Project Fitness Update

So here we are, another Monday.  Oh man, this is painful.  So you know, we were at the ER on Thursday night into Friday.  And it's so interesting how I deal with stress, which is by eating.  I've noticed it so much this week.  I have a stupid fight with J, and I run out to the kitchen and grab a handful of malted milk balls to calm my nerves.  On Thursday night, I had a screaming baby on my lap for hours - I wasn't about to let her crawl around in the ER with all the who-knows-what on the floor.  So I just held her on my lap while she flailed and screamed.  And she sat in her stroller sometimes, and I'd walk with her.  But mostly it was her on my lap, flailing.  Until she finally started to pass out.  So guess what I did?  I hit the snack machine.  Grape soda.  Orange soda.  Diet coke.  A giant pack of vanilla cookies.  Chocolate.  You name it, I guzzled it.

I didn't choose to meditate and channel my inner silence.  No, I inhaled sugar.

This is not particularly healthy.

Even worse, I justified it because I did spend a ton of time walking her in her stroller in circles.  So I was like, "well, I'm walking her around for hours, that must be burning some calories, no?"  Uh, no.  Not that many.  

I've also gotten out of the habit of using the loseit app, which I started rectifying today.  I'd also been sliding on my meditation (mostly because I noticed that whenever I would meditate, I would start thinking hateful thoughts about my asshole neighbor, but that's a different story).  Which doesn't seem to be the point of meditation.  So I meditated today and pushed past that and started thinking no thoughts at all.  For about 6 seconds.

So that's where we are.  Stopped by stress eating.

New week this week.

Project Fitness Update

Really quick update tonight because I need to wake up at 4:30 tomorrow for an early flight up to San Francisco (though one perk of having a baby is that I'm completely on this morning-biased schedule and regularly get up at 5:45 anyway, so 4:30 doesn't seem as early) but this week was a lot better.  I credit it to hiking the three miles around the lake every day without fail, sometimes twice a day (if Hannah is really fussy).  I'm getting a lot faster.  It's a three mile trek around the lake, with lots of hills, and in my heyday of 2012, I could do it in about 36 minutes.  

With pushing a stroller it's a lot harder, having to navigate the hills and keep her from tipping over where the banking is weird.  Plus I was massively out of shape when I started again with her.  In the beginning, with the stroller, I did it in an hour and ten minutes.  Now I'm down to about 50 minutes.  Still a far cry from the high point, but fast enough so that J was impressed with my ability to push her up a steep hill, and not need to stop for breath along the way when he came along with us on Saturday.

I'm also really getting in the habit of not eating that much.  Now that I'm becoming mindful of what I'm eating, I'm realizing that I was just shoving stuff into my mouth before without even thinking about it.  A cookie there, a bagel here, some cottage cheese with blueberries now, and some chocolate in a few minutes.  That being said, I still need to work on finding other ways to deal with stress besides eating.  Today, for example, Hannah decided that, even though she was super tired, she wasn't going to take an afternoon nap.  Which led to her being fussy and totally unable to keep happy.  I had been at it for about 2 hours, and J ran an errand so I was alone with her.  She didn't want to be in the walker.  She didn't want to be in her safe play space (behind the gates).  She didn't want to go on my back and go for a walk.  She didn't want to eat.  She didn't want to play in the high chair.  I was running out of ideas.  And so I ate.  Cookies and cream ice cream, three spoonfuls of chunky peanut butter (choosy mom's choose Jif) and a spoonful of cool whip.  Yep, that was dinner.  In between her wails.  

It kind of makes me scared to step on the scale tomorrow, but I'll deal.  It's a new day tomorrow.

Granted, it's a day in which I'm going to walk past an Auntie Anne's pretzel stand in the Oakland airport.  But it's a new day nonetheless.  And maybe tomorrow I won't stop at the Auntie Anne's pretzel stand when we land.  Fingers crossed.

Project Fitness Update

It's Monday, which means I don't have to think about what to post because I always try to do my Fitness Project Update on Monday's.  This week was poopy.  That's all I can say about that.

I'm still using the LoseIt app, and I even earned a badge for logging my weight every day for 2 weeks or something like that, but I'm still pissed off because I gained like 2 pounds this week.  It's those damn pretzel bites.  Screw them.  Stupid pretzels.  But mmmmm they were so good.  Not worth 2 pounds, though.

So I'm trying to remember that it's not what you do with success but with adversity that shapes your character.  Blah blah freaking blah.

Anyway, Hannah and I now regularly walk at the lake twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.  Pushing a stroller around our mountain trail is no small feat, and I'm building a lot of muscle from that.

I'm still crappy at drinking water.  I wish there was something else I could say about that.  I add Mio drops, but that doesn't seem to actually count towards water, then.  I don't know.  There are "plain water" Nazi's who say it doesn't count if you add flavor.  I think that it's probably better than diet coke, to which I have a serious addiction.

Anyway, I'm plugging along.  Logging my food.  Logging my weight.  3 steps forward, 2 steps back.  Can you tell I'm a little disheartened?  If I'm going to be hungry all the time, I at least want the scale to budge.  Sad face time :(

We'll see what happens this week.  Maybe it was a blip.  Maybe it was the full moon.

Hacking a foody recipe so I can make it with an awake toddler

So last night we were at Applebee's (because we are officially Old People who go to Family Restaurants where it doesn't matter if Hannah cries a little bit, and they have unlimited refills of diet coke) and I saw something in the desserts that spoke to me.  Cinnamon Sugar Pretzel Bites with a cream cheese dipping sauce.  Yum.  But because I'm trying to be off deserts, and also because they were like $8.99, I thought to myself, "self, I bet I could make something like that."

And it's been a while since I've been domestic and tried out new recipes, so I decided to look online and find a cinnamon sugar pretzel bite recipe.

I found this one from some people called Kevin and Amanda, who seem to love cooking, getting excited over food, making gifs of their finished product, having a really great manicure; and they blog-crush on some other cooking bloggers called Two Peas and Their Pod.

They were really, I mean REALLY excited over these pretzel bites.  Like, seriously excited.  It was a group blogging effort with the two peas and the pod people, so there were four of them in a trendy kitchen getting excited over pretzel bites.  The post is really long.  They go into detail about the salted caramel sauce that's way beyond what I cared about, given the fact that I was just trying to satisfy a sweet tooth.

But their recipe seemed easy enough, and so I thought I'd try it at home.

The only thing is, these food bloggers don't seem to have toddlers roaming around in their walkers, trying to find things they can chew on, or digging through your purse when you're not looking trying to eat your lip gloss.  Also, I don't have nearly the kind of kitchen gadgets they have.  I have an espresso machine, a blender, a tea kettle, a toaster oven, and a soda stream.  And that's it.  No microwave (they freak me out).  No fancy mixer.

I was going to try out the recipe adding in my own little touches to make it something that I could do while Hannah was zooming around trying to eat the cat food.

So, going through their recipe, here's what I did:

Yeah, I have an old and new pineapple on my counter.  Don't judge.

"Combine the water, sugar, yeast, and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix with the dough hook until combined. Let sit for 5 minutes."

Hannah was napping when I started the recipe, so gathering the ingredients and making the dough was easy enough.  Only thing is, I don't have a stand mixer or a dough hook.  And there's no way I'm getting one.  That is just way more of a commitment to domesticity than I am willing to make.  So I stuck it all in a regular bowl.  And mixed it with a spoon.  The way the pioneer women did.

Add the salt and flour and mix on low speed until combined. Increase the speed to medium and continue kneading until the dough is smooth and begins to pull away from the side of the bowl, about 3 to 4 minutes. If the dough appears too wet, add additional flour, 1 tablespoon at a time. Remove the dough from the bowl, place on a flat surface and knead into a ball with your hands.

Again, not using a mixer.  So just did this myself with my hands.  When it looked like it was all combined, I called it done.

Coat a bowl with vegetable oil, add the dough and turn to coat with the oil. Cover with a clean towel or foil and place in a warm , draft-free spot until the dough doubles in size, about one hour.

Easy enough, except I covered with a paper towel and put on the stove.  Because I don't know where a draft free spot would be that also wasn't accessible to either the cats or the baby.  

At this point Hannah woke up, so we had lunch and went for a walk at the lake.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Bring the water to a boil and add the baking soda.

My messy pulled-apart "bites"

Remove the dough from the bowl and place on a floured surface. Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces, and roll each piece into a rope about 22″ long. Cut the dough into one inch pieces to make pretzel bites. Boil the pretzel bites in the water solution in batches, about 15 at a time, for 30 seconds. Remove with a large slotted spoon. Place pretzel bites on a well-greased baking sheet.

Here's where I really cheated.  Hannah was zooming around at this point and ain't no way I had the time or space to roll pieces of dough into a 22" rope and then cut them nice and evenly.  So I just held chunks of dough in my hands, twirled it around so it made a skinny rope, and pulled pieces off that seemed bite-size.

The finished product

Bake the pretzel bites at 425 for 8 minutes, then remove from the oven and immediately place the pretzel bites on a cooling rack. Brush with the egg wash and sprinkle the tops generously with cinnamon sugar. You want to do this over a cooling rack and not on the pan you bake the pretzel bites on or else the sugar will stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Then put the pretzel bites back on the first pan and continue baking for an additional 8-10 mins until golden and cooked through.

Again, I don't have a cooling rack.  So my hack for this was to put the egg and water into the original mixing bowl, dump everything in there and pour the cinnamon and sugar in, and then put them all back on the pan, with aluminum foil wrapped around it.  Tear it off, and the pan is like new.  No burning sugar to scrape off.  Easy peasy.  

The finished pretzel bites were yummy, which was the point of the exercise.  Even Jonathan, who's not a fan of sweets, noshed on them all night long.  There was also a recipe for salted caramel sauce, but I realized I had some from Trader Joe's already, so I opened that up.  Cuz why cook when you can open a jar?

Cinnamon Sugar Pretzel Bites with Salted Caramel Sauce: it's what's for Dinner.

New Year: Less Sugar

I subscribe to the digital edition of National Geographic, and was caught off guard a few months ago when, on a cover that usually features exotic places or animals, there was a giant cupcake. If National Geographic is covering it, there must truly be a national sugar epidemic. I ignored it at the time. I had just given birth, and getting back on track with my diet (after a pregnancy where Lucky Charms played a major role) was the last thing I wanted to do.

But I know I need to now. I've been dealing with post partum depression - PPD - (which is a monster, let me tell you) and when I went to the psych for meds, the first questions they asked me were whether I was eating a healthy diet (no), if I was sleeping (no), and if I was exercising (not as much as I'd like). So apparently my sugar addiction is mixing with my hormones and making me loopy. Great.

I'm nervous about taking psych meds, so the doctor advised that the first two things I could do myself to improve my mental health was make sure I was going for a walk every day, and cutting way back on my sugar intake. So now I'm back on a kind-of sugar fast.

And damn, does it suck.

According to the National Geographic article, here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/sugar/cohen-text, sugar tickles the same parts of my brain (and yours) that gets tickled by heroin and cocaine. And it's just as addictive. Yikes.

“It seems like every time I study an illness and trace a path to the first cause, I find my way back to sugar.” - Richard Johnson, a nephrologist at the University of Colorado Denver

So cutting back on sugar should help my joints, my headaches and my energy levels. But getting there - ahhhh, that's going to be the tough part. I tried to go cold turkey, but lasted about six hours. Now I'm making bargains with myself. I'm allowed sugar as part of coffee drinks, because right now the Peppermint Mocha Coffeemate creamer is my favorite thing in the world. But that's it. If I have sugar in that form, I'm not allowed any chocolate, for instance. I also am forbidding myself from putting any sugar in my tea.

If sugar is so bad for us, why do we crave it? The short answer is that an injection of sugar into the bloodstream stimulates the same pleasure centers of the brain that respond to heroin and cocaine. All tasty foods do this to some extent—that’s why they’re tasty!—but sugar has a sharply pronounced effect. In this sense it is literally an addictive drug. - National Geographic August 2013

I'm on Day 2. I'm jittery and my headache is worse. I kind of feel a little dizzy, even though I've slept well (Hannah gave us a 6 hour stretch last night - bliss!). I really really, but really, REALLY want chocolate. But I am avoiding it. I'm staying strong. I think if I can get through the first week or so, it should get better. I've never quit an addiction like this before. I never smoked, I've never done drugs, I've never been into drinking. So this is my first time cutting out an addictive substance. And I'm really not enjoying it. But I see it as a necessary evil. Once I get over this hump, every day will get a little bit easier.

And if I can lose some weight and feel better soon, then it will be what I need to push me to continue.

Here's to a less sweet 2014. For me, and so Hannah can learn good habits, and not have to kick a sugar addiction herself when she's my age.

The Soda-Sobriety Chronicles: Day 33

It's been 33 days since I've had a soda.  As my 30 day detox was winding down, I found myself starting to get more liberal with sugar, but I have learned my lesson.  Friday I was baking pumpkin muffins with a cream cheese frosting center.  I thought, "well, the entire muffin only has 12 grams of sugar, so I can take a little bite of this cream cheese frosty goodness and that will be barely a gram or two, right?" So I take a little teeny bite, and almost instantly I had an enormous headache.  Lesson learned.  No highly concentrated sugar/cream cheese frosting mixtures for me any time soon.  

Sunday I was driving home from the lake where I had my walk, got to McDonald's, and I thought, "I really deserve a diet coke.  If anyone deserves a diet coke, it's me.  Yep, I'm going to finally get a diet coke."  But then I found myself driving right past McDonald's without stopping for my diet coke.  I did stop at 7-11 for a newspaper, and again I pondered the soda fountain, but I didn't get any.  

Today I was grocery shopping and there was a Chick-Fil-A across the parking lot from where I was parked.  Without getting into a post about the CEO's political ideas, let me just say that I'm a fan of the diet coke at Chick-Fil-A.  I am slightly embarrassed at what a connoisseur of diet coke I have become over the past 23 years of drinking it.  There's something about the syrup level they use, as well as the foam cups, and the ice, that makes it my hands-down favorite (followed closely by Sonic, which also has foam cups and magic ice).  I'm not a fan of McDonald's diet cokes, to be honest.  Maybe it's the paper cups.  Maybe it's the ice.  They just seem off to me.

(I'm not a fan of diet coke from a bottle, I can tolerate a can, but my most favorite kind of diet coke is from a fountain, with lots of ice.  Just thinking about it makes me a bit misty-eyed.)

Anyway, so I was loading the groceries, and I thought, "ok, I'm going to pull my car out of my spot, drive across the parking lot, to the drive-through, and I'm getting a diet coke.  I'll make it small.  I gotta get a diet coke."  So I drive to Chick-Fil-A and I am almost at the drive-through when a giant pick up truck with a Romney sticker pulled in front of me and beat me to the entrance.  I took it as a sign, sipped my water, and morosely pulled off.

The thing is, I feel so good without drinking soda, and now that I've gone longer than any time since I was 13, I don't want to risk messing that all up, and having to start over.  Because seriously, the first week was hellish.  The cravings were terrible.  Now it's bearable.  I really only miss it about ten times a day, which beats the ten thousand times a day I was missing it a month ago.

So here we are.  Somehow I have managed to go for 33 days without having soda.  I'm thinking it might be fun to go for another 33 days, just for giggles.  I'm kind of feeling like an alcoholic with the whole one-day-at-a-time thing, but it really does work.  Today I said, "nope, no soda today.  Maybe tomorrow."  And if I tell that to myself every day, eventually I will have amassed a lifetime without soda (though that thought scares the crap out of me - a lifetime without soda?  What will I drink when I'm at the movies eating popcorn?  What about if we get pizza?  You can't eat pizza without soda?!?!).

It's nice not only being soda-free, but having so little sugar in my system that I get an instantaneous headache when pure sugar enters my mouth.  

I highly recommend it.

Is Drinking Soda Really That Bad For You: http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/18/health/jampolis-dangers-drinking-soda/index.html

The Truth About Diet Soda: http://news.menshealth.com/the-truth-about-diet-soda/2011/07/07/

Sugar and Spice

About two weeks ago I had a bit of a revelation.  I realized that I am completely addicted to sugar.  How did I find this out?  Through the font of knowledge that is In Style magazine.  No, seriously.  I was having a really bad day at the office, I drank two full-sugar sodas, I ate full-sugar cake, and towards the end of the evening I felt like full-sugared shit.  Then I was reading my magazine, and there was this quiz to see whether you are a sugar addict (You can take a similar one here: http://www.vanadia.com/stopbeingsweet/quiz/).  My answers qualified me as a serious, no question about it, full blown sugar addict.

Then I turned into a detective, to see just how much I needed to cut back.

Do you ever notice on food labels, the sugar is listed there with the carbohydrates and fiber, and both carbs and fiber have a percentage next to them - ie the percentage of carbs in the cereal based on the recommended daily amount you're supposed to have... look next to the sugar number.  There's no percentage.  So you don't know how much sugar you're supposed to have based on the labels.  J's 20 ounce bottles of Sprite have over 50g of sugar, but they only have something like 20% of your daily carbohydrates, so it must be ok, right?  Wrong.  The average American consumes more than 20tsp/day of added sugar.  According to the American Heart Association, women are supposed to have no more than 6 tsp of extra sugar/day.  That's about 30g.  So J's soda has nearly twice the daily recommended allowance in it.  Note that fruit and sugars found in milk don't count towards that total because they are nutritional - this is purely sugar for the sake of sugar that we're counting here.

The syrup to make my vanilla latte has 25g/serving (2 tbsp).  That's not even counting the frozen yogurt, the sugar I put on my oatmeal, the coffee creamer, etc etc.  Seriously, I can easily eat 100g/sugar a day, no problem.

Well, I knew I needed to do something about this, and so I am embarking on a sugar detox.  I found a couple of programs online that promised you would kick your sugar addiction in 14 days, or 10 days, or 30 days, yada yada.  Everybody seems to have a sugar-program.  I found one I liked called The 30-Day Lift, which doesn't promise that you'll be sugar-free in a month, but does help you wean your way off of sugar so you're eating less.  Every day you get exercises to do, and an audio recording to listen to, giving you ways to lower your sugar intake.

So now, thirteen days later, here's where I am:
I'm eating about 20-30g of sugar/day, which for me is amazing.  I haven't had soda in 2 weeks, and while I did drink a lot of sparkling water the first week, just to give me something fizzy, I decided I wasn't really a fan, and I mostly just drink plain water now.  That's actually the hardest part for me.  I want a diet coke so freaking bad.  A few days ago, when I realized I wasn't pregnant from the last IUI cycle - another story entirely - I told J that I deserved a diet coke.  Dammit, I had earned it.  But somehow I made it through the day without having any soda.  (And in case you're wondering, I'm avoiding artificial sweeteners as well because they have been shown to increase sugar cravings by stimulating your taste for sugar without giving you any real sugar.)

I've lost about 6 pounds.  I'm not doing this to particularly jumpstart my weight-loss again, but the weight loss is an added benefit.

I haven't had any heartburn since ditching the sugar.

I have way more energy.  I eat lunch around noon, and then at about 3pm I eat a handful of nuts, and that easily keeps me going until dinner. I don't snack in the evenings anymore, except maybe eating a few crackers when I take my nighttime fertility meds and vitamins.

The first few days were really horrible, though.  I was jittery all the time.  I could literally taste sugary stuff on my tongue.  I was crabby and had awful headaches.  In between there I was also traveling up to San Francisco and presenting at a conference, so I had some other stresses going on, too.  But I successfully avoided the call of Auntie-Anne's in the airport, and learned how to make my own soft pretzels at home, without all the added sugar (which is a different blog post...all I can say for now is that Auntie Anne can bite me - and I'm allowed to say that; I went to school with their whole family and remember when she just had one little stand at the Downingtown Market).

I still have a smaller version of my iced mocha in the morning - coffee, 1 tbsp of chocolate syrup, and some milk, all over ice.  It's yummy, and since I make it small, and measure out my syrup, it's not absolutely terrible.  That's really the only sweet thing I have all day, but I get the extra grams from bread, and the cheerios I've started snacking on (I have turned into a 3 year old).

If you're thinking about cutting back on your sugar, obviously talk to your doctor, and check out these links below.

NPR: Too Much Sugar Can Be A Heart-Stopper
Mayo Clinic: Don't Get Sabotaged by Sweeteners
141 Reasons Sugar Ruins Your Health

I'm a podcasting fool

I'm up late, having just done another episode of the Renaissance English History Podcast, cuz that's how I roll on a three day weekend.  You can subscribe in itunes, or listen online (just click the EnglandCast tab).  Cuz you know you need to know lots of stuff about 16th Century English Art in 10 minutes or less...

And I made these homemade potato chips today.  I'm not really sure that they count as, you know, chips.  But they're made with potatoes, oil, salt and pepper.  So they ain't Doritos...

And since I'm punchy, and today my 32 year old husband tells me that when he grows up he wants to be a guitar player for Big Time Rush, it's time for Funny Local News: Arachnophobia Edition.  Love how the woman tries to take charge.  Leave it to a woman to try to keep stuff moving along.  Bunch of stupid frat boys acting like ten year olds while the woman tries to do her job.  

What the hell CAN I Eat - Fake Food Edition

We all know I'm on a Noble Quest to Eat Better, right?  One of the biggest things I'm noticing on my Journey is how little Actual Food there is in the grocery store.  I read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food when it first came out a few years ago (his axiom for health: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants) and I thought, "yeah, that makes sense, we don't really eat a lot of real food."

But see, I thought that meant stuff like Dorito's or macaroni and cheese.  I figured that, you know, yogurt, for example, was a real food.

I'm learning that I've been way off in jumping to that conclusion.

I've become an obsessive label-reader, and here's what I'm learning:

All those yummy General Foods International instant coffee that I love to mix with cold milk in a blender to make a pseudo-frappuccino?  Not really food.

I was reading the label of my Hill's Brothers mocha mix, and I noticed that it's loaded to the brim with phosphates.  Whereas my Starbucks Via instant coffee is simply coffee, cane sugar, and dried milk.  I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and asked myself, "what are these phosphates, and are they bad for me?"

It doesn't seem very cut and dry.  The International Food Additives Council publishes a list of phosphates used in food, and why they're there.  They're in loads of foods.  Everything from cake mixes to soy milk.  Apparently they are often used to prevent clumping (like in my instant coffee or the aforementioned cake mix).

The FDA lists them as "Generally Recognized as Safe."  And they're approved for use in the EU.  So it looks like they're ok, except possibly for people with kidney problems.

But still, here's the thing.  So much of what we're eating isn't actually food.  It's edible food-like substances that are engineered by food scientists.  The plus side of this is that we get a lot of great food, very easily.  Just add water, and you've got creamy coffee.  They allow us to have an enormous range of food in our refrigerator that we don't even really need to cook ourselves.  I'm sure it's made food less expensive.  But the downside is that I'm loading my body up with chemicals.  Coffee is not supposed to have a non-caking agent in it.

Is this sustainable?

Take my Fiber One bars.  They're touted as being pretty healthy, right?  They taste like granola and chocolate, and they have 11 grams of fiber.  But they have Yellow Number 6 in them, which can cause tumors on the kidney, can mess with your chromosomes, and is banned in Norway.

Yellow Number 6 is approved in the US.  Maybe Norway is overreacting.  Or maybe not.  Cigarettes are still legal, after all.  Maybe in fifty years we'll all be aghast at the amount of food chemicals that we put into our bodies.

And I ask you, why the hell does a granola bar need to have Yellow Number 6 in it in the first place?

So the next phase of my Eating Better Quest is to get rid of as many of these chemicals as I can.  Tomorrow I'm going to make my own potato chips, and I might even start making my own bread, because seriously, why is there high fructose corn syrup in bread?  Of all the stupid things...

I'm gonna take this "no additives and chemicals" thing to the next level.  For thousands of years people ate without this kind of crap in their food, and honestly, I think it's still too early to call it safe.  So I'm out.  I'm getting off the chemical train.

I'm glad I'm finding all this out now, before I get pregnant again.  Because it takes time and effort to make your own bread and it's good to get in the habit now.  Dammit, I'm committed to having a kitchen with real food in it, and not something that was created in a laboratory.    

I shall report back on the chips, as well as other chemicals I'm finding in my new obsessive-label-reading experiment.

What the hell CAN I Eat?

I'm going to start a new segment on my blog, called What the hell CAN I Eat? because there is seriously, like, nothing that is edible in the grocery store.

I've long been a proponent of shopping on the perimeter of the grocery store, even when I wasn't actively trying to lose weight and be healthy.  The stuff down the middle aisles, aside from some of the baking ingredients, and the occasional bit of rice or pasta, is largely chemical-filled junk.

But I'm paying even more attention now because we're getting ready to start trying to get me pregnant again, and as I get healthier, I realize how much further I have to go, and how much more feeling-awesome there is waiting for me.   I've started using agave in my tea instead of sugar.  I switched to the "natural" coffee creamer (milk, sugar, cream, and vanilla).  I eat a lot of veggies.  I'm doing the whole oil-pulling thing.

I am trying desperately to get off of diet coke right now.  I've read enough about aspartame to know that it's no good.  It can screw up your fertility, make you gain weight, probably causes cancer, and lots of other bad stuff.  I've been drinking it for nearly 20 years.  I did quit at one point, for Lent a few years ago, but I went back to it after we lost Baby T, and have been off the wagon since.

So I think it's probably ok to give up diet soda, and I won't have to worry about aspartame, right?  I go to Whole Foods, see they have stevia-sweetened soda, order a 24 pack on Amazon and sign up to have it delivered every month.  I think I'm doing good, right?  I'm gonna get rid of aspartame, and be super-healthy.

Now, I enjoy snacking on yogurt.  And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those Yoplait ads that show the lady talking on the phone about how she's eating red velvet cake and still losing weight while her hubby goes foraging through the fridge and only sees yogurt.

Plus, they're usually the cheapest yogurts at the store.  10 for $6.  It's a deal.

They look innocuous enough.  Pretty innocent. It's just yogurt, right?

Till you look on the back, and not only does it have Yellow #6, which is a carcinogen (and has been banned in several European countries), but it also has aspartame.   What the hell CAN I eat???

Looks like after I finish this batch, I'll just be getting the all-natural stuff.  Which really sucks because I like the raspberry cheesecake flavor a lot.  But, you know, not enough to stay addicted to aspartame for.

Stay tuned for my next installment, where I find out that my fiber bars will also give me cancer!  Who knew the grocery store was such a frigging death trap.

Food Stuff

In an effort to keep up with my new year's resolution (since the year is half over - ahem, see previous entry), I am going to be posting my daily food and exercise intake here on my blog. So here's the what's so for today.

Breakfast - 7:30am

homemade breakfast sandwich - 3 egg whites, slice of cheese on an english muffin

Activia yogurt

homemade iced mocha using skim milk.

Snack - 11am -

somebody brought chocolate covered toffee stuff into the office - I had one piece.

Lunch - 12:30pm -

pb sandwich

coleslaw left over from Memorial Day

container of raspberries

crackers that I nibbled on for the rest of the afternoon

5 hershey kisses

while driving back from the office - 4pm - a handful of chips, and a diet cherry coke from sonic half-price happy hour.

Dinner - 7pm

brown rice

catfish - baked, with a bit of butter, and seasonings

caesar salad with light dressing

fudgy pop

Drank plenty of water and took my vitamins.

Didn't work out though.

Check-in: done