Reading Cookbooks

Controlled Freak

Sometimes I believe that if I could just control my environment, I could control my eating. For me, making healthy choices Monday morning through Friday afternoon is pretty easy. Sure, there are midday moments when I’d trade my firstborn for a cookie, but the cravings often pass quickly with the help of a piece of gum or some whole grain crackers. The truth is, if I grocery shop, stock up on healthy foods, and pack my lunch every day, I’m pretty good to go for the work week.

Enter Friday afternoon and life’s little variables.

No one wants to give up having a social life — friends, a boyfriend or girlfriend, events, restaurants, bars — for an all healthy, all the time lifestyle, but some days I think if I could just skip… well… everything fun… I’d lose weight quickly and without much effort.

So, that’s one issue.

Here’s another one: I don’t want to be the whiny friend-on-a-diet who makes requests of others — be it specific restaurants, or no dessert, or whatever. No one else should be “punished” because I think I need to lose a few pounds.

This is particularly a problem if you are dealing with people who love and accept you for you are, at any weight. Plain and simple, they just don’t get it. Those of us who are truly only ten or so pounds overweight, or ten or so pounds away from being comfortable with our bodies, probably have it the hardest. Sure, we may not be “fat” or “obese,” but our goals are our goals and sometimes I think I sabotage myself just because I don’t want to make “big deal” out of my weight to those who may say they support us, but don’t actually know how to support us.

It took me a long time to come out to my boyfriend that I am a WeightWatcher. I knew he wouldn’t be judgmental, but I think part of me didn’t want to bring it to his attention that I was unhappy with my body. Maybe I thought that if he knew, he’d suddenly realize I was overweight, and he’d be unhappy with my body. Considering that I’m not dating a complete ass, this was not the case. I broke “the news,” and he responded with a nod and, “OK.”

He tries his best to be supportive, but the situation remains the same: he doesn’t get it because he’s never been where I’ve been. Sure, I think there’s been times in his life when he hasn’t been particularly happy with his weight, but this is a guy who sneezes and gains muscle mass; this is a guy who, as long as he’s training for a marathon or a triathlon, can eat his body weight in meat and cheese and bread and sweets, and not gain an ounce.

But that’s just it. I can’t do that. Some people start working out and the weight — whether they were trying to lose it or not — just melts off of them. He’s one of those people. I’m not sure he had any weight loss goals when he decided to train for his first marathon six years ago, but — like magic — 30 pounds gone.

Sadly, when I started running and training for distance events, I initially gained weight, and no, my clothes didn’t fit that differently. But, for me, that’s reality. I cannot workout like a maniac, train for endurance events, and eat whatever I want. I just can’t. It sucks. Let me tell you.

I am reading Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt, which has nothing to do with weight loss, but this passage made me laugh out loud:

Gradually, I forgot what I knew and lost the confidence to try new recipes, nor did I ever learn to use any of the numerous appliances he collected: the espresso machine with cappuccino attachment, the Cuisinart mini-prep, or the deep-fat fryer he bought the day after I said I was going on a diet.

Now, the ex-boyfriend she’s referring to in this passage is probably a bit of an ass in real life, but it made me think about a day not long ago, when I was feeling particularly unhappy with body and my ability to motivate myself to lose weight. I spent a decent portion of the day making demeaning comments about myself and my body to my boyfriend, who decided at dinner, to order a piece of cake. I don’t think he in any way wanted to sabotage my efforts, but he wanted cake and frankly, he can eat cake without repercussions. I, however, cannot. It’s not his job to monitor what I eat, and I realize that, but it just makes it… harder… my weaknesses are exploited in those moments. And, it’s not always easy to rely on shear willpower and determination.

Tonight, I made plans to eat at a tapas restaurant. I’m preparing myself because going in with a game plan is really my only defense. It must be an amazing feeling to not have to plan to “be on the defensive” simply because you are eating out at a restaurant. And, I’ll be honest — this “defense” often fails. Regardless, I’m scouring the Internet, reading the restaurant’s menu, searching for nutritional content, trying to figure out what the best choices are, and kind of kicking myself for feeling as though it’s not my place to burden other people with my weight loss issues.

And, of course, I do love me some tapas.

Once More with Feeling

At what point do you consider a recipe officially part of your meal repertoire? I have decided – today – that I have to make the recipe three times, in a reasonable amount of time, like say a month or so, in order to consider it an old stand-by. The first time I made Chickpea Noodle Soup from Veganomicon, I raved about it on A View from the Park. I’m not sure anyone was listening, except perhaps, my sister, who now also makes this soup on a nearly weekly basis.

Seriously people, would I keep making the soup if it wasn’t fantastic?

Check out the original recipe.

This soup has so much going for it – beans, buckwheat soba noodles, veggies, the option to add some greens. It’s a no-brainer, health-wise, but for the sake of too many snacks pre-run tonight, I decided to WeightWatcher-ify the recipe tonight. Look at that, I made a new word.

Here’s what I did:

2 tablespoons olive oil –> I reduced this to 2 tsp, and to compensate, I used a few splashes of vegetable broth as needed to sauté the vegetables.

6 cups water or vegetable stock –> I actually up the amount of liquid in this recipe to approximately 8 cups, sometimes I use all vegetable broth (store bought), but last night I used half water, half broth. The effect was a somewhat lighter soup.

6 ounces soba noodles –> Soba noodles expand a lot once cooked. Six ounces isn’t necessarily too much, but I reduced this to four ounces and still felt like I had noodle-palooza going on in my soup.

Finally, I added a handful or two of spinach at the end of the cooking process (at the same time as the miso).

Based on six servings, the WW points value of this soup is 3. That’s approximately one and a half cups of soup per serving. Keep in mind, the original WW points value of this soup is only 5, still very low, so go on with your bad self and make yourself some soup. Either way works!

Tuesday Training Update

Apparently, the Flying Pig race organizers over in Cincinnati think it’s a good idea to send me an email each morning to remind me how many days are between today and the half marathon.

Yesterday it was 26.

Today it’s 25.

What would I do without mass email blasts? Why, I’d be expected to perform elementary functions manually — like count, or look at a calendar — if I didn’t receive an email every day.

So, in the interest of alliteration, I thought Tuesday’s would be a prime day to update the world on my training, which currently, is for the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati on May 4 (25 days from today).

Training Schedule March 31-April 6

Monday
Cross training — Generally I like to do a circuit workout (weight training with short cardio intervals, but I was so exhausted from my weeklong business trip, it was all I could do to get myself to the gym. Luckily, my running buddy persuaded me and she and I walked on the treadmills set to a steep incline for 40 minutes.

Tuesday
2 mile run — If I remember correctly, this sad little run was a little rough, but we managed to get it done.

Wednesday
Cross training — I workout with my trainer on Wednesdays, which usually means a lot of heavy weights. I began questioning his methods when he handed me two 20 pound dumbbells with which to do biceps curls. I was sore with a particularly achy back and neck for a few days after.

Thursday
2 mile run — It started raining, and I totally skipped this run.

Friday
7 mile run — My running buddy and I both took Friday off so we set off around our neighborhood on Friday morning. Originally we planned to do a nine mile run on Friday and a seven mile run on Sunday, but it became evident that we were struggling. After a few walking breaks, we decided to cut it short and rearrange the schedule.

Saturday
Nada.

Sunday
9 mile run — Hooray for sunshine and temperatures that do not make you want to curl up into a little ball and die. The nine mile run wasn’t the greatest, but it was good enough, and frankly, after a spotty training schedule over the winter, good enough is good enough. And honestly, it didn’t get tough until we reached about seven miles. Sometimes I forget that nine miles is still a long distance to be running and getting tired is acceptable.

So there you have it. If it’s Tuesday, it’s the training update.

Adventures in Vegan

On and off since the New Year, I’ve been experimenting with a vegan diet. While I’ve given up meat (poultry, beef, and pork) entirely, I found myself shifting seamlessly from vegan to vegetarian to flexitarian depending on the situation. For the most part, I have been keeping a vegan kitchen, though a pint of the B&J finds it way into my freezer from time to time (who am I kidding… like it ever goes into the freezer… it goes directly into my face). I eat vegetarian out because I don’t really want to dissect menus and question waiters. And, I have continued to eat fish — but only for sushi or on the rare occasion I find myself at a steakhouse where the restaurant’s vocabulary excludes the word “options.”

But, after a week-long business trip where I primarily spent my time shoving every piece of food I could find into my mouth — sans the meat, obvi — I have decided to challenge myself to eat vegan for the entire month of April. Combined with WeightWatchers, I’m hoping to drop approximately 8 lbs before the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati.

[Road trip!]

Does that sound like a lot? Eight pounds in one month? Maybe it is. But if I hadn’t gone nuts on the cookies, rolls, ranch dressing, croutons, cheese, and God knows what else during my trip, I would be talking about wanting to lose 5 pounds. Not eight.

So eight it is.

I’ve found that the hardest part about eating vegan is reading the labels of every packaged food you buy. So many products include some form of dairy or animal products — buttermilk, eggs, cream, whey, whatever — slyly tucked away in the middle of a long ingredient list, between high fructose corn syrup and xanthan gum. You can’t just pick a product off the shelf and assume it’s kosher — so to speak. You have to go all detective on that product’s ass and investigate. Fo’ real.

Luckily, as I was wasting time on the Internet yesterday, I found this — Trader Joe’s Web site offers a list of the vegan products available in its store. It also provides lists of products for other types of restrictive diets: low sodium, fat free, heart healthy, etc. If you’re not interested in the vegan products, go here and pick your poison.

So, Trader Joe’s saves the day, per usual. If you don’t heart Trader Joe’s, it’s probably only because you don’t have one in your state, because if you did, you would pilgrimage there even if it was 100 miles away. Life must be unimaginably hard for the Trader Joe’s-less among us.

So This Is New…

New blog! New blogging platform. New template! New color scheme. It’s anarchy!