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Five easy pieces

I’m home from two weeks working away and 3 pounds heavier on the scales this morning. But since being a healthy weight is all about doing the best you can and climbing right back on the wagon every morning, that’s what I’m doing.

I’m giving myself tiny pats for ordering light beers or single glasses of wine (who can afford more than one?) in restaurants, for putting no butter on bread, for skipping lots of bread, for skipping red meat, for sharing dessert (even if the Carrabba’s tiramisu is 1,440 calories per serving OMG I swear I didn’t know!), for eating breakfast and a small, healthy lunch daily. For walking and for (almost) keeping up with my yoga and my calorie-counting on livestrong.com.

And when I didn’t do so well — like, for instance, the evening my host came home with a basketful of little glassine bags filled with The Fresh Market’s most irresistible candies (packaged like any other drug of choice) — my body smacked me upside the head the next morning with a sugar hangover to beat all. ‘Just a reminder,’ it said. ‘Take care of me, and I’ll take care of you.’

So the next night, after a healthy dinner of chicken, collards, lentils and bread at an Ethiopian restaurant, I came home and chose exactly 5 pieces of that dratted candy — 3 sour pumpkins, 1 peanut butter malted milk ball and 1 cashew and white chocolate. I knew if I had none, the candy’s presence would gnaw at me until I ate too much (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it). So I ate 5 and quit. I was actually very proud of myself for the quitting part. (And, BTW, there was nothing easy about it!)

I came home Friday night and soon after our friends Jody and John arrived from Virginia. Our late supper was Port-A-Pit smoked chicken and squash casserole (I knew P-a-P chicken was terrific, had no idea how much we’d like the squash), slaw and an apple crisp and vanilla ice cream. I ate no seconds, drank a lite beer and took it easy on the half-fat ice cream. Figured today’s another day, and indeed, it is. The omelet whiz himself is making egg white omelets with Cubanelle peppers from the garden, and then we’re biking. Onward, upward (or downward in the case of my weight).

Cooking buddy Beryl found this recipe in the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook and I’ve never used another since. It is perfection and easier than pie!

June’s Apple Crisp

Heat the oven to 350. Fill a pie pan with peeled apple slices. Drizzle the juice of one lemon over the apples. In bowl mix 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon. Using 2 forks or fork and pastry blender, cut in 1 stick butter until mixture resembles a coarse meal.

Gently press topping over apples, sealing to edges if you can (no biggie if you can’t — the juices are going to bubble up no matter). Bake for 1 hour or until top is golden and you see those luscious bubbles.

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Exercise, good food, Restaurant eating while dieting, Weight loss

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Out of my comfort zone

I had to pack up my lunchbox and water bottles this week and move to a friend’s home about 70 miles away for some temp work. I was much more anxious than I’d have predicted — kind of like a recovering drunk, I guess, leaving her support group. I wasn’t taking my bike, didn’t really know the walking places, wouldn’t be in my kitchen and wouldn’t have round-the-clock access to livestrong.com and my obsessive calorie-counting.

It’s been interesting. My biggest NSV (non-scale victory) has been coming home mid-week this first Wednesday, snacking all the way home, entering my calories-in and calories-out on the computer and eating nothing else that night. I don’t expect I’ll have lost anything by the end of these two weeks, but maybe I won’t have gained either which, I guess, will be an SD (scale detente).

There are wonderful places to walk around my friend’s condo (and more dogs than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life) and lots of people out at all hours walking. Combined with 15 daily minutes of yoga, that’s good exercise for these 10 work days. (Even with the clearly marked bike lanes everywhere, I’m chicken to ride my bike in city traffic.)

When I lived in Charlotte for 10 years, I was a single mother of two, working my first fulltime job. My friend’s condo is in our old neighborhood and what’s surprising is not how much has changed in the 23 years since I left, but how little. Surrounded by that old environment, I recognize suffocating feelings of loneliness and dependency, wanting nurture. Which translate to wanting to eat. I did fairly well recognizing and managing that until Thursday night when I was tired. Cravings + fatigue = deadly tendency to eat in effort to “feel better.”

In the words of Anthony Bourdain in “Medium Raw” (HarperCollinsPublisher, 2010): “Where was my reward for all this self-denial? Shouldn’t I have been feeling good? If anything, all that relative sobriety pointed up a basic emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life, a hole I’d managed to fill with various chemicals (read: foods) for the better part of twenty-five (read: sixty-six) years.” 
 
My friend shared some of the Kona coffee and pineapple shortbreads she brought back from Hawaii in January, and I managed not to finish the entire box, even though she said they needed to be eaten. I did eat five (250 unnecessary calories) and felt better but not as masterful as I’d have felt if I’d had a glass of skim milk (80) and gone to bed.
 
I can’t pat myself too hard for not finishing the box because — like sex — I’ve kept most of my overeating private through the years. If you don’t see me eat that box of Wheat Thins, I didn’t, and we’ll ascribe my pudge to genes, etc.
 
We ate four suppers out and that was also a challenge because — even though dining out is shared and public — my friends wouldn’t judge or probably even think about my scarfing down a bacon cheeseburger with home-made potato chips and ranch dip.
 
The tricks for me seem to be complex carbs (like carrot sticks or fruit) before I go out and something that will take lots of time to chew while in the restaurant. Something like the wonderful, if over-priced, salad I had Thursday afternoon with two beloved former newsroom buds: Baby greens and lots of them, a lemon-thyme vinaigrette and a balsamic reduction, orange slices, a few candied pecans and three light-as-air goat cheese croutons. That kept me occupied through two Amstel Lights and lots of laughter.

I’ve eaten white beans braised with fresh rosemary and Mediterranean tuna salad (no mayo), black bean and corn cakes with tomatillo salsa, as well as the best salmon cakes and hushpuppies I’ve ever had in a restaurant. Friday He Who Ate Peanut Butter While I Was Gone and I had take-out shrimp tacos and Asian chicken salad from the Cluck ‘n’ Cup in my office building.

On Monday it starts again and I’ll struggle again to find some inner discipline, a structure, to which I can cling while staggering along this healthy eating path. My problem — in an unsalted almond nutshell — is that I’ve always looked outside myself for that structure. To a software program, a weight-loss organization, a diet buddy, a blog….Inside me, I find only cookies and more cravings.

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Exercise, Restaurant eating while dieting, Weight loss

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Harlequin glorybower and an NSV

Isn’t that a wonderful name for a tree? I just love saying  it, ever since I identified the perfumey trees blooming at the foot of our drive. If the wind’s blowing toward you, the sweet smell of the honeysuckle-like pink and white flowers is almost overpowering, but what else do we have to smell in mid-August? And, at least a month before the purple asters take over, nothing else is blooming besides the last of the sunflowers and some rather timid zinnias.

If you look it up, every source emphasizes that the non-invasive native of China and Japan doesn’t look like much except when it’s blooming. And it doesn’t — the plain-Jane foliage and droopy limbs look rather blowsy standing down there at the mailbox. But, oh, when it flowers, not only is the air alive

Harlequin glorybower in full flower

with the smell, the flowers are covered, make that blanketed, in butterflies.

When we walk past, it looks like an entire tree might lift skyward as all the swallowtails  take off for a moment. Yellow and black wings vibrate on every square inch.

He Who Rides the Fields on a Tractor found these in a fencerow years ago, brought them home and stuck them in the ground. Not only have the originals thrived — they’ve multiplied. And, truth to tell, blowsy suits our landscaping with its shaggy forsythia, wisteria and mock orange.

Walking past the h.g.c.’s with Panda the Pushy Pit Bull dragging me down and back up North Meadow Road in another sailor-take-warning sunrise, I was thinking about “can’t” and “don’t”. As in I can’t eat that or I don’t. Can’t implies I’m helpless before something; don’t, that I have the discipline to simply not eat it. So I don’t eat much sugar anymore, and I feel better for it.

Last night, though, at the Prickly Pear “modern Mexican” restaurant in Mooresville, I chose to eat some, both in the mango cheesecake (not worth the calories, even for half a slice) and a regular-size margarita with cactus (so worth it!) But I didn’t fall lemming-like over the cliff — I got home and ate nothing else for the evening. So I can say I don’t eat too much. Yay, me! Another NSV (non-scale victory — a Weight Watchers term) like my waist “shrinking” to 39 inches. First time out of the 40s in a couple of decades! I think I can, I think I can.

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Restaurant eating while dieting, Rural life, Weight loss

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Hysteria on the lips and hips

Getting rid of these 27 pounds has been so gradual (8 months) that I didn’t realize until I tried yesterday that I could fit into the orange linen cropped pants I bought on clearance a year ago. And when I’m thinking at 8 o’clock every night about another helping of  whatever, I also tend to forget what a good thing it is to get rid of this dead weight.

I italicize  because I’m a true hysteric, which is part of the weight problem. Moderation in all — for that matter, any- — things is as alien to us drama queens as growing blue hedgehog quills or popping out  steel fingernails. Feel miserable? Eat a bucket of something and feel miserable in a different way. Feel just so-so? Eat anything because not feeling wonderful or awful is not really feeling. Oy, as  my better-balanced friends would say.

But these days when my hand brushes against the beginnings of a defined hip, I also think, hmmm. Another 21 pounds and that might be a hip without a baggy stomach next to it and wouldn’t that be cool? I saw a photo of myself with the stray dog we’re trying to get rid of and thought, My legs (in shorts) look not bad. Which means another bike ride this morning. And eating intelligently all day today before we go to Keaton’s Barbecue with friends tonight.

I’ll aim for lots of water today, along with bushels of vegetables, fruit, some cottage cheese for breakfast and an egg white omelet for lunch. I’ve looked online at the Keaton’s menu and know I want to save fat grams for their mac ‘n’ cheese or banana pudding. I’m learning to eat vinegar-y “barbecue” slaw and to skip the mayonnaise-based alternative when eating out. I’ll enjoy my barbecued chicken with as little  skin and sauce as possible, savoring the moist, seasoned dark meat for itself.

The recipe’s a secret — really, the owners wouldn’t share with Roadfood or The Splendid Table. If you want, you can go to their website (link above) and order some for yourself. While ordering, you’ll listen to Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful,” one of those non-food pleasures that brighten the corners where we are.

And, of course, note to self: The reason for eating out is the sociability of the occasion, not the piggability. I think I can, I think I can…….

 

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Restaurant eating while dieting, Weight loss

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No fair!

In only 4 days, I got hornswoggled twice by restaurant salads. You’d think I’d have learned the first time when a signature chopped salad amounted to hundreds more calories and fat grams than I figured.

But, nooooooo. Last night He Who Must Be Obeyed and I had a early light supper, meeting halfway between where I’d been working all day and where he was going to work at night. I won’t name the restaurant, but  it’s a national chain with fruit in the name. And they’ve currently got a big advertising push going on TV for their under 500-calorie meals.

So I see a half portion of their grilled chicken salad on the menu with that same piece of fruit next to it. Silly me, I figured the fruit meant it was healthy! Big fat hah! Emphasis on the ‘fat.’

That half salad, I discovered when I put it into my Livestrong.com daily plate has 682 calories and 42 fat grams, not to mention 1340 grams of sodium. How do you do that to a salad?

It was tasty. Nice, fresh romaine lettuce, a bit of grilled chicken and some almond slices I could have read through. The dressing must be made from rendered hog fat, that’s all I can figure. (If you order it without dressing, the calorie count drops to 320 and the fat gram tally, to only 17.)

But I could have eaten a rare, lean steak for less fat, calories and sodium. In fact, I’m headed to the kitchen now to toss about 4 ounces of poached chicken breast with some lovely buttercrunch from the garden and one tablespoon of Ken’s Steakhouse Lite Balsamic Vinaigrette. I expect the calorie count to be about one-third of last night’s.

So, here’s my point, national chains of restaurants. If you can’t make the nutritional content of your recipes as easy to access as McDonald’s where it’s on the back of every paper placemat, don’t count on my business. I need to know calories, fat grams and sodium content. I know you know it and I know you’re not helping the obesity epidemic with diet boobytraps in what should be healthy entrees.

Some municipalities have discussed trying to legislate salt content in restaurant offerings. I don’t care if some things are high in sodium, just let us know which. And, P.S., I dropped another pound this morning (27 so far) so maybe that hog fat has some other beneficial properties!

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good food, healthy cooking, Restaurant eating while dieting, Weight loss

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