Monday 30 August 2010

Today was a sick day.

Today was about being kind to my body, especially my stomach. I napped, ate bland foods, recovered my gastrointestinal equilibrium.

Today was boring (mostly).

Breakfast was actually a whole piece of my flax toast with almond butter and sugar-free jam.  And tea. I drank lots of tea today:  green tea and Good Earth original tea.

Snack: 1 apple with almond butter.

Lunch: Cauliflower in chicken broth with flax toast and butter/canola spread.

And almond butter.

I also ate a little probiotic chocolate.

No more photos from Monday, but Thing 2 took very kind care of me when she got home from school.  She helped me make some chicken noodle soup and toast; we gave me most of the broth and her most of the noodles. She also kept feeling my forehead and telling me now much better I was feeling, and reminding me of how chicken soup helped her feel better when she was sick.  How could one not feel better after that kind of treatment?

Later, I felt better and had 1/2 a banana, about 2 ounces of hamburger (wanted a whole one but didn't want to go too nutzo), and some peanuts.

Friday 27 through Sunday 29 August 2010

Not only am I behind on my food blog, I've gotten kind of sloppy with photographing.

Talk of the Table

Usually, I'd say I eat pretty healthy around here.  I've read that some people find pictures and talk of food to be triggering, and I can respect that; which is one reason I branched off the food blog from the main blog.  But this weekend's post is a little more heavy on the foods that might be triggering, so I just want to give everyone an advanced heads-up.

So here's the weekend update...

Friday 27 August

Friday's breakfast started out typical:  eggs with cheese, a piece of flax toast with the butter/canola and sugar free strawberry jam.  And the usual decaf with half-and-half and almond milk.

Lunch was an outing with a few of my coworkers.  We went for Chinese food and I had a couple of plates from our shared entrees - heavy on the veg, skipped the rice - and we also had bowls of not-so-hot & sour soup.  (Although I made mine hot with a dollop of pepper condiment.)  It was nice to have some company for lunch!

Late afternoon snack: a Luna mini-bar!

I also had some chia'd coffee.

Dinner was awesome salad, applewood-smoked pork ribs with sauce added later, and a mojito.

Dessert: Mixed nuts and chocolate chips.

I took a plummet into here...

Saturday 28 August

The following picture really represents the dichotomy of the rest of my weekend:  the donut holes and the almond butter.

Even though I packed a sensible lunch, I got swept up in the baking and wrapping of 3,642 ginormous cookies and didn't take a break to eat my almonds and South Beach bar.  No, I grabbed 1/4 glazed donut and some coffee, and proceeded to the wrapping stations.  I noshed on some of the broken bits.  I should have chosen my station a bit more wisely.  Although I suppose it kept me from buying and bringing home all 3,642 of them.  (Or even whole ones in all the flavors.  Not that they would sell me the secret flavor this year.  I'll let you all know what it is on Saturday; I'm sworn to secrecy!)  The good news here was that I was on my feet for a good 7 hours, working my arm muscles vigorously the entire time.  I was really sore the next day!

Thing 2 made me a cookie face.  The resemblance is uncanny, no?

So I got the request to bring home In & Out Burger for early dinner.  I got my two protein style lovelies (no bun) with ketchup and mustard instead of the secret sauce.  I ate some fries.  I ate some of Thing 2's with a bit of the bun.  Later on, I had some tomatoes and cheese, because my body was longing for some vegetable matter.

Sunday 29 August

I made a sketch of today's stuff.  It all started out pretty decent, but then dinner.  I don't know if it was dinner, per se, because it could have been the suspicious pre-cut cucumbers on my salad.  But I think the stripped-and-stuffed-into-debreaded-end-crusts treatment of pizza caused me to feel sick later in the night (that's what the little equation down there means).  It also may have just been my body telling me it had consumed enough crap, thank you, now can we get back to the regularly scheduled eating next meal?

Thursday 26 August 2010

Talk of the Table

Well, I think I can explain some of the heavy snackage last week: our old friend, PMS!  And lookie what I found in the archives on Opposite Life:  a post on PMS, Type 2 Diabetes, and healthier things I eat when the girl hormones are a-raging! (Mostly, anyway.)

Breakfast:  The School Year Special: 2 eggs, 1 slice flax toast with butter/canola and sugar-free strawberry jam, and decaf with almond milk and half-and-half.

Not pictured:  Regular coffee with almond milk and half-and-half at work.

Lunch:  Kicked off with this combo from the Thursday Goody tray at work - 2 squares of dark Chocolove and a piece of some fancy graham cracker cookie.  (No Petite Ecoliers today, but this substituted very nicely!)  The cookie was very buttery and no overly sweet.

2 oz. steak, some thawed frozen Brussels sprouts (petite), and an apple.  Followed all that up with a nice walk-and-talk on the phone with my mom! :-)

Late afternoon snack:  One of these was good.  My stomach was grumbling at me all afternoon!  And for no reason.  Post-lunch number was 118 (after the walk), so I knew I didn't need any food.  I think I may have stretched out my stomach during the past week.  So I ignored it for awhile, then had one of these a couple of hours after my lunch walk.

Dinner:  Mr. Handsome-and-Handy made a thick spaghetti sauce.  I steamed some broccoli to have with it and had some milk.  (I'll need to get some shiritake to go with the leftovers!)  Thing 2 helped me eat the strawberries.

Dessert:  Later on, I had the last of my Clemmy's when the kids had some ice cream.  We all had some sugar-free gummy bears on top.  (I also had a spoonful of their mint chip.)

And I had a couple of these.

P.S. Anyone notice what I didn't have today?

Wednesday 25 August 2010

Yeay, it's Back to School!  I sure appreciated the votes of confidence in the comments.  Amazingly, I think it really did help to write it out there that I was feeling anxious about the new school year.  (Well, that, and we finished the macadamia nuts...)

Breakfast:  With the kids safely ensconced in school, Mr. Handsome-and-Handy and I headed down to Alice's Restaurant (yep, one of several named for the Arlo Guthrie song) for a morning breakfast date!  We got what we wanted: we split the Mexican Scramble (yum!  I jazzed mine up further with Jalapeno Tabasco) and I had about 1/4 cup of hash browns and 1/4 of that cinnamon coffee cake.  (It was truly massive...it looks a lot smaller in that picture.)  And coffee.  Love the coffee mug!  This held me until after my lunchtime CardioSculpt class (although I did take a 6 carb grams electrolyte beverage to class and sipped on that...not as hot outside today and the gym was cool, but I was being extra careful after yesterday's stupidity).

Lunch:  I knew we'd have a big breakfast, so I was glad Mr. H&H packed me a light salad!  I threw in an apple and a couple of cheese sticks, plus one handful of walnuts from my desk drawer.  I had to throw away one of the cheese sticks, because it was past code date!  (Luckily I looked before I swallowed that first bite!)  Salad had about 2 Tbsp of lite Italian dressing.

I was still hungry, so I had one more handful of walnuts.

Late afternoon snack:  1 square of Valrhona chocolate and some more walnuts (about a half a handful).  And I thought I'd eat less of walnuts than I do other nuts, because they're not as salty!  Hmmm.  

A Digression (Rationalization?) on Nuts:

Note to Geneene Roth:  Eating all the nuts I want is not making me stop wanting them and moving on to other things.  Just sayin'.  Then again, I'm no longer trying to do that with cookies, but that was more of a mind decision to help the poor body, rather than a natural desire.  (Although I can now forget about the presence of most types of cookies in the house, as long as they are out of sight, but I think that's more a habit thing.  I hardly ever forget the nuts.)  So it's either (1) nuts are one of the new categories of food that I can eat that won't mess with my blood glucose levels or (2) nuts are what my body needs or (3) a mixture of both.  

How can nuts be what my body needs?  I wondered about that, and once I looked up once the nutrients on pecans, because I so powerfully craved them for a time.  Walnuts and pecans are both great sources of the mineral manganese.  So maybe I have a greater need for manganese than average?  Actual manganese deficiency is not a common thing, but two of its symptoms are impaired glucose tolerance and osteoporosis.  That may also explain the thing I have for dehydrated kale crunchies, too...although I have to say, I don't crave kale in general, and the kale crunchies tend to be made with things like sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, and/or ground cashews.  See?  There are the nuts again.  I love but do not crave pineapple, which is an even better source of manganese than nuts.

Dinner:  About 1 cup of broccoli with butter+canola spread (I think...forgot to ask Mr. H&H what he put on it) and 4 oz. steak with A1 sauce.  And milk!

Not pictured:  Later on, I had the last of the 7-layer cookie bars, a 1x1/2 inch rectangle, and I ate a couple of tiny strawberries from our plant.

At bedtime, my tummy was rumbling something fierce, so I tested.  Blood glucose was 97, so I ignored it.

And that's it!  It really simplifies the blogging process when I have only 5 photos, because that's how many I can email to my blog in one email from my phone.  Maybe "day of eating, in 5 photos or less" should be on my goal list?

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Well, we had quite a day before back-to-school!  We did a dry run of the morning routine (up around 6 a.m., out the door at 7 a.m.)...except we went out to breakfast.



Breakfast:  Omlette with spinach, avocado, onions, and linguica; 1/2 slice of sourdough toast, and 2 piece of apple from the fresh fruit salad.  Many mugs of coffee with half-and-half.

Pre-workout snack:  Kashi peanut butter bar.

It was hot here, and I ran (mostly) outside at lunch today.  Bad idea.  I got a bit overheated.  I was sensible enough to do a coolout in the gym on the treadmill, but not sensible enough to stick to a slow walk for it.  Crikey!  Anyhow, I fortunately had a bottle of water in my locker to which I'd added some electrolyte drink (low sugar-see photo), and I felt a little bit better after that and a lukewarm shower.

Lunch (post-workout): The whole orange, the rest of the pecans (their saltiness was a good thing), a cheese stick, and the broccoli in veggie broth below:

Snack:  Later in the afternoon, I had some walnuts

Pre-commute:  Word had it that there was an accident clearing, so I knew my commute would be much longer than usual.  I had a ginger chew before I drove.  And some more water.

Dinner:  Shared some almonds with Mr. Handsome-and-Handy, who started the fish after I got home.  (You can really tell when he cooks for me vs. when I have to fend for myself!  His meals are much nicer!)

Just in time for back-to-school, we had our summer!  The Things played on the slip&slide today and rode their bikes wearing their bathing suits!  And at 8 p.m., our house was still quite toasty:

I shared this with Mr. H&H along with dinner, too!

P.S. First day of school started well!  We got there nice & early, and the kids were excited and happy!

Monday 23 August 2010

Talk of the Table

Lori noted that I use almond milk in my coffee quite a lot, and asked, "Do you drink milk?"

I love milk! But I find that I don't drink it very often, because 8 oz. has 15 grams of carb (1 carb exchange), and I'm rarely satisfied with only 1 cup of milk. And in the morning, when I was starting out, I was super sensitive to carbs, so I used half-and-half in my coffee. But that's kind of calorie dense, so I tried cutting it with unsweetened vanilla almond milk, which has way less carbs per serving than milk. Plus I like how it tastes in coffee.

Foodie McBody asked if I'd share my secret for creating captions on my pictures. The short answer is that I have a screen capture tool called "SnagIt" (inexpensive and excellent!). In its editor mode, one of the tools is a Callouts tool. It has several options, like thought bubbles and speech bubbles. That's how I add captions to photos. It isn't the greatest for hard-core photo editing; for example, it doesn't have one of those lasso tools that you can use for selecting odd shapes (the Paint program that comes with MS Word does, however). If your graphics tool doesn't have captions, you could always create an oval and a triangle and connect the two, then make a text box with a clear border and add text to it. If anyone is interested, I could post a little tutorial with the steps.

Breakfast:  I did my workout on the exercise bike this morning, and I got really hungry!  So it was the usual spackle, plus Kona Joe coffee (not decaf!) with almond milk and half-and-half.

...And a donut hole.  (10 seconds in the microwave made it a little too hot to handle!)

Mid-morning: Chia powder in green tea!

Lunch:  I have no idea how this got so overexposed!  This was a couple of leftover polish dogs, half a package of frozen Tuscan veggie mix, and about 2 Tbsp of lite Italian dressing.

Frozen veggie mixes + leftover meat = easiest packed lunch ever!

I also had an apple and some walnuts.

Late afternoon: About 2 Tbsp peanut butter, 2 Tbsp wheat germ, and 1 square of Valrhona dark chocolate.

Mid-evening:  Mr. Handsome-and-Handy said it was "fend for yourself" dinner tonight, and I was working late, and I knew I'd need to help with gearing the kids back into an earlier bedtime...in other words, not a lot of time for dallying over dinner.  So a "Jayb" (1/2 of a Jaybar) before I went home.

Really late dinner:  I wasn't hungry when I got home, so I went straight to bedtime duty.  I read the end of one of the "Pet Fairies" books to Thing 2, then a whole other one.  They're about 60 pages of easy chapter reading, with pictures on each page, but it's still a lot of reading out loud.  After a little over an hour of reading, the vocal cords were kaput!  So Mr. H&H took over, and I had a little bedtime snack:  3 sticks of cheddar cheese, a handful of cherry tomatoes, and (...yes, Lori, I DO drink milk!) a little glass of milk.  And then I had some almonds.  Thing 2 was asleep, but I was well-fueled to help Thing 1 get to sleep.  We talked a little, and then I read him the meditation in the appendixes of Savor to help him relax.  Does anyone know of any kid resources about learning to meditate?  It seems like most of the stuff I've read is geared toward adults, and it seems like it would be a really useful life skill for kids.

Friday 20 through Sunday 22 August 2010

I'm playing weekend catch-up today...

Friday 20 August

Pre-run 1/4 banana snack

Spackle (usual ingredients) + 2 mugs of the usual coffee.

Lunch: About 2.5 oz. leftover taco meat (from the freezer) and 1/2 package of Tuscan frozen veggie mix.  Handful of those smoked paprika pecans.

A few more of those pecans...

About 1.5 square of Valrhona dark chocolate (yum!) and a handful of walnuts.

Regarding dark chocolate, I love it!  I used to prefer milk chocolate, but dark chocolate is much friendlier carb-wise and more satisfying taste-wise.  Favorite brands for me are Green & Black's 70%, Valrhona (usually a good deal at Trader Joes), Trader Joes' 3-pack, and Guittard semisweet chocolate chips.  I also like the Sharffenberger cocoa nibby bars, but I was mad when they sold out to Hershey's and haven't bought them lately.  Anyhow, I like just about anything 60-75% dark, but these tend to be the ones I buy.

Mojito, tri-tip steak, and grilled veggies!  Yum!

Same mojito, with mac nuts...

...a little more mac nuts, and 1/2 of one of those 7-layer cookie bars from the picnic.

A few smoked almonds...

And some strawberries from our garden.  Darn snails like these and the tomatoes. :-P  Anyone have advice for keeping the snails off my plants? We do use the snail pellets, but who would eat that and not the fresh produce?  Apparently not the snails.  Mr. Handsome-and-Handy is thinking we should perhaps think about eating the snails.

I also had another mojito and some peanuts with our movie night.  We geeked out and watched Tron.

Saturday 21 August

Well, this day was easy to document! I loved being able to send all of my photos in one email!

Here's brunch!  Those are protein pancakes, made from the recipe in the Blood Sugar 101 book plus a scoop of flax seed meal.  One batch made 4 pancakes; I ate another one and saved the 4th for Sunday.  The yellow and red item is a scramble with tomatoes, eggs, and cheese.  I also had a couple more pieces of bacon than those shown, and another mug of the usual coffee.  Except it was full caff today; Mr. Handsome-and-Handy bought me some Kona Joe coffee; love it!  Turns out it was a good thing, because we ended up going to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and I drove!

Here's a sketch of the eats; mostly after the Boardwalk excursion, and I was hangry by then.  I hadn't had a Taco Bell chalupa in 2 years; they used to be my favorite.  Tasty, but it didn't make me want more.

The Boardwalk was so much fun!  A little overwhelming for us country mice, but Thing 2 loved the rides.  She rode her first roller coaster, the Sea Monster.  (It's small but fast, more of a curvy one than one with big hills.)  She was really anxious about it, and so was I.  I hadn't been on a roller coaster in...I think 14 or 15 years.  For many years, I avoided them because I was afraid I wouldn't fit in the seat with the restraint down, and I didn't like the idea of having to get off the ride if it didn't...or worse, have the ride take off with me not securely in it!  But I figured it was worth a try, and to my delight, we could both fit!  (It was a little scrunchy for long legs, though.)  Thing 1 was timid about trying the rides, but we finally found a Nascar-themed one, and he enjoyed it quite a lot.  He and I loved the bumper car speedway, too.  We all played a round of mini golf and enjoyed the arcade, too.  Nice cap to the summer!

Sunday 22 August

Whew!  Rocky night for everyone.  I think maybe the Boardwalk overstimulated everybody.  I bought a cup of caff'd coffee at the donut shop.  I had 2 donut holes: this one, and the one below.

I had one of my protein pancakes with peanut butter and sugar-free syrup, and an omlette with bacon, cheese, and tomato.  And a couple more cups of the usual decaf coffee.  Not shown: 3.5 strawberries from the garden.

Lunch was chili (this bowl + another half) and a couple of polish dogs.

Later, I had half of a piece of the 7-layer cookie bars.

And some boardwalk taffy: 3 regular, 4 sugar-free.  (They had sugar-free, and it was tasty!  Some different flavors than the regular.)

And a couple of these:

I wasn't too hungry for dinner.  Forgot to get a picture, though, so here's a sketch:

Later on, we had dessert.  I had a taste of the kids' mint chip.

And a little dish of Clemmy's sugar-free chocolate.  This stuff is really chocolatey, and very little sugar!  (It's very high fat, though, so a little bit goes a long way.)

Toasting with Thing 2!  (She even liked the Clemmy's, and she generally does not like sugar-free stuff.)

And a little dish of peanuts.

Cramming for School?

When I eat like I've been eating lately--cramming in stuff when I'm not hungry, that is--it seems to be a sign that something is eating me.  In this case, I know what's eating me:  back to school! (Cue horror movie music.)  Nowadays, kids have so much more homework in elementary school than we did back in the day, and the school they attend is known for being academically rigorous.  Which in many ways is a good thing, but it means ever-so-much more involvement from we parental units.  So in addition to the hectic get-out-the-door routine, none of us are looking forward to the homework/project stuff.  It's pretty much non-stop, even over holidays and weekends.  It's hard for us to get genuinely excited about it, and I'm sure that rubs off on The Things.  Ugh.  And I also will have a much less flexible schedule for fitting in the soon-to-be-seriously-ramping-up training for the half marathon.  Double-ugh.

So no answers, but I guess I need to just remain open and flexible and trust that we'll figure it out as we make the transition.  Maybe this year will go more smoothly, since we're not new to the school anymore, and Thing 1 even has the same teachers.  We'll see!  Maybe just writing all this out will help a bit.