Archive for the ‘Healthy Eating’ Category

Tonight is the first official date night I have had with my husband since beginning this journey.  Tonight will be for part business and part pleasure.  The business part:  we’ll be meeting with our Realtor to see the house again and talk house stuff.  We’re going to decide just how long we want to wait out this short sale before deciding to move on.  All of this will take place over drinks.

I am taking the time to prepare for date night.  That includes trying out the new acne products I purchased a few days ago. I really want to be fresh-faced for my date.

So, i’m taking some care to have a strategy in place for myself in regards to both food and drink tonight.  I want to make sure that I will make the right choices.  If I tried this on the fly, I don’t know that I would be as successful with it.  So I am trying to plan as much as possible.

How do you handle “date night” with your significant other?  Do you set boundaries for yourself ahead of time?  Do you wing it?  Do you choose date nights as the only night you splurge?

For me, staying the course with weight loss is much easier if I have some easy snacks or meals on-hand.  I have tried losing weight unscripted and on the fly before, but I found that having no strategy just doesn’t work for me.  As a mom who wears many hats and has many responsibilities, sometimes meal time can feel like a big overwhelming job.

And so enters fast food.  Because you see, for me, it’s easy to drive up and order and take home.  It doesn’t take much time and everyone is fed.  The problem with this, is that fast food, while quick, is majorly unhealthy.  It is loaded with salt, transfats and refined sugars.  You can however, find *some* low-calorie stuff on the menu, but for the most part, everything is ridiculously high in calories, fat and salt.

I love to eat.  I’m just going to throw that right out there.  I love food.  And so for me, getting healthy means that I have to change my course with food.  I have to put it in the proper place.  Because it’s okay to love food but you want to make sure that you fuel your body with the kind of food that loves you back.  So, I am trying to open up my relationship with food to include mainly healthy options.   I would like to share some of what I have discovered with you.

Meals:

• Veggie burgers (warm up your foreman and in 8 minutes or less you can have a healthy meal!  So far I have tried Morningstar Veggie patties)
• Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice freezer meals (choose your favorites and make sure you have them on hand!  Pop them in the microwave and have a meal on the fly!)
• Healthy Breakfast Sandwiches (Egg Beaters, low-cal cheese, turkey bacon or turkey sausage, and Thomas 100 Calorie english muffins — so yummy!  You can make them in advance and freeze them!)
• Cereal (keep a box of your favorite low-cal cereal on-hand)
• Brown rice (you can make so many things with brown rice!)

Snacks:

• 60 calorie Jello pudding snacks
• Colbert 50-calorie cheese (individually wrapped.  You can find them at Sam’s Club)
• Skinny cow Truffle ice cream bars (only 100 calories a piece!  A delicious 2 pt. snack!)
• Jolly Time 97% Fat Free popcorn (1 serving is only 1 WW point.  A whole bag is only 3 WW points!)
• String cheese (low-fat mozarella cheesy goodness!  1 stick is 2 WW points or 80 calories)
• Hummus (you can make your own if you don’t want to buy it in the store:  chick peas, sesame seed oil (if you can’t find tahini), crushed garlic, lemon ~ This stuff is great for carrot sticks and other dippables!)

Another thing I found, is to keep low-cal shaved lunch meat on hand.  I like Oscar Mayer Deli Fresh Shaved Meats.  50 calories and 1 gram of fat, gets you a serving of six slices of meat.  You can nosh on roast beef, chicken, turkey, ham and beef salami!

Also, it’s always a good idea to keep some prepared vegetables and fruits around!  Carrot sticks, grapes, strawberries, celery, green pepper, etc.  If it is already washed, prepared and put into a Tupperware container or baggy, then it will be much easier to choose and transport!

And the last piece of advice:  Don’t buy what you hate.  If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.  I have done this before.  I will buy squash (not my fave) and think that maybe I should give it another chance.  But what ends up happening is that my good intentions of becoming a squash lover flies right out the window soon after buying it.  It sits in the vegetable bin (and at the very bottom of that bin I might add), and then everytime I think about using it, I choose another veggie instead.  I end up eating all of the veggies I like and intentionally skip over the squash.  So the day before grocery day, if all I have left is squash (or insert other disliked veggie here), I will opt out of eating veggies all together that day.  The squash goes bad and I am no closer to becoming a squash lover.

So what I found on my journey so far is that it is not hard to eat healthy if I arm myself with healthy meals and snacks that I can fix on the fly!

Side note:  For those wondering about the face behind the blog, I am going to get my husband to take some pictures of me with our new Canon camera and post at least one on the about me section!

Cartoon by Natalie Dee

Diet soda harms kidney function.  Natural news reported that the chemical Aspartame destroys kidney function.  According to the article, a study was done to determine the affects of drinking diet soda on a regular basis.  The study found that the women who drank 2 or more diet sodas a day, doubled their risk for kidney failure.

Aspartame is no stranger to scrutiny.  It was reported back in the 70s and 80s that aspartame causes tumors, brain holes, seizures and death.  Investigations into the chemical never went very far.  The FDA will claim that aspartame is safe, but to this day, we the consumers really don’t know that it is safe.

Damn.  Damn.  Damn.  I have been trying to wean myself off of Diet Pepsi for some time now.  I replaced it with Crystal Light Energy drink (it has a little caffeine and some vitamins).  Of course, after reading the article by Natural News on aspartame, I just had to look at the ingredients.  And get this… Crystal Light Energy drink contains aspartame.  Damn.

Thankfully though my Special K drinks do NOT contain aspartame. *whew*

If you’re not sure if the chemicals contained in whatever it is you are eating and drinking are 100% safe for your body, think twice before eating/drinking/using.  I know I will.