Recipe tip

These cheese sticks are wonderful! I miss pub food type appetizers sometimes, and these really fit that bill. The womanchild says they're as good as the fried version. I used garlic salt in lieu of regular salt in the crumb mixture coating. It minimized the dusty aftertaste oat fiber cereals sometimes have. All ovens are different of course, but I found that the cheese was just too oozy if I let them cook the full ten minutes. Seven to eight minutes gave me that stretchy, cheesy center while still maintaining an attractive shape. Best of all, they only have three points!

(Just in case you're wondering, the picture is a cheat. Those didn't come from my kitchen, but they pretty much looked like that.)

recipe

Body and Spirit

In my life as a Christian, people outside of my religious paradigm have sometimes given me the most profound lessons and gifts about living the principles of my religious belief. I still smile with gratitude when I think of an online Wiccan friend who reminded me of the love and forgiveness God/dess has for me in a way that reached through one of my depressions when it seemed nothing else could. Last night, as I was reading, I got another one of those lessons from the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book, Living Buddha, Living Christ.

As other areas of my life seem exceptionally complicated now, I've been obsessed with an area in which I feel some control, my diet. Despite truly needing to lose weight, my thought processes have borne every hallmark of eating disorders, and I will not swap healthy changes in my body for unhealthy changes in my mind. It doesn't matter what you weigh if your mind has become a minefield in which you can find no peace. Most of my life has been lived more strongly in the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects rather than the physical, so putting so much emphasis on my body, my food and the changes in both has taken some focus away from the other areas. I have felt the effects of the lack of attention they have been given. So, when I read this meditation, I felt like I'd been given a map through the mines and reassured of my ability to safely dislodge and rid myself of them.

"Breathing in, I am aware of my heart.
Breathing out, I smile to my heart.
I vow to to eat, drink and work in ways
that preserve my health and well being."

That's really what it's all about. I started dieting to regain my health when my heart finally said it was working way too hard. It was only one way I was seeking to improve my life, but it just happens to be the one in which I'm finding greater success right now.

Later on in the book I found this, and well, it's going on my fridge.

"This food is the gift of the whole universe -- the earth, the sky and much hard work. May we live in a way that is worthy of this food. May we transform our unskillful states of mind, especially that of greed. May we eat only foods that nourish and prevent illness. May we accept this food for the realization of the way of understanding and love."

This next part tied it all together for me:

"We drink and eat all the time, but we usually ingest only our ideas, projects, worries and anxiety. We do not really eat our bread or drink our beverage. If we allow ourselves to touch our bread deeply, we become reborn, because our bread is life itself. Eating it deeply, we touch the sun, the clouds, the earth and everything in the cosmos. We touch life, and we touch the Kingdom of God."

He added, "When I asked Cardinal Jean Danielou if the Eucharist can be described in this way, he said yes."

Reading it again, I got those chills once more. I feel like I've been anchored again to the vital connection with the Holy Spirit that truly sustains me, in a way that has real, present and practical meaning in my everday life. The trinity of my body, mind and spirit have consciously returned to The Trinity.

I love the lessons that I have learned within the boundaries of Christianity, but when I receive something like this from someone outside of my own religion, I feel particularly blessed. I'm reminded that The Creator surpasses the limitations of human understanding and that Divine grace is for everyone.

This entry was originally posted at Sorting The Pieces.

spirituality, diet

Tracking

Keeping my motivation up through the long haul of this diet isn't always easy. Sometimes, it's just a pain in the ass to document everything that I eat and drink, but I know that Weight Watchers Flex Plan is the right way for me to do this. If I tried Core Plan, I wouldn't have to document what I eat or count points, but I'm afraid that I'd feel too restricted in what I was supposed to eat.

That's one of my pet peeves. I hate the idea of foods I should and shouldn't have, and realistically, I'm not going to go through life without eating chocolate, chips and dip, having a social margarita or vodka and tonic. That's just not going to happen, and in the past, when I've tried to follow diets like that, I just set myself up for failure. Learning what is a more appropriate portion size of the foods I want and will eat is much smarter. At times, it seems temporarily harder. There are times when you just don't want a little bit. You want a lot, and sometimes, it's easier to go without than push your willpower by stopping after one serving. In the long run, that becomes dangerous always/never thinking for me, and that is a guaranteed step to regaining my lost weight.

Because feedback is a great motivator for me, I decided to make sure that I gave it to myself. That's one of the reasons for so much positive body image reinforcement, and it's why I want to see my results someplace other than a mirror or a scale. When you track everything you eat, it becomes easier to track other aspects of the diet as well. That's why I created a spread sheet and graph, and why I decided to publish it through Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I know this is (more than) a bit obsessive, but it helps me. I'm a businesswoman. I respond to spreadsheets, and I've seen how simple charts help people understand things better. Public accountability also helps me, so that's why I published it.

The chart is strong visual reminder that my weight loss is not a straight line journey. Seeing the peaks and plateaus on that chart remind me that the weeks where I gain or where I just seem stuck do not have to be a permanent thing. On a week when I've gained or stood still, seeing my average weekly loss reminds me that I'm still making forward progress. Today, just because I was fooling around with numbers, I added the percentage of total body weight that I've lost, and I love seeing that. I've lost nearly a quarter of my beginning body weight!

Now, I don't think that anyone else would really be interested in my personal spreadsheet, but other people who are making a long term commitment like I am might find it a useful tool for themselves.

Not so tiny dancer

This is just so cool. One of my private icons has always been the dancing ballerina from Fantasia. I always loved the grace, beauty, humor, self acceptance and sexiness she presented. (Don't tell me that alligator was just hungry!) Now, here are the real live versions.

I always wanted to dance. A song will play, and I'll feel my body respond. My feet tap. My shoulders sway. I want to leap and shimmy, and somehow I never manage to dance like no one's watching, even when no one is watching. When I was a little girl dreaming of being ballerina, it was made clear that fat girls don't do ballet. In my deeply immature moments, I've blamed my overwhelming klutziness on never having had dance classes.

I can't think of an activity that grounds a person more in their body than dance, that makes a person feel comfortable moving -- even when the movements are challenging and painful, and fat people need this. Movement is too large a part of being healthy. Cultural attitudes towards fat encourage fat people to divorce the mental and the emotional from the physical. You damn near must to keep a sense of self worth if you listen or read the crap that's issued daily about fat and size from our well-intentioned but cruel friends and families to the conformity demanding media. But that separation between the mental and physical promotes disuse of the body.

The article states,"But something strange happens when the troupe takes the stage. Classical and modern dance often give the impression of human beings flying, freed of the earth. The usual female dancers are like nymphs, the men like Greek statues. They soar, spin, leap and reach for the sky. Because of the size of the dancers in Mr. Mas’s troupe, however, the work of Danza Voluminosa conveys something more earthy and human. Fat people move differently, he said, and the choreography must change. “We are more mountainous,” he said with a smile.

The dancers’ movements are often slower than those of their slender colleagues. These dancers favor limbs swinging in pendulous arcs and wavelike motions that seem to ripple through their bodies. They seem to grip the floor rather than abandon it, keeping a low center of gravity, often crouching or dancing while kneeling or lying on the ground.

And when their dance becomes frenetic, the sheer weight of the dancers thudding across the stage conveys an excitement akin to a stampede, something out of control and wild, yet made of human flesh and blood. It can be a riveting sight."

Fat people do move differently, and differently doesn't have to mean worse. My body can be one more tool I use in self-expression. I think in dance, one has to view their body as both a tool for creativity and a work of art. I think that's an attitude we all need.

dance, obesity

Taking steps

I did something tonight that I haven't done in years. Don't ask me why, but I remembered how when I was young, my mother would have my sister and I practice walking across a room with a book on our heads. It was one of those charm school things (Yes, we actually went to a charm school that taught etiquette, grooming, and deportment for young ladies. Have I mentioned that I had an extremely old fashioned upbringing?)

Both of my parents were rather short. My mother was 5' 3" before old age shrinkage set in, and my father was 5'9". By the end of their lives, I felt like I towered over both of them. Despite that my striking grandmother (she bore a resemblance to Wallis Simpson and had a similar elegance) who lived with us was nearly six feet tall, I somehow got stuck in the idea that pretty girls were petite, and my 5'8" just didn't cut the mustard. I had to learn how to walk tall and proud, and the head-book exercise worked. For a very brief time in my young life, I had wonderful posture.

Then the boobs came out, and self-consciousness took back over. I relearned the back slump, the forward curved shoulder, and the ducked head. No amount of posture training ever cured of me of klutziness, and as the knee and ankle injuries accumulated, my stride became a shuffle. During my pregnancy and at my peak weights, I confess it was a waddle. At worst, it was a limp. I'm still relearning to walk up and down stairs more than one step at a time.

So, tonight, when the disrupted body clock set in, keeping me alert and awake when I should be sleeping, I got out one of our taller and thinner art books, placed it on my head and decided to see how far I could go. (It's a good thing the womanchild was asleep. She would have howled with laughter.) It took five attempts to go more than two steps. On the tenth, I made it to six steps. On the fifteenth, I slowly traversed the dining room.

It felt good. Forgetting for a moment that I had a book on my head and was wearing an old nightgown and Birkenstocks, I felt elegant. I could feel in the line of my back a greater potential for strength and for the display of power. I felt dignified. This was a walk that would command attention when I entered a room. It could turn heads. I liked it. (Thanks, mom!)

Sitting here writing, I'm trying to keep up the good posture. Frankly, it hurts. Honestly, large breasted women ought to be provided counterweights to help keep their shoulders back.
The minor ache in my hips is making me wonder just how just how badly I've twisted my spine and what my stride has looked like in my mirror avoidance years.

I think it's worth practicing, no matter how silly the practice itself may look. Who knows what this could lead to? Being treated like a woman who deserves respect because I'm presenting myself like that's the only option? Feeling sexier? Who knows? Many times I've repeated to myself over the months that change occurs two ways, inside out and outside in. I've put a lot of thought into the mental and emotional aspects of being fat, so I could understand what I really needed to change on the insides and keep what what was worth keeping. I've spent a lot of time and energy on tangible changes in my food intake, and now it's time to make more changes in how I treat and use my body.

posture

My new theme song

The weekly weigh in, week 46

This was a week that I just had to white knuckle my way through each day's food choices, each look in the mirror, each shower, and each change of clothing. Since the womanchild has changed jobs, my going to Thursday night meetings has been difficult, so I've gone to the Saturday morning meeting for the last three weeks. Well, I weighed in the last two. I knew that I needed a meeting this week, so I stayed. I'm glad I did. The instructor was great. I just click better with some than with others, and it's nice to know when my favorites are leading the meetings.

When I got to my turn at the scales, instead of just hopping on as is my wont, I waited until all the paperwork had been done, and he stood there waiting, saying, "OK, we're ready now." My response was just that I'd had a rough week. He replied, "You may have had a rough week, but you lost three pounds."

Talk about being blown away. I really didn't expect that. I took a few minutes to think back over my week. I looked at my food journal, and with one day's exception, I had tracked everything. The bulk of what I say there was healthy food. Yeah, I blew a couple of things -- some second helpings I didn't need, one day where the one point chocolate oatmeal cookies played way too large a role, a pretzel binge, but even on a bad week, I'm still making healthier choices. That feels really, really good.

So I'm off to a good start today. I just got back from the grocery store, and I know that I've got some good food waiting for me over the next few days. There's this baked cheese stick recipe I'm dying to try out. Soon, I'll go fix my lunch, Greek pinwheels with feta and cream cheeses, olives, basil, sun dried tomatoes, and spinach in a tortilla. Easy and delicious.

I'm going to try very hard to ignore my belly and focus on how my waistline (above that bulge that's more annoying than it has been in a long time) is noticeably smaller, and how the legs on my jeans are definitely almost too large.

I needed some positive feedback this week, and I got it. Smile with me.

Weekly summary: Weekly change -- lost 3 pounds, Total loss -- 76.4 pounds, Average weekly loss -- 1.66 pounds

health and wellness, Weight Watchers, diets, weight loss

In the kitchen

I'm not a creative cook, and I really don't have any desire to become one. I like the predictability of following a recipe and getting the desired results. I'm the only non-picky eater in my family of three, and a great deal of experimenting on my behalf means a great deal of wasted food. Waste make me crazy, so my cooking tends to be predictable.

However, there are times when we ate a crucial ingredient for planned meal, or someone's tummy won't handle the spicy meal on the night's menu, and sometimes I get a wild hair. Tonight was one of those nights, and I'm really pleased with myself. I actually just looked at what I had in the fridge and pantry and came up with a palatable dish! For me, this is a real accomplishment.

I broiled two four ounce boneless, skinless chicken breasts that had marinated about 30 minutes in soy sauce, then roasted a yellow pepper. While they were cooking, I chopped a tomato. Earlier today, I had fixed a large bowl of brown rice. After they had cooled, I diced the chicken breasts, peeled and diced the pepper and added them to two cups of brown rice. I mixed four tablespoons of sunflower oil with with four tablespoons of rice vinegar, added a generous amount of McCormick's Spice Blends Key West style (lemon, basil and thyme) and whisked until emulsified. I immediately added the dressing, popped it in the microwave for a little over a minute, then added the tomatoes for a nice salad with a good juxtaposition of hot and cold. It made four (6 WW point servings) and fits into the Core plan.

The best part is -- I had fun.

recipe

Watch out, I'm gonna getcha!

The contagious obesity study is all over the web, and well, this response from Slate magazine is just lovely.

William Saletan wrote,"To resist a fattening norm, you need willpower. To reverse it, you need to promote responsibility, which implies blame. You almost certainly need stigma. And realistically, to add normal or underweight friends to your circle, you have to relegate others who are overweight. That may be bad for your fat ex-friends, who will lose your friendship as well as your thinness. But it's fine for you, since you'll have just as many friends as before."

As someone who respects concise writing, I think that Saletan could have made the same point this way, "Cooties!"

That's right, I and the other estimated 20 million obese Americans carry big fat cooties that are going to glomp immediately all over the body part you most fear will get larger. Watch out, I've trained my cooties to land directly on your stomach. We need to have this pointed out for our own good, since apparently we're irresponsible people who just don't care enough to make ourselves fit through the only acceptable physical mold for a responsible person.

After that, we all need to be quarantined, because we're dangerous, don't you know. (I've got some great Escape from New York imagery in my head, some relic of a city converted to a walled prison for fat people. Potholed streets crushed from our thunderous steps. Mass riots and mob scenes as our food allowance is air dropped in before our contagion makes the pilots too heavy to get their helicopters away from Fat City. Can I wear the Snake Plisskin eye patch or would that just not work with chubby cheeks?)

Don't you also love the underlying assumption in Saletan's article that a person can only have so many friends? Apparently, in order to acquire a skinny friend, you're going to have a dump a fat friend to make room for them. Did I miss the memo limiting how many friends I'm allowed to have? If I meet someone really funny with I click, am I going to have to dump a serious, intellectual friend?

What is that thing called when you advocate socially isolating, stigmatizing and judging people who are different from you? Can you say prejudice? I knew you could.

contagious obesity, fat prejudice, media

Fat friends?

When I saw the headline of this article, I had to check it out. A new study on obesity shows that if a friend or relative gets fat, it's more likely that you will as well. Well, how fun is that. To be fair, the article notes that the study shows that fat people tend to hang with fat people and thin people with thin people, and it also notes that this study could be used to further stigmatize fat people. The supposed causative factor is that socially acceptable norm for size changes when a member of your group gets fat.

The study shows that the closer the relationship, such as husband and wife or sisters, one is more likely to gain weigh when their friend or relation does. This does make some sense to me. It's just old folk wisdom that birds of a feather flock together. Married couples eat the same food and many would have the same effects from it. Sisters and brothers grew up eating the same food and will have some similarities in tastes and preferences. If their social lives interact regularly, they could easily be consuming similar amounts of foods and have a common genetic predisposition to gaining. That makes much more sense to me than thinking hey, my friend is still okay even though she's fat, so I'll get fat too!

What first got me interested in the article though was a conversation I had with my sister decades ago. For most of her life, she was overweight, though nowhere near my extreme. She's always been beautiful, charming and in her school days, that ultimate rarity for a big girl -- popular. Heck, she even dated the high school quarterback. I was the more typical fat girl, shy, smart, bookish. What was notable about the conversation we had so many years ago was one line. She said, "I don't have any fat friends." Now times and bodies have changed, and I know this is no longer true for her or her high school friends whom she regularly sees. I always wondered though if part of her social success came from distancing herself from other fat people and if she was in fact, the token acceptable fat girl.

I've always had friends that ran the gamut from skinny to average to fat. I hated being judged on my size, and it seemed hypocritical of me to do that to other people. In stopping to think about it, I've never known anybody who had a circle of friends who were all fat. I've seen weight used a way to reject people, but never as a condition for acceptance. Is size then really the feather that counts, or is it common interests and dislikes?

This article has me with more questions than answers, but I can't help think that even assuming there is high statistical accuracy their information gathering, their conclusions are seriously flawed.

obesity research, fat acceptance

Not staying stuck

The last three weeks have been the hardest I've faced since I started this diet. I've let emotional eating get out of control. Today was so bad I just quit tracking my points which I've done religiously since I started, even on the days where I blew it so badly that having a record of what I'd eaten was just embarrassing.

I've also been stuck in some serious body loathing. This has become less common for me, because I've seen some pretty big changes. Dropping five, nearly six clothing sizes, has just been fun. I've tracked the number of inches I've lost. Heck, I've even been so compulsive as to make a spreadsheet and graph my pounds and inches lost. So, the body loathing has dropped a lot as well. However, I'm in one of those phases where my skin is looser and the firmness that I felt in certain muscles a few weeks ago isn't quite as firm. This has happened before and it's been followed by a tightening as my body readjusts. However, at my age, my skin is not going to snap back the way it used to, and it is harder to build muscle. Images of my skin eventually looking like over stretched crepe paper are haunting me. On top of this my hidradenitis suppurativa has flared up with several lesions. This is the first time in almost two years I've had a serious episode. Being in pain, dealing with wound management and the subsequent additional hygiene challenges, and knowing that I'm adding to the map of scars on my body have just been the icing on this toxic cake.

However, despite all of that mess, I've been able to reach my sane place. I'm not going to stay stuck here. Several years ago, I wrote a body image affirmation to help me re-learn how to love myself. It's no masterpiece of writing, but it's been very helpful to me. I haven't looked at in a long time, so I pulled it out tonight and re-read it. Smartest thing I've done in some time.

I love my hair. It's thick, shiny and a lot of different shades of dark brown, and I love having it long again. I love my eyes because they communicate to the world, and it is a source of amusement when I see people trying not to notice when my wandering eye pops off to one side and back again. I love my smile because it can draw people into my world. I love that my shoulders are broad and strong enough to carry my burdens. I love my breasts because they fed my daughter and are a source of comfort. My daughter, my husband and even my pets all tend to rest on them when they are tired or discouraged. I love the curve of my belly and hips because they show so clearly that I am a woman. I love that my back, legs and feet are strong enough to get me where I want to go. I love my wrinkles because they show that I've grown and matured. I love my scars because they remind me that I can endure. I love my freckles just because they're cute. I love the sensuality of my body, the pleasure of feeling, tasting, hearing, smelling, seeing, how it can interpret and understand the world in a non-intellectual way, how it grounds me solidly. I love the sheer transcendent power of my body's sexual response. I love the interconnectedness of my body's systems, and how naturally they show me what true balance is. I love how emotions become real physical feelings. That's such a miracle to me. Oh, God, life is such a miracle, and I am so grateful.

Tonight, I want to add this. I deserve to love myself. I deserve to respect myself. I deserve to be honest about my feelings and share them with the people in my life. I deserve to be healthy and treat this body with love, care and tenderness. I deserve to give myself credit for my accomplishments and to believe in my ability to achieve more. I trust that I have both inner and outer beauty. I deserve the chances to pursue my dreams. I thank God/dess for loving me when I've forgotten how to love myself.

body image,diets, affirmations

The Big Conflict

Yesterday I was asked what my goal weight is for my diet, and I honestly answered, "I don't know." I know my recommended target range is 132 - 164 pounds. Those numbers mean several things to me. The first is that to be at the top of my healthy weight range by the shaky standard of Body Mass Index, I'll need to lose almost 100 more pounds. The second is that I haven't weighed in that range since I was about 15 years old, and that thought is immediately followed by the standard advice that weighing what you did in high school when you're a middle aged woman isn't a realistic goal.

I didn't start this diet to get skinny. I'm not built to be skinny. No matter what I've weighed at any point in my lifetime, I've had full breasts, hips and a protuding belly. Regardless of what our culture wants women to look like, we come in all different shapes and sizes, and they can all be healthy and beautiful. I want to be healthy and live my life with joy, peace, productivity and pleasure. That is my real goal.

The conflict comes in with identifying those benchmarks. There is only so much that changing the size of my body will accomplish towards achieving those goals. Joy and peace will hinge much more on spiritual, emotional, and intellectual growth than losing pounds. Accepting and loving the body that I have must be a part of that. I know what joy, peace, productivity and pleasure all feel like. I can identify those easily.

So, where is the conflict? It doesn't seem like anybody can truly define what healthy is. Is it like art, where you know it when you see it? There are certain quantifiable standards, of course. Blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood chemistry values, urine content and more can all be measured, but I'm not going to spend my days waiting to hear lab results. So, how do we decide what's healthy?

Size alone won't tell. When I was in my twenties, I was considered obese, yet I felt great. I had endless energy, the kind of skin I envy now, shiny hair, strong nails, and muscles one could see, yet I was uninsurable because of my weight, deemed unhealthy by doctors and full of self loathing because I was fat. I was physically healthy, but not recognized as such. Mentally, I was a wreck, and people told me that I had the right attitude about my weight and size, because I hated myself for being fat. Self-hatred is apparently deemed a good motivation tool.

I know better than that by now, but I'm still conflicted. Health is something too transitory and too individual to set as a goal or standard. What the "experts" in the field of obesity say is a healthy weight, they also tell me is an unrealistic standard. I'm going to have to go by how I feel, and unless I'm truly worthy of my own trust, that can be scary. With a lifetime of stupid, messed up thinking about fat behind me, finding the good attitudes about size, fat, beauty, and food is new and tricky territory.

I'm having to combine parts of the fat acceptance movement, the diet industry, the experiences of having eating disorders in my family, the medical industry, decent counseling, and feminism to forge this path. It's too easy to say that an individual standard of what is healthy though is what people need. My daughter just knew that 77 pounds would be the perfect weight for her despite all the other evidence of her health going to pot. Everyone was telling her how wonderful she looked when our family and her team of doctors and nutritionists were fighting just to keep her alive.

When the public voices that say what is healthy for are driven more by profit than fact and what they say is contradictory, there's really no wonder why I and so many others feel conflicted and confused.

diets, weight goals, fat acceptance, health and wellness

The weekly weigh in, weeks 44 and 45

A cranky router has kept me offline for a couple of weeks, and that kept me from posting my weigh in from last week. In all honesty, technical difficulties gave me a good excuse for hiding. Last week, I gained 3.8 pounds that I fully deserved. The previous week I had lost huge. A six pound loss in one week is three times the maximum recommended weekly weight loss. I knew that I hadn't been that disciplined with either food or exercise, and I expected to follow that big loss with a small gain. My emotional eating binge turned that into a significant gain.

I learned an important lesson though. Despite how natural the Weight Watcher's way of eating feels at times, it's very, very easy to slip into the habits I acquired over my lifetime. I may have been dieting for 10 months, and healthy, nutritious may seem like the natural thing to do, but 46 years of yo-yo dieting and poor eating habits haven't disappeared yet. They may never disappear, and I am never going to be able to take eating for granted. That's the scariest part about trying to do this monumental thing, the Nevers and the Always that seem to hovering out there. Yet I know that very few things meet a never or always standard. This is a good reminder that I might ought to drop in on a few Overeaters Anonymous meetings. The reminder that life is lived by the moment, and food is eaten or not eaten by the moment, is something I could use right now. One day, one meal, one snack, one choice at a time. I invite someone to plant that deep in my mind until it really takes root.

So, that was last week. I fell below my 75 pound goal and am now scrabbling back towards it. Re-establishing the habit of good eating was hard this week, and I didn't stay within my daily or weekly points guidelines. I didn't exceed them by much either, and I did lose .6 pounds. It's a loss, I'll take it.

I hosted a tea today for my unofficial daughter who's getting married in a couple of weeks. I ate chocolate cake and a butter cream dipping sauce for the fruit tray. It was a party, and I enjoyed it. This was a good balance for me. I tracked my points. I knew what was indulgence and what was just good basics. I'm losing weight to be healthier and better able to enjoy life. So if I can't enjoy life on the journey to good health, something is seriously wrong. So, the last couple of weeks haven't been outstanding as far as diet results go, but they've been significant.

Weekly summary: Week 44 -- gained 3.8 pounds, Week 45 -- lost .6 pounds, Average weekly loss -- 1.67 pounds, Total weight loss -- 73.4 pounds.

health and wellness, weight loss, diets, Weight Watchers

The weekly weigh in, week 43

I've tried posting this entry at least four times, but Blogger seems to have a gremlin that doesn't want to me to save, proof-read and edit my entries. So if this is a misspelled mess, I beg your forgiveness.

This last Thursday at my weekly WW meeting, I overshot my last Big Goal. I lost six pounds last week. I don't know why the loss was so big. I didn't do anything differently, but that's the way it goes sometimes. If I'm not going to let myself get upset over a little gain or just a tiny loss, then I can't celebrate over a big loss. However reaching my goal line is cause for celebration. Those six pounds brought my weight loss to 76.6 pounds! Oh, when I got up to receive my reward (a refrigerator magnet that says 'I Lost 75 pounds) my group started singing, "I'm too sexy..." and I danced my way to the front of the group.

This means that my next Big Goal is 100 pounds, and honestly, that doesn't seem completely possible yet. That would be like losing a whole person. So until it does seem possible, realistic and indeed probable, I'm going to focus once again on the daily goals of staying within my points allowance (which has now dropped another point), eating all my fruits and veggies, drinking my water, getting in my oil (which is the hardest part of the diet program for me), and exercising.

My other goal is getting a grip on emotional eating, specifically eating to ameliorate stress and anger. The other day, I ate a bag of rice cake snacks, simply because I was so mad I wanted to get really nasty with someone who, well, did deserve it, but doing so would have only made the situation worse. The anger had to go somewhere though, and I literally swallowed it. I still felt like garbage, and I wasted my bonus points on...rice cakes. C'mon, that could have been cheesecake or a steak, and instead, I ate rice cakes because I didn't know what to do with my anger. I could have lived well if I hadn't tried to run away from myself.

I've said many times, this diet is about getting healthy, and well, it looks like I'm going to have to find a healthy way to deal with my emotions as well as my food. Well, damn, my inner brat does not like that idea too much at all. I'm 47 years old, and it looks as if I'm to be healthy, I'm actually going to have to grow up. Double damn. There goes another illusion of youth, but the reality of a healthy life is better than the appeal of pouting and eating my way through pretending I'm actually a calm and nice person.

So, I've weighed in. I feel great. I know what my next Big Goal is, even if it feels tenuous now. I've got good habits in place, and I know some of the challenges I'm facing. I'd say this is a good launching pad for my way to 100 pounds.

Happy Snacking

There are some days I just have to respect the urge to snack. This is a little tricky for me though, because my natural eating style is grazing, instead of sitting down for meals. A few bites here and a few bites there all day long can add up to a whole lot of food, but it never feels like a lot because there's not much consumed at any one time. I felt like I still need a real meal because grazing never made me feel full, and I forgot what I've already consumed. It wasn't until I started journaling my food and points intake that I realized how much I was really eating.

So I shifted my grazing habits to three meals and three snacks a day. The snacking respected my desire for regular nibbling, and the meals provided a sense of fullness. Keeping the snacks healthy though has still presented a challenge. I like my chips, and I will not give up my chocolate, and I want them in a quantity that fills my eye appetite for sufficient volume.

So, I mixed up a couple of my favorite treats today. The first was Roasted Red Pepper Hummus. It's a far healthier alternative to bean dip but satisfies that craving. I serve it with All-Bran Garlic and Herb flavored crackers (18 crackers are only 2 points) for that chip craving, but it's also great with veggies. It's also easy to make. Half your red bell pepper and roast it under the broiler. Let it cool in a brown paper bag and then remove the skin. Put a 16 oz. can of garbanzo beans in your blender. Add a clove of minced garlic, a teaspoon of cumin, a dash of salt and three tablespoons of lemon juice. Blend until smooth in texture, adding a bit of reserved fluid from the can of beans to help reach the texture you prefer. Then add the red pepper and blend until everything is consistently mixed. Let this sit for at least a half hour for the flavors to marry well. A quarter cup of this hummus is only one point and with the crackers (2 points) is incredibly filling. The recipe makes a little more then two cups and refrigerates well for several days.

This is a common but great cookie recipe. With the oatmeal, it provides a nice amount of fiber, and even with real butter and sugar, one cookie is only one point while tasting very rich. Stir together a half cup of milk, 2 cups of sugar, 3 tablespoons of cocoa, 3 tablespoons of peanut butter and half a cup of butter over medium heat. Continue stirring until the mixture is well blended and has reached a boil. Let it boil for a minute and thirty seconds without additional stirring. I highly recommend using a coated pan to reduce sticking. Remove from heat and add 3 cups of oats and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, stirring until well mixed. Drop a rounded teaspoon on wax paper for each cookie, and let cool. This makes about five dozen rich, chocolaty, guilt free cookies. (I got this recipe from a Weight Watchers instructor who had lost 110 pounds about five years ago and has successfully kept it off. She called them her magic cookies because every week she made and ate these, she lost weight.)

snacking, recipes, Weight+Watchers, Weight Watchers points