How we eat, how we cook...

Yesterday I had to take baby to the doctors AGAIN, to find out he has an ear infection.  He's been leaking from his eyes and nose, and is miserable all round.  I dealt with his screaming for the day, and when husband came home, he took baby out for a small stroll while I cleaned up the kitchen (Sainsburys had been delivered earlier, I only had time to put away meat and milk, etc).  Once we finally got baby down, hubby asked what he could do - I simply replied "Let me cook".

For the next hour and a half I boiled, pureed, peeled, skinned, chopped, set up the crock pot, and portioned into freezer pots.  I did the next 5 days of baby food, made 'breakfast' (chicken breasts over root veggies with tomato puree), and boiled a whole chicken in fresh herbs that I let cool overnight (and broke down today for chicken salad).  I felt much, much better.

I've always considered cooking to be a relaxing activity, something that I do when I am stressed in an effort to let go.  Maybe it's that I can be creative; more likely it's because I equate food to comfort.  When 9/11 hit, I (who lived alone) made a turkey dinner.  I was stuck eating increasingly dry turkey sandwiches for the following week.

Part of resetting my eating mindset is resetting my cooking mindset, which is far more difficult.  I cook all the time, for necessity (I cook all my child's food), for thriftiness (living in London, you do NOT want to waste a lot of money on packaged foods), for creativity (*can* I make the greatest bacon dressing known to mankind?  YES!), but always in the back of my mind because I know everything I make I can eat.  And because I love to eat, I love to cook....

A vicious, vicious circle...

It's a pain you forget...

When I was pregnant, people used to always assure me that women have some magical hormone that helps them forget about the pain of pregnancy and childbirth (otherwise the human race would have died out years ago!).  Well, if anyone knows me well they know I still deal with the birth trauma every day of my life, so forgetting it isn't going to happen anytime soon, but the concept of "It's the kind of pain you forget" does weirdly apply to my food choices.

I know that if I eat cheap crappy pizza, I will be sick for the rest of the night.
I know that if I drink sweety drinks with fake sugar, I will be sick as well.
I know that if I even taste test Burger King, I am good and well screwed gastro-wise.

And yet, I forget EVERY SINGLE TIME as I reach for my credit card when ordering pizza after a late night of baby wrangling.  Every.  Single.  Time!  Is there some fat based hormone that makes my body forget that 2 hours after eating a box of Cornettos, I'm going to be doing awful things to my own bathroom?   Even now, writing about the Cornettos, I want them.  They are going to make me sick as a dog, but I am salivating thinking about them!  One would have thought that evolution would have shoved this concept out of my head - even rats learn which food can hold poison and stay away.  I am officially dumber than a rat.

For the Mumsnetters - a recipe book recommendation

Some lovely folks on Mumsnet (*waves*!) have been asking about Paleo and recipe books.  Now, to Joe (my personal trainer buddy and Paleo smartypants), this is all going to be way oversimplified, but the premise is this: You eat what the Paleolithic man ate.

Veggies
Fruit
Meat
Fish
Eggs
Nuts
Berries
Water

Paleo man hadn't yet learned to farm, so the following stuff is a no-no

Anything with grain (bread, pasta, etc)
Rice
Potatoes (every once in awhile, you can have sweet potatoes, but no white/jacket potatoes!)
Sugar
Dairy (sorry, no milk in your tea)
Beans
Caffeine
Anything in a box (cereal, oatmeal, macaroni and cheese, etc)

Essentially you are getting all your good complex carbs from the fruit and veg, and cutting out most of the simple carbs that usually go straight to your body as fat.  I know it sounds really restrictive, but it's not.  For example, I just had a huge rocket salad with 2 hard boiled eggs and diced onions/cucumber, topped with a quick dressing I made from the bacon fat and a little coconut milk, rendered down.  Name another diet that uses BACON FAT DRESSING as a good food?  ;) Also, your shopping is really easy, as you only go to the produce and meat section, which are usually right in the front of the store.  Aaaaaaand, you can do it on the cheap!  I got a bag of rocket for £1 at the Co-op, 2 eggs are about 50p (I like free range), about 50 worth of bacon, and maybe 50p worth of chopped veggies.  I bet whatever crap you may be eating from the vending machine cost you that much!

Now, I am doing a modified Paleo, as you can have my coffee when you pry it from my cold dead hands, but other than the first few days of sugar/simple carb withdrawal, it's actually pretty nice.  AAAAAAAAAAAND, you get bacon.  And as mentioned above, bacon is just awesome.

As for a recipe book, the one he recommended to me that I really dig is Everyday Paleo. The lady who wrote it is a mum who needed to make food her kids would like, as well as being quick/pre-planned (so you don't have to spend hours over a stove just to make a sad little piece of boiled salmon).  The instructions are super simple, and she has a great index of what foods are in and out.  Easy peasy.



I hope this gave you a great into to the Paleo diet.  As for exercise, I am doing lots of walking with baby (already did my mile today!), and will be starting back up on the Wii this weekend.

I did not cheat yesterday!

...Well,  I did.  Let me explain.

I did great all day, had lovely salads with the BEST dressing (Editor's note:  YOU HAVE TO TRY THIS DRESSING - remove bacon from pan, saute finely chopped onions in bacon fat, add a glug of orange juice (or just juice the orange into the pan) and a teaspoon of English mustard, stir till reduced, pour over salad hot, OM NOM till you are full).  I walked about 2 miles with the kid.  I was at the huge mall, but didn't get anything to eat.  But I knew that the evening was going to be tough, as I had writer's group, which is at a theatre pub, and the ladies always split a bottle of wine.  So, I went.  And I had a glass of wine.  I didn't freak out, I didn't beat myself up over it, I had a glass (and no nibbles!!!), and came home, where hubs had ordered omelette, curry, and rice.  Well, the omelette is perfectly fine, and the curry looked safe enough, so I had that over approximately 1 tablespoon of rice (just enough to give the sauce something to stick to), and that was it.

Technically?  I cheated.  It's supposed to be no alcohol, no rice.  So why don't I call it that?  Because that Puritanical food mindset is one of those things I am trying to break in my head.  Food *doesn't* have to be good or bad, it can just be a carrier of calories, and when I stop vilianizing (and lionizing) certain foods, THAT's when I can begin to feel more in control over my body.

There's a naughty e-card/meme going around that says "Instead of meat, maybe you should give up your contradictory, homophobic religion for Lent.  Just sayin'."  I like that.  Instead of giving something up, I am giving up the mindset that got me into trouble in the first place.

The cravings have begun...

Oh crap, here come the sugar cravings.  I would kick a puppy for a Mars bar.

DAY 1!

Other than extreme gastro pain from last night, doing good!  Took advantage of the stabbing pain to get up early and make myself a veggie omlette with a peach and coffee and glass of water.  Plan today is to take it easy with exercise - it's supposed to be actually nice out in London (light rain for only a few hours, but high of 48F), so I am going to take the baby for a nice long walk in his stroller. I cannot wait to get fit enough to pop him in the baby carrier again! He's fine, it just adds so much weight to my already massive chest I get too winded!

Okay, 273 lbs.  Let's see what you got.

I come from the land of competitive eating, you are surprised?

Yesterday our Yummy Mummy group had their group 1st birthday party.  It was *lovely*, even though Alex was being a snark monster half the time.  Wonderful company, food, drink, and lots of hugs and laughs.  We were getting to the cake cutting, and the couple that brought it said it would feed 20.  My husband joked that I could probably polish off a quarter of the cake in a go, and the poor folks were HORRIFIED, thinking he was being an abusive monster husband and worst, and a crass individual at best.  I had to step in and say while normally that would be considered an insult, in my case, it was actually a boast.

(We are the weirdos in our group, why do you ask?)

I come from the land of competitive eating, and never leaving the table without finishing your plate, even when the plate is 40% larger than other countries' dinnerware.  I come from a land where sugar is in everything, including meat preparation foodstuffs (A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich gives you diabetes!).  I come from the land where a competitive eater gets his own show, where we watch him stuff his body cavity full of food every week, cheering him on like a Gladiator.  I come from the land that calls diets like Paleo 'dangerous', while simultaneously holding the highest record of obesity among all the 1st world nations.

I come from a land of madness, BUT...

I will get over both these mental and physical hurdles.

  

Welcome to Mumsnet readers, and some slight whining about magic pills

First off, welcome to all new Mumsnet readers! I am one half of the family blog Geek Family 2.1 , also on the Mumsnet blogger's network. Glad to have you on board for my weight loss journey. To get you up to speed, read here or just click around. For the rest of you...

SO.  So today I wasted an entire baby's nap looking at pep pills online.  Seriously.  I wasted almost an entire hour reading testimonials that I know are probably bought and paid for talking about how AMAZING these pills are, all in some vain attempt to circumvent the fat-losing process.  I could have spent that hour on the bloody Wii.  Argh.

The plan, as it stands, is to start in earnest on Wednesday, the 22nd.  I'd love to start tomorrow, but I have in the space of the next 5 days:

2 parties, one of which is a group birthday party for my son
1 documentary shooting (can't be mean and going through withdrawal on camera, sorry)
1 sister in law staying for a few days, because...
Hubby is getting wisdom teeth out, and
Baby is getting booster shots.

Screw you to Mars if you think I am going to go through carb withdrawal through THAT.

A vicious circle concerning family and food

I was just talking to my mum on Skype as I was getting baby's food ready.  She was commenting that he seemed very chatty and such, and I said that he woke up STARVING and very happily downed 2 clementine oranges.  (It should be noted that he normally only gets one, but I was peeling for both of us, and he freaked out when he saw mine, and I caved).  A few moments later, she said, and I quote, "It will be so nice in a few months, he can try cereal like Alpha Bits".  I scoffed that I'd like to hold off on him ingesting that much sugar so young (he's 12.5 months), and her answer?

"Ha!  How much sugar does his oranges have?"

o.0

Let's do some math, shall we?

Clementine Orange:  9.2 grams (per 100 grams of orange) of naturally occurring sugars.
Alpha Bits:  37 grams  (per 100 grams of Alpha Bits) of unnaturally occurring sugars, including table sugar and high fructose corn syrup.


Really?  Way to try and make me feel like a shitty mum.  My kid loves oranges - thank God!  He doesn't crave biscuits, he doesn't like cake, he's not even crazy about those baby rice cakes.  He's never had fruit juice (except for when he was very little an incredibly constipated, he had it very watered down), he doesn't drink anything other than milk and water, and will hopefully never have soda.  He loves melon, and apples, and bananas, and carrots, and sweet parsnips.  Shouldn't I be HAPPY that he loves natural foods, versus handing him sugar coated corn treats and calling it a friggin' day?  I guess not.  I guess I have to get shit for feeding him real food, while in the same breath being told to feed him processed food.

Diet Pills, or Magic Weight Loss, or Life Lessons

I've been reading up articles on exercise, trying to get myself pumped up to the thought of sweating in front of strangers on a semi-regular basis. All of them say the same thing, though: The keys to weight loss are exercise and smaller portions. There is no 'magic pill', don't bother - just put the work in, and you will feel great! Besides, hard work builds character! No magic pill? God Almighty, I wish there was. I wish there was a magic diet pill that could make me skinny tomorrow. I wish I could pay £500, take a red pill, and like Neo, fall down the rabbit hole to hottie-ness. Hell, I wish that red pill was a red cookie, as an extra f*ck you to my soon-to-be former chubbiness. I'll even settle for 84 little pills, like - Alli - if it meant a perfect bod. Because I have to tell you, folks, I've got character. I've done all the character building bullshit - moved halfway across the world for love, gotten married, had a horrific pregnancy and 66 hour labor (with every complication you could think of), have a chronic disease, the list goes on and on. I've BUILT up enough character, I'm OWED this magic cookie. And yet, I'm not. I'm not owed anything in this life. None of us are. We get what we get, and we either choose to make the best of it or not. I've made some bad choices along the way, most of them involving massive amounts of chocolate, and now I have to make good choices to make it better. I don't have to like it (in fact, I can hate it ever step of the way), but I have to do it. Might as well get stuck in.

Food is Sexy

I can still remember a meal I had 14 years ago.  It was a little upscale place in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.  I wore a black wool cocktail dress, with low heels.  My fellow patrons were my best friend Joe, and my friend Paul.  I started with a martini, and the appetizer of salad with crab cakes.  We moved to a beautiful bottle of cab sav, and I had the salmon with a weird but delicious berry crust.  The dessert was a tiramisu with honey-spun topping.  We were there for about 3 hours.  The bill for the 3 of us was nearly 250.00, no small sum in 1998 (no small sum now!).  I wept at the end of the meal, it was that glorious.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a foodie.

I love food.  I love making it.  I love eating it.  I love finding new, weird foods.  I love shopping in markets, just browsing and grazing and picking up little handmade things in jars.  I love finding things that gross me out the first time I try it, and that I slowly grow to love (hello, Unagi!).  I love gadgets that make food, make it easier to get the food, make it easier to make the food look sexy.  At some point, I have owned every major foodie gadget out there, from a cheap slap-choppy thing, to an industrial bread maker.  I grow my own veggies, make my own salsas and dips, and lick the plate clean at the end of the day.  I love working around food; I've been everything from a car hop in a 50's themed place, to a dishwasher, to a salad girl at my best friend's mum's eatery, to a bartender at a corporate giant, to management at an high end bistro.  I drool over magazines that show new cake decorating techniques, or how to grill the perfect steak.  I mock cake wrecks.  Even now, with no time and even less room to cook, I still work to make things my family will enjoy - my child's food is all hand prepared by me.  I record my in-laws while they cook, hoping to learn secrets from them, and I try their recipes to more or less failure when they leave.

I love delicious, rich, decadent, delightful, sexy, food.

The trick, then, becomes finding the love in food when it is blander, less exciting, less sexy.  And I know, 'diet' food doesn't have to taste 'diety', but let's all be very very honest with ourselves:  CAROB DOES NOT TASTE LIKE CHOCOLATE.  ICE MILK DOES NOT TASTE LIKE HAGGEN-DAAZ.  AN APPLE DOES NOT TASTE LIKE KRISPY KREME.  Lying and saying, "After awhile, it tastes just the same, even better!" insults my intelligence and your own.  It's going to suck.  But, admitting that salad without dressing won't taste as good as salad with a pound of cheese, bacon bits, croutons, and 1000 Island dressing is a step on the way to accepting that yes, you are going to have to eat it if you want to lose weight.

Wish me luck.  Have a cookie for me.  Send me recipes.  All of the above.

Kate Moss tells lies

Kate Moss once said "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels". And for her, that may be true. Being skinny have made her a household name, and the envy of women everywhere, even those with a bone structure that ensured they could never look like her, no matter how hard they tried. Even now, she makes serious bank on being nothing more than a walking clothes hanger. And yes, I imagine cocaine and cigarettes don't taste all that great, so her quote makes sense for her. But I have to tell you, Kate, I've had some pretty damn fine meals in my time, I don't see skinny topping that any time soon. Just sayin'.

On why I have difficulty saying 'no'. Or rather, all I can say is 'no'.

(In the interest of full disclosure it should be noted that I am writing this while polishing off a large tiramisu from Sainsburys.  You know the one...)

I've always been a bit of a contrarian.  Tell me no, and I'll do it.  Tell me yes, intending to use reverse psychology on me, and I'll punch you in the neck, and then do it.  I like doing things at my pace, and hate being wrangled.  And that's probably why weight loss isn't fun for me - to get from my size, to the size I need to be, I can't work at 'my' pace.  I need to work on a schedule, with some rules laid out. And, I'll need to do it in front of people, something I *hate* doing.

It's weird how one small part of your life can be so intrinsically tied to everything else.  I was mopping the kitchen floor last night, and was stuck by how much I was huffing and puffing.  How much more clean the house could be if I wasn't winded mopping, I thought.  Not that my house is a biohazard, but I could certainly keep a tighter ship.  And my kid - he'll be walking soon.  Will I be a mummy that runs after him in the park, or one that has to sit on the park bench, "to keep an eye on things"?

Tonight I step on the Wii for the unofficial weigh in, so that I don't die of shock when I am at my doctor's office.  I'm looking over meal options, but I think I am going to start with a modified Paleo diet (lots of meat, veggies, no dairy, and no ground grains like bread or pasta, but I will have rice and potatoes).  And yes, it means I'll have to look for a cheap and cheerful exercise class once a week, just so that I am held accountable by other folks around me.

Ugh.  If only taking the weight off was as fun as putting it on.