Posts Tagged ‘healthy’

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Weekly Weigh-In: Everything’s Bigger in Texas?

May 15th, 2010

Well – I’ve taken Reconstructing 30 on the road this weekend.  I’m in my adopted hometown of Houston!  I lived here for a little over three years, and I really did love it.  Houston isn’t for everyone, and it’s very much a car-based city, but it really has some amazing assets, including the Texas Medical Center (the world’s largest!), some really beautiful neighborhoods with fantastic parks and museums, and wonderfully friendly people.  If you’ve never visited Houston, here’s a taste of it – convention and visitors’ bureau style:

So I’m here to take care of a bit of business (if you know of anyone who wants to buy a beautiful 2BR/2BA condo near the Texas Medical Center and Rice University, send them my way!), but the nice side benefit is getting to see my wonderful friends here in Houston.  Which includes visiting some of Houston’s amazing restaurants…  Am I making perfect choices that would lead to consistent weight loss if I ate these things on a daily basis?  No.  Am I making mainly healthy choices, controlling portions, and eating better than I would have if I were here six months ago?  Absolutely.

And that starts to sum up the lessons of the past week for me, which are really the lessons that are the culmination of an experience that’s been going on for three or four weeks now.  » Read more: Weekly Weigh-In: Everything’s Bigger in Texas?

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Nutrition Monday: I’m a Chobani Convert

May 10th, 2010

No, I haven’t joined an obscure Eastern religion – I’m still a Methodist.  For those of you uninitiated in the Greek yogurt craze that’s sweeping foodies and health nuts across the nation, Chobani is a brand of Greek yogurt, usually with fruit on the bottom.  My nutritionist recommended Chobani to me way back at our very first appointment on my actual 30th birthday last October.  I’ve never been much of a yogurt person, thinking even Breyer’s or Yoplait tasted like flavored bad breath until I was well into my twenties, so this Greek yogurt thing scared me a little bit.  Greek yogurt is more pungent than regular yogurt, and I blogged months back on how I just couldn’t do Greek yogurt, or a Scandinavian (maybe it was Icelandic, I can’t rememeber) yogurt called Skyr that I tried.  You can read the details here, but long story short, I thought they tasted like @$$.

The last time I tried Chobani was literally the day after I first met with my nutritionist in October.  That was enough for me at the time.  Truly.  My nutritionist is amazing, so I thought we just happened to have different taste preferences when it came to this stuff.  Nutritionally, Greek yogurt has a much higher protein content than regular yogurt, so it fills you up more effectively (at least this is my layman’s understanding of the concept), but I had decided I didn’t like Greek yogurt, and that was that.  (I can be quite decisive with food when I want to be).  Then a series of seemingly innocuous conversations and readings of tweets got me to reconsider.  A couple of weeks ago I was » Read more: Nutrition Monday: I’m a Chobani Convert

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Nutrition Monday: Grandmother’s Goodies

April 19th, 2010

This past weekend was a bit of a nutritional challenge for me, but man was it good.  I went to visit my Grandmother – and being a good Southern family, we call her MaMa instead of Grandma or whatever other more generic grandmotherly names you might imagine.  Though in the South, MaMa is a pretty common term for grandmother.  It’s a little more casual and down home than the more formal “Grandmother” (though my other Grandmother, was always, well, “Grandmother,” and she was the warmest, most casual person you’d ever meet – a far cry from the steely soap opera “Grandmother”), but not straight up country like Mee-Maw.  Please.  We do have a little class.  ;-)

Anyhow, MaMa is an AMAZING Southern cook.  She measures nothing, even when baking cornbread and biscuits, but everything comes out perfectly.  This woman’s cornbread is to die for.  I actually imagine that when I do die, I’ll pass through the Pearly Gates and someone will hand me a pan of MaMa’s cornbread and tell me the calories no longer matter!  When we used to go visit when I was a kid, MaMa always had a huge meal waiting for us on the kitchen table of the farmhouse she and my PaPa lived in until I was a teenager.  They weren’t actually on a farm, but their property backed up to one, and my summers consisted of feeding the cows next door, helping PaPa in the garden, and helping MaMa shuck peas.  This was quite the adventure for the city kid, and I still long for it every now and then, even though I’m a dyed in the wool East Coast city type.  Anyway, the meal on that farmhouse kitchen table usually had anywhere from 5-7 vegetables, cooked with bacon fat, and always including fried okra, mashed potatoes, biscuits, cornbread, fresh sliced tomatoes, and 1-2 meats (either fried chicken, ham, or roast beef).  Did I mention the woman weighs all of maybe 120 pounds?  Further proof that life is not fair. » Read more: Nutrition Monday: Grandmother’s Goodies

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Nutrition Monday: Top Five Tips to Deal with Cravings

April 12th, 2010

This morning, I read the blog of a good blogger friend of mine, and it had to do with cravings and emotional eating.  Well, I’m an emotional eater, and while I have no scientific evidence for what I’m about to say, I’m willing to bet the vast majority of overweight/obese people also struggle with their emotional relationship to food.  For some it’s worse than others, I imagine, but I’m perfectly willing to admit I was a complete junkie when I began my reconstruction.  If I had a bad day at work, I had no interest in downing a bottle of wine or having a few stiff martinis.  Nope – an alkie, I’m not.  But if I had a stressful day, I would sure eat the hell out of a box of Fudge Stripe cookies, or a pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream, or most of a pizza, or…well…you get the ugly, way too honest picture.

This past week in fact, I was under a good bit of stress, and I ended up having a few snacks late at night that I normally wouldn’t now that I’ve seen the light, yelled hallelujah, and changed my ways.  The snacks were fairly healthy, portion controlled, and nowhere in the same zip code of a binge, but they were a few more calories than I normally would have eaten that late at night.  And they usually consisted of a craving of one sort of another.

Cravings are a fact of life.  We all have foods that we love that aren’t the greatest thing in the world for our health or our weight loss efforts, and it’s just a given that we’re going to crave those foods from time to time.  In the beginning of my journey – the cravings were intense and frequent.  Now they’re fairly rare, with varying levels of intensity.  The most recent was for a Chick-Fil-A chicken biscuit, a craving I tried to blame on my dog.  I’m a firm believer that as soon as you make a food forbidden, you’re going to crave it even more, so one of my little rules for myself before I even went to my nutritionist for the first time was that nothing would be totally off limits.  Over time, I’ve come up with my Top Five Tips to Deal with Cravings – which I’m sure are heavily influenced by tidbits of advice I’ve gotten from my nutritionist, as well as some of my readers, and I’ve put all that advice together with some of my own common sense: » Read more: Nutrition Monday: Top Five Tips to Deal with Cravings

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Weekly Weigh In – Buffet be Damned!!!

April 10th, 2010

This morning marked my first weekly weigh in since the mind-blowing Easter buffet that left me full for two days after.  I was a little concerned that it might have thrown off my weight loss efforts for the week, but I guess my stepped up training efforts for my 5K saved me, because I had dropped 2.4 pounds!!!  This Saturday, I was down to 251.8 (on my new scales – which weigh about 7.5 pounds heavier than the old ones) for a total loss since I began of 56.2 pounds!  I’m feeling really good about where I am with both nutrition and exercise recently, so things are going really well.

I did go for a session with my trainer this morning, and in a total 180 from my exercise mindset of three months ago, I decided to get up early so I could go for a run/walk in the park before I went to her office for the strength training session.  I was running late, so I only got in a mile and a half, but it felt great to get out this morning and do that.  And I got to test out my new toy, a Nike + SportBand, along with a new pair of Nike + running shoes!  If you’re not familiar with Nike +, it’s a system Nike and Apple have developed that consists of » Read more: Weekly Weigh In – Buffet be Damned!!!

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Reviewing Devin Alexander’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fattening!

April 1st, 2010

A few weeks ago, I started a little experiment.  I’ve always loved cookbooks, but some healthy cookbooks leave a little to be desired.  And I also have gotten so out of the habit of cooking at home, even though I love to cook, that I really needed some motivation to get back into cooking on weeknights.  So I decided to choose four healthy cookbooks (above), commit to cook one night a week at home using these books, and then review the books here so you can learn from my experience and decide whether or not to spend your hard-earned clams on any of these books.  So far, I’ve reviewed Rocco Dispirito’s Now Eat This! (miss…) and Ellie Krieger’s The Food You Crave (hit!).  This week, Devin Alexander’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fattening! was my dinner-time project.

I had no idea who Devin Alexander is.  I’m not a fan of The Biggest Loser, but apparently she was a nutritional consultant on that show.  She also lost a lot of weight herself and has maintained her loss for many years.  That’s a good sign, I think.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fattening! is the type of book you’d expect if Paula Deen wrote » Read more: Reviewing Devin Alexander’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fattening!

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Nutrition Monday: A Call to Action

March 29th, 2010


I'm Blogging National Nutrition Month

In honor of National Nutrition Month®, I’ve been devoting my Mondays in March to blogging on different nutrition topics.  For me, nutrition was the starting point of my reconstruction, and it remains the keystone of my efforts, joined in recent months by exercise.  These Nutrition Mondays have helped me personally refocus on nutrition, and I’ve enjoyed them so much that I’ve decided to make them a permanent (until I change my mind!) part of this blog!  So get ready for many more Nutrition Mondays to come.  There’s plenty for us to talk about, and if you have suggestions for a Nutrition Monday topic, send them my way!

This week, as 2010’s National Nutrition Month® comes to a close, I want to focus on a few policy and advocacy efforts where we can all make a difference as we attempt to change nutrition in this country!  I’m totally drinking Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution kool-aid (though I don’t think that stuff’s part of the Food Revolution…).  Here are three ways you can be a part of the change: » Read more: Nutrition Monday: A Call to Action

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Karma: I Hate You…

March 25th, 2010

Soooo…..  I’ve been kind of sick this week.  It’s not something I’ll be blogging about in detail (trust me – I’ll spare you), except to say, remember the post where I wrote about being kicked out of the ER for laughing at my dad’s rather humorous problem?  Well apparently it’s freakin’ genetic.  And painful as hell.  Crap.

I’ve been recovering, and I’m finally feeling almost up to snuff again after a few days laying low, but the doc has me off of exercise, both cardio and strength training, until I’m pain free.  I’m hopeful that will be this weekend, but I just have to wait and see.  Anyhow, right after my two consecutive back injuries greatly reduced my strength training routine, this really isn’t what I wanted to hear.  But I’ve been a good little patient, and I’ve avoided » Read more: Karma: I Hate You…

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Reviewing Ellie Krieger’s The Food You Crave

March 24th, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I committed to cook dinner once a week from one of the following cookbooks and then to report back here as to whether the cookbook was any good, in my humble opinion.

After making the low calorie black bean brownies from Rocco Dispirito’s Now Eat This!, I was a little gun shy about jumping into these healthy cookbooks again.  I still can’t believe that one’s on the NY Times bestseller list – to each his/her own, I guess.  But today, my faith in healthy cookbooks was not just restored, but I think I may have found the holy grail of healthy eating cookbooks – Ellie Krieger’s The Food You Crave.  Ellie also has a new book out (So Easy), but The Food You Crave is now a couple of years old and has received a couple of awards, including a coveted James Beard award.  You may also recognize Ellie Krieger from her Food Network show, Healthy Appetite.  I’ve seen the show a few times, but I’ve never really watched it as much as some of the other shows on the Food Network (which may explain why I’m now on this weight loss journey!).  Anyhow, around the time I was assembling the list of healthy cookbooks I’d review as part of this series, my nutritionist Rachel told me about The Food You Crave, and I added it to the list.

I’m sure glad I did!  I’ve been thumbing through the book for a week or so now, and first, it’s just really well done as a cookbook.  The book is easy to navigate and has beautiful photography, plus a number of good pages that provide tips for healthy eating and quick ideas for things like simple breakfasts, what to have for lunch, etc.  It’s really well-done.  And the food itself is » Read more: Reviewing Ellie Krieger’s The Food You Crave

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Weekly Weigh In – Breaking Records

March 20th, 2010

This morning I stepped on the scales, proud of the fact I’d broken fifty pounds lost and was sitting below 250 pounds for the first time since I can remember. I was hoping I may have dropped another half pound or so since I broke 250 on Wednesday, but that wasn’t the case – I was still at 249.5 pounds. Which is totally okay, two pounds down from last Saturday, and 51 pounds total lost know!

But in my quest to shave as much weight as possible off of my “official” Saturday numbers that I record and report to my nutritionist, I decided I’d walk around a bit, get moving, and come back to the scale to see if I couldn’t drop a little more before I broke down and ate breakfast. Senseless, I know, but how my aching to become skinny self operates sometimes. So I got dressed, went downstairs, milled around for a while, played with the dog, then » Read more: Weekly Weigh In – Breaking Records

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