Progress... kinda

I have been plugging along. I haven't been terribly successful, but not a complete failure either. I've been eating whatever I want, but watching my portions. I think I've done ok. I lost 5 pounds just from not eating like a crazy person (but isn't that what the holidays are for??) since we've been back from our holiday traveling. Apparently it takes like 7,000 calories a day to sustain that rate of weight gain. :) I made my little "Pounds to Go" and "Pounds Lost" jars with the pebbles in them and took great pleasure in moving my five little pebbles to the "Pounds Lost" jar.

I am a little stalled in my exercise because I am EXHAUSTED. Kyla, I do not know how you are running when you get so little sleep. The girls have been sick. We had the stomach flu twice with the regular flu in between. Our sleeping routines are allll messed up and we're having a hard time reestablishing them. However, I am reaching the insanity level of exhaustion. I think I'm going to lock our bedroom door, turn on the sound machine, and let the kids figure out their sleeping arrangements sans our bed. I'm hoping this will make for a better frame of mind for exercising.




I am reading an excellent book. It's called A Course in Weight Loss by Marianne Williamson. It's not about an eating plan, but how we use food to replace God in our lives and how to change that. I never thought that my dependence on food was akin to idolatry, but what she says makes sense. I will admit that some of it is weird and I haven't done all the assignments, but it has been instrumental in returning the sanity to my eating. For a while after the holidays I thought I was going to be a thoughtless food shoveler for the rest of my life because I could not make myself STOP EATING! Things have improved vastly since I started reading her book and I would recommend it to anyone who feels hopeless about losing weight.

Help!

Today was a very stressful day. There was a mix-up with my bank where they took my credit card payment out of my checking account TWICE, Jane (and therefore, I) did not sleep well last night and was cranky, I have clothes the girls have outgrown aaaalllll over the house that I was trying to sort/put away, Sarah has been having a testing-her-limits stage lately that is soooo fun, Tyler had meetings at the church tonight so was home for only a half hour to eat, Jane acted like a maniac during story time so bed time took about 1-1/2 hours, etc, etc, etc! I am feeling frazzled. I am feeling completely wrung out. I am feeling intense cravings for unspeakable amounts of doughnuts.

My cry for help is this: what works for you when you really need to vent some steam? Besides eating. I have already mastered that stress relief technique. :) And how do you switch your technique from eating to something else? I'm open to any suggestions!

Back on Track

This morning I made a delicious green drink. I added more green cubes than usual to make up for the fact that I didn't really make many green drinks over the weekend. Jane and I shared it, like we always do. I'm convinced it's the reason we didn't catch the flu that Sarah had. :) Maybe I should start making smoothies for Sarah's breakfast so she can beef up her immune system. That might include waking up a little earlier.... well, I'm sure it would work just as well if I made her one after school.

I thought I should probably start taking pictures of the stuff I'm making. So here's my green drink.



I realized two things when I took this picture: 1) I do not have any attractive glasses. I broke all our glass ones when I was pregnant with Jane. 2) Our kitchen is really dirty. You know those days when you can't find any clean dishes so you end up using recycled sour cream containers to mix your chickpea salad in? Not that I'm having that kind of day.... and if I was, who are you to judge me! Ahem. Sooo, I made this one with 3 little bathroom cup (you know, the little Dixie kind that you use for mouthwash) size green cubes, a handful of a frozen fruit mix with peaches, mangoes, pineapple, and strawberries in it, a few frozen blackberries, a banana, some rice milk and white grape juice.




Speaking of chickpea salad, I found this delicious basic recipe for a chickpea salad from Diva Dish (I really REALLY love this woman). You can also use chicken if you'd prefer. It's basically mushed chickpeas with garlic hummus instead of mayo. Then you add in your regular chicken salad ingredients. I used some quartered grape tomatoes, chopped green onions, chopped roasted almonds, a little handful of golden raisins, Garam Masala, cumin, salt & pepper and some fresh chopped cilantro. It was A-MAZING. I almost left out the raisins. I'm not a big fan of raisins in savory salads. That would have been a mistake. The sweetness in the raisins really brought out the flavor of the cardamom from the Garam Masala. It was like pure deliciousness.....

Sorry! I drifted off in a rapturous memory of eating my chickpea salad sandwich. Point is, it was GOOD. Try it. You'll like it.

Mug Cakes

(photo from family kitchen)


Last night I was having a hard core baked goods jones. I wanted cupcakes. Or coffee cake. Or brownies. Or cookies. Really, anything with sugar and butter that could be baked would have done. I was telling Tyler about this craving and he made a brilliant remark. "I wish there was a recipe for just two cookies." I realized I had a recipe for something like that! Have you ever heard of mug cakes? They are little single cakes that you cook in a mug in the microwave. I remembered pinning the recipe for a chocolate salted caramel mug cake recently. It seemed like just the single serving fix I was looking for!

I mixed up the ingredients and popped it in the microwave. One minute and thirty seconds later, I had a little chocolate cake aaaallll for me. It was horrible. :( It uses a whole egg in a mug sized cake. As you can imagine, that makes it a bit, well, eggy. If that's the only chocolate cake I can have, I might hold out hope for a chocolate craving cure. Oh well. It was great in theory.

If you want to try it for yourself, head on over to babble.com's family kitchen. Maybe double the recipe, but use only one egg? If anyone has suggestions, please let me know. I would love to be able to make this work.

Sheesh

I hit a bit of a rough spot these last few days. Sarah woke up in the middle of the night on Thursday night and climbed into bed with us. She was running a fever. Friday morning she was crying because everything hurt and she was burning up. Yep. It was the flu. And it was bad. I gave her ibuprofen. Towards the end of the eight hours before her next dose, she would just be miserable. As you can imagine, I have not slept much the last couple days. AND to top it all off, I think Jane is teething. She got into bed with us yesterday morning and just tossed and turned and whimpered. I thought she might have the flu, so all us girls stayed home from church yesterday. Turns out they were both just fine. In fact, they were feeling a little wild from being inside for 3 days. Which can be harder than dealing with sick kids.

Anyway, the point of that long, excuse-making paragraph was to say I have not been doing well with my eating. I've mostly been living on almonds, caramels, and chocolate chips left over from Christmas baking. I think it is still vegetarian, though, even if I wasn't eating any vegetables. :) Okay, so it was mostly sugar-tarian. But whatever.

*TODAY IS A NEW DAY!

*positive statement requirement for weight loss blog met

Um, about that whole "vegetarian" thing...

(photo and spinach nuggets recipe here by The Diva Dish, who I love)

I should have said I'm going to start incorporating a vegetarian lifestyle into our eating. :) My father-in-law sent Tyler home with a large sack of meat (all you "that's what she said"ers out there, let it go) and free food is free food, so we will definitely be using it. Which is why we had sliders for dinner. WITH sweet potato fries. That makes it healthy. And vegetarian-esque-esque. I had to add that second -esque because hamburgers are pretty decidedly UN-vegetarian. Even small hamburgers.

Everything was delicious. I think I ate about four sweet potatoes worth of fries. See, it was healthy. I'm gonna go ahead and skip telling you how many sliders I ate.

For breakfast I made another green drink and for lunch I had spinach nuggets/cookies. They were supposed to be more like little patties, but I did something wrong. They were a little more liquidy than they should have been, so they looked more like spinach cookies. Jane was not fooled by them. In fact, she actually raised her eyebrow at me when I offered her one. She ate a turkey dog for lunch. :) Like I said, we'll slowly be incorporating the vegetarian lifestyle.

2012 is going to be the year! For what, I'm not yet sure...

Sooooo, yesterday I had a policy council meeting at Sarah's school. I have a nice pair of jeans I usually reserve for these sort of dressy soccer mom occasions. I missed the meeting in December (Jane had the stomach flu) so it had been 2 months since I put these jeans on. I almost dislocated a rib sucking in enough to get those babies zipped up. Seriously. Something popped. I decided it was time to get serious about my New Year's resolutions.

I am going the natural foods route. You can call me a hippie, a tree hugger, a vegetarian, even (gasp!) but I think it's the best answer for me. I feel like I will not eat as much crap if my body is already loaded with the good stuff. I have been doing some research, and, since I must admit that I have an aversion to the taste of some healthy food, I decided a "green drink" would be the best way to get in the nutrients without having to actually taste all that healthy stuff.

Slight problem: we live 40 minutes from the nearest grocery store stocked with anything but iceberg lettuce. And we only go shopping every 2 weeks. How do you keep your fridge stocked with necessary greens for 2 weeks without having them turn into a science experiment??? This is why I'm a genius. I saw a tutorial for saving fresh spices by blending them with water and freezing them. This is a great idea. Whenever I buy a bunch of cilantro I end up throwing half of it away. BUT, I figured it would work just as well for greens! I brought all my greens home from the grocery store (I'm not sure what they are, I just chose the greenest, most disgusting looking greens-I figured they were probably the healthiest), blended them up, and froze them in ice cube trays. This is great for two reasons: I don't have to worry about my greens rotting AND it eliminates the need for ice in my green drinks!

I had a lovely green drink this morning. Jane even shared it with me, so it couldn't have tasted that bad!



*for pictured green drink recipe, go to http://greenmonstermovement.com/?cat=3