Posts from — May 2010

This has been one HOT day!  We hit 90 degrees in the Philly area!  When it’s hot outside, my cravings for cold foods definitely increases and fruit seems to be my number one pick!

There was no time for formal morning exercise since I had to be out the door early to chaperone little daughter’s field trip.  Breakfast had to be simple and quick, too.  A yogurt bowl works!

In the bowl…

• 1 cup plain nonfat greek yogurt
• 4 drops NuNaturals liquid vanilla stevia
• 8 strawberries
• 2 tbsp. sliced almonds

Pretty sloppy, huh?  Sorry about that!

Then, it was off to school where my workout began.  We piled 80 kids into a good old fashioned school bus with no air-conditioning for a 45 minute ride to visit the Camden Aquarium with every other school in the United States.  Seriously.  There were 33 other area schools visiting that day, not including the general public.  It was craziness!  I must have counted the kids in my group 1,000 times to make sure I didn’t lose anyone!

We buzzed around to see as much as possible with the time that we had allotted.  The kids were wearing down and we broke for lunch.  I brown-bagged it, too…

Applegate Farms Herbed Turkey Breast, mustard and baby spinach on Ezekiel bread…

with carrots and leftover (the last of it!) roasted chickpeas…

We toured more of the outdoor attractions at the Aquarium, loaded up the bus and went back to base camp.  Sweaty.  Very Sweaty.

When I got home, I needed water…

Aaaaaah

The cool treats continued!  I had a frozen banana calling my name.  I’ve been seeing homemade banana fro-yo or banana ice cream on many blogs (most recently on Skinny In The City and Iowa Girl Eats!)and couldn’t wait to try it! 

It’s just as easy as my watermelon water ice!

Place frozen banana in the food processor…

Let it run…

Almost there…

Creamy, fluffy and still frozen.  Top with almonds, taste and cry from the goodness of it all…

Where has this been all my life?  I can never be without it now.  There may be a banana shortage soon.

I believe we can thank the “raw food community” for this small miracle!

Dinner was barley.  Can you stand to see another barley dish?  Good, because it seems to be reproducing on its own in my refrigerator.

Leftover Barley Delight – leftover Caprese Barley Salad, leftover chicken and grape tomatoes…

Now, I need some fruit!

Brilliant Blogger:  Tami at Nutmeg Notebook had a great post today about measuring your success by more than the scale.  I loved her tip about trying on a clothing item every week to gauge the fit instead of relying on the scale.  Such a fantastic concept! 

Have a great day, everyone!

Does your appetite decrease in the heat?  Do you crave more cold foods in the spring/summer?

The running mojo is back!  Happy, happy, joy, joy  

I got two new things that helped me get back in the groove.  First, a running buddy!  The mom of one of big daughter’s friends asked if I would be interested in running together and I said hells to the yeah!  I haven’t talked about it on the blog, but I’ve been feeling unsafe running alone.  I try to stay in neighborhoods or on non-wooded trails because of it and it gets a little boring after a while.  Do you feel that way when you exercise outdoors alone?

My second new thing is this…

I’ve been looking for something to help me with my run/walk intervals.  Staring at my watch was dreadful and although, I would LOVE  a Garmin Forerunner or even a Polar, it’s just not in the budget.  But this baby is!  The GYMBOSS is $19.95.  That, I can do!

The GYMBOSS is an interval timer that you can program for specific time frames varying from 2 seconds to 99 minutes.  The best part of this timer is it has an alarm that you set to beep, vibrate or both to alert you to the interval changes!  No more clock watching! 

I set it up before meeting with my running buddy (Hi Kerri!), which was very simple.  There are even a few reminders on the back …

We decided to do a 5:1 interval and I set it on “beep high” so that we both could hear it.  I clipped it on my shirt and we were off.  We ran around the neighborhood, talking when we could and the time flew by!  We ended up doing 4.34 miles in 59 minutes with a 5 minute walk to start and cool down.  In total, it came to 8 intervals …

Definitely makes the intervals much easier and gave me time to get into the run, instead of just watching the clock.  I highly recommend it!   It can be used for a variety of other exercises, also like weightlifting, HIIT and kettlebells. 

If you think you might be interested in ordering a GYMBOSS, please consider clicking through the link in my sidebar.  I liked this product so much that I joined their affiliate program and will receive a small commission if you order through my site!  Thanks!!  Okay, I’ll stop gushing over this now!

Before the run, I wasn’t into my normal smoothie, so I noshed on some almonds, dried apple and a date…

When I got back, my stomach wasn’t up to eating a real breakfast.  I drank a pond of water, so I waited and had an early lunch.

I was ready then!

I decided on a grilled veggie panini using the leftover veggies from Saturday’s lunch.  Here’s my tutorial on how to make a panini on the George Foreman Grill!

Heat up the GF…

Spread a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese and a tbsp. of TJ’s roasted red pepper and artichoke spread on a slice of Ezekiel bread …

Layer on the veggies…

Top with the other slice of Ezekiel and put it on the hot seat…

Close the lid and slowly press down.  It’s all done when it looks like this…

Simple and delicious…

I served the panini with a side of carrots with TJ’s tomato and basil hummus for dipping and roasted chickpeas…

I posted on Facebook that roasted chickpeas are addictive!  They are so easy to make, too!  Drain and rinse a can of chickpeas, dry them a bit, toss them with olive oil and your seasoning of choice (I used taco seasoning) and roast on a rimmed baking sheet for 20ish minutes at 450 degrees. 

Chickpea Crack…  mmmm…crackalaka…

I made up for my lack of pre-run smoothie by having it for an afternoon snack…

Just a basic one with 1 cup skim milk, 1/2 cup frozen mango, 1/2 cup frozen raspberries and 1 tbsp. date puree.

Dinner was fish and vegetables.  Cue the crying and whining. 

Dover Sole with lemon dill butter and mixed vegetables is a very fabulous dinner.  No matter what they say

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Another thank you to Heather Rudalavage, RD for her wonderful post on Intuitive Eating  and thank you all for the insightful comments!

Have a great day, everyone!

Do you eat fish?  What is your favorite way to prepare it?

Heather is a registered dietician and owns the company, Intuitive Nutrition, where she counsels clients on how they can begin to tune into their own inner wisdom.  She has kindly offered to share her knowledge and experience in making the transition to Intuitive Eating.  Please welcome Heather!

How to get started with IE

If you are currently dieting, or have tried dieting in the past you most likely know that diets are usually a short term solution, at least for 95 % of the people that go on a diet. As a matter of fact, if you are on a diet now, itʼs probably because you have been on a diet before! Did you know that every time you go on a diet it is harder to lose the weight and easier to gain it back?

If you want to lose weight what else are you going to do though, right? Wrong. There is another way, and that way is known as intuitive eating.

Intuitive Eating is not a diet, it is actually the opposite of a diet. The definition of Intuitive Eating according to Wikipedia is: a nutrition philosophy based on the premise that becoming more attuned to the body’s natural hunger signals is a more effective way to attain a healthy weight; rather than keeping track of the amounts of energy and fats in foods.

It’s a process that is intended to create a healthy relationship with food, mind, and body. Intuitive Eating, goes by many names, including non-dieting or non-diet approach, normal eating, wisdom eating, conscious eating and more.

With a diet, you are “told” what to eat, when to eat it and how much of it to eat. Even with a plan such as Weight Watchers (the best diet out there) point system, someone is telling you how many “points”, based on grams of carbohydrate, you can have every day. The problem with this is that most people donʼt want to spend the rest of their lives weighing and measuring food. It just isnʼt realistic!

The thought of going off a diet can be very scary for most people. To some, it feels like throwing in the towel and to others it seems like it would be impossible to eat what you want and lose weight, especially if you are used to being told what to eat. Remember, itʼs your past dieting mentality that has led you to believe you canʼt trust yourself. You have the ability to eat intuitively, everybody does. When you were an infant you ate when you were hungry and stopped when you got full, even as a toddler you most likely were known to eat a half of a cookie or 3 bites of your dinner. You used to eat intuitively,but somewhere down the line you stopped listening to your body. When did that happen?

If you are ready to jump off the dieting cycle or are at the bottom of your dieting rope and are ready to try relearning how to eat intuitively, here are some tips to get you started. First, I highly recommend reading Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole RD and Elyse Resch RD, they are the original intuitive eaters! Currently, the book Women Food,and God by Geneen Roth is a NY Times bestseller, I think she does an excellent job at helping you find out the reasons you overeat to begin with. Honestly, if you just start eating whatever you want, without figuring out why you are eating, you arenʼt going to lose weight-sorry!

Once you do a little reading on IE, youʼll have to be willing to give up the notion that if you just found the right diet…You would be thin and happy forever! It would be one thing if diets were a pain but worked, but people, listen to me, “THEY DONʼT WORK” at least not long term for the majority of people. Even “pseudo-dieting” such as following a raw food diet or choosing to become vegetarian just for the sake of losing weight, will prevent you from listening to your own body, your own true inner wisdom.

Once you are on board with realizing dieting is not the answer you seek, and you have thrown away all your diet books and maybe even your scale then comes the hard part, beginning to ask yourself, “am I hungry?” and if I am than what do I really want right now. You can go slowly with this and use the “am I hungry” speed-bump every time you catch yourself reaching for something to eat. Just recognizing how often you reach for food without being hungry is progress! At this stage, you are just exploring why and when you reach for food. At this early stage, you may decide to eat even though your answer to “am I hungry” is no. Thatʼs OK, you wonʼt be at this place forever.

After you begin to realize that eating only solves hunger, not boredom, loneliness, anger, stress or any other emotion, then you can begin to eat slowly and try to tune into your satisfaction and satiety. Every few bites, pause and ask, “am I still hungry? Does this food still taste good?” You might be surprised by the answer! Gone are the days where you would eat birthday cake so fast you didnʼt even taste it, now you are slowing down and beginning to notice that bakery cake icing kind of tastes oily or greasy and you might decide to just eat the cake part. Or, maybe stealing cold fries off of your childʼs plate is disgusting and you prefer to order your own fries and eat a few while they are still hot- concept! LOL!

I know I am not going in depth enough to really give you an A-Ha! moment, but if you do some experimenting yourself and begin to slow down and savor your food, youʼll realize you need less of it to feel satisfied! There is so much more to IE than just food, it really does go to a much deeper level. This is challenging for some, we of the human race prefer to stuff our feelings down, often with food, instead of facing those feelings head on. Maybe you donʼt really want to bring up those feelings, maybe you think you will die if you had to face those feelings, how much power are you giving to those feelings? Are you living in the past and letting those stories control you today? Whose voice is telling you that chocolate is bad or that leaving food on your plate is wasteful?

IE is not, as some claim, eating whatever you want, whenever you want. Rather, it is learning to love yourself enough to want to take care of your body by providing it with healthy nutritious food that nourishes your body and your soul! Your body is amazing, beautiful and deserves respect! Many people treat their pets better than their own bodies, they provide their pets with love and exercise, fresh air and adequate food. Do you treat your pets better than you treat yourself? Your pets deserve love, so do you.

I am just scratching the surface in this post, maybe Iʼll be invited to guest post again and we can discuss IE in more detail. For now, if you would like more information on IE, please visit the site www.intuitiveeating.org, there you will find links to more sites, resources and a list of IE counselors listed by state. I also have many postings on my own site www.intuitive-nutrition.com that discuss many of the different pieces of learning to eat intuitively.

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What are your thoughts on Intuitive Eating?  Is it something that you’d like to transition into or are you more comfortable staying on a specific weight loss/maintenance plan?