I was tired of being a back, so I've changed my avi to my face :) Hello! (waving)

Birch, I freeze bread all the time. If you double bag it and have it in a proper freezer bag it doesn't dry out. I only thaw mine out once - I don't refreeze it.

Michele, I hope it all works out with the visiting family. It sounds stressful. I always find family visits more stressful than fun. Usually DH does most of the visiting and I take off and go hiking. They are invited to come along, but they never want to.

I hope everyone is finding their maintenance motivation today.

Alice, yes, we do too. I was just wondering about saef's set-up as she eats so little of it. (I live with two large males who eat a lot.)

I have had a lot of luck keeping bread in the freezer - I take it out and thaw on paper towels a couple of pieces at a time. I've always had mold and dryness in the fridge, but the freezer works great for me. Kind of like cake - no fridge, but freezer okay.

Howlin', I like your picture, but I don't think it's fair for you to try to tell us you're 60 when obviously you are 42.

If I were that student, I'd commit suicide. What has gone wrong with our culture that everything is a life-or-death competition? What happened to kids having fun, trying to do better, but not feeling like complete failures because of a spelling error?

Me too! I also freeze tortillas.

Alice-- you look amazing from both sides!

My dd has arrived... and, yes... visiting relatives can be supremely stressful. I know my food will be way off plan but I'll do my best.... maybe....

JayEll, I took your advice and went for several short walks at random times. I'm trying to dig out of this bad place. Work is a mess today. The president is on campus and everything is a total snarl, plus the helicopters landing next to our animal buildings, causing shaking and deafening racket, are really ticking us off. Also, our lab building has a "planned power outage" for the next 3 days, requiring emergency generator power lines run all over the place. Why bother coming to work?

Do you have certain times of year when things get out of control? Or is this pretty much the "normal" every day for you (not counting the president's visit of course). If it's temporary keep reminding yourself of that. That sounds kinda dumb but it helps me so it might help you too. If it's the regular state every day then :hug: to you.

I'm fortunate in that, with my job, winter DOES end eventually and so far I'm still standing at the end of each winter. It's getting harder with each winter but I have no other choice now - I'm 58 and no one is going to hire me at anything, never mind anything where I'm making enough money to meet the basics. I do comfort myself with food but I try to limit it to 2x per week. It's the same thing each time (jellybeans) and I don't put on much weight as a result.

Dagmar :tired: of :brr:

JZJ~after POTUS leaves your area he is coming here. This weekend would be better spent indoors and off the streets here. We have a myriad of events happening all over the valley. Hotels are booked and we're expecting unusually high tourists this weekend. Just some of the events this weekend:
Tour de Palm Springs (5-10-25-50 ang 100 mile bike ride) expecting 8,000 riders
The Dr. George Car Show (VERY large)
The National Date Festival (our county fair)
POTUS arriving today leaving Monday. Playing golf (means lots of road closures)
Modernism Week (again, thousands expected for all that this entails)


DH and I are golfing this morning on a regular course as our home course is hosting a two-day "sweetheart" tournament. We'll stop at Costco on our way home. Tonight we're going to a Mardi Paws party at the Living Desert (our zoo) that is just two blocks from our house. I'm hoping the food and drink there will be minimal--probably small bites type stuff. We're having lunch at the golf course so that probably means a burger.

Wow, this turned into a chat thread really fast!

No weigh-in today. I wanted to eat & eat after yesterday's physical therapy, and didn't, and the rooms were chilly from the horrendous outside temperatures. I took more ham at dinner than I usually would have. Lesson: If I am cold and hungry, sometimes drinking hot tea doesn't work.

Today's meals:

Breakfast: Egg bake with ham, spinach and mushrooms, the last slice of home-made whole-wheat bread, yogurt and those strawberries that always go on sale for Valentine's Day.
Lunch: Baby arugula salad with roasted vegetables, cold steamed asparagus, half an avocado, two hard-boiled eggs, walnuts and Craisins
Snack: Bag of Bare Fruit cinnamon apple chips
Dinner: Picadillo on brown rice, steamed broccoli and green beans
Dessert: Frozen Jell-o pudding

Exercise:

Front leg raise 3x20, Lateral leg raise 3x20, Lateral w/ toes up 3x20, Lateral opposite 3x20, Bicycle 3x20, Kickback 3x20 and High knee 3x20 (both these just left leg) Did this twice
Walked in hallway for 10 minutes, stood in kitchen while cooking
5-lb dumbbell routine

I am so bored with leg raises. I want desperately to go to the gym, because now I can get to some of those machines you can sit in. But I have to get my mother to take me, and she doesn't seem interested in doing that.

Oops, I am definitely part of the problem here. For me, work pressure and health issues constantly interfere with weight loss. But I end up talking about these proximal causes of gain more than the mechanisms of weight management, and it gets tangential fast.

So on the weight front: ate well during day yesterday, rode bike to and from work, came home late and exhausted, walked 1.5 miles with dog then stayed up late working and ate about 3 cups of granola that I had made for hubs. A good day totally undone at the end. Today I walked 3 miles total to/from store, and am planning to go for long hike at sunset with DH, hopefully 8 miles. He's making me dinner tonight - lasagna (ugh for the carb load, but he so rarely makes "complicated" dinners that I hate to discourage him. Plus he leaves the cheese out for me).

Again, no weigh-in.

And JZJ, I agree completely with your holistic view of the state of your body (and your weight as one of the indicators) correlating to your state of mind.

I am not a dedicated believer in any of the "religions" regarding food and eating. That is, I don't believe in the complete efficacy of any particular diet, or pattern of eating, exercise regimen, cognitive therapy, regular sessions with a therapist, medication, etc. The reason this weight and health thing is so tricky is that all of those things are braided together inextricably, and it's fiendishly difficult to monitor and regulate all of them at once.

I am human, not a performance-optimized machine with lots of dials and electronic level gauges, and a completely rational, mathematics-based decision-making process. So of course I have to look at everything that's going on with me to see what I ought to be doing more of, or eschewing.

But yeah, we do drop off into life's worries and errands a lot in these threads. I do think there's a difference between "what I am doing" and "what I am feeling about what I am doing." People find it easier to talk about the first thing than the second thing.

Today's meals:

Breakfast: Egg bake with ham, spinach and mushrooms; pumpkin steel-cut oats*; yogurt and strawberries
Lunch: Baby arugula, roasted vegetables, walnuts, two hard-boiled eggs and several tablespoons of hummus
Snack: One small, cold apple, too cold for this bitterly cold day
Dinner: Steamed crab legs, cauliflower, green beans and half of a sweet potato
Dessert: Bag of Bare Fruit cinnamon apple chips

Exercise:

Front leg raise 3x20, Lateral leg raise 3x20, Lateral w/ toes up 3x20, Lateral opposite 3x20, Bicycle 3x20, Kickback 3x20 and High knee 3x20 (both these just left leg) Did this twice
Did 5lb dumbbell routine

*I make this in the crockpot, cooking it two and a half hours on High. It's a cup and a half of steel-cut oats, a half-cup of ground flax seed, a half-cup of pecan meal, one can of organic pumpkin, two tablespoons of Trader Joe's Pumpkin Pie Spice, a half-cup of Torani Sugarfree French Vanilla syrup and one shelf-stable box full of Almond Breeze Original Unsweetened Almond Milk.

Saef, I'm not following you. Please could you spell it out a bit for me? Thanks.

On many threads, people narrate their actions (I did this, I have to do that, this happened & then that happened, this relative did that, my business did that, my job is like that, my pet is like that) more than how they are feeling. The feelings just get a word or two compared with the actions & occurrences. And yet the feelings are often what affects our health and whether we're up to caring for ourselves.

Thanks. So are you saying that there's more of a tendency here to talk about feelings? I think my confusion comes down to whether "life's worries and errands" is describing feelings or the plain list of what has to be done each day. Sorry if I'm being particularly dense.

(And this isn't even "my" thread! I'm much too stout to be here really. Don't normally feel stout but I do this evening. Apple crumble related stoutness.)