Riding lawnmowers and maid service: another way to rack up excess pounds?

Oh, spring cleaning. It always has the power to make me vaguely ashamed that I didn't do a better job cleaning during, well, the entire rest of the year.

But emptying, cleaning, and reorganizing your closets, thoroughly scrubbing your sinks, and moving furniture to vacuum all the accumulated dust and pollen does have another benefit besides a sparkling home that smells faintly of bleach. It is a bit of a workout. This is why all women with overweight husbands should sell the riding lawnmower and make sure that their husband is out there, pushing that mower once a week. It's a chore--and it's good for the cardiovascular system.

Hits and misses

I enjoy trying new recipes. If I had my way, that's what I would do for a living. But since there's not a lot of positions available for a self-trained cook/recipe-tester, I guess I'll have to finish my ConLaw reading...

This weekend, I tried two different recipes: an Apple-Ginger Oat Bran muffin from an old issue of Fitness, and a black bean and couscous salad from CookingLight. The first recipe intrigued me: it called for nearly no fat. Fat binds baked goods together--and it does such a tasty job, particularly when you use butter. Mmm. This recipe called for 2% milk (which I didn't have) and extra light olive oil.

Frankly, even if I used 2% milk instead of nonfat, this muffin still would have tasted blah. It was soft, moist...but just lacked any sort of flavor. I've made other light muffins that end up with the same calorie count (around 150) that are much more flavorful. There's a Cran-apple muffin I'll post another time that is delicious. But these just didn't hit the spot.

The other recipe is good: perfect for packing in lunches, and it survived several ingredient swaps that happened because I just wasn't paying attention: "No rice vinegar? Uh...sure, I'll just use that white wine vinegar instead! Red bell peppers are $2 a piece!? Green will be just as tasty." I'm not going to run out and buy rice vinegar to make this again, though. It's good, but it's not one of those recipes that I can't wait to make again. Good things about this recipe: large serving size (2 cups), lots of fiber, easy and quick. Despite that, I'll be making my curry chicken pitas for the rest of the week--if I can just remember to cook the chicken tonight!

As part of spring cleaning, I have been going through my old issues of Self and Fitness, tearing out recipes. I have a gnocchi and shrimp dish I hope to make this weekend. Let's hope it turns out better than those muffins!

Emergency rooms, migraines and distractions all around

When life is going well, obstacles inevitably pop up. This week has been a failure as far as working out goes; I slept in every morning only to find my efforts to work out in the evening fruitless. First, I had to meet my roommate for grocery shopping. Then, a classmate and friend fell and hurt her ankle; there was no way I was going to have her take the bus to or from the ER! Then, today, my vision started to go crazy and I found myself in the midst of a migraine while in class. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to sleep it off.

The good news? This is a speed bump. Next week will be better. I'm not going to abandon my goals just because of one bad week.

I have also found out that Ben & Jerry's lowfat version of Chocolate Fudge Brownie is extremely delicious, especially if you're sharing it with a friend.

If the way to hell is paved with good intentions, what about the road to health?

I think the answer to that one is patience. Patience and perseverance. Patience, perseverance, and surprise. Surprise and fear...wait, that's a Monty Python sketch!

I recorded a loss this week...and then I held my drink tickets for the Gala in my hand and thought, "Well, I need to get my money's worth, right?" Oops. So much for the low-calorie Diet Cokes I planned on imbibing. There's nothing worse for weight loss than alcohol, unless it is drinking lots of alcohol when you haven't had a proper, filling dinner.

And THEN someone mentions Tater Tots, the best drunk food ever. And you find yourself wondering who you have to beat up to get a plateful of Tots.

Yeah...this weekend didn't go so well. I had calorie-laden Long Islands, Tater Tots at 2am, and then a hangover brunch that involved chorizo and eggs. But I think I've relearned a valuable lesson--a lesson that I need to learn about once a year, apparently--about planning ahead. If I had thought to have a good meal before the party, if I had alternated alcohol with water, I would be much prouder of myself right now.

Beating myself up about this serves no purpose. Instead, I'm going to work on my homework and then go work out.

Stalling out

This last week has reinforced to me how important it is that I learn to wakeup earlier and work out. I slept in, then promised myself that I would work out later in the day. Of course, life intervened: finishing my reading and review took longer than expected, which meant arriving at home hungry and tired.

Today, I'm going to try and inspire myself a bit by cleaning and filing. Nothing makes things seem more possible than a clean slate--or clean room--to work with.

Finding healthy, easy-to-transport lunches

One of the keys to weight loss is avoiding unplanned meals, especially those in restaurants. Being a student living on loans, it's especially important to me to avoid spending money. I almost always bring my lunch to school.

My favorite lunch foods:

1. Any cold pasta or grain salad (i.e. Quinoa Caprese)
2. Sandwich fillings plus a pita half--I tried Curry Chicken Pitas recently and really liked them.
3. Apples, oranges, pears: I usually slice or peel these and put them in a plastic bag for easy snacking. You can avoid brown apples by putting some lemon juice on the apple slices.
4. Soup-at-hand: if they're on sale, they're only about a dollar--and very convenient. Just watch your sodium intake the rest of the day.
5. Leftovers from a healthy meal the night before.
6. Hummus and carrot sticks (or green pepper slices)

I'm always looking for new ideas. If you have any, be sure to comment!

Venti he go? Coffee secrets of a savvy Seattle girl

Someone told me that once you start living a healthier lifestyle, it's like noticing a new kind of car: suddenly, you see people doing unhealthy things (or that particular model of car) EVERYWHERE.

One of the first things I did back in the size 16 days was to switch to nonfat milk when ordering lattes and such. Not knowing much about calories, I took my best friend's word for it when she said that ordering a tall--not a grande--nonfat latte would save me some money and some pounds. She was right: Starbucks' nutrition site says that the difference between a tall whole and a tall nonfat latte is 80 calories.

And then, I looked at the whipped cream. I live in Seattle, and Starbucks is everywhere. Don't get me wrong, I love them. I love that you can go to a Starbucks in Kansas City (not the airport though, Starbucks doesn't run those) and get roughly the same quality of coffee as at the original store down by the market. I also like that they offer employees stock options and health care, but that's for a social responsibility sort of blog, not this one.

So, yes I love Starbucks. But sadly, you have to give up some things when you're trying to be healthy. I cut down to once a week: I went to Starbucks on Friday mornings to celebrate the weekend's arrival and had a tall vanilla nonfat latte. Mmm. And every single time, I would see the same people ordering venti Frappucinos WITH whipped cream. "Okay," I thought, "Maybe they are ALL on graveyard shift and this is dessert? Don't judge, don't judge...okay, I'm judgmental. I have to judge."

At Starbucks, adding whipped cream to ANY drink adds at least 100 calories. A venti caramel Frappucino is 530 calories with whipped cream. If those people would switch to even a tall caramel Frappucino with no whipped cream (assuming this is a weekly, not daily ritual), they would lose a pound in 11 weeks JUST by changing that behavior, assuming they held everything else constant.

I've been drinking more than one espresso drink lately. Law school encourages excessive coffee consumption. But I found out a very interesting secret: Starbucks has a SHORT coffee cup. They don't advertise it, but it is 8 ounces of deliciousness. That is 4 ounces less than the tall; granted, the calorie difference isn't a lot. But like the example above, it may be enough to add up to a loss. Also, I have learned that you can get an Americano with room, then add a bit of nonfat milk and cinnamon for a tasty, caffeinated treat (around 15-30 calories depending on the amount of milk you add).

The new goal for the rest of this month is to cut out coffee treats, for the sake of my wallet and my waistline. Since the ultimate goal is one latte a week, I think I can let it be a tall :)

A so-so kind of day

Evenings are such a minefield. I respond well to schedules and being busy. Being at home with nothing to do but chores, I tend to nosh mindlessly. But tonight, I stopped before too much damage was done.

Again, I couldn't manage to rouse myself to get up for more than a twenty-minute yoga workout this morning. Someone has suggested that I schedule my workouts and post them somewhere above my desk, just to try and jar my brain into thinking of this as a duty, not something I can beg off. I may do just that. I also need to come up with a better incentive structure. Being a bit of a cheapskate, it is hard for me to promise myself pedicures, clothes, shoes and vacations with any degree of sincerity. Where's that altruistic, anonymous benefactor who will bribe me towards fitness? Do such kindly souls exist? Would someone actually give me a trip to Greece to celebrate reaching my goals?

Hello? Anyone out there? Nah, didn't think so.

I am NOT a morning person

Today was another attempt and another miss at getting up early to exercise. After dragging myself home after a very long day, I spent most of my evening doing more research and reading, not noticing how quickly the time was going by. Now I'm irritated at myself for not working out today.

There is a nasty cold hitting my classmates. Having been sick a lot in the last six months, I only hope that my immune system is going to adopt a "been there, done that" attitude and bulldoze past it.

Now: I am going to bed early and getting up early to work out. Otherwise I'm going to have to buy this.

Habit-breaking, habit-forming

One of my goals this year is to become a morning exerciser. This quarter, this has been made more challenging with 9am classes. If I want to work out, shower, eat breakfast, and catch the bus in time to make it to the law school with a bit of breathing room, I either have to do a short workout (i.e., 20-minute yoga DVD) or get up REALLY early. This is made more complicated when my roommate, who gets up after me, is already using the shower when I get back from my workout.

But the real problem isn't the shower: I have the hardest time getting out of bed at 6am! I've been slowly trying to push back my wake-up time, but I have this unfortunate tendency of falling back asleep. Even putting my alarm across the room hasn't nipped this habit in the bud.

On the habit-forming side, I am having some success resurrecting an old, kind of weird habit: Pulling off pieces of food--like cheese from pizza or a quarter of a cookie--and throwing them in the trash before I can eat them. I know it's weird. But when I hit my first plateau two years ago, I started doing this at work and the scale started to budge again. It is best to do this only with snacks and treats.

At first, I was horrified at myself for "wasting" food by not finishing what I started to eat. We're all taught to clean our plates as children. (By the way, I think this is the worst thing that you can do as a parent. By all means, withhold dessert, but making your child eat past satiation sends the wrong signal. They learn not to listen to their bodies saying, "Hey, I'm full, you can stop eating now.) But then I realized that eating something I didn't need or want wasn't a waste--it was just another step towards a healthier, fitter body. So I'm going to continue to pick pieces of granola bar off of my snack and throw it away, pull cheese off of entrees at restaurants, and leave things on my dinner plate.

Muffin top at the bar

Nothing is worse than putting on one of your tighter, more revealing tops--the ones that are supposed to make you feel cute for a night out on the town--and noticing a wedge of fat hanging over your waistline where there wasn't one before. I'm heading back towards my healthier weight, but I am still lacking the muscle tone that I once had.

I think that my roommate is having similar issues because today our trip to the grocery store was extremely healthful in nature. We bought fish, lamb, tons of veggies, whole wheat pitas and nothing fattening or sugary in nature, except for some chocolate chips for a friend's birthday treat. Hopefully we can keep this up!

The pitas are for a curry chicken pita recipe I saw on CookingLight.com. I'm hoping that it will be as tasty as it looks!