Falling Off the Wagon

Falling off the wagon is such an easy thing to do in the name of convenience.  It's so much easier to grab some chicken strips and toast at Raising Cane's than it is to wake up early enough to make lunch, or stay up late enough to make it the night before.  Am I right?  But that means making very unhealthy choices that I know will have negative affects on my health and well-being.  Do I do it anyway?  Oh, yes, all in the name of laziness!

Has anyone ever heard of DietBet? Essentially it's an online game where you bet a certain amount of money that by the end of the time period you can lose 4% of your weight. If you lose 4% or more of your weight by the end then you get some of the pot.  Everyone who loses 4% or more wins and the pot gets split between them, so at the very least you get your money back as long as you lose the weight.  Jillian Michaels is putting one on and so far the pot is $200,790.

I signed up for that, as well as an Advocare 24-Day Challenge that a friend of mine is putting on.  Through the Advocare products and the DietBet I'm getting tons of motivation that I am beyond excited for.

These are some of the healthy things I bought to help me out.  Cucumbers, avocado, bulk walnuts, coconut water, chia seeds, baby carrots, bulk spinach, cheese, and ginger.

Thanks to my dad lending me his juicer, I'm going to be using juice to help me get in the veggies and nutrients I need.  This is my first foray into juicing - spinach and carrot juice.  It was surprisingly good!  At least to me.  The other members of my household had varying reactions from not daring to try it to a shake of the head and a declaration that it was not for them.  I found the juice really filling so I'm excited to do more juicing!

As I do these 24- and 28-day challenges it's my goal to blog at least every couple days with progress and tidbits.  Let the games begin!

My Motivation

Do any of you guys watch The Biggest Loser?  I've been watching it the last few years.  When it's airing I tend to be way more motivated to work out.  Seeing these people, how heavy they are and how hard they work out in spite of it, is a great motivator to get moving.  One of the people on the show this last season was over 400 pounds.  It kept me thinking, "If he's that large and can work out that hard, then so can I!"  Not that I work out 4 hours a day, but you know what I mean.  I tend to use my weight as an excuse.  "Oh, I can't do that because I'm too heavy," or "I'd do that if I was skinnier, but I'm not."  These contestants are larger than I am and they're doing it.  That really motivates me into believing that I can do it, too.

Unfortunately, The Biggest Loser is now on break and the current season is over.  To keep up my motivation I decided to download some weight loss podcasts.  Jillian Michaels has one called...wait for the totally unique name...The Jillian Michaels Show.  A lot of it is incredibly long intros, outros, and segment breaks along with her joking about completely random things with the person I assume is her producer.  But interspersed amongst the unnecessary stuff is some actual really good material.  On one I just listened to she had her mom, JoAnn McKarus, a psychotherapist who works with people with eating disorders among other issues, on to talk about compulsive overeating.  In two others she talked about weight loss myths and why they were myths and not reality.  At the end of every podcast she takes a call from someone and answers questions.  It's all very informative and I'm really liking listening to them.

I bought this game a while back.  Like, years back.  I used it a couple times, but didn't really do anything with it.  This past week I had a moment that Jillian would call a "come to Jesus" moment.  I work at a salon and as I was blow drying a little girl's hair I was shaking my wrist to move the hairdryer back and forth so it wouldn't stay in one spot and burn her.  As I was doing that I realized that my wrist and the hairdryer weren't the only things shaking....so were my "wings" as I've heard them so eloquently called, i.e. my flabby upper arm.  Ew.  Yeah, gross, right?  Totally.  It was then that I realized that eating right to lose weight was great, but that wasn't going to help my "wings" disappear or help me get the shape that I want.  I immediately went home and set up a new fitness program on this game.

There's good and bad things about this game.  Some of the good things are that it takes you through a workout to assess your fitness level and then tailor a workout to you.  It also lets you track your calorie intake, works with you on your nutrition as well as your physical activity, and has some really fun and neat challenges like the ones they do on the show.  Some of the bad things include that you can pick how many days you work out each which but it doesn't allow you to choose which days, and it uses the Wii remote to sense your movements and track if you're doing the moves.  Some of the moves, like jump rope, tire jumps, and others that ask you to put the remote in your pocket, don't sense that you're doing the move even if you are so you get a bad score on it or the game thinks you weren't doing anything at all during that move.  That part annoys me so very much, but I've learned to just roll my eyes and move on.

With the game you can pick whether you want Bob, Jillian, or both to be your trainer.  Bob uses that soothing sweet voice of his to say things like, "Your personal goal is where you want to be and you don't get there by sitting on the couch."  Jillian says things like, "I know what you're thinking - you're dying, it hurts, wah wah wah!  Do you want to be skinny or not?!"  Jillian's a little harsh but there's just something so satisfying when you do one of the exercises and she says, "I'm impressed!" or "You make me proud!"  It makes me think, "Aww, I'm making Jillian proud.  I should keep going!"  Is that sad?  Haha.  Whatever motivates, right?

TheBiggest Loser is what helps motivate me to keep going, eat right, and exercise.  What motivates you guys to keep going?

Progress!

Well, today was weigh-in day.  I was kind of scared to get on the scale, but I shouldn't have been.  I lost a total of 4.6 pounds last week.  Yay!  I will definitely take that.  I've begun working out in the mornings before work.  Oddly enough I'm really not hating waking up at 7am instead of my usual 8:30am.  I've found that I feel so much better after I've worked out.  I have more energy throughout the day and it inspires me to be more active as the day goes on.  What pleases me most is the change in my mood.  I find that I'm just happier and have a lot more patience because of it when I've worked out in the morning.  It's a great feeling and one I plan on keeping.

I made some delicious bbq chicken and cauliflower mash last week.  It was so good that I went to the store the next day and bought ingredients to make more.  The mash doesn't taste like mashed potatoes because it isn't, but it was stinkin' good.  First, I cooked off some bacon.  I pulled the bacon out and set it aside, then cooked the cauliflower in the bacon fat.  Once it was good and soft I mashed it up and added some cream and butter then cooked it a while longer.  When it was the consistency I liked I pulled it off the heat and added the bacon back to it.  So good.  The chicken I just cooked in a skillet with some of the bbq sauce from my last post.  So so yummy. It completely satisfies my craving for bbq while keeping my carb count low.

I got a Magic Bullet, something I've been wanting for a long time.  My nephew was the first to use it and made a strawberry-apple smoothie.  Not at all low-carb friendly, but a good snack for a growing boy.  There will definitely be future posts containing things I've made that are low-carb friendly with the Magic Bullet.

There seems to be candy everywhere I look.  It's so hard to resist.  Even with my sugar-free alternatives, sometimes I just want to grab a king size Reese's Fastbreak bar.  It's hard to resist, but I am resisting.

What kind of evilness is this?  While shopping I found an M&M vending machine.  Vending machines are bad enough, but a machine that vends only sugary candy?  It's ridiculous.  The US has a problem with obesity?  It's not hard to see why!

I ordered some Ketostix from Amazon so I can test myself and make sure I'm in and staying in ketosis.   I've been lax on logging my carbs because the Atkins app doesn't work on my phone.  It only works on my tablet and I don't like lugging my tablet around.  Estimating how close or far from my 20g net carbs per day is not a good way to make sure I'm staying low enough to be in ketosis.  I think I'll switch to using a written log so I can keep better track as I haven't been able to find a carb counting app that I like that works on my phone.  More on that once I get it worked out!

A Day in the Life of Atkins/Low-Carb Eating

Yesterday was my birthday, but the things I ate during the day were actually pretty typical for what I usually eat on Atkins so I thought I'd share.  This gives just a general idea of the sort of things I usually eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks when doing Atkins.

For breakfast I had a slice of quiche with a dallop of sour cream on top.  Unfortunately I didn't pay really good attention when I made this quiche and what I put in it had no dietary fiber...  Oops.  Next time I'll pay much better attention to the types of veggies I put in my quiche!  The quiche with the sour cream came to 391 calories and 6.3g net carbs.

Lunch was a delicious burger from In-N-Out Burger.  Animal style and protein style meant the onions were grilled and the bun was replaced with lettuce.  I also removed the pickles just because pickles are yucky!  It came out to 520 calories and 8g net carbs.  Usually my lunch wouldn't be quite that high in either calories or carbs, but it was my birthday!  It's actually not bad as long as you're aware of the carb and calorie content and adjust your day accordingly.

Between lunch and dinner I like to have a snack so that I'm not ravenous at dinner and overeat.  Today it was a peanut butter cup Chocolite bar that I'd gotten earlier at Sugarless Delite.  At 35 calories, 0g net carbs, and 6g of fiber it's delicious and filling.  A great snack!

Dinner was a delicious grass-fed steak with garlic-herb butter and a bit of bbq sauce for dipping.  The totals there came to 423.6 calories and 2g of net carbs.

Being a girl from the south, I do love barbecue.  Unfortunately, bbq sauces are just full of sugar.  Molasses, brown sugar, all those things that make it so tasty.  One thing I've really missed on Atkins is bbq sauce.  Fortunately, I found this bbq sauce at Sugarless Delite.  It was a bit on the pricey side, but at 5 calories and 1g net carbs per 1 tbsp serving it was worth it.  It's also delicious!

Along with the steak for dinner I had a nice side salad with chipotle ranch dressing.  The salad had lettuce, cheese, some orange bell pepper, radishes, broccoli, avocado and cherry tomatoes.  It came out to 151 calories and 7.8g net carbs.

These dressing also come from, you guessed it, Sugarless Delite.  They're 0 calorie and 0 net carb and absolutely delicious.  The first ingredient is purified water, but they're so thick and packed full of flavor!

For dessert, again because it was my birthday, I had a cheesecake brownie from Sugarless Delite.  (Think if I drop their name enough I'll get a discount?  Ha!)  There was a 0g net carb brownie on the bottom and their plain cheesecake on top and it was a slice of heaven.  This wonderfulness was 2g net carbs, and I'm not sure the calorie count because it wasn't listed.

All in all my day came to 1,520.6 calories (not counting the cheesecake brownie), and 26.1g net carbs (counting the brownie).  Let's be honest, with the cheesecake brownie we're probably talking an extra 300 or so calories, so my total could be around 1820.  Still not bad.  On Induction, it's recommended to keep net carbs to 20-25g, so at 26.1g I'm still good!

That it what a typical day on Atkins looks like for me, more or less.  I hope it was helpful!

Lesson Learned

It's very late-  Okay, it's 11pm, but lately bedtime for me has been....well, right about now.  I am so ready to head to bed, but I've been wanting to get this post out for a while and have been putting it off.  It's time to stop procrastinating!

I started doing Atkins on November 20th.  I was hardcore into it, following every single rule.  At Thanksgiving I caved for some of my grandmother's dressing, the most amazing dressing I've ever eaten and something I look forward to every year.  It's that good!  I had some dessert, but as soon as the day was over so was my straying from the path.  I was back on it with a vengeance and I lost over 20 pounds.

Right along a month later came another difficult food time of year....Christmas.  My step-grandmother came to town for the holidays and I thought, "Screw it.  It's Christmas.  I don't care what I eat or how much I eat of it.  It's the holidays!"  I don't even want to talk about all the carb-laden foods I've eaten in the last two weeks.  So much so that I've seen a difference.  No, really, I have.

It's weird how just one month of changing your eating habits can change how you physically feel.  I didn't think much of things when I went onto Atkins.  I was there to lose weight, right?  Everything else just kind of fell by the wayside.  You know the phrase out of sight, out of mind?  That's how my physical problems before Atkins were while I was on Atkins.  It wasn't until I strayed for two weeks - heck, a couple days even - that I remembered how I used to feel.

Before Atkins I had a really hard time with gastro-intestinal problems.  I really thought that I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) with the way my body reacted to foods.  It wasn't pretty and I felt miserable daily with stomach aches among other things.  I tried restrictive dieting to get it under control as I found out that IBS treatment asks you to do, but I've talked about restricting myself before and how good does that ever work?  Not very well.  I always just assumed it was eating fatty foods that hurt my stomach so badly so I tried to stay away from fatty foods but it didn't really help much.

With the vicious return of IBS symptoms when I stopped watching my carbs, I realized something....  While on Atkins, my stomach never hurt.  Ever.  I was never in pain after eating, and never had any symptoms whatsoever.  And?  I was eating fat!  And not in small amounts!  I was having cheese, and oil, and butter, and I wasn't having severe stomach aches every time I ate.  It was an eye-opener.  Maybe it wasn't the fat that was messing with my insides, maybe it was the carbs.

I'm one of those people who have to learn by doing.  Telling me that doing something will have a certain affect won't sway me at all.  I have to do that thing to see if that's really true.  It also takes me going off of a plan - like doing Atkins - to realize how great it was on it.  I'm convinced now more than ever that Atkins is right for me.  These past two weeks I've gone off of Atkins and eaten so many carbs.  You know what?  I've felt absolutely miserable.  I'm tired of feeling miserable.  Why would I eat things that I know make me feel that way?  To do so would just be ridiculous.

So, starting tomorrow, I am back on with that same determination when I started.  My eyes are open, my motivation is renewed 100%, and I'm ready.  Now it's no longer just about losing weight, it's about taking care of my body so that it's not reacting with pain at what I'm doing to it.  It's about taking care of myself the best way that I can.

Various Bits and Pieces

The weekend before Christmas I house-sat for my dad and watched his golden lab, Sophie, for him.  Sophie and I bonded and I'm proud to say that she now responds when I call her "So-Fifi".  I feel as if I've accomplished something here.

On that Saturday I went to Sugarless Delite in Richardson for the very first time.  I wandered around aimlessly - it's a tiny store, but they have a buttload of stuff there - until a very nice woman named Hannah came up to help me.  I could almost swear she read my mind because the first thing she had me taste-test when I told her I wanted low-carb things was a 0 net carb brownie, then a 3-4 net carb piece of pecan pie with a pecan crust.  Pecan pie is my absolute favorite and brownies come in a close second, so I snatched some up.  The pie was just divine, and the brownies were so fudgy that when I let my nephew eat one he spent a few minutes arguing with me because I'd called them brownies and he insisted they were fudge.

I also got a few sugar-free, calorie-free, carb-free syrups.  I usually put Starbucks peppermint or vanilla syrup into my coffees, but those can run something like 26 net carbs per serving.  Yikes!  Since I'm only allowed 20, that didn't fly.  These are very tasty and I found that since they're artificially sweetened, I didn't need to add extra sweetener.

What I forgot to take a picture of is the Millennium pie I went back on Monday for.  Once again Hannah helped me out.  I wanted a pecan pie, but they were out so she had me try the Millennium pie and explained that it had the same ingredients and the main difference was that it had caramel and the pecan pie didn't.  It was tasty!

Seriously, if you're low-carb, sugar-free, diabetic, or just want sweets that aren't going to blow your diet out of the water then go to Sugarless Delite.  And ask for Hannah.  Hannah is awesome!

Monday night I made dinner for my nephew and dad.  It included what I was affectionately told was called "crack slaw."  It's very simply shredded cabbage, ground beef, onion, soy sauce, and rice vinegar but it is so so good.  Yum!

Along with that went brussel sprouts tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Look at how crispy and caramelized it got!  It was seriously delicious.

And no low-carb meal is complete without jalapeno poppers.  Seriously, meals are incomplete without them.  No joke.

When I got back from house-sitting and Christmas festivities with my dad I found this beautiful dish of oxtail stew in my freezer waiting for me.  CarbTripper has shown herself making this a few times in her blog and she was kind enough to make it for me.  Oh, you have no idea the deliciousness in that bowl.  I've been eating on it slowly so as to savor it and have it as long as possible.

These awesome dishes that are part Christmas present and part house-warming present are also from her.  If all I got as house-warming gifts were things for the kitchen, I'd be a happy person.  Forget the bedroom, living room, bathroom...  I want pots!  Pans!  Spoons!  Knives!  Blenders!  Food processors!  I might be a little sore from sleeping on the floor, but it would be a good sore.

Okay, so there's one thing other than kitchenware that I need.  Books.  Books are what make the world turn.  I took a box of books up to Half Price Books to sell to them.  When I left the box was as full as it had been before, but now with books I'd bought thanks to an amazing Christmas gift card from my dad.  Kitchenware and books.  Life is good.

Some food. And then some more food. Oh, wait, and then more!

Isn't this the most beautiful picture you've ever seen?  Okay, maybe not, but it's gotta rate up there, right?  The pink of the shrimp, yellow of the oil, and white of the pan make for a beautiful mix of colors.  Mmm, shrimp.

I used said shrimp to make this - lemon shrimp on a bed of spring greens with a chipotle-garlic vinaigrette.  Yummy.  It made 4 of the large bowls pictured.  Each bowl is 217 calories and 3.7 grams of net carbs.

These gorgeous chicken thighs got marinated in worchestershire sauce and spices, baked, then chopped up and put onto salads I'll show you in a minute.  My nephew's reaction to the sheet pans of chicken was, "You made grease like on Schlotzsky's pizzas!"

One of the things that got topped with the chicken thighs was this warm salad.  Wilted greens, sauteed onions, and toasted pine nuts.  It took about 5 minutes to cook everything up and it's delicious!  There's 4 servings.  152 calories and 5.2 net carbs per serving sans the chicken.

Another dish that was topped with the chicken was zucchini a la romano.  The herb you can see on there is mint.  Yum!  This pan of wonderfulness made 6 plentiful servings at 62 calories and 2.5 grams of net carbs per serving sans the chicken.

This monstrosity is my attempt at a quiche for my breakfasts.  There's two types of ground meat, green onions, and mushrooms in it.  8 servings on this one - 730 calories and 5.8 grams of net carbs per serving.  I forgot how heavy in calories quiches are!  Whew!  Like I've said before, breakfast is my largest meal of the day.  As you can see from the lunches/dinners I made, their calorie counts are very low so while everything made is full fat, the calories are still very much under control.

Last but not least, I made something for snacks.  Sorry for the picture quality!  That white glob there is veggie dip.  Sour cream, mayo, and a couple of things thrown in.  It's super delicious!  I cut up some broccoli and cauliflower florets for dipping.  It made about 3 cups of dip, with a serving being 2 tbsp.  For each serving it comes out to 65 calories and 2.2 grams of net carbs.

Everything I made today - except for the dip - has been pre-portioned and put into individual containers.  This way I can just grab a couple containers on my way out the door in the morning.  The dip was harder to deal with because you just can't find containers that are 2 tbsps in size.  I might just portion a cup or so into a smaller container and leave it in the fridge at work so I won't have to worry about taking a single portion every day.

I spent so many hours cooking today.  Oh, so many.  The good news is that I now have 2 weeks' worth of meals ready to go!  I'd call that a good thing.