The Blondie

I have a huge Achilles heel.  You’re shocked, I know. Where I work we have a caterer who supplies our lunches and breakfasts when we have meetings and workshops.  It’s good…they make a couple of good meals, wraps, etc.  This caterer makes Blondies that I can’t resist!  I mean, I CAN’T!  Today I was involved in a meeting and lunch was brought in.  I was prepared.  I tore apart a wrap and had some turkey, lettuce and a bit of mayo, washed down with a Vanilla Coke Zero.  And then washed all that down with a BLONDIE!  I never thought about dessert – I didn’t know the Blondies were coming.  It caught me off guard.

A Blondie, for the less-informed, is basically a chocolate chip cookie bar.  Looks brownie-like but it is light brown and has chocolate chips and this caterer adds walnuts.  They are fabulous. F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S.

And I had one.  I raised my insulin by doing so and probably didn’t lose any weight today.  And so what?  I haven’t had one since maybe June and I won’t have another opportunity for a while, and that’s life.  As I’ve learned from the many pod-casts that I listen to, you can’t cheat on a lifestyle.  If 80/20 is the goal, then I am achieving it.  And maybe it will take me an extra week or two to get to my goal weight, but I will get there and enjoy the occasional Blondie along the way.

Ups & Downs

After Amy smacked me around and I got through the “1st week of school”, I found a bit of sanity again.  Actually, when I got on the scale on Saturday I was pleasantly surprised to see that I’d lost weight.  HOW that happened during amidst the stress is beyond me.  But I’ll take it.

Question is, how to decrease the stress moving forward?  Some serious stuff happened at work which I will blog about later, as I do have a colleague or two that check out the o'l’ blog and the serious stuff hasn’t been announced yet.  There's a good component and a bad component, and both are BIG stressors.   I think the fact that I lost weight last week was a fluke and I know, without question, that I NEED to find away to calm the waters as I move through these changes.  Believing as I do, that hormones rule in the weight loss world, I do not want to taunt Cortisol.  She won’t let me keep losing if I give her control.

After this week, I found myself battling depression this weekend.  At least, I think that’s what it was.  On Friday night, I sat comatose on the couch, falling asleep around 7:30 and not wanting to move, eat, or think.  I thought I wanted some low-carb ice cream but couldn’t bring myself to scoop it, and couldn't even imagine lifting the spoon and putting it in my mouth if I had.  I thought, as I sat there, that this must be what it feels like to die.  I’m not ready to go yet, and I’m not suicidal by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt….nothing.  Of course I was tired.  But this feeling was more than tired.  It was – numb.  I wasn’t sad, I didn’t cry, but I also didn’t necessarily want to feel any different.  That’s the best I can do in describing it.  The last time I felt that way was when I had post-partum depression after the birth of my 2nd daughter.  It was horrible.  At least this time it came and went within a couple days.

Saturday is always my hunting and gathering day.  I go to the farmer’s market for grass fed beef & free range chicken and this week also got some free range eggs and raspberries.  Then I headed to Wal-Mart for the staples.  I brought it all home and my dear husband moved my zero-gravity chair out into the sun,  where I listened to some podcasts and slept another 2 hours.

Jeff and I went to a local establishment, a new one for us, and we had a very nice meal.  It was probably the best I had felt all day.  Today was our weekly breakfast out and we went to Lakeside Farms – they cook up a great low-carb breakfast but the obstacles are the mammoth apple fritters!  I seriously need to avert my eyes!  As it happened, there was a craft fair today and I found a lovely pair of earrings and a bracelet that Jeff has promised to get me for Christmas.

I spent the afternoon half-heartedly watching a movie and taking a nap.  I also had to get ready for the week.  I’m trying to make an effort to bring “real food” to work and avoid the processed bars.  This takes planning, as you all know.

As I begin another week, I’m hoping that I get a call from the endocrinologist that my doc referred me to, as I know my thyroid plays a role in all this – low-grade depression is one of many symptoms of hypo-thyroid.  Though I take medication, it doesn’t mitigate any of the symptoms.  And this is acceptable?  Not to me.

So that’s my story today.  Here’s hoping for time to prep food, lower stress, some long walks, and a call from the doc this week.  All of those things would be great!  Here’s wishing for you, whatever you need this week to make it a good one!  Thanks for reading.

What Is WRONG With Me??

I have been enjoying the low-carb, weight-losing life for a couple of months now.  No dramatic weight loss for me, but slow and steady, and the overall feeling of good health and slow shrinkage has been driving me forward.  Really, once you get past the initial CRAP feeling, it is quite nice.  And once you figure out how to substitute some low-carb dessert options, it’s very manageable.

So WHAT happened to me today?  Today was the first day of “school.”  I no longer work in a school with students, but rather I work in the administrative offices of a Board of Cooperative Educational Services.  I supervise teachers and run some other educational programs.  Today my teachers came back and it was all good.  They are delightful to work with (usually) and today was not a big deal.  Yet, today I have eaten about 1900 calories. NINETEEN HUNDRED CALORIES!  I would like to blame stress, but I'm not sure it fits this time.

I know that as a low-carb Atkinsite, I should not be counting calories but carbs.  However, I’m a counter.  I’ve admitted that before on this blog.  So I count calories, carbs, glasses of water…. I can’t help it!  So, in case you were wondering, today I’ve had 52 carbs.

I do not believe in a “calories in/calories out” weight loss platform.  I do believe that carbs count and the hormonal impact of WHAT you eat is more important than how much.  BUT, that said, the how much can’t be too much!  At some point on the continuum of calories vs. quality, the calories matter. I was not overly hungry when I came home.  I had even stopped for a diet Coke on the way home (it was very hot here today) and grabbed a pack of mixed nuts to make sure that I did not enter the kitchen starving.  That tip was reinforced today on Jimmy’s podcast today with Nell Stephenson that I listened to this morning on my way to work.

But then I proceeded to eat 2 range free eggs cooked in coconut oil with a little Swiss cheese, 4 (yes 4!) sausage links, a half piece of Mastroianni whole grain bread with grass-fed butter AND a few fried red potato pieces.  I’m sick just thinking about it.

I cannot dwell here.  That’s why I’m blogging tonight.  I need to leave this at the alter of my readers in true-confession style and make tomorrow another day with better (and fewer!) choices.  Thanks for letting me get that off my chest!

Stay tuned.  I need to turn this ship around, folks, and I will need support.  Please cheer me on!!

Are All Food Tracking Websites Equal?

I ate something yesterday and went to My Fitness Pal to enter it and was frustrated that I could not find an exact match.  I came to MFP after a short stint with my Lose It app on my iPhone, and before that I was logging over at the Daily Plate at Livestrong.com.  There was another one in the mix, too, but the name escapes me.

I have found myself on occasion floating over to Livestrong because their food database is unmatched.  They just have everything!  But back when I was with them, their interface was a bit clumsy and I had the Blackberry app and could never get that to work.  So, fickle as I was, I left.

Yesterday following my moment of MFP frustration, I looked and read about Livestrong’s new iPhone app (new to me, anyway).  I forked over the $2.99  for the app, and re-logged on to Livestrong. If you know me, you know that I’m a bit OCD when it comes to logging or tracking food.  I don’t know why this is – especially since I’m now following a low-carb lifestyle and should throw tracking by the wayside.  But that’s just not me.  I want data, spreadsheets, and information.  I want to have something to shove in your face when I am stuck on a plateau to say, “HA!  See?  I SHOULD be losing weight!”

So I’m going to log in both places for a while to determine if there’s a big discrepancy between the two, which I don’t expect.  More importantly, to discover which one I like better.  So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, you might notice my new addition on the right  - my weight log.  Whew – I was not sure if or when I’d be ready to post this, but there it is.  I remember vividly confessing to my co-workers David & Shelley, back in April or so that I weighed 191 pounds.  They politely scoffed and said there was NO WAY I weighed that much!  Love them (liars!) but indeed I was and I thought that now that I was a good 10 pounds lower than that, it was time to be transparent.  So there it is.  I’m itching to show a 170-something over there!

Long-time-no-post

Yes, thanks for asking, I’m still here!  It’s not that I haven’t thought about posting, it’s just that my summer totally got away from me and I never really felt like I had any earth-shattering info to pass along.  Sorry, not much of an excuse!

So, I’ve meandered through my summer doing some low-carb living.  I haven’t made a lot of progress.  I see that on August 6th I was 183.6 and today I am 182.2.  That’s rather depressing to me.  Yes, it’s going in the right direction but why so slow?  I am still netting about 35-45 carbs per day, and my calorie intake is anywhere from 1350 to 1650 per day, depending on what’s going on (and what I eat!!)  I’m wondering if I eat too often, or eat too much, or eat too many carbs.  (You can click on My Fitness Pal link to the right to see what’s going down the hatch).

I have said “no” to a lot of foods I would have liked to have this summer.  Ice cream in particular, though I have started eating Breyer’s Carb Smart ice cream and it’s pretty good.  It’s really good with a couple of teaspoons of natural peanut butter and a Tbls of Chocoperfection chips melted and poured over top!  On my birthday, three weeks ago, I skipped dinner and went to Cold Stone Creamery and had the most flippin’ wonderful bowl of the Real Thing!  It was fabulous and worth it.  I only have a birthday every other year, after all!

Last week we went to the fair.  “The Fair” is the Washington County Fair in Easton, NY for us.  I spent my childhood at that fair and even took my goats and rabbits there when I was 12 with 4-H.  Lots of memories in that place and 98% of them are of food.  I kept it light all day and splurged on French fries, soft ice cream and sugar fritters.  None of it was worth it except the sugar fritter!  The sugar fritter shack has been there since before my time and is run by the fine ladies of the Greenwich United Methodist Church and they fry hunks of bread dough and roll them in sugar and charge all of a dollar for them.  Seriously, I wish now that I’d ditched the fries and ice cream and just eaten 3 or 4 more fritters!  They were THAT good!

After I ingested all of those carbs, not only did I not feel so good, but my legs felt like lead!  I warned my husband that he might have to carry me back to the Jeep, which was parked in the furthest spot from the gate!  I definitely had a carb-hangover, which was a great reminder of why I’m trying to live this low-carb life!

So other than those two, albeit significant, carb blow-outs, I’ve been tried and true.  Perhaps this slow weight loss is to teach me patience and perseverance!  If so, I’d better learn them quick because I’m becoming a bit frustrated.  More as it comes to me….thanks for stopping by.

OutRAGEous!

I’m a big podcast listener.  Even before podcasts I was more apt to listen to talk radio than music on my daily commute.  Now with the advent of podcasting, I’m hooked on listening to people talk, experts and non-experts alike.  I think everyone has something important to say.

Everyone except the two guys I listened to today, I should say.  I will not name the podcast – I don’t want to get sued and maybe these guys just have more to learn.  I searched for more podcasts on low-carb living and found Podcast X.

I should point out that the title of Podcast X was very indicative of low-carb.  Like “We Love Meat and Fat” or “Hamburg R Us.”  This was not a case of mistaken identity on my part where I thought it would be about low-carb and it was really something else.  Nope, it was definitely supposed to be a low-carb podcast.

As I listened, the hosts were talking about their return from a recent vacation and how they’d both fallen off the “wagon” and had spent a week or two eating all sorts of horrific things.  OK. I can understand that, in the spirit of true confession and all (which reminds me, I haven’t blogged about my birthday “dinner”).  So one of the hosts was saying how he had ice cream every night, hot dogs, and steak!

Steak?  The other host chimed in about how he had been eating too much “flesh” and how he was thinking how he really needed to get away from that.  The next few minutes were spent talking about how not-so-bad the couple of trips to a national Smoothie chain were because while the smoothie of choice was 450+ calories, it only had 1.5 grams of fat.  AND THERE WAS NO MENTION OF THE CARBS or SUGAR!

By now, I was ticked.  While I paid nothing for this podcast episode, I felt ripped off!  I quickly grabbed for my iPhone and was all set to call these guys!  Only then did it occur to me that I didn’t have their number and it didn’t work that way!  Not to worry, I left them a 2 star iTunes review.  I gave them a couple brownie points for good rapport with each other.  I ended my misery when they were debating whether rice pasta or wheat pasta was better for you.

Fear not!  I can recommend some good podcasts!  For low-carb, there’s none better than Livin’ La Vida Low Carb with Jimmy Moore.  He has set the bar high for any other low-carb podcasters that dare to follow in his footsteps!  For general good health and fitness, there’s Shauna & Carla’s Two Fit Chicks and a Microphone, and for sensible eating and weight loss, there’s Russ & Jeff from Fat 2 Fit Radio (though with more of a “calories in/calories out” bent for my tastes, but I do appreciate their work!  They were my first podcast subscription!).  I almost forgot Logical Weight Loss Podcast with Dave Jackson.  Dave isn’t on board with the cutting the carbs too much either, but he keeps me in the loop with diet and exercise gadgets and is entertaining.

So the moral of the story is that there are a lot of voices out there.  Listen for a minute to each one, decide who’s speaking from wisdom and from foolishness, and tune in accordingly.

Ore-aren'ts!

Tonight I tried a recipe from my friend Maria who blogs over here and who’s also a Facebook friend o’mine.  Being on this low-carb journey has left me wanting some junk food!   I know it’s not supposed to work that way, but for me, I will ALWAYS crave the sweet stuff.  That’s just who I am.  I grew up on Oreos and Chips Ahoy along with mom’s baked goods (and my own!) so it was natural that I would get around to trying her recipe for, as she calls them, “Healthified” Oreos.



I should have made my cookies smaller, I realize now, as I ended up with mini whoppie-pies instead of the flat cookies traditionally seen in an Oreo.  I also made too much creme filling.  Though, if I’d had more cookies, it might have been just right.

I added some vanilla to the filling as well as another packet of Truvia.  I just wanted them sweeter.  Next time I may add another tsp of Truvia to the mix, as well.

Thanks, Maria, for the recipe!  I have been known to polish off an entire 1/2 package of Double Stuff Oreos in one night in my past.  But these are filling and overwhelmingly chocolate – and two of these were more than enough!