Day 4 is done!!

Technically it's day 3, but I'm counting it as 4 because Wednesday was a rest day and still part of the program.

Speaking of Wednesday, my brother's birthday is this weekend, and my mom always takes us and our spouses out to dinner for our birthdays and he called and said that he was off for the night. So he wanted to do his birthday dinner on Wednesday, which was fine. I love my brother and I love my family. But when we go out to eat, we like to drink and we like to EAT! Which isn't really that great for healthy eaters, especially when he picked a german restaurant. If its not smothered in some kind of gravy, its smothered in cheese. There was no way to get out of it, so I just had to find a way to live with what I could eat.

There weren't any salads on the menu, so that option was out. The worst thing about going out to eat for people is that you don't know how they cook it, you don't know whats really in it, and you have no control over the portion size. So I normally I would have gotten the Brau Haus Platter which includes half a bratwurst, half a knackwurst, pork tenderloin smothered in gravy with kraut and german potatoes. Yes, that is way way too much. I didn't even count up the calories, honestly I didn't want to know. I would have gone for chicken, but they put cheese on it. I love cheese and I eat cheese every day, more than once during the day even, but I keep a close eye on how much I eat. Never more than an ounce at a time. So that was out too.

Eventually I went with the Grilled Bratwurst meal. There is one bratwurst, potatoes and kraut. More potatoes than I could eat. So I only ate half, and the wurst wasn't huge or anything. And I had half a beer. I was going to finish it, but to be honest I was just full, so I gave my beer to my brother. And the meal wasn't horribly bad for me, nor was it crazy in calories. I was very happy with myself. For the first time in a long time I didn't leave a restaurant feeling like I just wanted to cover up my belly because it was so full, or have someone roll me out.  Overall it was disaster averted and a very nice meal with my family. Will I go out to eat again soon? No probably not.

I think my next big thing to over come is going to the movies. I LOVE pop corn with butter and now they offer those awesome popcorn flavors. The white cheddar is our favorite. But really its just popcorn salt, and I always eat way to much. So do I stay away from the movies? Or just not give into the popcorn. Plus we usually get a coke zero, but I'm not having sweets, and that is sweet. So no coke for me!

I haven't been able to sleep at all lately. Which is horrible when you have to get up early to work out. And so I've had the hardest time going to sleep. I'll be super tired when I get to bed, I'll turn out the lights and I'm wide awake. Not cool. The past two nights I've gotten a total of about 9 hours of sleep, which is crazy because usually for two nights is at least 14 hours.

Now, I have been wanting to do this every since I started keeping track of my meals, I want to do a food diary for a day or two just to see how much I'm really eating. Its one thing to measure it out, and then just consume it, but its another to visually see what I'm eating and how much. So I think tomorrow and saturday and sunday I'm going to do a food diary, which I think will help keep me honest on the weekends. Plus I have workouts on Saturday and Sunday, so I will have to be good anyway. Usually I wouldn't work out on either day, but with my new workout system, its part of the plan. PLUS I'm totally looking forward to Sunday which is a 40 minute stretching class. My muscles are so tight that even with the 10 minute stretch class, I'm super tight.

Tomorrow pictures of my food!

Tasty Tuesday! Oven Fried Green Beans and BLT Club

Omg.. my dinner was amazing!!!  This was such a fun recipe and very easy! Tonight I did Oven Fried Green Beans and a BLT club! And the whole meal was only 409 calories. Which is great for a dinner. I love things that are tasty, healthy and look good!

Yes this is as tasty as it looks, my iPhone does a really good job with photos! I would use one of my cool apps, but I decided not to, because it would throw off the color. I don't think blue turkey bacon looks good, but that's just me!

Okay so the recipes are as follows:









BLT Club

Ingredients:

2 ounces of chicken breast

2 pieces of turkey bacon

1 ounce gouda cheese (or whatever you have)

2 lettuce leaves

2 slices of tomatoes

I had made the chicken breasts before, and so they were grilled, but you can cook them anyway you want. Cook the turkey bacon in the microwave. Slice the cheese and just layer all of this on the lettuce leaves. I just used green lettuce.

You can do more than 2 lettuce wraps, but this is the serving for one person. I used a whole tomato and did it for 2 people, and so that way we didn't have left over tomato to put in the fridge.

Oven Fried Green Beans

Ingredients:

1 pound fresh green beans

1 cup of bread crumbs

1/4 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp onion powder

pinch of cyanne pepper (if you want it)

pam, or other kind of spray

1 egg

Preheat the oven to 425

Wash and trim beans and dry throughly. In a medium bowl combine all the dry ingredients breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder and caynne.

Whisk egg to break it up in another bowl

Coat a baking sheet with non-stick pam

Keeping one hand dry and one hand wet, dip a green bean in the eggs, lift out and shake off any excess egg, put green bean in the crumb mixture and coat completely, lift out and shake off any excess breadcrumbs, then transfer green bean to the baking sheet. To save time, you can do as many will fit in your breadcrumb bowl at once.  Just make sure to place them each in the crumbs separately.

Once all beans are coated put in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes.

Serve hot!

For a dipping sauce I used a ranch wasabi dipping sauce:


Ranch Wasabi Dipping Sauce

1 small container of reduced fat sour cream

1-2 tsp of prepared wasabi

2-3 tsp of powdered ranch mix. You can use more, just depends on how much ranch taste you want.

Just mix together and serve!

Day 2

Okay I'll make a Tasty Tuesday post later after I eat dinner. I have something special up me sleeve for all the folks who like to be naughty and eat unhealthy things. It's a nice compromise, so come back later and read that post too!

So today was the second day of Turbo Fire. It was a HIIT day, or High-Intensity Interval Training. If you don't know what that is read about it here. I will explain a little just for people who don't want to click over to wikipedia to read about it. Basically its a 15 minute workout that is broken down into 9 intervals that last about 35 seconds. You go full out for those 35 seconds and then you recover. The point of it is to get your body to burn more calories while you are going about your daily life, which is called anaerobic exercise.

It was intense, the intervals themselves aren't too difficult until you get to the end, where there is a lot of hopping around. They do have a lady on the stage that is modifying the workouts, but when I went though the interval the first time I didn't get enough intensity doing the modifications, so when I was supposed to hop, I did a little hop, mainly because I can't pick my feet up too high like the people in the video. But I'll get there!! Yes it is only 15 minutes, but by the time it is over you are dripping sweat, your muscles are shaking and you are totally out of breath. There isn't any sugar coating in these workouts, which I really like, its just you come in, you work out and you're done. No fuss no muss! Well lots of both I guess but not on the video's side.

My main problem today was soreness. Did drink gobs of water yesterday to try to prevent this, but I just know that when you work out muscles that you don't use, they will be sore. And trust me, until I took a shower, they were screaming. I haven't had any aspirin or anything, I have another job interview and so I'm going to take some before I go.

Tomorrow I have the day off, which sounds like fun, but I think I'm going to Zumba, because I miss it. Plus, when I first started this I had decided that I would workout for 21 days straight because anything you do for 21 days is a habit. Plus Zumba is fun.

Last night was a very successful dinner which was a chicken marsala (healthy version), except that I didn't have any Marsala wine (I really did, but I couldn't find it) so I used a cabernet, which tasted great, I added asparagus, but I don't know how well I liked it. Corey doesn't like mushrooms so I wanted to find a good substitute, and I thought that the asparagus would be good... well maybe not so much. Or at least they needed to be steamed before I put them in. I let them cook for a while, but not long enough I suppose. Today we are all having leftovers for lunch, which will mean that lunch is heavy, with the chicken and the pasta. So I'm going to do something light and fun for tonight. I can't wait to try this out!!

My sleeping still hasn't recovered yet. I couldn't fall asleep last night, and I went to bed a 12. Not sure that I'm liking this very much. But more days of getting up early will help solve this. I've been so tired that after my breakfast and workouts I've been taking a short nap in the morning, which again, I guess is a bad idea because I need to go to sleep at night and the more tired I am the easier it will be.

I have another interview today, its a call back! I hope I get this job! I'll be back later with my Tasty Tuesday post!

Where have I been?

First off I need to apologize not to the people who (don't) read the blog, but to myself, because all this time I could have been working out and eating healthy, and I didn't. So shame on me because I let my goals go.

I'm not going to say that there weren't reasons, there always are, but I derailed and now I'm back!! 

Needless to say, I have some catching up to do! I should weigh much less now. But the important thing is that I'm going to keep going. I realize that this is going to be a struggle even when I get down to my goal weight! So I'm just going to keep on struggling.

Some things to update you on, I quit my job. Yes I only had it for barely 2 months, but it was horrible, and one of the reasons that I got depressed and stopped working out. Overall I think it was for the best because to be honest, I was over qualified for the job, and I want a full time job, something that can support my family, and I couldn't do that on what I was making at my previous job. Money is totally a crunch right now, but things will get better, they always do. :)

I have finally started to shake off my post job quitting depression, after waiting till 12 on Thursday night to watch the Hunger Games it threw off my sleep schedule (I hardly had a good one since I quit) and I haven't been able to go to sleep before 2. So Saturday all I wanted to do was sleep, which for me is a sign that I'm getting depressed, and I knew that if I didn't want to keep feeling this way, things were going to have to change. So I told mom (Corey was out of town) that we would have a "last meal" on Saturday night, which was grilled burgers, artichoke dip and brownies and ice-cream, and Sunday we would start back eating healthy again. Which of course means I started working out again.

I didn't push myself yesterday, just drank a ton of water, to get myself rehydrated and ate smaller meals and less junk. I wrote it all down, but I'm not going to post it today, maybe I'll post later tonight with my dinner recipe. 

So... today was my first day of Turbo Fire (insert gasp here)! I had been doing the Zumba, which you would know about if you had read previous blogs. But I need something with structure. I need a plan for everyday of the week, or I won't work out. I need to know what I'm going to be doing, and just get up and do it. And Turbo Fire offers that. It is sold by Beachbody which are the same people who market the P90X and Insanity. Which, lemme tell you, I'm totally not up for yet. I went with the 20 week schedule because, while I know I can work out for half an hour and my knees aren't hurting me (those are the requirements to be able to do this workout) I don't want to take things too fast.  I can't go full tilt like the people in this video, but I totally got a workout! Thats what matters. Which I really like about this set of workouts is the stretching. I did 30 minutes of cardio/kickboxing and 10 minutes of stretching, which felt amazing. 

I borrowed this set of DVDs from a friend, so I don't have the Shakeology, which is a pre-made mix of powder and you just add water or ice or both and you make a shake and drink it. I have tired it, they have three types, chocolate (which is supposed to taste like Wendy's frosty, but I don't like Wendy's frostys so that sucks for me) and a green tea, which I have had, and it tastes weird. And they also have a strawberry which I haven't had, but I would like to try, but its just not in the budget right now for me to get any, maybe when I have a job again! 

I have done something similar to shakeology, where you are supposed to drink 2 shakes a day with some supplements and a healthy dinner, but eventually I couldn't stand the taste of the shakes, and I ended up throwing up the shake after my breakfast shake one day. That was the end of that diet. Plus, while it's good to drink this stuff, once a day I think is what they say to do, I need a diet that I can live with everyday. But mostly the idea of powered shakes makes me feel sick to my stomach. 

I think that was everything that I wanted to talk about, other than my weight, which I'll get to at the end, and something that I have been wanting to do for a while, but just haven't been able to give up. I am not catholic, but I was going to give up sweets for lint. But it seems silly, because like I said, I'm not Catholic. But starting back and doing my best to be healthy, I am going to give up sweets. I LOVE anything sweet, not so much of a chocolate fan, but anything that is sweet, I will probably love it. I need to do this for myself, because I feel like I should have dessert with every dinner, and I just need to get out of the habit of thinking this. I don't have to have something sweet everyday to be happy. I'm not giving up fruit and I'm going to stick with the stevia for my tea. But other than that, no refined sugar, no brownies, no sweet cereals, no sugar in things. I need to do this for me. But I love fruit, so its not too much of a sacrifice to eat  fruit. 

Yesterday I wanted something sweet SOOOO badly it was almost painful. I have a hard time watching food network, especially stuff like cupcake wars. Good gravy it makes me want sweet stuff. But I just ate some strawberries and tried not to think about it! I'm going to go without for a month, so I'm going to say that the end of April is the end of the sugar fast, but to be honest I think I'll keep going all during my 20 week program with Turbo Fire, because May is my birthday month and Coreys too and I always make so many excuses to eat what I want then, and I just can't do that this year. I'll find a healthy alternative to birthday cake. Something with strawberries, maybe a little pie with stevia in it, I'll have to experiment. 

Last night, I have no pictures, was amazing I made gilled chicken breasts, grilled asparagus. And I put potatoes in a little hobo pack (aluminum foil) with onions, garlic, rosemary and salt and pepper and threw those on the grill. My ode to sweet was an apple chopped up, in a hobo pack with cinnamon, stevia and a little bit of cloves that I grilled. So I did get sweet, but it wasn't brownies. It would have been amazing with the ice-cream though! Mmmm.

Lastly my weight, I'm sure you are wondering what the damage my month and a half off has been. You know I got down to right at 270, so I weighed this morning and these are the results:

Weight: 275

Hips: 52 inches

Waist: 47.5 inches

Bust: 49.5 inches

Not great, but I didn't gain all the way back up to 279, so thats a good thing. 

Despite everything I am proud of myself. Yes I feel off the bandwagon, but I'm back on and other than being tired from lack of sleep, I'm pumped up and ready to go for tomorrow!

Also I have a job interview at 3:30, so send good thoughts and prayers my way today!!