Lily - from what you've said about your SD, it sounds like the courts made the right decision to take the kids from her. Congrats on resisting smoking!

Michele - sorry to hear about all the medical problems!

Barbara - our raspberry plants are really tiny right now, but hopefully they'll grow a lot the next few years. There's a pick-your-own raspberry patch not too far from our house that we went to last year. Yum!!

I haven't heard about this one checked bag rule. Is it only for commuter flights? I have seen the rule where instead of two carryons you get one carryon and one "personal item." Then again I think I only checked two bags like once in my life.

Raspberries to pick?!? Yum! I love all the berries! I could live on blackberries, raspberries and strawberries!

The one bag rule applies to some airlines, and it isn't a rule but just that you have to pay for a 2nd bag. So check the airlines you are flying to see if they have changed their maximum bags allowed "free". If you are a frequent flyer, most of the extra fees are waived. My dh travels so much that luckily these fees don't apply to him yet (or us when we travel with him).

Dd will be going to college in the fall and we are going to fly as she will be out of state. I hope they don't charge as a ton for her baggage.

jessica, yes, I think the judge was very intelligent and his decision proved to be the best interest of the kids. I think the courts have changed some and the woman can no longer be gauranteed to win custody.

I just got off the phone with Sam's XH. He called to thank me for being there (although I didn't testify) and to say that DH and I are welcome to see the kids anytime we want.

Morning.

Lily - it was great you heard from Shane. And I'm glad you'll still be able to see your little grandsons.

Raspberries - yum. I agree they are wonderful. We have about a 10' row of them on the edge of our garden. You do have to be vigilent - they'll spread very fast. We have a place for a second row, and a friend of DH's has promised us some golden raspberry plants.

Michele, it does seem that husbands are often gone when they're most needed, doesn't it? I once moved with DH out of town - though to be fair he was grounded by weather....

What a day! Go fast, go fast, go fast, get nowhere! Ever have those days???

I'm glad to hear that someone else thinks nursing school is hard. I'm so much older than so many of the students, sometimes it feels like I'm swimming upstream. Today we were in the chem lab (I haven't touched a test tube in probably 25 years) and I discovered microscopes and bifocals don't mix. ARGGGGGG!!!! Tomorrow I'm taking my reading glasses to see if they work any better. Would it be totally awful of me to just look and say, "Oh, yeah, that looks good"? Jeez!

Got ditched by the entire fam for supper tonight - oldest daughter left for TN today, DH is helping a friend build a deck, youngest daughter has softball and then a date. Tried one of the Healthy Choice cafe steamers. Yuck! Guess I'll have some peanut butter on a Wasa. :-) Ol' dependable!

Hey!

traci in training, I tried one of those Cafe Steamers too, and I didn't like it. I'm better off if I stick with Lean Cuisine.

The day just whizzed on by for me, too, and now it's bedtime. I feel like a barely got up... aggh.

Jay

Evening, all,
With 4 weeks until I hit my first six months of maintenance, I decided to tighten up my eating for a couple days and get a few additional pounds I've gained to go away for a bit. I'm still 10 lbs below my goal, but I like the 15 lbs better! The real question in my mind is can I maintain the 15 lb lower weight. Over the past 6 months (almost I have been able to get down there, but my weight gradually creeps up to around 181 or so. Still not a bad number. Don't know what I'll end up doing about it. I just don't want to start hearing myself say, well, 181 isn't bad, well, 185 isn't bad, well, 188 isn't bad. I think that can be a really tempting way to look at a slowly creeping up weight and I don't want to go there. On the other hand, I am tired of fighting myself to get to the 175-180 range. Seems I have to do my take off at least once a month just to get back down there again.
Thanks to the no excuses challenge, I have now given up caramel SF candies for two weeks (I still want them really, really bad though and they appear to have made no difference whatsoever in my weight--sounds like I'm trying to talk myself into having them, doesn't it? Help!) I also have for the past week walked to and from work (no excuses week 2) until today when the afternoon found a driving rain --I took a ride home instead. I guess I should be on my recumbent bike making up the 20 minutes I walked. I'll do that after this, promise!
I'll be glad to return to my maintenance eating plan tomorrow. Tonight, because I chose Monday and Tuesday to cut back, I actually missed my spring staff meal out. Bummer! My husband and family said I was nuts; just go eat. I think, though, it's a matter of commitment. I've promised myself a steak this Saturday night instead, so I'm looking forward to that though I'm looking more forward to sharing a piece of cheesecake with my husband as part of that meal.
Hope all is well with everyone. Keep maintaining those commitments to you! You are so worth it!!!

What's up with coconut milk? Ok, I did great on fats today--28% of my calories, but it was the wrong kind of fat. A lot of it came from the coconut milk in the swordfish recipe and I also made coconut rice to go with it. Did you know that even light coconut milk is almost all saturated fat? No carbs, no protein, all fat and most of that saturated? How can that be--isn't a plant food, for Pete's sake? Is there some fatty coconut milk animal that the coconut milk is from? I guess it just goes to show that just because it's a plant doesn't mean it's good for you (but I guess I should have known that--HFCS comes from plants too and it sure isn't good for you).

Healthy Choice: I've always found the Healthy Choice entrees to be disappointing too. I tried one of their new paninis and thought it was pretty good, but everything else has been pretty bland. I definitely prefer Lean Cuisine or Smart Ones (or Ethnic Gourmet). Wow, it sounds like I eat a lot of frozen meals but actually I hardly ever eat them.

Fresh berries: We have a tiny blueberry bush but no room to grow raspberries. I wish we had u-pick places nearby, that would be even better than having to do all the work to grow them myself. But all the u-pick berry places are about an hours drive and none of them have raspberries. There are hardly any that even have blackberries (and CA blackberries are pretty tart--nothing like the PA blackberries I grew up with). Mostly they just have huckleberries and lollaberries. So I guess I'll continue paying a small fortune for raspberries at my farmers' market.

Nursing school: I've never been to nursing school but it sure sounds hard to me. I didn't take a single math or science class the entire time I was in college. I would never have made it through nursing school. Plus bodily fluids are gross. Ick!

just jumping in to say that nursing school SUCKS big time. Or at least it did 'in my day (late 80's, early 90's). I don't even want to think about it, and my nursing school was easier than some of the ones my friends went to.

Good morning! DH went out of town but left me his cold and I feel absolutely wretched. So I apologize for being such a bad poster. We're leaving for NM on Saturday, so much to get done before then. Food is on track, exercise is waiting until I can breathe (a necessity, I think!)

Barbara, the calories in even light coconut milk scare me so much that I've never used it. Nothing is that good!

Lily, good news on the custody decision. Those sweet little boys need stability in their lives.

Time for a protein shake with frozen blueberries. It feels SO good on my sore throat.

Yes, coconut milk is evilly good. I love it. I try to be very careful with it. 1/2 cup is about 225 cals, and 24 grams of fat. I don't care about the saturated/unsaturated part of it, but it's still a whole LOT of fat.

I've worked back down 2 pounds--mostly the water weight from the weekend trip. I'm going to keep going. I don't like the creeping up...

Jay

That coconut milk DOES sound more then a tad frightening. I'm sorry, I don't care how good it is - it's still - milk.

Lily, that's wonderful news about the boys.

Sorry about the cold Meg, springtimes colds are not fun. Not that they're such a joy any other time of the year for that matter.

Love, love, LOVE raspberries. Blue and straw are pretty darn good too. But raspberries, they are the best-est.

I had a scary revelation yesterday. If I like how I look/feel best at 122 lbs and that's where I want to be, (yay excuses thread, getting very close) the only way, and I do mean the only way for me to stay there or at least hover around there ,within a 5 lb margin, is to get all the way down to 117 lbs.

Have a good one folks.

I cook with coconut milk rarely, and most of my recipes call for light coconut milk and small portions of it (like 1/2 C in a recipe that makes 6 servings). I'm starting to be skeptical about saturated fats being so awful. I know that in excess they are definitely bad, and the same for trans fats, but really, they are a part of our natural diet. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate animal products and I'm sure polynesians have always had coconut milk. It seems to me it is more a matter of consuming them in natural quantities -- e.g. eating free-range chicken (fed on grass and insects) instead of artificially fattened chickens who never move and are raised eating grain and animal byproducts, and not eating a huge amount.

Pat - 10 feet of raspberries! Yum. We have two baby raspberry plants, one golden and one red/black. They are each about eight inches tall. Yesterday we went and bought two strawberry plants and put them in a hanging basket. DH is disappointed that his rhubarb didn't come up!

Meg - hope you feel better soon!

Robin - I know what you mean. My ideal weight for myself is 127-128 but I don't know if I can maintain that.

I am totally on a local, natural foods kick. Too bad they are so much more expensive than grocery store foods. :P I need to do some research about foods native to Indiana. I have been pretty insistent lately on getting local - or at least free-range - animal products, preferably organic. DH feels like it's okay to spend the extra money for that as long as we don't eat it very often, so we've been eating more vegetarian food lately. Of course I still eat Lean Cuisine for lunch on a regular basis so I can't claim I'm being all that local and organic. :P At least I'm trying.

You guys are killing me with all your talk of freshly grown / picked berries. I'm in NYC, so I can't exactly have a berry bush in my apartment (about 8 years ago I lived in Connecticut and had the most amazing blackberry bush - yum! I still yearn...). I am lucky in a way, though, because I live 1 - 2 blocks from 3 amazing grocery stores, each of which carries a great selection of organic and fresh foods. Not cheap, of course, but so good and so healthy.

On the frozen food front, I agree that Lean Cuisine outscores Healthy Choice. My recently-discovered favorites, though, are Kashi frozen meals, which are really great and quite healthy (a lot fewer "bad" ingredients than the LC). I also love Amy's organic frozen meals, though some of those are higher in calories so I have to watch.

Sorry about the spring cold Meg - those are terrible. My current issue is allergies. Any other sufferers out there? They're driving me nuts. On top of all the other symptoms, they make me so tired, so concentrating at work is just hard. I love spring, but pollen certainly makes it a challenge.

Hope everyone has a great day.

Debbie

Allergies for me are bad almost year round. They are much worse at my work than my home, and the two are only about 5 miles apart! The area surrounding my school where I work is undeveloped and very windy and my eyes are always burning and itching by halfway through the day. Yuck!

I had a bad overall day yesterday with lots of family stress.

But, weight wise it was great. One of my co-workers stopped me to tell me what an inspiration I had been to her whole family (I've never met them!). They are all doing WW now and are happily losing weight and enjoying the program.

Another lady asked me just how much more weight I was going to lose as I was "fading away" and I tried to explain maintaining to her!

Then I decided I needed a little "retail therapy" before I went to the gym (to buy new exercise shoes-- mine were worn out!). I tried on a pair of pants in size 4 and they were actually too roomy. I was going to try on the 2 just for kicks but I really didn't like the pants too much. I knew if I tried them on and the 2 fit, I'd buy it just to say I bought a 2! It was affirming though because I still "feel" fat quite often but obviously the numbers don't lie (ok--not too much anyway-- I know there is vanity sizing!).