Meditating Monday

Chloe enjoying her new bed.

Eating Clean Challenge Day 2

Day 2 and I made it without my Dr. Pepper. I had a close call but thanks to a coworker, I did not drink one. Yea!

Here is another eating clean rule: Try to eat food that has five ingredients or less. Easy if you are eating fruits, veggies, and basic proteins. Really start looking at labels and you will be surprised by what is in your food.  Half of it, you cannot pronounce so why eat it?

Ok, so here are my meals. Really struggled to eat.  NOT hungry at all until I got home from work.  Then starved so I am really trying to work on eating 5 - 6 small meals a day.

Breakfast:

9:30am (Remember I said I was not hungry)

Banana, coffee, water

11:30am (I will repeat myself. Remember I said I was not hungry. Really had to force myself to eat)

Hardboiled Egg and 16 oz of water

Lunch:

1/2 of leftover seafood salad from last night and slice of cornbread

4 strawberries with a teaspoon of chocolate hazelnut spread (had more than 5 ingredients-yikes)
8 oz water

Afternoon Snack:

2 stalks of celery
2 wedges of Laughing Cow cheese
24 oz water

Dinner:

Corn Tacos with Roasted Veggies
16 oz water

Exercise:

Walk 20 minutes morning
Walk 20 minutes evening
Played on the Wii for 30 minutes

Night!

Eating Clean Challenge Day 1

Today was the first day of my eating clean challenge and I have to say not bad, not bad.

One of the rules of eating clean is to eat every 2 -3 hours.  I focused on this today because I have not wanted to eat lately.  A lot of times, this is what keeps weight on me because I do not consume enough calories and my body does not like it.  Plus I have hypothyroidism, which makes this worse.  So how did I do with eating every 2 - 3 hours. Not bad.

Here is my day of eating:

I started my morning off drinking coffee with cream. (I will try and give the cream up at a later date) Cannot do everything at once.

9:00am - 10:30am

Plum, 2 hardboiled eggs, coffee, and 16 oz water

This meal was extremely hard for me to eat but I got it down.  Just did not want to eat.

Lunch at 1pm

Nutty chicken salad from Jason's Deli.  Delicious.

3pm snack

String Cheese

I also had four thin mint like cookies.  We had an ice cream social that I had to set up for and the cookie smell drove me nuts, so I ate a couple.  Not a sweet person so I was a little sad that I ate these.

5:30pm

Home from work and extremely hungry.  Ate 7 carrot sticks with light ranch dressing.

6:15pm 

Seafood salad with a slice of cornbread that I made.  The salad was yummy and purchased at Walmart. Good to have on hand for me when I just want something light.  

I also had several more 16 ounces of water to drink for a total of 80 ounces.  

Exercise:

Walked 20 minutes before work. 

Walked 20 minutes around 9pm.

I think overall I had a good day.

Eating Clean 7 Day Challenge

I returned from vacation a little over a week ago and I will tell you that I did not eat the greatest while on vacation or since I have returned. I know this happens to all of us but I will tell you that it really has made me not feel good since I have returned. I have a bit of a gluten intolerance and I ate bread, pasta, and lots of other goodies while I was home and my stomach has been paying for it.

So I decided at the end of last week to get back on track by completing a seven day challenge of eating clean. If you are not familiar with this term, check out Eat Clean Diet or Clean Eating Magazine. I got out my Clean Eating books and magazines and went to work on getting some motivation and my mouth was drooling by all the good eats.

I did some meal planning on Saturday and the today went to the grocery store and bought lots of goodies. Here are some of the items I purchased.

Meats:

Ground turkey
Tyson's grilled & ready chicken breasts (trying these for the first time)

Dairy:

Yogurt
Almond Milk
Coconut Milk
Cheese (Laughing cow)

Fruits:

Plums
Peaches
Strawberries
Bananas

Veggies:

Celery
Salad Mix
Zucchini
Squash
Peppers
Sweet Potatoes
Pre-made salads

Misc:

Walnuts
Dark Chocolate Chips
Natural Peanut Butter
Chocolate Hazelnut Spread
Brown Rice

After I purchased all of my groceries and got everything home, I washed and cut up all my fruits and veggies so they would be ready to use. Also I grilled chicken and browned three pounds of ground turkey, some for me and some for my dog Chloe. Yes, she is spoiled. I cooked rice and roasted veggies.  I also boiled six eggs for breakfast. I have been very bad about eating breakfast. I also made oatmeal.  Packed everything into glass containers. I am trying not to use plastic. Now I am ready for the week.

I am going to try and do a blog post everything with pictures of my meals. This way you can see what I ate and I can keep track too.  I also will discuss my workout plans in another post. I am hoping that this will jump start my weight loss again because I have been at a plateau.

One last thing, wish me luck because I am also trying to not drink any sodas.  This will be the hardest part!

Motivation, Where are you?

Lately I have been lacking motivation in all areas of my life but especially when it comes to eating and exercising. I am not sure if it is due to the heat in Oklahoma, which I love or something else. Maybe it is just enjoying the lazy days of summer. I am not really sure but I need my mojo back.

What do you do to get back on track or motivated to do something? I would love to hear any thoughts or ideas. I am doing a 5K on Saturday and I have not even wanted to train for it but maybe it will be the motivation that I need.

Biggest Loser, Who Me?

For the past sixteen weeks I participated in a Biggest Loser competition at work and guess what WON!

www.nbc.com

I lost 11.03% of my body weight and this made me feel really good.  

Around the beginning of the competition, my doctor diagnosed me with a gluten intolerance. This caused a huge change in my eating. You cannot imagine how much food contains gluten. Cutting out a lot of gluten items caused me to eat lots and lots of fruits, veggies and protein. Also, I mostly followed the Tone It Up plan.  

If you are not familiar with Katrina and Karena from Tone It Up, you should check them out or check out my previous posts about the 7 day slim down.  I love the support that they give on Facebook, Twitter, and their Tone It Up community.  I have learned so many things about what to eat and when.  Plus they have great workout videos on Youtube.com for free!  

My office is going to host round two of the Biggest Loser competition on campus. I hope I will be saying I won again realizing that the money is not the biggest factor. It is totally about getting rid of weight and feeling better!

My New Addiction, Oatmeal in a Jar

I have a new addiction from an old favorite oatmeal in a jar.

If you are on Pinterest you might have seen the pins about overnight oats.  Well these oats looked so good that I wanted to try them but one hiccup, no regular oats just quick ones so I came up with two hour oats.  Right before leaving for work, I add the following to a mason jar.

1 cup quick oats
1 cup almond milk
1/2 cup of Dole Ready Cut Fruit Strawberries, Peaches & Bananas (these are frozen)
1 TBS chia seeds or hemp seeds
add sweetener of choice if needed ( I omit because I do not like sweet stuff in the morning)

Shake everything up and put in my bag that I take to work. So around 10am I open up my major jar and the best creation in recent times for me pops out, two hour oats. No cooking.

My mom thought the no cooking was strange but she tried them and like them so I think you will too. Enjoy!

Quiche with Roasted Vegetables

This morning I slept in and it felt wonderful. So I was late in getting breakfast but boy was it worth it. I roasted some veggies and then made a quiche. I also sliced a papaya for the first time and ate it with the quiche. My mouth is still watering from this recipe. I did use almond milk to replace the cream and used a very good quality of hard cheddar cheese. It was very easy to make and I know it will now be a go to recipe for breakfast or lunch.

Enjoy!

Turkey Chili with Kale

Last weekend I needed to use up some kale, so I found a recipe for Turkey Chili with Kale. It was delicious and very easy to make.

Kale has always been a favorite of mine but lately I seem to want to eat it even more. I think this is because kale is becoming the new spinach in health circles. You hear people talking about kale all the time now. This makes me happy because it has been a favorite and now I can even find it at Walmart.

There are various kinds of kale and for this recipe I used a new variety to me called Lacinato (Dinosaur) Kale. It is called this because of the look of the leaves. This variety has a more nutty taste and I do not think it is as bitter as some of the other varieties.

According to Wikipedia, Kale is full of beta carotene, Vitamin K, Vitamin C, lutein, and rich in calcium. I encourage you to try adding some kale to your diet! I think you will find it addicting.

Weight Watchers and My Journey

I am going to do a weekly video on my weight loss journey. Below is my first video. I hope you will share any successes or advice you might have if you have gotten rid of weight.

Cook Once, Eat for Awhile

It has been forever since I have done a post and mostly because I have not wanted to cook lately. However last weekend I ended up cooking a lot of food for the rest of the month. This was very interesting and I will say that it has made life easier when it comes to food but it is an extremely large amount of work on the cooking day. I had heard other people say be prepared to order pizza the night of cooking because you are exhausted and this is correct. I cooked Egg Casserole in the crockpot. Baked French toast in the oven. Shredded Chicken in the crockpot. I marinated chicken, pork chops, and filet mignon, which were all grilled on my indoor grill. I baked potatoes and browned two pounds of ground turkey with onions and the other with taco seasoning. I also browned a pound of pork sausage. This makes me tired just typing all this again.

Several of the recipes came from Youtube.com since I have been obsessed with it lately. One channel, The Bag Holder stood out to me and I felt like several of the recipes would work well. So I ended up making her Egg Casserole, Baked French Toast, and Chicken Tenders. Here are the videos.

Country Casserole by The Bag Holder

This recipe was good but I think I would cut back on the hash browns next time. I tend to like more eggs than potatoes. However this is what I love about her recipes, you can tweak them it needed.  She has such great ideas.

Cinnamon French Toast Bake by The Bag Holder

This one was my absolute favorite. Every time I bring it to work and heat it up, everybody is saying what is that delicious smell. Plus it was so, so easy.

Next was the Chicken Tenders that I also loved. Plus the way that she shows you how to cook them is so cool. I am getting one of these Bag Holders soon. Cooking in the plastic bags makes clean up a breeze which is wonderful. I hate cleaning dishes.  

Crusted Chicken by The Bag Holder

I loved these and again so easy to make plus she gives you such great ideas for changing up the recipe.  I added these on top of my salad and loved them. Will make again and again.

Realize that these are just a couple of the things I did but I will definitely try this method next month again. I also look forward to watching more of her videos and trying her recipes. I even bought her ebook. Go check her out!