Birthday Dinner

Today is my boyfriend's actual birthday and this evening he wants us to celebrate together tonight by having his favorite dinner. I, of course, will oblige. However, his favorite dinner is not exactly of the healthy variety.

Steak, macaroni and cheese (boxed), and crescent rolls. It's so funny how much he loves this meal. Simple, cheap and extremely easy to make. Of all the restaurants we have to choose from, of all the meals that I can make, this is what he wants.

And since it's his birthday, it's what he's going to get. It's not exactly on par with how I'm eating, so I'm adding some roasted broccoli (maybe with some red/yellow peppers) as my main side dish and eat just a few bites of everything. It should be good.

This week's menu has been pretty good so far. Couple of snags but I've managed.

Monday I ended up eating the tomato bisque for lunch and didn't have time to make "the sauce" so I ended up tossing my pasta with a bunch of tomatoes, seasoning and the ricotta cheese. Admittedly, not the best thing but it was a blah kind of eating day.

Tuesday I ended up at the doctor's office for three hours which really threw a wrench in my day. Just a check-up but I kept getting bumped for emergency appointments. Because it took so long, my eating plan had to be revamped so I went to Subway and got a veggie sub on whole wheat bread and ate that throughout the rest of my work day.

When I got home I made my sauce:

onions, carrots, celery, EVOO



add zucchini, garlic, basil and chicken stock



simmer with tomato sauce



delicious!

I made enough to freeze half the batch. I thought I would mainly use this to toss w/ some whole wheat pasta but I've found that I'm enjoying it for breakfast in omelets with some sauteed spinach, garlic and light cream cheese. It's a good combination and pretty filling. So for the past couple of days I've eaten this.



My snack this week has pretty much been low fat cottage cheese and an apple. And, Wednesday and Thursday lunch was 1/2 a veggie burger on ww bun.

As for weigh-in this week. I am up, again, but I definitely came down from that over 2 pound gain I saw. +1.2 lbs. Working out has been lack luster because of the shuffling of my schedule but I did go to a concert last night and danced around for 4 hours so that must count for something!

And this weekend is Memorial Weekend! The weekend that is traditionally filled with barbecues and parties. I've come up with some fall back ideas in the event that I need to face any terrifying food decisions so I'll let you know how that goes.


P1:
Week 1: -4.4
Week 2: -1

P2:
Week 1: +1
Week 2: +1.4
Week 3: -1
Week 4: +1.2


You know, looking at it this way I'm noticing way too many + signs. I'm really going to do my very best to get a - sign come next weigh-in!!!

It's Been One Week ...

since last I posted.

Once again, a week feels like an eternity. However, not much has really happened. I'll recap a few items and some of my food choices.

It was Monday the 16th the last time I wrote and in case you're wondering ...

Monday night, instead of my vegetables, vegetables, vegetables I had Italian food. And not just any Italian food, I had fettuccine alfredo with garlic bread. I found it to be delicious in the moment, but I had some horrific heartburn afterwards.

Tuesday was a day filled with normal eating and then I went to Korean BBQ for a friend's birthday. I found online where on South Beach Korean BBQ is actually encouraged. The meat was very tasty but I found the extreme lack of vegetables to make me feel very unbalanced. Also, I don't think that much meat sat well in my stomach. If I go again, I will order meat as well as vegetarian options to round it out.

Wednesday was weigh in and I was happy to see -1 lb on the scale. Woo Hoo! Also, I got in a nice lunch workout on the stationary bike.

Thursday I ate an entire calzone for dinner. Yup, Italian strikes again. However, I managed to take a nice walk to Universal on my lunch break.

And that brings us to the weekend where I had a mixture of food. Some examples: I had a lovely caprese salad Friday, turkey dogs on whole wheat buns with sweet potato fries (baked) on Saturday, and a pulled pork BBQ sandwich with cole slaw and french fries, and junior mints at the movies on Sunday. The bbq sandwich was from a diner and pretty much straight forward. Afterwards, I wished I had been a little more selective in choosing my meal but I enjoyed it.

I AM pleased to report that I got in two really good workouts on Friday and Saturday but all in all, I do NOT think that I had a successful weekend food wise. In fact, I'm pretty displeased with the entire week.

That brings us full circle again to Monday where, as of this morning, I am up 2.4 lbs from my Wednesday weigh-in. Ideal? no. But I'm pretty positive it is the result of foods I've been eating.

I chose not to cook anything last week. In fact, I didn't even go to the grocery store and kind of just ate what was left in my fridge. It was both a good and bad thing. It was good because I got rid of a lot of produce and other food items that I would have otherwise wasted. It was bad because I really had no plan in place for my meals. I found myself scurrying each morning to try to figure out decent snacks and lunches and then I'd go home for dinner and without a plan in place, ordering food seemed ideal. Hence, the Italian nights.

So for this week, I made sure to plan.

My food for today is pretty normal, eggs for breakfast, vegetable chili for lunch - I also have some tomato bisque that I'm going to try.

And for dinner, tonight I'm going to be making a tomato sauce heavy on vegetables: carrots, celery, onions, garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, mushrooms and a few sweet peppers - and then I'm going to throw it over a half serving of whole wheat pasta with some dollops of fresh ricotta cheese.

I thought it sounded decent enough.

So goals for this week:

I feel pretty good about my menu and if I stick to what I have planned and continue working out, I have no doubt that my weight will ease its way back down. Also, I'm going to try to not let so much time go by before I blog again because writing down the food on here is like a check point for me.

P1:
Week 1: -4.4
Week 2: -1
P2:
Week 1: +1
Week 2: +1.4
Week 3: -1

Great Weekend!

I had a fantastic weekend filled with lots of birthdays and fantastic food.

On Friday night, I went to the Cheesecake Factory to celebrate the first birthday of the weekend. It was just a quiet dinner with one of my friends and my boyfriend. There was, of course, lots of talking and great food. We started with a celebratory drink in her honor and ordered some sweet potato fries for the table. For my entree I went with a chicken dish that included mashed potatoes and broccoli. I knew dessert was a must so I ate just a bit of everything and actually we were talking so much I took plenty of time in between bites which helped a lot.

We ordered cheesecake to share and left half on the plate. I walked away from the restaurant feeling very satisfied with not only my food choices but my fullness level. It's hard to walk away from the Cheesecake Factory and not be overly full. The portions are GIGANTIC. The next morning though, I did wake up and feel dreadfully dehydrated most likely from the sodium intake.

Other than dinner, Friday's menu was pretty good:

B: 1/2 egg sandwich on ww bread w/ peppers, lettuce, cheese, coffee
S: romaine tossed with broccoli slaw, edamame and dressing
L: vegetable chili w/ shredded cheese

I also got in 2, yes TWO, workouts. I woke up before work and did strength training and then took a 45 minute walk on my lunch break.

The next birthday event was to be at my house but not until Sunday so Saturday was spent cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning.

I also got in a 45 minute working running intervals and ate ..... um ok.

brunch: portobello mushroom cap topped with sauce, tomatoes, and cheese
s: skim milk, handful cadbury mini eggs
dinner: pad thai with pork

Sunday Sunday Sunday!

Started the day with eggs over easy and a small glass of skim milk.

Got in a 30 minute elliptical workout followed by 15 minutes walking on the treadmill.

Ate a slice of muenster cheese.

And then we had our birthday dinner for my boyfriend. He cooked his favorite Thai dishes and we had many, many people come over to help us celebrate.

I enjoyed Jasmine rice with Green Curry and shrimp accompanied by a glass or two of wine. And topped it off with a few bites of pie and ice cream.

We started dinner at 5pm and everyone was still having fun at 10:30pm so we ordered some pizza and I had 3 slices of cheese pizza.

I probably could have done without the pizza at the end of the night if I had eaten better after my workout. All I had after that workout was the slice of cheese because I was in the kitchen cooking and before I knew it guests were everywhere.

No matter, everyone had a lot of fun and it was definitely a successful evening.

I did, however, throw the merriment into Monday morning. My boyfriend drove me to work this morning and we stopped at Carl's JR. and got some greasy breakfast goodness!! Yeah, this party needs to come to an end pretty soon.

Lunch is going to be vegetable lasagna w/ whole grain noodles and then dinner will probably be vegetables, vegetables and more vegetables.

I enjoyed everything I did and ate but I'm ready to get back full time to my better way of eating. I feel a little heavy and sluggish but I'm sure it's just from the foods I ate.

Hopefully Wednesday's weigh-in will be kind to me :)

Carb Cravings

Ok, that didn't take too long. This is an excerpt from the boards I read:

"life happens and you will, on occasion, find yourself eating an off-plan meal or a slice of birthday cake. Enjoy! Do not berate yourself, and most importantly, DO NOT GO BACK TO PHASE 1! Get back on track with a healthy P2 diet, continue to exercise, and move FORWARD. P1 should only be revisited if your cravings have returned or you've been off of P2 for a long time."

Ok, that seems like sound advice. With that in mind, I'm going to continue on as I'm supposed to. If I notice that the carb cravings continue, I'll go back to P1 for a few days and hopefully that'll kick it. Also, I had a banana for breakfast yesterday. That's the first time I've had fruit in the morning and maybe that also was a factor.

Unfortunately, I had a banana for breakfast today too. I'll see what happens tonight and then I'll move it tomorrow and figure out if that was a culprit too.

Week 2 ends ...

Yesterday I woke up feeling great. Truly, I had amazing energy and felt like the world was my oyster.

That's all - nothing exciting happened -- I just wanted to share because I LOVE days like those. Where everything just seems to go your way even if it doesn't.

Anyway, I recently divulged my over-indulgences and I stand here now needing to make a correction.

They did have an affect on me. Last night for dinner I ordered Pad Thai. And as I was eating it, I had a revelation:

"SON OF A GUN!!! This is a carb craving"

Didn't even see it coming til I was almost done.

So yes, my little jaunt over the weekend DID have an affect on me. When I got home from work it didn't occur to me that I was overly thinking about eating pad thai or anything. I had had a wonderful day of eating and somehow in a single thought I convinced myself that I would eat it and be ok and blah blah blah. Truly I performed some excellent jedi mind tricks on myself. Very crafty I have become.

Anyway, now that I've indentified it I'm not so sure what to do now. I don't know if I'm supposed to go back to phase 1 or not. Hopefully I'm not because I really don't want to do it again - maybe just a day or two. So today I'm going to peruse my resources and get some advice from people who've "been there done that".

Also, today is Wednesday - so that means it's WI: +1.4 lbs

Yeah, that's a big jump but I was expecting that due to certain choices I made that I am going to forgive myself for and move on ;)

P1: 5.4
P2:
week 1: +1
week 2: +1.4

I'm not too worried about the gain because week 2 for me was *head bowed in shame* not the best for me. No worries though, I will come up with a plan and turn it around.

In food news, I made a dish that I'm very pleased with.

Vegetarian chili:



It's kidney beans, garbanzo beans, pinto beans, onions, carrots, and red peppers with all sorts of chili seasonings. I just mixed it all together and let it simmer for a couple of hours. Very filling and tasty.

Yesterday's menu:
B: banana w/ PB
L: chili w/ 1T shredded Portuguese cheese
S: yellow pepper strips, plum tomatoes, carrot strips w/ hummus
D: pad thai :(

Today starts week 3 for mean and technically I am to add a grain today (yippee!) but before I officially do that I'm going to go see what I can find out about my carb cravings.

My Confession

Guess what I did this weekend??

I cheated and I cheated hard :)

Friday night I had pizza. Saturday, well Saturday, I ate normal. And then came Sunday. Sunday I had candy, doughnuts and nachos!!!

The lesson: If anyone out there is reading this. Don't do it! If you want to cheat, cheat small. Just have a tiny cheat meal or cheat snack. Why? Because I got super sick.

Well to be fair, I think I've been having issues with my stomach ever since I started this diet. The drastic change in my eating has had some sort of affect on me and I'm hoping to get it all figured out in my upcoming annual w/ my doctor in 2 weeks. My mother also recently informed me that gallbladder issues run all sorts of rampant in my family so that may be the problem. Whatever it is, how I am feeling right now is not worth it.

On the bright side, I don't have any sugar cravings. Maybe that's because I have yet to eat any food today. I feel so sick that the thought of eating ANYTHING makes me feel more sick.

I just thought I needed to get that off my chest. You know, full disclosure and all.

As far as my other meals, nothing new or exciting was made. I pretty much stuck to the same foods.

Up ahead:
WI is Wednesday. Before I took my little excursion, I was looking good at having a loss this week. But we'll see what happens.

Phase 2 week 1 results

My first week on Phase 2 was good. I really have no complaints about it. I think I was super worried about starting because I thought that eating just one serving of grain would be enough to make me go back into a stupor because I really like my carbs. However, I found that the one slice of whole wheat toast that I chose as my grain this week really worked well for me. I switched back and forth between peanut butter toast and half a roasted turkey sandwich. I ate them either at lunch or as my post dinner snack.

I started w/ the PB toast as an after dinner snack because honestly, I was afraid that if I moved it up earlier in the day, it would set me up for cravings for the rest of the day. After a couple of days, I moved it to my lunch and that didn't seem to do any damage so I gained more confidence.

So, as far as my results. I know I weigh in on Thursdays but now I'm thinking I just need to move it to Wednesday because that will make it coincide w/ my SB starting date. So, I'm trading my Thursday weigh-ins for Wednesdays. And thus, my results are below:

P1: -5.2 lbs total
P2: +1 lb - week 1

During the first week I went up almost 2 pounds before things started settling. It also dropped lower but that +1 was my final number so I'm sticking w/ that. And other than the tummy troubles early on in the week, I feel good and have recently noticed my clothes seem to be getting bigger which is always nice.

As of right now, I'm on day 3 of my second week. This week I added back fruit and honestly, I'm not doing so well. Wednesday I added some strawberries and yesterday I forgot completely. Today I have an apple so I'm going to try super hard to remember to eat it. I know it could be worse - I COULD be cheating left and right. I have cheated a little but all I've done is go over my 100 calorie limit of SF treats and eat too much Pad Thai one night.

So far so good.

Today's menu:

B: Southwest omelette (seasoned beans, tomato and cheese omelette topped w/ salsa, guacamole and a dollop of sour cream)
S: yellow pepper strips, carrot slices, plum tomatoes w/ hummus
L: half roasted turkey sandwich, garden salad w/ kidney/garbanzo beans and Ital. dressing

Still here

I've had quite the time since last I posted.

I did finally decide what to buy at the market and what to eat for the week. However, this is the first week where I'm not all that impressed with my selections. Oh well. Maybe I'll come up with something grand for next week.

Many things to discuss so lets talk about food first.

This weekend I had two, yes TWO, different dinner parties to attend. I think I did pretty well :) The first was at a close friends house and they had a plethora of options. I know for a fact that there was sugar in some of the dishes but I think I did pretty good considering. I enjoyed some salad, some peppers and sausage, and a chicken wing. I sat down and talked to the host about how he prepared everything and honestly, it was a little worse than I thought :) But it's all good.

I ate enough to not be starving and then I just sat back and enjoyed my friends company. Once I got home I ate a nice dinner.

The second dinner was with my boyfriend's sister's family. My boyfriend is half Thai and his sister cooks AMAZING Thai food. Now, I LOVE Thai food so I was afraid this one would be just a hair more difficult. Nope! And I have a wonderful boyfriend too. He asked his sister what was in everything and how much sugar. And we both helped cook so I saw first hand. Also, when he saw "bad items" go in, he'd pull me aside and tell me. It was really cute. I had a little bit of everything. And again, just enough to not be starving. When we left, we stopped and got a bite to eat before we drove back home.

So yes, I did well at my first two tries at eating out of the house. It was a lot easier than I thought. The first dinner party I had no idea what they were making so I had a snack before I went to make sure that in the event I had to not eat that I would be ok. The second dinner, I knew beforehand what dishes were being made I just didn't know how they were being prepared. But I feel confident that in the future, I'll be able to maneuver the situation.

Now, if it had been a pizza party that might have been way more difficult ;) Man, I love pizza.

Anyway, Monday was a different story. I got through breakfast and then I was sick to my stomach all day long. I'm not sure if it was something I ate over the weekend or if it was because maybe I had more off limit ingredients (ie: sugar) than usual but I didn't eat anything all day. When I got home from work I was really hungry and my boyfriend wanted Thai. So I ordered Pad Thai. Now, I can have rice noodles but I'm pretty sure restaurant Pad Thai is just off limits in general. Fat, sugar, deliciousness and whatnot. But I ordered it and I ate it. Not the whole thing because I get full really quickly lately. And some interesting things happened.

First, it didn't taste as good as I thought it would. This restaurant has my favorite Pad Thai of ALL TIME so I was a little shocked at this. Maybe it was a bad batch (hey, it happens) or maybe my taste buds have changed (that happens too) - in any case, it just didn't wow me. Second, it KNOCKED ME OUT! Seriously, I ate it and then we sat down to watch a movie but it was no use. By 8:30pm I was gone. It might have been from being sick, being full or eating such a heavy dish when I wasn't used to it. Who knows.

That leads to Tuesday which was ... ugh. So, I'm assuming it was the Pad Thai but I was sick to my stomach all through the morning and afternoon on Tuesday too. I wasn't in as bad a shape as Monday - I still could eat food - but my stomach was gurgling and churning and doing not fun things off and on. Not fun and it will definitely make me think twice about eating such a heavy dish that I'm not really used to.

And that brings me to Yesterday's Menu:

B: omelette w/ onions, mushrooms, cheese, salsa, and sour cream - I didn't prepare myself grocery wise for the apparent mexican breakfast cravings I've been having the last couple of days - so this is my improvisation.



L: Soupe de Pistou (yeah, still eating this and I still like it - but it's gone now) and a half Roasted Turkey Sandwich



I roasted a turkey breast over the weekend. That was a good idea - plus it was on sale!

and dinner .. I tried to come up w/ a new idea for dinner. I'd been wanting barbecue food lately so I tried to come up with some recipes to simulate a SB barbecue

behold:




That's chicken sausage, cole slaw and baked beans. I made a bbq sauce that had no sugar in it - which, mind you, is pretty difficult. I got the recipe off the internet and the ingredients alone made me doubt the whole thing but I made it anyway. The cole slaw was a Bobby Flay recipe but instead of cabbage I used broccoli slaw and instead of sugar I used Splenda. I also was leery of this one.

And guess what? I was right. I wasn't too pleased with either of these. I'm actually going to give them both a second shot today. I brought a little cole slaw for lunch and I might try the baked beans again for dinner. Sometimes food tastes better after its been sitting and the flavors meld. But we'll see.

And now on to my weight.

Today ends my first week of Phase 2. Adding back the carb wasn't all that difficult or mind blowing. In fact, for the first few days I almost forgot to do it. My weight HAS been fluctuating all week. I said I wasn't going to look at the scale but I did anyway. It's just been going back and forth between my P1 ending weight and one pound up. Tomorrow is Thursday and that's my weigh in day so from now on I'm going to use whatever pops up on Thursday as my reference point. So, as of this morning, I weigh the same as I did last Thursday and tomorrow will be the official number for the week.

Also, today is the first day I add back fruit so here's to another week of seeing how my body handles me messing with it :)