Angel Food (lowfat)

When I first started Weight Watchers back in 2005, food journaling was a revelation to me. It taught me how much I was eating, how much I should be eating, what “quality” foods are, and why I tended to overeat. But, now in this “second leg” of weight loss - that is losing some of the 30 lbs I gained back after losing 75 lbs - I have a much more complicated relationship with food journaling. Now when I journal every day, I tend to beat myself up when I overeat. For some reason, when the “bad days” are down on paper, they hurt deeply. The negative feelings overwhelm me, and it’s draining trying to deal with negative emotions and diet at the same time. I find myself back in a messy cycle of losing/gaining.

I’ve been faithful with a new food journal technique, using it not so much as a daily record. Instead, I use it as a simple tool to get me back on track. If I gain one week, then I’ll journal for a couple days to get my appetite regulated again. This new technique has been difficult for my compulsive little soul to get used to. At first, it felt weird not to write down my food every day. But, I’ve found security in knowing that the food journal is there if I need it. It’s on my desk nearby, and I look at it every now and again to realize my progress, to remember healthy meal choices, and just to mentally check in.

Miraculously, this journaling technique has really been working for me. I stood on the scales this morning and was stunned. I weighed 155. I’ve lost about 9 lbs since January 1 and am on track to meet my goal of being below 150 by my wedding. I was able to wear a dress to work this week that I couldn’t fit into a couple months ago. What a relief! I wish I could get to a healthy enough point where I don’t stress out and judge myself by “good” or “bad” food days. However, progress is progress, and I’m pleased as can be to have a weight loss strategy that’s working.

I gave up last week. I threw up my hands in dismay. I was exhausted from failing. My weight loss has been stalled out for nearly two years! I’ve been somewhere between 153 and 162 since the fall of 2006 - nowhere near the 210 I was at my highest, but still a few sizes away from my beloved size 8 jeans. (I own one pair of size sixes, but I’m not crazy about them…) Somewhere on Thursday, I stopped my food journaling and decided that exercising was just not happening. I needed to reevaluate. Clearly, my half-hearted attempts at weight loss had become more trying than the times when I worked hard to lose weight.

On Sunday, my weekly Monday morning weigh in looming, I found myself with a choice to make. Do I, for the umpteenth time this year, stop my food diary, stop counting points, and stop working out? Or, do I do what it really takes to lose weight? New marriage looming, I realized that I must choose the second option. I don’t want to become a new wife weighed down by feelings of failure and disappointment. I want to start my new life feeling strong and healthy. I’m marrying a pilot who’s six years my junior, for goodness’ sakes, I need to be able to keep up with him!

After that little epiphany (yes, one can skip church and still be given epiphanies), I immediately set about finding my old WW points logs from 2005. Thank God that I saved them. I wanted to see what I did that made me so successful in weight loss a few years ago. How dedicated was I really? See, I have been telling myself lately that I can count points ever so loosely and still succeed. My journals tell a different story. I was shocked to read how faithful I was at points counting. I seriously stuck to the plan? Oh yes. On weeks that I went over my points allowance, I usually didn’t lose anything or gained a little bit. Another thing I noticed is that I regularly ate all of my recommended fruits and vegetables. I was the fiber queen!

Sitting in my kitchen on Sunday, with all these old WW journals in front of me,  I felt a strange combination of annoyance and relief. Annoyance  - that I’ve not been wanting to admit that someone else’s plan worked so well for me. (I am too gosh darn defiant and independent at times.) Relief - that there was something out there that worked for me. So, today, I am proudly giving up my own stubborn ways and am back on my the WW points plan (22 base, 35 flex a week). I’ve been fibering up and feel much less hungry than if I’d just been subsisting on cheese and crackers (re: last week’s breakfasts).  I’ll check in here again during the week to report on whether or not I’m ready to cannibalize myself from hunger (likely, I’ll be ok). I hope to report my weigh in results regularly on Mondays from now on (nothing like some accountability to start the week). For someone like me who likes to feel so in control, it actually feels kind of good to tell my little points log that it is to be my guide.

Today’s weigh in: 160.6 

I had the most lovely lunch today. A coworker emailed a last minute invite to our staff to join her for lunch in the dining hall. It’s “Fried Chicken Day” at the college where we work, which always puts people in a celebratory mood . Diet be darned. You don’t say no to Eddie’s Fried Chicken.

This Georgia girl enjoyed her chicken, collard greens, and black-eyed peas immensely. Even more special, however, was the camaraderie around the table. We were a diverse group of personalities but had a fine time talking about our families, tv, zodiac signs, church, etc. What we talked about honestly didn’t matter. I was struck but how we all were engaged getting to know each other better. There was no competition, no gossip, just pure enjoyment of the moment.

This is what “good food” should be about, right? Not the grams of fiber, the number of calories, or even gourmet ingredients. Good food helps to bring people together. Nutrition has its place and must not be totally ignored, but the best food is the kind that makes you comfortable and happy enough simply to relax, enjoy the moment, and feel the love.

Wow, this old blog sure is dusty. My weight loss has more than stalled, it has reversed. I put on 5 lbs nearly overnight in September. I’ve only sort of halfway been counting points, only mostly faithful with my food diary, and only occasionally hitting the gym. Honestly, my heart hasn’t been in my weight loss lately. Honestly, my heart hasn’t been into anything much lately.

Three weeks ago I helped my fiance move halfway across the U.S., and I’ve been trying not to think about how much I’m missing him. We’ve been doing the long distance thing for a long time, longer than we actually dated in the same city. But, when he was down in Florida, he was a fun five hour drive away. I’d hop in the car, find some baseball game to listen to on my XM, and then settle in for the jaunt through the backwoods of the South. Now, he is a whopping sixteen hours drive away from me. I won’t be seeing him again until Thanksgiving. And, I’m totally oscillating between (1) feeling like this is a wonderful opportunity for me to take advantage of this time to work on me and plan our wedding AND (2) feeling overwhelmed by the planning, the loneliness, the fear of all the changes that are taking place in my life. I’ve been having restless dreams that can only be defined as loopy. I’m trying to put on a very brave phone voice when I talk to my fiance who has his own problems out in Oklahoma.

So, I give up. I’m gonna stop trying to be so brave and hiding how I feel, which is morphing into added stress, which morphs into added foodstuffs finding their way on my plate (or napkin, or just straight from bag to mouth). Instead, here I am again, back writing in all my strange glory.

And, as an added dose of irony, I’m off to a wedding cake tasting with about 10 points left in my day. Here’s to cake for dinner…

I’ve been keeping my food diary very faithfully now for a few weeks, and that is the only way I can remember what I’ve been eating. I’m in a bit of a funk, and my sustenance has been of either the feast or the famine sort. Case in point: two nights ago, I chowed down on macaroni and cheese (at least I worked out that afternoon); last night, I just didn’t eat. The hunger in my stomach feels somehow more appropriate to my mood, and I’ve no desire to feel full. I know skipping meals is unhealthy, so I basically forced myself to have breakfast and lunch today. I’m supposed to bring dinner to my grandmother this evening, yet absolutely nothing sounds good to me. I usually love food - eating it, cooking it, talking about it, reading about it - so I’m disturbed by this total lack of desire to eat.

It’s very rare for me to go through an experience like this. The last time I can remember feeling the way I feel now was when I was trying to get over a heartbreak. I’m not heartbroken now; I have a very lovely man who pledges always to be in my life. Yet, we are in a period of transition as he prepares to move across the country and we prepare to get married. Can someone experience grief over ending a chapter in her life? That’s what I feel I’m going through now.  I’m closing the chapter on an old, deeply rooted set of hopes and dreams, yet the new chapter hasn’t quite started. I’m foundering in this uncertainty but recognize that I can’t continue with the emotional achy-ness that I’ve become immersed in for the past few days.

There are a lot of things I don’t have control over in my life these days, but I refuse to lose control of my own happiness. Ignoring my friends, eating boxed meals, and climbing into bed at 8:30pm certainly aren’t good remedies for staying happy, are they? I need better remedies. I need to be with friends right now. I need to rest. I need to cook. I need to eat. No one else is going to take care of me, as much as I’d like them to, so I need to be sure that I’m taking care of myself as I close one chapter and start working on another.

Things are changing with me, and I’m so exhausted. My emotions have been so jumbled, so bittersweet lately. Not only am I getting married soon, but so is my brother. My nephew will be graduating from high school at the end of this school year. I’ll be changing jobs and moving halfway across the country in a few months. Perhaps things wouldn’t be so difficult if my family were as disconnected as we once were. But, in the past 5 years or so, we’ve worked really hard to tighten the threads of the family quilt, to be stronger and more closely knit. With all the changes taking place in the coming year, I can feel the threads unraveling again. I’ve been feeling nearly overwhelmed with sadness during what are, by all accounts, happy, happy times for my family. I’m watching my mom become more and more disapproving and rigid in her attitude with my brother, catching me in the middle of their disputes. My sister is withdrawing at a frightening pace. I’m torn between wanting to get the heck out of dodge to be with Andy, and never wanting to leave so I won’t disrupt the family further.

My heart is overfull, and I want to eat any number of good things and replace all the difficult emotions with pasta, ice cream, and cashews. Nearly every day for the past three weeks has been a struggle for me to keep my emotions in check, my eating in check. Thank God I’ve identified that I’m an emotional eater, so I can limit myself to just a third of a pint of Haagen Dazs at a time. Still, I miss those days when life was more boring and green beans and other healthy things could fill the hollow spot in my gut.

My fiance won’t be in Pensacola too much longer. Soon he’ll be heading to Oklahoma to live out his fighter pilot dreams. So, visiting him a couple weeks ago, I had to take advantage of what may the freshest seafood available to us for quite some while. There’s this great fresh seafood market in Pensacola, FL called Joe Patti’s Seafood. It sits right on the water, and boats dock alongside it to deliver their catch. Doesn’t get much fresher than that!

The market has all sorts of really cool (re: intimidating) whole fish, crab legs, claws, lobsters, clams, etc. Wanting to make a quick and tasty dinner, rather than exercise my culinary muscles, I chose some very approachable 21/25 jumbo shrimp.

I love spicy food in the summer (it goes so well with a crisp pale beer), so I decided to make Shrimp Fra Diavolo for dinner - a tasty saute of shrimp served with a spicy tomato sauce over whole wheat pasta. I’ll have to make the Fra Diavolo sauce again to be able to give an actual recipe. Essentially, I used San Marzano tomatoes, a little garlic, fresh basil leaves, cayenne pepper, and a splash of balsamic vinegar. It was too sweet. Then, my fiance got home and decided to dump some cajun seasoning in it, against my protests. Turns out he’s got a pretty good palate after all. The sauce was suddenly nicely spicy and not too sweet. The shrimp, however, were more controlled affair. So, here’s my homespun recipe for Spicy Lemony Sauteed Shrimp (or Shrimp Fra Diavolo when served with the spicy tomato sauce).

If you have fresh herbs on hand (especially basil, parsley, or oregano) mince the herbs and toss with shrimp at the end of cooking.

1 tbsp olive oil

1 medium shallot, minced

2 large cloves garlic, minced

1 lb shrimp, peeled and cleaned

generous pinch Cayenne pepper

generous pinch of salt

1 lemon, halved

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add minced shallot to pan and sauté until shallot softens and is translucent. Add garlic to pan with shallot and sauté until garlic just begins to color (do not let garlic turn brown). Carefully add shrimp to pan so oil does not splatter. Stir and sauté shrimp until it is barley cooked, just opaque on each side. Remove pan from heat. Sprinkle cayenne and salt over shrimp to taste. Squeeze juice from lemon over the shrimp. Add herbs, if using. Toss shrimp until well coated with spices and aromatics. Serve immediately.

Serves 4, est. time 30 min (incl. prep), est. 4 WW points 

So, I just finished reading Julie and Julia, the book about the Julie/Julia Project. If you don’t know what the J/J Project is, er, was, it was a raucous blog about one woman’s obsessional cooking through Mastering the Art of French Cooking (524 recipes) in the span of just one year. It was also the first food blog that I regularly read. I loved it as an antidote to my Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines, publications that have you believing that there’s something wrong with you if you balk at paying $28/lb for organic chanterelles. (I actually spent that on mushrooms one Thanksgiving, although I only bought 1/4 of a lb for the salad course, thinking I’d ruin the precious recipe if I substituted a cheaper fungus. Sadly, the chanterelle and pear salad was possibly the most underwhelming plate of food I’ve ever eaten on Thanksgiving.) Well, having finally finished the book about the blog, I find myself wanting to cook, and write, and give my little spin on the recipes I encounter.

Also, I still want to lose weight.

Here’s the deal, though. With the exception of the recipes in Cooking Light, I nearly always hate any recipe that purports to be low-fat, low-cal, or ”points-friendly.” (I most especially have hated the “points-friendly” recipes written by Weight Watchers.) But, since I love to cook and love to eat yet still have 10-20 lbs to lose (depending on how nice I’m being to myself), I most definitely need to focus on low-fat, good-for-me comestibles. So, my plan going forward for my 3fc blog is: when I’m feeling a bit lazy, I’ll cook and share tasty recipes I come across in Cooking Light; when I’m feeling more spirited, I hope to revamp others’ recipes to make them a little more healthful (or, in the case of the WW recipes, a lot more tasty).

I’ve not yet picked out a first recipe to write about here. I’m in Florida this weekend visiting my pilot-in-training fiance, praying that he rocks his checkride this afternoon and the visual navigation route later tonight. He’ll not be in from his two flights until about 11pm or so. That leaves me about 6 1/2 hours to do a bit of recipe research and experimentation. Now, where did I leave my uppity Aug 08 Gourmet?

I’m really excited tonight because I’m finally heading into the weekend having not totally blown my WW points this week. What’s funny is that I’m more focused on food than I have been in a long time, despite being hot and heavy into dieting. Food has long been a passion of mine, and, like many, food is at the center of fond memories of family, childhood, etc. More than simply having heartwarming thoughts about my grandmother’s heavenly biscuits, I’ve also just been downright interested in food for almost as long as I can remember. I distinctly remember learning how to make butter when I was in kindergarten. For me, it was the most exciting lesson of the year (far more exciting than learning my right from my left). I still can remember how it tasted, and how the taste was so different from the butter and margarine I was used to. When I learned that a great aunt of mine actually owned a working butter churn, I was ecstatic and fascinated. My family all thought I was a little weird.

My interest in and passion for food has continued into adulthood. For many years, I’ve been wondering just how to use this interest (culinary school? blogging? teaching?), introducing fear and worry into my love. Well, lately, I’ve realized that I don’t want to continue fretting about food. I want to recapture the joy and fascination I felt when I was a kid. Perhaps while dieting doesn’t seem like the best possible time to recapture my own personal joy of food and cooking. Yet, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing these past couple weeks. I’ve been cooking new recipes and old favorites. I’ve been reading cookbooks just for fun. I’ve been absolutely enjoying myself, choosing seasonal ingredients, cooking and eating things that I really love. I’m feeling more satisfied at mealtimes and am accepting the hunger that comes with dieting much more readily than ever before. (And, oh yeah, I’ve lost about 3 lbs.)

Sometimes weight loss just doesn’t make any sense. My family threw a graduation party for me on Saturday with a buffet laden with, among other things, pulled pork barbecue, sliced smoked brisket, a “southern caprese salad,” and key lime pie. I ate with abandon, not counting any points. Still, I lost 2.2 lbs last week. Most likely, the nice scale victory occurred because I was diligent about cooking last week and really enjoyed my meals. Also, I worked out twice. That’s not great, but it is a 100% improvement over the week before.

This week, I’m planning to make a weight watchers recipe - a chicken and cabbage salad with soy dressing. I’ve had mixed luck with WW recipes - sometimes they can turn out tasteless or glommy from the lack of fat. The recipe I’m going to try tomorrow night calls for fat-free mayo, which I find pasty and gross. I’m going sub in reduced fat mayo instead. Since the original only has 3 points/serving, I figure that I can afford to add a few extra points to the recipe.

I’m a good cook but sometimes can be a strict recipe person. It feels good to realize that I can tweak recipes to suit my palate, the ingredients I have on hand, etc. and still make them work. I’m slowly starting to accept how to incorporate dieting back into my lifestyle. I really have to make it work for me instead of trying to shoehorn myself and my personal tastes into a way of being that are counter to who I am. Now, let’s just hope that chicken salad with a ginger soy dressing tastes good!