Round

Last night I went to my husband’s office after my own workday because I needed to find cranberries and there is a store not too far from his office where I thought I’d find some (I did).  I was also hoping to entice my DH to leave the office earlier than he had planned, but in fact that didn’t quite work.

I had not eaten a lot all day - just what I was in the mood for, and lunch had been on the early side and was a Chinese noodle soup so not very substantial.  I had sent my DH to the office with a bunch of apples on Monday and ate two small ones when I first arrived, but still it was my hunger more than anything that finally got us moving out of his office and towards home at almost 10pm.

My husband suggested we go to a local restaurant for a quick bite to eat (he knows I am terribly bitchy when I haven’t eaten and he didn’t want to risk 20 minutes in the car with me to get home without food).  The restaurant we had in mind was really busy and we knew it would take forever to get served, so we walked out thinking of various places between his office and our house where we could go, when I remembered this fancy Italian place we’d been to one that was nearby and that had been fabulous. The restaurant is one of the places frequented by the truly chic - the ’see and be seen’ crowd, and often there are celebrity sightings for those who are interested in such things (or recognize French stars, which I never do).

At this point I just needed to eat, and it didn’t matter if it would be healthy or not, as long as it was fast.  We were in luck, they had a table and we got right in, and I already knew I mainly would be eating the appetizers (they do a special of various antipasti that are always changing).  Because my DH found something else on the menu to interest him, I also ordered a main course (pasta).  The appetizers came, were less rich than the previous time we were there (and less good, frankly).  There were several items I don’t eat (calamari, salt cod) so I ate from what I could and didn’t pig out.  When my pasta arrived it was beautifully presented - linguini w clam sauce - I ate some but stopped about halfway through, realizing my hunger was satisfied and I was not totally loving the dish.

Not too bad for an unplanned stop at a restaurant that could easily set you back as far on your diet as it does on you wallet.

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans!

Eating well is almost a natural rhythym now.  It’s not been quite two weeks, so I’m pretty happy with that.

Breakfasts are healthy - usually oatmeal these days, sometimes fruit. 

Tons of water and herbal tea during the day.

Not much caffeine apart from a big pot of tea w milk in the morning

Lots of fruits for snacks and dessert, and tons of veggies. 

Being at home has helped (as has less stress) and I’ve been able to cook more, which is good both for my waistline and for my spirit.

I’m so glad I got back on track before the holidays.  This time of year being out of control with eating is a very dangerous thing…

Last night I made this :

It was delicious and absolutely what I wanted.  It was full of veggies and completely homemade. 

It was made with milk, butter and cheese.

It was dinner (along w some steamed plain broccoli).

I’ve been working on a big recipe organisation project, plus looking at recipes as I finalize my Thanksgiving-on-Saturday menu.  I found the swiss chard at the market on Sunday and added Swiss Chard to the things I was looking up for recipes anyway. 

When I found this recipe I was sold - in particular because I know the French love their veggies in gratins, and my husband would desperately love for me to give veggies that treatment at home.  Since he wasn’t coming home until late I decided I could play with little risk and set off for my rather complex cooking task.

I thoroughly enjoyed spending over an hour preparing one dish (it’s supposed to be a side dish).  It was really good and maybe if I knew the recipe by heart I could get the time down by half, but who on earth has time for that kind of time for ONE side dish?  Well, I did yesterday.

It was DELICIOUS.  I mean fabulous, awesome, incredible.  I had to stop myself from eating more and more but I did stop, knowing it was too full of calories to go hog wild, and yet it was rich enough that I felt really satisfied with what I did eat.

I skipped eating a lot of other things to eat this - and exercised the control muscle pretty well, and ended the day with a really healthy dose of extra veggies and within normal calorie bounds as well. 

I am very VERY happy to be back on track.

I have found the shift back to healthy eating relatively easy.  I think the first days were the worst, but the fact that I kept some of my healthy habits even when “gone” has made getting back on track reasonable.

I’ve been tracking my weight daily, something I’m going to keep up for a while, just because it helps me see the goal of managing my diet clearly every day.  Even a ‘lower’ weight is a frightening number to me, so this daily check-in is kind of a motivation boost.

I’ve weighed myself enough in my life to know that daily weight fluctuates by a few pounds.  So I don’t freak out by a higher number, and I don’t jump for joy at one low number either.  I know a +3 gain (like between yesterday and today) is not a real reflection of my diet, and I know that a low number seen once may take a while to establish itself as the new normal.  But overall it gives me a trend and for now it’s helpful motivation instead of stressful punishment, so for now it’s staying in my plan. (See the tab at the top for the daily graph if you want to see how I’m tracking it).

I’m going home for the holidays for about 10 days in December.  I think this has opened up the “can be homesick” option and I’m feeling it more and more.  My big challenge when I’m home will be to not do a “final feast” and try to cram into my mouth everything I think I “don’t have in France”.  Ridiculous, really, as I can find almost everything and there are plenty of great things in France I can’t find in the States, but that mentality almost always does me in when I go to the US.  The only place that’s really legitimate is maybe my Mom’s cooking (which is always healthy anyway) and good Mexican food (and that, I will allow myself without guilt).  All the chain restaurants, all the convenience foods, all the holiday snacks etc are all things that usually aren’t absolutely delicious and unique.

In the homesick vein, I made a can of Campbells Tomato soup last night for dinner.  It was bought in an import grocery store and cost about $4.50 for one can.  Ridiculous.  And it tasted…  chemical, fake, processed and not-so-great.  The first few bites were okay but by the end I was really totally over it.   Homemade tomato soup is so much better - even if it’s just throwing cans of cut tomatoes into a saucepan w spices and water.

I also ate a lot of the leftover veggies from the past few days - those were far better than the soup.  I finished the spinach (one of my favorite veggies since forever) and ate almost all the oven-roasted beets (so good, so sweet, I understand why some diets consider them non-diet food!).  I also polished off the remains of the green beans (well, I gave my husband half of them!).  Yum, I’d made them w a lemon pepper that my cousin had sent me and they were so good.  The veggies cleared my mouth of the soup residue and tasted so good and fresh - really amazing.

I have had in mind coming back to healthy eating AND exercising but frankly the healthy eating thing has been a pretty big change from how I’ve been eating for weeks, or even months…  And so I felt pretty justified in putting off the exercise thing a bit.  But a series of work-from-home days this week had me walking up multiple flights of stairs several times a day, and feeling winded after that minor effort, so the realization that I need to get on the stick was coming.

In addition, I know that diet is 95% of weight loss.  It’s so easy to eat an extra 500 calories.  It’s so hard to burn off 500 extra calories.  But somehow the two are synergistic together, I think because I tend to do MUCH better on my diet when I am also making the effort to exercise.

The day started out promising - instead of showering and getting dressed this morning, I jumped directly into workout wear.  That’s where the good intentions remained for many hours.  Breakfast.  Making cornbread.  Making chili.  Doing a few things around the house.  Playing on the internet.  You get the picture.  Doing everything EXCEPT getting my butt out the door to go to the gym.  Finally late afternoon I was reading someone’s blog who said how much better she had felt after going to the gym, and that was it, it pushed me to step away from the computer and head out the door.

I did 50 minutes on the elliptical and 20 walking on the treadmill.  Plus its 5 min each way to the gym (which I consider my warm up and cool down).  My thighs hurt, but I feel really good.

I ate more than my fair share of corn bread, which is only modestly offset by the fact that it’s a low-cal recipe.  I’d wanted to find out if the cornmeal I can find in France for polenta can be used for cornbread (it can) and one of the Thanksgiving stuffing recipes I’m considering will need cornbread, so I needed a trial run.  Plus, I’ve always liked cornbread.

Reporting on yesterday’s dinner is easy.  I had potato-leek soup and made a bunch of veggies (roasted parsnips, roasted beets, roasted apple-pear compote, and green beans).  I ate a bit of each of those, and took just one bite of the meat fondue.  Yuck.  I seem to have gone kind of off meat these past few days, everything I’ve had just has made me turn my head away.  So there was no struggle to control myself at dinner - I ate some of each of the veggies.

I started back on a healthy track a week ago.  I was really ready and it wasn’t so hard.

My husband was also out of town.

He came back Tuesday and it’s been progressively harder every day.

There are so many things I love about this man, but his knowledge of healthy eating is non existent, and his love of good living is very strong.  He came back from the butcher yesterday proudly telling me he’d bought meat for fondue Bourguinon.  Do you know what that is?  It’s cubes of beef that you cook in a fondue pot in OIL.  That you then dip into basically mayonnaise-type sauces.   I guess it’s diet food if you are doing hard-core Atkins.  For anyone else it’s a thousand ways to say “heart attack express”.

Sigh.

He also came home with panna cotta.  What is he thinking?  He’s thinking it looked good, that he knows I like it, etc.  In fact, I do love panna cotta, but I passed it up without too much hassle (I have all that leftover applesauce!).

Dinner tonight - for me, I mean, will be spinach, roasted veggies and soup.  I may have a few pieces of the fondue with him, but I promise to report on how many pieces of flesh I drowned in oil and then doused with greasy sauce.  (hoping I’m psyching myself into moderation here!)

Earlier this week I accompanied my husband to the butcher’s.   This is a big deal for me, for I am not a fan of going to the butcher, although I am a fan of the butcher himself.

France still tries to cling to it’s traditions of boutiques vs one-stop-shopping.  As the world modernizes and cities boom that becomes more and more difficult.  Today in our neighborhood there are still specialized shops, including one produce vendor and a fish vendor.  There are about 8 bakeries, 3 of which are really good (and one of the not-great is just across the street from us). There is not a cheese shop in our neighborhood.  We also have one butcher just at the end of the block, and there is another one at the end of what I consider to be our neighborhood.

There is also the open-air market in our neighborhood, 3 days a week - Tuesday, Friday and Sunday.  I am usually only able to use it on Sunday, but at least while this work-from-home period lasts I try to take advantage of it.

We also have 2 big supermarkets, and several smaller general markets around.  There is an organic supermarket (well, small supermarket).  And the internet - almost all my household supplies like paper towels and cleaning stuff come from there, and when I order I might pick up a few other things but rarely my main food items.

Our butcher at the end of our block is a really nice guy.  He’s won several awards including one for best rillettes - rillettes being a type of pate made with lard and strings of pork in it (I won’t touch the stuff — I take everyone at their word that it’s good).  He will cut meat to order and give advice on preparation etc.  He has some fresh products too - eggs, for example, a few cheeses and usually a few of whatever-is-in-season fruits and veggies.

The problem, for me, is that it smells of blood.  Which I suppose is normal if it’s a butcher, I mean after all, it’s meat.  But I really have a hard time with the odor and being confronted by so much flesh.  As much as I try to fake it, I was born and raised in America.  Where I come from not only is meat sold under cellophane, there is a little sponge-thing in there to soak up the blood.  And I learned from my mom to put all the meat inside a clear plastic bag when doing the grocery shopping to avoid any risk of getting the juices that might leak out on the other food.  When our butcher cuts you a steak he wraps it in butcher paper and when you open it you have to be careful because the blood might run out all over the place.  This is still traumatic to me, and is one of many reasons that I don’t cook much meat.  My husband is the one who purchases and prepares pretty much all the meat, and I take care of the rest.  It works for us.

But on Tuesday I went with my husband down the butcher, as it’s been months since I’ve set foot in the place and apparently he’s asking about me.  It was apple season.  I decided to make applesauce and as the butcher was filling a sack full with apples he asked me if I was going to make it “a la française” (the French way).

What? Applesauce?  Has a French way?  Turns out he meant to cook the apples with their skins on and then push the stuff through a food mill.  I laughed, saying I didn’t even know what a food mill looks like.  I’ve made applesauce at home for the past 4 years now and frankly it’s pretty easy.  You just peel and quarter some apples with a tiny amount of water and boil it up and smush them down.  But my husband was laughing as was the butcher, who went in the back and came out with a food mill to show me what one was, how it worked, and to loan it to me to make applesauce.

So yesterday evening I made my French applesauce.  The skins of the apples gave a nice warm color to the sauce, but otherwise I don’t think it added much.  I strongly prefer the lumpier version I make usually with chuncks of apple vs the smooth version I got from the food mill.  But I tried something new, and it was very healthy (and it looks like it came from a jar, which mine usually does not).

And so I now have a good association of the butcher, and I know how to use a food mill.  Not so sure what I’ll do with that knowledge, but there you go…

I hate Splenda.

I spent many years without real sugar, using substitutes or none at all. My first switch was in college, moving from regular to diet Coke. Aspartame was my savior for many years - diet jello, and all those myriad diet sodas I used to drink. The arrival of Splenda several years ago was a huge thing too, as no doubt about it, Splenda tasted better than Nutrasweet and I made the switch fast.

Little. Yellow. Different. Splenda. “It’s made from sugar so it tastes like sugar” their claim (although they are no longer allowed to say that). Remember when it was in really short supply? I contributed to that - I’d stock up when I saw it. I would take packets from my work cafeteria to keep in my purse to use for coffee wherever I was, because Splenda was rare and expensive and very hard to find. When I moved to France I brought several gallon-size ziplock bags full of Splenda packets with me, as at the time I was going through 4-5 packets a day in coffee and oatmeal and sometimes even in yogurt, and Splenda wasn’t yet approved in France and I didn’t know how I’d manage.

Then when I stopped the vigorous dieting I stopped Splenda. I’d already been moving towards organic and whole foods, and Splenda just didn’t fit in.

I kept up many of my good habits including cooking from scratch, but when I used something I used the real stuff - real butter, real sugar, real eggs (I was also a big consumer of egg whites in cartons when I lived in the US).

I’ve been paying a lot of attention to my diet these past few days. Mainly eating tons of fruit and vegetables, with little fat and sugar. The other day I made a big pot of oatmeal but put nothing in it, but it is really impossible to eat it totally plain. Yesterday I tried it with jelly (something I recently saw in my travels in the UK) but I’m not a huge fan of that mix. Today I thought I’d try another way to get around having sugar - I’d whip out my Splenda. So I put Splenda on my oatmeal.

Blech.

I doused it with cinnamon to try to cover the chemical fake taste but it still was horrible. I’ve brushed my teeth twice but the flavor is still lurking.

Tomorrow (my last serving of the oatmeal), I will allow myself real sugar or honey. And for the days after I will try a different recipe of oatmeal, hoping to find something I can eat without any sweetener at all.

Funny how your tastes change over time.  There was a time when I thought I could never move to fake sugar, then when fake sugar tasted just fine to me.  Now I’m back full circle, although my motivations are not just taste - there is also an overall health concern today that was not present at 20 years old.  I am a huge believer in scientific advances in our lives, but I think our food supply is over-chemicalized and over-processed.  Even “fresh” fruits and vegetables are usually treated to reduce pests and improve color and shelf life.  I am not a nut about these things, but I figure I have plenty of exposure to the altered elements in our food supply without pushing that even further.  And taste has also become more important to me.  I really think one of the long-term success factors for me to manage my weight here in Paris is going to be to via my taste buds, not in denying them in a strict diet.  I can diet for a period, but food here is art, and I can’t live in deprivation for life.  No, I need to use my taste buds to determine what is worth the calories and what is not, and find that point where I’ve had enough to be satisfied without it being more than my body needs.  These are long term goals, not my “gotta get the weight back under control right now” goals, but still, Splenda does not fit in.

So Splenda, goodbye.  I’ll stick with my approach of eating less sugar less often, and when I do indulge it will be the real stuff.

I am happy to report that I am off to a good start.

I had considered the 4 days at home without my husband as a huge opportunity to get back in control of my diet, and I did it.  (I had also wanted to go back to exercise and I didn’t but hey, let’s stick to the positive…)

On Friday morning I cleaned the fridge of all the “ewwww, what was THAT?” stuff and made a quick tour of the market picking up carrots and apples and clementines, cauliflower and broccoli.  That’s what I ate until Sunday when I re-hit the market and added more fruit and veggies, plus a roasted chicken and some yogurt.

I’ve been drinking a lot of tea (about 3-4 pots a day, only one caffeinated, the rest herbal).

I checked my weight on Friday morning - it was at SCARY NUMBER (although I suspected my week’s excesses hadn’t yet caught up fully so I bet it went a pound or two above SCARY in the next day or two).  I got back on the scale today, and I’m down 3 from SCARY, so not bad for a start of just a few days.

Beginning today I will do my food diary sheets (the best I can credit myself with for yesterday is that I found them on my hard drive and printed them out - that has to count for something, right?)

My DH is on his way home from the airport as I write this.  So the challenges of normal life will start to increase beginning today.

Last night I made a really quick but yummy dinner.  I took most of the roasted chicken (which I take of the bird when it’s still hot) and mixed it into a big can of stewed tomatoes, about half a cup of corn and half an onion. I threw in one of my envelopes of taco seasoning (although next time I’d just use half) and some water to make it not too think but not broth either.  I let it simmer a while and then dove in.  I dusted it with just a smidge of cheddar cheese (maybe a tablespoon and a half of grated).  Really yummy and really easy.  I was inspired by Audri’s taco soup recipe that she had posted once on her blog and I’d saved in a folder.  I omitted the beans, deciding I didn’t need the calories last night.

Here’s the pic (very messy in photo but I was starving and didn’t want to wait!)

Sandra Ahten (see sidebar) has a great saying “It’s not what you think you SHOULD do, it’s what are you WILLING to do.”

I’m taking some steps to get back on track, starting now.

I was lucky to have a few days at home without my DH to distract me to have a kind of break from bad food and allow myself to really concentrate on what I wanted and how I want my life to be.  Part of that includes losing weight.

I remain committed to do this low-stress.  I had moments in the past weeks where I contemplated putting myself on some severe restriction plan with shakes or rigid diets, lured by the possibility of dropping a bunch of pounds right away.  But that’s not a path that will work for me psychologically, and certainly not a way to make peace with my body, with food, and with my life in general.  That approach is war, and I don’t have that kind of fight in me right now.

I am willing to make some changes, though.

I’m willing to keep a food diary, although I haven’t totally decided in what format.  Maybe online, maybe paper. Maybe going back to the format I developed for Dr Hope last year.  That’s what I’m going to try for this week at least.

I am willing to go back to exercise, and to work on getting fit again.  I know this will take time and effort - both short term and long, but I also know I feel so much better when I am exercising regularly, and I also know it is very synergistic with healthy eating.

I am willing to spend time and energy cooking yummy food.  I am not willing to eat yucky stuff even if it’s low calorie.  Luckily, I find a lot of healthy stuff yummy.  But I will use real butter and sugar from time to time.

I am going to spend more time concentrating on what I should eat and less on what I should not.  I am going to vaguely follow something like Superfoods and WW Core plans just to have an idea about incorporating lots of healthy foods into my diet.

I am probably going to look more into Intuitive Eating type ideas as time goes on.  In the end it’s where I need to be, but I dont think I will follow steps or rules.  It’s also not where I will begin.

I am going to try to find a tight support system.  Yesterday I arranged to have a diet buddy, calling on an ex-3FC blogger who I’ve kept in touch with, and who I now consider a friend.  She was one of my favorite bloggers and like me she has had a pretty hard year.  I am also going back to a small forum group where I can have accountability and support, and the atmosphere is friendly and intimate.

I am going to weigh in very regularly.  Daily for a while and then maybe switch to weekly.

I am going to blog regularly.  This blog has been very helpful to me since I started it, and although I feel like I’d like a clean start, on the other hand everything on here is part and parcel to my current situation and thinking, so I’m just taking down some pages that no longer seem relevant and moving forward from here. A blog is kind of like a diary but not completely - it’s more living, more fluid.  A diary was written (usually in ink) and a real record of the past.  This, for me, is more about today — and tomorrow.

I am going to set my goal very modestly.  I am not going to reference my weight goals to where I *used to be* because it just depresses me.  I am going to just accept where I am, dry my eyes, and move on.  My first major goal is to get out of the 200s, this time FOR GOOD.