Sunday is Waffle Day

Posted on 3 April 2016 | Leave a comment

“On Wednesdays we wear pink,” Karen famously says on the movie Mean Girls. On Sundays I eat waffles. Well, I don’t eat them every Sunday, but I have an affinity for big weekend breakfasts, and since my entire food intake yesterday only amounted to 828 calories, I figured I could splurge a bit and make waffles for me and the grandkids.

As a vegan, I’m finding that the same thing is happening to me this time around as happened last time I was vegan, I’m having a hard time eating enough calories. We went for an hour, or so, hike yesterday, so I burned quite a few calories doing that, and I ate a big dinner, but vegetables and other plant-based foods, don’t have a lot of calories in them. I have added an avocado to each day, so I can get a good base of fat in my diet, and I eat beans and rice for complete proteins, but there just aren’t a lot of calories there. I ended yesterday with a net of 237 calories consumed, which isn’t amazing or sustainable.

Because I’m not used to cooking gluten-free, sugar-free, and vegan, I looked up a recipe for waffles. I’m not sure I adored the recipe (though it was really tasty) and will definitely tweak it in the future to make a more waffle-consistency batter. This batter was thick and made waffles that were fairly chewy in the middle. Delicious, but chewy. Both my granddaughter and I like our waffles a bit more crunchy than this recipe made them, but my grandson thought they were just divine. Tomorrow I will see if cooking the waffle in the oven for a few minutes, after it has been cooked in the waffle iron, to see if that will make it a bit crispier.

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Anyway, I made a nice peach and orange juice compote to top my waffle with, so I could stay with my focus of not adding sugar to anything. I do realize that fruit and vegetables contain sugar. I get the basics of nutritional science, but my sugar-free is avoiding added sugars. That said, I am still staying under 30 grams of sugar (which is all sugar that naturally occurs in the food, no added sugar) pretty much every day. I have found no recommendation for the amount of naturally occurring sugar  a person should eat, but I did find the recommendation that women should not eat over 25 grams of added sugar (for men it’s 37; why do they get 12 more grams?).

Since last Monday, so for 7 days now, I haven’t eaten any added sugar, wheat, or animal products. I’ve lost 6 pounds, and my itching is all but gone. I was a bit itchy when I got home last night, but I think it may been stress-related, because as soon as I started up Ken Burns’ Civil War and began to relax the itching subsided. Ken Burns, you are a magic man.

“On Sundays I eat waffles.”

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Posted in Abstinence, Addiction, Cooking, Fat, Fitness, Food, Goals, Health, Mental Health, Social Justice, Spirituality, Sunday, Vegetarian or Vegan, Weight Loss, Wellness

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What Do You Even Eat?

Posted on 30 March 2016 | 1 comment

Since I wrote about my plan to leave sugar, gluten, and animal products out of my diet for the month of April (at least), I’ve found that I have to explain what exactly it is that I eat. Again. Make no mistake, I get that it’s confusing to be my friends or family members, since I change my diet more frequently than the average person. My friend Tish would say I’m like a fart in a skillet, with which I might agree.

I would like to take this moment to point out, though, that I’ve been vegan or vegetarian for more of my adult life than I haven’t. I remember the struggle of being vegetarian at Ball State University in the early 1990s when the best choice I had for lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and for dinner the lovely and magical vegetable tetrazzini that looked (and tasted) like chunky wallpaper paste. In their defense, there were some brownish peas and carrots, likely once frozen, in that tetrazzini. I lived the vegetarian struggle. Looking back I can even chuckle that the jello cup was a vegetarian selection.

Let’s discuss when I became vegan a few years later in the thriving metropolis Muncie, IN. I looked high and low for a single veggie burger, block of tofu, carton of soy milk, or container of nutritional yeast. Most weeks I’d drive all the way to Broadripple to the health food store to find some of the ingredients mentioned in my “Vegetarian Times” magazine.

(Sidenote: I have to give my parents, and I guess my little brother, some kudos here, because, even though it was weird to have a vegan in the family in the 90s in Indiana, they were very supportive. My mom even makes some amazing vegan oatmeal, banana, raisin, walnut cookies. I mean those things are AMAZING.) 

At that point in my life, I wasn’t sure which caused my mail carrier more consternation, my subscription to “Vegetarian Times” or the monthly delivery of the several LGBT+ magazines to which I also subscribed. I only wondered this because the couple of times I met her at the mailbox, the mail carrier would say something like, “Interesting magazines you read,” or “You got a couple new issues today”, but I could never tell for sure if she was bothered by their content, or if that was some sort of awkward Midwestern lesbian pick-up line. As most anyone can tell you, I am really bad at reading those sorts of signs.

But I digress. What do I even eat?

Today I started the day non-vegan because whenever I try to change my diet, I finish off the food leftover from whatever I was eating before. Something I hate more than itching, inflammation, and super fatness is wasting food, so I make a point of trying not to waste. I also have an intense phobia of mold, so sometimes things do get wasted, but I try.

This morning for breakfast, I ate two vegetarian corndogs, and I will have the last two for lunch tomorrow. I also had an Americano with some soy milk, but how exciting is a picture of any coffee drink in a paper cup? Now if I’d had an my drink in a glass or even a ceramic mug, I’d have taken a picture, because Americanos are some sexy coffee when they’re made right.

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For lunch, I had a sofritas bowl from Chipotle. It had brown rice, black beans, grilled vegetables, sofritas, pico de gallo, corn salsa, spicy salsa, guacamole, and lettuce. This photo isn’t mine (I got it from here), but mine looked just like this, and it tasted super yummy!

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For dinner I had a smoothie with some frozen berries, plain almond butter, and unsweetened almond milk. Again, this is not my photo (I borrowed it from Silk), but mine was delicious, tasting a bit like an almond butter and jelly sandwich. A bit.

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Basically, I ate everything delicious today, and I will continue to eat everything delicious for the month of April.

 

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Posted in Abstinence, Addiction, Cooking, Fitness, Food, Goals, Grace, Health, Hope, Joy, Mental Health, Vegetarian or Vegan, Walking, Weight Loss, Wellness, What I Ate Wednesday

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Jump Start This Thing, Will Ya?

Posted on 28 March 2016 | 2 comments

When I was little there was an exercise place in my hometown that was run by two of my friends’ moms. The name of the place was the “New You.” What I loved about it was that more than being a collection of strange 1970s exercise equipment—yes, they had the fat-jiggler belts—New You was a place where women like my mom could go to feel better about themselves and to be inspired by other women from the same small town. They could all find their New You together.

Once the “New You” closed down, there were a few years where the HC had no exercise facility, and then Tom and Kay opened “Main Street Gym.” Again, the endearing quality of Main Street Gym was the camaraderie of people who went there to make themselves healthier, to challenge and support each other in life’s  new journey toward health. My dad still has weightlifting trophies he won while he was lifting weights there, and the rest of my family still has the memory of going there for aerobics classes or weightlifting after school.

My point in sharing all of this is that health and the desire to be fit isn’t new in my life. I’ve ridden this horse before, which is what makes it a bit annoying to admit that I can’t just stay in the land of the fit. Instead I find myself where I was nearly 10 years ago when I started this blog, at around 250 pounds and unwell. More than I have been in the past ten years of goofing around with fitness and wellness, I am looking for a New Me and a community that will hold me accountable and support and challenge me. I want to learn to rock climb with my friends Travis and Angie, and I want to be part of the Mill City weekly runs when I can, and I want to be able to finish some bucket list races, and I can’t if I am fat, itchy, and inflamed.

After I wrote the entry last night, I was up for another several hours watching Ken Burns’ Civil War and pondering why it is I thought I needed to wait until April 1 to start this (renewed too many times) quest. I also thought about how many times I’ve failed at this before, and then I decided with exercise, I need to take it slowly, so no matter how badly I want to start running before May 1, I am forcing myself to walk. Why? I need to ease back into this, so I don’t injure myself and so I don’t burn myself out. Here’s to long walks and dietary abstinence.

Because I couldn’t wait to get started, I got up this morning at 8AM, walked the dogs, and then went for a 70-minute walk along one of my favorite non-state-park routes past the cemetery and the oil refinery. When I got home I made myself some breakfast (beans, rice, onion, garlic, garam masala, spinach, and mushrooms), and drank a big glass of water. Needless to say, I am feeling pretty good about how this day has started off, and I feel like the next 30 days couldn’t be more splendid. Of course, now I have to leave the house and face the real world.

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Posted in Abstinence, Cooking, Fat, Fitness, Food, Goals, Grace, Gym, Health, Joy, Mental Health, Nature, Spirituality, Vegetarian or Vegan, Walking, Weight Loss, Weightlifting, Wellness, Workout

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Major Life Changes: No April Fool’s Day Joke

Posted on 27 March 2016 | 5 comments

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’ve gotten super fat again, and that I’ve been sick pretty much all winter long. Since some time in November, around Thanksgiving I’d say, I’ve been sick or not feeling 100% more than I’ve been well or even feeling 80% or better. A couple of days in January and a couple more in February I couldn’t even drag myself from the couch. I missed work more this winter than in the entire time I’ve been working combined.

In addition to being a coughing, sneezing, tired, achy mess, I’ve also been inordinately itchy, which I think is some sort of allergic response to something. If I forget to take my allergy pill in the morning, by the early evening, the itchiness is over the top to the point where I have bruised myself or bloodied myself with the fierceness of my scratching.

Because of the misery of labored breathing, aching joints, and constant itching, I’ve done very little aside from sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, and wishing my life was way more awesome than it has been. I mean I’ve hiked some and swam some, but I’ve really done no physical activity to write home about. Consequently, I’ve gotten really fat again. I can tolerate being fat, but super fat is where I draw the line. For my own comfort, super fat is not okay.

On April 1, 2016, I will usher in a life change. Again. I’m serious, though it’s April Fool’s Day.

I’m publishing this now because I’m hoping to leave behind a few things that get in my way of doing positive things for myself, or that get in the way of me getting out of the house on a more regular basis. I’m grabbing the reins of this horse, and turning her fat behind around. I’m leaving the social medias for the next 30 days, and hopefully for the next 365 days, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Don’t worry, I still have a phone, so you can call or message me.

To begin the diet changes I think are necessary to feel better, I’m doing a bit of a detox, and not the kind where I drink 8 million gallons of water and suck only on ripe lemons harvested by llamas on a beach in Brazil. I’m cutting out some things which I think may be harming my body or at the very least causing me discomfort in the way of itching and inflammation.

To make a long story short: sugar goes bye-bye, wheat goes bye-bye, and dairy goes bye-bye. If I am not mistaken, this is common practice when trying to find the allergen that is causing discomfort. So basically, I’ll be a gluten-free, sugar-free vegan. For at least the next 30 days. If I feel better, I’ll keep on. If I don’t, I’ll find an allergist up here to figure out what is going on. Don’t be sad if I don’t eat the food you offer to me. I’m not being rude; I’m simply trying to figure out why I am so achy and itchy, because I’m tired of feeling like yuck.

For the next 30 days, I am making a promise to myself that I will spend one hour outside moving about. If I take a walk, if I go for a hike, if I run, I will spend 60 minutes in nature moving. I would love it if this would grow to include some swimming and weightlifting, but, again, I am doing this more to feel better than for any weight-loss goal right now. I just need to stop itching and feel well.

I’m hoping these health changes will move me toward starting to run again, because I really miss it. I have just looked at some photos from about 6 or 7 years ago to find record of the fact that I could run 15 miles at a time. I was, at one time, running 3 or 4 miles in the morning, then some more in the evening. I’d be happy if I could just run a 5K without feeling like I might die. Maybe that day will return.

I hope to make this a 365-day-long experiment, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I hope to feel better by March 31 of next year, but I want to focus on the next 30 days instead.

I have heard that the answer is 42. I’ll be 42 this year, so maybe it’s my year.

 

EDIT: In the interest of full disclosure, I’m addicted to candy and sweets. I can’t control myself when I am around them, and I’ve been inspired by my friend over at Travels with Freckles to change my life.

I’ll use today for an example of food consumption. We went to Easter Brunch, which is a thing up here, at the Green Mill. I had a mimosa, salad, a donut, about a quarter of a pizza, some spinach dip and bread, some butter and bread, six little rice kripsy treat bird nests with icing and mini cadbury eggs, and probably some things I am forgetting.

To burn off the calories, we went for a four- to five-mile walk at Afton State Park. It was beautiful and amazing. But afterwards I needed some strawberry milk.And then I needed some jelly beans and marshmallow bunnies and chicks (think circus peanuts, but shaped like Easter things). And a three- or four-hour nap.

For dinner, when I woke up from sleeping, I had a bowl of popcorn, and some (okay, an entire bag of) Malt M&Ms.

Long story short: I need to get my shit together before I make myself diabetic, hypertensive, and at risk for heart-disease by eating so much crap. Not to mention that I can’t fit into any of my dress clothes, and Burris graduation is coming up in two months.

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Posted in Wellness

Break Me Off a Piece of That Kit Kat Bar

Posted on 16 February 2016 | Leave a comment

Give me a break. Give me a break.

I’m taking a break. I’ve been way too sick for way too many months this winter. I’m tired. My body isn’t cooperating. And I’m giving her the rest she desires.

There will be no previously set goals accomplished this year, nor anymore set. Possibly next year will be the year I run a 50K and swim a 5K. We’ll see. This year, though, will be set aside for leisurely walking and hiking, and I’ll be doing some occasional swimming and weightlifting.

I’m going to focus my energies on non-digital methods of creativity and communication, so I’ll not be posting here either. I am hoping to spend some of the many hours I spend in front of my computer in front of some art supplies and writing pages.

Here’s to a healthy 2017.

Until then: peace, grace, love, and joy.

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Posted in Grace, Health, Just for Fun, Lent, Rest, Wellness