Christmas time in a school office is a happy time of year.
Kids are taking mid-terms and are off campus before noon. And good-natured parents are being ever so
generous with holiday goodies. Cookies,
candy, fruit (much appreciated!) covered in
chocolate (dammit!) and towers of treats.
But enough already! I
am very glad when Jimmy brings in a box of “Big-Box-Best” chocolate-covered
cookies, but so did his friends Steven, Billy and Maria. There is never a
shortage of cookies in a school office -- ever.
What you don’t see when we happily accept your child’s gift is
us stuffing it into a cabinet crammed with four other boxes of “Big-Box-Best”
chocolate-covered cookies
When I go to the gym, I don’t sweat anymore. I break out in a candy coating.
The best thing that happened yesterday was when a parent
came in with a $20 bill and offered it to our school’s fund-raising drive for
the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary
massacre.
Wouldn’t it be nice if that cookie money would go instead to
the Sandy Hook Elementary Support
Fund? What a great blessing that
would be to the families who are suffering an unimaginable loss.
I am past the sugar saturation point. Thank you from the bottom of my candy-coated heart
for your well-meaning cookies and candies. Time for a candy detox.
And I’ll leave you with a little video I did a couple of
holidays ago:
Took my hostility out on a particularly tasty bag of leftover pumpkin tortilla chips this morning.
We had a holiday party at the house and had a lot of leftover snack food. Gave a big bag of it to the husband to take to the office, but the teenager requested that we leave some around for his enjoyment. (He has had portion control ground into his system since birth and actually knows how to enjoy a small dish of potato chips ... I know! Crazy, huh?)
I started doing the "magical eating" thing of only eating broken chips and realized that broken chips have the same damn calories and carbs as grown-up chips. So I exercised the "scorched earth" policy on them with a rolling pin.
Now instead of a tasty bag of chips, I have a chicken coating product. You wouldn't sit down with a spoon and a box of Shake 'n Bake, would you?
Would you?
(Don't worry, kid -- your kettle chips are safe.)
And what's tastier than chips? How about a book on willpower? I'm going to be reviewing the book "The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It" for BlogHer next month and, wow, this book couldn't have come at a better time.
Mmmm … the smell of burning oven debris is in the air. It’s
time for Thanksgiving.
That stench that you may actually smell where you are is me
running the self-cleaning oven setting. I’m getting ready for Turkey Day by
hauling out the knife sharpener and cleaning the oven for the family meal.
Notice I didn’t say family feast, despite the chance at
alliteration. This is no belt-buckle-popping orgy. Instead it’s a chance to
gather everyone around the table (in our case, the patio table) and give thanks
for friends, family and food – real food, not stuff that comes in boxes and
cans.
Yeah, there’s a little of that, in my husband’s family
recipe for scalloped corn, which requires creamed corn and crackers, but for
the most part, you can recognize the vegetables, which are not gasping for air
under greasy onion strings or cheese sauce.
I like to have some absolutely unadorned things on the Thanksgiving
menu. Want my secret recipe for green beans? Here it is:
Green beans.
Yep – steamed green beans with nothin’ on ‘em. It’s sort of
a palate cleanser for the bacon-festooned Brussels sprouts and cornbread
dressing. But never fear, those recipes come from places like Cooking Light magazine and the latest
Hungry Girl cookbook. (She has really come far in using unprocessed foods in
her recipes.)
If everything is cheesy and saucy and bubbly and creamy, isn’t
it overkill?
As for the turkey, that’s the husband’s job. We’ve been
cooking it on the Weber kettle grill for years, and every year it comes out
perfectly. I order a fresh turkey from Whole Foods (much better than those
giant frozen bowling balls) and it’s totally worth the extra cost, especially
since turkey is pretty inexpensive to begin with.
Our fresh turkey Thanksgivings began when we lived in Delaware.
One windy night after work, I drove halfway down the state (it’s not that big!)
down a tree-lined, unpaved dark road to a turkey farm and stood in line with
others as farmhands walked past us with buckets of bloody turkey guts. We then
discovered why fresh is best.
Will Thanksgiving derail my
weight loss? No way! Turkey is about the best lean protein there is, and if you
keep the sides clean as well as desserts, then it won’t be a problem. Plus, I
have this little built-in appetite suppressant – working all day in the
kitchen. By the time mealtime rolls around I don’t want to look at food, so I
usually pick at my meal and enjoy the leftovers for days to come. I also make
sure I do some sort of informal “turkey trot” in the morning – there’s nothing
like a brisk 5k to rev you up for a day of sticking your head in and out of the
oven.
So, as for my weight loss, I have FINALLY! gotten the scale
to move – 3 pounds to be exact. Once again, I am a mere pound away from
pre-baby weight.
What has helped? Snapping
photos of every meal and snack for Stefan Pinto’s C Diet
over on Facebook. I really like the idea of an “impartial jury of my peers”
looking over my meal choices. I’m far less likely to eat a bowl of cookie dough
ice cream and call it dinner if total strangers are going to see that. I’m also
being really consistent with my exercise, averaging five days a week.
This is just some of the supplement stash.
What hasn’t helped?
Watching the “Dr. Oz Show.” I literally made myself ill last week, gleefully
and dutifully taking all his “miracle supplements” twice a day. Garcinia,
raspberry ketones, green coffee extract – you name it, I was taking it until
Thursday around lunch when I felt absolutely disgusting. Queasy, dizzy, spacey,
headachy – I thought I was getting the flu. Then it hit me – the last time I
felt like this it was after I did the same thing with a different bunch of
supplements. So I stopped and went back to one multivitamin and one serving of
fish oil. And within a few days I was feeling normal again.
I get sucked into the hype every stinking time. I have to
keep reminding myself that the only thing that works -- the only “miracle” -- is
a balanced diet of the correct calorie level and regular exercise.
FULL DISCLOSURE CITY!
Many of the books and products I write about I purchased for my own use. Some were sent to me specifically for reviewing purposes.
Links within my blog posts sometimes are affiliate links that pay me a very small amount (pennies, really) for referring you to them. Any concerns? Please contact me.
