Flog it good!

I got on the scale this morning. It was disappointed in me again. 4 pounds up since Thanksgiving.

It’s possible to gain weight as a vegan or vegetarian. I’ve proven to my mother that just cause something’s vegan doesn’t mean it’s automatically healthier.

I can pile on Earth Balance — which is amazingly butter-like — on my vegetables and be 100% vegan. I can eat a triple cheese pizza and be lacto-ovo vegetarian. With all the recipe testing and “Oh this looks good” type of cooking, maybe it’s time to step back — counts as exercise, right? — and start food blogging again. I love reading others’ “what I ate today” posts cause I can get some ideas — or feel better about that huge bowl of vegan bread pudding. I am interested in the new program at Weight Watchers but have no time in a few weeks since school starts back up.

There are lots of words of wisdom out there in the interwebs:

• Weight Loss Tips for Vegetarians
• Vegan Weight Loss which talks about Weight Watchers, McDougall, and Low-Carb
• High-Carb, Vegan Diet Causes Weight Loss
• GoVeg.com’s Success Stories makes it look so easy

We’ll see. I don’t like those 4 pounds. I have more to lose but was taking a break by maintaining for a bit. Meh.

Two days of eats

Oatmeal:
How I love thee but won’t it get old quickly? I still have about 2 or 3 cups left in the fridge for nuking. So far my favorite way to make it (other than oodles of brown sugar and milk and butter) is banana. Gotta find some other ways!

PB&J roll-up disaster
I tried to make a PB&J roll-up so that I can cut it up for my Laptop Lunch. It was a disaster! My little cutting board looked like I just butchered something. The spewed guts (aka: jam) went on top of some yogurt so that was good. But the roll-up…. I don’t know what I did wrong! I put peanut nut butter on the tortilla first so it wouldn’t get soggy and then put on the jam. I put too much jam (2 tablespoons) definitely but the cutting was horrible.

Breakfast

• Oatmeal, steel-cut, leftover, 1 cup: 2
• Apple, organic, Fuji, cut-up: 1
• Cinnamon:0
• Da Dew! 0
• Was going to put slices on top of the oatmeal but that’s hard to eat so I chopped some up and mixed apple in after the oatmeal was nuked. Sprinkled cinnamon on top. Not a huge fan. Maybe it’d be better with the apple nuked or some sweetener added like honey or such. I’ve seen people add applesauce to oatmeal so thought this would work.

Lunch

• Chicken fried rice
  Based loosely on OAMC Chicken Fried Rice. I used some of the cooked brown rice, rest of the chicken, onion, frozen vegetables, 2 eggs, and soy sauce/pepper.

Dinner
2 Turkey cheddar dogs, 1 cup corn/lima beans.
I didn’t cook this but photographed anyway.
3 hot cocoas: 12
ice cream (1 cup + chocolate syrup): A kazillion points. Ok, not really.

Brunch
PB&J roll-ups: 2 Tbl peanut butter, 2 Tbl jam, 1 tortilla (3)
1 cup ff yogurt
Diet dew, 1 can

Saturday foodstuffs

Yeah. Difficult day. Emotionally draining. I’m glad it’s over. I ate those little quarter sandwich things on a boat that I didn’t take pictures of but I did take pictures of the dinner I ate out. Yay? Oh and I am a huge fan of steel-cut oats! Cook up a bunch and store it for a quick nuke each day!

Breakfast [5]

• Oatmeal, steel-cut, leftover, 1 cup: 2
  I’ve been warming the oatmeal up in this bowl. I measured out how much each line is with water from a measuring cup, but also the oatmeal comes from a storage container that has lines for 1 cup, 2 cup on it. Very helpful.
• Banana, 1: 2
• Honey, 1 teaspoon: .5
• ICBINB, 1 teaspoon: .5
• Diet Dew, of course: 0
• I mixed up some cut-up, slightly smooshed banana in with the microwave oatmeal. Pretty lovely combination!

No picture of the food, but enjoy the water….
Lunch [4][9]

• Finger sandwich, 2 quarters, 1 turkey and 1 roast beef: 4?
• Water: 0

Dinner [9.5][18.5]

• Diet pepsi: 0
• 1 fried mozzarella stick: 2
• 1 broccoli nugget thing: 1
• Mahimahi: 5
• Broccoli: 1
• Hushpuppy, 1/2 of one: .5

After

• Diet dew, 1 can: 0

And then….

Ice cream with chocolate syrup. It seems the emotions of the day sent me back to my frozen lover. At least now that I’ve figured out how much my bowls hold, I can say how much I had. 13.5 points. How satisfying was it? Not very.

Friday Food Journal

I’m off work today. Thought I’d make a bunch of steel-cut oats for heating up later. This time, I stirred more so I didn’t have a layer of very browned bits stuck to the bottom. Stirring is our friend!

Also, while on the brain train, I came up with a way to outsmart my temperamental card reader. I locked the card before trying so that if it got hungry, it would not eat my pictures.

Breakfast [7]

• Oatmeal, steel cut, 1.5 cups: 3
• Local honey, 1 tablespoon: 1
• ICBINB, light, 1 tablespoon: 1
• Banana, 1 whole: 2
• Diet Mountain Dew, 1 can: 0
• Notes: I measured out the margarine this time to see how much of a dollop I do. 1 tablespoon was too much. And 1 tablespoon was too much honey. I tried banana chunks in it as I was eating and liked that combination.

Lunch [6][13]

• Leftover chicken, 1 breast: 5
• Mixed vegetables, 1.5 cups: 1
  I put the frozen pile right next to the chicken on the same plate and microwaved everything for 5 minutes. Vegetables were hot. Chicken was warm enough.
• Apple, organic Fuji, 1 whole: 1
• Diet Mountain Dew, 1 can: 0

Dinner [6][19]

• Cereal, 2 cups: 4
• Milk, Skim, 1 cup: 2

I feel like I’m forgetting something but am finishing this post almost 24 hours after eating this dinner so forgot. Argh!

Thursday’s food journal and toy

Didn’t realize it but I did the laptop lunch entry in a different format. Not sure which is better.

Food Lion is giving away one free reusable shopping bag with two purchases of Food Lion brand cereal. I usually buy their Toasted Oats, so that was win-win for me! Normally, the bags cost 89c. The Food Lion cereal is on sale too. Don’t know for how long but I saw it for the first time today so maybe till next week?

My fear of using a reusable bag is that the cashiers would mutter obscenities. Nope. The opposite. She saw that I had it nestled in with my two boxes of cereal and asked if I wanted to use it today. I said, “Sure! If that’s ok.” She filled it up with the cold stuff. And it held a lot. It also has a long enough handle that I was able to shoulder it.

Wow. Mother Earth would be proud. I reduced my lunch waste today and I, for the first time, didn’t use a disposable plastic bag at the store!

Here’s what it looks like till I photograph it: photo/article. Not exciting but that’s fine with me!

That free bag saved me from using at least 3 plastic bags. Not bad! And it’ll save me 3 plastic bags next time I use it.

Did I mention I hate my USB card reader? I thought I’d try it again to save me turning the PC on. I guess it heard me talking badly about it because the photos went BLIP. Fine. Checked my USB ports with a thumb drive and that worked. So I dunno. Thankfully, I took pictures of the laptop lunch last night. Even if it was in crappy light and the lids were on, it’s still documented!

Previously taken and reused. [bad words]

Breakfast

• Hot link, 1: 7
• Potatoes, 1/2 c:
• Dew, diet, 20 oz: 0
• Multivitamin: 0

Lunch [4.5]

Laptop Lunch #1
1 cup salad greens: 0.
1 cup Amy’s Vegetable Barley soup: 1.
2 Laughing Cow, light, wedges: 2.
1/16 cup (1 Tablespoon) Light Greek dressing: .5.
1 White House Natural Plus applesauce cup: 1.
1 Sugar-free Jello: 0.

Snack – 3pm

• Kitkat: 5
• Dew, Diet, 1 can: 0

Dinner – 8pm [6]

• Cereal, 2 cups: 4
• Milk, 1%, 1 cup: 2

Ye ol’ hump day food journal

Last night I suddenly got starving hungry around 11:30. “Well, Jessica, if you were in bed….” I know. So I had a Laughing Cow wedge since I’m fruitless. I’ll add that on to today.

My excuse is that I was so busy studying my computer science homework and taking a quiz — which I bombed unfortunately — that I lost track of time. And then, of course, I had to read the User’s Guide for my new toy. Weird thing? I’m thinking about sketching out some ideas for boxes so that I can make a shopping list. Either that or just copying Vigilant20.

I threw together one tonight from leftovers and what I had on hand. Photos tomorrow of my first Bento / Laptop Lunch!

Last night [1]

• Laughing Cow, Light, 1 wedge: 1

Breakfast [2] [3]

• Oatmeal, 1 cup: 2?
• Splenda, cinnamon: 0
• Diet Dew, 20 oz: 0
• Multivitamin: 0
• Water, 24 oz:0

Lunch – 12:30ish [4] [7]

• Fruit salad: 2?
  1/2 cup? raw spinach, mandarin orange, sprinkle of carrots, 1 cup? melon bits; no dressing and I didn’t miss it… the orange juice was plenty!
• Yogurt, fat-free, 1 container: 2
  Amazing that this little container (6 oz) is 100 calories. Also amazing the list of ingredients is almost as tall as the container. Milk, High fructose corn syrup — no wonder 100 calories. Sigh.

Snack – 2ish [7] [14]

• Cheddar cheese stick, Sargento, light: 2?
  I’d rather have Laughing Cow. That stuff is so good.
• Water, 24 oz: 0
• Die dew, can: 0
• KitKat: 5
  I chose this over cake in the conference room. KitKat >>>> cake. See? Indulgence. But choosing what is ‘worth’ it. Y’know?

Snack – 4 [5] [19]

• ::whisper::KitKat: 5

Dinner – 7:45~ [9] [28]

• a href=”http://www.recipezaar.com/3929″ target=”_new”>Oven Fried Chicken, 1 huge piece: 6
  I used some of that frozen cut-up chicken from last month’s .49/lb whole chicken sale. So, don’t laugh at the piece shapes. Ok, you can laugh. I did. Because I use so much chicken and because I love spice, I increase the flour to 3/4 cup and each spice gets upped to 1 teaspoon and the salt becomes 2 teaspoons. I spray the pan with some butter-flavored Pan since I was raised on butter-flavored Crisco as the oil of choice for fried chicken. Also, Recipezaar’s values come out to 4 points a piece but these are huge so I rounded.
• Milk, 1 cup, skim: 2
• Romaine lettuce, 1 cup~: 0
• Greek dressing, light, 2 Tbl: 1
• Carrot, 1: 0

Snack [8] [36]

• Hot cocoa, 2 cups: 8

Total: 36

Eating through Tuesday

[HAHA! I was so distracted by the laptop lunch that I forgot to 'publish' this.]

Class went late Monday which threw me off. I was late to work. I hate that. Well, I wasn’t late because I was in by the implied cut-off time but I am trying to hit closer to 8 a.m. than 9 a.m.

Because of my glorious excuses in the previous paragraph, I didn’t pack my breakfast. I did bring snacks though because they were easy to grab. In my bear-just-woke-from-hibernation stupor, I put my Lean Pocket in the fridge. It thawed, of course. I tossed it. Bright idea: Buy a bunch of frozen stuff and stick it in the freezer at work in a container that says “Jessica’s Low-calorie, Low-fat, Low-taste Food.” If I mark it that way, then who’d want it?

Had another follow-up visit for the Lasik today. Even with all the water I drank, he said my eyes were dry. They don’t feel dry. Argh.

Now, on to the real excitement! What’d I eat today and what’d it look like!

Breakfast [9]

• Multivitamin: 0
• Hot sausage, 1 link: 7~
  I wish I’d never tried these. They’re addictive. Since last night’s meeting was about indulgence and our homework was to indulge in something, I thought I’d have a little treat.
• Potatoes, 1/2 cup: 3~
  I can’t finish the amount the give me.
• Diet Dew, 20 oz: 0
• Water, 24oz: 0
  I know, right? Water before noon!

Lunch – 12:30ish [3.5]

• Egg drop so up, 16 oz: 1.5
  I got excited that this was being served today but my heart fell to my feet when I saw the red flecks. I remember one day almost everything had some sort of bell pepper in it. I like all peppers except the sweet bell peppers. But, no, it seems to be a hot pepper and there’s a gingery sweet flavor or something. I think this was the worst egg drop soup I’ve ever had. But others probably love it.
• Banana, 1: 2
• Water, 24 oz: 0
  Yes, that’s my 24 ounce mug.

Snack – 3ish [4.5]

• Water, 24oz: 0
• Cottage cheese, fat-free, 1~ cup: 3.5
  I sprinkled some cinnamon on some and it was ok.
• Laughing Cow, light, 1 wedge: 1

Dinner – 7ish [12.5]

• I didn’t make it but I photographed it.
• Some kinda southern sausage, 3 oz.: 7.5
• Collards, 3/4 cup?: 1
• Blackeyed peas, 1 cup?: 4
• Water, 8 oz: 0

Snack [8]

• Hot cocoa, 2 cups: 8

Total: 37.5

Just another manic Monday

I brought my breakfast! Yay! I even brought snack-y bits from home! I don’t like microwaving in the Ziploc container though but did. The yogurt was in a disposable container but that was so I could just try it. I can get a larger container next time and portion it out like I do for cottage cheese.

My laptop lunch is getting closer! It’s in Pennsylvania right now so I should have it within a day or so! Woo hoo.

First weigh-in was tonight. Even though I had over-indulgences — self-indulgence was the topic this week — I had a loss. I figure because even though I went over my WPA, I still tracked and got back on track as soon as possible. I didn’t let those lapses become a gateway to “Oh, I had that, might as well have this.”

This leader is on Core and even though all the other women I joined with last week said they were going to try Core, not one did. Why did they want to do Core? “I don’t have to measure and can eat what I want.” Why did they not do Core? I kid you not, some said this. “I didn’t trust myself if I didn’t measure and count.” Wow. The reason for wanting it is the reason for not doing it. But the leader told us that it’s not that “scary.” We didn’t gain weight by eating too much broccoli. The foods on the list are, overall, not trigger foods. Rice/Pasta are limited to once a day because they could be.

On to the day’s food [30] journal….

Just another Sunday in the fridge….

I’m still extremely upset about this class. I have spent so much time on it compared to my other one. I feel like I’m just wasting my time because no matter how much time I put in it, it seems I get the same result or it’s an inconsistent result anyway. What really gets me is that I could cheat and use someone’s answers but I don’t. I’ll cheat by eating food but not to get a silly score on a silly piece of paper. Weird, eh?

Well, the great news about today is that I got a gift of local honey! Its taste isn’t the same as the other local honey. This one’s more bitter? No. Not sure how to describe it but it’s not as wonderful as the other. But it’s local and it will do its job well. I also have a new place to check out, it seems, for local produce!

Breakfast

• Cheerios, 2 cups: 3.5
• Milk, 1%, 1 cup: 2
• Sugar, 2 Tbl: 2
• Diet Dew, 1 can: 0

Lunch

• Honey, LOCAL!, 2 Tbl: 2
• Bread, Whole Wheat, 2 slices: 4
• Banana: 2
• Kiwi, organic: 1
• Diet Dew, can: 0

Dinner – 6p.m.

• Amy’s Shepard’s Pie: 3
  Why don’t things look like the darn box? I should have had a clue when I looked more closely and saw the little bowl on the box that was nothing like the little white paper-y thing my pie came in. Taste was alright. There’s something in it that I don’t like though and not sure what it is. Did I miss the meat? Heck no. Amy’s great about that! Was it worth the almost $4? I don’t know. It’s better, point-wise/world-wise, than what I could have had for dinner so maybe.

  Do I get “activity” points for not having more leftover lasagna?

• Diet Dew, 1 can: 0

  I don’t usually start caffeine this late but I have a class meeting online at 7 p.m. and want to be somewhat “sharp” for it.

Steel-cut Saturday

Today, since I had all morning and wanted to procrastinate my studying, I tried some steel-cut oats. Boy, did that take forever to cook! And the bottom of the pan was scrubtastic. Worth it? Not sure. I have half of the pan leftover in the fridge.

Breakfast – 10ish

• Steel-cut oatmeal, 1 cup: 4
  Interesting. WW.com says oatmeal is 2 points per cup. On container, it looks like 4 a cup.
• Honey, 3-string drizzle: .5
  I miss my local honey desperately!
• ICBINB, light, dollop: .5
  From the tub.
• Milk, skim, 1.5 cup: 2.5

Lunch
Diet Mountain Dew, 1 can: 0
Tortilla, low-fat: 2
Ground turkey with taco seasoning, 1/2 cup: 4?
Cheese stick, low-fat: 2
Picante sauce, liberal pour: 0
Corn, 1/2 cup?: 1
Lima beans, 1/2 cup?: 1
Lima beans have a little taco meat in them because I microwaved the two together in a non-plastic bowl

Dinner
Leftover lasagna from the freezer, little square: 12?
Salad (spinach, 1/2 apple, sprinkle of dried cranberries, sprinkle of walnuts, carrot): 0+.5+1+3+0
Balsamic, light dressing, 2 Tbl: 1
Leftover cauliflower: 1
Corn, lima beans: 1

Snack
Hot cocoa: 8

I’m filling most of this the day after because of how hard it was to do anything but study yesterday. I think I need to keep the little paper journal with me so I can write stuff done and not rely on memory. Photos help but I don’t photograph everything.

Yesterday’s quiz in the class went horribly. I’m getting very frustrated with the amount of times this professor puts material on the quiz that isn’t covered in the class. I turned to my comfort: ice cream.

Not a snack…
Ice cream with chocolate syrup: 20?

Oh and I didn’t write down what I turned to the other night after the bad fight. That time it was Krispy Kreme chocolate glazed donuts. I just looked up how much that “retreat into comfort zone” cost and that was 30 points. Needless to say, I’m way over my WPA. Will my few (ok, a lot at the few times) transgressions mean a gain tomorrow?