Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  263.6  Today:  264.6
Change today:  +1.0   Loss-so-far: 15.2 lbs.

In case anyone notices, I did change my blog design… I noticed that other folks had features that my scheme did not - and that bugged me!  I don’t know why, but the scheme I had didn’t allow for different categories of links and it didn’t allow for comments on any page but the blog page.  So seeing as I so respect and admire Ms. realcdn, (and want to be just like her, you know, cooking cool stuff and losing 100 freakin’ pounds, lol) I thought I’d be a copycat and use the cool theme she’s been using!  =D  =D  (Anne, I hope ya don’t mind!)

It’s Friday and tomorrow starts the Labor Day three-day weekend, woohooo!  Earlier this week, Hubby suggested we make it a bicycling weekend and hit a couple trails we haven’t been to before.  So we hopped online and picked two paved trails… the one we’ll be tackling tomorrow is seven-and-a-quarter miles long - and we’ll see how it goes as far as how far we go because the trail is not a loop.  If we go five miles, then we have to turn around and go five miles back.  Personally, I would like to take our time and do the full fourteen-and-a-half.  But like I said, we’ll see how it goes.

Then, we have hotel reservations about an hour-and-a-half away from home; we’ll spend Saturday night, get up on Sunday and go to this other trail (near the hotel).  This trail is 29 miles long!!  Okay, we’re definitely NOT going to do the whole thing.  There’s a ten-mile chunk of the paved trail, though, that goes through some pretty isolated, woodsy area.  I’m thinking that the round trip of that section (a total of twenty miles) would be a good goal for the second day.

It’s a good thing I reserved the room for two nights because I have a feeling we’ll be needing a rest and a soak in the pool after 34 miles in two days! 

As long as we don’t get rained out.  Weather for Saturday says scattered showers in the afternoon, Sunday says 50% chance of rain - also scattered.  Typically in the summer in Florida, it’s clear or cloudy until late afternoon, then it rains for an hour or so and clears up again.  Of course when we want it to do that, then it doesn’t.  So we’ll see.

I’m really excited about our weekend plans!  LOL, if someone had told me a couple years ago that my husband and I would willingly make plans for a weekend that included 34 miles of bicycle-riding, I would have laughed in their face.  Of course, a couple years ago I would have been smoking a cigarette after stuffing my face with fried chicken and french fries while I laughed in their face!  My life has changed significantly in many ways - since a couple years ago!

And it will continue to change as I make my way from fat to fit.  =D  For the better!

2112

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  264.8  Today:  263.6
Change today:  -1.2   Loss-so-far: 16.2 lbs.

Today I weighed in at the exact weight that I was five days ago before I somehow gained weight and lost it again.  This happens to be, by just two-tenths of a pound, the lowest weight I’ve experienced yet.  Yep, weighed in at 263.8 nine days ago - so in effect, I have made progress of just two-tenths of a pound in the last nine days of dieting and exercise.

But I feel way better than just two-tiny-tenths of a pound.  I feel stronger, peppier, and yeah, just a little bit leaner.  So I’m goin’ with that.  The numbers are falling wooohoooo!

In my netrition.com box the other day were a few mystery packages.  Nondescript foil packages, they contained ingredients I’d never heard of before but just had to have.  See I found a recipe for bread — omg BREAD! — and I am, right now as I am typing this, I am attempting to make my very first ever loaf of bread (low-carb or otherwise).  It’s been rising for almost 20 minutes (supposed to rise a full hour) and so I just went over there and took a picture.

It will be a momentous occasion if I actually end up with edible low-carb bread!

So what were the mystery ingredients?  Wheat Protein Isolate 5000, Wheat Protein Isolate 8000, and Resistant Wheat Starch.  What are these things?  I have no idea.  The two WPI’s look and sorta smell like flour.  The RWS kinda looks like baking soda.  In any case, all three of these magical things have almost no net carbs.

Okay, I’ve been doing other stuff at the same time, so an hour is up and I just put the bread in the oven.  It rose nicely!  The suspense is killing me! 

Will it be edible? 

Edited to add:

It’s not only edible, it’s awesome!  I can smell the carbalose smell a little bit, but can’t taste it at all, which is wonderful!  It actually tastes like bread, homemade bread, woohooo!!!!  Only 2.5g carbs in each slice!! 

2025

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Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  264.8  Today:  264.8
Change today:  -0.0   Loss-so-far: 15.0 lbs.

My baby drove today.

Okay, so he’s sixteen years old and technically he could have been behind the wheel a whole year ago but omg he’s sure not my little baby anymore.  He’s a young man and he is incredible.  He sat in the driver’s seat for the very first time today and it was like he was born knowing how to drive.  I was so amazed. 

We went this afternoon and got his learner’s permit.  He had already passed all the tests in driver’s ed and so all I had to do was hand over twenty-seven dollars and watch him smile (slightly so as not to be uncool) while they took his picture.  Ten minutes later we walked out, him with his new permit in hand.  That was without a doubt, the quickest and least painless trip to the Driver’s License bureau I’ve ever experienced.

After we got home, I switched cars with my older son (my ’stang is a stick shift) so that we could run over to the driver’s ed lot at the high school.  I rode along for an hour as my “baby” did three-point-turns, pulled into parking spaces, and rode around the figure-eight a zillion times. 

I’m so friggin’ old.  Geesh.

I did better at the calorie/carb thing today.  It’s just been a while since I was in the calorie-awareness-groove and it’s not hard at all to slip back into it.  I had a salad with both lunch and dinner to help fill me up and ate chicken and turkey today, limiting my cheese intake.   Skipped the cheesy broccoli leftovers and indulged in sugar-free jello and low-carb-low-calorie muffins that I made from the mix I got in the mail yesterday.  Like I said, I can do this.  =D

I will do this.

1985

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  265.2  Today:  264.8
Change today:  -0.4   Loss-so-far: 15.0 lbs.

Okay, watching carbs and calories at the same time is easier said than done.  All day long I felt almost afraid to eat anything!  I ate eggs for breakfast, two of them and then worried because two eggs is over two hundred calories.  I had a romaine salad with a spoonful of egg salad and a helping of the broccoli casserole and I could barely enjoy it, all I could think was, “Holy crap this broccoli stuff is 300 calories.”

My netrition.com box arrived this afternoon (yay low-carb tortillas!!!) so I pulled some chicken breasts out of the freezer so we could have chicken-soft-tacos for dinner.  I went ahead and added it all up ahead of time, exactly what I planned to have for dinner and my day came to a respectable 1400 calories but then while dinner was cooking I was hungry so I had a low-carb-peanut-butter-and-sugar-free-jelly roll-up on one of the tortillas, bringing my total for the day up beyond 1600.

Then after dinner I had a 118-calorie piece of low-carb-peanut-butter-fudge.  Sigh.  On this particular day - the first day I am paying any attention to the calories I’m eating - I ate more calories than I did when I wasn’t watching the calories at all!  Way more!!!

BUT, I was good in the exercise department.  My workout on the Total Gym now includes enough reps that it’s a full 40-minutes AND I put in 10 miles on the exercise bike.  TEN!  I broke it up into two parts, four miles and then later six miles - both while I was watching the movie Field of Dreams.  I still love that movie!  I would have married Kevin Costner in a heartbeat, had he asked.  =D

1956

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  265.0  Today:  265.2
Change today:  +0.2   Loss-so-far: 14.6 lbs.

I was scouting around the 3FC forums and happened upon a post which referenced an article about Atkins that I hadn’t read before.  I learned a few things from it, important things.  Here’s the link:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/low-carb-and-calories-2/

As I read down through what Dr. Eades had to say, I recognized myself.  I had done exactly as he described:  I’d gone from eating for hunger to eating for pleasure and had switched to low-carb-but-high-calorie foods, thinking that as long as I kept the carbs low, I’d be okay.  Somewhere deep inside me though, I knew that snacking on macadamia nuts was not a great idea — even though they are so low in carbs they are SO high in calories!

The other thing he mentioned that I immediately recognized was cheese.  Ahhhhh, cheese.  Years ago I had a horrible string of migraine headaches, and a neurologist gave me the cure:  Don’t eat chocolate, cheese, or nuts for one whole year.  I didn’t miss the chocolate much, and I could easily live without nuts, but what I really really missed was the cheese!  I feel the same way now, omgosh don’t take away my cheese!  Yeah okay, I can have it, but I just need to watch it.  Like earlier today, I made another batch of my yummy broccoli casserole, and son-of-a-gun a serving of that stuff is only 3g carbs but a whopping 300 calories, thanks to the cheese!

So… it’s time to start watching the calories AND the carbs.  No problem, I can do that.

It’s also time to make sure and get my exercise every day.  I took some time off from the Total Gym workout, well, today I got back on track! 

Hey this shows my progress on # of reps each time… woohooo me!  =D

For the hip abductions, the # of reps went down because I raised the level of difficulty.  For most of these exercises, I’m truly amazed that I can now do as many reps as I’m doing.  At the beginning I could never have imagined doing, for example, 23 pullups or 23 bicep curls.  It’s neat to feel strength that you know wasn’t there before!

1928

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  263.6  Today:  265.0
Change today:  +1.4   Loss-so-far: 14.8 lbs.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Losing the same pound over and over again. Last time I was doing this, I was losing pound #267.  Now I’m doing it with pound #264.  I would have appreciated something longer than a 3-pound gap between the two.  But that’s okay.  As long as there are downs between the ups, I’m good with it.

I haven’t been doing the Total Gym thing, not since Wednesday, and I haven’t ridden the exercise bike since Thursday.  Funny how that span of time corresponds with a gain. 

SO!!!!  This is why I’m so EXCITED today!  FINALLY FINALLY we went on a bike ride!!!

It was storming again this morning.  Hubby spent the early afternoon working on the bikes (inserting those tire liners we bought, what, 2 weeks ago?).  I checked the weather and it looked like the storms were going away and clear skies were moving in, so Hubby, Son, and Mom took off headed south.

We followed the bike trail - the one that includes the overpass - and even though it’s been a while, I made it up without stopping, woohoo!

Here’s the overpass:

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Going up is a challenge but coming down the other side is FUN!!!

Anyway, we stopped for an early dinner at the three-and-a-half-mile mark.  Hubby ate pizza, Son ate low-carb pizza (meaning that he scraped the toppings off and discarded the crust) and I had the most delicious antipasto!  It was a perfect mid-ride feast!

We decided on a route (east) while we were eating, knowing that the direction we’d be going would present a good amount of uphill.  We weren’t disappointed!  LOL, we went uphill for most of the next two miles or so.  The payoff was worth it though, because as soon as we turned north on the next thoroughfare, we cruised down the most marvelous hill!  I yelled “Weeeeee!!!” the whole way down, which amused my Hubby since we were connected by Bluetooth and so I was basically yelling in his ear.

Yeah, speaking of the Bluetooth, this was great!  My husband is hearing-impaired and when we’re out riding our bikes, we’re often forced to ride single-file, which is certainly not conducive to conversation, even if one of us wasn’t hearing-impaired.  We bought two different models of walkie-talkies which both had hands-free VOX and tried to hook ‘em up so we could talk to each other when bike-riding and neither worked out.  Then I got the idea for us to get Bluetooth thingies for our phones.  We kept the line open the whole time and it was awesome!  We enjoy our time together and we enjoy sharing our experiences, and that’s hard to do when one of us can’t hear.  This way we were connected during the entire ride!  I could hear him when he said, “Look at the size of that duck!” and he could hear me when I said, “Holy shit, when does this hill ever end?”  LOL!

We got back home a full fifteen minutes before it started raining - almost a half-hour before it started pouring and thundering and lightning!  We clocked 8.8 miles and it was awesome!

1895

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  264.8  Today:  263.6
Change today:  -1.2   Loss-so-far: 16.2 lbs.

I asked Hubby this morning what he wanted to do today and as usual he countered with, “What do you want to do?”  I didn’t hesitate for a second - what I wanted to do was to go ride our bikes.  He laughed, “You know we’re surrounded by storms, right?”  Storms?  The sun is shining!

We decided to go out for brunch and while we were on our way to the restaurant, the sun was still shining and it was raining out.  It always amazes me when that happens, it doesn’t seem like it should be possible.  I figured the rain wouldn’t last long, and it didn’t, but not long after that storm left, another took its place, and this one didn’t come with built-in sunshine.  This one came with lightning.  I’m thinking we have Fay to thank.

Well, we didn’t go out riding on our bikes.  Instead we (Hubby, son and I) went to a movie, we went to see Mirrors.  It looked really spooky and creepy in the trailer - and it was spooky and creepy but it was also gory (in just a couple short parts).  Overall I thought it was good.  Hubby thought it was good.  Son did not like the ending but said, “It was the best scary movie of the summer so far.”  High praise from a 16-yr-old.

I hope the sun is out tomorrow.

1875

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  264.0  Today:  264.8
Change today:  -0.2   Loss-so-far: 15.0 lbs.

In yesterday’s comment, rach asked me to post the recipes for the Cheddar Bay biscuits and the broccoli casserole.  This is such an unfamiliar place for me because I generally do not cook, therefore nobody ever asks me for a recipe, ever!  It’s pretty cool! 

Okay, I got both the recipes from Linda’s Low Carb site, but I made little adjustments, so I’ll go ahead and post the recipes here.  Besides, it’s just really fun for me because the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.  =D 

Broccoli Cheese Casserole

1 batch Dottie’s Cream of Mushroom Soup (below)
24 ounces frozen broccoli florets
8 ounces cheddar cheese

Cook the broccoli until not quite tender; drain well. Mix all of the ingredients and bake at 350º 30 minutes until hot and bubbly.   Do not freeze.

Dottie’s Cream of Mushroom Soup

8 small mushrooms, chopped, 3 ounces
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 tablespoons onion, chopped, about 1 ounce
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup chicken broth
3/4 cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper, to taste
Xanthan gum, optional 

In a medium skillet, sauté the mushrooms, celery and onion in the butter until soft. Add the broth and cream. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat a bit and cook until reduced and thickened, stirring frequently and watching closely so it doesn’t boil over. Season to taste.   Makes about 1 cup.  Do not freeze.

Okay, here’s my input:  8 oz. is a lot of cheese (2 cups)!  Look at the packages of cheese at the grocery store and find a medium or sharp cheese with zero carbs – and grate/shred it yourself!  All the pre-shredded ones that I found were about 1g carb per ¼ cup.  (I think they add some kind of preservative to it to keep the shredded cheese from getting mushy or lumpy.)  Kraft sells an 8 oz block of unshredded cheese that has zero carbs.  (I figure every little carb helps!)

Also… I don’t like mushrooms, so I left ‘em out (woohoo there’s almost 3 carbs deleted right there, hehe).  I used fresh broccoli instead of frozen (and cooked it first until it was almost tender).  I didn’t have Xanthan gum, so since it said optional, I didn’t worry about it – and I probably didn’t let the sauce reduce long enough, so my casserole was a bit soupy (but yummy nevertheless).  Also, I had some bacon on hand, so I tore up 4 thin slices (ready-made-microwave-slices) and threw that in there too (only added 0.3g carbs).  Oh, and I love almonds so I decorated the top with a few slivered almonds.

OMG do I sound like I know what I’m doing or what?!?!  ROFL!!!!

Okay, so made my way, here are the nutritional values for the broccoli cheese casserole: 

1 serving = 1/6 of recipe

Calories: 224 / Fat: 20.3g (Sat 12.3 Poly 1.0 Mono 6.0) / Protein: 7.2 / Carbs: 4.2g / Fiber: 1.3 / Net Carbs: 2.9

Cheddar Bay Biscuits (like the ones they serve at Red Lobster) 

2 cups Carbquik
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 cup cold butter, cut in small pieces
2 ounces cheddar cheese, shredded
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup water 

Toss the Carbquik with the garlic powder. Cut in the cold butter with a pastry blender (or two knives) until it looks like coarse meal. Add the cheese. Very briefly and gently stir in the liquid just until the dough comes together. Do not overwork the dough. Drop by large mounded spoonfuls onto a lightly greased baking sheet. Bake at 450º 10-12 minutes until golden brown. 

Makes 12 biscuits - Can be frozen

These are best reheated (so the cheese melts again!).  Oven, toaster oven, or a few seconds in the microwave brings them back to delicious!

Per biscuit:

Calories: 157 / Fat: 14.5g (Sat 7.0 Poly 0.4 Mono 3.0) / Protein: 4.9 / Carbs: 6.3g / Fiber: 4.0 / Net Carbs: 2.3

Enjoy!

1811

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  264.2  Today:  264.0
Change today:  -0.2   Loss-so-far: 15.8 lbs.

That’s right, today I spent seven long hours with Sally.  I enjoyed the time I spent with her, even if the reasons for our visit were such that we both were exhausted by the time we finished our adventure.  I treasure Sally - I might even go so far as to say I love her.  She’ll be good to me and she’ll make me happy for years to come I’m sure.

Sally… is my car.  Mustang Sally is her full name.  Yes I do - I love my car!  =D

This afternoon I had to drive to Tampa, then from there to Clearwater, then to Palm Harbor, then back to Clearwater, back again to Palm Harbor, back to Tampa, and then back home.  With stops for errands, that process took a full seven hours.  Whew!

Other than the fact that Sally is manual transmission so I had to press the clutch and shift, driving Sally all over the place didn’t exactly give me a workout.  So I put in seven miles on the exercise bike when I got home.  No Total Gym today, it was just too late for that.

1784

Starting weight (7/15/08):  279.8
Yesterday:  263.8  Today:  264.2
Change today:  +0.4   Loss-so-far: 15.6 lbs.

MMMMMmmmmm I had a yummy dinner tonight!  =D

Incredibly, I cooked not just one food today but TWO!  This afternoon I made the broccoli casserole, and then this evening I made the Cheddar Bay biscuits.  Both were outrageously good!  I’m so amazed!  And that meal you see above — even with two biscuits (had to have two), that meal racked up carbs in the grand total of… drum roll… SIX POINT FIVE GRAMS. 

I am totally getting the hang of this!!!  =D  =D

Kevin’s got drum-line practice tonight so he won’t be home until after nine pm.  I am saving the Total Gym workout so he can do it with me.  I haven’t read anything about late-night exercising (how effective it might be) but I seem to be doing a lot of it lately. 

1719

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