Warm summer days make you not want to turn on the oven… sweetie got me a new toy! I’m gonna use the crap outta this thing.
Barry White muffins were a big success with my husband. Oddly, I somehow neglected to tell him the magic ingredient is beets. SHHHHH we will just keep that between us, okay? Daughter says that I should work on a banana walnut version next. I can’t decide: banana-carrot, banana-beet, banana-zucchini? The batter needs the veggie component for body; banana by itself isn’t bulky/firm enough. Maybe sweet potato? Hmmm that is an idea with some merit. Parsnips? Also I have located some recipes for paleo shortbread, or rather primal because butter mmm butter. I think I’ll make the shortbread with date sugar. See if that works for my face.
Also, happy parenting moment. My son finished his breakfast while I was puttering about upstairs. From downstairs he shouts up, “Hey, are we doing a WOD? What’s the WOD?” I shout back down, “It’s kettlebell swings and jumping jacks!” (I make his WOD pretty easy so he doesn’t get discouraged.) And he shouts, “I like that!” Oh yeah. That is what I like to hear.
Food Accountability Post
Woke up with a sore throat — damn you sweetie — so I decided to dedicate today to defeating this invader before it progresses. I did about 50 minutes of yoga that was so damn relaxing I couldn’t even be bothered to log it on Fito. It was just a whole bunch of twists and supported inversions or bridges. Just trying to get my prana all moving where I want it, up in my upper works where the problem is manifesting.
Breakfast: More of the fish curry, with a bunch of brussels sprouts. YES thank you Dr. Fuhrman I am rocking my immune system with lots of greens.
Lunch: Went to WF and got a bunch of immune boosters. A huge tumbler of Seasonal Wellness tea and a juice from the juice bar which was made of kale, spinach, celery and ginger, plus apple for a bit of sweetness. The ginger was a real punch in the face. Overall, I’m not at all eager for another glass of that stuff. But I drank nearly all of it. Because I hate being sick. The meal was sauteed chard, and broccoli, and more fish. Sadly, the chard was undercooked whilst the fish was the opposite. Booo.
Dinner: CHILI!!! And also some cold steamed green beans
Snacks: Lunch wore off completely and I was starving like a wild thing at about 4:00. So I got some baby carrots and mac nuts to eat while waiting for daughter’s bus.
Dessert: about 6 grapes left over from son’s lunch box. W0000 CARBS! and a few more mac nuts because damn if they ain’t delicious.
Notes: It was funky getting really hungry like that. That hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I don’t know what it means but it sure is interesting. Also, I got ready to make the coconut bark and discovered I don’t have all the ingredients. Back to the store tomorrow!!
Grade: A. Normally when I feel a bit poorly, I fling myself into the arms of bad food. But this time I didn’t. I’m pretty sure I stayed in keto. I was out all day so no ketostix. I’ll take a look later. But I did eat a LOT of mac nuts. Hmm.
After work today, I am attending one of those merchandise parties. Like Tupperware, or Pampered Chef? Only this time it is sex toys. Apparently this is what happens when your husband’s friend’s wife goes through a hilarious midlife crisis and has too much time on her hands.
And I was all, I dunno if I really wanna go to this thing cuz it seems kinda weird, and my husband said [Barry White voice] Here baby, take my credit card. And while you’re there, sweetie, why don’t you check out the soft restraints?
Jahshdheheyxvhxushsksbdbdjcgzhdhrrh.
Monday Morning Check-In
Last week of no weighing-in. I gotta admit I did cheat on this rule at least once but I ain’t telling the results. As I recall, I made a deal with myself that starting in January, I would officially no longer be trying to lose weight. I actually forgot all about this due to the overall excitement of going Whole30. But I did make that deal and I’m sticking to it. So I’m in maintenance now, and whatever my weight is, that’s what it is. Caveat: if I get over 140, I’m going back to weight loss until I am under 138 again. 140 is the cut-off; I’m not slipping up past that weight.
But, aside from that, I’m focusing my energy on heavy kettlebells. It is super-fun slinging that big 40 lb sucker around. I can’t wait until it’s time to pick up a 53!
Happy to report that husband’s digestive woes have calmed down. Naturally he’s not being at all serious about taking his probiotic supplement. I just shrugged and said, “whatever, dude. It’s your gut.” You don’t want to do what you know will help you, man? Fine. I ain’t the one with the problem here.
Aaaand Saturday is my housewarming party so this whole week is about prepping (paleo but non-Whole30) food for that. I’m off now to bake some muffins and maybe some biscuits too. Anybody out there in MD or VA? You wanna come to my party? Inbox me for details!
Monday Morning Check In
All in all, a good week! I did eat out with friends at least once and I’m pretty sure that meal was not quite 100% Whole30-compliant. But I did my best to stay on track and both my husband and I must have been about 90-95%. On the down side, sugar cravings continue to bedevil me. Of course, shark week is due to begin sometime quite soon, so that might be the problem there.
It’s weird not weighing in. I do note that my face and neck are looking thin. In particular, the naso-labial grooves are deeper by my mouth. This is the sort of thing I feel a bit ambivalent about. But okay, whatever. I observe it and that is what is there.
OTOH the pressure to fit into my smallest jeans is off now, because my daughter has taken possession of them. They look sensationally good on her! So I regret nothing, at least not with regard to those jeans. I suppose I do regret or perhaps I just feel nostalgic for the flat belly of my own teenage years. How sad that I could not appreciate it at the time. Oh well.
Whole30 Update — Look, Here Comes The Pushback
As I was getting ready to pass out last night, my husband was heading to take a bath. And he had his tablet in his hand. I said, “you should be putting that away already.” He replied that he wanted to read in the bath, which of course I completely understand. I said, “you should read The Sun magazine, then.” He indicated that he wanted his tablet. So I thought, well, gotta try. I replied, “it’s bad for you. You are cheating.” But he just went on into the bathroom. And I passed out.
So there it is, 2 weeks in and he cracked. I’m a little sad about it but whatever. Back on the wagon today.
The meatgasm at Fogo de Chão yesterday. I still felt stuffed when I woke up this morning!
Monday Morning Check In
It was surprisingly hard to not weigh in this morning! I really wanted to do it. Finally decided not to simply because I wanted to so much. If I am that emotionally involved with my numbers, maybe it IS a good thing to mentally detox from it a bit.
Otherwise, we are going along well with our Whole30 situation. The primary effect of it so far seems to be that everyone’s guts are cleaning house. My husband is annoyed by it because he does not really care to have a movement during the day. He likes to do his business in the late afternoon or evening, so that it’s pretty close to shower time. He has very mild OCD and so he can sometimes be upset by feeling dirty. (“I have swamp-ass,” he roars irritably as he stomps upstairs to hose off.) I’ve always been a morning-movement person myself so it’s not upsetting to me. OTOH when I have about 10 minutes in between clients on a busy Sunday, it’s a bit stressful having to spend 5 of those minutes taking care of business for the 3rd time of the day! Perhaps I need to lay off the dried figs.
Dried fruit is Whole30-approved, isn’t it? I checked but I am not certain. I am certainly noticing that even now, after an entire year of fairly strict Paleo eating, my body continues to cling on to sweetness. It is extremely hard to cut down on any sweet foods, perhaps even harder because there are not that many of them left. My fridge is packed with good stuff. But I just want sweets! I can see now why it’s a good idea to work on calming this urge. It’s underlying every move I make in the kitchen and it has the potential to completely sabotage me even now, 6 years into the process. Feeling how deeply-rooted these needs or feelings are gives me a better understanding of why hardly anyone succeeds at keeping weight off! I have to think what would be a good way to calm it down without being unkind or punitive to myself.
And now, I’m off to toss my KBs around a bit while I watch the season opener of Biggest Loser on my TiVo. Ah, the joy of weeping, vomiting, self-loathing dieters! I dunno. I may be outgrowing my need to watch this show.
Whole30 Update
So, one of the detox-type measures in our Whole30 that I have chosen is to turn off anything that shines a light at your face from its screen 1 hour before bedtime. So, that means phones, laptops, and tablets all should go off to recharge at about 8:30. Sweetie was extremely dismayed to learn about this measure. No sugar? Okay. No tablet? OH JESUS NOOOOOO. I implemented this item because I’ve noticed that, along with many other signs of chronic inflammation, my husband’s sleep is getting bad. He is spontaneously waking up, sometimes very early, not able to get back to sleep. Often he gets as little as 4 hours of sleep. I believe that these sleep issues are symptomatic of a typical cortisol/leptin problem. So last night, as we began our Whole30, we turned off our screens right on time. Poor sweetie was quite lost without his toys. But he went to sleep so fast. And he did something he hasn’t done in over 15 years: he talked in his sleep a little bit as he was drifting off. He used to do that all the time when we were just married! That makes me feel we are on the right track.
Ironically enough my own sleep was bad. I had not remembered to turn down the thermostat, so the room was too warm. And I had caffeine late in the day due to being an idiot. I was wide awake. And after I drifted off, I woke up at 11:30 wide awake and starving hungry. Had to go downstairs and eat a hefty mini-meal. So funny. But I don’t feel crappy today. Insomnia is not so awful if it’s only once in a while. It’s when it comes every damn night that you get a bit stabby.
One of the awesome gifts I received today.
If you’re like me, you set at least a few New Years Resolutions each year in early January, work hard the first few months (or weeks) and then let them fizzle. Once December comes around you remember what you had planned and feel lame that you didn’t accomplish what you set out to do… Not this year!
When I completed my first Whole30 in October this fall I knew it would only be my first and that I wanted to do another in January. Along with going through another Whole30 I want to continue for all of 2013 eating and living the paleo way.
If you are sick of being sick, feeling crappy, bloated, not sleeping well, lacking energy, desperately fighting to lose those last stubborn pounds then join me!
If you aren’t 100% sure about this yet then check out these Personal Testimonials for nearly every life-changing result that has happened to someone or COULD happen to YOU.
On a side note I will be writing up some super fun, picture filled posts on my vacation to Florida earlier this week! Stay tuned.
- The Freckled Foodie
I’ll be whole30ing in January FO SHIZZLE!
We’re gonna do a Whole30 in the New Year as well. It’s more for my husband than for me. He had asked me to help him get his weight-loss situation back on track. So I was trying out different approaches with him, and I started out with what worked for me: making small changes on an incremental basis. Guess what? FAIL. It was like the small changes couldn’t find any purchase on the smooth, impermeable surface of his long-ingrained bad habits of unconscious behavior. So once again, my husband turns out to be completely different from me. I should have expected it, really. He and I are hilariously different, except in one area: we are both big over-thinkers. (But not about the same sorts of things, naturally. For example, he’d never spend hundreds of hours obsessively focusing on things like what squash is the best this season.)
So the upshot is, if small changes are a fail, next thing to try is huge changes. So, Whole30 it shall be. Starting right after the New Year. Since he’s nothing like me, sadly, there’s little or no chance he’ll read the book or even visit the doggone website. I figure I’ll just write the rules out on an index card and make him stick it in his wallet. Oooh, better yet, I can just text them to him.
I dunno. We’ve done so much yummy baking lately, and I know that such items are not truly Whole30-approved. So I suppose I might have to give it a rest for a month. OTOH my beloved banana-pudding breakfast is completely free of sweeteners and is completely Paleo… so there’s that.
SIGH. What I want for my sweetie is for him to be more in control of his food-life, since I believe that adults ought to be in charge of their own plates. But somehow the ship keeps steering the opposite way, over toward the archipelago of Mommy-Is-In-Charge-Of-Me. I can’t figure out if I need to combat this problem first, or if it is okay to just focus on results first and handle the weird life-organization issue later, or if in fact the life-organization issue is actually sabotaging the whole situation.
Why does every single post I write go into TL;DR territory? When a person has the mindset that someone else is in charge, then they can easily get into a place where it’s almost like a game to find ways to skirt the rules somehow. It’s a way of passively resisting someone else’s control - even when they actually chose to be controlled in this manner. I have a feeling that this is what is going on with my husband. He’s passively resisting the “outside” controls, pretty much as a matter of lifelong habit. That’s why I want to re-organize his thinking so that he is the captain of the ship. I’ve noticed that in the areas where he regards himself as being in charge, he does not skirt the rules even a tiny fraction of a hair.
So I guess I just answered my own question. Now the new question is: how do I set up the situation so that he has to be in charge of his own food, when I am the one who does all the shopping and all the cooking and all the meal-planning? Hmm.
Monday Morning, NO Weigh In
I don’t have the heart to try. Sharks are coming, there was flying, there was pie, let’s just stipulate for the record that the results would be unfavorable and move on from there. Tune in next week for your regularly-scheduled weigh-in.
As I already said, Thanksgiving was just too wonderful to even express. But I want to still fit into my jeans later this month so I need to get back on my grind a bit. Does this mean I will log back on to MyFitnessPal? [thinks about it] NOPE. I just can’t get too interested in logging. I think I just don’t want to anymore. I’m just gonna try to focus on staying Paleo and maybe eating more greens and less squash. I took sweatforit’s advice and got myself some tea with dandelion root in it to detox and de-puff myself a bit. It’s surprisingly tasty tea, actually. It’s Yogi Tea, DeTox flavor. “Supports Healthy Liver and Kidney Function,” it says here. Well, we’ll see.
My daughter took possession of my fave jeans from Chico’s. There’s something not quite right about a girl of her young age wearing anything from Chico’s, that bastion of suburban-mom-wear. But they look great on her and I know, of course, how comfortable they are. So the upshot is, I bought myself more jeans Saturday evening (amusing myself while my husband was at a HeroClix event) and I tried to pick them with an eye to things my daughter might like to steal from me. JCPenney’s had an excellent selection of petite jeans but pretty much all of them were rather low-cut for my taste. I bought some anyway. They are comfy but there is a loaf situation around my midsection that I am not totally okay with. Hopefully my daughter will take the bait; her tummy is nice and flat and she looks great in low-cut jeans.
I will just take a moment now to say, WOW, the insanity of sizing in women’s clothing is really annoying. I see why it drives some ladies into a frothing rage. I have jeans in my closet in size 2, but those were “short” rather than “petite.” In petites at JCP, I ranged from a 4 up to a 10. Over at Land’s End they were having a sale on shirts (OH YEAH) and I was a small in one style but an extra-small in a different style. How can I ever order from their damn catalog again, now I see that I have no real idea what my size is anymore? And don’t tell me to take my measurements, either. Obviously my measurements did not change appreciably in between trying on 2 different styles of shirt, now, did they? And yet… there it is. Anyway. I had no trouble finding some nice things to buy, so I feel happy and very thankful. But the sizing thing… annoying.
Coconut chocolate cookies, recipe from Practical Paleo. Came out quite delicious. My husband did that thing where he took a bite and closed his eyes as he chewed. Oh yeah.
Well hey there psychic twin!! This is exactly what I was planning on serving today myself!Yaaaay meatballs! Yaaaay psychic twin-ness!
If you have any spare, send them my way.. I have a feeling my chief taste tester may well have already ploughed through the leftovers!
I had a late client last night. When I got upstairs to go to bed, my husband was already sacked-out. He woke up barely enough to mumble a few words of love and then all he said was, “can i take those meatballs for my lunch? they were good.” And I said he could, and he fell back deeply asleep right away. So yeah. No leftovers here at all. Out of 2 lbs of meat, I literally only got to eat 2 meatballs. I’m guessing that this dish will definitely be making a return appearance quite soon.
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