January 2, 2016 – Thinner in 30

So, feeling all New Years resolutiony and all, yesterday I began reading the book Thinner in 30: Small Changes That Add Up To Big Weight Loss in Just 30 Days.  I received the book free to review from Netgalley.  I read the introduction and learned that the author, who seems to brag a lot about herself which kind of annoys me, but I am going to look beyond that, is presenting a tip a day and you should do the one the first day and then do that plus number two the second day and so on until by day 30 you are doing all 30 things.  She suggests that you do not skip around so I am not even going to read ahead.  I will just read each day and do it.  I realize that may not be possible if some of them require purchasing something that I don’t have, but I will leap that hurdle when I get to it.  So, yesterday I read Day One, which is to drink 20 sips (a strange arbitrary amount) of water every morning as soon as you get up – before you even get out of bed.  Obviously it was too late to do that but I am counting it as day one anyway and going on. I always  have water on my nightstand so I was all set this morning. Unfortunately, I did not remember to drink water as soon as I got up.  For one thing, I am on vacation so I did not have my alarm set and I actually slept in, a luxury I rarely am able to do, and I did not remember to drink water until I drank a few sips of coffee and my brain turned on.  Then I got a glass of water and drank it and went back to  my coffee.  The water is supposed to rehydrate you.  I am now supposed to drink water every morning as soon as my alarm goes off before getting out of bed and doing anything.  I’m not sure if I will ever remember to do that, but hopefully if I write about it every day eventually I will begin remembering to do it.

Today I read Day two which is to keep a food diary.  I have been doing that on and off for quite a few years on my food diary blog.  I don’t really share that with anyone – it is just a record keeping thing for myself.  I have found it helpful, but also difficult to keep up with.  I will begin again today recording my eating.  I know it is supposed to help me to see what I am eating that I should not be eating and I have done it enough that I know what I am eating that I should not eat when  I eat it.  I just eat it anyway. I can list my problem foods ahead of time.  Sugar.  Mainly in the form of cookies, chocolate and wine.   Here is the link to my food diary blog: http://herdingcats-fooddiary.blogspot.com/

 

 

January 1, 2016

Well, when school started, and I had to get my kids to school and myself to work – I work 3 jobs while school is going on, I no longer had time for this blog, although I did keep reading and working on my diet and exercise.  Since I began this blog, 6 months ago, I have lost 10 pounds.  I have kind of gotten stuck there at that weight and I really need to drop 10 to 15 more pounds.  I tried the whole vegan diet, and while it sounds good in theory, it is too difficult for me to put into practice, especially because I want to eat more whole, healthy foods and most vegans eat lots of fake processed foods – fake meats, fake cheeses, fake milks, and lots of beans, which just disagree with me.  So, I am back to a more regular diet, heavy on veggies, but including some dairy and meats.  The most recent book about nutrition that I read is The Dorito Effect by Mark Schatzker.  My review for that is on my book review blog http://becauseisaidsothathswhy.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-dorito-effect-by-mark-schatzker.html 

I think it brings up some terrific points and I hope that lots of people will read it and that we can convince the food industry to start working on producing healhy, flavorful, real foods.

 

Day 35 Forks Over Knives The Cookbook

My house is full of vegan cookbooks.  I have been checking out every vegan cookbook I can get from three different libraries – the one where I work, another library which is closer to my house, and one that is on my husband’s way home from his work – 3 different cities. Anyway, most of the cookbooks are not good. However, I did find one that I plan to buy – and I already have another cookbook from the same author – Terry Walters. I have her Clean Food cookbook and now I plan to purchase her new book, Eat Clean Live Well. So far I have made two different cookie recipes from it – vegan and gluten free. Tonight for dinner I made things from 3 different cookbooks – roasted carrots from Oh She Glows – and I added in some mushrooms with that, and baked okra and potato hash from Thug Kitchen, and Cauliflower-Cream butternut squash from the Forks Over Knives cookbook. That last one was supposed to have pasta with it, but I left out the pasta and I added soaked cashews and lots of spices and vinegars to the cream sauce and I totally loved it! The cream sauce – per my adjusted recipe – is to cook cauliflower in veggie broth – not even quite enough to cover it at first because it will shrink as it softens. Cool it and pour the whole thing in the vitamix and add some soaked cashews and blend it all and pour it over the cooked onions, bell peppers and butternut squash. Then, since it was rather flavorless, I added a bit of apple cider vinegar and balsamic vinegar, turmeric, smoked paprika, salt, pepper and ground cumin. It was kind of like a curry sauce. So yummy!

Day 31 Walk Your Butt Off!

While I think this book is mostly common sense and overly simplistic, I think it could be good for someone who is currently not exercising or dieting at all.  I personally like the little section of exercises because they are easy enough for me to do.  Instead of push-ups, it has you start with a wall press – and while I cannot do a push-up, unless it is a push-up bra and even that is not for me, I can do wall presses – like a champ!  You can then work your way down to push-ups.  It also shows “door squats”  which involves holding onto the handles of an open door to do squats, which takes care of the balance issue that I had in the past while trying to do squats the way I saw on an online video.

I am also still listening to The First 20 Minutes book.  They discuss a large variety of exercise studies, many of which make me wonder who on earth thought that one up and why?  There are studies of stretching before exercising and cooling down afterwards – both of which, surprisingly make no difference and the stretching actually makes performance worse. There is also a study in which they had men drink low fat chocolate milk after exercising.  Not surprisingly, they had plenty of volunteers for that one and they eagerly complied with the instructions.  I am guessing that one was funded by the dairy industry.

I am still walking daily although today I only walked for 30 minutes with 4 bursts of speed – ok – jogging – included.  Today I jogged past 5 houses each time, which is double the amount of houses that I jogged past earlier this week.

Day 29 – The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can: Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer

I am not an exercising type of person really.  I do not enjoy exercising and I sometimes wonder if the people who say they enjoy it are lying to themselves or just nuts (no offense intended.) This book, however says that some people are genetically predisposed to enjoy exercise more than others and some of us are more genetically predisposed to be couch potatoes. I believe that I fall into the latter category.  About 30 percent of our ability to be fit and healthy is genetic and there is not much we can do it, but the other 70 percent is up to us.  Since I began this blog a month ago I have lost 8 pounds.  That is due to changes in both diet and exercise.  I started out walking 15 – 20 minutes a few evenings a week, which increased to longer evening walks – around 25 to 30 minutes. Then it got too hot to walk so much in the evenings and I switched to morning walks, then morning and evenings when it is not too hot. I now walk for 35-45 minutes in the mornings and 20 to 25 minutes in the evenings. I am not a morning person either.  I sometimes see other people out walking and jogging or running in the morning and they look all energetic and happy and I am often just trudging along forcing myself to go step by step, trying to wake up.
I also follow what I call my stairmaster plan – I always walk up one more flight of stairs than I need to any time I am near any flight of stairs and park my car as far away as possible except when there is a shaded spot available closer. Dr. Fuhrman recommends weight bearing exercise and says that walking up and down stairs counts for that.  He suggests that if you have stairs in your house you walk up and down them 10 times in a row three times a day.  I did that once yesterday evening.

The book The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can: Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer, suggests that short intervals or bursts of speed can be very beneficial so I jogged 3 times during my walk this morning. I can jog past 2 or 3 houses. That is rather pitiful. I think I need a sports bra. I also attended my first yoga class this week. I plan to purchase some yoga pants to wear to it instead of loose shorts and wear a tighter shirt and a sports bra if I get one the next time I do yoga. At this point, I plan to go to the beginner yoga class once a week and other classes when I can fit them in.

Day 28 My New Roots

This is a lovely cookbook that I got from the library.  I am considering buying it, but I need to make a few recipes from it first.  The author is from Denmark and uses European and American measurements in most places, but not always.  How much is a knob of coconut oil?

I am using one of her recipes to fit into the eating plan from The End of Dieting by Joel Fuhrman.

I really like what Joel Fuhrman has to say and am working on following his diet plan. It says to: 1. Eat a large salad every day as your main dish in one meal. 2. Eat at least a half cup, but preferably closer to 1 cup of beans a day. I don’t eat much beans right now so I will have to work up to that. I don’t really even like beans. However, I found a recipe that I am making tonight – from the cookbook My New Roots – Fully Loaded Breakfast Bars – they have chia, oats, and a can of white beans in them. I figure I can eat beans if they are in a cookie, which is close to what these breakfast bars will be like – I hope. 3. Eat one large serving of lightly steamed green veggies a day. 4. Eat at least 1 ounce of nuts and seeds per day if female – 1.5 oz if male. 5. Eat mushrooms and onions every day. I have not yet read why one needs to eat mushrooms and onions daily – that one seems a bit odd to me. 6. Eat three fresh fruits a day.
Right now that sounds like a lot of food – and I don’t know if I will get all of it in today because I had a late lunch and really just may eat a bean cookie for dinner, but perhaps I can stir fry some mushrooms, onions and greens to go with it. He says steamed veggies, but you can’t steam onion and mushroom. I do have his Eat For Life Cookbook but have not yet gotten very far in it – need to browse through it some more.

Day 27 The End of Dieting

I am still listening to The End Of Diabetes and I picked up two other books by the same author – The End of Dieting and The Eat to Live Cookbook.  I am still horrified by what I am reading.  The author, Dr. Fuhrman makes a very good case against eating any animal products.  He explains how they are tied to higher incidence of diabetes, heart disease and cancer.  He also explains how treating diabetes with insulin actually makes the problem worse instead of better.  He tells why the SAD diet is so horribly unhealthy and shows that even a vegan diet can be unhealthy if you eat processed foods and don’t make sure your diet is filled with nutrient dense foods.  It makes me feel even more doomed.  In the photo above is my lunch from today – a large salad topped with sunflower seeds, hemp seeds and chia seeds and some quinoa with butternut squash (grown in my backyard garden).

I took my first yoga class this evening. It was a beginner class.  It is a kinder, gentler, quieter way of torturing your body.  Balancing is the hardest part for me. I totally need a sports bra and tighter clothing for yoga. Every time we did downward dog I was staring into my open loose tank top at my underwire bra which felt quite uncomfortable while doing yoga. I don’t even want to think about what I looked like from behind since I had loose shorts on.  You live and you learn. I realize  that I need some other form of exercise besides my morning walks.  Right now is the hottest time of the year and this morning when I went outside for my walk at 6 am it was 82 degrees.  That is just too hot for so early in the morning.

Day 26 The End of Diabetes

I recently started listening to this book and I am horrified!  I already knew that I am at risk of developing diabetes due to my family history and the fact that I had gestational diabetes in my second and third pregnancies, but this book has shown me how high my risk of getting diabetes is if I do not change my eating habits drastically now.  According to Dr. Fuhrman, even being 5 or 10 pounds overweight can set off diabetes in someone who is prone to it.  I am sure that I fall into that high risk category and even though I have lost 7 pounds in the past 25 days, I need to lose about 20 more pounds.  Why is it so much easier to gain weight than to lose it?  I can gain weight effortlessly.  It is so easy to gain weight. The only time in my life I ever had to try to gain weight, ironically, was in the beginnings of my pregnancies when I was so sick that I dropped around 10 pounds each time.  In my first pregnancy, I started off at 110 pounds (I am 5 feet tall so that was a healthy weight for me) and when I went to the doctor weighing 100 pounds, he threatened to hospitalize me and feed me intravenously if I lost any more weight.  I actually did lose about 3 more pounds, but managed to gain it back before I visited the doctor again.  Other than during my pregnancies when food itself was totally repugnant and I had to force myself to eat in order to nourish the babies that I carried, I have gained weight effortlessly and unintentionally.  Twenty five days ago I weighed 140 pounds.  That is what I weighed when I gave birth to my first child.  I do not need to get down to 110 pounds again, but my optimum weight should be between 115 to 120 pounds right now – probably closer to 115.  So, I still need to lose 18 pounds.  Until I started listening to this book, I thought that I was not doing too bad because on those height and weight charts that show normal, overweight and obese zones according to BMI (body mass index), I am in the overweight category, but will fall into the normal category once I am below 128 pounds.  That is just five pounds away! Based on that, I decided that I am not too bad off.  I think that conclusion was wrong.  I really am at a very high risk of developing diabetes right now.  The last time I had blood work done, which was about 2 months ago, the doctor said my blood sugar level is higher than it had been in the past.  It is not in the diabetic or even pre-diabetic range, but the range in between there – above normal, and therefore, not a good place to be.  The doctor recommended that I take vitamin D3 to help with my blood sugar levels.  I am not sure what that does, but I am taking it.

In this book, Dr. Fuhrman also mentioned that waist size is an indicator of health. Sadly, I have the dreaded apple body shape where excess weight stays in my belly.  I have read elsewhere that the apple body shape is at highest risk of heart attack.  My family history, along with my current diet and lifestyle, is killing me.  My mother’s father and one of her sisters and her brother all had type 2 diabetes.  My  mom also had diabetes as a result of the chemotherapy medications she was on.  She died at age 38 of cancer.  My father died of a heart attack as did his father and uncles.  I feel doomed and I worry about my children’s and my husband’s health as well.  I currently take medications for high blood pressure and for high cholesterol.  I want to be able to quit taking those medications.  I am not sure if that is even possible, but it is my goal.

So far, I have made the following changes in my lifestyle. I now walk every morning between 30 to 45 minutes.  I sometimes walk in the evenings if it is not too hot.  This week, it will be too hot with temperatures over 100 degrees.  I am following my “stairmaster plan”.  Even though I don’t go to a gym right now, I work in a 5 story building.  I have always walked up the stairs rather than taking the elevator, but I only work on the 2nd floor so that is just one flight of stairs.  For my stairmaster plan, I always walk up one more flight of stairs than I need to any time I am near any flight of stairs.  Even if I am going downstairs, I walk up to the next floor and then down.  I also started parking higher in the parking garage so I have more stairs to climb to get to my van.  When I am out running errands, I try to park as far away as possible so that I have to walk farther to my car – unless there is a shaded parking spot closer.  In the summer in Texas, parking spots in the shade are the priority whenever they are available. I have also found a yoga studio that is about a 15 minute drive from my house and I plan to take some classes there.

I have already made some good dietary changes.  I tend to eat a fairly decent diet.  I don’t drink sodas or sugary drinks and I don’t eat beef.  My biggest  problems have been snacking after dinner, cheese and chips and sweets. So, now I brush my teeth immediately after each meal to discourage myself from eating anything else after it.  I am now trying out a vegan diet.  I cut way back on processed foods and would like to cut them out completely, but honestly, that requires a lot of time and preparation and I am not there yet.  I am hoping that the vegan diet will be the tipping point that will make a big difference for me along with my continuing to eat fewer and fewer processed foods.  I am also trying to feed my family healthier foods.  My husband’s blood sugar is also up a bit, in the same range as mine.  The past few days I have been serving some vegan processed foods to my kids with minimal success.  I plan to keep trying to make the diet of my whole family much healthier.

Day 25 The Hip Chick’s Guide To Macrobiotics

Somehow I missed a few days on this blog.  I did, however continue on my other blog which is a food diary.  I listened to part of the Hip Chick’s Guide to Macrobiotics as an audio book.  I think that macrobiotics is a mostly vegan diet except with fish too.  However, there is also this whole yin and yang spiritual stuff to it.  Ok, but not really my thing.

I have decided once again to really try to be vegan and to get my family to eat at least some vegan meals.  That is a difficult task since my youngest daughter could easily live as a carnivore.  She would be fine with a diet of only meat, dairy and sugar, chocolate of course, and a bit of fruit in smoothies.  Anyway, I decided to try fake vegan foods again because even though I would prefer to eat only whole foods, after listening to Veganist and seeing some videos of how animals that we eat are treated in factory farming conditions, I have realized that meat and dairy from conventional factory farms are also highly processed foods.  The way they are treated is disgusting and if you saw what the chickens looked like you would not want to eat them or their eggs.  Also, what they are fed is gmo processed grains and just ick.

The fake foods, however, are so fake.  I was hoping that since it has been a few years since I tried them, they might be better now.  I have checked out a plethora of vegan books and cookbooks and spent a small fortune at the grocery store on vegan foods in the past few days.  I am drinking my coffee with So Delicious French Vanilla Coconut Milk Creamer in it.  It does not taste like coconut milk or vanilla.  It is not very good.  It just has this strange fake taste to it.  Yesterday I ate a toasted cheese sandwich made with a Daiya Cheddar Style Slice on it.  It did melt, and the taste was ok, but the texture had this disgusting oily sticking to the inside of my mouth and throat feeling that was rather dreadful.  I also got Peas Please chip things – they are green puffy things shaped kind of like pea pods that taste salty and stale and Chickpea Snacks that are salty and crunchy and not good.  I got some Gardein Crispy Chick’n Sliders for the kids.  They said they were not really great, but they ate them. The So Delicious Coconut Milk Minis are little bitty fake ice cream sandwiches.  They do taste like coconut and they are ok.

One thing the macrobiotic chick said about the whole yin and yang thing is that if we eat a food that is either yin or yang – not sure what that means anyway – that it can make us crave a food that is the opposite to balance that out.  After eating vegan all day yesterday, I was still quite unsatisfied after dinner and ate a variety of snack foods trying to find one that would make me feel satisfied.  I ate a bit of actual real non-vegan cheese – it was a small bit – the end of the smoked gouda and it was good, but still, after eating empty calories that I did not need, I did not really feel satisfied – just guilty.

Day 23 Exploring Veganism

So, after listening to Veganist and realizing how really revoltingly the animals that we eat are treated, I am once again exploring veganism.  Main problem – fake disgusting meat and dairy substitutes.  And the books all list them and recommend using them.  Ick.  I have not perused through this whole stack yet and I hope to find some better options in them.  Today I did eat a vegetarian diet.  That is one step towards veganism.  However, Veganist explains that dairy cows and chickens that lay eggs are also treated deplorably.  Ick.