...in Hell. Negative 9 this morning again, traffic slower than going backwards, the sun up in a sky so clear it made your eyes water, and Denver still hadn't plowed a big chunk of the roads to my office. I'm walking over the compacted snow that the businesses haven't even tried to scrape off their sidewalks, despite city ordinances, wondering how on earth early man survived weather like this. We have no fur, and our feet are tender - it makes no sense that we were supposed to live in this climate.
I am in a bad mood. Weight up - no surprise, really; we went for Mexican last night, including chips, and I had enchiladas with corn tortillas. 144.4 this morning - not a huge gain, but taking the long view, I'm up 3 pounds from Saturday morning. I'm stress-eating these days, which is not helping one bit. With my parents mired in estate settlement for a distant cousin out in California and needing help on site (flying out this weekend to spend 2 days painting and go to the funeral), my daughter in another state fighting vertigo issues, and the weather here being oh-so-wintry, I've just had it. Oh, and I have a 4-hour meeting this afternoon with people who drive me stark mad on a good day. My every atom is screaming at me to run away and join a circus, preferably in Florida or something.
I guess tonight, I cut up a few more blocks of cheese into bite sized pieces (not, mind you, the nasty raw-milk one we tried on Sunday afternoon - it was disgusting) and try to keep to them, rather than going for chips or nuts.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Tuesday with snow
Seems to be becoming a bit of a theme around here. If it's Tuesday in Denver, the weather is miserable. I'd be open to breaking the streak.
144.0 this morning - don't know if that's carryover or to do with my eating some of the potatoes at dinner last night. We went to Olive Garden, and I had the steak Toscana - not bad, but it came with fried potatoes, and I had about half of them. I'm a little concerned that for me, carbs=weight gain, in nearly all cases. I don't think it's a good idea to eat zero-carb for life, although I suppose I could. But I seem to be a bit stuck - zero or very low carb causes weight loss, some carb above that causes weight gain. I haven't found the balance point yet.
Made something pretty boffo later in the evening. A handful of frozen berries in a glass, covered barely with coconut milk, and hit with an immersion blender. Strawberry for me, blueberry for Lee. We both went for a spatula to clean out the glass, so I'd say it was a success all around. Unfortunately, I seem to have a mental block about opening coconut milk cans - that's the second one I managed to open upside down. More problematic with the full-fat version than with the low-fat - there was a big clump of solids at the top, with liquid below. So, I learned something - shake the be-jeebers out of a can of full-fat coconut milk before opening, and then open it on the end that the can says to open. And make some more of that stuff with the berries.
144.0 this morning - don't know if that's carryover or to do with my eating some of the potatoes at dinner last night. We went to Olive Garden, and I had the steak Toscana - not bad, but it came with fried potatoes, and I had about half of them. I'm a little concerned that for me, carbs=weight gain, in nearly all cases. I don't think it's a good idea to eat zero-carb for life, although I suppose I could. But I seem to be a bit stuck - zero or very low carb causes weight loss, some carb above that causes weight gain. I haven't found the balance point yet.
Made something pretty boffo later in the evening. A handful of frozen berries in a glass, covered barely with coconut milk, and hit with an immersion blender. Strawberry for me, blueberry for Lee. We both went for a spatula to clean out the glass, so I'd say it was a success all around. Unfortunately, I seem to have a mental block about opening coconut milk cans - that's the second one I managed to open upside down. More problematic with the full-fat version than with the low-fat - there was a big clump of solids at the top, with liquid below. So, I learned something - shake the be-jeebers out of a can of full-fat coconut milk before opening, and then open it on the end that the can says to open. And make some more of that stuff with the berries.
Monday, February 7, 2011
And Monday again
Actually, it feels like Monday squared, or cubed. I sat down abruptly on a kitchen chair yesterday morning and muscles on both shoulders knotted up simultaneously, leaving me with a caught feeling when I try to move my head into a full-upright position. It's not excruciatingly painful, but very wearying, and definitely interfered with sleep last night.
I think on Saturday morning, I was at 141.6 - a new low for me. Loss accompanied by the usual leg cramps - I have a spot in my left calf that is still very sore from them. We ate Chinese for dinner on Saturday, and like an idiot, I had 2 egg rolls and some teriyaki steak appetizer strips, rather than an actual entree. Note to self: Egg rolls bad. I think I can say that I'm officially gluten-sensitive. And in addition, the carbs gained me about a pound overnight.
Yesterday, being Superbowl day, we did snack and watch TV. I had some cashews, lots of cheese, and made my remaining 90% cacao bar and some dried coconut into more of the paleo-ish "candy" we had before Christmas. It was okay, but very not sweet - this lot of coconut is less sweet than the last so it didn't help the chocolate much. I'm thinking of sprinkling them with sea salt to see if that helps - I think it will. Anyway, lots of food, and I ended up this morning at 143.4 or 6. Whatever. It'll go away in a couple of days unless I get on a starch bender.
Pretty good dinner last night - put a top sirloin roast (at about 2" thick, it was too bit to be a steak) in the crock pot with beef broth, soy sauce (more wheat - oops), molasses (not much), a can of chopped tomatoes, a bell pepper, half a large onion, and about 1/2 pound of mushrooms. The meat fell into two roughly-equal pieces while cooking for about 6 hours, so we each had one piece and a bunch of the other stuff. I thickened the sauce with a slurry of 2 tablespoons of potato starch with cold water - didn't use all of it, either. It tasted really good (though next time, I won't use anywhere near as much molasses - maybe even swap it for red wine), but there were way more onions than any of the other veg, and I ate enough of them to upset my stomach overnight.
Interesting random reading over the weekend. Because it's been cold, I indulged in my yearly reading of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, and had in addition, picked up Elisabeth Hasselbeck's book about gluten-free eating. Both of them prompted thinking about diet, interestingly. Toward the end of the long winter of 1881/2 (I think), the entire Ingalls family, having been reduced to subsisting on whole grain sourdough wheat bread and nothing else, was getting un-hungry, sleepy, and stupid. They'd had potatoes for about half the winter and were doing okay while they lasted, but once it came down to nothing but wheat to eat, their metabolisms obviously shut completely down. Seems right in line with Taubes' argument that the mechanism that makes one fat (carb-heavy diets and the insulin response) also makes one less likely to exercise. Not that they were fat at that point; just trying to hold on to enough to survive, I think. Hasselbeck's book was basically annoying. I found myself saying (silently) "Hey, but...!" on nearly every page. Maybe I'm over-simplifying, but if you need to eat gluten-free, your best bet is to buy raw ingredients (meat and vegetables and fruit) and turn them into meals yourself. She had all these lists of ingredients to watch for when reading boxes of convenience food, and all this advice about cooking for one gluten-free member of a family when everyone else was still eating gluten. Given that the stuff is, at best, and anti-nutrient, and at worst, a toxin, why is she feeding it to her kids? And why is she going to all the trouble of finding gluten-free fake food-like substances in order to keep having penne, for example? I don't know - we had it pretty easy with transitioning off the SAD, I guess - and without her incentive, since none of the three of us has full-blown celiac. Maybe other people are just wedded to their original menus and cannot envision eating any other way. It just seemed way too complicated a message for advice that really is pretty simple: You don't need "heart-healthy grains". Stop eating them, and stop eating things that contain them.
I think on Saturday morning, I was at 141.6 - a new low for me. Loss accompanied by the usual leg cramps - I have a spot in my left calf that is still very sore from them. We ate Chinese for dinner on Saturday, and like an idiot, I had 2 egg rolls and some teriyaki steak appetizer strips, rather than an actual entree. Note to self: Egg rolls bad. I think I can say that I'm officially gluten-sensitive. And in addition, the carbs gained me about a pound overnight.
Yesterday, being Superbowl day, we did snack and watch TV. I had some cashews, lots of cheese, and made my remaining 90% cacao bar and some dried coconut into more of the paleo-ish "candy" we had before Christmas. It was okay, but very not sweet - this lot of coconut is less sweet than the last so it didn't help the chocolate much. I'm thinking of sprinkling them with sea salt to see if that helps - I think it will. Anyway, lots of food, and I ended up this morning at 143.4 or 6. Whatever. It'll go away in a couple of days unless I get on a starch bender.
Pretty good dinner last night - put a top sirloin roast (at about 2" thick, it was too bit to be a steak) in the crock pot with beef broth, soy sauce (more wheat - oops), molasses (not much), a can of chopped tomatoes, a bell pepper, half a large onion, and about 1/2 pound of mushrooms. The meat fell into two roughly-equal pieces while cooking for about 6 hours, so we each had one piece and a bunch of the other stuff. I thickened the sauce with a slurry of 2 tablespoons of potato starch with cold water - didn't use all of it, either. It tasted really good (though next time, I won't use anywhere near as much molasses - maybe even swap it for red wine), but there were way more onions than any of the other veg, and I ate enough of them to upset my stomach overnight.
Interesting random reading over the weekend. Because it's been cold, I indulged in my yearly reading of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, and had in addition, picked up Elisabeth Hasselbeck's book about gluten-free eating. Both of them prompted thinking about diet, interestingly. Toward the end of the long winter of 1881/2 (I think), the entire Ingalls family, having been reduced to subsisting on whole grain sourdough wheat bread and nothing else, was getting un-hungry, sleepy, and stupid. They'd had potatoes for about half the winter and were doing okay while they lasted, but once it came down to nothing but wheat to eat, their metabolisms obviously shut completely down. Seems right in line with Taubes' argument that the mechanism that makes one fat (carb-heavy diets and the insulin response) also makes one less likely to exercise. Not that they were fat at that point; just trying to hold on to enough to survive, I think. Hasselbeck's book was basically annoying. I found myself saying (silently) "Hey, but...!" on nearly every page. Maybe I'm over-simplifying, but if you need to eat gluten-free, your best bet is to buy raw ingredients (meat and vegetables and fruit) and turn them into meals yourself. She had all these lists of ingredients to watch for when reading boxes of convenience food, and all this advice about cooking for one gluten-free member of a family when everyone else was still eating gluten. Given that the stuff is, at best, and anti-nutrient, and at worst, a toxin, why is she feeding it to her kids? And why is she going to all the trouble of finding gluten-free fake food-like substances in order to keep having penne, for example? I don't know - we had it pretty easy with transitioning off the SAD, I guess - and without her incentive, since none of the three of us has full-blown celiac. Maybe other people are just wedded to their original menus and cannot envision eating any other way. It just seemed way too complicated a message for advice that really is pretty simple: You don't need "heart-healthy grains". Stop eating them, and stop eating things that contain them.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Friday
After some contemplation, I think I over-onioned the soup in last night's recipe - it lent a rather lingering flavor to life last night. However, a regular breakfast, a couple of hunks of walnut mid-day (all I had left - and none today, which could get dicey), and that soup and some cheese and chocolates in the evening, resulted in another half pound gone - 142.4 this morning (with the scale indecisive between that and 142.2 for quite a while). I also did my body fat measurements and it looks like much of the loss was fat - I'm at 23.5% fat and around 109 pounds of lean mass, which is consistent with the last time I measured.
This time of year, with the nasty cold temps we've been having this week, especially, I rather miss that fat. It's a little chilly being thin - not that I'd trade it, really.
Slept wretchedly last night - one bounding-out-of-bed leg cramp and a trip to the fridge for coconut water, and just general restlessness. I think the coconut water minimized the cramping, but couldn't eliminate it altogether.
We have a Super Bowl party to go to on Sunday, bringing snacks and drinks. I'm thinking meat of some sort - whether mini hot dogs or meatballs or a beef stick, I don't know - and maybe some hard cider and beer. Gotta give that some thought.
This time of year, with the nasty cold temps we've been having this week, especially, I rather miss that fat. It's a little chilly being thin - not that I'd trade it, really.
Slept wretchedly last night - one bounding-out-of-bed leg cramp and a trip to the fridge for coconut water, and just general restlessness. I think the coconut water minimized the cramping, but couldn't eliminate it altogether.
We have a Super Bowl party to go to on Sunday, bringing snacks and drinks. I'm thinking meat of some sort - whether mini hot dogs or meatballs or a beef stick, I don't know - and maybe some hard cider and beer. Gotta give that some thought.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Not Bad!
I started out to make tomato soup from scratch this evening. And I guess I really should have checked for a can of tomatoes before starting. However, of such mistakes are new recipes created. No canned tomatoes, but I did find a can of Ro-Tel. So I made Cream of Ro-Tel soup for dinner, roughly this way:
- 1 tsp Ghee
- 1 can of Ro-Tel Original tomatoes and green chiles - 10 oz
- about 1 Tbsp dehydrated onion
- about 1/2 tsp granulated garlic
- about 1/2 cup chicken stock
- about 1/2 tsp green chile seasoning
- about 1/4 cup heavy cream
Mix everything except the cream in a saucepan over medium heat, until it just starts to boil (really, simmer). Add the cream, and use an immersion blender, food processor, or regular blender to puree the lot.
Mine made about 1-1/2 generous servings (I ate all of them), especially after I threw a handful of Mexican blend shredded cheese on it and stirred it in. It wasn't bad at all - I picked a rather larger saucepan (4 qt) than I needed, which made immersion blending very messy and not at all thorough, so mine had a fairly chunky texture. It was pretty spicy, but very tasty. I would do that again!
Thursday
And the corn chips blew away with the wind... I'm at 143.0 today - a new low. I figure it'll settle one of these days, but I have some clothes I'd still like to wear more flatteringly (if that makes sense). I have, however, been rather favorably impressed by my appearance in the underwear equivalent of a tankini just now - because of the cold, I've been adding a layer of silk to my clothing, and with a silk tank added, I look pretty good - the last remnants of subcutaneous abdominal fat are pretty subtle in that garb. I don't know if a 49 year old belongs in a bikini, no matter how thin she might be, but come warmer weather (come quickly, please!!!), I will need a new swimsuit, and am thinking that a tankini might be the ticket.
Lee has seen 197 since his breakthrough - I don't ask him for daily updates, so I don't know if that's the current figure or not. And Elizabeth's weight continues to drop - though more because of inadvertent IFing than anything - with her vertigo, she has very little appetite right now and has to force herself to eat. But she's looking quite good these days.
I saw yesterday on the Hunter-Gatherer site that the Green Bay quarterback is reading The Paleo Diet - the book/website that started this odyssey for me. I was going to root for them anyway; this just bolsters my resolve.
Dr. Kurt Harris has some great posts on macronutrients on his PaNu blog right now - his discussion of carbohydrate quality and how the atomic structure affects our bodies is very thought-provoking. We do eat some starchy carbs - potatoes and sweet potatoes, mostly, with occasional corn and rice thrown in - and after reading his article, I'm thinking that's probably okay. I'm really glad he's back to active posting - I think his writing may have been the most influential for how we ended up eating. Good stuff - not lockstep with either Paleo or Low-Carb, but really looking at the effects of various dietary choices on our health. Combine his stuff with Taubes and you have an incredible one-two punch.
Lee has seen 197 since his breakthrough - I don't ask him for daily updates, so I don't know if that's the current figure or not. And Elizabeth's weight continues to drop - though more because of inadvertent IFing than anything - with her vertigo, she has very little appetite right now and has to force herself to eat. But she's looking quite good these days.
I saw yesterday on the Hunter-Gatherer site that the Green Bay quarterback is reading The Paleo Diet - the book/website that started this odyssey for me. I was going to root for them anyway; this just bolsters my resolve.
Dr. Kurt Harris has some great posts on macronutrients on his PaNu blog right now - his discussion of carbohydrate quality and how the atomic structure affects our bodies is very thought-provoking. We do eat some starchy carbs - potatoes and sweet potatoes, mostly, with occasional corn and rice thrown in - and after reading his article, I'm thinking that's probably okay. I'm really glad he's back to active posting - I think his writing may have been the most influential for how we ended up eating. Good stuff - not lockstep with either Paleo or Low-Carb, but really looking at the effects of various dietary choices on our health. Combine his stuff with Taubes and you have an incredible one-two punch.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Wednesday
In Phoenix and basically offline yesterday. Always fun, trying to fly anywhere in winter - even being on the western edge of that gargantuan storm was a bit much. But, surprisingly, my flight there was only about 1/2 hour late, even with lining up to de-ice, and my flight back was early arriving, and very empty, to boot. Pity, that - I would have been TOTALLY OKAY with a cancellation - twist my arm, I guess I'll stay in 63-degree Phoenix instead of returning immediately to 9-below-zero Denver. Oh, well.
One somewhat humorous note from the trip there. I sit in aisle seats on planes so that I have at least one arm rest, guaranteed, and the option to stick my feet in the aisle if the legroom is scanty. I'd picked an aisle seat, and another woman had picked a window seat, and the flight out wasn't full. But our row was. Toward the end of boarding, a rather large man indicated he wanted to sit in the middle seat, and as he was getting settled, remarked that he'd picked our row because we were "the smallest people on the flight", and he needed the extra room. And then asked if he could leave the armrest up on my side. Sheesh! I don't think that I lost 48-odd pounds so that I could better accommodate overweight airline passengers. And I fought mightily the urge to explain to him that he could fix things by cutting back on the starchy, sugary, food choices. Not surprisingly, he had a Coke during the flight (not a "diet"). Also not too surprisingly, he was from Seattle - where I saw the largest people I've ever seen last fall. I was a mite annoyed by the episode at the time, but looking back, I guess it's a compliment of sorts.
I saw 143.2 yesterday - I didn't quite do a fast all day Monday; had some cheese and nuts after arriving in Phoenix. I actually ate 3 meals yesterday - mostly-naked tacos from Chipotle for lunch (had the barbacoa, which was tasty but who knows what the sauce was), and some soup and a salad (and some of Elizabeth's chips-and-salsa) for dinner at the airport Chili's. So at home this morning, I was at 143.8, which still isn't bad. Worthy of being asked to give up a portion of my plane seat to a larger passenger, anyway.
One somewhat humorous note from the trip there. I sit in aisle seats on planes so that I have at least one arm rest, guaranteed, and the option to stick my feet in the aisle if the legroom is scanty. I'd picked an aisle seat, and another woman had picked a window seat, and the flight out wasn't full. But our row was. Toward the end of boarding, a rather large man indicated he wanted to sit in the middle seat, and as he was getting settled, remarked that he'd picked our row because we were "the smallest people on the flight", and he needed the extra room. And then asked if he could leave the armrest up on my side. Sheesh! I don't think that I lost 48-odd pounds so that I could better accommodate overweight airline passengers. And I fought mightily the urge to explain to him that he could fix things by cutting back on the starchy, sugary, food choices. Not surprisingly, he had a Coke during the flight (not a "diet"). Also not too surprisingly, he was from Seattle - where I saw the largest people I've ever seen last fall. I was a mite annoyed by the episode at the time, but looking back, I guess it's a compliment of sorts.
I saw 143.2 yesterday - I didn't quite do a fast all day Monday; had some cheese and nuts after arriving in Phoenix. I actually ate 3 meals yesterday - mostly-naked tacos from Chipotle for lunch (had the barbacoa, which was tasty but who knows what the sauce was), and some soup and a salad (and some of Elizabeth's chips-and-salsa) for dinner at the airport Chili's. So at home this morning, I was at 143.8, which still isn't bad. Worthy of being asked to give up a portion of my plane seat to a larger passenger, anyway.
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