Hi Ho and Happy Monday!

I'm sipping tea and getting ready to climb aboard the , which is my usual Monday routine. The thermometer says 36 this morning, which is a darn sight better than yesterda's 20, but I'm ready for 70! Everybody ready for a new week?

Good morning, Robin and gang! It's still cold here but going to warm up as the week goes on. Boy, do I need some spring!

I'm back from doing some elliptical and arms at the gym. We're dealing with two sick cats at the moment, so it's going to be a day.

Let's make it a great week!

Hi , we were supposed to leave camping yesterday at 3PM and DH had to work an auto accident (he's a state trooper) so we didn't get gone as planned. I'm waiting for him to wake up so we can go.

Hope everyone has a great week. We are in for rain showers, but just being at the lake will be fun anyway. Temps are forecasted for 70's all week. BYE everyone.

Oh, I weighed this morning to see my pre-vacation weight. It was 144, not too bad considering my eating and exercise haven't been horrible but not great either. I wasn't surprised or disappointed.

Good morning everyone. Our thermometer hit 96 yesterday, and that was probably pretty close. I'd gladly send some of it out to you all--I'm hoping it isn't an absolute scorcher this year.

My eating has been on for a few days, and most of the chocolate therapy weight is now gone. Time for the hard work again.

Anne

Good morning everyone! Just checking in before heading off to work.

Lily~have a wonderful vacation!!! Wow, relaxation!

Anne~good to hear your chocolate "therapy" is complete!

Oh, good news! I MAY have convinced DH that we should look into buying a family membership at the gym!!! I'll work on him some more this week. He really needs to get in shape himself.

Morning all! It was still below zero this morning (-4), but it's supposed to be in the 20's later on. I'm very jealous of all the warmer temps (though not 96, sorry Anne!)

Lily - have fun at the lake! Sounds like your family could use a relaxing week.

Allison - we have a family membership, and since it gets paid automatically by our credit card, we scarcely think about the cost. We hardly ever go together but at least we both go.

Robin, Meg, and anyone else!

I have a busy short week at work. Thurs afternoon I go into Anchorage to sign our will codicils and have an eye doc appt. Then we'll go to dinner and a movie, and DH will drop me at the airport (12:43 AM! flight) and I'm off to Dallas for a girl's weekend. Monday is a holiday here (Seward's Day), so I only to have to take Friday off. I'll get to Dallas about 1 in the afternoon and my friend is picking me up. Our other 2 friends come in mid-afternoon (from Massachusetts and Oklahoma) and we'll all have a good visit, I'm sure. I can't wait to get into the warm weather!

I'm happy to report that I've been consistent with moderate eating for several days now. Of course, the scale hasn't budged since the initial water-weight free fall, but I know it'll get there. I can feel a difference in my legs, and my pants are fitting better again.

News of the week: DD is now a climber. I was watching her play, looked down at my book to read a couple sentences, looked back up and she is standing on a wobbly table-type toy about 2 feet above the ground above the hard tile floor. I just about had a heart attack. On the plus side, she climbed right into the car and up into her car seat after day care.

Pat, have fun in Dallas this weekend! Allison, great news about the gym. I'm sure it will be good to have some company with your DH.

Hi everyone!

Lily, have fun camping! I wish I was going camping (provided it was somewhere warm!).

Allison, I hope you talk DH into it! My fiance and I have a family membership and we have a regular schedule... We carpool to work (our jobs are only a few blocks away from each other), then go straight from work to the gym, then back home again. It's been working out really well so far (no pun intended).

Anne, great job on the eating!

Pat, I bet the weather in Dallas will be a relief after winter in Alaska. Phew!

Meg, I hope your cats get better soon. Did you hear about a cat food recall? I don't know if it was nationwide or just here in Indiana but they are recalling some wet cat food because it was causing kidney failure.

We had our second week of house hunting. I have really mixed feelings about these places! One house we saw was really awesome, a beautiful A-frame with enormous windows, a huge lot (.69 acres), very nice arched doorways and great bedrooms. The master bedroom even had a sliding door directly to the yard, where there is a nice pool, professionally landscaped gardens, and lots of mature trees with birds singing in them (which was lacking in a lot of the subdivisions we went to). It was a beautiful house -- it looked a lot like a vacation home. It's also about a mile from a beautiful new park, and across the street (a big street) from an elementary school. BUT (of course there is a but), the bathrooms were so tiny that when I stood in the tub/shower my shoulders were touching the wall and the shower curtain. Why would someone build such a large, beautiful house, and then stick in these teensy cruddy bathrooms? It was pretty disappointing. If it had had nice bathrooms I would probably make an offer on it right away. But bathrooms are a really big deal -- you have to use them every day! Also if we lived there our neighbors would probably be all older than us. There are a few cheaper houses (<$300,000) on this one street where we were looking, but the rest of the neighborhood is $600,000+ and the surrounding area has million dollar mansions.

Another house we looked at is probably the frontrunner at the moment. It is in a subdivision close to work and shopping (one of my coworkers lives there even). It was very spacious and well-maintained (10 years old), with a good size yard (.3 acres). The community has a park, pool, and tennis and basketball courts, plus sidewalks all over. Also, a lot of young families live there so we would have neighbors around our age. OTOH it has vinyl siding and I don't particularly like the color, plus every single house in the subdivision looks almost identical. And we would not be able to get a gas range in the kitchen on this one either. Also since it is a newer subdivision there are very few mature trees.

There's another house for sale down the street from the A-frame one that we are going to look at this weekend but we're running out of houses that are for sale, in our price range, in the area we want to live, and with our basic requirements. Too much stress!!

Ah, Jessica. Don't forget - this is just your first house, not necessarily one you'll live in for the rest of your life! The first one sounds wonderful, though I agree about the bathrooms - what were they thinking?? The second sounds good too, and while vinyl siding isn't great, it likely matches the rest of the neighborhood.

On a side note, what you call a large lot differs considerably from here. Most homes outside the actual city have at least 1 acre, and in our subdivision the smallest is 1.5 acres (we have 2).

Last week I asked if anyone knew how to calculate how many calories I need to eat now. Barbara (Blue to Blue) over on Featherweights listed three sites:

- http://nutrition.about.com/library/b...tion_guide.htm
- http://www.calorieking.com/tools/weight_maintenance.php
- http://www.calorie-count.com/calories/calories-goal.php

I needed to know how much I should be eating now that I've gotten to my goal weight. If I wanted to, I could still lose another 5 pounds (doesn't everyone think that!) but any lower would be too much.

The three sites all gave me different answers, so I averaged them to get a target to shoot for. They did tell me that at my present calorie intake, I'll easily loss the 5 in 6-8 weeks. After that, I'm going to have to start eating more just to maintain.

Since I joined this forum a week ago, and learned that most of you weigh, measure, and count your calories, I've been doing so also. My daily average was 1300 eating "intuitively" - a method I've learned about since joining 3FC.

Somedays, I've actually eaten more than I was going to because I realized by keeping track I hadn't eaten enough. That's the down side of having no appetite due to my medications. I do better when my DH is home and I have to make meals for him. Left by myself, all I want to eat are salads and there's not enough calories in them.

Another thing I've learn from reading Glory's very interesting story and rules for maintaining is about Super Foods RX: 14 Food that Will Change Your Life by Steven Pratt. http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=84601

Super foods are: tomato (including watermelon), spinach (all leafy greens), whole grains (brown rice, whole wheat, quinoa, barley etc), yogurt, tea (green or black), pumpkin (carrots, sweet potato, orange pepper), orange, walnuts (all nuts), beans, blueberries (strawberries, raspberries, blackberries), broccoli, salmon (halibut, canned albacore tuna), soy, turkey

Glory can you tell me what it is about these particular foods that make them so good for you? Do they individually help your body in different ways? Do they all work in the same way? Why is an orange pepper better than a red, yellow, or green one?

The good news for me is I like and often eat everyone of them except raw blueberries. I can only get them down in calorie laiden muffins.

On the PBS cooking show Flavors of America with Chef Jim Coleman, he's aways talking about these same Super Foods as being heart healthy. I've gotten the idea that they lower cholestral. He also talks all the time about using heart healthy olive oil.

Carolyn, I haven't read the superfoods book but I can give you some idea for them based on what I have heard. I'm not a biologist or nutritionist or doctor though so I could be totally wrong.
- Tomatoes have lycopene which is supposed to help prevent testicular cancer (as well as some other cancers I think).
- Spinach and other leafy greens are high in vitamins.
- Whole grains are high in fiber -- insoluble fiber helps your digestion (keeps the pipes moving) and soluble fiber helps prevent cholesterol from building up if I remember correctly. Some of them, like quinoa, are also high in protein.
- Tea has antioxidants which are supposed to help prevent cancer, as do blueberries.
- Oranges as you know are high in vitamin C, which is supposed to help your immune system.
- Other orange foods, like orange pepper, carrots, sweet potato, and pumpkin, have some other thing (I don't remember if it's antioxidant or vitamin or what) that is supposed to be healthy. Aside from that sweet potatoes and pumpkin are high in fiber.
- Nuts are high in unsaturated fats, AKA "the good fats." But that doesn't mean you should eat too many since they are high in calories and too much of any fat can be bad, not just saturated.
- Beans are also high in fiber and I think protein. Soy is a source of complete protein, meaning it has all the amino acids our body needs in it. These are not produced by the body but must be ingested, and they are used by the body to build up all the proteins and enzymes we need to function. That's part of the reason soy is popular with vegetarians -- the rest of us get a lot of our proteins/amino acids from animal products.
- Broccoli is high in vitamins and calcium.
- Yogurt is also high in calcium. Also, the active cultures are good for keeping your digestive system healthy, since it needs "good" bacteria to function.
- Salmon is high in omega-3 fatty acids, another kind of "good" fat.
- no idea why turkey is good for you. They got me on that one, other than just being a lean protein.

Hi Carolyn,

I have the SuperFoods RX book and it's wonderful. I loaned it to a friend and am having a hard time getting it back! LOL You might want to look for it at Barnes & Noble to see if it's something you'd want to buy. I highly recommend it.

You should also jump over to the Whole Foods thread here at 3FC. There are a lot of us that eat whole foods and can give you good insight into super foods.

As far as Blueberries go if you don't like them you don't have to eat them. Blueberries are the super food but the "sidekicks" to Blueberries (their cousins) are all the other berries: Raspberries, Blackberries, etc... They also have great antioxident properties so if you like you can eat them.

Beth

Hi, everyone.

I am starting to feel a little under the weather. My throat is scratchy. It started right before I went to bed last night. By some miracle, I have managed to go 1 1/2 years without a cold. This is amazing for someone who usually got at least 4 or 5 colds a year as an adult. I stopped getting them so suddenly that it was quite odd. I thought I must have already caught everything and so I was immune to all colds! Ha, ha! I'm hoping this won't turn into anything real! Wish me luck! I don't remember how to be sick anymore!

Sorry to hear you're not feeling well, Tara. I, too, have gone over a year without any illness. I keep hearing about people getting colds and the flu and I just pray they don't know where I live!!!

I loaned my SuperFoods book out, too and probably won't ever see it again......boo. At least there are enough references out there that I can get along without it. I wasn't too keen on most of the recipes anyway.

Jessica~good luck on the house hunt. It's a big job!

Hi everyone,

I'm enjoying the beautiful weather here this week. I just wish it would rain for my garden's sake. I have all the spring veggie seeds planted, and my potted herbs and flowers just got their springtime fertilizer and are going crazy. I went to a St. Patty's Day party Saturday night and sort of fell apart last weekend *sigh* again...for about the, oh, 50th weekend in a row, and once again have been perfect food and exercise-wise since Monday morning.

I'm starting to think a month ahead to the play that I'm in where I have to wear a white nurse's uniform, complete with white hose and cap - how unflattering. I'm making it my goal to take of my 5 lbs. of winter pudge by then.

Tara, get lots of sleep and head that cold off!

Carolyn, sounds to me like Jessica knows her food pretty well. The list of superfoods definitely sound like they're all high in fiber, various nutrients, and antioxidants. I've heard/read from many nutritionists that you should eat a "rainbow" of foods of different colors to be sure you're getting a variety of vitamins, nutrients, etc.

Jessica, good luck house hunting. Sounds tough.

Anne, glad to hear you're feeling better.

Hi to everyone else! I hope you all have a great week.