one. When my husband is gone for a few days, I often eat out every night or nearly every night while he's gone. Our grocery budget, divided by 1 instead of 2, allows that. However, it's not the best way to go as far as taking care of myself, and taking time and energy to take care of myself is the name of the game these days. So check back each night this week, and I'll post a photo and recipe of what I've made that night. I'm worth a tasty, healthy home-cooked meal all on my own.

Any suggestions?

2007-04-29T12:11:00.000-05:00

I'm home alone for a week now and really want to focus on some great, high-veggie, low-sugar, (possibly vegan or nearly vegan?) meals for one this week. I eschew highly processed foods as much as possible. Any suggestions? I have stir-fry on the menu but nothing else yet. A small amount of cheese or other dairy (or eggs, even--okay, that's very far from vegan, I know) would be okay, but I am craving some simple meals that show off fresh veggies, whole grains, and vegetarian protein.

I'm here, just . . .

2007-04-26T23:51:00.000-05:00

. . . 3000 miles away at the moment. We're on vacation in Oregon. But I'll be back and alone (my husband is going to a conference in CA for a week after this) soon, so I'm sure I'll be posting lots next week.

This has been a fascinating vacation, for while I have indulged more often than usual, I have used the realization that stuffing myself makes me miserable to keep myself in check; I have enjoyed veggie-packed meals because I was craving them; I have realized that I not only am not craving desserts as I was before--I also cannot tolerate them in the same abundance as I used to; and I have (while not running--doesn't work with the schedule and weather) happily exercised with walking, hiking, etc. AND have realized I miss running. MISS it--Really!

This has also been a thoroughly enjoyable vacation because my husband and I saved money for it for half a year. Knowing the budget for our trip and knowing everything was paid for in advance has been marvelous. We're never getting back into consumer debt again--I swear!

Kitchen Sink Dinner

2007-04-18T12:42:00.000-05:00

I conceived of the idea of making a frittata (basically a crustless quiche) last night as a way to use up vegetables we have left in our fridge before our vacation. (They'll rot while we're on vacation if I don't use them up.) Apparently, I'm the 8-billionth person to come up with this idea, as nearly every recipe site I visited to look at recipes discussed the history of the frittata as a way to use up vegetables, bread, or even pasta!

Here's what I made--which I'm calling my "Kitchen Sink Frittata" based on the saying "everything but the kitchen sink." I am not certain of the origin of the phrase, but I have heard it is from WWII when Americans were supposed to be exceedingly careful about their use of metal in their homes, because the military could potentially need from Americans' houses "everything but the kitchen sink" (the sink being ceramic). I don't know if that saying exists outside the US, but you should definitely try making a frittata with whatever you have on hand. . . . As a side note for you omnivores, we had a dinner guest who is a real lover of meat (he orders steak nearly every time we eat out with him), and he loved this meat-less meal.

I use organic and local ingredients wherever possible.

Kitchen Sink Frittata

Serves 6 (or 4 as a full meal)

1 bunch of spinach
1 yellow onion
2 tsp. olive oil
3 garlic cloves
1 zucchini
~3 T of sun-dried tomato pieces
8 eggs
1/4 c. Parmesan cheese
1/4 c. crumbled feta
1/4 c. cheddar
salt
pepper
paprika

I washed the spinach well and washed and chopped the onion. Because spinach releases so much water when it's heated, I sauteed the onion for a couple of minutes and then tossed in the spinach to steam out some of the water for 3-4 minutes. I chopped the garlic and zucchini and threw it in the last minute or so of the spinach cooking.

I turned that eye off and left the veggie mix in it.

I preheated the oven to 400 degrees.

I cracked the eggs into a large bowl, whisked them well, added the sundried tomatoes, cheeses, and seasonings, and whisked again. I sprayed with cooking spray and heated an oven-proof skillet (a seasoned cast-iron one, in my case) on medium heat. When it was hot, I added the veggie mix to it. Then I immediately poured the egg mixture on top. I used a spatula to lift the spinach bits to let egg swirl throughout. When the frittata was about half set, I carefully transferred it to the hot oven to finish cooking in about 15 minutes.

To go with the frittata slices, I served fresh snap peas quickly sauteed in sesame oil with lots of garlic and a bit of Bragg's on top.

It was a delicious, easy meal.

Back on track and a tasty vegetarian meal

2007-04-17T08:31:00.000-05:00

Have I mentioned I can totally do this? Because I can. When I keep a positive attitude and don't let a bad day or three throw me off, I'm alright. I know what to do; it's just a matter of keeping it up.

I've been considering making videos of how to make some of the easier meals that I make. Would that help any of you be more committed to cooking meals full of healthy foods? For those of you who don't cook or do cook but are scared to experiment, what would help you be more comfortable and adventurous? You'd get to watch me lose weight in the course of videos. . . . That could be interesting for me, anyway! One of my friends mentioned this weekend she panics, basically, when she sees words she does not know in a recipe and just does not use that recipe. I wish everyone could enjoy cooking like I usually do--it can be such a centering pleasure--and I want to help people with that however I can.

I just finished pumping up my ball, so I'm going to do some exercises this morning with that and my resistance bands. I should stop typing for a minute and go take some meds for cramps. . . . Okay, let's hope I feel better now in a few minutes.

After I try out my various exercises with the ball and resistance bands, I'll post what I'm doing since some of you asked about that.

Oh, interestingly, I have noticed in the past couple of days that I am able to stretch a lot further than when I started stretching before running six weeks ago. (Can you believe it's been six weeks now? That's crazy!)

Another bonus is that I am developing crazy ab muscles! I keep making my husband feel them. (He always obliges me.) They are still under a layer of fat for the most part, but it's nice to feel how different I am becoming. Lifting your legs to run is a great core work-out, I've learned.

I found a picture of me from the fall that demonstrates how I looked at my recent highest weight. It's a physical picture, not a digital one, but I'm going to scan it soon to keep a record, I think. I don't think I still have any photos of me at my truly highest weight, which was about 40 pounds higher than I am now. (40 pounds!)

As I stayed home from work yesterday, I had plenty of time to make dinner last night. I made a much more elaborate meal than I would usually consider making on weeknights. I set stuff up to marinate, went for my run, came home and bathed, and finished the meal.

This is what I made (nearly every ingredient was organic, and the produce was local):

I peeled, chopped, and blanched (boiled and then plunged into ice-cold water) a couple of golden beets for about 8 minutes, adding a couple of peeled, chopped turnips the last four minutes.

I peeled and chopped several carrots. I tossed the carrots and the cooled-off beet/turnip mixture into a big plastic bag. I added some herbes de provence, garlic-and-herbs Mrs. Dash, a tablespoon or so of olive oil, and a couple of grinds of salt and pepper. I sealed the bag and spread the marinade around by lightly pressing together and shaking the contents of the bag. i stuck it in the fridge to marinate.

I chopped up a block of tempeh and put it in a smaller plastic bag. Then I stirred together some molasses, Bragg's amino acids (a soy sauce substitute), a bit of vegetarian Worcestershire sauce, some grated peel of a tangelo, and the juice of the tangelo. I poured that mixture into the tempeh bag and squished it all together. I stuck it in the fridge to marinate.

I sliced the ends off of fennel (I should have cut off a bit more and left just the bulbs--this was my first time cooking fennel, which has a mild licorice-like taste, delicious though I don't like licorice), doused it in a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper, and stuck it in another plastic bag in the fridge.

I put some rainbow chard in a big bowl of water to soak some of the dirt off.

I went for my run--Day 2 of Week 5 (I'm repeating Week 5's days for a while). It was a really hard day for running. But running 8 minutes at a time rocks to be able to do!

When I got home, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees. Then I took a quick bath.

While I was in the bath, my husband chopped a yellow onion for me and put it in a bit of olive oil on low heat in a non-stick pan.

I sprayed two cookie sheets with non-stick cooking spray. I dumped the turnip/beet/carrot mix on one and put the fennel bulbs on the other. I put the turnip mix in the oven for about 40 minutes; ten minutes later, I added the fennel.

I stirred and covered the onions. Then I rinsed the chard off and tore it into bite-size pieces, dropping it into a bowl as I went.

I added about a tablespoon of brown sugar to the onions and stirred that in. The onions were caramelizing at this point.

With ten minutes before the veggies were going to be done roasting, I put water on to boil in a non-stick pan to make enough grits for two people.

When the water was boiling, I added a dash of salt and the grits to it. I stirred the grits in well.

I threw the chard into the onion mix, turned the heat up to medium, stirred the onions and chard together, and put a lid on that pan.

I heated another eye on the stove to med-high heat and, when it was hot, tossed in the tempeh, which cooked quickly.

I stirred the grits, grated a bit of sharp cheese, and added the cheese and a teaspoon of butter to the grits. I added a dash of my ever-present Lawry's seasoning salt (ooh, a recipe to make your own here) and a few grinds of pepper. (Grits--a Southern US staple which are a whole-grain version of corn meal, basically--are ready to eat in 5-7 minutes, depending on how thick you want them.)

I pulled the roasted veggies out of the oven to finish the prep.

To serve, I put the grits in two bowls, topped them with the roasted vegetables, put the chard/onion mix on that, and topped that with the tempeh.

Then I drizzled a very small amount of truffle oil around the edges of the bowls. I have eaten truffle oil in restaurants but never cooked with it before. It is amazingly rich and wonderful. If you are trying to be careful of your fat consumption, I encourage you to use a small amount of truffle oil in savory foods that you want to be rich. It made a huge difference in the meal.

The end result was rather pretty.

I loved the grits, roasted veggies, fennel, and chard/onion mix; the grits were rich and creamy, the roasted veggies were earthy and slightly bitter, and the chard/onion mix was earthy but sweet from the caramelized onions. I thought the tempeh was a little too sweet. I also had given myself way too much food in my bowl, so I only ate about half of it. My husband really liked it all, including the tempeh; he ate part of what I had left in my bowl.

This recipe used a good bit of oil but did not have much fat otherwise, and nearly all of the ingredients were healthy, so I consider the meal a success. It was beautiful and delicious--just what you want from a healthy meal.

Just a glitch . . . and a question for you

2007-04-16T09:26:00.000-05:00

Okay, I knew this day would come.

I did. It was just going to happen. And it did.

I had a gain this week.

And I know what caused it. We had a crazy weekend last weekend--starting with a big Easter breakfast--with our car getting broken into, and it turned into a bigger deal than it initially was where the insurance company wanted to total the car. (They aren't, though.) That didn't cause weight gain, but it caused the week to be a bit haywire. (We share one car.) I got sick. My period is coming. Things at work made me want to cry. Several times this past week, I said, "Ooh, I am stuffed" at the end of the meal instead of slowing down and stopping when I was becoming satisfied. (You know how the food keeps hitting your belly for about twenty minutes after you eat.) This weekend, I went to another city for a bridal shower and bachelorette party. I ate less than other people but still ate until I was uncomfortable. I didn't listen to my body enough. Because of an issue with the exercise ball I bought, I haven't used it yet. I have one to use now and am starting either today or tomorrow. (Today, I run. Can't decide whether it's okay to do them the same day.)

Those aren't excuses; they're just facts. "One week doesn't mean you're forever off-track; it's just part of life." That's my zen weight-loss-of-70-pounds-maintained-for-years husband speaking. And he's right. 1.2 pounds up this week is a bit disappointing, but only because I know I haven't been taking as good of care of myself as I could. It's not really about the weight; it's really about the weight being a marker to demonstrate how much I'm nurturing myself. The real problem would be if I let this past week become a habit. I don't feel well when I'm not caring for myself.

I am at home (in my home city, I mean) today through Thursday evening. I'm going to be concentrating on making us meals with lots of fresh, loca, organicl veggies, whole grains, great herbs, and lean vegeterian protein until then. Thursday, we leave for my grandmother's house in SC to visit for her 92nd birthday. We drive back here late Friday. Saturday morning, we are flying to Oregon for a week for a much-needed vacation. While we are there, we are going to have many culinary feasts. But I'm going to remember that just because something is fantastically tasty and full of local, fresh, organic ingredients doesn't mean I want to eat all of it. Better to leave satisfied and feel well (ready to wander around and hike) than stuff myself and feel sick. (I don't binge, by the way--I just mean eating a whole restaurant meal is usually eating way too much food.)

I am still confident I can do this, though. This slow, steady weight loss that's not about beating myself up has me feeling wonderful, and I can't give that up. Nor can I give up the exercise that makes me excited to look at and feel my various body parts to feel how I am remaking myself.

Going to the mall last night and finding size-12 dresses that fit me . . . size 16 pants that were too big . . . that's exciting. This blip on my radar can't change that unless I let it.

Statistics like the ones in this article are scary, and I've been one of those people who lose just to gain double, certainly. But this time . . . I'm not willing it to be different like I have in the past; I'm not forcing myself to make changes that feel painful. I'm easing myself into changes that feel great, which makes this different from every other weight-loss attempt I've ever had. "Whipping myself" into shape hasn't worked, but keeping a constant attention on taking good care of myself (hey, I'm an adult--no one else is going to take care of me for me) is working. What makes you feel confident that this time is going to work for you?

Success stories

2007-04-13T08:45:00.000-05:00

Here are some details of a woman who went from around my highest weight (230 was hers) to now being 140. Her goal weight is a bit lower than I expect mine to be--I'm thinking 150. But anyway, I was happy to see she partly accomplished her goals by doing C25k!

I borrowed a friend's recent Good Housekeeping magazine, and there was a woman profiled in there who started at my January starting weight (203) and ended her weight loss at 150. It was cool to see--and show my husband--the difference between the starting weight and the end in her photos.

Day 2, Wk. 5

2007-04-11T14:06:00.000-05:00

Day 2 of Week 5 (a repeat of Day 1 of Week 5, for me) accomplished! They're setting up for a big festival in the park where I run. It's going to be packed all weekend. I am hoping a run on Friday morning will work with all of the vendors et al out there.

I owe y'all lots of food info with some great photos. I've been so busy! Today I am freecycling a huge chunk of stuff from my apartment to clear it out and make way for the cleaning service (an eco-friendly, living-wage cleaning service) that is coming to do a deep clean of our apartment tomorrow. My husband and I agreed to spend some money on that after we have been so lackadaisical with cleaning since his accident. I am really excited about having the house be thorougly clean.

Off to give away more stuff now. . . .

Trying to explain what I've been trying to do

2007-04-09T09:27:00.000-05:00

Here's part of a chat I had with my best friend, who has recently moved down the street from me (like when we were kids! only in a different city) and started C25K. The chat illuminates part of what I've been working on mentally and emotionally since January:

8:32 AM Margaret: i'm still sore

8:34 AM me: yeah

i will feel alright

8:35 AM and even be okay walking

and then the first running step i take

i can feel the soreness

not like shin splints

but very mild similar pains
not enough to keep me from going

but you also moved this weekend--is your upper body sore?

Margaret: yep, but my legs are the worst

8:36 AM they are very heavy

me: hmmm

i wonder if you pushed yourself too hard

Margaret: i don't know

i don't really think so

it's not miserable

6 minutes

8:42 AM Margaret: i don't want to not run tomorrow, but ....

7 minutes

8:50 AM me: it's okay not to

the point is to take care of yourself

right?

i mean part of the point is running

but running is about taking care of your body

Margaret: yeah

me: and if taking care of your body means waiting another day

then so be it

8:51 AM you had a very taxing weekend, body-wise

Margaret: that's true, but it would be hard to start again if i stop

me: ah, that's where you have to work on letting go of the perfectionism

just as i have been doing :

8:52 AM waiting an extra day or two is only 'quitting' if you live in a perfect world

and we don't

Margaret: it's not perfectionism i'm worried about it procastination

me: you're not procrastinating if you're in pain

Margaret: i'm very good at that kind of logic

8:53 AM me: it's been very good for me to always try to keep in mind taking care of myself

sometimes the answer is NOT to exercise

and sometimes it is

i don't know

8:54 AM it's working for me, but i can't really explain it beyond that

8:55 AM Margaret: hmmm... i know myself and i can totally logic myself out of working out

me: if you mean that you can justify not working out if you think of it that way, so can i. but i remind myself that if i am bullshitting myself, the only one that suffers is me

Margaret: i mean i can make excuses all day

that's true

me: and that keeps me in check because i am being very honest with myself at all times

or trying to be, at least

Margaret: yeah

8:57 AM me: if you're just beating youself into submission to work out

. . . i guess i've come to see that's no answer in the long run, at least for me

because eventually i'll rebel if i'm 'punishing' myself into shape

but if i'm doing it to take care of myself

8:58 AM there's nothing to rebel against

Margaret: that's very good stuff

hard to get into that mindset

me: yeah, it's definitely a process

i sent you that o magazine article, didn't i? that talked about having empathy for the self?

Margaret: i'll see how i feel tomorrow

8:59 AM and i'll be prepared to go

me: yeah, that's smart, too. because you will probably feel somewhat better tomorrow.

Margaret: yep

me: the other thing is, if i just don't feel like going but don't have a good reason, i just pull on my clothes and get the forward momentum, and then i know i'll be really disappointed in myself if i don't go

so i end up going

Keepin' on keepin' on

2007-04-09T09:01:00.000-05:00

The last few days have thrown me off a bit emotionally. The biggest thing was finding out that I am allergic to a huge variety of molds, grasses, animals, trees, etc. *Sigh* My husband and I are trying to figure out what changes to make in our house to deal with that. Because we are careful with money, we have it for things we need it for, so it's not a problem to change things in our apartment. It's just a pain in the butt and requires energy that the allergies are already sapping from me some.

Also, my husband takes the second/last part of his mid-Ph.D. quals exam tomorrow. I am confident he will do well, but I'm still feeling a bit nervous for him. It will be nice to have it over with. He's struggled, somewhat, with preparing for it because of his accident in November. (For those who missed that post, he was crossing a street in a crosswalk when he was hit by a car that was traveling about 35 mph on impact.) He spends 4-5 hours a week in PT and is often exhausted, achy, and/or cold when he's not in PT. So even though he's brilliant (really--he is), getting ready for this test, which is draining under the best of circumstances, has been hard on him.

But in happier news (and that last news WILL be happy when it's over tomorrow, too), I did Day 1 of Week 5 of C25k yesterday. It wasn't easy, but it also wasn't as hard as I was expecting it to be. It helped that it was a bit chilly; I'd rather run in GA cold than GA heat! Week 5 is different than previous weeks because each day is different, and on the third day, you're doing nothing but running! Eek! I am going to stretch Week 5 out a bit and do Day 1 once more before I move on to the next day.

In other happy news . . . I broke my plateau! This is the only time in my life that I have stuck with healthy eating and exercise to break what was basically a three-week plateau. Today, I weighed in at 184.4, which means I am down 19 pounds since January. And it means I'm 4 pounds away from my next goal weight, which means I will be ordering a new bathing suit soon! At 177 pounds, I will have reached my half-way point (I can't believe I'll soon be in the 170's! That's marvelous!), which means I get a bigger reward. I'm thinking about looking into tooth bleaching. I know some people think tooth bleaching is completely superficial, and certainly, it is superficial, but after I had braces for four years in high school, my teeth were no longer as white as they could be. They've seemed dingy to me ever since then. It's funny, because I sure don't notice other people's teeth, so I doubt they notice mine. But it bothers me a bit, and rewards are about things I wouldn't normally buy myself, so I want to look into it. I think it might be more money than I want to pay.

This weekend, I learned that I have fit back into three pairs of pants I wore in college. That's really exciting! I'm back in clothes that I haven't worn since I had my first surgery for ovarian cancer (which changed the shape of the front of my body and left a ridge of scar tisue in my abdomen). I freecycled a variety of size 16 dresses and shirts. Woo-hoo!

I'm glad I took the time this morning to write this post. I was feeling a bit crappy emotionally, but now I'm excited. I love being able to share with y'all; it keeps me accountable, and in general, it feels great to share with people who understand.

Day 5, Wk 4, C25K

2007-04-04T09:30:00.000-05:00

I've done two more days of week 4. I'm still not feeling super-confident, but I was able to do them in completion, so I'm going to move on to Week 5!

I went to an exercise store in Atlanta where a personal trainer was very kind in helping me get resistance bands and an exercise ball. I feel self-conscious going into stores that are solely about exercise, but he was very helpful and genuine. If you're in the Atlanta area, check out Fitness Resource in Buckhead if you need something they offer--it's fitness equipment only, from low-tech to high-tech.

Now I have to develop a work-out for my arms with my new equipment! Not that it has anything to do with any of my ultimate goals, but I'm in a wedding 8 weeks from now, and it will be nice to firm up my arms some to go along with the rest of my slimmer profile in my bridesmaid dress!

Day 3, Wk. 4, C25k

2007-03-30T10:45:00.000-05:00

I went for my run/walk this morning about 7:30 a.m. (Yes, it made me late for work. I called and left a message to let my boss know I'd be late. Not a big deal--I'm working all sorts of extra hours right now.) It was so cool that I felt a bit chilly until I got my blood pumping with my first run. I was definitely breathing easier with no early morning smokers in the park, no high-humidity/high-smog conditions, and the pollen having been slightly tamped down out of the air by a light mist. I managed to finish Day 3 with no problems: no cramping; no stitches; no being entirely, desperately out of breath.

However . . . I still feel like I need to strengthen my ability to do this level before I move on, so I'm going to continue the Week 4 routine (5-min. stretch, 5-min. warm-up walk, 3-min. run, 90-sec. walk, 5-min. run, 2.5-min. walk, 3-min. run, 90-sec. walk, 5-min. run, 5-min. cool-down walk--whew, that's complicated, good thing I have my mp3 timing it for me) for anywhere from an additional day to an additional week--until I feel more confident about my abilities at this level.

And I'm definitely going to try to go out in the mornings . . . albeit a bit earlier than today. I can't get going too early, because it won't be light outside, but 7 a.m. should work fine right now.

Oh, and I went shopping a couple of days ago for a couple of new work shirts, as the ones I own are getting too big for me. I bought two shirts and wore one of them yesterday. Our small office was abuzz with people asking me about my weight loss; apparently, it's very obvious when I wear stuff that's more fitted than my old clothes!

Changing

2007-03-29T13:13:00.000-05:00

I did Day 2 of Week 4 of C25k last night. I waited a half hour later than I have been going out, and that was a good idea; it was a bit cooler going out at 7:30. (I live in the Southern US, so 'sunset' technically is something like 8 p.m. right now, and it stays somewhat light until 8:30 or so. I exercise in the park, so road traffic is only a concern on my way there and back.)

Honestly, Day 2 of Week 4 was hard for me. I got a stitch in my side with my first 5-minute run--despite me running slowly and trying to breathe deeply-- and eventually I put my mp3 player on pause and walked/deep-breathed it off. Then I started running again. I did manage both 3-min. runs and the second 5-min. run with no stopping. I am going to try (*try*) exercising in the morning before work tomorrow to see if an earlier, cooler, less smoggy start (Atlanta has terrible smog when it gets hot/humid) helps me out. If tomorrow's run/walk is as difficult as yesterday's, then I'm going to do Week 4 over again. It is easy for me to feel anxious, frustrated, or competitive with myself for not being able to skip straight to Week 5. I am taking time to remind myself that this is a journey toward being able to run, not a competition!

Doing C25k is good for me in that way. I remind myself I'm learning to do something that I'm not good at. There are many things I won't be instantly good at that I want to try. This is the first one I can remember in a long while where I am recognizing I'm not good at it and gradually working toward the goal of doing it better without getting frustrated or flustered to the point of giving up. What will I try next? I'm not sure, but I guarantee you I'm on a roll.

For some reason, I have kept putting off getting a trainer for upper-body work. Now the end of the semester isn't terribly far away, and I can only buy sessions through the end of the semester at my husband's school. I'm considering not getting a trainer and buying resistance bands and a ball to use at home instead. I wanted a trainer to help me exercise in the park, but the heat and pollen (high pollen count = 120, pollen count in Atlanta yesterday =5300) are making being outside not terribly enjoyable. So now I think I would like to do stuff at home. I want to do things that don't require going to the gym at all, so I've been researching at-home, weight-less exercise. I'm thinking some plyometrics, some exercises that use my own weight and gravity (like push-ups), and some resistance work-outs would be a good upper-body combination. Until I get through C25k, I don't need any additional work-outs for my lower half. My core has been amazingly strengthened by running--I can't believe my hard obliques!--and will also be supplemental support for the upper-body stuff I'm looking at.

I have realized something important in this process of learning to run. Ladies, some of you will understand how major this is. I have realized that if I am going to be someone who works out regularly, if I am going to be some kind of athlete, I have to take care of my body to the point of giving up some of my shoes. During the workweek, it's not unusual for me to wear shoes that have stretched out to be slightly too big (I hold them in place by occasionally tensing my toes or some such--which I didn't even realize till recently) or that pinch my foot a little, or something like that. But if I go to exercise after wearing those shoes, my feet are, of course, still uncomfortable from the shoes I had on. That's not cool. It looks like I'll be purging my closet this weekend. This is not a small thing: we are talking about some of my most beloved shoes. My husband is in awe of the fact that I'm considering giving up my favorite red clog Doc Marten's, which are, these days, a smidge too big, and slide around on my feet a bit in a way that's not entirely comfy for much walking. But I'm thinking about giving up those shoes and probably half a dozen or a dozen others because part of this whole weight-loss thing, and part of this whole exercise thing, and part of this whole becoming-a-better-me thing is realizing that I want to take good care of myself in every way possible. I mean, really--I've recently started flossing every night, and I hate flossing. It's the same thing, at heart, the rest of this: I want to be a happy, healthy me, the me that is nurtured; and that means doing things that ultimately take good care of me even if they are not the easiest to do initially or in the short term or even if they change my life a bit or alter my relationships with some people or whatever. I'm taking time for me and making energy for me in a variety of ways, getting healthier as I go. No one else can nurture me if I don't nurture myself.

There are times in life when things are falling apart and you do what you can to hold them together. You cling for dear life. You grudgingly make whatever changes you have to make to keep going. It's all a struggle, and you are brave for just making it through the best you can. Then there are times in life when things are coming together for you, and you can either sit complacently or take those times for all they're worth. I'm in one of the latter times now: figuring out grad school plans, working on a great relationship with my husband, calming down my complex relationship with money (a subject due its own long post, whenever I manage to finish the one I've started), simplifying my life so that what is really important to me is in the forefront and what society tells me should be important isn't as prevalent in my mind. I want to take this time for all it's worth and make some big strides towards the person I want to be . . . even though it's not easy to do that.

When it got hard for me yesterday on my second 5-min. run, I pictured the little girl I was when I was three. When I was three, I loved my tricycle. I cycled my bright red tricycle everywhere I could: I was a tricycle speed demon. I was full of energy. I was full of possibility. "I'm coming home," I told the little girl in my head. "I'm getting back to the you you thought you'd be."

Weekly Weigh-In & C25K Update

2007-03-26T20:52:00.000-05:00

I'm down another .8 pounds--woo hoo! I'm hoping maybe my drop will be slightly bigger this week. I'm itching to get down to my next goal (180) so that I can buy myself a new bathing suit. It'd be awfully handy to get to that weight in time to get my suit for the wedding I'll be attending on Florida's coast the first weekend of June.

I finished Week 3 of C25k and did Day 1 of Week 4 yesterday. I think I am going to try switching to mornings (pre-breakfast, pre-work) for my runs as apparently in spring our city's largest park turns into an mj haven in the evenings. Combine clouds of smoke, smog, high heat, and humidity, and you get one gaspy veggie paparazzo. Still, I made it through the first day of Week 4 . . . until the last 30 seconds. I got a stitch in my side that didn't want to leave, and I walked the last 30 seconds of my last run. I was a bit disappointed and had to remind myself I'm really doing well.

Because really . . . REALLY . . . I still ran HALF A FREAKING MILE at a time.

And tomorrow, I plan to run every bit of the running part.

I CAN do this. And that's pretty damn awesome.

Fruity Curried Tofu Salad, Version 2.0

2007-03-25T21:48:00.000-05:00

I liked my initial attempt at curried tofu salad, but I didn’t love it. I went back to the drawing board, using this recipe as a base. Here’s the end result, which is delicious. Even one of our friends, who claims he does not like tofu, enjoyed this salad.

We served the salad in pita bread (warmed and brushed with melted butter) with avocado and butter lettuce in the pita, and with sliced melon and steamed, garlicky broccoli as the side dishes.

Fruity Curried Tofu Salad

Serves about 6

1/2 c. cooked wild rice (I cooked mine in veggie broth)
1/4 c. walnut pieces
1 pckg. extra-firm tofu, drained and cubed
1 T. olive oil or canola oil
1 tsp. honey
1 T. curry powder
1 c. grapes, halved
1/2 c. dried cranberries (Craisin-style)
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
2 stalks green onion, finely chopped (green and white parts)
1 c. Greek yogurt
the juice of one lime
~1 additional T curry powder
1-2 additional tsp. honey or cane syrup
salt and pepper to taste

Chop, drain, etc., everything that needs it, tossing the rice, fruits and veggies together in a large bowl as you go.

Heat a large, dry pan on medium heat. Toss the walnuts in the pan, and toast 2-3 minutes, flipping once. Remove the walnuts and put them in the large bowl with the other ingredients.

Add the oil to the pan and let it heat a couple of minutes (not until smoking). Add the tofu, 1 tsp. of honey, and 1 T. of curry powder. Cook until the tofu is no longer very wet (4-5 min.) but not browned. (You can make the tofu a day ahead and keep, covered, in the fridge.)

Add the cooked tofu to the bowl. Toss well. Add the remaining ingredients, using additional salt, pepper, curry powder, and honey or some cane syrup (I used some cane syrup because we got it in our CSA order) until the taste is to your pleasure.

Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour. The yogurt may separate if left overnight.

Enjoy!

Weekly weigh-in

2007-03-21T14:27:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a bit longer than a week--oops. I'm down .8 pounds, which is fine by me given that a) I ate a lot of unhealthy foods last week, b) my period just started, and c) I am down FOUR PERCENT in my body fat measurement since Jan. 1st. FOUR PERCENT! I think that rocks. My percent of body fat was horrifyingly high and now it's just really freaking high, but I'm getting it down.

I really think the charts and graphs you can get at extrapounds.com are very interesting. Here's a chart of my weight loss since the year started. I think it's fascinating how it's a nearly linear loss even when it doesn't feel like it.

Tasty, light salad

2007-03-20T20:33:00.000-05:00

This weekend I was having one of my times of anxiety that come up occasionally as I eat healthfully without trying to count anything in the process. I was back to the Can I really actually do this? train of thought for a couple of days there. I went a bit overboard last week/over the weekend with what I ate, because we ate out a lot. It's okay to eat out and choose whatever you feel like occasionally--to eat what sounds tasty to you without any regard for how it will affect your healthfulness. But if you want to lose weight, it's not okay to do that three or four nights in a week!

But that was a different week, and I'm back in the zone this week with a variety of tasty, healthy meals planned.

I had had a rather rich, high-calorie lunch today, and I knew I was going to make a late dinner because I was going to do my second day of Week 3 on C25k, and I need to wait at least three hours after eating anything for me to do the running parts. I felt very worn out today, as it's the first day of my period. I spent the morning at work with cramps; by the afternoon, I was just tired. My husband (bless his heart--he's pretty clueless about grocery shopping) went to the store for me to buy our weekly groceries, and I geared up to do my C25k outing even though I was tired. I knew if I could go out and do it today, it was making a statement about me progressing towards a goal even when it's not easy. And I did it! I even realized I could have (if I'd had to) run a bit farther than I did. As it is, I'm up to over 1/4 mi on my 3-minute runs. To some of you, I'm sure that sounds like nothing, but for me, it's huge! Huge and not even horrendously hard.

In any case, I decided to make us a light dinner of a salad. If you're eating dinner at 8:30 at night and tend to go to bed around 10 p.m., you don't need a heavy meal. Here's what I made.

First, I made our dressing so that the flavors had time to meld a bit. As I believe I've mentioned on here, I'm recovering from a really bad case of interstitial cystitis, and while I have healed a good bit, I am still not able to eat normal vinaigrettes and may never be. Fortunately, I've actually discovered that you can make great dressings with no vinegar, so if you are someone who has a stomach or bladder or other body part that doesn't agree with highly acidic foods, you may want to try some of my dressings. They are acidic, but much more mildly so than normal dressings (especially 'light' dressings, which usually means they've cut the amount of oil and jacked up the acid). I couldn't have eaten even this dressing six months ago without a lot of pain, but I am happy to say I can now.

So--the dressing: we have a thyme plant in our tiny little interior herb garden (no sense in paying lots of money for small amounts of herbs that are easy to grow indoors), so I pulled off maybe a teaspoon of leaves, washed them, and sauteed them for about a minute with a few tablespoons of olive and canola oil. Then I turned off the burner and let that sit for a while to let the thyme release its flavor into the oil. I took a break to wash the salad leaves and prepare the other salad parts. Then I combined a handful of raspberries, 1 heaping tsp. of dijon mustard (with seeds in it), 1 tsp. honey, and the thyme-y oil in the blender. I threw in a little bit of red grapefruit juice fresh from the grapefruit I was tearing up. I blended it all together until the ingredients were well-mixed and foamy. My husband commented that the color reminded him of a milkshake or smoothy, but the taste, as he agreed with an "Mmmmm," was all dressing. When I make it again, I'll add just a dash of salt to the mix. I poured that into an old, washed-out jar I'd saved; I keep dressing in the fridge, with a lid on it, for up to a week after I make it.

I pulled sections out of a grapefruit we'd gotten from our CSA. I toasted walnut pieces in a dry pan with a small bit of brown sugar tossed in to stick to the nuts right at the end. I tossed together two types of lettuce from our CSA with the grapefruit, the toasted walnuts, the raspberries I hadn't used in the dressing, and a bit of feta cheese.

I put the dressing on it at the end and tossed it together as I served it into our individual bowls. We had exactly two servings of it (go me), though my husband loved it so much he said he would have liked another helping. The sweet/salty/tangy combination of flavors was really wonderful together.

Still trucking along

2007-03-19T20:36:00.000-05:00

Ah, I'm so busy right now! . . . but I want to get back to posting daily, so I'm going to try to start making that a priority again over the next couple of days. Posting daily keeps me accountable, as does reading all y'all's blogs.

I can tell you that, YES! I finished week 2 of C25K, and I have also finished Day 1 of Week 3! Very exciting. I never thought I would be able to jog 1/4 of a mile, but hell, look at me go! I'm loving what this is teaching me about my ability to develop new skills over time.

Sunday was my first anniversary with my husband, and we had a lovely day. Off to bed now.

Autumn Harvest Stew (a tasty, easy vegan meal)

2007-03-15T19:36:00.000-05:00

Autumn Harvest Stew (or Winter Harvest Stew these days)

This slow-cooker/crockpot recipe was adapted from a Publix Greenwise recipe from last fall. I added a couple of bitter vegetables because using only sweet ones made a very sweet meal the same day, and it made leftovers that were nearly unbearably sweet. Depending on how mild or spiced you like your meals, you may want to slighty decrease or increase the spices. There's no heat in these spices, though--I don't mean to imply that there is.

2 chopped sweet potatoes
2 medium chopped, peeled parsnips
2 medium chopped, peeled carrots
2 small chopped, peeled apples
1 chopped, peeled turnip
1 chopped, peeled rutabaga
1 chopped onion
2 pckgs. regular seitan (28 oz.? or so--it's strange how similar to meat this stuff can seem; just look at the photo!)
1 tsp. crushed, dried thyme
1 1/2 tsp. dried rosemary
1 tsp. salt
few grinds of salt
1 1/2-2 c. veggie broth
1 c. organic apple juice

In a 3.5-4 q. slow cooker place your veggies and seitan. Sprinkle with the seasonings. (You can also use ~three times as much fresh seasonings, tie them together with twine, and tuck them in the food. That's how I originally made this dish.)

Pour broth and apple juice over all.

Cover and cook on low heat for 7-8 hours or on high heat for 3.5-4 hours. (I've always used low heat.)

I serve the stew over couscous. As you can see in the photo, I like to serve it with sauteed, tender-crisp garlicky green beans as a foil to the sweetness of the stew.

Still trucking along

2007-03-15T19:12:00.000-05:00

I did Day 2 of Week 2 of Couch-t0-5k yesterday. It was hard work, but I was very proud when I finished. I have realized that if it is this warm outside (it's not even THAT hot, but in the low 70's) I have to take water with me. Otherwise, I'll end up parched several times during any training and just feel miserable. If you start out doing C25K, I would encourage you to take a bottle of water as well. I'm not normally terribly thirsty at any given time--I drink water regularly throughout the day--but the running portions in even moderate heat really dry out my throat and mouth.

Tomorrow is the day my husband takes his big mid-Ph.D.-point quals test. It's potentially a test over an enormous variety of subjects in the history of computer science research--drawing older studies in with the future of computer science. He's been studying for it for around a year, and he's been intensely studying for it--reading for about six hours a day--for the past few months. I feel confident he will do well, but it will be a lot of work; he has 8 hours to answer four essay questions. He can use any books, papers, studies, etc. that he wants; he can use the internet; he can use whatever information he has compiled. He just can't use other people. He's loading up our dining room table with books he may want to use as I type. The upcoming quals have been hanging over us as he has tried to recover from his accident, and I will be very happy when it's over!

I hope he will come out of it tomorrow afternoon feeling that he was well-prepared. Three weeks later, he does a presentation and an oral defense of the answers he put on the written test. If he feels he did well tomorrow when it's done, he can relax until the orals; if he feels shaky about an answer, he has to spend the time between the written and the oral tests figuring out what he should have said.

That's been a big thing on our plates lately. And I've been very busy with work; I feel like tonight is the first night this week I can catch my breath, and really, I'm holding my breath till he takes this test.

Next week, we get our settlement check from the insurance company; then the bank will put a hold on it, and finally the money will be released the following week. I have been meaning to write a post on here about finances, because I think they have played a fairly large role in my ability to relax into trusting myself about weight loss. I have had a major shift in how I feel about and treat money in the past couple of years. Maybe I'll write that one tomorrow if I have the energy!

This weekend, once quals are over, my husband and I can start focusing on creating the details of our vacation to Oregon that is coming up in April. Although we have traveled a pretty good bit together (three cities in Japan, Boston, London, Helsinki, Tallinn, Vermont, and other smaller trips), my husband is usually working at least part of the time when we travel. (I fly with ff miles 1-2 trips a year. He gets a lot of ff miles with all of the travel he usually does. None since his accident, though, of course.) It's going to be so wonderful to take a trip where he has nothing to do but enjoy what we decide to go do. And we've saved up for this trip for half a year, so everything will be paid in cash. We don't charge things anymore unless we are paying them off literally as soon as they show up on the card online. But that belongs in my financial post!

I still owe y'all a tasty vegan recipe I made last week. I will see if I can get it on here before the husband-imposed deadline of being in bed relaxing by 9:30 this evening so that he is very rested tomorrow.

And now I'd just like to take this random moment to say that I love the weight-loss/exercise/intuitive eating blogs that I read. They are all a source of support and comfort to me as I work away from my perfectionistic ways, learn to trust myself with food, and get into a healthier lifestyle. I cherish all of you and your takes on life. I haven't had as much time to read blogs in the last couple of days, and I've really missed them.

Another couple of non-scale victories

2007-03-13T21:42:00.000-05:00

I visited the allergist today. I was curious how my measurements would come out there. The nurse didn't measure my weight, but I was able to (proudly! since it's dropping!) tell her what it was when she asked. My blood pressure was 118 over 65--"enviable," the nurse said. She also said my pulse, at 64 beats per minute, was strong.

My pulse has had about a drop of about 10 beats per minute from when I was at my highest weight and not really exercising a couple of years ago. My blood pressure has been in a great range since I started eating mostly vegetarian (no meat at home, and very little meat not at home) a little over a year ago.

These are the kinds of victories that matter immensely but can be hard to consider important. High blood pressure, heart disease, strokes: all of those run in my family on my dad's side. Taking care of myself now--should I continue to do so, which is definitely the plan--will pay off in the short-term through things like looking cuter in jeans, but it will also pay off in the long term when it comes to quality of life for me and my husband as we grow older.

If you're curious about what blood pressures can mean, look at this interesting chart. And if you are curious how your current habits are potentially affecting your lifespan, visit this website and fill out the info. If I continue my current healthy habits--vegetarian eating, vigorous exercise nearly daily, no smoking, positive relationships, etc.--I am projected to have a natural lifespan of 98 years! I would have had a very different result with my habits several months ago.

For the love of tomato paste

2007-03-13T13:56:00.000-05:00

Given the improvements in the condition of my medical problems, my doctor has me decreasing my medicine and trying out foods that have been forbidden for about two years. I drank some mango green tea two nights ago and found it immensely pleasurable . . . though it also kept me up extremely late given that I have mostly ridded myself of a caffeine tolerance.

Earlier in the evening, I made a quick chili topped with cornbread. It was incredibly delicious. I could have eaten four bowls of it (could have, but didn't). It was so tasty to me because, well, it was good (my husband ate two helpings), but also because I have so sincerely missed being able to consume things that contain the rich-tasting, cancer-fighting goodness of tomato paste. I’ll be thrilled to eat all the leftovers. I do have to be careful, though; while my body can take small amounts of formerly forbidden foods in occasional meals, it is easy to overload myself and make myself sick.

For the chili I made, I just used Bear Creek Damn Good Chili Mix. (Amusingly, they have different packaging with “Darn Good” on it in Kroger these days.) It’s so simple, healthy, and delicious; you just add 2 jars of tomato paste and 7 cups of water, boil it, and you’re good to go. I also add about a tablespoon of dark brown sugar when I make it. The only problems with it? 1) it has animal fat in it, so even if you make it without meat it’s not truly vegetarian (which doesn’t really bother me, but I know it would bother some of my completely vegetarian readers); and 2) the beans are cooked from dehydration, so whatever nitrogen they are kicking out stays in the final product, potentially causing you to have gas after the meal. (That’s why you normally soak dried beans, dump the water, and then cook them in fresh water.)

I love that chili mix and it’s easy, so I used it. I made the cornbread topping by heavily modifying a recipe I found on allrecipes.com. I loved the final product, though I’ll use less sugar when I make it again and have reflected that in the recipe I’m giving you.

A note on this cornbread: it is not Southern cornbread; it is sweet rather than savory. Southern cornbread has its place, but I think a strongly flavored chili works better with a sweet cornbread than a savory one. Yum.

Soooo Tasty Sweet Cornbread

2/3 cup regular flour (I use a mix of 2/3 whole-wheat and 1/3 white in everything I do)

1 1/3 cup cornmeal (I used some very grainy cornmeal from our CSA–YUM.)

1/8 c. sugar

3 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1/4 c. honey

1 egg

3/4 c. milk

1/3 c. vegetable oil

1 c. corn kernels (thawed from frozen, cooked 3 min. from store-bought fresh, or straight off the cob from garden-fresh)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Stir in honey, egg, milk, and vegetable oil until combined.

Fold in corn kernels.

What I did then was pour most of the chili into a very large, deep casserole dish, sprinkle a layer of cheddar cheese on, and drop the cornbread mix by large spoonfuls into the chili mix. Then I let out an expletive: my cornbread topping was sinking into my chili! I baked it anyway for about 25 minutes, and luckily, the cornbread surfaced and baked up nicely . . . as you can see below.

I intended to serve the chili and cornbread with a salad, but I had had a crazy day and was short on time, so we just ate it by itself. I figure an unbalanced meal once in a blue moon won’t kill us.

Local or organic? Why not both?

2007-03-12T15:15:00.000-05:00

Time Magazine’s cover story this past week was Forget Organic–Eat Local. The title is a bit of a misnomer for what the article contains; I didn’t want to buy the magazine but was interested to read the article online. It’s really the story of one man considering the dilemma of whether organic trumps local or vice versa for his habits and desires. In the end, locally grown food that was grown without pesticides (whether certified organic or not) wins. But that doesn’t surprise you, does it? It certainly doesn’t surprise me.

One amusing moment in the article is the author wondering whether people actually could survive on what, say, the Northeastern US could produce through the winter. Um, yeah. How do you think your ancestors survived for you to exist? They weren’t shipping apples from New Zealand to your forebearers in the 1800’s. Perhaps our palates now would find entirely local eating (or nearly entirely local eating, as spices and specialty foods have long been shipped at intervals) boring, but of course it can be done.

My husband and I have spent the last year learning to eat mostly locally grown foods that do not rely on artificial pesticides, and learning what the Southeastern US grows has been fascinating. The food is of amazingly high quality since it reaches us mostly within 24 hours of picking. I will be sad when our CSA stops giving us the absolutely delicious butter lettuce that apparently thrives in GA in winter. But I am also looking forward to what spring brings us in our produce. I’ve always loved the changing of seasons, and it’s very homey to have our diet shift (to some extent–we do buy some stuff at Whole Foods) based on what the earth is able to produce around us at any given time.

I Did It! Vol. II, Issue 1 ;)

2007-03-11T22:53:00.000-05:00

I did the first day of week 2 of C25k today! I ran NINETY SECONDS at a time, and that is so freaking awesome! After my fourth 90-sec run, I got the strange cramps in my lower abdomen again (though not as severely), so I put my mp3 player on pause and walked pretty slowly for a couple of minutes until they had subsided. Then I picked up where I'd left off and finished that sucker.

It definitely was hard. And I had taken medicine last night that was giving me cotton mouth today (like what happens when you're on morphine, if you've ever had surgery--though the med I was on is nothing like morphine!), so I spent nearly the whole time with a painfully dry mouth and dry throat. (Note to self: bring water just in case from now on.) I thought about quitting today with the dry mouth, the cramps, and the unusually hot day we were having that was making me feel uncomfortably warm. But then I thought about coming back and how it would feel not to have finished--about telling my husband, about telling y'all--and I got my butt in gear and just did it. It wasn't impossible, just hard.

The other issue for me today was that the park was absolutely packed . . . truly, absolutely packed. I had to get over the idea of hundreds or thousands of people throughout the park chilling on blankets while watching me huff and puff (though already my huffing and puffing is less than it was last week). I just did it. Kept my head up, concentrated on my form, and just did it. You can never be an athlete if you don't take the steps athletes take. And I do want to be an athlete.

I used new songs this week and had my husband show me how to set up the beeps in the program he wrote so I would know when to start and stop running. I put U2's "Beautiful Day" as the song in the very middle of my run/walk, thinking I might need some propping up then. And it did the job beautifully. I love that song.

I have a couple of great meals to post for y'all tomorrow--one of which is vegan--so be on the look-out if you're recipe-hunting.

Weekly Weigh-In & Exercise Explanation

2007-03-10T10:03:00.000-05:00

I'm down 15 pounds total now since Jan. 1st! Woo-hoo! That also means that I'm over halfway towards my first goal of 28 pounds by May 28--a goal that was intended as a guideline, not something to fixate on . . . but which may turn out to be attainable! I ordered a bridesmaid dress for a June wedding in a 14, and it should at least fit me well now, if not be a little big. I'm certainly not going to complain if I have to get it taken in.

I have a new shirt in a size medium that fits me. Yes, it's a fluke--I would normally be in the large size range, especially given my 36DDD boobs. But I'll take it. It's a cute shirt, anyway, and I've gotten lots of compliments on it. (I gotta tell you I think a company could make a lot of money selling clothes that were sized a bit larger. If a woman who's normally in a 12 can fit in a 10, I'm guessing she's more likely to buy.) I also tried on a pair of 16 jeans that I possibly could have pulled off of me--they were that loose zipped and buttoned. I found another pair of 16's that are a lot smaller and fit me well; I bought those. (I was at a discount store, so things are entirely hit-and-miss size-wise. I got a pair of Michael Kors jeans for I think $30.)

Someone emailed me to ask about the Couch-to-5k program. As I believe I've mentioned before, I tried a similar plan when I was in college and failed to do it. But this time, there have been a few differences: I was already getting cardio for at least half an hour almost daily with my long walks, I bothered to go to a running store and get expensive shoes that actually fit my gait and foot pecularities, and I have my mp3 player--thanks to my husband's computer-geeky ways--set up to beep when I need to switch from running to walking and back to running again. Those three things have all made a big difference. Thanks to the global warming of the past 20 years or so, Atlanta is much more pleasant for exercise in February and March than it was when I was a kid (nice for me right now, bad for everyone in the long term), so exercising outdoors now is easy. About the middle of May, it will suddenly be up in the 90's with very high humidity, and I will constantly feel like I'm melting into a puddle.

I tried out my new Enell sports bra that I bought from Two Roads Fitness (an online store for women's fitness products--my stuff shipped very quickly with great customer service). That sports bra kicks ass. It keeps my boobs strapped in, comfortably, even with running. It's pricey but I highly recommend it. It's awesome.

I use Cool Running's Couch-to-5k program. I'm working on adding in appropriate stretching. If you don't have a computer-geeky husband, I would encourage you to utilize a podcast that tells you when to switch from walking to running and back. If you want me to send you my version with the beeps in place, email me at veggiepaparazzo at gmail dot com.

Week 2 starts tomorrow, and I'm really excited! I've also signed up to have a personal trainer create upper body exercises I can do at the park to supplement my work-outs on my not-running days. I need to go pay the fee and then I should have someone helping me!

I Did it, Vol. III, and a tasty lunch

2007-03-09T16:11:00.000-05:00

Ladies (and the occasional gentleman), I did it, I did it! I did my third run/walk of Week 1 of C25k--AND it didn't even get difficult to do until I got to the sixth section of my run. I'm so excited! Week 2, here I come.

I told my husband's sister--who has recently worked up to running a 10k--and she asked me what 5k I'm going to do. I said, I guess I should pick one that's right after the last week of my training! So I'll be checking up on that now.

I got home from my run/walk psyched to eat a healthy lunch, too, so I ate some leftover curry tofu salad.

After having a lovely curried chicken salad at West Egg (we were there so that I could sample their tasty–but not perfect–cupcakes) last weekend, I decided that I would try to make a curried tofu salad at home this past week.

I froze a block of extra-firm tofu and then thawed it in the microwave. That process firms up tofu for some reason. Then I pressed the tofu with our giant bamboo cutting board for a while to get out more of the moisture.

I sliced purple organic grapes in half; chopped two very large, not very strong green onions (from our CSA–the biggest green onions I’ve ever seen); toasted some walnut pieces; and tossed all of that together with lots of curry powder, some Greek yogurt, a little Lawry’s seasoning salt, a few grinds of pepper, a tiny bit of sugar, and a small amount of light mayonnaise.

I sliced up the tofu and stirred it in. Then I realized I needed lots more yogurt and curry powder, so I tossed more in . . . twice.

After leaving the salad in the fridge for an hour or so, I stuffed some pitas (slightly warmed in the microwave to prevent breakage) with some CSA butter lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and the tofu salad.

In the end, I really liked the flavors, especially today after they’d melded a bit. But I don’t love the consistency of the tofu I used . . . not sure if I should have cooked it, shouldn’t have frozen it, or what.

We also ate oranges that came in our CSA order; our CSA is low on their late-winter produce and is waiting for their spring produce to be ready, so they had to supplement with some organic produce from Florida. The juice oranges we got were absolutely incredible.

There's my mp3 player in the picture after I finished my work-out.

Feel free to share any suggestions for alterations to the salad.

Roasted Winter Vegetable Pesto Pizza

2007-03-08T12:29:00.000-05:00

When I roasted winter vegetables (onion, turnip, rutabaga, and sweet potaotes, I think) with apple chunks and herbes de provence last week, I roasted wayyyy too many veggies/apples total. So I had my husband, who cleans up after dinner since I plan and make dinner, put the leftover roasted veggies in a baggie in the freezer.

Two nights ago when we were hungry and in a hurry, I preheated the oven to 450 degrees F while I defrosted the veggies/apples and defrosted an already-made & baked whole-grain pizza crust. I spread pesto on the pizza crust, then tossed sundried tomatoes (which I always have in the fridge, stored in oil) on top. I sprinkled on a little leftover mozzarella on there with a few pine nuts for good protein. Then I dumped on the roasted veggies and chopped up some soft goat cheese into bits to fling here and there on the pizza. I love goat cheese bits on pizza because they provide a very rich flavor without the pizza being entirely coated in cheese.

I baked the pizza for about seven minutes, and we were ready to eat!

We loved the end result of the slightly bitter veggies with the sweet apples and sweet potatoes, the savory flavor of the cheeses, onion, and pine nuts, and the intensely rich, sweet bits of sun-dried tomato.

It’s a meal too high in fat and calories to eat regularly, but a meal similar to this is a great occasional treat. I used to make us personal-pan style pizzas, but I realized we eat less if we are slicing pieces off of a large pizza than we do when we eat have a “mini” pizza of our own.

Guilty as hell

2007-03-07T21:53:00.000-05:00

. . . which we all knew. But it's sure nice to have a judge say it. I just got home from work (it's 9:30 p.m.), and my husband wants to go to sleep already, poor exhausted guy, so I'm going to keep this as short as I can while providing a few details.

The driver came in late, literally as the judge was calling his name as one of the names to be given bench warrants for not appearing. The driver, AC, refused to look me or my husband in the eye the entire time we were in there.

Let's see. The short version. The solicitor--who had told us she'd meet with us at 1:30, but did not--called my husband and AC back to a separate room. I could not be in there. Apparently AC announced he would like to plead no lo, as he hadn't realized he could plead that previously since he had pled no lo to something else in the last four years. What he had pled no lo on was a different offense, so he could plead it again . . . potentially. But my husband told the attorney he did not want AC to be allowed to plead no lo. She asked why, and he showed her photos of what his body and face looked like in the hospital while he described his injuries. I had had him blow these photos up to 8x10" for effect, and it worked. She refused to agree to the no lo plea.

AC did not have representation (our attorney for the civil matter said, "What a dumbass."), and his one question of my husband during cross-examination was, "Uh, did you look both ways before you crossed the street?" This is an especially funny question given that the street my husband was hit on is a one-way street. My husband managed to just say simply, "Yes," and with that one word convey what, yes, a dumbass this guy was.

So . . . AC's defense was . . . basically non-existent. "There were cars parked on both sides of the street, your honor." Yes, he said, my husband was in the crosswalk. Yes, he said, he did hit my husband.

Well, there you go. That's all you need in the state of GA. The rest is just details.

The prosecutor asked that my husband be allowed to give a victim's statement, and he did. He described his injuries, said he'd had to be in Grady Hospital for 10 days and that he imagined the court might understand what that meant, told them his wife had experienced a lot of mental anguish as she dealt with what happened, informed them his family had had to travel from VA to help care for him. He told the judge he is still in PT and will be until his strength has improved.

The judge then, I kid you not, must have said some variety of, "You're lucky this guy didn't die," and "It's amazing this isn't being tried in Superior Court. You have permanently injured this man" a dozen times.

He put off sentencing until he could get AC's driving record.

When he got the driving record a few minutes later, he asked the solicitor what punishment she wanted. She said, "A $500 fine and driving school." My husband and I both thought, That's all? The judge asked AC what AC thought of that. "Well, your honor, I'd be happy to go to driving school."

"Yeah, I bet you would," the judge replied. "But you're going to do a lot more than that."

The thing is, AC was in a car accident two months before he hit my husband. Then he hit my husband. Then he got a ticket for making an illegal left-hand turn NINE DAYS LATER. That combination really grated on the judge.

So the judge informed AC that he would have his license suspended for three months, would do 40 hours community service, would pay $1500 in fines and fees, would attend driving school to get his license back after three months, and--this is the kicker--that he would be on probation until November 19 of this year ("a date that is not a coincidence, I would like to point out," he said--the anniversary of the accident) , at which time, if the judge finds that AC has gotten any vehicle-related violations of any sort between now and then, AC will go to jail. "And now," the judge concluded, "you can go sit on the front row for a while. You are going to need to call someone to pick you up, because you don't have a driver's license anymore."

And that--that is awesome.

My husband says that if at any point AC had said to him, "You know, I just want you to know I'm really sorry for what I did. It really weighs on me," my husband would have seriously considered supporting the no lo plea. But AC never spoke to him and never looked at him. He showed no remorse. So he gets what he deserves.

And seriously? Seriously, when we left the courtroom, one of the other guys who had been in there was with us took the elevator with us. "That guy doesn't need to be allowed to drive nothin'," he said of AC. "He don't even need to be driving a bicycle!"

A loving spouse

2007-03-07T09:35:00.000-05:00

Today is the court day for the guy who hit my husband; for those of you who missed the earlier post, this is the guy who hit my husband with his car going about 35 mph (about 55 km/hr) when my husband was crossing the street in a crosswalk, breaking my husband's pelvis in three places, pushing his collarbone permanently out of place, shifting the front part of his skull, etc. The guy pled NOT GUILTY to "failure to yield to a pedestrian." Um, right.

Our attorney--who has been representing us in the civil matter but has no say in the criminal matter--warned Dan that if the guy brings an attorney to represent him, that guy may try to ream Dan. My poor husband--the victim of this matter. I wonder what the guy's attorney could ask him that would be so rude? Needless to say, I'm feeling a little anxious today. I was also feeling a little anxious last night. I convinced my husband to go with me to a bookstore to get the book I need to read for this weekend's book club meeting. I thought I wanted dessert. But I was too tired to make dessert, so I pondered getting a piece of mudslide cheesecake at the bookstore. Then I pondered a milkshake. Once I had dragged him out of the house, my husband wanted to wander the books for a while, but I told him I felt like I would eat something if we stayed in the bookstore (with its cafe).

"Well, use your sympathetic mind thing that you've been doing." He put his arms around me.

"What do you mean?" I was somewhat just being purposefully obtuse. My eyes felt heavy.

"I mean, do you really want dessert? If not, what is it that your body really wants?"

I put my head on his chest and closed my eyes. "I want to go to sleep. That's what I want. I'm very tired." Just saying it, I felt like I could have fallen asleep leaning against him.

So he agreed to go ahead and leave the store. I bought my book. We went home and were asleep by 10 p.m., and I still struggled to wake up this morning at 7. I was seriously worn out last night.

I'm very grateful my husband is the kind of guy who will do what's best for my needs even if it isn't convenient for what he wants.

I Did It, Vol. II

2007-03-06T19:00:00.000-05:00

Week I, Run/Walk 2 of C25k completed!

In my sixth walk after my sixth run, I got a stitch in my side. I put my mp3 player on pause and walked while breathing deeply until the stitch evaporated. I started to feel disappointed in myself at that turn of events, but I reminded myself that the point of all of this is to get healthier, not to hold myself up to some ridiculous standard. I'm always telling you guys to be positive about steps you take, even if they aren't perfect (because when are we perfect, really?), so I applied it to myself and felt better.

Right as I was done, I felt like I might be about to get the low pelvic cramps I mentioned, so I sat down on a bench for a couple of minutes and breathed deeply before walking home.

But I did it!

I'm going to take two days off, I think (though I will do some sort of exercise), and finish the run/walks this week on Saturday. We'll see how sore I am tomorrow.

When I got home and stripped for my loving husband to go wash my sweaty clothes for me, I had him feel my outer thigh while I flexed it, and he was so impressed at how hard it is getting.

Non-menstrual menstrual-like cramps while running

2007-03-05T15:56:00.000-05:00

Okay, I've been doing a little research, and I guess I'm going to try taking an Alleve before I go out to exercise tomorrow or Thurs. (depending on how my legs feel tomorrow) in addition to trying to stretch my pelvis out. We'll hope for the best.

If any of you experience cramps that feel like menstrual cramps during exercise, you might find these pages interesting:

an Active.com message board thread (although the guy who's named John on this thread needs to get a life--he seems obsessed with shutting down a discussion of a women's issue)

an Active.com "ask the coach" question

I'm sore today, but not close to unbearably so. . . . That's a good sign, right?

Lazy Sunday Dinner: Soyloaf and veggies

2007-03-05T12:25:00.000-05:00

Guess I just wanted comfort food--last week was a very stressful one for me. I called my mother when I was planning meals Saturday and asked her how she makes her meatloaf. I love the veggieloaf generator over at The Vegan Lunchbox and intend to try one of the combinations eventually. But my mother’s meatloaf isn’t like most people’s meatloaf, because it’s mostly meat and isn’t tomato-y or mushy. I wanted to try to make it vegetarian–a soyloaf. She happily obliged me with the simple recipe.

To round out the Sunday evening meal, I slow-roasted organic tomatoes (again, yes–I’m in love with them, poor tomato-averse husband); cooked vegetarian CSA collard greens using the recipe I have posted previously; and toasted a couple of Hawaiian rolls. (The rolls are outside our usual eating habits, but I went to Kroger–a very rare thing for me–with a friend and was entranced by the idea of slightly sweet rolls . . . and they sold a pack that only had 4 rolls in it, so I got it.)

I also wanted to cook carrots to go with dinner . . . sweet carrots, to complement the salty soyloaf and slightly bitter greens. My husband loves carrots, too, so they were a nice balance to the tomatoes he would eat but wouldn’t like. For whatever reason, though, I’m not a giant carrot fan, so I wasn’t terribly excited about making them. For a change in consistency and to perk up the idea of carrots in my mind, I decided to try using our nifty new-ish immersion blender to whip the carrots in their pot. It was a very successful experiment.

And speaking of experiments, I’m now testing whether I can manage to add red wine back to my diet without pain. I did have a few twinges of pain after the meal, so perhaps the tomatoes and wine were too much acid together. But it was nice to have a small amount of wine with dinner. (We had tried a wine from Four Vines called Anarchy and loved it, so we decided to try a couple of other types from them. The Zinfandel was good–not great like the Anarchy, but good.)

My husband is trying out new photography equipment, so this picture’s a bit stark. (See the photographer’s umbrella reflected in the glass of wine?)

Hearty Onion Soyloaf

I must admit I cringed when I saw the ingredients in the Lipton onion soup mix I used in this recipe. Partially hydrogenated fat? MSG? Yuck. I’m hoping to find a better onion soup mix made entirely from natural ingredients when I retry this recipe. But I did have very pleasant childhood memories from the scent of the soyloaf as I mixed and baked it.

~2 lbs. ground soy (similar to ground beef–I used two tubes of sausage-style soy, and they were a little too pork tasting–with thyme, I think?–and very salty. The end result was good and will be great in sandwiches, but I’ll try a different variety next time)

Note: This soyloaf is pretty similar in texture to hamburgers. It's firm. It would probably work well to make into patties for burgers, actually. It's not in the least mushy, so if a soft loaf is what you're going for, this one isn't it.

one egg (two eggs–or add some milk or soymilk or whatever–if the consistency seems too dry when you mix it all together)

1/8-1/4 c. Italian bread crumbs (amount depending on desired consistency)

one packet of onion soup mix

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all the ingredients together in a big bowl. The easiest way to mix it is to use your (clean!) hands.

Shape the mixture into a loaf, and spray a baking dish with a little non-stick spray. (This may not be necessary, but I was worried my loaf would stick to my dish.) Put the loaf in the dish.

Bake 40-55 minutes–until your loaf is firm and turning brown on the outside.

“Wow, these are carrots?” Carrots

Put a large pot of water on to boil. Toss a bit of small bit of salt in it.

Unless you have carrots fresh from the earth, peel your carrots. I used three bunches of organic (much smaller than ‘conventional’) carrots in two shades of orange. I think parsnips would make a lovely addition, though I don’t think they’d need to boil quite as long.

Cut your carrots into ~1″ sections. When your water is boiling, add the carrots to it. Partially cover your pot. Boil your carrots for ~20 minutes.

When the carrots are done, turn off the eye, drain the carrots in a collander, and return them to the pot while they are still steaming hot.

I had about three servings of carrots. I added 2 tsp. butter, 2 tsp. heavy cream, three dashes of ginger, two dashes of nutmeg, a dash of salt, and about 2 tsp. of dark brown sugar (the organic kind, which is redolent of molasses). I used my immersion blender to mash most–but not all–of the carrots into a puree with the flavorings. If you don’t have an immersion blender, get one. I’m just kidding, though really, I do love ours and am very glad we got one. If you don’t have an immersion blender, you could try using your regular blender (melt the butter if you do that), your food processor, or (for a chunkier consistency) your potato masher. My husband and I both loved these carrots. They were flavorful but not overpowering.

Oh, and the rolls didn’t seem nearly as exciting once I had a flavorful meal put together. Good lesson to learn.

I Did It!

2007-03-04T15:34:00.000-05:00

I did it, and one of the only ways I got through it was to think how I could go home and write to all of you with a post title exclaiming that I did it.

I did the first day of the Couch-to-5k. It was hard, but it didn't kill me. My new running shoes definitely helped.

I told my husband that I was really impressed by the podcast of music for the Couch-to-5k that Robert Ullreys put together, but that I didn't love the music (electronica/techno-type stuff). So my sweet husband wrote a little program to create a version of it just for me: an mp3 of songs I picked with a little high tone going off each time I should switch from walking to running and a low tone going off when I should switch back to walking. It's great to have music I love and not have to try to keep up with when I should make the switch from 60-second runs to 90-second walks this week. Now my best friend wants a copy of it so she can do C25k herself! In line with my eclectic music tastes, I have on my set Rascall Flatts, Jewel, Jimmy's Chicken Shack, Lauryn Hill, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ice Cube, Indigo Girls, REO Speedwagon, and a song from the musical Rent. I used old mp3's I finished downloading several years ago. I just wanted fairly fast-tempo songs to keep me going.

The runs were hard--no lie, they were. But I thought, "I can do this, I can do this," and got some endorphins going that way. As I mentioned previously, I psyched myself up by picturing coming home and being able to tell y'all I'd done it. And I thought about the little girl who turned into me--the girl who loved to ride her bike everywhere, who played outside all the time, who kicked ass in basketball, but who got chubby and then got no support at PE in school even when she beat nearly all the boys in a running competition. . . . I thought of that little girl and who she expected to be when she grew up, and I ran to become more like that person. Someone still in love with her body's capabilities. Someone I am becoming.

The only problem, really, was that at the end of it, I got terrible cramps in the area of my bladder and/or uterus. Strange problem, right? It happens to me sometimes after a lot of physical exertion, and I think it's related to oxygen, because if I sit still and breathe deeply for a few minutes, the cramps stop. While they are going on, they are really horrible and make me feel like I am going to either pass out or throw up--but they are not a side stitch or stomach cramps. I feel light-headed and shaky. Then I stop, sit, and breathe, and they pass. I think they may be related to the fact that I've had two major surgeries in that area of my body; I know I had some complications from surgery (as many people do), and I'm wondering if oxygen flow to that area doesn't function particularly well when I am highly exerting myself. I'm not sure what to do about it except hope it doesn't happen until I'm done with a workout and have my cell phone to call my husband to pick me up if it gets unbearable.

But in any case, I'm proud of myself for getting it done today!

A Dinner-Worthy Salad

2007-03-04T15:28:00.000-05:00

Ha. If only my former-chef ex-fiance could see me now. I guess he could, actually; I know he’s visited my other blog before. (Ahh, the power of statcounter.)

But that’s not really my point. My point is that my cooking has come a lonnng way since he and I were together. Then, I was the occasional baker, and he was the experimental cook. I even once found a tape of him interviewing someone for the local newspaper–for a column he briefly wrote–and telling her that I couldn’t really cook but that I was a great baker.

Of course, I’m still not skilled like he was, practically speaking. I don’t chop my vegetables efficiently and perfectly or anything like that. But I do have good kitchen utensils (I told him he couldn’t take the cats; I should have added he couldn’t take the expensive knives I paid for), and I’m willing and ready to experiment. I’m a lot more comfortable trying things out now than I used to be.

A few nights ago, I was planning on us having a big salad and some refrigerated soup from Whole Foods. It turned out the soup was sour–the 5th (FIFTH!) thing I’ve gotten from Whole Foods that’s turned out to be bad/rotten/moldy in the last couple of months. (Whole Foods, I am always recommending you guys, but I have a bone to pick with you. Seriously. Update: I actually just sent Whole Foods an email to complain.) So our salad had to get more elaborate–with some protein thrown in–to accommodate being the only food in the meal.

I chopped and threw together a mix of winter vegetables–a turnip, a rutabaga, some sweet potatoes, an onion–with a couple of peeled and chopped apples. I tossed those with a little high-quality fruity-tasting olive oil, some herbes de provence, and a smidge of salt. I roasted that mix at 400 for about 40 minutes, tossing them twice during cooking. It wouldn’t have hurt some of the veggies to roast a little longer.

I tore up some butter lettuce from our weekly CSA load and tossed it with my usual-these-days lemon salad dressing: shaken together well in a lidded jar–the juice of one Meyer lemon; three times as much olive oil as lemon juice; Mrs. Dash garlic-and-herbs seasoning; a bit of Lawry’s seasoning salt; and a teaspoon or so of honey.

I toasted a handful of walnut pieces in a dry pan on medium heat for 3-4 minutes, tossing them once. I set them aside.

Then I sliced a small log of goat cheese into ~1/2″ rounds. I beat an egg in a small bowl, and I poured some Italian-seasoned bread crumbs in another bowl. I covered a plate with waxed paper. I dipped the goat cheese slices in the egg wash and then in the bread crumbs to thoroughly coat them. I put the breaded goat cheese slices on the covered plate and put them in the refrigerator for 15 minutes. Then I heated up a small amount of olive oil on medium heat using the same pan I’d used for the walnuts, and I pan-fried the goat cheese for about 30-45 seconds on each side. I tossed the goat cheese on the salad, and we sat down to eat!

The salad was fantastic. The winter vegetables were slightly bitter and very aromatic from the herbes de provence. The apple bits provided small notes of sweetness. The goat cheese was easy to slice into warm gooey pieces, and the savory flavor of the cheese cut the bitterness of the vegetables. The slightly sweet, slightly sour flavor of the salad and dressing, and the saltiness of the toasted walnuts, were a nice foil to the rest. Delicious–and healthy.

A hard day's week

2007-03-02T18:28:00.000-05:00

I am so worn out. Besides having my mega-cold this week, I worked 13-hour days on Tuesday and Wednesday--on top of my normal 40-hour workweek, I mean.

I haven't been sleeping well because of my cold. I'm either stuffed-up or dehydrated at any time.

Thursday, I took half of a day off to go to a neurologist with one of my friends; due to my extensive experiences with medical crap, I'm the go-to person with my friends when they need someone to go with them and make sure they're heard. Unfortunately, the doctor did not hear her or me, really, though he did at least agree to run tests that he thinks are unnecessary. Why is dealing with medical crap so hard to do? I absorb the emotions of people around me--something I have to be careful about--and my friend was so, so incredibly upset. Today she got worse news: basically, her job wants her to go on disability or get fired. But it's difficult for her to do disability unless she gets a diagnosis (all she has is short-term d., anyway), so again I talked to her while she sobbed and sobbed. We feel certain she has MS, but she doesn't have clear enough brain markers yet, I guess. She and her husband cannot afford for her not to have any income, so this is a bad situation.

Last night, we had crazy bad weather, and I was worried about my mother, who was having worse weather where she lives.

Then this morning, I was in traffic on the other side of the interstate from the accident in Atlanta where a bus of college students went over a bridge and killed six people. I'm sure you've heard about it today if you look at national news. Something like that is always horrifying and terribly sad, but anything related to car accidents gets me worse since my husband's accident (he was hit by a car) in November. This afternoon, I drove over where the bus landed--it created grooves in the road--and I literally got chills down my spine.

While I was at work, I had to deal with a very rude person who doesn't understand the purpose of my organization. Nothing major, just irritating on top of everything else.

A major ex-boyfriend--my first love--dropped by to drop off something I need to plan our high-school reunion. That wasn't a bad thing, just strange. "See you in four more years," he joked as he left. He says he never sees me even though we live in the same city--which is true, pretty much. And we were friends for years before we dated. But it's a bit strange for your husband if you're terribly close to the first guy you slept with and whom you dated for longer than you've known your husband.

I drove home with a collective tension headache pounding in my temples.

So I got home and cancelled our evening plans to attend a party. I laced up my new running shoes . . . but my husband wanted to go with me (and he can't run with his injuries) . . . so we went on a walk. But it was a good, fast walk, and I feel somewhat better now.

Tomorrow I will feel more rested and more able to take on the world.

Non-scale victories . . . 'cause they're the ones that really matter

2007-02-26T21:44:00.000-05:00

Yesterday: "Are those new sweatpants?" I think I may detect a note of anxiety in his voice. I did just buy a pair of expensive running shoes, and my husband is the more frugal of the two of us. But we live on a budget, and, outside of emergencies, I don't buy things we haven't budgeted for. (And actually, our budget is set up to catch most emergencies as well.)

"No, they're not new. I used to wear them when we went to the gym."

"Oh." He's forgotten because they haven't fit me in a long while. And they are both bright red and cut slimly through the hips and thighs, so if they don't fit well, I'm not wearing them! But they do fit me now. Yay for recovering wardrobe pieces.

~~~~

"FEEL ME!" I'm standing in the kitchen, and he's two rooms over in his office. "FEEL ME FEEL ME FEEL ME!" Then I laugh, wondering what our neighbor must think we're doing. I'm standing in the kitchen with my hands on my waist, feeling how much differentiation I'm developing between my waist and my hips. My waist is one of the places I lose weight first; above a certain weight, my weight thickens closer to the size of my hips, but normally . . . well, in high school, I had the waist of a size 6 and the hips and breasts of a size 10. J. Lo had nothing on me. I'm not anywhere close to that size set or differentiation now, but I feel sexier when I can feel a greater distinction in my curves. I like being curvy--the curvier the better.

He finally comes into the kitchen and rubs my waist and hips. "Wow," he says, and his eyes widen. "I can feel a big difference."

My hips and breasts used to be perfectly balanced. Then I had surgery twice for ovarian cancer, and it left a ridge of scar tissue in my lower abdomen. Now my hips are always a little bigger than they would have been before. But that's okay--it used to frustrate me, but I'm alive, right? That's a lot more important than having hips and breasts that are the same size.

~~~~~

I'm still sick. I was worse today, so I stayed home from work to rest. Tomorrow and the next day, I'll have days that are about 14 hours each at work. Ick. And there's no one to run that stuff but me, so I have to be there, awful cold-ish thing or not.

I had my husband bring me home a pint of B&J's for my sore throat, but I've only eaten about a fourth of it. I do want something cold, but I don't want something so fattening. And I'm not a big popsicle fan.

I think by tomorrow night my nose will be as red as one belonging to someone in a cold meds ad. Ick.

It's a good sign that I feel like I'm missing out when I'm too sick to go exercise. But I know missing a couple of days can throw me back into old routines if I let it. So by Thursday (once my crazy workdays this week are done), ask me whether I've been out to exercise, okay? (Assuming I'm not this sick still, anyway.)

How I Know It Can Be Done

2007-02-25T21:24:00.000-05:00

Of course we all know it can be done--at least theoretically--but how many people do we know who haven't taken unrealistic, drastic, even obsessive steps to lose weight . . . many of them just to gain back whatever they do manage to lose? How many people do we know who have a happy relationship with food that has taken some adjustment but left them at a reasonable, healthy weight?

But really, there's more to this story. Where should I start?

Around September of 2004, my best friend convinced me to join match.com to look at photos of guys she was talking to on there. (She did finally meet the right guy on Match--they will be getting married next October!) I had to join because Match wouldn't let me look at more than three or four profiles without joining. So I joined . . . and because I'd been through a bad break-up with my first fiance a couple of months earlier, I was excited about at least having some long-distance flirtations with random guys.

I was not excited about dating with how heavy I was, however. I had peaked out somewhere in the 220's while my first fiance and I were still together. I'm not sure how high my weight got, because I quit getting on a scale after 223 popped up there. But shortly after he and I broke up, I was magically down to about 215. I say magically because I didn't do anything in particular; the relief of stress seemed to impact me in a way to let me lose weight. (Funny that breaking up was stress relief, huh? But it was.)

I put up photos of me on Match that were not dishonest--and were at my current weight--but that showed me in the best light. I got a lot of hits on my profile from guys who clicked to read it after looking at my picture, and that was an ego boost for me.

Having been left with two car payments, the full rent, and a variety of other bills in my break-up, I was completely broke, so I didn't pay for a Match membership. I had my email address hidden in my profile in such a way that Match didn't catch it to delete it. Unfortunately, many of the guys who were interested in me didn't catch it, either. So I could read what they wrote me on Match, but I could not reply. I discovered that many of the guys who wrote me thought I was cute but didn't bother to read my profile to see who I was or what I wanted out of dating. Completely inappropriate men wrote me completely inappropriate messages. It got a bit old receiving them.

A month or so later, I decided I was tired of just messing around on Match and that I might actually want to find a guy or guys to date--just casually, I thought. I was planning to move across the country as soon as I had my finances worked out. I did a search for guys who fit what I wanted: politically liberal Christian men between the ages of 25 and 30 with college degrees or higher who were within 60 miles of me. I think there were 8 guys who popped up total. I winked at maybe three of them. A couple of days later, I got an email from one of them, a cute grad student at Georgia Tech. I got not just an email, but an email that was about three pages long that responded to everything I had written on my extensive profile. I wrote him back a long email, and things took off from there.

From email we moved to talking on the phone. The grad student happened to have a conference in DC soon after we started talking on the phone. He continued to call me--we would talk late into the night--but we didn't have a chance to meet.

The night before he was coming home, he told me that his face was hurting from how much he was grinning every day from talking to me and thinking about me. I knew he was pretty smitten, and I was too--but we'd never met.

This grad student looked, from his pictures on Match, to be a fairly thin size. He was very handsome. I was so overweight and so miserable about my weight. I was very anxious about meeting him and seeing whether my weight would keep him from being attracted to me.

The next day, I devised a plan to happen to pop up in Atlanta on an errand and ask whether he wanted to meet me. If he was busy, fine, but if not, I would get our first meeting over with and see whether he was still interested in me once he took in my size.

So I put my plan into practice, completely surprising him. Sure, he wanted to meet up--did I want to get dinner? We set a time and place. I was full of butterflies.

Upon meeting me, he said, "Wow, you are even cuter than your photos." My weight--my size-- was a total non-issue for him. I would kill any of my friends if they pulled a similar move, but I stayed with him that night--a guy I had never met before. There was nothing more than kissing involved, but we stayed up talking and flirting and snuggling. I slept on his bed; he slept on the floor.

It turned out that this guy--who was to become my husband, who was to become the first person (outside of WW, which I had tried earlier) who ever knew my true weight--understood weight issues. He'd been a chunky guy himself, and miserably so: a guy who'd been the friend of many girls but the boyfriend to none. A guy who kept thinking "When I reach ___ pounds, I'll do something about it." (But who never did . . . and his weight crept ever higher.) Then he graduated from college, lost a little weight from the drop in stress, and realized he didn't want to be the type of person who is a picky eater anymore. He started eating a broad number of vegetables, fruits, grains, and meats. He eventually got on a path to intuitive eating that would take him down--no counting points, no calculatingcalories--85 pounds, to 175 pounds, before working back up to around 200 and stabilizing there. (For this 6' tall guy, 175 was so thin the photos from that time are a little creepy.) He lost weight without ever learning about all of the calories in different foods, without learning about fat grams and proper amounts of protein, without obsessing over food the way most of us do with weight loss. His path involved living for a while in Switzerland, living for a while in Japan, working out some, walking a lot, and learning that he really did not need to eat the entire portion of almost any meal he was ever served outside of his home. He had found a general purpose for his work and enrolled in graduate school to study it, and that made him much happier, which helped him lose weight more easily as well. His weight loss journey still took a couple of years. Then he emerged: he was a handsome, trim guy, but he didn't really know that--still struggles with the idea now, actually. He had a girlfriend for the first time, dated her a pretty long time, realized it wasn't working out, and broke up with her. He pined after his best female friend. Then he went on a few Match dates. Then he met me. And while I joke about all the changes I strongly encouraged him to make (new haircut, regular haircuts, no black and brown together, no more pleats, no more tapered jeans!), he was already a wonderful person in every way (well, except fashion) when I met him. And he saw that in me, as well, despite my weight--or maybe I should say including my weight.

I can't find any photos of my husband when he was at his highest weight (how many of us keep those?), but this is one of him I found that was taken not too long after he started losing weight.

And here's another copy of the photo of him that I posted a few days ago. I find it so hard to believe he has no idea how hot he is, but he really doesn't. Partly, it's just that his looks were never terribly important to him, I think, and partly, it's that his self-image (despite all my comments) has never caught up to the changes he's made. (Fat passing for thin, I've heard it called.)

But back to my original point: well, I guess there actually are two. The first is that you shouldn't put off dating or trying out online dating until you're thin, because someone who is perfect for you could be waiting to accept you just as you are. And when you find him, he will love you for you, all of you, through thick and thin, for better or worse. Until I met my husband, I didn't realize how compatible a person you could find, but I found my match, and you can find yours. Don't let your weight stop you from looking.

The other point, the starting point, of this post is this: when my husband and I entered into this relationship, I possessed 95% of the knowledge about food, exercise, nutrition, weight loss, whatever you want to say. But my husband was the one who had managed to learn to listen to his body and reach a reasonable weight--with no obsession and no unreasonable compromises. So I know it can be done, because I live my life every day with a perfect example of intuitive eating accomplished.

My attempt at making Indian food

2007-02-25T17:05:00.000-05:00

My husband loves lentils. I mean, he freaking loves lentils. You can’t fault a boy for loving something healthy, right? But the thing is, I don’t really love lentils. They’re okay–I’ll eat them–but I don’t get find it easy to get excited about lentils. That changed (at least for one recipe) when we were eating at an Indian/Bangladeshi restaurant near our apartment a few weeks ago. I tasted my husband’s light, delicious, almost fluffy bright yellow dal and said, “Ooh, what’s in that?” Lentils.

I took another bite and thought about the ingredients in it while I ate the bite. Then I needed another bite–you know, for verification. “The difference is that it’s pureed,” I pronounced, not at all stating the obvious. Somehow pureeing the lentils moved them from mealy to smooth and tasty.

Excited about unexpectedly having Friday off (long story), I got ambitious about our cooking this weekend. Lately I’ve been testing out fusing various cuisines together–combining, from an earlier example, things like peanut-sauced tofu and a Southern vegetable plate. And it works, mostly, to do some experimentation like that. Last night I wanted to try to make the dal and was trying to figure out what to serve with it. I wanted to see if I have healed enough to eat yogurt (formerly too acidic, possibly still too acidic unfortunately), so I decided to make raita (an Indian condiment usually combining yogurt, mint, and cucumber) to go with the dal. Whatever vegetables I served had to be strong enough to complement the rich flavor of the dal. So I decided to make some vegetable fritters . . . and then I added some roasted tomatoes to the list after thinking about the nearly orgasmic experience I had eating them at Watershed. (I was dying to include some chutney, but the highly acidic nature of vinegar-loaded chutney would probably still send me into spasms after a very short period of time.)

Here’s the end result. The raita and vegetable fritters were nothing to write home about. I still can’t figure out how my fritters–which had zucchini, carrots, onion, and green onion in them, plus twice as much of every spice as I initially thought I should put–came out as bland as they did, but, well, they did. They were also very heavy/dense, which I think was because I used the same mix of mostly whole-wheat flour with a little white flour that I use for everything. “They’re good–they’re just not great,” my husband said generously. I didn’t finish mine.

The raita was also just boring: not sour enough, not blended enough.

The dal and the roasted tomatoes, though–they really hit the spot. (My husband, whose one food hang-up remains tomatoes, thought the roasted ones were only okay. I thought they were incredible–rich like tomato sauce, but sturdy enough to eat alone. YUM.) And both the dal and tomatoes were healthy and easy to make, though the tomatoes were in the oven for-evuh.

I blended recipes while making both of them, but here’s a basic recap of what I did:

Easy Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

per person:

1 large red tomato (even a hothouse tomato in winter works)

1/2 tsp. crushed fresh garlic

1/2 tsp. olive oil

1/2 tsp. sugar

sea salt and pepper

cooking spray

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees (or 250 if you want to cut the time down a couple of hours).

Core your tomato. Halve the tomato (top and bottom half) and scrape out some of the seeds, leaving as much pulp as you can. Sprinkle crushed garlic, oil, and sugar over tomato. Grind salt and pepper over it.

Spray non-stick spray on a cookie sheet or jelly roll. Place the tomato pieces, cut side up, on the pan. Roast for 6-8 hours, until the tomatoes have started to blacken around the edges.

Delicious. Eat by itself, chop or blend it up for a pasta sauce, or serve it with toasted bread.

(I think I might get on a roasting kick after this experience.)

Pureed Lentil Dal

~3 servings (or 1 regular serving and 1 double serving if you’re married to my husband)

1 c. red lentils

1 T. butter

2 cloves garlic

1 tsp. red pepper flakes

3/4 tsp. (or so) powdered ginger

3 c. vegetable broth

1 1/2 T curry powder (or less depending on your powder)

salt and pepper

Dunk your lentils in a couple of inches of water, picking off any non-lentil bits that may pop up from the lentil pile.

Drain the lentils well.

Heat the butter in a skillet on med-high. Add garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, and stir around for a minute. Add the drained lentils and stir together. Add the vegetable broth and curry powder; heat to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook for 20 minutes or until lentils are very soft. Use an immersion blender in the pot to puree and fluff your lentils. (Alternately, pour the lentil mixture into the blender and do it there.) Add salt and pepper to taste.

This makes a flavorful but mild dal. My husband has asked me if I’ll make him a bit pot of this to eat all week for lunch. That’s how much he liked it.

Weigh-in and . . . running??

2007-02-25T11:23:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm down .8 pounds this week, which is great. I was concerned I would have a gain after being at my husband's parents' house last weekend, but it didn't happen.

Pulling reserves of determination from within myself, I went--with my husband--to a runners' store near our apartment in Atlanta. I was fitted with running shoes that will work for me as I train up from walking and running to just running. Going to the runners' store made me feel very anxious and somewhat silly at first; as I mentioned before, I don't like doing things when I am not immediately competent at them. I had researched running shoes before I went, but that doesn't make me a runner already (unfortunately!--if only it were that easy). When we got in the store and an employee started helping me, my husband wandered off to look at clearance shoes. I called him back and told him that I was nervous and needed his support. He understood and stayed beside me the rest of the time. The employee who was helping me--a marathon runner herself (which is cool, but which I have no aspiration to ever be)--had me try on various shoes and run the length of the store repeatedly to see how the shoes fit and felt. She noted my gait and arches and, after I tried maybe 8 pairs of shoes with her making various adjustments, we got me fitted in a pair that I love. I was really happy that I was buying Brooks shoes, too, as the company seems like one I can support. I really like this ad (click on the circle) and this ad (love the title of the women's magazine in that!) at they have on their website--not your typical "be a supermodel" or "be a bodybuilder" sports ads. After I bought shoes, I picked out two pairs of (expensive!) socks to try and see whether socks matter to me and, if they do, which kinds I prefer.

I had been thinking about making this leap for a while; what finally sealed the deal was when my husband's sister (who's a year younger than me) went for a 10-mile run while we were up visiting my husband's parents. Ten miles! That's unfathomable to me. I am still so impressed by that. (And yes, I did tell her I found it amazing.) She's been training up to a half-marathon for several months, and you can see the difference in how strong her legs are.

So now I need to start using those pricey shoes and socks. Yesterday I woke up with a cold, and today it's worse. I'm not sure whether or not I feel up to going out for a walk/run with my throat so scratcy and dry. We'll see how I feel later this afternoon. I don't want to unnecessarily put off starting a formal plan, but I also don't want to make myself sicker.

I tried to do Couch to 5k at one point in college (I think after reading about it in Real Simple?), but I could never get myself to break from the walks to just running. I'm hoping one thing that will help me this time is the free podcast series by Robert Ullrey that tells you when to start running and when to switch back to walking as you go along. I also think Couch to 5k is a misnomer, as it would be difficult for someone who is really a couch potato to go out and immediately move his/her body as much as is required in Week 1. I'm hoping my regular long walks will have set me up to be ready to switch to a run/walk and then a run without the difficulty I had last time.

My husband pointed out that they had sports bras on sale at the runners' store, but the largest cup size they covered was a DD. I wear a 36DDD, or F. (Have you ever had your bra size measured? It really changed my life. I thought I was a D before!) I do have two good sports bras from Nordstrom, so I guess I'll be using and regularly washing those!

I'm fortunate to have Piedmont Park two blocks away, so I have a good place to run.

For those of you are who are runners, feel free to offer suggestions/advice/whatever. And of course, I'll take support wherever I can get it!

Vegetarian shepherd's pie & dijon avocado salad (yum!)

2007-02-24T20:15:00.000-05:00

I like my Vegetarian Times magazine because it gives me good ideas for what foods I can use for tasty vegetarian dishes. However, I often feel that the magazine limits recipes to a short ingredient list (and sometimes skimps on the spices that are in the ingredients) so that the recipes do not reach their full potential for flavor. Last night I altered a V.T. recipe for vegan shepherd's pie to create a heartier, richer flavor. My version isn't vegan but could easily be reconverted to a vegan recipe. My friend Lesley ate it with me and my husband, and we all thought it was a pretty wonderful, bone-warming dish.

If you usually cook with meat at home, I encourage you to try the soy crumbles. The consistency isn't exactly the same as ground beef but the flavor is very similar. Except for missing the gristly tiny bits that beef has, I don't think I would realize the soy bits in this dish weren't beef. (And soy is so cheap to buy, too!)

Vegetarian Shepherd's Pie

2 medium sweet potatoes, cut into small cubes

2 medium russet potatoes, cut into small cubes

salt for potatoes

1 T olive oil

2 shallots, chopped

1 yellow onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

12 oz. package soy crumbles (looks like ground beef--buy the regular kind)

0.65 oz. vegetarian dark brown gravy mix

1 2/3 c. water

2 c. frozen peas and carrot pieces (or use fresh and chop the carrots finely)

2/3 c. 2% milk (use soymilk for vegan)

4 tsp. butter

1/2 tsp. garlic powder or garlic Mrs. Dash

salt and pepper

Chop everything you'll need chopped and set out the appropriate amounts of what you'll need for the dish.

Cut your sweet and reg. potatoes, placing them in a large pot as you go. Add about 1 tsp. of salt to the potatoes. Cover the potatoes with about 2" of water. Turn the heat to high and bring the dish to a boil. When the water is boiling, turn the heat to medium. Let it simmer 15 min. or until potatoes are tender.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Heat oil in a large skillet over med. heat. Add shallots and onion, and cook 4-5 minutes--until onion and shallots begin to be translucent. Add garlic; cook one minute. Add soy crumbles, and cook three minutes or until crumbles are heated through.

Sprinkle gravy mix into the skillet, and stir it all together. Pour in water, stir, and bring to a simmer. Add carrots and peas, and allow mixture to simmer about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Drain potatoes, and mash with milk and butter. (I put them back into the same pot and mixed with an immersion blender, leaving a few small chunks of potatoes.) Season with garlic seasoning, salt, and pepper to taste.

Spread vegetable mixture into a deep casserole dish. Top with mashed potatoes. Bake 25-35 minutes, or until vegetable layer gray bubbles around the edges of the mashed potatoes.

With the shepherd's pie I served a simple but tasty salad topped with a dijon dressing.

Dijon Dressing

2 T. grainy dijon mustard

4 T. olive or canola oil

1 tsp. honey

(Add other ingredients as you deem necessary.)

Combine ingredients in a jar. Put the lid on the jar, and shake it well. Let the dressing sit in the fridge for an hour or more for the flavors to meld. You will want to toss the dressing with your salad well so that the grains of mustard are spread out in the salad.

I served a salad of butter lettuce, freshly shaved Parmesan Reggiano, toasted walnut halves, and avocado. Lesley and I think finely sliced apples or tangerine sections would make a nice addition. But it was also very tasty as it was.

Meal Planning: An essential for my success in healthy eating

2007-02-23T14:37:00.000-05:00

Many times when I'm flipping through dieters' blogs, I see statements like, "I am hungry and don't know what to eat tonight." Or "I don't have anything at home to eat, so I'm tempted to go out." I used to live that way as well; I tried to keep some staples in the house, but meals were largely whatever I could rustle up and combine.

That changed when I developed medical problems related to food (IC); suddenly, figuring out what to eat if I hadn't planned my meals was a very upsetting prospect, as I was often left with little to eat that wouldn't make me ill. Going out to eat regularly was expensive and still often left me sick. I learned that I had to plan my meals--preferably for each week on the weekends, so that I had time to decide what we wanted and didn't have stuff go bad in the fridge from waiting too long for me to use it.

Even as my medical problems have faded (if you have a bad case of IC, we should talk--my doctor is a miracle worker), I have stuck to planning our meals week by week. I find that planning our meals is important financially to keep us from eating out too often, and it's also important to enable me to balance meals that are higher in calories/fat/sugar with ones that are lower in them. I try to make sure every meal is very high in nutrients from vegetable and fruit content. I almost always pick whole grains, and I put a good source of protein in virtually every meal.

Right now, I am usually planning our meals Wednesday to Tuesday so that I have time to figure out each week what we'll be getting from our CSA's Wednesday deliveries. This week we were very busy, so I'm planning today. (I have today off from work.) While I'm planning, I use Google and allrecipes.com to search for recipes that have the ingredients that I either know I want to use or know I'll have on hand because of the CSA. I also flip through cookbooks, any magazines we have with food, and my fat three-ring binder where I keep copies of recipes I like, divided by season, stored in plastic page covers. For the most part (though this week isn't as good about this as previous ones), I try to keep most of our meals seasonally appropriate.

When I am figuring out what we will eat, I first label my Word page with the days of the week and any days we have things going on that might affect meals. If I know I want to eat out on any particular night (we go out about once a week), I label that night on my sheet. Otherwise, I may leave one night blank so that we can shift the meals around and eat out once that week. (I didn't do that this week because we've eaten out so often lately.)

Then I plan out our meals. Our weeknight meals are usually simple; I try to keep my hands-on time for those meals to 30 minutes or less, though sometimes with baking they may take as long as an hour (or more, on rare occasions). As I choose a meal for a day, I label that day with the meal on my Word doc. If we have weekends like this one where I will not be very busy, I sometimes enjoy making more elaborate meals--like my Saturday night Indian feast this week. As I am planning, I keep up the pages with recipes that I am looking at. Then I print the recipes, make notes on them about any changes I want to make, and, starting from the first day listed on the my Word Doc, I go down the page and type in what ingredients I need to purchase at the store and what recipe those ingredients correspond to. (If the grocery store doesn't have an important ingredient, I want to know what else not to buy to cancel out that recipe.) After I have finished adding ingredients from recipes, I add to the list any items we need to pick up for our regular consumption--almond milk for my husband's breakfasts, for example. I put question marks beside any items that we may already have in the house--I check for those items right before I leave for the store.

As I am typing up my list of ingredients, I separate the list into the parts of the grocery store I vist, in the order I reach them while walking through the store: produce, bulk and nuts, canned/boxed foods, frozen foods, general dairy, refrigerated protein, beer/wine, the cheese counter, most desserts, and then miscellaneous items. (I know that I buy organic and fair-trade whenever possible, so I do not note that on my list unless I'm sending my husband to the store without me!) My process might sound anal retentive to some, but it makes my time in the store more efficient when I'm not wandering back and forth for this ingredient and that one. I cross off each ingredient on my list as I go so that I accidentally do not forget to buy something I need. If I am going to get an ingredient from another store or source, I put a box around that word.

One bonus of shopping with a week's meal plan is that while I might add an item or two while I'm in the store, I keep myself from buying all sorts of impulse purchases when I know that I have a list of foods that will keep us from being hungry over the next few days.

I'm sharing all of this information in such great detail because I find that planning my meals like this keeps me on track. I think it might be important for other people who are watching their food choices (and/or their budget!) as well.

To give you an example of what my final product looks like, this is my meal plan for the week:

Friday--Vegetarian shepherd's pie (Vegetarian Times, p. 11) with a side salad with avocado, Parmesan, and a light dijon dressing
Saturday--(lunch) oatmeal with apples, egg cups; (dinner) dhal with sides of roasted tomatoes, toasted pita bread, raita, and green onion/veggie fritters
Sunday--(lunch) pitas with hummus, raita, cucumber, spinach, onion, and tomatoes and sweet potato fries; (dinner) Spicy Coconut Sweet Potato Soup with Collard Greens with crispy tempeh strips (Fresh Food Fast, p. 230)
Monday--big salad with roasted winter rosemary vegetables (onion, turnip, rutabaga, sweet potato) and pan-fried goat cheese (MAKE DRESSING), refrigerated WF soup
Tuesday (I have AOM)--chickpea salad with lemon and Parmesan; Greek pasta salad with carrots, tomatoes, and cucumber; cold broccoli with garlic--for us to take with us to work (MAKE ON MON)
Wednesday (D. teaches class, I have PL)--leftovers

7 apples (oatmeal and breakfast)
2 pears (snacks)
1 c. cilantro (dhal, soup)
2 lb. tomatoes + 1 (roasting and sandwiches)
1 English cucumber (raita)
1 regular cucumber (pasta salad)
fresh mint (raita)
1 zucchini (fritters)
6 carrots (2 for fritters, 2 for roasted veggies, 2 for pasta salad)
4 yellow onion (shepherd's pie = 1, sandwich + salad = 1, soup = 2)
2 sweet potatoes (shepherd's pie on Friday, before farmer's market)
2 regular potatoes
4 sweet potatoes (sweet potato fries = 2, roasted veggie salad = 1, soup = 1) (F. MARKET)
1 rutabaga (salad)
1 turnip (salad) (F. MARKET)
1 Meyer lemon (salad dressing)
1 lemon (chickpeas)
broccoli (cold broccoli with garlic)
garlic
fresh dill (tzatziki)
1 small jalapeno--subsitute poblano? (soup)
1 small bunch of collard greens (soup)
1 lime (soup)
2 shallots (shepherd's pie)

brown jasmine rice (soup)
1 c. red lentils (dhal)

spiral whole-wheat pasta (pasta salad)
coriander? (soup)
canola oil
vegetarian gravy mix (shepherd's pie)
dijon mustard (salad)

frozen peas and carrots mix

1 c. of Greek yogurt (1/2 c. for raita, 1/2 c. for tzatziki)
goat cheese (salad)
small container milk (shepherd's pie)

hummus (sandwiches)
1 container of ground tofu (shepherd's pie)
2 containers of tempeh strips (soup & tempeh)

pita bread

WF refrigerated soup

Eating organic food cheaply

2007-02-23T11:03:00.000-05:00

MSN has an interesting article on eating only organic foods for $7/day.

We spend a lot more than $7/day on food but have found, as the article says, that if you are trying to eat economically and healthfully at a reasonable price, you aren't going to be having a whole lot of meat. Fortunately, one of our goals was to switch to vegetarian eating at home for health reasons, so we have no complaints about doing that.

One of the benefits of buying local organic foods, additionally, is that you can not only get a lower price than you might otherwise--you also get food that has been picked recently and is at the peak of its flavor. It really makes a big difference in the quality of a simple meal.

Yes I can

2007-02-21T19:56:00.000-05:00

Today started off badly in general. I had cried for a long time last night because my sister with whom I had been arguing has switched to ignoring my existence; she won't return my communication. Then I had trouble waking up. My period was gushing randomly like a geyser. (Sorry for the gross imagery, but, well, it did affect my day.) It was raining. I was late to work. I forgot (forgot!) to eat breakfast for the first time since the start of this year. I had a nosy coworker frustrate me. There was a heinous smell of dead rats in our office from some rats that died above our ceiling tiles. I felt gross and bad and off. But I was determined to get back on track today.

So when I realized I had forgotten to eat breakfast, I ate an early lunch of my leftovers--white bean and kale soup--with a side of a piece of whole-grain with almond butter and honey. I bit my lip so badly it bled and bled; finally my boss came in and asked if my nose was bleeding. That's how much blood there was! I blotted it and kept on eating.

Knowing that I'd be eating a late dinner tonight with a visiting friend, I ate a snack of smoked almonds and dried fruit about 3 p.m. When I left work for a minute to pick up my new shipment of contacts, I learned that I somehow never got two boxes previously--six months ago--that I was charged for; no manager was on duty to refund the money, and the woman who was working the counter argued they probably wouldn't give me a refund--"because it's been six months since they came in." Um, do contacts go bad in six months? No. So resell them. I'll deal with it tomorrow, though. I considered popping through Starbucks for a hot chocolate, but I realized what I wanted was to feel better, to feel on track, and that wouldn't do it.

When I got home from work, I immediately felt tired. I wanted to take a nap. I stood by the bed and stretched the top half of my body across it. But I didn't lie down. Instead, I pulled on some exercise clothes and went for a long walk, listening to my mp3 player along the way. I even ran three fairly short stretches during my walk! That probably doesn't sound like much, but it was. The first time I ran past runners--well, what did I expect? that they would point and laugh?--of course they did nothing. I wasn't remarkable--just one of many people running in the park. I must not have looked as foolish as I felt. That experience made me more confident. I went home and took a bath to get all the sweat off. (It is, quite randomly, 65 today.)

When my friend arrived tonight, we walked to dinner. I had a tasty alcoholic drink and ate about 2/3 of my meal--about two bites too many, but not bad. I was aware. I was planning to walk home, but my husband had met us and told me he didn't want to be lonely in the car by himself. (That means, I miss you! Come love on me!) So I rode with him and held his hand. Now I'm home. I got myself back on track today. And I'm going to keep it up tomorrow.