Finding joy in food / 183.6

I've been following this young lady's blog for the last couple of years. She follows a vegan diet and eats very healthy. She maintains her prefect healthy weight through eating natural whole foods.

What amazes me is when you look at the food she prepares it doesn't look at all like "diet" food. She uses wholesome ingredients and never mentions calories. She eats real food.

Since obviously what I've been doing isn't really working for me lately (like the last year or more), I thought it's time I take a different approach to my eating. Instead of constantly going for the totally non-fat, sugar-free, lowest calories food, I'm going to try eating more whole foods and fewer processed foods.

I'm going to stay with Weight Watchers and will still count Points and track my food, but I want to eat different food. A woman (or man) cannot live by chicken breasts and Brussels sprouts forever.

I attended two Weight Watcher meetings this week, one on Wednesday (at-work meeting) and one today. The topic for both was the same, about having a variety in your food. If you eat the same thing you'll get bored and start overeating, trying to compensate for the boredom. I'm living proof of this statement.

This is exactly where I've been for the past year. I couldn't even remember the last time I tried a new food. My breakfast for the last three years has been the same almost every single day. A couple of times I'd try oatmeal (yuk!), and immediately would go back to my same boring (although delicious) breakfast.

In case you're wondering, my breakfast was a healthy egg McMuffin type meal: one egg, 28 grams 2% sharp cheddar cheese, 4 thin slices Canadian bacon, 1 sandwich thin. PointsPlus = 8. Full of protein and cheesy goodness, but after three years, extremely boring.

After Wednesday's Weight Watcher meeting, I tried Fiber One pancakes. Thursday and Friday I had a mashed banana added to the Fiber One pancake mix and sugar-free pancake syrup (Smuckers). It was okay, but not fantastic. I didn't like the sugar-free syrup, although it tasted okay, I try to stay away from artificial sweeteners and usually have Stevia if I must have something sweet. It just didn't seem healthy. Processed Fiber One mix and sugar-free syrup, not exactly natural or a whole food.

Today I decided to break away from my usual practice of figuring out the Points before I eat. I know, scary idea isn't it? Breakfast today was really breakfast/lunch at 12:30 p.m. so I knew I had a lot of Points to play with (I get 29 a day and still have 44 of weeklies to use this week, plus all my activity Points).

I saw a recipe on Angela's blog that looked and sounded wonderful. Spiced-up Stacked Pumpkin Butter Pancakes For One.

I couldn't make them exactly as she said because I couldn't find the Kamut flour at the nutrition center of my local Fred Meyers. Instead, I used Bob's Red Mill Organic High Fiber Pancake and Waffle (a combination of several different types of organic whole grains). I added only a teaspoon of baking powder to make them fluffier, but not as much as Angela added since the mix already contained some baking powder.

I purchased my first jar of Nature's Way EfaGold Coconut Oil, pure extra virgin. I cringed when I looked at the calories, but I was determined to make the recipe as close to Angela's as I could. You can read about the benefits of coconut oil here. I've been reading about it on several blogs but sort of blew it off. I mean, it's an oil and very high in calories. However, I eat olive oil since it's healthy and it's high in calories too. I think it's time I try something different in the oil department.

Angela has a Pumpkin Butter recipe that I'm going to try, but this morning I didn't want to take the time. Instead I purchased R.W. Knudsen's Organic Apple Butter (one PointsPlus per tablespoon).

I made the pancakes using the Bob's Pancake mix and substituted the store-bought apple butter for the pumpkin butter as the topping. I added one tablespoon pecans on top of the apple butter and had one egg on the side (for extra protein and I'm a big egg lover).

This meal was fit for a king. I'm not kidding you when I say this was the best pancake I've ever eaten in my entire life. The total PointsPlus for everything was 14. That's a lot for one meal, but it was my breakfast and lunch together, and it was delightful. Worth every Point.

I'm going to stop by the health food store and pick up some Kamut flour, but I doubt it can beat the pancake I had today. I also plan to whip up the Pumpkin Butter. I'm not sure if the Points will be that much different than the store-bough Apple Butter, but I'd like to try it anyway.

Since I put away the book by she-who-shall-not-be-named I feel 100% better about myself and my life. Looking back at the past and dwelling on unpleasant situations really doesn't work for me. I'd rather look towards the future. I'm feeling very positive and happy today (it helps that the sun is shining).

Taking joy in our food isn't a bad thing. In fact, I think it's a much  healthier way to look at food, rather than think of it as the enemy. We need to grab our joy where we can find it, as long as it's good for us and healthy. I really believe it's okay if that joy is in our food.

~Diana

Picture from this morning, on my way to Weight Watchers

 Beautiful sky

Close up of the flowers that are just starting to pop out on our tree int he front yard.

I do NOT like this book

The book
I'm on chapter two of A Course in Weight Loss, 21 Spiritual lessons for surrendering your weight forever, by Marianne Williamson. I wonder, exactly what does "surrendering your weight forever" mean?

I've decided this book is a bunch of crap. Lesson two is even more stupid than lesson one. It's titled Thin You, Meet Not-Thin You. I got about four pages into this lesson and realized I don't like this author.

Marianne talks about Divine Mind, and "One in Whose hands it will dissolve forever". Seriously? Sounds kind of Harry Potter-ish to me. If she's talking about God then why doesn't she just say "God"?

When I read "Fat cells will dissolve permanently when they are dissolved through the power of love." I almost couldn't stop laughing. That's news to me. I thought those little guys were with me for life. I knew they could shrink, but I didn't know a little love could get rid of them.

I'm sure she was speaking figuratively and not literally, but so much of her writing is like a puzzle. It sounds nice but it doesn't make any sense.

Lesson one, tearing down the wall, which involved looking at the darkness in my life, was a terrible exercise. Dredging up old grievances and sadness in my life did nothing for my soul. Examining them in detail was horribly depressing.

This is by far the worst weight loss book I've ever read in my life, and I've read a lot of them.

After reading this book for a few days, I remembered buying another Marianne Williamson book several years ago. I had totally forgotten about that book. I can't remember the name of it. That was when I respected Oprah and she was promoting it at the time. I hated that book. In fact, that's when I was very involved with my church, reading the Bible daily, and of course, daily prayer. I found Marianne's writing offensive, and I still do.

I think there might be some value in this book. Sadly, so much of it is New Age garbage that you have to try to weed through to get to anything worthwhile, I really don't think it has much overall value.

I did a little research on Marianne last night and found an interview she did several years ago. Personally, I think she's a little crazy. Sure, we're all a little bit crazy, but most of us aren't out there selling our brand of crazy to the masses.

Buyer beware

And life goes on
It's only Tuesday but yesterday was long! After a couple of sleepless nights over the weekend (thanks to that damn book), I awoke exhausted on Monday morning. I felt like I hadn't slept all weekend. I managed to drag myself to the gym, but my heart wasn't in it.

Saturday I had done a new upper body workout that killed my triceps, biceps and deltoids. My arms are still very sore. After purchasing a great new magazine that I totally love, "Muscle and Fitness hers", I read about doing supersets or compound sets. I remember doing these years ago, but had forgot all about them.

You pick two or three exercises for one body part and then you complete one set of one exercise and go immediately into the next one, alternating until you complete all sets. Compound sets are a great way to get better results in less time, stimulating muscle growth while also bumping up fat loss. I also found it a lot less boring.

After the gym I only had a half day of work because I had a dentist appointment. I go three times a year for a cleaning, but this wasn't a normal visit. It was to "look at my crown". I had a crown put on a molar three years when my dentist saw a "shadow" in the x-ray. I had no pain in that tooth but he convinced me I needed a crown, which resulted in three years of cold sensitivity and often pain.

The "looking at my crown" turned into a two-hour root canal. My dentist is a "pain-free" dentist and I didn't feel any pain, other than sitting there for two hours while he drilled, prodded, poked, drilled some more, more poking and prodding and more drilling. I had my iPod cranked up but I had no idea it was going to be two freaking hours in that chair.

I was on nitrous oxide the entire time so I was in happy land.When I came home I took a Valium he had prescribed because as soon as the numbness wore off I wasn't in happy land anymore. After dinner, a bowl of delicious homemade beef vegetable soup I made in the pressure cooker (my new best friend), I became violently ill. Like I thought I was going to die ill. I couldn't stop throwing up. It was horrible.

I'm not sure what made me so sick. This is the first beef I've eaten in over two years. It was fresh, as well as all the vegetables. Maybe it was a reaction to the Valium, but I've never had that happen before.

At least I'm over it now and I've tested out the crown. I can drink ice water and let it hit that tooth without screeching in pain. I guess it was worth it.

Now, off to the gym. I have some new glute exercises to try (from the magazine - love it!).

One last thing, as my friend Roxie often says....be kind to yourself today (and others). :)

It should be called: A course in pain

Last night, after my husband was asleep and the house was quiet, I sat down with my book, A Course in Weight Loss. I was determined to tackle chapter one, tearing down the wall. The wall being all the things that are stopping me from losing weight.

With a heavy heart and a feeling of dread, I picked four words that reflected emotions or feelings that I I feel very strongly. I chose the ones that were the most important to me. Ironically, they were the first four words in the list of twenty-six.

My choices were:  Shame, Anger, Fear, Unforgiveness.

I sat at my computer and went conscious (versus going unconscious). I wrote out everything I could about those feelings. I cried. I felt sad. I remembered some things about my past that I had forgotten and had put away because they were too painful to deal with. According to lesson one, I need to deal with them now in order to lose weight.

The most powerful emotion in my list is Anger. The anger I hold in my heart stems from something that happened Easter weekend seventeen years ago. It was 1994. My husband and I had been married five and half years. We had married in 1988, the first time for both us, and both of us 33 years old. Both of us were very set in our ways.

Looking from the outside in, we appeared to have same the same values and were very much alike. We seemed perfect for each other. Looking from the inside, we were, and still are, very different.

What happened on Easter weekend in 1994 is a source of great pain for me. My husband left me, for three years. He moved out of our home. He didn't even tell me he was leaving. We hadn't discussed separation or divorce, although we had been arguing continually over everything. He just didn't come home from work on a Friday night, Good Friday 1994.

All weekend I had no idea what had happened to him. This was before cell phones. I found out later he had spent the weekend with a friend, a female that I didn't know. He claimed they were just friends, but after examining our phone records where I saw he had spent hours on the phone with her while I was at work, I was sure they were more than "just" friends.

When he came home early Monday morning, the day after Easter, he said he was moving out. I asked him why, he said he couldn't live with me any longer. It was too stressful, I was too "difficult" to live with and he couldn't talk to me. I asked him where he was going and he simply said he didn't know for sure. I asked if he wanted a divorce, and he said he didn't know.

He came back that evening and packed up his suitcases and left. I remember begging him not to leave me. I asked if we could try marriage counseling. He said no. I asked him how we could work on our problems if we weren't even living together. He simply said he had to leave.

We barely spoke for the next six months. I can't even begin to tell you the pain I went through during those six months. To add insult to injury I was the heaviest I had ever been in my entire life, 200 pounds. During the next year I managed to gain another thirty pounds and my weight shot up to 230. I thought that was probably part of the reason he left me. He was thin, a runner, lifted weights and he was very physically fit. I was fat and forty and now I was alone. I knew I'd be alone the rest of my life.

I remember many nights of weeping, curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor. Dramatic? I guess, but I remember feeling like I was dying of a broken heart.For some reason curling up in a ball on the bathroom floor seemed to calm me. I cried the hardest I had ever cried in my life.

During the three years we were separated I filed for divorce twice. Both times he talked me out of it. Sometimes I wonder how much different both of our lives would be now if I would have followed through on a divorce. Would it be better for both of us, or would it be worse.

The second time I filed for divorce, I was dead set on following through iwth it. We'd been separated three years, and I had lost over 100 pounds. I weighed 126 and was happy and very self-confident. Even though I was 42, I was getting a lot of attention from men. I wanted to date, to fall in love again and live my life, but I was still married. If my husband didn't want me, I wanted a chance to find someone else.

As we sat outside the courtroom for the second time, waiting to go before the judge to tell him that yes, we wanted a divorce, my husband pleaded with me for another chance. He said he could tell I'd changed and he loved me and wanted to make our marriage work. That was August 1997. I thought it was what I wanted at the time. Sometimes, I'm not  sure I made the right decision.

I'm still angry at my husband over what happened seventeen years ago. I'm angry not only that he walked out, but I'm angry how he handled it. To this day I can't believe he did something so incredibly cruel and heartless.

We've discussed it over and over, and even though he says he's sorry that I feel this way, he still says he did what he had to do. To this day he denies there was anyone else.

According to lesson one, the last section is called "Reflection and Prayer". Supposedly you hand these problems over to God, and He will help you understand and feel the pain. Once this happens the pain will disappear. I feel the pain, I understand it, now I'm waiting for the "disappear" part.