I am not going to let little lemon pies get the best of me!

Aren't they adorable? Grr. So creamy and good too. I ate four yesterday (and another this morning before breakfast). I'm sure it's no coincidence that I also started my period yesterday (Wasn't I just on it? Why yes, I was. That's a whole other subject entirely.) I also ate some jalapeno chips, a couple tablespoons of cookie dough, and some random candy at work. Yes, I tracked it, and I did have the points for it. I also didn't eat myself sick again, so that is some progress.

I think I am in need of a new strategy though. I have noticed that I almost always want some sweets in the evening after dinner. This is not reduced if I have been eating sweets all day. It just means I wind up eating a lot MORE sweets over the course of the day. But what does sometimes happen is I am not hungry enough for all of the healthy food I am supposed to be eating, so it gets skipped, and the points just get replaced with junk food.

I'm not against junk food. If I try to avoid it completely then I just wind up eating unrestrained portions of it at some point in the future. But it should not be replacing my regular healthy food. I have struggled with this since I started my medication which caused appetite loss. I'd go entire days without eating a single serving of fruits or vegetables, but since I wasn't gaining any weight from it and sometimes even losing weight, I just let it continue.

Anyway, I know it's not good for me, and I need to stop. I think I can start with not letting myself have sweets unless I have already eaten whichever meals I should have eaten by then. If I still want it after that and have the points, fine. I am not working today and I can't believe how hard this is. I already caved once today and had a pudding cup while my lunch was cooking, but at least I ate my lunch right after. It's almost four now. If I want to snack on something before dinner, there is fruit. Anything else will have to wait till after dinner. I mean it this time!

I need to run to the grocery store shortly and pick up some things for dinner, plus the stuff I am low on or out of. For dinner I am planning on sauteeing the last two Tofurkey Italian sausages, some zucchini and the rest of the mushrooms, then mixing them with marinara sauce, covering it with mozzarella and some parmesan and baking it.

Back to work

Today was my first day back at work in five weeks. I hurt my back at the gym almost two months ago. I'm starting back at only four hours a day and will work my way up from there. I had no pain today, and everything went great.

I've been doing great with my eating too. Today I had a cranbran Vitatop with a pumpkin smoothie for breakfast. The pumpkin smoothie had a frozen banana, a cup of soy milk, a half cup of canned pumpkin, a packet of splenda, and a dash of pumpkin pie spice. For lunch I had a tuna sandwich on light whole wheat bread and some boiled baby white potatoes tossed with salt, pepper and olive oil. For dinner I cooked up some chicken, red peppers and mushrooms in a skillet and added Santa Fe Philly cooking cream and some frozen corn I had microwaved.



I also made the lemon pie from last week's WW weekly booklet. I couldn't find any fat free condensed milk so I just used the regular stuff. I also made ten individual servings in those little silicone muffin cups so I only used half as many graham crackers and half the butter. The points wound up the same. They turned out sooo good. Here's the exact recipe I used:

3 reduced fat graham crackers
1 T butter
11 oz can condensed sweetened milk
2 eggs
juice from one large lemon
zest from one large lemon

Pre-heat oven to 350. Mash up crackers into fine crumbs (I put them in a baggie and just broke them with my fingers). Put them in a bowl and add 1T melted butter. Mix well and pat into the bottom of each muffin cup. Place in fridge while mixing the filling.

Mix eggs into condensed milk until smooth. Add lemon juice and zest and mix until well incorporated. Spoon filling into each muffin cup (about 3 tablespoons per cup). Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and refrigerate. Serve chilled for best flavor.

Each serving is 4 points. The recipe says you can freeze the portions too. I'd like to try this again with limes and lime juice.

Denny's

The doctor appointment went well. I am cleared for work and going back tomorrow. Blood pressure is awesome. Weight is exactly as I expected.

Across from the hospital is a Denny's. It's not just any Denny's though, it's MY Denny's. Two years ago I lived a fifteen minute walk away and I ate there after work 3 to 4 times a week. Dining alone at Denny's was practically ritual for me. It's the only Denny's I ever happen to be around on occassion, and I decided to go today after my appointment.

This is not nearly as assinine as it sounds, given last night's horrible food fest. My all-time best favorite breakfast out meal is actually pretty points friendly. Depending on how hungry I am it ranges from one fried egg with hash browns (8 pts) to two fried eggs, hash browns, and a side of fruit (11 pts). I always cut the eggs up first thing and mash them together with the browns so the yolks make sort of a nice yellow gravy over everything.  After they started offering the build your own slam I added an English muffin because that made it cheaper than a la carte. Naturally I ate the muffin, as well as endless Cokes and a hot fudge brownie. But at it's base, it's a points friendly breakfast.

Today I got turkey bacon instead of the English muffin, figuring that way if I ate it it would be fairly harmless. I also got black tea, and was pretty damn certain that I'd have zero desire for a brownie. Taking a tip from Lyn, over at Escape from Obesity, I saved the bacon till last so I wouldn't have to over stuff myself to get the good stuff I had come for. I did decide to eat one strip of bacon, not because I wanted it, but because I worried that if I left it all my server would think there was something wrong with it. It's clear that I have a long way to go in terms of not eating so as not to make people feel bad.

The good thing is I don't feel nauseated any more. The bad thing is I am still kind of uncomfortably full. Probably should have stuck with one egg and hash browns.

Off the fricken deep end

So, yesterday was going fine until about 4 or 5 pm. Then all hell broke loose. Not entirely sure what happened. One huge downfall about living where I do is the fact that I have one convenience store less than a block from me and another in less than two blocks. I can control my environment all I like, but I still have to contend with the fact that it's way too easy to bypass that in one impulsive moment.

I wound up not even making dinner because I made myself sick on candy, ice cream, and cookie dough. I think I started to unravel when I decided to finish off a tub of pudding in the fridge, which put me over my weekly points by about five. I changed my weigh in day to Monday, so my points were going to reset after yesterday. It was a case of the usual faulty dieter's logic. Might as well do all the damage I can now.

My boyfriend was totally my partner in crime as well. We talked about it late last night and decided we really need to do a better job reigning each other in. He's diabetic and fighting a major foot infection, looking at a strong likelyhood of losing his toe now. It's one thing for me to do this and suffer a stomache ache for a while, but it's a BFD for him, and I should not be enabling him, ever. Luckily it's fairly rare for both of us to just blow it all off at the same time, but it's so hard when we do.

I have a dr. appointment early this morning. I feel like utter hell. I am not sure if I'll be attending the meeting simply because I feel like I could puke at the moment. If I do, I am skipping the weigh in. It would be pointless, and I weighed in last Friday. I will just continue weighing in next week. What is most disappointing is that based on yesterday morning's weight taken upon waking I likely would have lost a bit more today. When I'm only losing half a poind a week on average, an overage of 1500-2000 calories has the potential to set me back quite a bit. Lesson learned.

I don't want to feel like this again. Regardless of how I came to lose most of this weight, the reality is that I was obese for about ten years, and I'm in a relationship with a guy who was morbidly obese for most of his life and is still suffering from health complications from that. Neither of us is out of the woods, so to speak. We both have a lot to be lost from going back to our previous eating patterns.

I owe it to him and myself to get back on track and to put more effort toward staying there. I am hoping that having Monday weigh ins will make me behave myself more, as weekends are a more difficult time for both of us. I have found that I can be on plan and still eat more than is comfortable or healthy for me. I need to listen to my body rather than just looking at it in terms of what I "am allowed" to do.

Holy Cow!

I did the weigh in at my meeting today and lost 0.8 lbs! Not bad for having been on vacation. Now I'm scared to weigh in on Monday because I don't want to have gained any of it back. Some day I will learn to trust the process and not freak out over stuff like that.

While I was at the meeting my ex boyfriend texted me with a question about some protein powder I had given him. It was really nice out and we hadn't hung out in a while so I suggested we go for a walk after my meeting. We walked from downtown up to Kerry Park which is about 2.5 miles and mostly uphill. I didn't take any pictures today because the scenery doesn't really change, but here's an old one I took a few years ago on a similarly nice day.



There's a nice Trader Joe's a couple of blocks from the park so we went there because I haven't fully stocked up on food yet since getting back from Alaska. We were planning to catch a bus back so I went ahead and bought two heavy bags full. Then I remembered I hadn't reloaded more money onto my bus card. Grumble grumble. So we walked the 2.5 miles downtown where I reloaded my card in the bus tunnel and then we took the bus back to his house because he had something in his Jeep he'd forgotten to give me.

Once we got there he wanted to go to the Grocery Outlet (they have overruns, re-packages, discontinueds, etc. for super cheap) and he asked if I wanted to go, to which I said, "Hell yeah!" They always have an interesting assortment of points-friendly desserts. This time I got sugar free cinnamon bun pudding cups, Smart Ones chocolate chip cookie sundaes, and lemonade flavored coconut water sorbet bars. I also found a great deal on light soy milk with one point (!!!) and stocked up. It's the 8th Continent Light variety. He needed to go to Trader Joe's too, and I had remembered a few things I forgot the first trip, so we went back a second time.

Now, by this time it was after 5:00pm. I had had a protein bar when I first woke up (after which I fell asleep until right before I had to leave for the meeting), a Cadbury Creme Egg while I waited for my ex downtown, and a diet Mountain Dew up until this point. When we hit Trader Joe's again I was starving. I bought much more than I had planned on, and texted my boyfriend with a list of options for dinner (he enthusiastically picked the fish tacos).

When I got home around six I started eating the stuff I had planned for my lunch and snacks. I didn't think I'd be able to get everything I'd planned in, but I managed to. I won't lie. It was sort of awesome. The walk had left me pretty hungry. I even used 3 of the activity points I earned today towards a second serving of frozen yogurt later this evening. I had bought a box of frozen breaded fish nuggets at Trader Joe's, and I baked them in the oven for the fish tacos. They are only five points for 4 nuggets, and two of them are just the right size for one soft taco. We used small low carb tortillas, lettuce, sour cream, and mild salsa. Man, were they good, and only 9 points total. I am just slightly uncomfortably full enough to not start in on the lemonade sorbet bars, which is just as well because that sounds really good.

I also had a bowl of strawberries with my dinner. They looked so pretty, I had to share.



I bought all kinds of tasty things while grocery shopping today and am having a grand old time planning out my meals for the next few days. Tomorrow it's tofu with mushrooms, red bell pepper, peanut sauce and brown rice. Sunday I will probably do Tofurkey Italian sausages (7 points each but so worth it) with more mushrooms, marinara (I found one at TJ with 1 pt per half cup!) and a little pasta. I also bought some of those tiny little fingerling type potatoes at Trader Joe's and I'm thinking about what I should do with them.

I have learned that I am not one of those people who merely eats to live. I need variety, interest and novelty in my food. If I am not looking forward to eating what I have planned for the day, then I'm sure not going to look forward to cooking it either, and the odds that I will just say "screw it" and go get fast food or a frozen pizza are greatly increased. I love food. That's probably not going to change. I can let it work for me or I can let it work against me. I'd rather let it work for me.

The rest of the day

There were only a few minor changes from my plan over the rest of the day. I actually managed to eat it all with no problem. It turned out we were out of canned chicken so I used canned tuna. I also forgot to put olive oil in with the canned tuna, so I had two points left over (one from the olive oil and one from the switch from chicken to tuna). I decided to have a low carb yogurt and get another dairy in since I only had one other serving. The only other change was I had a Skinny Cow Truffle bar after dinner since I had earned some activity points and wanted to use them.







I tried a new product today too. It's the True Raspberry Lemonade mix made with stevia. It was honestly pretty weak for my tastes. Next time I may add it to half as much water and see how I like it. It's 5 calories for 8 oz. as made per the directions, so that wouldn't be terrible even if you double it.

I'm planning to go to tomorrow's meeting, but I'm not sure yet if I will weigh in. I may just wait until Monday.

Out of it

I slept until almost 2pm today. I have no idea why. I went to sleep around midnight last night. I think my boyfriend is getting worried about me. Maybe I'm low on B-12. I can't absorb it from my food anymore, and it's been a little while since I've taken any supplements.

I had all my food planned out for today, 29 points worth, and it's 3pm and I've only had my breakfast. I made a frozen waffle and topped it with a cup of frozen peaches that I had microwaved until hot and mixed in a packet of Splenda and a dash of powdered ginger. I also blended a cup of soy milk with some ice and cappuccino flavored protein.



I also have planned for the day: 2 Wasa Light crackers with a wedge of Laughing Cow Cheese, half a can of white meat chicken mixed with dill relish and light mayo on a small low carb wrap with romaine lettuce, a clementine, a cup of shell pasta with 3 oz shrimp, 1 cup of broccoli and cauliflower, and 1/3 cup jarred alfredo sauce, and a half cup of frozen yogurt with a sliced banana and sugar free chocolate syrup.

I have to walk down to work later, pick up my pay check, and deposit it at the bank. My boyfriend gets out of work at six, so I will walk down around five and then meet him at his building.

I was thinking about my Weight Watchers meetings, and it occurred to me that I go back to work next Tuesday, which means I won't be able to make the Friday meetings anymore. I am thinking I will go to the Monday meeting instead of going tomorrow. I may do both since they will be different meeting topics. Maybe I'll just go tomorrow but weigh in on Monday. Or weigh in tomorrow but wait until the following Monday to weigh in again. I don't know.

I can't believe how well the medication for over active bladder is working though. No more trouble getting to sleep or needing to go at least once an hour. I didn't expect it to work that well or that quickly.