Are You Kidding Me???

Today is my wife's birthday, and to celebrate we went to the Cheesecake Factory.  Trying to somewhat stick to my eating regimen, I ordered what I thought would be a relatively healthy meal, the miso salmon platter.  Salmon, white rice, snow peas, and some sort of white sauce.  Doesn't sound too bad, right?  It was, in fact, delicious, one of the best salmon dishes I've ever had.  I limited myself to three bites of cheesecake that we were all sharing.

Imagine my surprise when I plugged that salmon meal into MyFitnessPal and saw that my dinner contained over 1600 calories.  That's one thousand, six hundred and seventy three calories.  More than my total daily allowance.  I was stunned.

Oh well, what's done is done.

The Downward Trend Continues

Down another 1.1 pounds at weigh-in this morning.  That's over 4 pounds total in 3 weeks, 10% of my goal!  I was dreading the weigh-in this morning, because I didn't do much walking this week, I wasn't expecting good results.  Apparently just the eating changes that I've made were enough.

Sorry, You've Been Replaced

Sorry Cookie, Puddin', Sweetie, you've been replaced...

The Get Hawt topic for this week is Substitutions, the assignment is to write about ways that we've found to substitute healthy foods in place of unhealthy ones.  This is something I've been actively trying to do for the past three weeks, and it's not as hard as you might think.

Consider lunch for example.  Mine used to consist of a "main" item, a frozen pot pie or a sandwich, some chips, and a can of Pepsi.  Every day, no matter what the food items were, there was a can of Pepsi in there somewhere.  No more.  I've replaced that can of pop with a bottle of water.  I think I've had four pops in the past three weeks.

Another substitution that was easy to make - yogurt in place of pudding.  I love those little Jello pudding cups - tapioca is my favorite.  I would almost always have one with lunch, or something equally sweet.  You're supposed to have dessert with every meal, right?  I've eliminated the pudding in favor of Yoplait yogurts.  Calorie-wise, I'm not sure there's much difference, but it seems like a good change to make.

The main course for lunch has become, at least for now, a large serving of fresh fruit.  I've found a 2-cup serving of grapes, watermelon, and chopped apples to be quite satisfying, and infinitely better than those pot pies.

There have been substitutions as home too.  The biggest has been in the area of side dishes.  As I've said before, my wife and I were raised on meat and potatoes.  Every meal had to have some kind of meat, and a side of potatoes, usually mashed.  Bake a chicken, serve with mashed potatoes.  Pork roast, goes with mashed potatoes.  Salmon, that calls for red potatoes.  See where I'm going with this?

We've swapped out the potatoes for a vegetable or rice side dish.  I've become a big fan of those frozen steamer bags that you pop in the microwave for 5 minutes.  They come in a variety of choices, they're easy to make, quite tasty, and as far as I can tell, they're not loaded up with fake ingredients.

The hardest substitution to make at home has been the meat.  We're trying to do at least two meals a week free of meat (not counting fish).  I've liked every alternative that I've tried so far, but not so with Missy.  It hasn't been easy finding recipes that we both like.  Most meat-free recipes use beans in place of meat, and she's not a huge bean fan.  One recipe that we did agree on was a Chipotle bean burrito (recipe forthcoming), very, very tasty, and completely meat free.  It will be on the menu again this week for sure.

Another pitfall at home is after-dinner snacking.  I can sit down with a package of those sugar wafer cookies and annihilate the entire package, no sweat.  Yeah, I know.  That has ended.  If there is any snacking after dinner now, it's popcorn.  Not that nasty microwave stuff either.  I'm talking real home-made popcorn, popped on the stove, with just a little butter and salt added.  Delicious, and not terribly unhealthy.

Giving up the goodies isn't easy, but it's worth it it.

How To Get Fruity At Work

Have I mentioned yet how hard it is to eat the right foods and ignore the wrong ones?  The past couple of weeks have been eye-opening for me in terms of some of the foods I've eaten over the years.  I'm focusing on cutting out fatty foods, heavily processed foods, cutting out junk foods (like POP, as a proper Minnesotan would say).  I'm also looking for easy ways to increase fruit and vegetable intake.

We've always tried to keep some sort of fresh fruit in the house, but honestly we were just going through the motions.  Grapes, apples, oranges, typically those get thrown into the bottom drawer of the refrigerator, forgotten until we rediscover then six weeks later.  Bananas sit on the counter until they resemble some sort of pudding, or possibly the leavings of a large animal.  We've eaten a lot of banana bread over the years.

The problem with fruit is that it takes effort.  If you're looking for a snack, and you have the choice between a bag of chips that are ready to eat, or grapes that you have to wash first, typically you're going to grab the chips.  Taking an apple or an orange to work may seem easy, but sitting at your desk with sticky fingers, dripping apple juice all over the place, you quickly decide it's not worth the effort.  That's been my experience anyway.

I read somewhere recently that a way to solve this dilemma is to prepare the fruits ahead of time.  Wash the grapes all at once and divide them into containers.  Make a fruit salad, again dividing into containers.  I've been doing that for the past two weeks with grapes, and it's worked perfectly.  I've had a cup of grapes with almost every lunch, with no extra effort on my part.  This week, I'm expanding that to include apples and watermelon.

Each of these containers contains 1 cup of grapes, 1/2 cup of apple chunks, and 1/2 cup of watermelon chunks.  That's 2 cups of fresh fruit in a grab-and-go ready-to-eat container.  This, a yogurt, and a handful of cashews will be lunch this week.  All it took was 10 minutes of prep work.

Now, back to my bottle of POP, the first one I've had since mid-week.

I'm A Bigger Loser Than I Was Last Week

In spite of being assaulted last weekend by Five Guys armed with fries, I managed to pull off a win this week by losing.  I'm two pounds lighter than I was a week ago.  That's three pounds total in two weeks, 7% of my goal!  Something I'm doing is working!

Works For Me

It's week 5 of the Get Hawt challenge, and the blog topic for this week is "what works for you" with regards to fitness and well-being.  I'm wrapping up my second full week of changes to diet and exercise; tomorrow morning will be my second weigh-in.  When I saw the topic for this week, my initial reaction was "aww, too bad, I won't know until Saturday if anything is working for me".

I've come to realize that's not necessarily true. There has been a noticeable change in my energy level this week.  I've been sleeping great, waking up before the alarm every day except this morning, something I haven't done in a long time.  I've been following the Two Hundred Situps program religiously, and today I did 107 situps.  ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN SITUPS!  Are you kidding me?  Should I mention the 71 pushups that I did after that?  This is phenomenal stuff for me.  Even better - it's getting easier to do them!

The hardest thing is the food.  I am trying very hard to stick to good foods, fruits, vegetables, fish.  I'm trying not to be a calorie-counter, but I am using calories as a guide to what's really bad.  Some things have surprised me at their calorie count, both good and bad.  Some things that I thought were acceptable are surprisingly heavy in calories.  Some things that I knew were bad are INCREDIBLY bad.  1400 calories from a cheeseburger and fries???  I had no idea.  To make it worse, there are temptations everywhere.  Brownies at work.  Free-flowing soda in every restaurant.  Cookies on the kitchen counter.  Co-workers wanting you to go to a burger joint for lunch.  You don't want to be rude. but you know that if you go you're going to eat something you shouldn't have.

It's obvious to me that what I'm doing is working.  I'm learning how to eat, I'm learning WHAT to eat, I'm learning easy ways to get some exercise, and I'm starting to feel the rewards.  I haven't had soda in three days, and I resisted the siren call of the cheeseburger today.  I wouldn't have cared three weeks ago.  I call that progress.

Cheesy Potato Soup w/Ham Sandwiches

I love potato soup, especially in the winter.  Actually, I'm a fan of most any thick, cream-based soup, but potato soup is definitely a favorite.  My standard recipe involves milk, heavy cream, lots of butter, and BACON!  Tastes great, but plays hell on the waistline.

Missy found a recipe in Cooking Light magazine for a cheesy potato soup.  Sounded good, and it's in Cooking Light, so it must be less unhealthy than the other stuff, right?  Turns out, it's pretty darned tasty too.

You can get the original recipe here, but I made a few small changes.  My version is below.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 3 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 6 cups chopped red potato (about 2 pounds)
• 2 1/4 cups 2% low-fat milk
• 2 cups fat-free, lower-sodium chicken broth
• 1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded reduced-fat sharp cheddar cheese
• 1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper
• 
  

• Preparation

1. Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat.
2. Add onion to pan; sauté 5 minutes or until onion is tender. Sprinkle with flour; cook 1 minute, stirring onion mixture constantly.
3. Add potato, milk, and broth to pan; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes.
4. Add 1/2 cup reduced-fat sharp cheddar cheese and ground red pepper; cook 2 minutes or until cheese melts, stirring frequently.

For the ham sandwiches, I used four sweet Hawaiian rolls, split them and baked at 400F for about 4 minutes.  A swipe of mayo and a swipe of mustard, a slice of ham on each (folded into fourths), and you have a perfect little ham sandwich to go with the soup.

There was enough for the two of us to eat for dinner two nights in a row, and it was delicious.  Sure to become a favorite in this house.