Long Day

I have a long day ahead of me. Work and then a meeting in Waltham until 8 or so, meaning I won't be home until 9. And since all this week I've been going to bed at around 8:30, I hope I can stay awake. 

I went for a walk for about 20 minutes last night. I didn't exercise in the morning because I used all my exercise time looking for something I had hidden away to keep safe but then needed.  But I did do a bunch of trips up and down the stairs trying to find it, so maybe that counted a little.  The truth is sometimes when I get into slug-mode, I just stay there. And then my skin feels sensitive to cold and I am sick of bundling up to go walking and my bedroom is freezing and I don't want to turn the heat on anymore but yoga in socks and a hat is inconvenient.  It looks like tomorrow will be very warm, so maybe I'll leave work a little early and go walk in the woods.  And there is YogaDance next Friday which I will go to. 

That said, I'm going to put on my shoes and go for a walk soon. After I finish this coffee. 

Stress

Today was a stressful day, but has ended well. Lots of work to do, and last minute tax stuff to deal with. But, since my word of the year is "AWAKE" it is good to pay attention to my stress and my money stuff and deal with things head-on. So I did. And because I had again planned my meals in advance, there was one less thing for me to think about.  

Breakfast, after about 20 minutes of a self-led yoga practice, was raisin bran and milk. I had an orange before yoga, which was much better than having cereal first, so my stomach was not all sloshy during down dogs. 

Lunch was similar to yesterday: 1/2 cup brown rice, 1/3 cup pinto beans, 2 cut up hot dogs, and a few ounces of roasted aspargus from last night. 

Dinner will be cooked by The Boy: grilled ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches and a beer. Or two. 

My brain is tired now and I'm leaving work. 

Monday Evening

I loved having all my meals planned out today. I took some time last night to plan out breakfast (raisin bran and milk) lunch: 1/2 cup of pinto beans, 1/2 cup rice, 1 cup of roasted cauliflower and broccoli. 

And then dinner: 

I made about 5 oz. of the steak, 3 of the potatoes and a little more than 1/2 the asparagus. The veggies were drizzled with oil and roasted on high heat for about 25 minutes. The steak was seared on a stove top grill about 3 minutes per side. It is very tasty and filling and goes fantastically with the Sam Adams Scotch Ale. 

I also have some dough rising from the No-Knead Recipe from The New York Times. I started it last night, and it will be done tonight. I make it with 1/3 white, 1/3 whole wheat, and 1/3 rye flour. The rye doesn't add that weird rye flavor, but it does add more flavor.  Dessert may be a small slice with butter. 
And in case any one is interested in the calorie counts: 

Breakfast: around 300. 

Lunch: around 350 

Snack: orange at work (90) hardboiled egg upon arriving home (80) 

Dinner, including beer and bread: 850. Since I tend to eat more at night when left to my own devices, I usually find that scheduling more of my calories for the evenings works better when I'm tracking. 

Calories were 50% from carbs, 25% from fat, 25% from protein. 

I am still working on getting back on track with my working out. I started to do yoga this morning but 15 minutes into it I got annoyed and stopped.  I'm not worried. I know that it will turn into a habit again if I keep doing it. And if I can get up at 6 every morning so I have 1 hour for coffee and waking up, 1 hour for exercise and writing, and then an hour to get ready and get to work. 

Preparing for the Week

I'm preparing my fridge and myself for the week ahead. By making everything myself, I know what's in it and can easily track it in Sparkpeople.  
Some hard boiled eggs for a quick snack.

Asparagus that has been washed and the ends snapped off. I chopped half of it for steaming and adding to lunches, and left the rest whole for roasting for dinner.

An assortment of citrus for breakfast and lunches.

Pinto Beans. This recipe from The Pioneer Woman is so simple and so delicious. It has a couple of chopped up bacon ends in it for flavor. They are simmering away on the stove right now and smell heavenly.

Brown rice is on the stove, too. Made with veggie bullion.

Roasted broccoli and cauliflower, adapted from The Amateur Gourmet. This recipe is fantastic, I don't usually add cheese because I forget, but it's amazing if you add some shrimp to make a dinner.
This is my trusty little scale.  
And these are the chicks that I went and visited at the feed store. I'm getting 6 (0r maybe 8) in a month or so, so that I can have fresh eggs and cute little friends who run around my yard saying bock-bock. 

On the Importance of Tracking

Yesterday there were not so many green check marks on my Sparkpeople page. I had a fine breakfast (a little higher in cals than normal) and lunch, came home from work feeling peckish, had some toast with fresh mozzarella, snacked on a piece of cake, opened a beer and then tracked my calories and discovered that was it for the day, folks. All used up. Hmm. Ok then. 

I looked at the kinds of food I'd eaten, realized that I was within my ranges for protein, carbs, fats (a little over, but the day before was a bit under) and that I was not hungry and decided that I was done eating for the day.  My beer was a lovely Sam Adams Honey Porter which took me an hour or more to drink, so that tided my tongue over until it caught up with my stomach. 

I'm noticing that when I start tracking my food, I get better about tracking my money. I love charts and things like that to show me my progress.  When you are out of money, if you keep spending you are just getting into debt. And when you've reached the end of your calorie allotment for the day, if you keep eating, you're getting into calorie debt. 

Without tracking, I would have had my little bread and cheese snack and then just counted that as a an appetizer and would have gone on to fix something else for dinner.  By tracking, I was forced to just sit and think - "ok, this says I've eaten enough calories for the day. Let's see, do I feel like that is true? Yes, actually, I do. Ok, lets move on to something else."  I need the outside information to help me calibrate my inside information.  

Plan for the day: eggs & toast for breakfast, trip to the dump, Lunch Party at my mom's with more cake and planning for chicken coop building. 

Pizza and Beer and Shake Your Soul

That's what I had for dinner last night, and managed to still get happy green check marks from Sparkpeople. I make my own pizza, so I know exactly what goes it in and can easily track the calories, etc. I brought 1/3 of a batch of dough over to The Boy's house and we made mushroom and onion pizza. And had Mayflower Golden Ale. It was the perfect combo.

And I can't remember if I ever told you how much I loved my trip to Kripalu last fall, but I have found a program I want to return for: Tribal Jam. 5 days of dancing my little heart out. I used to look at the Kripalu YogaDance/Danskinetics as something "other" people did. And when I was there for 5 days in the fall, the first day I thought "I'm not doing that, it will be a bunch of weird people dancing around." But then the friends I'd made convinced me to go. Our teacher was Daniel Leven of Shake Your Soul. It's hard to describe, but I can say that my life changed while I was dancing. I actually had the thoughts "if everyone did this, there would be no war" and "I think my life's purpose is to dance." That's how good it makes you feel - good enough that your brain thinks weird things and you don't find them weird at all.

When I came back home I searched for more YogaDance and found it. Granted it was an hour away but I didn't care. The instructor has live drummers to lead our dancing, and we move and sweat and laugh and dance.  

Breakfast is toast and butter, lunch - the remaining 2 oz. of pulled pork, whole wheat cous cous, green beans & okra. Yum. 

Short Report

My alarm went off at 6, but I didn't get up until almost 7, which is later than I like when I'm fitting exercise into my morning. I can feel it in my arms and hamstrings that I did yoga yesterday. In my sleepy haze before coffee I put on my walking clothes and socks so I was ready to go outside after coffee. A nice 35 minute walk. I'm working on mapping out some walking routes near my house so I don't have to do the same thing every day, and can have a variety of lengths and routes to choose.

Lesson The First (and Second)

Today we learned two things:

1. How to Plan for Dinner When You Have a Late Client Meeting (yes, 6pm is late to me. And I have a 7pm in 2 weeks. What was I thinking? I'm usually in my pj's by 8.)

2. How to Deal When Someone Gives You a Cookie.

We'll start with Lesson 2. You say thank you. You eat the cookie. Because it is homemade and yummy. Then you put in Sparkpeople that you ate a cookie. And you give thanks for the Passover that caused the cookie to have to go out of the home and wander the lands until it found its way into your belly.

Lesson 1. You pack a small and interesting assortment of high protein foods for dinner to keep you full but not stuffed. I packed my little Bento Themos with 2 hard boiled eggs, some pickles (the fresh pickles from Whole Foods), carrot sticks, and almond butter. Then I ate the carrot sticks after lunch and forgot about the almond butter, so I used the cookie to eat that. It was a dear little dinner that lacked for nothing.

I am now home from my client meeting and having a lovely Harpoon Dark Beer. According to Sparkpeople I am well within the ranges for calories, fat, protein, carbs and fiber for the day. And I feel perfectly not hungry/not full. Just right.

Planning for Success

So, last night after weighing my sweet potato and deciding that a hot dog would go really well with it (both things dipped in ketchup, yum) I figured I'd plan my meals for today. After all, I plan my work day with a to-do list to keep me on track, so why no plan my meals as well.

I decided that breakfast would be raisin bran cereal, and lunch is a tuna sandwich and some green beans. One thing that tracking is showing me (which I sort of already knew) is that I need more fruit and veggies in my day. Thankfully the organic farm will open soon which will make that much easier to do. I have to meet with a client at 6pm, so I need to figure out something to eat around 5:30.

I walked yesterday at 8am, which is sort of too late, so this morning I started my yoga at 7:30, done by 8. I did sun salutations with Shiva Rea, which is always nice. Each day I can start a little earlier, so that ideally I'm starting at 7.

I'm going to experiment with taking sneakers to work today and taking a walk down to the end of the street at some point during the day. I think it might be good to get the fresh air and movement during the day.

Hopefully future entries will be much more exciting but I'm feeling sleepy right now so this is it.

Tuesday Report

The thing about this is that it takes more time. Like the time to actually think about making a well rounded meal, the time to get out my little scale and weigh my food to get my eyes trained again (it turns out that 2.5 oz. of pulled pork is the perfect amount for lunch, 6 oz of broccoli is a little much, and 1/2 cup couscous is just right.) The time to keep the kitchen clean so that there are pots and pans and tupperware to use for lunches. The time to weigh a sweet potato (8oz) check on Sparkpeople what the nutrition is (200 calories) then try to figure out what will go with it to make a cohesive dinner and not just a patchwork of foods designed to meet my nutritional needs for the day. I know once I get into the flow of it I will be fine, but this is like if I had to check my bank balance before I spent money and then make sure I was spending it in the places I needed to be so I ..... wait a minute, I may be onto something here.

Anyway, I walked for 40 minutes this morning and dinner is a sweet potato and some other stuff. 

We Now Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

I'm reading back over my Sparkpeople Journals from last year at this time, to see what I was eating, when I was exercising, to try to get back on track. I appeared to eat a lot of egggs, oat meal, chick peas, shrimp, beets and couscous. It's nice to have the old meals to look back on, so that I can just recreate them now instead of trying to figure it all out from scratch again.

A Series of Unfortunate Events last year caused my weight to be the least important thing. It still isn't important, but what is is being strong and flexible and healthy - and getting in touch with what and how much and when I eat is part of that. As is remembering when I used to exercise, and learning to make it part of my life again. And I know that using something that tracks what I do really works for me. It works for getting my work done at my job, and it works for making sure I'm doing what I need to do at home.

My sneakers are sitting by the door, with my socks on them. I remember that having my socks near my sneakers helped me get out and walk. So, I keep a basket of socks by the door so I don't have to go back upstairs for socks when I want to walk.

Then I have to think about what to have for lunch. I have broccoli, some pork, some pickles and maybe a banana, too.

I'm going to commit to blogging here at least once a day for the remainder of April. And I'm going to commit to tracking at least one meal a day on Sparkpeople until the end of April. And I'm going to commit to going for a walk at 8a.m. this morning.