June 27, 2013

June 27, 2013 - Happy Birthday to my most wonderful sister, Andrea!! :)

Ah, day two. Not always the best day, but probably better than day 3.

I rode my bike to work today. According to Google it is 3.2 miles from home to work. I know it isn’t much, but it is better than driving the three miles. The great thing is that it takes about as long (or short) as driving does if I park for free by my cousins’ home. I have been riding my bike to work since April, but more steadily since May, and my legs have gotten noticeably stronger which makes me feel good. I also took a quasi-leisurely bike ride on my lunch break for about 40 minutes. I have ridden my bike 11.8 miles today.

Speaking of feeling good, my trip to the bathroom was not as good as I had anticipated. I do recall this from my other jumps into paleo eating. Hopefully my body will adjust quickly, but in my past experiences there is about a one week time period of intestinal upset. Is paleo worth this experience? Yes. As Dr. Loren Cordain has said of the paleo diet, “People lose body fat, gain muscle, strength and endurance while virtually all indices of health improve.” Let me repeat that last part – all indices of health improve. I don’t know if this is entirely true. Others say that we should eat whole grains, low-fat dairy, and legumes to maintain a healthy diet. Admittedly, the paleo diet is lacking in Vitamin D. That is likely because our ancestors had plenty of that from the good old sun. I’m taking supplements.

Today’s meal plan is as follows:

Breakfast:

2 egg omelet with chives, tomato, cheddar cheese, parsley

½ grapefruit

Snack:

Red grapes

Lunch:

Tuna (5 oz can) with lemon-pepper salt

Tomato

Celery with peanut butter

Snack:

Berries (rasp and black)

Dinner:

Chicken with red pepper sauce

Apple Honey Cole Slaw

This is what it looked like:

Okay. So? I had cheese. It was a small amount. I’m stating right now that when I do paleo, I still eat cheese because if I didn’t, I’d be a very sad person. I don’t eat a ton of it, but I do eat it. I assume you caught the other two non-paleo items, the lemon-pepper salt, and peanut butter. I have no excuse for the L-P Salt other than to say that it was better to eat that than mayo with the tuna. The peanut butter - we have all natural peanut butter in the house right now and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend $10 on a jar of almond butter when we already have peanut butter. Once the PB is gone, I’ll switch to the other. In fact, I saw that with a gold coin at Big Y, you can get a jar of Barney Butter for $3.49, so I’ll be going back there within the next few days to get that deal. My Grandma gave me a gold coin. Awwww she loves me. J

I was more satisfied with today’s breakfast, though I was still feeling hungry around 10:30, but not terribly hungry. I waited until about 11:30 to start eating my grapes. I ate slowly (for me) and didn’t need lunch until 12:50 – a vast improvement from yesterday’s hunger pangs at 11:30.

I also ate lunch slowly. The tuna was pretty dry, even with tomato in it, and I found myself kind of forcing it in. I guess canned tuna isn’t my favorite food anyway. I enjoyed the celery/PB quite a bit, but didn’t finish it all during lunch because I was too full. Probably because there was so much tuna. I didn’t feel the need/want to eat the berries until 4:00. When I initially looked at my meal plan for the day, I was nervous that I was going to be hungry. I was wrong.

Dinner took about an hour to make, but it was excellent. I have invited some of my family to try some tomorrow for dinner.

After supper I went to go for a walk with my mom as my hubby was sleeping. Then I had a popsicle… not paleo, but refreshing. I did get ones made with natural fruit. It tasted very sweet to me. All in all, I’d say this was a successful day. My mood is much improved… like a depression cloud is lifting. That is wonderful since I’ve had a slight depression since October. Happy on paleo!

June 26, 2013, A Fresh Start

June 26, 2013

Two years ago my waist was 26.5 inches. I worked pretty hard to get it there by eating paleo for a month or more. I did this to fit into a costume that had been made for me in 2009.

One year ago, I ate whatever I felt like and didn’t care much about gaining weight because I was going to hike the Appalachian Trail with my fiancé. We hiked over 1,300 miles of it and had horrid eating habits, but it was kind of necessary to keep pack weight down. Calculating calories per weight was a big deal, so we ate Pop Tarts every morning (at the end 4 every morning!), a cheese or peanut butter sandwich at lunch, and Ramen Noodles every night. We drank water and when we were in town, soda. Other town foods included pizza, burgers, Chinese cuisine, chips, cookies... anything fatty we could find. By the end, we were both definitely craving vegetables and fruits. We did carry apples sometimes, but they are heavy. I lost about 15 pounds on the trail and was pretty much at my ideal weight. I suspect if we had healthier foods, I’d have been the healthiest I’d been in my life.

Currently my waist is 29.5 inches, but I am getting a gut which is below my waistline. My hips are 42 inches. I weigh approximately 144 pounds (or more), the same weight I was in 2007 when Rox and I started our month long paleo experiment. You can read about that in the LiveJournal, “Milovia” if you are curious.  It starts in July 2007. I’m six years older now and I’m pretty sure my metabolism has changed since then.

I’ve been exercising more than I have been since October (when we stopped hiking), but eating too many processed foods; gaining weight, hanging on to fat. I mostly cut out soda and candy, but since then I feel like I've gained even more weight. So, what next? Paleo it is. Healthy, feel good, difficult to maintain paleo. Starting today. Perhaps not the greatest day in the world to start since I only got about 6 hours of sleep, but if I don’t start now, I might not start at all.

I am going to post my progress and recipes that I have made and if I like them or not. Today’s meal plan is as follows:

Breakfast:

1 banana, sliced

½ peach (it was rotting), cut into chunks

¼ cup walnuts

1 Tbsp honey (approx)

Mix all together, eat

Tea ... it was black, but I will start drinking green tea as I hear this can curb appetite and help prevent fat from settling in.

Snack: baby carrots

Lunch:

½ avocado

Lemon juice

2 hard boiled eggs

1 Tbsp parsley

1 stalk of celery

Ground pepper to taste, more parsley on top

Mix avocado and lemon juice together until a paste. Add other ingredients and serve over lettuce. (I used Boston lettuce. Can also use endive)

Snack: berries (rasp, black, and straw)

Dinner:

1/3 lb salmon

Ginger root

Honey

Olive oil

Make marinade out of ginger, honey, and oil. Marinade salmon for ... however long you feel like it. Wrap salmon in foil, place on baking sheet, and bake at 350F for 20 minutes or until cooked through – it will flake.

Kale

Dessert: apple

Breakfast: was great, as I already knew it would be. It kept me full for about 2 hours. I’m usually hungry by 10:30 anyway, so at that time I had my snack of baby carrots, hoping that it (and water) would stave off my hunger for another 2 hours. It didn’t work completely. I had about 24 oz of water and had to pee 3 times in those two hours. By 12:30 I was pretty darn hungry.

This is a note to self: eat more filling foods in the morning!

Lunch: the egg/avocado salad wasn’t bad. It could have used some salt, though. The original recipe called for bacon, and that would have been an improvement. My husband even made bacon this morning (jalapeño bacon), but I didn’t use any. Because I was so hungry, I ate very quickly which made me feel kind of sick.

A NY Times article states: A 2008 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association examined the feeling of fullness in 30 healthy women when they ate fast and slow meals on separate days. The fast meals resulted in higher caloric intake but less satisfaction.

Another note to self. Fast eating is not healthy.

Dinner: SO DELICIOUS!! There may have been a bit too much honey, but it was really good. I made Krispy Kale and it came out really well. I was very pleased with our supper.

Today’s meal plan puts me approximately 300 calories over what my other weight control program had me eating. Honestly, it is difficult to believe that my meal plan for today would pack on any kind of pounds. I understand that walnuts, the avocado, and olive oil are high in calories, but they are healthy foods in my book.

All-in-all, I feel great! Tired (from lack of sleep, I assume), but great. I didn’t do any exercise today, but I will tomorrow. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.