Please eat the flowers

This is DEFINITELY NOT on the diet… BUT…

Sam brought home a jar of homemade, unpasteurized honey a coworker of his made. Wow. I guess because it’s unpasteurized, retained in the flavor are all these faint tastes from the actual flowers. I’m sure eating flowers doesn’t taste good, but if it did… this is what it would taste like. Just Wow. I don’t want to know how many calories this stuff is. Denial denial denial. I’m.. uhm… eating it to reduce my sensitivity to the local pollen to lessen my allergies. Yup. That’s what I’m doing.

Spaghetti Squash, You FAKE!

Maybe it’s not really Spaghetti Squash’s fault. We don’t normally give ourselves our own name. But to whoever gave Spaghetti Squash it’s name has misled an army of dieters.

I dare you to go on a diet forum and make a post that says something like “I know I could do a better job sticking to my diet if I could just eat more pasta!” You will, I can almost guarantee it, bring out some well-meaning but misinformed person who will happily give you this golden piece of advice “Have you tried Spaghetti Squash!” 😀

I have desperately tried to embrace Spaghetti Squash, and I have desperately tried to fool myself into believing that it could replace spaghetti, and coming to the cold hard conclusion that no matter how hard I try – Spaghetti Squash is as far from it’s pasta namesake as green beans is from chocolate. Really. When someone pipes in and says “Have you tried Spaghetti Squash?!” I feel like responding “No. I haven’t eaten poop yet either, but I’m pretty sure it’s not spaghetti either!” (No, I don’t say that but I think it really loud)

Maybe it’s my fault too. I’m such a horrible cook. If I could make delicious homemade healthy dinners, deiting and healthy living would be so much easier. Instead, I grab a recipe for Spaghetti Squash off the internet. And I dress up the VEGETABLE (It IS a vegetable. Vegetable != Pasta!!!! M’kay?) like it’s a drag queen pasta dish, and it tastes simply awful.

So my final conclusion. Spaghetti Squash: You only vaguely resemble spaghetti in shape, but you are nothing like the goodness that is carb-filled pasta. You don’t taste like spaghetti. You don’t smell like spaghetti. If you cook just a minute too long you become a mushy mess and then you don’t even come close to looking like spaghetti. YOU, my fine veggie friend, are an imposter of the worst kind. You make people think they can eat a spaghetti dish that has next to no calories. You fill my dinner with dreams and promises and then you don’t deliver. You are a charlatan. A fraud!!

I dare any of you to come up with a recipe using spaghetti squash that 1) I can make without screwing up, 2) I can make quickly because not only do I suck at cooking, I hate doing it too, so the sooner I’m out of the kitchen and into the dinning room the better, and 3) that doesn’t taste like poo. I dare you. Because I know it can’t be done. HA!

Home so soon?

Forget what I said about the diet vacation. UGH. I mean, I know it was labor day weekend and all, but all the food from the BBQ, takeout because we wanted a break from cooking, and I am sick. I’m going to keep trying to get back into the swing of logging what I eat. After eating healthy for a few months, I’m quickly reminded how I used to feel. This feeling of food just sitting like a rock at the bottom of my stomach, even hours and hours later. I used to think this was “normal” because I would feel like this all the time. But now it’s so different. You’re not supposed to feel gross after dinner, or still “full” even the next morning! YUCK.

Diet Vacation (of sorts)

I officially hit 130lbs a few weeks ago. That’s 30lbs down from when I initially started trying to lose weight last year. Half of that I lost since April. I’m definitely hitting a point right now where I’m getting a little tired of logging what I eat. Every meal is becoming a chore because eating healthy takes a lot of time to do. A few weeks ago, we started shooting for having breakfast dinners partially because breakfast tends to be the lowest calorie and healthier meal of the day. It is also pretty quick and easy to whip up a breakfast dinner. Oatmeal. Cereal.

In any case. I’m tired. For the next week or two, I’m still going to try and eat healthy. But if I’m hungry, I’m going to eat. I’ll pick something healthy to snack on, and I’ll try to watch how much of it I have, but I’m going to cut back on how intensely I count every calorie. I’m going to watch my weight very carefully while I do this so it’s not like I’m going to allow myself to balloon up a few pounds. And the instant I see it starting to catch up with me, I will start being more religious about logging every calorie. I’m still going to do the workouts I’ve been doing. Hip Hop Hustle and running (and maybe Zumba – we lost our original instructor for this class, and it’s just not the same without her). But I just need a break.

My guess is that the “break” will be good. When I’m ready to start losing the last 5lbs, I bet it will be easier then if I had tried to push through right now. I think my body needs get used to being this weight. And then I can trick it down to going just a little bit more. We’ll see how it goes.

Calorie check in isle 5, please?

Before I started counting calories, I hadn’t paid much attention to nutrition labels. At least, not nearly as much as I do now. Sure, I would check fiber and protein counts occasionally. Sometimes I’d double check to make sure a product didn’t contain any trans fat. Beyond that I was in the land of ignorance-is-bliss. I figured that similar products would all be about the same calories, unless something was marked as “light” – and then I assumed the item was ok to have on a diet.

When I did start to track calories, obviously this required me to pay close attention to those labels. It was a huge eye-opener. Products that seem exactly the same – can vary in calories to a huge degree. Once I saw that, reading the labels of everything I buy has become both a necessity and an obsession. It certainly has made shopping trips take a lot longer, but the quality of food I’m buying is worth the extra time. Something that can look and taste almost the same, can differ in calories by a few hundred. And the big surprise, not all of those items labeled “light” are really lower calorie.

Just today, I was looking for some quick, easy lunches. I found some instant-noodle bowls that looked interesting. They all looked about the same, but read the label and one package was around 500 calories. Another was under 300.

Another thing to watch out with those nutrition labels, sometimes I feel like they design them to fool the consumer. Something that may look like it’s a low-calorie item, may not be at all – it all depends on the portion size too. I see this a lot in cereals. We found an awesome tasting cereal that was made to look healthy and low calorie, but the one serving the nutrition label was basing it’s numbers on was so small, there would be no way to feel satisfied with it.

Scanning the labels is pretty time consuming, and with a husband and two kids usually in tow – it’s not very practical. The first few weeks of calorie counting, I had to go shopping on my own so I could spend the time to look at all the labels on the shelf. Thankfully, now things have gotten a lot easier. I’m starting to be familiar with what to expect for calories for certain items. I’m getting to know the brands that have the lower calories so shopping trips aren’t as slow as they used to be.

It took time to make this part of our regular routine and way of eating. But it’s well worth the time we invested.