I am still around, just not blogging much.....

This week has been a long one. I am working 12 days in a row. Today is half way through. I am looking forward to next weekend already. But, trying to live in the moment and enjoy something each day. I am posting a lot of photos today because I have been eating a lot of good food this week. The first is the V8 Roasted Red Pepper soup. I loved this soup! It tasted like something that I would make myself. It wasn't thin like I had expected, but I really loved it. Why make it yourself when you can just open the carton and enjoy the home made taste immediately?

Ah, Lean Cuisine...how I love thee. I saw through Hungrygirl that LC was coming out with some new recipes. I was on the lookout for these and this is the first one that I found. It is the pest chicken with bow tie pasta. I had this the other night at work and it was almost like an escape to an Italian restaurant. The only thing that was a little bit off was that the chicken was a little tough. I don't think that it was due the meal, rather I think that it is the microwave at work. I think that LC has to be my favorite frozen meal company. My favorite meal ever is the butternut squash with vegetables. That is hands down a "bistro like" meal. I love frozen meals that fool me into thinking it is something that I could/would have made and that I didn't just nuke it.

I made steak fajitas on Thursday with some of the sweet peppers that we bought at Costco. Instead of using fajita seasoning I used some Chicago steak and Bar B Q 3000 (both from Penzy's spices). The sweet peppers gave it a whole new flavor instead of using green peppers. I turned this pan full of steak and veggies into several meals. I wrapped a few up in roll out flat breads and then today I made a salad from the greens I got at Whole Foods. I loved this salad and wish that I could have it again tomorrow. Too bad I am out of the fajita topping.

Like I said we went to Whole Foods today. Can you tell that the energy bars were on sale? Whole Foods is like my playground. I love to just look at everything, try their samples, and go home with something new each time. This will be about a month's worth of snacks.

That is the week in a nutshell. Not too much is going on besides work and making sure I fit in some type of work out each day. Tomorrow is weigh in day and I am hoping for a little bit more than last week. But, in all honestly I would take last weeks loss over a gain.

Trust me, it is not will power!

Yeah it is Thursday! Does not mean only one more day of work for me. It just means I get to come home to lots of good shows on the DVR. I can not wait to watch the Office. It is another cold, freezing cold day here. At least the sun is out. That helps.

I have talked to quite a few people lately that say, "I do not know how you did it, you must have the best will power ever." Here is the most honest thing that I am ever going to say. It is not will power! If you open up a box of cereal or a bag of peanut butter cups and I do not have a eating plan for the day I will eat the items above without thought. But, if I have a plan I can allow myself some of the food if I feel it will fit into my plan. More than likely I will turn it down because I have everything planned that I will eat for the entire day. By having this relationship with food allows me to truly be free. I know that for most people this will not work. They may feel like this is too constraining. For me though this allows me to spend my time without thinking about food. I do not have to spend hours thinking about when I will eat next, what I will eat next. Now I know around what time I will eat and what I will eat. This allows me to say if I am full then that is all right, I do not have to finish everything on my plate. On the other hand if I am hungry then I can eat my snack if I am truly hungry. More likely I will wait until my normal snack time, because I know that the food will be there waiting for me.

Here is another honest thing, I am not perfect. More often than not this works for me, but there are days where I eat more or less. My mantra is that no one is perfect. I will take each day at a time and if the day is very difficult I will take it one hour at a time. The truth is you can not live more than one hour at a time anyways, so why rush it?

Food for the day: carb check bagel, cream cheese, and SF jam
Lunch: chicken stir fry pictured above. Instead of rice I used quinoa as the grain. (Same veggie blend from Whole Foods as last time) It was actually really good. I think that it is more of a texture thing rather than a taste thing.
Snack: new clif bar and cheese
Dinner: more stir fry, yogurt, and a cookie
Snack: orange

I am off to work. This is my mid-week hump. Wishing that it was the last day for me, oh well. Hopefully it will not be as cold when I leave work tonight. I can hope!

Bob will kick your butt!

Yeah! You can see that I now own the other Biggest Loser workout DVD. Yes, I am a member of a gym. I just hate when it is cold outside. Having a DVD at home means that I have no excuse to do even a 20 minute little workout. I have not tried this one as Kevin just purchased it for me when I was at work. I have done the yoga video twice and I have to say that I really like it. Anything that makes your body feel stronger is worthwhile.

Yesterday, after I took Kevin out for lunch for his birthday I went to Whole Foods to buy some more Clif nectar bars. I love going there. I can just spend hours looking at all of the different products. I was hungry after eating lunch and knew it would be a long time till dinner so I ate this Odawalla protein bar. I have to say it was only ok. It was a point value of 4. It was good because of the protein, but it left a lot to be desired. I think that it would have made a big difference if there were some cranberry or raisin chunks in it. Not my favorite. Oh well it is one snack, moving on.

Today for breakfast I had an English muffin with a Tb of peanut butter and some SF jam. I also enjoyed some apple spice tea.

For lunch we went to Mimi's with Kevin's dad. It was a nightmare trying to find something healthyish to have. Luckily I had done my research in advance and already knew what I was going to get. I had the cup of french onion soup, with a request for less cheese topping. I also had the Asian chopped chicken salad with dressing on the side. This came with a muffin which I did not eat because I looked it up and for a points value of 11 I just don't think that it is worth it.

Snack was a laughing cow Swiss cheese and half a kashi bar.

Dinner, ah dinner. I wish that I could say that I made something that was delicious. I did not. I had a frozen dinner that was garlic stir fry chicken, veggie mix, and a yogurt. Nothing fantastic, but it got the job done.

My biggest let down of the day? I was going to reward myself for drinking lots of tea and water with buying a cherry coke zero at work. I pushed the button and what drops down? A coke zero. Yuck! I really dislike those! I had set my hopes high. I guess they replaced the cherry coke zero with just coke zero.

edit-Kevin tells me that I wrote about this said 11pt muffin in an earlier post. Guess what 11 points is way too much for a stupid pumpkin spice muffin no matter what month it is!

Happy Birthday Kevin!

Today is Kevin's birthday. When I got home from work last night at midnight we did a mini celebration for his special day. We had a piece of the dark chocolate cake that I made yesterday. I have to admit is was amazing! I tried to get him to guess the secret ingredient. When I told him that it was sauerkraut. He could not believe that it had that sneaky veggie. I also let him open his presents. He was very excited to get his hard drives.

Food of the day....for breakfast I had a English muffin with peanut butter and SF jam. I also enjoyed a cup of winter blossom tea and a tangerine. It was all very good.

For lunch we are going out to Chinese for Kevin's birthday. Out of all of the choices he picked Chinese. It will be hard to find something healthy, but I will try my best. Probably some soup and some veggies.

For dinner I am going to have a Kashi meal, which I love! I am also going to have green beans and some yogurt.

As far as the Kashi chewy bar that I had yesterday...It was not my favorite. It was kind of gritty. I think that I am going to go to Whole Foods today to get some more nectar bars and some other staples.

I am not going on a walk or doing yoga today. I am allowing myself to have a day off. I think this cold is getting me down.

Lazy Sunday

Today was a perfect Sunday in my opinion. Since it rained/iced yesterday we just stayed up late and watched movies all night. Thus, it led us to sleep in really late today. I think I woke up the first time at 9 then rolled over and fell back asleep. I finally pulled myself out of bed just shy of 11. It was a glorious sleep in morning. I then ate a Carb check bagel with WW cream cheese and my new SF blueberry Smucker's jam. It was fantastic. I also had a clementine and made a latte with my new espresso maker that I got for Christmas. I loved using the Breville espresso machine. It worked a lot better than I thought it would for an at home machine.

For lunch I enjoyed leftover meatloaf and smashed potatoes. It was just as good if no better than it was last night. I have to say that I will be making that meatloaf several times more this year! For an afternoon snack I had a bowl of airpopped popcorn. One of my all time favorite snacks.

The meal that I cooked today was from the Diet 2009 magazine. The sweet and sour chicken was another success. I used the base recipe from the magazine but I bought a prepacked pound of mixed vegetables from Whole Foods when we went on our grocery shopping date on Friday. It had broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, peppers, snow peas, and onions. I added a little bit more onion, celery, and sweet peppers. I then also used 2Tb of sesame oil to saute the chicken in. The sauce that you make turned out pretty good. I wouldn't have called this dish sweet and sour at all, but more just like a brown sauce stir-fry. I plated the stir fry with 1/2 c of brown rice and some toasted sesame seeds. Kevin said that the meal turned out all right, but he preferred the meat loaf. He just doesn't like big chunks of veggies. Oh well, I thought that it was pretty good and went from stove top to table in less than 30 minutes. Thanks Whole Foods for the tasty veggie blend!

Tomorrow is the WW weigh in day. According to our scale this will not be a losing week. Our scale is a bit different than the one at WW. We shall see.