Oct 25
Actual diet food~
Well, back to the diet board, today. Dinner tonight will be grilled chicken, peas, and brown rice. Unfortunately, trying to eat super-low calorie can often get.. boring. Which had me bemoaning the fact that I can’t put BBQ sauce on my chicken. I could, of course, but it seems like such a waste of calories just to add a little bit of flavor. Then I remembered about Walden Farms.. I had purchased their products once a while ago and really liked some of it (the chocolate and pancake syrup particularly, not so much the salad dressings, although Ranch was pretty decent), so I figured I’d order up some more today. For those who don’t know what Walden Farms is (probably everyone, I don’t think very many grocery stores carry their stuff, but you can always order it online), they make 0 calorie, 0 sugar, 0 carbs, basically 0 everything dressings, dips, spreads, sauces, etc. So anyway, I ordered up some strawberry and raspberry jam, some peanut butter, a coupla of different pasta sauces, some BBQ sauce.. can’t wait until it gets here, to try it out. I’ll have to make a post when it arrives (as I eat it) to let you know how it tastes. Obviously, it’s not like eating the real thing but neither is margarine, diet soda, wheat pasta, or any other number of healthy or otherwise “diet” foods. I suppose I subscribe to something my mother once said in that “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. I’m sure not everyone agrees, but I’d rather have abs than BBQ sauce. Not that I have abs. Well, I do have abs, everyone with a torso has abs (at least I’m pretty sure :p), but they definitely aren’t visible yet. I think I heard somewhere (probably from Katie) that most women need around 17% body fat to start seeing ab muscles. I still have a loooong way to go if that is the case. I’m hoping my scale lies when it says that my body fat percentage is 27% — which would put me in the “above average” category (as in the bad above average, as in having more fat than average). I don’t feel above average, but =/
I guess I really need to start mixing more cardio into my workout. I went for a walk / jog today (I’ll be fair and admit that it was mostly walk and a lot less jog), but I don’t really get out and do much cardio at all. When we were going to the gym, I spent most of my time on the treadmill and a lot less time on the weight machines.. I guess things have kind of flip-flopped now. The Bowflex is so easy to use that I just always want to hop on it and get to lifting, but I haaaaate running outside. It’s always so hot and sunny (I don’t wake up early enough to run in the am, nor do I want to) and I feel like every person in every car that drives past is just STARING AT ME WONDERING WHY I RUN SO SLOW or something like that. Or, if I’m with Dan, I feel like he’ll just be puttering along beside me, grumbling to himself about how slow I am, and how much I’m cutting in on his workout. I guess I need to get over it and run more. Or buy a treadmill. Not that I think Dan will go for that anytime soon after we just bought the Bowflex.
Link of the day: Walden Farms
Blogging - the bored, Warhammer playing housewife way!
I suspect your body far is not 27% (average does not, of course, indicate the average in the US).
As I’ve noted before, cardio eventually becomes catabolic (burns muscle). Lifting increases your metabolism for a while afterwards.
As far as diet? Cut the baked potatoes. The carbohydrates in those (as well as white bread) essentially metabolize just as quickly as simple sugars. Protein contributes immensely to feeling full anyway, so a bit more meat and a little less “heaping serving of vegetables” can go a long way. Add more roughage. Cottage cheese with fruit for breakfast rather than oatmeal (unless the oatmeal is rolled rather than cut, or you cut it yourself).
Plus, can’t go wrong with GORP (Good ‘Ol Raisins and Peanuts). It’s filling, good for you, and has a ton of energy.
Totally unrelated, but “Main” should be on the top of your “Pages” section to aid in navigation, and something has to be done about this comment box. Add a border? I don’t know. It’s practically invisible. If it weren’t for the big “Submit Comment >>”, I’d have missed it completely.
I did attempt to have it at the top of my pages.. it was for a little while, but after messing with some stuff it moved itself back to the middle and I quite haven’t figured out how to move it back, again. It keeps resisting any and all efforts to tell it what number to be. You’re right about the comment box completely.. I almost didn’t notice it myself. I’ll have to mess with that and figure out how to darken it up a bit.
I’m afraid to tell you that you are incorrect about potatoes. Not only are potatoes high in fiber (which helps you stay full for a long time), they also contain a decent amount of protein and are very high in potassium (whose benefits I’m sure I don’t need to go into for you).
My problem really isn’t feeling full or hungry, in any case. My dinner is always plenty satisfying — even my soup for lunch doesn’t leave me hungry. Oatmeal also has plenty of properties (aside from being low calorie) that keep me eating it. First and foremost are the benefits it provides for your heart (and your cholesterol level, given that mine is none-too-stellar). Oatmeal also helps regulate glucose levels, which I find important given the relatively small amount of calories I consume.
And don’t worry, I’m weight training several days a week — I wasn’t meaning that I want to drop it, just that I really need to get in more cardio too. Both are important, of course.
Oh yes and, totally pass on peanuts. I’m afraid that nuts just have way too many calories for me to ever feel happy eating them, delicious and wonderful as they are.
Sure, nuts have a fair amount of calories. Peanuts are 166 per oz, and 14g of fat. On the other hand, they have 4.5x the fiber, much less sugar, ten times the protein, and twice the potassium (in the same portion as the potato). Yes, potatoes have lots of fiber, but very little of that is considered resistant starch. The act of cooking it (unless you cool it back down after that) removes almost all benefits, since the cell walls weaken. Beyond that, starches are a glucose chain which takes virtually no time to break down.
Nothing wrong with oatmeal, but the high emphasis on low-calorie eating is almost bad. You want to be, what, 115? 120? 1150-1200 calories per day? It’s hard to believe you’re getting that, and maintaining enough nutrient intake to allow for muscle gain (rather than metabolizing all of it since your body believes it’s starving), and those numbers are for somebody trying to maintain without really exercising. Cottage cheese and eggs are also ludicrously healthy (plus relatively low in calories/etc), but both provide a bit more in terms of protein and other benefits without having two zillion carbs. If you find that you’re crashing due to running out of glucose, perhaps you should be eating more (or more often)? Tuna, nuts, and the like don’t really have enough carbs/calories to negatively offset your weight loss, but do have enough to keep you stabilized if you eat small amounts of them every few hours.
Well, here’s the comment I’d make about nuts. They are delicious, no doubt about that. However, having a little sad pile of peanuts sittin’ there next to your ahi tuna… well, it doesn’t mix very well. I think, if we were to snack on any kind of nut, it’d be pistachios, which are evil and addictive. They don’t fall too far off peanuts on the health scale, but nuts in general lend themselves to snacking in a way that potatoes don’t. A raw potato on top of the fridge says “I will take 30-45 minutes to prepare, so I’m not a quick fix”. A jar of peanuts/walnuts or a bag of pistachios say quite the opposite.
I believe Missy is aiming for 1200 calories a day, and I don’t think the nutritional breakdown of it matters all that much to her so long as it includes reasonable amounts of protein, fiber, fat, and carbohydrates. She’s not looking to overload on any particular element listed above, but she’s also not looking to load up on proteins and bulk up. She’s looking for lean muscle development, after all, not raw muscle mass. My goals are a bit different, but my eating habits are also a bit different.
Cottage cheese is delicious, and we’ve been meaning to buy some. Eggs, as I think has been mentioned, are filled to the brim with cholesterol. And she has higher cholesterol than me (so she thinks; I’m at ~ 140 now, and I don’t see her being higher). Getting a burst of carbohydrates from an oatmeal breakfast in the morning isn’t a bad thing in any case. They make one thirstier, for one, which entices Missy to drink more water. She normally gets up at ~ 9:00 AM, works out, eats breakfast at ~ 10:30(?), then eats lunch at ~ 1:00. Two and half hours of energy is all she’s really looking for out of it, though the fiber sure doesn’t hurt. Not much is better than a morning shit, after all, and fiber helps that.
I mean… all in all, I haven’t been counting her calories for her. My gut instinct is that she’s falling a little short. But then, my gut instinct was that a 12″ meatball sub + chips was ~ 700 calories. So perhaps I’m not the best judge. Still, she’s been eating like this for a couple of weeks. Weight hasn’t been dropping at a prodigious rate, but it is slowly coming off. And she looks a little thinner && can fit into size 4’s || 2’s more easily. Clearly it’s doing what she wants it to, so I don’t criticize. I only rationalize after the fact.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think a thing of nuts on top of the fridge says “You know if you eat more than a handful, you’re going to have to haul your ass to the grocery store to buy more again at $5/lb,” and pistachios say “If you eat more than is healthy, you’re going to feel as if your fingernails are ripping off.” (Note that those need to be pistachios in the shell, not the pre-shelled kind. /shrug
I have fake fingernails, so I don’t find myself bothered by opening pistachios ^_^ And have already proven on more than one occasion that a bag of pistachios lying around = Dan and I devouring about 700 calories worth of pistachios in a few minutes! And, to be honest, I’m afraid cost doesn’t deter us very much when it comes to food. Almost all of the money that we spend is on food, really. I suppose it’s a remnant from.. uh.. not having any ^_^
Ok, I can see that. The nuts thing is less about price and more about spending 20+ minutes driving to the grocery store, getting nuts, etc. At that point, they’d be way less satisfying.
To put this in perspective, I spend most of my days off sans shirt, socks, shoes (and increasingly necessary in Minnesota, jacket). Not that any of those things are far away from me, but it’s a deterrent. On the way to Whole Foods (which costs, on average, $40/bag), I pass:
Ray’s: Oddly (especially given the name), it’s Syrian, and very good.Cafe Latte: French style restaurant which has ridiculously good baked goods, spreads, and salads. The salads and spreads change daily, with such things as pistachio crab salad, horseradish salmon salad, artichoke crab spread, picante shrimp spread, and they always have excellent black bean spread, hummus, tuna, etc.
Everest On Grand: Nepali. Garlic naan, vegetable momos, excellent fish curry. Actually, just look at their menu
The Khyber Pass: Again, menu
The Tea Garden: I can never pass up a chai.
The Barbary Fig: Unfortunately, they don’t have a menu online. It’s Moroccan/Algerian cuisine, and the owner is rather obsessive about getting fresh ingredients every day and making whatever he can. No matter what, it seems to be amazing. Here’s a review to give an example of what he may have on a random day.
Grand Asia: Asian fusion? Vietnamese, Thai, Szechuan, Korean.
I will also be very close to:Izzy’s: It has the distinction of somehow being named the best ice cream shop in the US per Reader’s Digest. They’ve got 30 flavors on any given day, and 20 of those rotate. Summit oatmeal stout, Guinness, Irish whiskey, hot brown sugar (hot as in spicy), Irish moxie, chai, peace coffee (which may just be a Minnesota thing, but it’s excellent and sufficiently tree-hugger), etc.
Jimmy John’s: Doesn’t really need any explanation. Excellent sandwiches.
Punch Pizza: Traditional Neapolitan pizza. Menu rocks.
Assuming I don’t get distracted and stop at one of these places instead of getting nuts (which I probably will, as none are too pricey or slow for a random to-go stop), or any of the not-so exciting (Chipotle, not-as-good Asian, not-as-good pizza) places, I end up at Whole Foods. I head towards the nuts, and see some random produce that’s in season. Beets, artichoke, asparagus, pumpkin, acorn squash, whatever. I put it in the cart. I invariably pass their prepared food section (salads and whatnot, pretty much organic/vegetarian, which works out well), and where they keep the naan/pitas/hummus. I grab some, and go to the cheese section to get raw horseradish/garlic flavored cheddar (being raw, it’s also very soft and spreadable, and undeniably delicious). While there, I probably grab more chevre/roquefort/gorgonzola/ewe’s milk cheese. Probably goat milk to drink, too. On the way to the register, I pass by the butcher’s section, and I remember that there’s a seafood wholesaler a block away from my house who sells dungeness crab, crab cakes, oysters, clams, mussels, and fish (tuna/salmon/tilapia) ludicrously cheap for some reason, and I make a mental note to stop there, which means I need to buy more things from Whole Foods so I can actually prepare the seafood. For these reasons, I try to limit my grocery store excursions…
Way to strip my <ul> and <li> tags, Wordpress comment form!
To start: Goat’s milk is delicious. Like omg good.
And lucky you for having so many tasty things on the way to the grocery store! Unfortunately, when I drive to the grocery store I pass:
Upscale Salon 1
Upscale Salon 2
Upscale Salon 3
Upscale Salon 4
Safeway (crappy grocery store which we are currently boycotting)
Library
Car Wash
McDonald’s
Not much to distract me (unless my nails are desperately in need of a fill, which they are, btw). Also, I tend to hit the grocery store two or more days a week anyway. Alex feels left out when Anya gets to go to school and he doesn’t, so we go to the grocery store a lot to fill time and pick up random odds and ends.
As an aside — the reason it eats your comments a lot is because I have it automatically flag anything with more than two links as spam, to cut down on.. ah.. spam. I’ve listed you as an editor, however, so I believe that should give you the ability to go and approve your comments after you make them, should they be eaten.
Boycotting Safeway? Why?
Oh, and my complaint wasn’t really about it eating my comment, and more about it eating <ul> and <li> tags. I doubt if they work even with me being an editor, given that my WP comment form doesn’t list them as options. There’s a list of allowed tags in /wp-included/kses.php and <ul>, <li>, <ol>, and <u> are specifically commented out. I don’t see an option for <img>, either, so I probably can’t make comments with pictures, nor use <pre>.
Apparently the way around this is to either write a Wordpress plugin (right…), or to make a my-hacks.php file, click the checkbox for legacy my-hacks.php support in your wp-admin, then create one such as:
'a' => array(
‘href’ => array(), ‘title’ => array()
),
‘abbr’ => array(
‘title’ => array()
),
‘acronym’ => array(
‘title’ => array()
),
‘b’ => array(),
‘blockquote’ => array(
‘cite’ => array()
),
// ‘br’ => array(),
‘code’ => array(),
// ‘del’ => array(’datetime’ => array()),
// ‘dd’ => array(),
// ‘dl’ => array(),
// ‘dt’ => array(),
‘em’ => array(),
‘i’ => array(),
// ‘ins’ => array(’datetime’ => array(), ‘cite’ => array()),
// ‘li’ => array(),
// ‘ol’ => array(),
// ‘p’ => array(),
// ‘q’ => array(),
’strike’ => array(),
’strong’ => array(),
// ’sub’ => array(),
// ’sup’ => array(),
// ‘u’ => array(),
// ‘ul’ => array(),
);
}
define(’CUSTOM_TAGS’, true);
?>
The other option, I guess, is a plugin. I’m too lazy to devote much time to searching their plugin database, but this seems like it would do the trick.
You make me hate you so badly sometimes. Would that I passed five to ten excellent restaurants on the three mile trip to the grocery store, to say nothing of excellent ethnic restaurants.
Out of simple jealousy, I will say that I find it ridiculous that you can get tuna and dungeness crab and ahi tuna in Saint Paul, yet Fry’s (or the equivalent grocery store here, a mere six hours from Los Angeles) never ever fucking ever has tuna in stock. And forget dungeness crab.
Sometimes I feel like you list these things as some sort of twisted incitement for us to move to Minnesota… and sometimes I am tempted. Especially when we’re having dinner with the whole family today, meaning we get to wait until ~ 7:00 PM to eat dinner. At a time when Missy and I are used to eating dinner at 5:00 or so.
To be fair, I do live in the city, whereas you live in the suburbs. If I were to live in some area with dirt roads and no cable (which would be considered rural in Minnesota, not upper-middle class), the selection wouldn’t be nearly as good. What quality restaurants do you remember from North Saint Paul/Oakdale/Maplewood? It’s a lot more urbanized than Scottsdale, but it’s still Chili’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Applebees, Olive Garden, etc. Very limited ethnic selection. I suspect that Phoenix proper probably has a lot more than Scottsdale, though I couldn’t compare between Phoenix and Saint Paul (Minneapolis not included here. Uptown is like 80% restaurants, plus downtown, Broadway [the so-called Global Village which has tons of Middle-Eastern/Mexican places], and Lake Street [lots of African and the only Popeye's in town]).
Also consider that the location is a bit cherry-picked. The closest grocery store to my house is Kowalski’s, but the produce isn’t nearly as good. I’d still pass all those restaurants on the way there, though. University Ave has a shitload of Thai/Vietnamese restaurants, along with Cafe Biaggio (the place we got bread pudding when you were in town summer 2006), a few Caribbean restaurants, etc. Robert Street has assloads of actual Mexican (as opposed to Tex-Mex). Downtown, on the other hand? Sushi, steakhouses, breweries, Christo’s (Greek, of course), and Babani’s (Kurdish place we went to). The East Side? Virtually nothing worth eating at.
Minnesota’s a lot less, ahh… red than Arizona. High immigrant population (the sheer number of Near-Eastern, Middle-Eastern, North African, and Indo-Chinese restaurants should indicate that), and a lot of value placed in high-quality ingredients even if it comes at a premium. I can probably name 10 restaurants which specialize in organic food. I suppose my tastes run to what we have here (lots of spinach and feta used at pretty much every restaurant, etc). The seafood wholesaler? Sure, he has dungeness, crawfish, and ahi. No abalone, no spiny lobster, no rock crab. I could probably get him to order it, and he claims it would be there in two days, but that’s assuming he actually does order it. Like so many other things here, it’s conservation-mindful. If it’s on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch list? Not gonna order it.