Sandwiches and Distractions

So, it is June 23, 2012, time for another blog installment.
“Look, everybody, if you want to lose this weight, if you want to lose this weight and keep it off...then you've got to love yourself each and every day. And you do that by eating right, making exercise a daily part of your life and really taking good care of that body of yours!”: Richard Simmons on his facebook page.
He is absolutely right. Easy solution huh? Why not. It is not easy. Loving your overweight self is almost impossible. You look in the mirror it depresses you, step on the scale it depresses you, hang around slim people, it depresses you. I have discovered something that helps though…distractions, new friends and keeping that nasty sweet stuff the hell out of my house. 

Lets talk about loving yourself for a minute. Richard has preached for over 30 years that if you don’t you will not lose a pound. That theory can be spread to a lot of things in life. My favourite relationship advice is that if you don’t like yourself when you are with a certain person in a relationship, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. So, what do you do if that relationship is with yourself.  You can’t run from yourself. Or can you? Distractions are the key…healthy ones. An example of an unhealthy distraction that overweight people, at least I am speaking for myself, get into is watching movies at home by yourself. If you are riding a stationary bike or jogging on the spot through the whole movie it is one thing…but who does that? More like, you are sitting in one spot for two hours stuffing your face with candy, popcorn, ice cream and whatever else. Stop that, get out of the house. Get with other people. Being involved in that Godspell production saved me really. I know that sounds dramatic, but I was out of the house three or four nights a week for three solid months. The production involved singing, dancing around, falling, crawling around on the floor. It was exhausting, but exhilarating. And to top it all off, I lost weight. So I am auditioning for more things because I love it. And it is distracting.

They also say people with dogs re healthier. Pets are good therapy…they won’t let you lie in bed or sit around, they make you get up and walk them and feed them and take care of them. Kids do that too of course, but sometimes they require you to actually eventually need therapy.
So I need more distractions. I am working on it.
I am trying to love myself more. I’m thinking it would help if I surrounded myself with people who loved me. Kids don’t count. I need adult people, preferably of the male persuasion.

Let’s talk food for a minute. One of my favourite meals has always been sandwiches…Tuna, ham and swiss, subs. When I was a kid, I got a recipe book of Charlie Brown sandwiches. I loved it. They had weird, but delicious combinations like peanut butter and apple. I tried to find the book online and found a site that disses it, but what do they know? Kids today wouldn’t eat them, but we did. Here is the book and a sample sandwich recipe.

Here is a picture now of my favourite sandwich.

Zero calories. Talk about distractions.

Now the Sandy recipe:

Tuna Bagel
Multigrain bagel toasted, spread with a low fat butter/margerine mix (I like the stuff by Gay Lea which combines canola oil and butter) then fill with a mixture of white albacore tuna packed in water (drain the water), tablespoon light mayo, sliced celery, sliced onion or the dried flakes softened in water, pepper, sprinkle of dill weed. Add iceburg lettuce to the sandwich and serve with a dill pickle. 

Until next time. Enjoy those distractions.

Wii 21

 Yes they say it is a Journey. Just the word journey makes me tired or else makes me think of a 70s/80s rock band. 

Journey implies movement, which is obviously what a person needs to lose the pounds. Anyone who thinks they can just diet and not MOVE is seriously deluded. My exercise regimen involves going for two walks a day with the dog, time between both totals an hour. Usually. Only if the weather is good. And I try to do Wii Fit in the morning. For those of you not familiar with this particular Nintendo Wii “game” …you stand on the Wii board and it weighs you, tells you if you are well balanced and gives you your BMI. Mine sings “Da da da da da da, that’s obese!” and the little Mii figure of myself turns from thin to tubby. Yeah I know, seriously?!?!! But it gives you goal weights and other things to work towards. It has yoga, strength training and a lot of really strange games have you flailing about like a twit in a way that would make you die of embarrassment if someone walked in. Another feature, which  only seems to be designed as an ego booster, or deflater, is the Wii Fit age. You take a Body Test, then you take some balancing tests, two of them, which involve anything from standing on one foot to marching in place to rocking around on the board clicking at numbers or boxes on the screen, even standing perfectly still, which by the way is impossible. After all that, they give you a Wii fit age which is suppose to be a calculation of your real age and how you did on the tests. My lowest has been 21 (ego booster) and the highest has been 64 (ego deflater). Actually I believe during the latter I may have been using the Wii board as a pillow during the testing. I have three Mii-selfs on the Wii fit. Sandlynn is my working girl self dressed in blue. The other is Mommy dressed in black and the other is Lynn who is blond and 10 years younger and born in July. The other two have my real birthday. She is dressed in purple. Lynn is the cyclist. I was an avid cyclist when I was younger and my lowest weight ever when I was in my 20s was 111. I looked anorexic to tell you the truth. I worked out three hours a day on average and rode my bike everywhere. It’s time to get that body back, well not that body. A 135 would be fine.

Godspell is going well. And making me physically very tired, which I suppose is a good thing. They cast Lily, which is funny. She gets all the praise from the director and the rest of us get, “I know you can do better” during the run-throughs. The director is also convinced she will steel the show and so is Lily for that matter. Little canine diva princess bitch. I am using that last word in its proper way, not as a curse, of course. Being around younger people makes me feel so young, dancing and jumping and crawling around like a sheep and I forget that I am twice their age. Until I wake up the next morning and I can’t move. I have decided to make one of my goals when I lose the weight to date someone at least 10 or 15 years younger. Can you say cougar? Men do it “because they can”, so why can’t women.

OK my photo today:

This is the light in front of my condo. I really like the way it shines through the tree. I gives me a peaceful feeling. I have it as the photo on my desktop.

Now for the recipe portion with advice thrown in for good measure.

Eat a salad for dinner.

Throw lettuce in a bowl with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, maybe carrots and cheese cubes and sliced strawberries and sliced chicken breast with what ever low fat dressing you want and make that your dinner. Then go out for the evening somewhere to sing and dance like choir practice or theatre practice and don’t eat anything when you come home. Good luck with that.

Until next time. (This time I promise I won’t wait two months before I blog again.)

Blessings,

Sandy

Clutter House

Oh, I have a clutter house and it's OK,
no one's comin over anyway
you can't walk a straight line anywhere
and the whole darn place is full of pet hair

Oh, I have a clutter house should clean it up
'cause I can't find a clean drinking cup
the paper in my office is 10 ft high
and the dishes in the sink nearly reach the sky.

That's a song I wrote a few years ago as an effort to embrace the clutter rather than let it get to me. It worked to a degree. There are other verses, which I can't remember and though I wrote them down, I don't know where they are. In the song the word pet hair was originally cat hair because I had cats. I no longer have cats nor will I ever have cats again. I love my little dog. I do have a clutter house, I could post before pictures, but it will be a long time before there is an after picture. I moved into this condo to get a fresh start, but just ended up taking my clutter with me. It has been three years.

I couldn't find the picture I took awhile ago of the clutter on my office floor so here is a picture of me sleeping. I took myself. I will let you figure that one out.
In terms of my weight loss activities, I do walk the dog every day, but have only managed to do the wii fit exercising two or three times since I started this blog.
Excuses:
I am on deadline and work late
I am tired.
I don't have time in the morning and if i don't do it in the morning it doesn't get done
I figure if I don't do anything, the weight will just go away
My brain has been abducted by aliens and I forget how to excersice. Damn, I still can't spell it. Exercise. There, thank you spell check.
I decided to be brave this past Tuesday and went and auditioned for Godspell put on by the Paris Performers Theatre. I have always wanted to be in a musical play that people would actually pay money to see. I tried out for all the high school plays and never got chosen. I can't even get cast in my church plays. How lame is that. But, they asked me to be in Godspell, along with two UC choir ladies, one of whom I think is my age and two teenage girls, one of whom is the daughter of the  director. Then there are five young college aged guys, three of which are fraternal triplets. They sing like angels. I will like this. Lots of singing and moving and dancing in this play. I can't wait. I hope by the time performance comes around the weekend of June 1, I will have lost substantial weight. In fact my goal was to lose at least 40 lbs for the family reunion in July. I don't see why that couldn't be possible. Of course I need to avoid late night snacking and making those snacks hot tamales and chocolate and buttered popcorn. Not all at once of course.

Here is my recipe:
First I must divulge a cooking secret of which North Americans are clueless, but that Mediterraneans have known for years. When cooking with ground beef add a teaspoon or two of cinnamon per pound. It takes away the aftertaste that beef tends to have.
Sandy's Easy Chili
1 pound of lean ground beef
1 can of Aylmer's Accents diced tomatoes for Chili
1 can of red kidney beans
Brown the beef after first spraying the bottom of the pan with Pam, add some cinamon as specified in my divulged secret above, a teaspoon of garlic order or one fresh garlic mashed through one of those garlic masher tools, one onion chopped finely or a tablespoon of onion flakes.
Add the tomatoes and beans and simmer everything for while on medium heat until flavours are all absorbed and everything heated through. Serve on top of a baked potato that was cooked for a few minutes in the microwave. Sprinkle everything with your favourite low fat grated cheese. Enjoy. 

Body Flush

Here's the second posting of my "trip". I just watched the movie "Bobby" the other day and Ashton Kutcher sure takes a trip in that. He even pronounced the full name of LSD, which I won't because I probably wouldn't get the spelling right the first time out.
One word I never spell correctly is exersice...yes every time I spell it that way...exercise...there. Until I can spell exercise the first time out it will never become routine.
I did do some this morning on my Wii Fit. After sitting for a half hour at the cuputer afterward, every muscle hurt. Ah well.
So the first post was about Richard Simmons, but it won't all be like that. I will be stating an opinion about something, posting a picture and then giving you a recipe.
Let's talk about the "Cleanse!" Where for US$400 plus change you get three mega jars of whey powder and several bottles of vitamins. You have a shake for dinner, a shake for breakfast and a salad for lunch. Then you pop vitamins all day long. Celebrities are all into it, they are featuring it on TV shows. It's all the big rage. Trouble is these people are missing the obvious. They are buying into the fad. I would have bought into it 15 20 years ago, before I really knew that none of these things do what they say they will do. Eating no real food for several weeks is not healthy. Why do things like this when it has such short term results? It isn't part of your "journey" it is a stall in neutral. You are eventually going to go back to eat real food... in fact you are suppose to on this Cleanse. And then when you start falling off the wagon again you fork out another $400 plus change and do it all over again. And how on earth can you clense your body with powder and vitamins anyway? I agree with the salad part of it, natural organic (if you can find it) fresh vegitables and fruit will clean your system right out. And if you want  to save your money and still clense your body, Drink Water!!! Filtered, clean refreshing water. Lots and lots of it, 8 classes a day. Water is the natural body flush.
So, that's that. We all know what we need to do to lose the pounds, trouble is translating that to our behaviour. I am hoping that writing this will help with my behaviour.
So here I am writing this blog and sending it out to cyber space. Someone may read it, someone may not. But like the actor/rocker Meat Loaf (the person not the food) says, "I would perform for three trees." At least by doing this electronically I am saving trees.
I saw Meat Loaf this past summer too. So that will be today's photo feature. Great concert on the 2nd hottest day of the summer. He opened with Hot Patootie from Rocky Horror so the second picture there he is trying to do the Time Warp dance. Thought I should explain that as he looks like he might be doing something else. Maybe the results of the Cleanse.

Here is another recipe I invented.
Vanilla Yogurt, Banana Strawberry Orange Smoothy
In a blender put a frozen banana broken in peices (We never manage to eat the whole bunch of bananas before they turn too ripe, so I put them in the freezer.)
About a cup of Strawberries (you can substitute raspberries or blueberries too)
A half cup orange juice
A half cup low fat vanilla Yogurt
A squeeze of lemon juice.
Blend it up and enjoy.

Happy trails.

Sandy

Nobody likes to listen to someone else whine about their weight. I hate the term "let yourself go" I'm not letting myself go anywhere. That's the trouble. I am starting this blog so I will be accountable to any and all who read it. Especially to myself. It has taken 10 years to gain 90 pounds and I intend to lose it all in one. I've always been healthy and fit. I am still healthy, knock on wood. But I am pushing 49 and diabetes runs in the family so that may change. I am going to fix it before it completely breaks. My cousin once wrote me a very thoughtfully written letter on how her weight loss was a journey and I remember it made me angry. Not sure why exactly. I guess cause I knew that she was right and I didn't want to hear it. So yes it is a journey. I'm taking a trip. Met Richard Simmons this past summer and well...let me tell you, he was a trip. The guy is truly a freak of nature, but he knows what he's prancing about. You gotta love him. He jumped off stage to meet an extremely large woman in a wheel chair. He offered to buy a prom dress for a teen who said she was dieting to fit into one. He signed my DVD I brought even though is "handlers said he couldn't sign anymore, he gave me a kiss and hug and was crazy about my daughter with the rainbow hair asking her to come up on stage for a pic with us. It's pushing 1 am on January 31 right now. The New Year resolution starts now. Now that I have taken the month to recover from Christmas. So come on this journey with me and maybe offer me a paddle when I fall in deep water. I am being realistic here. I need to do this. Really do this.

So here a recipe I have invented that makes an amazing healthy breakfast.
Poached egg white omelets:
In an egg poaching pan spray the egg holding part with Pam. Then put small pieces of onion in the bottom to cook a bit first. Over the onion, sprinkle tiny bits of broccoli, then put bits of low fat cheese on top of that. Then pour in egg white to the top, I like the stuff in the little carton. On top of that sprinkle pepper to taste and some parsley and maybe a bit of fresh basil. Let it cook.  Eat it with a slice of flax bread or bagel. Really really good.