Time does fly….

Wow! Another year gone by with no posting at all. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Work continues to be great. We’ve added a new child to the mix, which is helping keep me busy. I’ve been cooking less, though I still get to do it on the weekends regularly. For Christmas this year I got a new Ice Cream Maker — WAY better than the old one we had — no longer do we have to deal with loading ice and rock salt — we just have to freeze the bowl in advance. We also got an Instant Pot – a programmable pressure cooker. Now I just have to figure out how to use it effectively. Early attempts have had mixed success.

A real-foods diet

So over the last several months, I’ve been working at losing weight. So far, I’ve lost about 26 pounds. My diet?

  • Less Soda. I started out by cutting back to 1 every other day. Now it’s more like 1 every once in a while. (i.e. 1-ish a week). If you figure I was having 1-3 in a day, that’s basically a drop of 150-450 calories a day, without replacement. In the place of the Dr Pepper, I’ve been mostly drinking water. I’ve also cut out my morning juice, for the most part, after being convinced that juice provides a lot of sugar/calories and not a lot of nutrition.
  • Eating products that are less processed, and more whole. This means reading ingredient lists. If there are a bunch of ingredients I don’t recognize, probably not a good sign. Most recently, this meant buying regular, all-natural sour cream rather than the fat free sour cream. When I stopped to look at the ingredient list of the sour cream, it had many, many ingredients as compared to the regular sour cream, including cellulose, which is basically the same thing as paper or wood pulp as I understand it. We just ate stroganoff made from the regular sour cream, and WOW was it good! So basically, while I’m losing weight, I’m eating richer, tastier foods, and feeling less hungry.
  • Accepting that my body had no clue what full and hungry meant. This can be attributed to many things, including the over-eating I was doing and the highly processed foods, especially the “light” foods I was eating which were essentially training my body that food did not correlate with calories. There were nights that I would make dinner portions for Kristina and I, and we would be eating, and she would remark how she was full and should stop. I would have been quite content to keep eating, but would follow her lead, and assume that what I had eaten was enough to fill me, so I would stop. I’m still not quite there, but I have started to be able to recognize sometimes in the evenings when I’m not hungry so that I opt not to snack because I’m not hungry rather than just the fact that intellectually I know I don’t need more food (which is still more common).

On the down side, one of the things we did as part of this movement was to visit our local dairy and buy a set of local cheeses. Tasty, yes. (Not necessarily more whole than what we could get at the store, but buying fresh/local is still something I’ve been doing as part of this general movement). Anyway – this morning we learn that the cheese we ate/bought while there is subject to a voluntary recall due to possible bacterial containment with a 3-70 day incubation period. Oh well.

One resource I have really enjoyed using for this is Fooducate. I enjoy both following their blog, and using their iPhone app to scan products to find out tidbits of things I ought to know.

Since I’ve been doing so much reading about food, I find I may post more about it too, so I’ve created a category for food.