The Daily Weigh-In

Part of doing WiiFit on a regular basis is getting on the WiiFit board and doing a body test.  Of course, this also involves being weighed.  A big part of  French Women Don't Get Fat mentions the American obsession with weight, and calorie counting, and the negative impact of being weighed daily.

Radagast the Cat doesn't like being weighed either                   

    

People's weights fluctuate a lot every day, and I'd imagine women especially in that time of the month, like me right now, would suffer the same levels of disappointment when, despite having been back on track, I'm up nearly 2 pounds!

Is this water weight? Is this a quick and violent repercussion from my splurge on Sunday at my friend's gaming session, that included cupcakes and pizza?

Either way, it leads me to thinking about further things that I can do in order to change up my eating and dieting routine.

Today, for lunch, I decided to eat raw again, choosing a familiar recipe from the book, Raw Food Made Easy for 1-2 People. Adam and I made Zucchini Pasta al Pesto.

I used a lemon peeler to pull the zucchini into long spaghetti-like ribbons.  Adam made the marinara sauce -- which wasn't cooked (obviously, as it was raw), and was comprised of:

2 ripe tomatos

3/4 red bell pepper

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon of basil

1 teaspoon of oregano

1/2 teaspon of salt

He blended it up, and we ate it all together!

The fact that I'm enduring the hormones isn't helping the fact that I'm feeling inappropriately guilty about gaining the 2 pounds, but I'm hungry hungry hungry to boot.

We'll see how healthy snacks go today, but especially since I think I've found my perfect wedding dress, I have a pretty firm goal in mind and really want to stick to that!

Overeating in America

Adam and I have both gained weight since we came back to the United States, and it's had us thinking a lot about the kinds of food changes we've made since being Stateside.

We've realized especially that there is just a lot MORE food being offered per serving and meal in the US.

Even the plates seem larger, and as we browsed through Restrauant Depot and Costco with some friends last week, the problems with American obesity were literally heavy in my mind.

Yes, a lot of these items are for restaurants and caterers, but there were tons of families there as well, filling their carts with bags of frozen chicken wings and boxes of microwaveable pizzas.

This sort of heavy industry technology is not available in Uganda or Congo, and from my experiences in France and Italy is only marginally used there.

Even marketing in America seems to be pushing towards overeating.  Get MORE for your MONEY!  Eat MORE! BUY MORE! QUANTITY OVER QUALITY! Buy Tons of Food To Put in your ENORMOUS FREEZER!

Is capitalism making us fat?

I inadvertently got stranded at Taco Bell during fourth of July weekend and was sort of horrified not only by the stale sliminess of the food, but of how many parents and their kids came to eat there.

Are these really the kinds of eating values we want to instill in our children?

Plus, Taco Bell seems eager to have people move to four meals a day?

Yes, the best thing to be eating at 2am is out-of-a-can Mexican food.

Yuuuuummmmmm.

One of the biggest emphases of French Women Don't Get Fat is that our American portions are too large.   Even last night, while cooking dinner, we had bought 2 pounds total of salmon fresh at Citarella, one of our local fancy Harlem supermarkets.

We had 2 friends over for dinner last night, and Adam was sure that we didn't have enough fish!  Which is sort of crazy, because the French Lady recommends that you eat 4oz of fish each, and we had eight ounces each!

So we continue along, starting and stuttering and going forward nonetheless.  We made our own dinner last night, heading back to cooking, and today I made mozzarella and tomato grilled cheese sandwiches on the frying pan, using PAM.

Snacks today have been yogurt & honey, and thinking of making gazpacho for tonight!

Back on Track

 

Running with my Mii-Coach!

Adam and I had been working on a pilot for Sci Fi with a friend of ours in Baltimore, that essentially consumed our lives every weekend and many of the weekdays in June.

It wasn't a shock when we started up Wii Fit and discovered that neither of us had done a BIT of Wii-Fitting since JUNE 1st!

Even worse, I had gained 7 pounds, and Adam had gained 17.  We realize that we CANNOT just let ourselves slack and eat whatever we want.  There are tons of people who can, but we are not them.

On set, we'd eaten some terrible food, had drunk soda, and had snacked all day long. Habits that we had before we went to Congo, that we fell into them again way too easily.

And, while I've been working out sporadically, the difficulty of the last G-Ball Melt it Off workout was really discouraging to me, and I haven't done it since. 

 

I might even wait longer to do it again - instead today, I did 30 minutes of Wii-Fit workouts, including running and my personal favorite, the hoola hoop. 

Then I did some DDR Extreme, enjoying the new songs available on my new game!

I am up over 250 now, which is also discouraging, but I'm PMSing and know that Adam and I will both be working harder over the next couple of weeks, spurred by the shame of weight gain!

The Clean Your Plate Club

 

The vegetarian option at my friend's wedding

A big problem for me is eating even after I am no longer hungry.  As a child my parents were really keen on enforcing the "clean your plate club" -- which, though probably useful in the Depression when food was scarce, is terrible for growing children because it does teach them to eat past the point of hunger.

So, as a part of my new food philosophy, I've been working to STOP eating when I am full. This past fourth of July, at a friend's wedding, the appetizers were delicious!  Ergo, I probably ate enough of them for a meal.  Especially these plum-brie cheese egg-roll type things... they were just fantastic!! 

When the meal came, my vegetarian option was manicotti, which was yummy but I realized as I ate that I really, really wasn't hungry. So I put down my fork, and I stopped eating! This was my leftover food that I left behind and didn't eat!

Bravo!

Special events and traveling are always difficult because you're out of your element, everything revolves around eating and you don't have your workout stuff with you.

Dancing at weddings is always a good start, though!

Healthy Summer Grilling

One of the most fantastic things about the summer is grilling, but usually I'd worry about a lot of calories and fat. 

I'm a mostly vegetarian, too, but with my kick towards healthy organic food and staying away from overprocessed garbage, I needed to find some exciting alternatives.

Honestly, if you're not eating meat, and instead are eating Soy Dogs and Soy Burgers and these other products that seem to have so many chemicals in them to give them the taste and texture of meat... well, why bother?

One of my absolute favorite things to grill is BEETS.  We bought these beets & corn at Butler's Orchard the day of.  They were extremely reasonably priced, too - the corn was 12 for less than $6!

For really tasty beets, you leave them on the grill between 1.5-2 hours, and they're just warm and delicious.  Though they definitely stain your fingers and teeth if you're not careful!

The corn is also delicious - you need to wet it down and get rid of some of the hairs before grilling it, and grill it with the husk ON.  Be careful, though, it can catch fire!!

Down to my Core

This is one of my serious problem areas. Sure, it looks okay when I'm standing, but once I sit down, BOOM! Baby got back.  And front.  And sides.  It's almost like a comical mouth.  I call it BOCA JONES.

I've been finding that, since my time doing the "10 in 10" from Mitch Gaylord, I'm feeling a lot of tightness and soreness in this area, which is a good thing! 

Plus, it felt really easy, 10 minutes yesterday, so I bravely ventured into the HIGH VELOCITY CARDIO workout today.  I've got the 2-pound resistance ball.

FAIL!  The countdown clock said 40:37 seconds left when I discoverd that I was TOO FAT to be doing this workout.  Or rather, too out of shape, and my fridge did not proffer more cold water fast enough in between sets.

  

                      Even that girl in the back is tired, and she's a beanpole!

So I've got it on pause, and I figure that I'll go back and do s'more later on today once I've farted around on the internet like a lazy person.

Adam and I are still on the "Recession Diet" of shopping with spare dollars and change at the local bodega, so I had spaghetti with olive oil for lunch and breakfast was a baked potato we made last night.

I hope we'll have money by tonight, so that we can go and get some real groceries and maybe make something with no starch in it.  Despite playing about 40 minutes of Wii Tennis together last night (SO much fun), we ate baked potatoes with vegan worchestire sauce and mozzarella cheese on them at midnight.

Not a terrible thing to eat, but not good to be eating at midnight!

Tuesday, June 30th

Today I received in the mail a product I had sleepily ordered off of an infomercial at 4 am -- the

MITCHELL GAYLORD MELT-IT-OFF BALL

It seemed like a decent enough thing, despite reviews about the company itself foisting one of those automatic-payment-monthly-vitamin-supplement-scams on the people who purchase it.  So I'll have to keep an eye on it for sure.

I did the intro and the 10-minute workout, which uses this 2 pound ball and the body's own resistance in a nice, simple, sort of fun routine.  It's of course difficult to work out in New York apartments - there isn't a lot of free space, and even finding a space where I can stretch up without hitting our gorgeous wrought-iron chandelier is difficult.

But overall, the workout was good, and I can still feel the ache in my core muscles.

I had lunch with an old friend at Sarabeth's, and I need to start learning how much I should eat when I go out.  I tend to clean my plate, even if I'm full! My friend who is 7 months pregnant only ate half of her omelette, and one of her four pieces of bread.

I, of course, ate everything! Even the sour cream!

Food

I did only have 2 meals today, though.  A spanish omelette, 2 pieces of sourdough toast, and tea at Sarabeth's.

Adam and I, strained for cash right now, had spaghetti with a homemade sauce with kidney beans in it for dinner.  I had two helpings, but they were both small.

Oh, and an apple.

Workout

I spent about 25 minutes playing DDR today, until I was too tired to be coordinated enough to play.

I spent 15 minutes on the Mitch Gaylord Resistance Ball




And now I'm going to play Wii Fit tennis!  Good first day!

A New Leaf

It's been over a year since I've posted here, filled with adventures in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

While there, my fiancé and I each lost weight, and also got engaged! We're getting married in December 2010 and I have decided that if I can lose weight eating in Congo when I'm stressed and often unhappy, that I can lose weight in the US too!

Additionally, I love playing video games, and RPGs both alone and with Adam, which is not a hobby conducive to losing weight.  Typically on nights when we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, we'll eat crap, visit 7-11 at 2am, and generally sit around, inactive.

We also play World of Warcraft, and pre Congo, we would play for an entire afternoon on the weekends and order in food that we ate, still sitting and playing.

Congo got us up and on our feet a lot more, a habit I'd like to continue. I figure with over a year until our wedding that I can make it a real priority.

I've also been inspired by my friend Al, who has been losing weight by playing Dance Dance Revolution and doing Wii Fit.

Playing video games AND losing weight?  Sounds like a deal to me!
\,
Plus, while in the past I've been really gung-ho on deprivation diets, I feel like long-term it will never be sustainable.  Adam and I read French Women Don't Get Fat in Congo, so we'll be trying to cook more often.

A longer welcome message than I was intending, but a good beginning nonetheless!