Beginning Weight Loss - Again

Starting out

Let’s see, day one on the weight loss journey (back on around May 15th, 2023). The usual rules: whole grains, no white food, lots of color, lots of fruits and vegetables, no fried food, no processed food, no alcohol and read the labels. Have I missed anything? Probably but let’s keep going. Keep a food diary, count calories and exercise. Oh, and read read read the labels.

It’s the day after Mother’s Day and I have to figure out what to do with all the ingredients my husband bought to make meals for Mother’s Day weekend. I know we want to be healthy and lose this weight, but we might as well be frugal and delicious while we’re at it. Let’s see, we have ground turkey, bell peppers, smoked beef roast, apples, asparagus, Brussel sprouts, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Breakfast is always two eggs over easy with one slice of sourdough toast. We use butter not margarine and we have coffee with 2% milk. There is a lot of hype right now about how cutting fats out of our diet is not really healthy. A lot of low-fat foods have added sugars to give flavor, so we end up trading fat for sugar. Not good. We went back to whole milk, etc. and then returned to low-fat dairy. Low-fat yogurt, milk, sour cream and cheese. We do stick with butter instead of margarine. But we only use butter on our toast. We cook with virgin olive oil. READ THE LABELS. I buy plain yogurt and my own fruit with sweetener, so I know how much sugar is in it.

Now you may ask why sourdough bread, that’s not whole grain. Correct, but it’s homemade. I’m into making my own food stuffs now that I’m retired and have time to devote to it. I make my own because then I know exactly what is in it. Exactly. No words I can’t pronounce and have no idea what it is referring to, no added preservatives, steroids or who knows what. So, I started making sourdough bread because we both love the taste and it’s unbelievably easy to make.

I use unbleached bread flour, and can you believe you have to read the labels on the flour? Yup, yes, we do. One popular brand of unbleached bread flour that was the lowest cost included the ingredients: unbleached wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid, enzyme. I buy King Arthur’s Unbleached Bread Flour because you know what’s in it? Unbleached hard red wheat flour and barley malted flour. That’s it. Plus, that company is 100% employee owned. I love that, I mean, everybody wins.

First, I got sourdough starter from my neighbor. He makes sourdough English muffins! I keep my starter in the refrigerator. When it’s time to bake a loaf (usually Sunday) I get it out and split it in half to bake the bread. I end up making one loaf per week. We only eat one slice of toast each for breakfast so that’s why one loaf is all we need. I also don’t want to be baking bread daily so if my husband wants sandwiches, he buys bread from the deli. He’s bigger than me so he needs to eat more even if he is wanting to lose weight as well. So, he makes sandwiches.

Lunch ended up being bell peppers stuffed with ground turkey (to use up the turkey he bought). I browned the meat with onions and garlic in a frying pan. I only used half and I’m saving the other half for tacos later in the week. Remember I had extra Brussel sprouts? I sliced them in half and placed them on the baking sheet with the stuffed peppers as well. I sprinkled them with a bit of the panko, cheese and spices. Voila! Lunch.

We try to eat our main meal in the middle of the day. The hope is that we burn all those snarky calories off before going to bed. I did succumb to eating some sesame sticks around 2pm. For some reason I get hungry mid-way through the afternoon. I don’t crave sugar; I crave salt most of the time. Did you know you can make your own sesame sticks? I haven’t tried it yet; it sounds like too much trouble.

Since we had half a head of cabbage and green apples left, I made apple slaw for dinner. I added avocado slices for healthy fat. When we sat down to watch tv in the evening I really wanted more food, snacks and the like. So did Rick. That’s one of our biggest bad habits, eating in front of the television. I decided to have popcorn. Rick decides he wants ice cream and cheese with crackers. Really? We’re trying to lose weight here and I really wanted cheese. That’s another downfall. I really really love cheese. All kinds of cheese. I tell him to put that away and go get some fruit. We have grapes, apples, oranges and bananas. Eat those, I said. He did, he’s a very patient man. He ate two oranges while I ate my microwave popcorn. Read the labels on those bags carefully. Don’t believe the calories. Manufacturers go to great lengths to list the least number of calories possible, and they say things like for 1 serving and there are 3 servings in the bag, or they talk about calories for unpopped popcorn when what I want to know is how many calories are in the bag once it’s completely popped and I’m eating it.

By the way, I drink lots of plain old water all day. We have well water with a filter on it and it’s delicious. It took me years to like plain old water. Rick still has to have flavor, so I’ve convinced him to drink fruit juice flavored water. We buy 100% fruit juice with no added sugar and mix about 1/2 quart of juice with 1.5 quarts of water for him. After coffee in the morning, I generally don’t drink anything else but water the rest of the day.

I managed to practice yoga between breakfast and lunch. I like yoga. I am a certified Hatha Yoga instructor although I don’t practice like I should, and I no longer teach it. But I know what to do for a yoga routine. Really, there’s tons out there written on yoga, so I don’t need to teach it here on the page. I didn’t complete a good well-rounded routine. I managed standing mountain, palm tree pose, warrior pose, triangle pose, standing forward bend, cat pose, cobbler’s pose, Lord of the fish pose, and downward dog with a couple of dance stretches thrown in. It took about 45 minutes. I hold each pose for 3 breaths.

I hurt my foot back in January. There was no specific injury to cause the pain like a stubbed toe, so it was diagnosed as some type of neuropathy, possibly due to the diabetes. Yes, I broke down and went to the doctor to check. That’s one of the problems with starting the latter half of life trek, you don’t know how you injure yourself. I feel like random pain just suddenly appears one day, like some nerve or body part has been lacking attention and decides to yell about it. Kind of like cats. Random acts of “I need attention now” things. Anyway, walking has been difficult. I am just now able to go down the one end of my street and back. It’s about a mile. I’m wearing my podiatrist shoes with inserts so it’s manageable. I want to increase my walk and do it twice. Today I managed my 1 mile walk at a slow pace.

I also have hay fever in the spring. This is new, I never used to have this. At the end of my walk, I’m short of breath, have a runny nose and I feel tired. I could take some meds for this but I eschew drugs, so I just sit down and rest for a while. Sometimes I have a nap. (Remember when I told you ALL the symptoms were due to diabetes? This is what I thought at first. This is what my previous doctor told me.)

I intend to do weight training on MWF. Today is Monday so I managed a bit. I have eight-pound weights, one for each hand and I do shoulder overhead presses, arm curls, side arm raises, and triceps curls. I do eight lifts and only round of repetitions. I have arthritis so sometimes my elbows hurt. That’s all I managed for today.