Saturday’s kinda late check-in

I started a journey toward a healthier, happier, thinner, more balanced me exactly two weeks ago.  This is supposed to be yesterday’s post, but…. alas time slipped away from me.  I’m a bad blogger!!  But I digress.

I wanted Saturdays to be a day of checking in and updating, mostly for my own sake, so I can look back and see my progress week after week, but I’m up to almost 20 followers in two weeks so I guess those of you following get an update as well!

I started at 275 pounds.  That’s a lot.  It’s too much.  So, being thoroughly upset with myself for letting myself get there, I made some dramatic changes.  I haven’t eaten out in two weeks.  I haven’t drank anything but water, milk, or a smoothie in two weeks.  I’ve cooked, mixed, or made all my food (well except for things like yogurt and whatever..)

And I go to the grocery store legit every other day at least haha.  It’s kind of insane.  I’ll work on the “planning ahead” aspect of this later, for right now, I’m just thrilled that I’m learning how to cook for myself.  And things that are not just nutritious but also delicious!

As of yesterday morning, I checked in at 266.8 pounds.  In two weeks, I’d say that’s a pretty good drop!  So as planned, here’s my Check in, including my favourite smoothie, my favourite recipe, and my favourite moment.

Favourite Smoothie

This is reigning in at a solid peanut butter banana.  I am out of cherries, so last week’s favourite with the almond butter and the cherries has fallen to the wayside until I run out of some more fruit and then clearly will just buy more cherries and less of the other things.  Live and learn… but I don’t want to buy more cherries and leave the other fruits just sitting in the freezer.

SO

1 C Almond Milk
1 TBSP Peanut Butter (I use the one with honey in it cuz yum)
1 TBSP Ground Flax Seed
1 C frozen baby spinach
1 frozen banana, sliced
1 TBSP cocoa powder

Throw it all in the blender, liquify, and enjoy.

My favourite recipe…

This is a hard one, and you’ll understand why when you get to my favourite moment….

I have three awesome things to share with you that I found around the internet this week!  Turns out, all that time I’ve spent learning the ins and outs of Pinterest has not been in vain!  Pinterest is my new best friend.  Follow me on Pinterest if you’d like some Pinspiration 😉

1.  Cauliflower Pizza Crust

I had a friend over on Tuesday and was determined to make this for us.  I had to use a few different pins (other people’s blogs) in order to get this to turn out, and I made slight variations in each, but here’s what I did.

I took a head of cauliflower, riced it in my food processor (which is small and will only do 1 cup at a time so it took FOREVER…. half an hour), then I wasn’t ready to make this til the next day so I dumped the riced Cauliflower into a large ziploc bag, pressed out all the air, and tossed it in the fridge.  Your whole fridge will smell like cauliflower until you cook it.  You’ve been warned.

The next day I dumped all the riced cauliflower into a glass baking dish, and put it in the microwave on high for 7 minutes.

In the meantime, I had grated about half a brick of marble cheddar cheese, chopped a red pepper and some broccoli, and lined my cookie sheet with parchment paper — because who likes washing cookie sheets??

I used this recipe.… but had to make a few substitutions.  Not thinking on Monday, after I’d riced my cauliflower, I hard boiled all my eggs to take to work for lunches…. So my crust had no egg whites and I threw in an extra 1/4 cup of marble cheddar cheese to hold it together.  Whether that worked or not is debatable… it was pretty crumbly, I’ll have to try again.  But it was delicious.  I also could have waited longer for the crust to cook… it didn’t really go golden brown.  But I was hungry.

I used basil and italian seasoning instead of oregano and garlic because I didn’t have either and don’t really like garlic.

It turned out delicious!  Hard to serve, but, delicious!  I’ll try again another time with the egg whites and see what kind of difference that makes…. PLUS did you know you can make pizza crusts out of spinach, and carrots too?  I kid you not.  Thanks Pinterest!

Tip:  When rolling your crust out, I put parchment paper on top of the cauliflower cheese mixture as well, cuz then I don’t have to wash my rolling pin.  I’m all about NOT washing dishes!

Toppings:  Broccoli, Red Pepper, Bacon Bits, Classico Four Cheese sauce, marble cheese

I found… you can tell it’s cauliflower… but it’s still absolutely delicious.

Next up in my 3 part series on favourite recipes is Parmesan Crusted Chicken with Bacon.

Whoa.

Amazing.

Here’s the recipe.

My variations:  I had pretty much a whole brick of marble cheddar cheese at home already (it’s my favourite, I’m pretty picky about cheese).  I didn’t want to have to buy Asiago AND Parmesan because I had neither, so for the coating I used a Parmesan-Romano-Asiago blend, already shredded, and for the topping I used marble cheddar.  I used sunflower oil because that is what I have.  The recipe wasn’t specific, but just so you know what I did…   And lastly, I used bacon bits instead of real bacon because I thought I had bacon in the fridge, but it turned out it’d expired January 1st and it was nasty… sooo…. bacon bits.

This was my first EVER attempt at frying anything in oil on the stove.  I’ve always been too afraid to burn the house down.  And was it ever a smoky endeavour.  I placed the first chicken breast in the oil and the smoke went everywhere.  I took it out and yanked my smoke detector off the wall, pulling the battery out, and opened some windows (at -15 degrees Celsius…) … but it wasn’t enough.  I dunked my next piece of chicken in the oil and it got so smoky that my alarm I can’t shut off, the one connected to my security system, it started going off too.

And it’s LOUD.

So ADT called to make sure my house wasn’t on fire and to walk my panicked self through how to disarm the system.

If you’ve done this frying in oil thing before — did I do something wrong?  Can the oil be too hot?  I don’t have a range hood so I’m sure that would have helped.  I didn’t burn anything though, and it was delicious!

I served it with steamed spicy green beans.  PS Whoever first thought “I should put this metal rack on my cookie sheet so I don’t lose my crispiness of my chicken on the bottom”?  Genius.  I will never skip the rack again.

Third and finally on the recipe list…. Roasted Spiced Sweet Potatoes.

Oh my goodness.

I don’t even have words.

Here’s the recipe.  I did exactly what it said.  Except if it called for a specific kind oil, I used sunflower.

Unbelievable.

I forgot to take pictures, sorry…. but they look every bit as delightful as the picture on the blog I linked to shows that they do.  They’re so good… I just can’t even… I miss them already.

Anyway I’ve gotten rambly here… One last thought — I’ve gotten kind of tired of smoothies after having one every morning for breakfast for two weeks straight.  I decided to switch it up and made crustless quiche cups.  A few of these will be great breakfast, too!  I followed the recipe but added some spinach and green pepper chopped in the food processor, and put basil in instead of salt and pepper.  I also added bacon bits… which was probably overkill with all the ham (I used honey maple smoked ham slices), but oh well, overkill or not they’re awesome.  I’m excited for breakfast!

Lastly, my favourite moment this week was when I realized that no matter how hungry I am, I’d rather eat at home than run through a drive thru because I can cook better than any fast food place going.  I feel like this is a monumental step for me… I was half way through making the sweet potatoes last night when I realized I didn’t have ginger or nutmeg (thankfully the grocery store is 1:45 away), and it was already 7 o’clock and I was hungry, but I wasn’t the least bit tempted to run through the Wendy’s in the same parking lot, because I knew that my leftover parmesan crusted chicken with bacon, paired with steamed green beans and roasted spiced sweet potatoes were going to be way better than anything Wendy’s could possibly offer, so I waited patiently for dinner until 8 pm and it was a great decision.

Over and over and over again…

I’ve been slacking.  I know, we’re only half way through the month and I missed three days of NaBloPoMo this month already!  If you have come across my other blog at all (thisblogisepic) you’ll know that this is actually somewhat of a habit of mine haha.

Anyway — Today’s post and yesterday’s post ideas are similar over at BlogHer — if you had to watch the same movie or read the same book over and over again, what would they be?

If I had to read the same book year after year, I think it’d probably be Beautiful Outlaw by John Eldredge.  It’s about the scandalous freedom offered through Christ and it just gave me a whole new appreciation for everything that Jesus was here on Earth to accomplish — and it confirmed every niggling feeling that we were designed for more than just ‘doing church.’

If I had to watch the same movie month after month?  That one’s harder.  There’s a big difference between a month and a year.  Year after year I DO watch Twister already.  It’s one of my all time favourite movies.  I love cheesy disaster movies.  Month after month though?  I don’t know.  I really enjoy anything from the Pirates of the Caribbean series.  Maybe I could watch those month after month?  The fourth one wasn’t quite as good though… no Orlando Bloom or Keira Knightley made it kinda lame.  Although… when I searched IMDB for the links for those to embed into my post, I see there’s a 5th movie slated to come out in 2017??  Could it be??  Pirates of the Caribbean — Dead Men Tell No Tales.  Epic.

Anyway — I digress.  Now I want to wear my pirate boots but I left them at school….

Stay tuned tomorrow for a check in and two fantastic recipes!

Laura

Creatures of Habit

Do you tend to order the same thing at restaurants or do you jump around the menu?

 

For a really long time, I would only ever order chicken fingers and fries off of pretty much any menu.

I was the kid who was completely content to take a PB&J sandwich every day to school even all through high school.  For real.

Then, I discovered poutine!  I thought I hated gravy (I’m pretty picky — I think picky people tend to be fine with eating the same thing all the time… I’ve spoken to many who’ve confirmed my hunch).  So my usual became chicken fingers and poutine.  I know, awesome right?

I discovered chicken parmesan some time later, and that became the usual.

Long story short, before I bore you with my flits from one thing to the next, in the last couple of years I have learned to branch out my palate and have found many new things that I’ve learned to really enjoy.  I currently don’t even eat bread, so I guess I can’t revert to my PB&J days, but I do miss poutine….

Checking In

So some results for ya here, those of you who’ve followed me (welcome, all 15 of you this week!)

I’m down 5 pounds, up a whole bunch of will power, and am confident that in one foot in front of the other goals, I can do this.  I refuse to think of this as “well I’m bummed because I still have 120 to go.”  I do still have that much to go, but with God’s strength I can keep the long term effects of gaining will power and just being healthy in mind as well.

I did finally receive my Amazon shipment of the Made To Crave Devotional in the mail this week, and I’ve started it.  It’s 60 days to learning to rely fully on God for fulfillment and not on food.  Today’s entry was particularly significant — perhaps I was meant to get the shipment two days late so that Day 3 would end up being check in day (that’s what I’ve decided Saturday shall be).  The whole day today was about Lysa’s (the author) check ins and how if she hadn’t lost as much as she’d hoped she’d get very discouraged — but to take heart because “We must obey God and not human beings” (Acts 5:29) and so if I haven’t overeaten, avoided exercise, eaten in secret out of anger or frustration, run to food instead of God, and if before I got on the scale I felt that I’d had a pretty successful day/week, then the scale does not define me.  If I’ve been obedient, then there’s some other reason that the scale is not as delighting as I’d like (not that 5 pounds isn’t awesome… it’s the first week though I reasonably do not expect this to last).  All kinds of reasons can make the scale an inaccurate reading of success — muscle built, salt intake causing us to retain water, PMS… to name just a few.  I will measure my success by the promises I’ve made with God, and not by the number on a scale or on the tag in the back of my pants.

 

Favourites from this week:

 

Smoothie ~ Choco-Cherry Almond

1 cup Silk Coconut Milk
1 cup frozen Spinach
1 cup frozen Black Sweet Cherries
1 Tbsp. Ground Flax Seed
1 Tbsp. Natural Almond Butter
1 Tbsp. Cocoa Powder

Amazing.

 

Recipe ~ Peanut Chicken Stir Fry

Forgive me… I’m not a food blogger… my pictures of food I make tend to be lame… like… the leftovers still sitting in the frying pan because oh my stars, I can cook.  I figured that out just today actually, because this ^^…. this was amazing.  I can keep doing this if I get to eat like that.

I found the recipe here… http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/contest-winning-peanut-chicken-stir-fry

Well, I found it on Pinterest, but the full instructions are there.  I made a few substitutions.

– My brown sugar was rock solid so I used yellow sugar instead, same amount.
– I think I had a bit more peanut butter because, well, peanut butter is hard to measure exactly and I love it so I didn’t fuss too much.
– I cut my carrots into ripple cut medallions instead of shredding them because, well, it’s more fun that way.
– I used 1/4 tsp. of garlic powder instead of 2 cloves of garlic minced, because I don’t really like garlic.

It was amazing…. I don’t know if I’ve said “it was amazing” about too many things that I’ve cooked.  My pulled pork I think might be the only thing… another Pinterest find 😉

 

Idea ~ turn my fat clothes into maternity clothes

My hope is that at some point in my life I’ll get pregnant and have a baby.  It occurred to me this week that some of my tunics that I love to wear so much with leggings would be perfect maternity shirts on a girl half my size…. so instead of getting rid of those shirts I love I’m going to put them in a bin in the basement as I shrink out of them and label the bin “for pregnancy only.”

I am, however, going to donate non-tunic-shirts and all pants to a shelter somewhere or something though, because the pants won’t work as well due to the whole smaller hips thing, and so keeping them would just feel like permission to gain the weight back again… and I don’t plan on ever gaining it back for any reason other than pregnancy… so…. there ya have it.

 

There’s your Saturday update!  Thanks for following along on week 1 of a whole new me 🙂

Laura

Balancing Out

BlogHer wants to know in today’s NaBloPoMo prompt whether we think we have more good or bad habits.

If you read my post yesterday about saving money (which I actually succeeded at this year!), you’ll know that I could only come up with two good habits….

I mean, I guess if you count like regular bathing and dental hygiene I can come up with a few more… and I wash dishes before they pile up… and I ALWAYS rinse the dishes even if I know I’m not going to wash them that day.  I hate dealing with crusted on, dead food.

But ultimately, perhaps I’m being too hard on myself — but I think I have more bad habits than good… I mean, I’m a terrible procrastinator, I spend too much time watching TV and on Facebook, I don’t read enough, I overeat and I hate exercising, I pick scabs…. (over share?) Anyway.  But.  Maybe I’m balanced?

In the end, who knows.  We do what we can with what he have, always trying to be better versions of ourselves, and I think it serves no one for me to stress over whether I have MORE good habits or MORE bad habits, but rather to work one at a time by the grace and strength of God on improving all of my habits, whether they’re good or not.

What do you think?  Or are you with me and you’re pretty sure this is just too difficult to quantify?

good habits are hard to come by

BlogHer asked yesterday about the good habits we have that were hard to start, but that we’re glad we stuck with.  I apparently skipped that day, and I wrote about today’s topic instead… so if you’re looking for a chat about a habit I wish I had, check out my discussion here on being an insane night owl who gets not nearly enough sleep…

Good habits though… I can think of one.  Honestly?  I don’t know if I have many habits I’d consider to be really good ones.  I call my grandmothers fairly often and they really like that….

Anyway.

Last year around the end of December, that 52-week money saving challenge started going around.  I decided I was going to give it a try, and if I was successful, at the end of the year I’d have enough money to buy myself both a new violin and an iPad.  I’ve wanted an iPad I think since iPads were invented, but I can’t justify the purchase because I truly don’t need one and I’d likely not even use it that often, I just really want everything Apple makes.  It’s a consumerist disease and I don’t know what the cure is… but I digress.  I actually bought an iPad once and was so wracked with guilt within three days that I wiped it clean and returned it.  I couldn’t even look at the thing.  That was 18 months ago, and I’m back to wanting one…. but I still don’t need one…. Moving on.

I started with 1 dollar and added another dollar per week with each passing week of the calendar year.  I entered the amount for each week into my iCal on my MacBook (see?  Apple disease…) so I would get reminder alerts on my iPhone (….) and would therefore remember to put the money into my Savings Account.

I was doing very well, watching the money add up, and in fact I completed the challenge.  I even put an additional 50 dollars per month into my savings account just for kicks, because I felt that especially at the beginning of the challenge, 1 and 2 dollars into my account weren’t enough.  Then in June, I lost my cell phone.  I lost my iPhone.  I was devastated.  Not just because I lost one of my precious Apple products, but also because of the dramatic amount of money it was going to cost me to replace it.  I was only 18 months into a 3-year contract, so I had to buy that out.  In all, I ended up spending almost 650 dollars on the entire process, and do you want to know how much I’d managed to save up to that point?  647.00.  I transferred the entire balance of my savings account onto my VISA to pay off the foolish mistake of leaving my phone on a school bus after a field trip with my grade 1 and 2 kiddos.  It felt like it was all for nothing, though I know that it wasn’t, because otherwise it would have meant my VISA bill was up by 650 dollars when I had no means to bring it back down.

This brings me to the habit part.  I really grew to like the feeling of saving money, and throughout the course of this year, God has been working on my heart in a way I’m not entirely comfortable… I’ve taken a hard look at my life, understanding that I make a very generous amount of money as a Canadian teacher, and that I could bless many, many people with that very generous amount if I didn’t have so much debt.  Between my mortgage and my line of credit, I sit at a not uncommon but not healthy either 200,000 dollars (give or take a few thousand) that I owe in various places.  I understand that most of it is mortgage, and some of it is school debt still unpaid, but some of it is also because I’ve been living the “Canadian” dream, without the means to do so.  And in a consumer culture I know that’s pretty standard.  But I look at the world around me, not just in other countries but literally the space around me, and I see people who need.  Not just people who want.  I want.  I need NOTHING.

It really makes me grateful for those habits of saving that I learned last year, because now I’ve headed into 2015 with those habits and skills in place, ready to pile money onto my debts so that I have more to give away, because I can’t stomach the idea that I literally belong to the 1% over here, and I’m not doing enough about it while people in my city go without basic needs.  That’s not ok.

 

The habit I wish I had

Today… I’m a little tired of talking about my weight.

I’ll talk instead about a different habit I wish I had.

Because I’m just a little tired, haha… see what I did there?

I don’t sleep nearly enough.  I tell myself almost every morning as I drag my exhausted butt out of bed that it’s about time I went to bed earlier than 1 am or later.  It’s about time I pack my lunch the night before so I’m ready to walk out the door in the morning once I’m clothed, and it’s about time I get up early enough that I can start my day spending time with God instead of rushing around and freaking out because I’m going to be late.  Also, as a fringe benefit, I hear sleeping more helps you lose more weight and faster, so I do need to get on that….

I have to say that these two things are areas I find even harder to change than my eating habits.  I much prefer staying awake late and sleeping late.  Even more than that, I prefer doing things at night.  I am far more productive at night and I get much more accomplished….

But alas, I have to work too early for this to really be a good life choice.

 

 

 

edit:  I just realized that I wrote Thursday’s post on Wednesday…. so stay tuned for Wednesday’s post on Thursday I guess!  I like this post and I’m not scrapping it 😉

That time I tried to break a habit…

Today’s (well, yesterday’s, it’s midnight…) NaBloPoMo post on BlogHer asks if you’ve ever tried to break a habit and failed…. Well…. here’s the thing.

 

I’ve tried several times to break the habit of dramatic overeating, and I’ve never succeeded because I’ve never really gotten to the heart of the issue.

The heart of the issue has always been that I’ve been eating to deal with emotions.  It’s not really a lack of will power, although lately I learned to love myself and let myself be fooled into thinking that meant I didn’t have to care about what I put into my body (quite the opposite, in fact, I’d argue — loving yourself should mean taking good care of yourself).  But I’ve realized lately that to really and truly love myself, I need to be able to do the things my body wants to do and right now I can’t… not all of them… because I stuff my emotions and deal with every occasion (good and bad!) with food.

I have tried to break that habit many times.  But that’s been the problem.  I have tried to break the habit.  This is an area I have never really completely surrendered to God, mostly I think because I’m kind of afraid of what I have to give up.  Because to give this to God means that it’s more than just using my self control and restricting all the bad things, or even most of them, but that it’s ok if I eat a few chocolates every once in a while…. it means I have to really examine the reasons WHY I want to eat the few chocolates.  And I have to do that for the rest of my life, even if I am successful in losing the weight I’d like to lose so that I can go shopping in my own closet.

When I surrender this to God, as I am doing, it makes me reflect on days like today, where the end of my day with my Grade 1s was incredibly stressful — trying to bundle 18 kids for -18C windchills is not my favourite thing — and so I came home and ate a few of the chocolates from the box I impulsively bought yesterday.  It makes me have to think — did I want those chocolates just because one tasted good?  Or did I want them because some little voice inside me believes that if I eat the entire box I’ll feel better?  Because… that voice is a very real thing for me, and changing only my eating habits isn’t going to fix that.

This time, this isn’t just my fight.  This is a fight that I need my God for, and on days like today when I wanted to eat the entire box of chocolates because I had a stressful end to my day, I instead need to fall to my knees and beg for the strength to not have any, and ask God for the comfort I need from Him — because you and I both know I won’t find anything but regret in the bottom of a demolished box of chocolates.

 

My Worst Habit

I don’t know what I’d classify my worst habit … I have a few bad ones.

Overeating, buying clothes I shouldn’t (then occasionally returning them out of guilt), staying up way too late (shhhh it’s not 12:15 am on a school night!)… the list goes on.

But if you’ve read any other posts on this brand new blog yet, you’ll know that the habit I’m trying to break currently… the one that I think, if redirected, will have the biggest impact on my life… is my eating habits.

So far I’ve started drinking way more water and I’ve started smoothies for breakfasts.  I had an amazing salad for dinner when all I wanted was a cheeseburger — then proceeded to drink another 650 mL of water.  I made it to 1650 mL today…. and when I was barely clearing 500 before Christmas break I’d say that’s a good step toward change.

Spinach, hard boiled egg, roasted chicken, crispy noodles, almonds, bacon bits, Marzetti Pomegranate dressing (the best ever!)

 

But I did something not so great today, too.

I had to go to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up a parcel that had arrived there at the post office outlet, and on my way out happened to walk through the clearance Christmas candy section….

I bought a box of truffle chocolates.

I immediately regretted the purchase, and then started thinking about what I can do with the box of chocolates so they don’t control me.

And I made a decision.

I’m not going to let them control me.  I ate 4, closed the box, and put them up on top of my hutch so they’re out of sight, out of mind.  As corny as I think this sounds, I gave the box of chocolate to God and asked for the strength not to over indulge.

I consider it a huge victory that I didn’t eat the entire box of them, or even one of the trays inside.  It would be great to find that I have the willpower to have chocolate in the house and not devour it.  We’ll see I guess.

As for why I bought the box in the first place?  Old habits will have to die hard, I suppose… but at least it was half price!

 

 

Check out BlogHer for all kinds of neat blogging resources, as well as other NaBloPoMo participant blogs!

Habits: Water Instead of Snacking

So I want to snack.

I don’t even know what I want to snack on, and usually when that happens I eat a smattering of many, many things until I figure out what it is that I wanted to snack on in the first place.

I’m trying to replace that habit.

With a bottle of water sitting right beside me.

And every time I think about snacking, I’m going to drink some water.

And then probably pee a lot.  But that’s a good thing, right?

Water water water water.

 

It’d be better if I were drinking water sitting on a beach though… am I right?

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