*lip wobble*

Ow.

Anyway. I stayed up late Friday night and ended up eating the rest of my pizza at midnight. I added some bacon crumbles. Mm.

Saturday morning I woke up and had some Liberte yogurt. Then I didn’t eat anything until dinner time, after a long nap. I had this sammich and grapes:

The sandwich was made with lettuce, tomatoes, havarti cheese, roast beef, and dijon mustard, on gluten-free brown rice bread. This was strange bread. It tasted fine, but it was sweetened with fruit juice and had the texture of very heavy fruit-based bread–there were squares of it breaking off and thudding onto the plate as I bit into the sandwich. It didn’t stay together very well. This is the only kind of gluten-free bread I saw at Trader Joe’s; if I decide to try gluten-free bread again, I’ll check to see what Whole Foods offers.

Of course, shortly after I ate this I was hungry again, because I’d hardly eaten all day. I had another yogurt and a Pure bar, because biting into the sandwich + acid from the tomatoes + dijon mustard = aggggh my mouth hurts.

Much later in the evening, I decided to put together a proper meal. I’d picked up some more Asian stir-fry veggies at Trader Joe’s, so I cooked them up with a few steak tips. So glad I got steak tips instead of stew beef like I did last time–these were tender instead of chewy, so they didn’t hurt my mouth and make me want to cry.

This morning I got up and had another yogurt for breakfast (dude, life is simpler when you eat the same thing for breakfast every day).

Then I took Heath on a walk around the neighborhood, and while we were out, I saw a hawk launch itself out of a tree with a dead squirrel in its talons. It was pretty awesome (well, not for the squirrel)–it was already a beautiful day outside and the local wildlife just added to it.

After our walk, I put together a mishmash of lunch items.

Three-layer hummus and tomatoes in one section…carrots in another…strawberries and cream dip in the third…

…and roast beef, havarti, and dijon mustard in the fourth.

This was good but painful to eat. Beh.

Sometime this afternoon I had my third nap of the weekend…I love napping in a puddle of sunshine next to my dog! I’m going to sell him to a gang of roving street musicians if he doesn’t stop his random barking at nothing, though…

Dinner was a big plate of EPIC FAIL. See, I thought that if I cut up my leftover chicken thigh and cooked it up with some mixed veggies, and then added a chunked up pieced of fresh mozzarella and some marinara sauce, everything would be okay.

And it turned out perfectly edible, but the cheese half-melted in the pot and then glued itself back into one big ball again, and the marina sauce pretty much disappeared when I added it in, so I had to dump the chicken and veggies and cheese out onto the plate, heat up more sauce, and then dump it over everything else.

I would make this again. But differently.

I spent about a half hour listening to The Mamas and the Papas (courtesy of YouTube) while cleaning my kitchen, then set about putting together my snack pack for tomorrow (it’s not a lunch bag anymore, it’s a SNACK PACK).

Here is my pretty hummus!

I decided to buy this because it had three of the four flavors that were in the four-flavor sampler that I bought last time at Trader Joe’s, but it was cheaper because there was less. Less is good,  because I didn’t quite finish all of the hummus last time.

Here is photographic proof that I packed food for tomorrow! 1125 calories’ worth!

…which doesn’t look like much, does it?

Thursdays have become my weigh-in day, and I was a little uncertain about how things would pan out, because I ate more than I had planned this week. But I feel like if I’m hungry, I should eat, so I did. And my weight came in at 151.0 lbs–only a 0.2 lb drop from last week, but given how little I exercised and how much extra I ate here and there, I’ll take that. I’m very excited about the prospect of seeing the 140s again!

I work 9-hour days so that I can take every other Friday off, and today was one of those lazy Fridays. I did set my alarm for 9AM or so, but I got up a little while before that and set to work making a grocery list. Then it was off to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, where I spent more money than I meant to, but a lot of it was on things that will last for a while. I need to go back to Whole Foods sometime soon, though–I didn’t realize that the Liberte yogurts were on sale for $1 each (usually they’re $1.25 or so) and since they’re something that I eat almost every day, I’d like to go ahead and buy some more. I only bought $12 today–the store was so crowded that I just  grabbed them and ran to hide in the wine section to regroup without looking at the prices.

(By the way, I don’t drink alcohol, but I’ve found that if you need a quiet place to hide for a few moments in a store so that you can check your grocery list without being trampled or having to move, you should go to the wine section. Trader Joe’s is the only place I’ve found so far where this is not a good strategy, because the stores are so small to begin with.)

I decided to continue my wheat-free experiment by picking up some wheat-free version of common foods. And I personally would like to thank Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods for clearly labeling their gluten-free items!

I bought a bag of pecan cookies, a loaf of brown rice bread (it is hard–I feel this may not be an enjoyable dining experience…!), a four-pack of lemon poppyseed muffins, a bag of brown rice pasta, and a gluten-free pizza. I almost didn’t buy the pizza because it was $12, and then I realized that was silly–I’ll pay $16+ to have a Papa John’s pizza delivered, a pizza loaded with crap and bad calories, but I won’t pay $12 for a nice, healthful pizza? I discovered when I was reading the package that the company that makes the pizza (Bella Monica) is based here in Raleigh and they have an Italian restaurant with a gluten-free menu! Isn’t that cool?

Since the pizza had already defrosted sufficiently by the time I drove home, I threw it in the oven and let it cook while I was unpacking groceries.

Another slightly pricey buy was this 3.5 lbs of boneless skinless chicken thighs…

…but they came from Amish Country! And check out the awesome packaging!

I pulled off one of the packs and threw it in the fridge, then put the other two in the freezer. That’s handy right there!

Soon enough the pizza was done…

I had the three slices shown below, then went back for another one, since I’d had no breakfast apart from a couple of chocolate-covered almonds.

Now, this did not by any stretch of the imagination taste like the pizza you get from Papa John’s or Pizza Hut. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It tasted, as I described to my mom, like “fru-fru pizza.” It was the mushroom and herb kind, with Asiago cheese, and it filled my house with the smell of Italian herbs. Mmm. And if you hadn’t told me that it was wheat-free, I’d've had no idea. Even if I go back to eating wheat after my little experiment is done, I might still buy this brand of pizza ’cause it tastes so good.

After lunch and some quick straightening up of the living room and dining room, I took a nice long nap. So when I got up, it was time to eat again. Sometimes I feel like all I do is eat.

I threw two chicken thighs on the George Foreman grill (one for dinner and one for lunch or something tomorrow) and covered them with Galena Street rub, started the brown rice pasta on the stove, and then cut  up some cherry tomatoes, onion, and pepper. When the pasta and the chicken were done, I cut up the chicken and then threw everything together into a pasta salad, with some mayo, salt, and pepper.

I’m no great fan of pasta to begin with–I usually have a bag or box of it in the pantry for that time every month or two when I decide I want to eat it–so taste-wise, I didn’t notice a difference. Texture-wise, I noticed a few bites felt a little chewy, in the way that brown rice is chewier than white rice. I didn’t notice this with every  bite, so it could be that I didn’t cook the pasta long enough (though I thought I cooked it longer than it said on the package, because I hate al dente pasta). But it was a good dinner just the same and satisfied my desire for something like macaroni salad.

Sometime after dinner, I decided to break into the lemon poppyseed muffins. I defrosted one in the microwave until it was a little bit warm…

Again, if you hadn’t told me this was a wheat-free muffin, I wouldn’t have noticed the difference. It tasted goooood.

For a bedtime snack, I munched on a few of the gluten-free pecan cookies.

These weren’t anything exciting. They were a bit too squishy for my taste, but otherwise they were fine.

[I will point out, in the interest of full disclosure, that the muffins and the cookies both contained potato flour and/or potato starch. However, I do not consider this to be a violation of my potato-free-for-three-months vow, because the potato flour/starch is just one of several flour-based components in each item and the items are not potato-based in terms of flavor--the intent is to not make them taste like potatoes. This is actually something I considered before I started this little potato challenge and I decided I'd cross each bridge as I came to it based on the situation. Potato bread? Definitely out. Gluten-free lemon muffin that contains potato flour as one of several flour components? That seems okay in my book. It's my challenge; I make the rules. Bwhaha.]

Last night I pedaled away on my recumbent bike for a half an hour while eating a homemade peanut butter cup and reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I was a bad child and never read the Chronicles of Narnia, although I’ve enjoyed the first two movies. I got about a third of the way through it before I went to bed at 10PM. Then, for some reason, I woke up at around 4:15AM, with my alarm not set to go off for another hour. After about fifteen minutes I realized I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I jumped out of bed and set about doing stuff…including unloading my dishwasher and putting away my clothes drying rack. It was so so so so nice to  come home to a clean apartment on a Monday afternoon…

…so anyway, I decided to go to work early, ’cause I was up. I got there at 6AM and ate my breakfast while reading e-mail and doing the sorts of things one can do while eating a Pure bar, a Chobani peach Greek yogurt, and three-quarters of a cup of Leapin’ Lemurs cereal.

Why so much for breakfast, you ask? I didn’t go to Whole Foods for my beloved Liberte yogurt over the weekend, so I grabbed some Chobani to eat for breakfast. But Chobani has about 100 calories less than Liberte. So I ate some delicious gluten-free peanut butter and chocolate cereal to add some more calories.

Speaking of peanut butter and chocolate…I started getting hungry around 10AM, since I’d eaten breakfast early. Look what was hiding in my bag…

Protein! In the form of a chocolate peanut butter cup! Yum.

I went for a lunchtime walk on a crazy convoluted path through campus because of some construction that’s being done on the trail. Afterward, I had some sausage, lentil, and spinach soup.

It doesn’t take the light too well, does it? Still good, though. I will add this to my potato-free soup file.

A little while before I left work, I started feeling hungry, so I got two little mini Snickers out of a coworker’s candy bowl. I checked the ingredients list to make sure they didn’t have wheat in them, and then double-checked online–hey, they’re gluten-free! So are M&Ms…mmm…

It somehow came about that I haven’t had wheat since last Tuesday, when I ate those four Girl Scout Cookies, and while I’m not necessarily trying  to embark on my I-Will-Eat-No-Wheat-For-Two-Weeks experiment…well, if it’s already been almost a week, why ruin it with some candy? I’ve noticed that my eczema doesn’t look as bad as it did, but I have no objective way of measuring that unless it clears up completely.

Also, one day I’m going to eat the rest of the Girl Scout Cookies.

After I got home from work I changed into my running clothes, threw my chef’s jacket on over top, set the kitchen timer for 15 minutes, and set about putting away the dishes I’d washed last night and washing the ones that were in my sink. Then I ran away! For 32 minutes! That was One Hour Runner Week 5, Day 2, if you’re counting.

My legs were tiiiiired after that. Still are. But I found the strength to make tacos…

…and I will confess here and now that I usually put a picture of three tacos up, but I generally eat five at a time (half the box). However, tonight I ate only the three you see here, and they were scrumptious. I was in taco heaven. Perfect tacos!

I also had a side of grapes.

And now, because I don’t have to clean my kitchen or my living room or my bathroom, I am going to take this glass of Crystal Light and this peanut butter cup and go sit on my exercise bike in the living room, with my lilies in bloom, and ride my bike while reading my book. Because I can.

Friday was only a partial day at work. I got there (not early like I’d planned, but on time!) and broke out my breakfast while reading e-mail. I mentioned earlier this week that since I started counting calories on workdays, I’ve been getting really, really hungry, but that I thought it was more related to how I was loading those calories, not to how many I was getting. So instead of eating a Liberte yogurt for breakfast and then having a snack later in the morning, I went ahead and had my yogurt along with a Pure cherry cashew bar.

And what do you know…it worked! I didn’t start getting hungry until around 11AM, when I was heading out to meet Jamie for a lunchtime walk.

My lunch was a giant salad topped with cheddar cheese and another piece of albacore topped with sour cream and seasoning. Oh, and cranberry-walnut-gorgonzola dressing.

I’m sure I must’ve grabbed something between lunch and taking Heath to the vet, or gotten something shortly thereafter, but I didn’t take a picture and I don’t have my food log with me (it’s such a long walk to the living room)…oh well.

Heath’s trip to the vet ended in him being muzzled while a tech held him down for his shots and so that the vet could look in his ear. I don’t know what’s with him, but the last couple of times  he’s gone to the vet he’s been very tense. I think he remembers the time I took him there to get his nails clipped, when he spazzed out big time. It’s so weird, because he’s so friendly to strangers normally. He wasn’t being aggressive, just cowardly.  The vet squatted down in the floor for five minutes and tried all manner of tricks to coax him over to her, and the most she could do was look in his eyes and pat his coat. And even that took some cajoling. He did lick her a couple of times, but she was trying to tell him that she was just going to look in his ears and it wasn’t going to hurt, and he was sitting sideways refusing to look at her, and I said, “Um, I think he doesn’t believe you.” And he didn’t.

Oh well. He’s on medicated eardrops twice a day for the next two weeks for his now-chronic ear-gunk situation. I had to buy more treats at the store to appease him…

Heath and I took a nap shortly after arriving home on Friday and didn’t get up ’til late…just in time to see Team USA win a medal in the short track relay. I reheated some of my soup from earlier this week, then watched My Sister’s Keeper, then went back to bed…

…then got back up, got on my exercise bike for 30 minutes, did some cleaning, wrote out a grocery list, ate more soup, and went to the store. Then I came back from the store and took Heath on a 30 minute jog, then rested for about 5 minutes after I got back and went immediately into the 30 Day Shred, since I hadn’t done it Friday night. Whew!

My reward for all this? Nachos…

MMMMMM.

Did some more cleaning afterward, and admired this week’s flowers–Asiatic lilies!

All the bouquets at Harris Teeter were $4 this week, so I decided to go for the lilies. Almost got the sunflowers, but there were only three  to a bunch and I figured hey, why not get the most bang for my buck…

I went to sleep early again, then woke up midmorning and tried to watch Twilight. Unfortunately, the DVD was so scratched that it wouldn’t play (something that rarely happens with my Netflix choices, but does happen on occasion), so I decided to check out what was available on Netflix’s instant services. And that’s how I wound up staying up until 5:30AM watching Supersize Me.

I went back to bed after that, slept in, then decided to make the tasty-sounding soup my mom linked me to yesterday. She was very clear that if I enjoyed this soup, I had to give her credit on the blog for pointing it out to me, so…here you go, mom.

Sorry for the poor picture–it doesn’t do the soup justice, but it’s hard to get a good picture when there’s steam rolling off your food. This is sausage, spinach, and lentil soup–crazy easy to make and crazy tasty, too. Just cook up a pound of Italian pork sausage, then add six cups of water, 16 oz of salsa, a whole chopped up onion, a bag of spinach, and a cup and a quarter of dried lentils, cook for about 30 minutes until the lentils are done, and you have awesome soup. So awesome that my first act upon finishing my bowl was to scoop some into a jar to take with me for lunch tomorrow.

After that, I set about cleaning some more. I remembered something I heard on Hoarders about there not being a point in keeping sentimental things if they’re buried where you can’t even find them, so I decided to stick every picture I found on the wall in my hallway. It needed some color, anyway.

Most of them are of dogs, mostly of Heath…I need to order some more prints off Snapfish so I have more recent photos!

I also found this picture of me at my highest weight from the summer of 2004. We went on a cruise and I was being menaced by a pirate at the dinner table!

I’m not sure how much I weighed in this picture, but it was around 170 or 175. Around this time I was wearing size 16 jeans and was determined not to go any higher than that…and I didn’t, but I didn’t go any lower for another year or two, either. Since I had an empty nail in the wall in my kitchen, I decided to hang this up there as a reminder of how far I’ve come!

This is me today, getting ready to take Heath for an afternoon walk.

151 lbs and trending downward…whoo-hoo!

Before we went for our walk, I decided to make some chocolate peanut butter cups! I made full-sized ones this time. They’re crazy simple to make…

…even simpler if you forget to put the brown sugar in like I did. Didn’t affect the taste much at all, though–I’ll probably leave it out in the future.

After we got back from our walk I had to taste test one.

I tried to spread out the chocolate on the tops before I put them in the fridge, but to no avail. I was worried they’d be too peanut buttery because it looked like there was very little chocolate…

…and then I discovered that the chocolate had just sunk down into the middle. Awesome.

A while later it was dinner time, so I served myself up a plate of various goodies on my nice clean bar!

Steamed salmon and asparagus, a plum, some co-jack cheese, and carrots and tomatoes with Greek yogurt dip.

Pretty and nommy. And I ate it on my nice clean dining room table, while the US/Canada hockey game played.

Now Heath and I are both winding down for the evening…

Unfortunately, my downstairs neighbor (who is hardly ever home when I’m home) has been here all day, and I won’t do my exercise DVD when I know that someone is in the apartment below me. So I’m skipping that for this evening and will try to fit it in tomorrow along with my run. For now, I’m going to go finish putting together my breakfast, lunch, and snacks for tomorrow, and then I think that I will do something relaxing, like read a book while enjoying the present cleanliness of my apartment…

Which just goes to show–I should’ve gotten up when my alarm went off the first time this morning…

Today was my weigh-in day for my fitness chore chart, and I’m happy to say that I’m down to 151.2 lbs! Last Thursday I was 153.8 lbs, and I feel that number was a little inflated due to my overindulgence during Mardi Gras (when people tend to dump unhealthy food in the office break area). However, this is the lowest number I’ve seen on the scale in a long time, which means I did indeed lose something. Go me!

This week, I’m keeping pretty much the same goals on my fitness chart as last week, with a couple of modifications. I bumped the number of days I’m going to try to ride my recumbent bike down to four, because I only did it three times last week when I was shooting for five days. I upped the number of days I’m going to try to get up the first time my alarm goes off to four days a week, and since I didn’t do that this morning I can’t miss a day now. I combined two of my nutrition goals–packing a healthy lunch for work the evening before and counting calories until 3PM–because on days that I work I don’t eat at home before dinnertime, so it’s much more efficient to just pack everything I’m going to eat before 3PM into my bag and count up the calories then instead of worrying about it as I go. To replace the missing goal, I made a goal to clean my apartment for 15 minutes every day. (Did some heavy duty work on the kitchen tonight–way over 15 minutes! No rolling cleaning minutes, though…).

I had an apple crumble Liberte yogurt this morning for breakfast–I think this might be my new favorite! This isn’t your typical yogurt–it doesn’t have artificial flavoring and HFCS and only kind of taste like the flavor it says it does. This stuff is all natural–it says it’s apple crumble, and it’s got apples and raisins and cinnamon in it to prove it!

Midmorning snack was a lemon Larabar. I had to eat this around 10AM even though I ate my breakfast at 9AM because I was ravenous–I don’t know why I’m suddenly so hungry all the time again now that I’m counting calories. I’m not going to try upping my calories yet, but I am going to experiment with shifting the balance so I’m eating more in the morning to fuel me throughout the day to see if that helps. That’s going to be hard–I hate eating in the mornings…

Went for a walk during lunch. Came back and immediately dug into my lunch, then realized I hadn’t taken a picture of it. It was the leftover half of last night’s chicken and mushrooms and rice.

Before Chinese class I snacked on this…

A sammich made of wheat-free (gluten-free, even) graham-style crackers and all natural chunky peanut butter. These crackers are good.

After Chinese class, I downed some carrots and roasted red pepper hummus.

And after work and some housecleaning, I ate dinner…

Two tomatoes, a broccoli crown sprinkled with garden salad seasoning, and a piece of tuna that I baked covered in a mixture of sour cream, dill, and Ozark seasoning. Super tastiness all around.

Well, I am tired and am going to try to get to work early tomorrow, because I’m leaving at 1PM–Heath has a vet appointment in the afternoon. Won’t that be fun…?

Last night I found a use for one of the glass jars that always seem to find a way into my cabinet…

They make transporting soup to work easy!

I got up when my alarm went off at 5:30AM this morning. Then I reset it for 6:30AM and got back in bed. Then I got back out of bed because I couldn’t bring myself to go back to sleep when I was doing so well with getting up early.

Had a strawberry Liberte yogurt for breakfast, chased by a Pure brownie bar for a mid-morning snack.

I think I must have overestimated the calories in my soup…

I guessed it probably had around 300. I knew I was shooting a little high, but I ended up crazy hungry in the afternoon and broke into one of the Larabars I bought at the drug store during my lunch break.

Maybe I need to be eating more than 1600 calories if I’m going to exercise every day? I’ve been checking my GoWear Fit and even on Monday when I ran and took a walk during lunch I still hadn’t burned much over 2200 calories by 8PM, so you’d think I’d be okay at 1600. Hmm…

When I got home from work, I found a heavy box waiting for me in the mail room.

My spices arrived! I spent $60 on spices at Penzeys, plus shipping, but it’s worth it to get good spices from a friendly company.

Among the jars and bags in my box were a small jar of Galena Street Chicken & Rib Rub and a bag of Chip & Dip Seasoning. I broke into both for dinner.

I had strawberries and cream cheese dip (which had been hiding out in my lunch bag for a couple of days and needed to be eaten), carrots and dip made with the chip and dip seasoning and Greek yogurt, and a half of a chicken breast with the Galena Street seasoning and some mushrooms. A most delicious dinner.

Unfortunately, it took a really long time to cook. So long that I decided to start cleaning my living room, dining room, and hallway, which had grown progressively more and more cluttered since their last cleaning. At some point I realized that even though I was supposed to run tonight, it was better for me to skip it and keep cleaning. I rarely get into a zone where I can clean for hours at a time (which I did tonight, with dinner intermingled), it was cold and rainy outside, and frankly, I’m just tired. I have Thursday scheduled as my rest day, but maybe I should have made it Wednesday…in any case, this won’t mess up my fitness chore chart standings–the week ends tonight for me and I have 24 stickers, so after I pack my lunch bag for tomorrow I’ll have the 25 I needed to reach my goal for this week. I need to write down my goals for next week tonight and put them up on my door…

Speaking of the door: I was trying to get a picture of the huge, muddy, bright orange spot on my carpet that is right in front of the door, but it wouldn’t show up in the picture. Instead, I got a white-eyed Heath licking his nose. Great.

Here are some pictures of my shiny clean dining room and living room!

Tomorrow morning when my jeans are dry I’ll put the drying rack away, and I’ll also take out the recycling next to the door and the bag of trash hanging off of it.

My “inbox” is on the stool, and the pile on the right side of the table is things that need to go with me to work in the morning.

Note that my kitchen area is barely visible in this picture, because it is one hot mess.

It’ll be so nice to come home to a nice clean living room tomorrow night!

It was nice (both mornings) to be able to just grab my bag and my nalgene bottle out of the fridge and go to work. No flying around trying to find things to pack. I had a Liberte yogurt for breakfast yesterday morning. When snack time rolled around at 9AM, I dug into a big bowl of carrots and tomatoes, accompanied by a double serving of hummus.

I’ve tried the hummus that you can get at Harris Teeter and didn’t like it at all, but this platter I got at Trader Joe’s is really good–all four kinds!

During my lunch break, I took a walk. It was raining. I came back in looking like a drowned rat, but assured myself while I was drying my hair with paper towels in the bathroom that I was totally hardcore.

I warmed up with the rest of my curry for lunch.

Looks disgusting, tastes great…can’t wait for my latest Penzey’s order to get here; I ordered some new curry seasoning, among other things…

Afternoon snack was some cheese and half of an apple.

Since I got to work at 6:45AM, I got to leave at 4:15PM. Yay! By the time I got home it was very foggy, but in the mid-50s and cloudy. Perfect time for a run! I planned to go out for a 30 minute run, since the first three weeks of One Hour Runner are all 30 minute runs. But even though my run was slow, I felt pretty good about it, so I decided to tack an extra 5 minute onto the end. I ran for 35 minutes, which means I can start Week 5 of One Hour Runner tomorrow (30/32/38 minute runs). I expected to be sore today, because my 5K times have both been slightly above 40 minutes and I was sore for days after, but no such bad luck…

After my run I decided to make a huge salad in a small mixing bowl.

Lettuce, sunflower seeds, cheese, tomatoes, bacon, mushrooms, and raspberry gorgonzola walnut dressing. It was extremely tasty and I wolfed it down, but I guess I didn’t have enough protein in my salad (though it had plenty of calories). I took a nap after dinner and woke up hungry at 9:30PM. I had a few chocolate-covered almonds, packed my lunch bag, and fell back to sleep around midnight, but I was still kind of hungry…

This morning, I got up at 5:40AM (yay!), and got to work at 7AM. I had another Liberte yogurt for breakfast–they’re one of the few things I can eat so early in the morning, and they’ve got 230+ calories each.

For a mid-morning snack, I had some grapes.

…they didn’t taste so great after being squished in a container and refrigerated. Remember, kids, don’t store your grapes in the fridge (unless you have to because you washed them the night before and you need to put them in your bag so you don’t forget them).

My hunger from last night started coming back around 10AM so I broke out some of the lunch goods in my bag. It was around this time that I noticed everything I’d brought, with the exception of the yogurt, was finger food. The better to eat while working…!

I had some salami and cheese…

And some Nut Thins. I made little sammiches! Nut Thins don’t taste a thing like crackers and they look like Tostitos Rounds, but they taste pretty good for what they are.

I went for a walk (with Jamie!) during lunch. It was a nicer walk than yesterday’s. Tomorrow, of course, it may snow…

Sometime after the walk I broke into my carrots and hummus for the day…

The green hummus is cilantro parsley, and it’s very good!

Late in the afternoon I was still hungry, but it felt more like a craving than actual hunger. I decided that today should not be a wheat-free day and busted out the Girl Scout Cookies in my drawer. Lemonades! Yum. I ate four. They were delicious, especially since I hadn’t been eating them non-stop for days.

I put in 10 hours of work today and got home around 6PM. My first order of business was to get some soup going on the stove. While it cooked, I did Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred. I can already tell a difference–I almost made it through both of the anterior raise segments today. Yay!

After the Shred, it was soup time.

Ye old veggie beef soup. I had three bowls, as usual…if I was still hungry before I started eating, I’m not anymore…

The thing I hate about getting home at or after 6PM is that I only have a little bit of time to do anything before it’s time to go to bed so I can get back up and go to work again in the morning. But at least I actually went in at 7AM today instead of lazing around and rushing into work at 9AM. Yay…

I’ve lived here for over two years and heard more alarms going off last night than I have in all the time I’ve lived here before that! Strange, strange times…

My brother and his wife invited me and my parents to lunch at their house today. They were making pork chops and macaroni and cheese, and since I don’t eat pork if I can help it (except sausage from the farmers market, and bacon. of course.), I grilled myself a piece of chicken to take with me.

I ate most of my chicken breast, a whole piece of bread (went back for another half-piece because it was good!), a scoop of macaroni, and a bunch of grapes.

My mom made a peanut butter pie with a chocolate crust…

So I had a piece, drizzled with chocolate syrup.

I kinda regret eating that huge piece. But I kinda don’t regret it, too.

When we left, I followed my parents to the thrift store in Fuquay and my dad helped me unload the boxes of post-yard-sale donations that have been in the back of my car since September. Then as soon as I got home I threw away all the big trash and took everything that had gathered inside my car into my apartment. The only thing still in there that doesn’t really belong in the car is the dog crate that Heath’s outgrown, which I will bring in tomorrow and store in my closet for future dog happenings.

I need to go through and pick up all the little pieces of trash (straw paper, candy wrappers, stray leaves…) and find some place where I can vacuum all the dog hair out of the front (at least), but for the most part…the HoarderMobile is no more. For now…

Shortly after arriving home, I threw on some workout clothes and busted out Level 1 of the 30 Day Shred again. There have always been two exercises in Level 1 with which I have trouble, and they’re both in the strength section. One is the push-ups–I’ve always had to do the push-up sections from my knees instead of from my toes, and right now I’m having trouble getting through all the push-ups in each segment. I remember this happening last time and getting better after a few days, though, so I should improve soon. The other exercise is those damned anterior raises in the last strength section–when I was doing the Shred last year, I had to go get bottles of water to use as weights because I could not do it with my 3-lb weights. Mind you, at this point I was doing chest flies and some of the other exercises with my 10-lb weights. Anterior raises? Could barely do them with the 1-lb water bottles. Things are a little better this time, but I’m still having to modify the exercise by raising only one arm at a time so the other arm has a chance to rest briefly.

I so put a sticker on my fitness chore chart as soon as I was done.

And then I made dinner!

Easy way to measure out a portion of carrots and hummus: put bowl on food scale. Tare food scale. Add carrots until you’ve reached desired serving of carrots. Tare food scale. Add hummus until you’ve reached desired serving of hummus. Ta-da!

I made chicken curry for dinner. It had giant chunks of onion in it. Mmm…

I made twice this much and plopped the rest in a container to take to work tomorrow for lunch. Then I sat down to work out how many calories were in a serving of my chicken curry. And my jaw dropped. The pot of curry I made tonight had 960 calories–and I didn’t even add as much rice or chicken as the recipe suggested! That means each serving had about 480 calories in it, which wasn’t too bad considering I only had two meals today and no snacks, but seriously–I’m going to be more careful with this stuff from now on. The recipe I’m riffing off of calls for a half cup of yogurt and a half cup of mayonnaise for the curry sauce and I’ve been using Greek yogurt in place of regular yogurt–I wonder what would happen if I just use straight Greek  yogurt, which is 120 calories for a full cup, instead of half yogurt and half mayonnaise, which is 280 calories for half a cup…I’m going to try it next time!

After dinner I set to work cleaning up my living room, and then rode my exercise bike for 30 minutes as a break. (And yes, then I ran and put a sticker on my fitness chore chart. ) Now I am contemplating some sort of small snack…perhaps a couple of chocolate-covered almonds? I also need to finish packing my “lunch” bag for tomorrow–it’s more like a breakfast-lunch-and-two-snacks bag…

And what a difference a few hours can make in the way you feel. I was a little sore this morning when I woke up, courtesy of last night’s 30 Day Shred. I wasn’t nearly as sore as I thought I should be, though–for instance, my abs, which I figured would be killing me, only hurt if I actually made a crunch-like movement. After my run–everything hurts. My calves hurt, my abs hurt, my arms hurt, my shoulders hurt…I feel sore all over when I move, like having the flu without the fever. Oh well, this too shall pass away…

…with the help of some chocolate-covered almonds…

This was my post-run snack–a half serving of dark chocolate covered almonds, washed down with some lemon-lime Crystal Light Fitness. And since I just went ahead and counted calories all day today, I’ll let you know that it was 30 calories for the drink and 115 for the almonds.

Dinner was a piece of steamed salmon (267 calories!), a crown of steamed broccoli (35 calories!), a handful of steamed sliced mushrooms (13 calories!), a bunch of grapes (59 calories!), and a cup of brown rice (216 calories!). I sprinkled some garden salad seasoning on the veggies, salmon, and rice, too. I busted out my kitchen scale when I started pulling things out of the fridge and just went ahead and weighed everything while I was waiting for the rice to cook. Since I knew how many calories I’d consumed through the day and how many I was going to eat for dinner, I knew to go ahead and eat an entire cup of rice instead of just half a cup, because I was coming up short. It’s much easier for me to count calories when I use the weights instead of the other measurements–a cup of rice can be a different amount depending on how you pack it in the cup,  but 6.9 oz of rice is 6.9 oz of rice.

(I used Calorie King for the measurement, by the way–all the sites do it a little differently, as I see from typing in some of the items I ate into SparkPeople!)

After dinner I had another five chocolate covered almonds, which would be about 115 calories.

And for my final snack of the evening, I had a big bowl of fruit with some of that delicious cream cheese dip.

I weighed the cream cheese dip this time just for fun–it was a little easier (and less messy) than using a measuring spoon. I had half a banana (49 calories), half an apple (55 calories), and three strawberries (22 calories). The dip was 100 calories.

That puts me at around 1675 calories for the day, and I try to shoot for between 1600 and 1700. That wasn’t too hard and I feel satisfied and was never too hungry throughout the day (except for when I woke up at 11:30AM, of course). I’m hoping that I’ll be able to prepare my breakfast, snacks, and lunches during the workweek on the night before and just go ahead and plot out the calories then, all in one go–that would make it much easier to count calories, which is a process I often find extremely annoying.

Don’t worry, I won’t be posting calorie counts every day, just once in a while…

Now that the sun’s gone down there’s a bit of a chill in the air, but it still feels pretty good outside, and it’s supposed to be lovely again tomorrow. I’m off to either curl up on the couch and watch the Olympics or clean while watching the Olympics. I’m leaning toward the former…and maybe a nap while the bobsledding’s going on…

I don’t feel so bad about not rolling out of bed until 11:30AM today, since I was up past 2AM last night. I did want to make sure that my lunch was kind of calorie-heavy since I didn’t eat breakfast or a mid-morning snack.

Here’s how the calories broke down:

Havarti and cheddar cheese: 1 oz for 120 calories
Salami: 1 oz for 110 calories
Carrots: 3 oz for 35 calories
Roasted red pepper hummus: 2 T for 60 calories
Strawberries: 75 grams (3 berries) for 25 calories
Sweet cream cheese dip: 2 T for 100 calories
Cherry Pom Wonderful: 8 oz for 150 calories

For a total of 600 calories for the whole meal. I poured 8 oz of the Pom into a cup and then filled it the rest of the way up with water, so I ended up not drinking it all, but I put the rest in the fridge for later.

I pulled out my kitchen scale and then went through the fridge selecting items for lunch, weighing out a serving of each item (except the dips, I measured those) and then adding it to the plate. I was puzzled by the salami, though–it came on a platter with the cheese and the outer wrapping for the whole tray said 1 oz was 110 calories, but the inner wrapping that was just for the salami said it was 1 oz for 85 calories. Very odd! I went with the higher number because it seemed more in line with my previous salami experiences. o.O

I think I’m going to open the blinds in my bedroom and lay on my bed reading and enjoying the sun for a little while…