Archive for Health and Fitness

Nom-age

February 14, 2012 Health and Fitness 2 comments

We’ve been cooking most of our meals over the last week. That’s not saying much, I guess, but I feel like we’ve been cooking better meals and that’s what counts (even though we ended up having cheap fast food more times than we would have liked). It should because I spent a heck of a lot of time working on it last week too. So here’s basically what we made:

Lemon Rosemary Salmon with Carrots that we baked with it (lemony-rosemary carrots are *so* good)

Butter Bean Soup <mine is very similar minus the dill, bayleaf, and olive oil. I use Marjoram and 4 cups of water with some dry chicken broth in addition to the crushed tomatoes – my recipe is actually from my Mother-in-law. I also threw this in the crockpot and let it cook all day so I didn’t have to think about it.

Three Bean Pasta E Fagoli from Rachel Ray’s Look + Cook cookbook. We froze what was left of both soups after we had them for lunch the next day. I still have some of this in the freezer. I had to substitute the noodles though and got just small shells, and we didn’t get the fancy cheese because we couldn’t find it. :P

Corn, Rice, and Bean Burritos from one of our Taste of Home magazines. They were almost as good as this one local hole-in-the-wall burrito place and would have been really good with some kind of sweet potato salsa thing. But I don’t know how to make that, I just like how Bruce’s Burritos does it. I think we had salad with cucumbers with this one. We’ve beent trying to use up our lettuce, so we’ve had a few green salads interspersed all week.

Alex made Spaghetti with an amazing salad (and bread! but he didn’t make the bread) for dinner on Monday. Alex had taco’s and I had breakfast for dinner on Sunday (our cooking-ness takes a break on the weekends).

I’m going to attempt to make a kind of “fauxtisserie” chicken breast with…something for dinner for Valentines.

And then I get to start this all over again. Joy (not).

I think I’m going to go through the Slow Cooker Revolution cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen for ideas this week.

Because I love Pinterest

February 7, 2012 Health and Fitness 2 comments

I finished going over the last two fitness books from the library and came to the conclusion that I actually like using pinterest for finding exercises. Some of the exercises in The Perfect Body Diet I actually have pinned on my fitness tips board.

The Mayo Clinic book was very nice though, and I’m glad I skimmed it. I like their approach and if I hadn’t figured out more of what I was doing last week I think I would have gotten more from it. They were very gentle which I liked and took a lot of care in talking about things like self-image in and how your self-esteem/mood/body image relates to getting healthy. They suggest things besides just exercising – like writing notes to yourself and confidence boosting activities, which I do occasionally (write notes to myself) when I’m feeling particularly happy with humanity for those moments that I know I’m going to need it (like today).

Pinterest Motivation

from pinterest

me + food = meh

January 31, 2012 Health and Fitness No comments

I realized earlier today, that I think the reason I enjoy food significantly less than everyone else is because I have no real emotional connection to it. I eat food because I have to as my body dislikes starvation. While I appreciate good food, and I have a handful of foods that I will be very happy if you serve me (dark chocolate, pizza, and mac & cheese) I don’t enjoy it like everyone else I know seems to. I wonder if it’s because food and I are less emotionally connected and if that’s part of the reason I only eat when I’m hungry and (generally) don’t eat more than I need to. I don’t eat for non-hunger reasons (like boredom or sadness or happiness) with the exception of being held captive by hormones that send me into a depressed and munchie ravage.

So today, I did something that I really don’t enjoy.

recipe quest

Finding recipes. I dread it and try to avoid it as much as possible usually, but something else hit me today.

I’m doing this because I think I’m worth it, and no one else can do this for me.

I want to eat healthier and cook healthier not because I’m a good wife, or I enjoy the process of making a good meal for my husband, because honestly, I don’t. I hate loathe the process and I have no satisfaction in cooking at all (thankfully my good-wifey-ness isn’t subject to my kitchen performances); but I finally think that I’m worth the effort, as much as I might hate the process.

So jumping into the annoying finding-recipes-and-making-lists quest I was able to write down some interesting bits of information I found from the encyclopedia, and hit with a little bit of genius, I came up with something to potentially solve the ever frustrating problem of not knowing what to do with leftover produce (you know, before it turns into goo).

Produce & Uses Chart

I’m coming to the scary realization that taking this healthy eating thing on for myself means I need to actually put effort into finding food and using it and maybe even doing more cooking (sad). So if I can streamline some of that process to limit the amount of “I don’t know what to do with it” coma’s that I inevitably fall into, that might help me feel better about getting foods that expire in a week.

In the meantime, I’ll keep reminding myself that me and my health are worth the uh, torture of potential meal planning…and I’ll keep switching between Spongebob and MSNBC while I’m at it, because that seems to help.

Workouts on the Second Floor

January 31, 2012 Health and Fitness No comments

I’ve said this before – I live in a second floor apartment and someone lives under me. We don’t have carpet, so there’s nothing to soak up the sound. We try to be as quiet and considerate as possible which makes exercises like jumping or jogging in place kind of hard to do. I even tip toed through some of the kinect fitness stuff because I didn’t want to land too hard.

Amazingly, when looking for exercises it’s hard to find ones that are really good for people who have to equipment (not even a yoga mat) and live above someone in an apartment complex. The easy go-to’s are kind of off limits to overly considerate apartment dwellers.

But I found one website on pinterest, that lets you select a region you’d like to work out and lists a variety of exercises to choose from.

It’s Divine.ca and at night, before I go to bed I’ve been doing the Inner Thigh Sculptor and the Leg Raise. They all take place on the floor and use your bodyweight, so it works well and I can feel my muscles working. The other exercise I’ve been experimenting with I also found on pinterest from Tracy Anderson called the Thigh Trimmer.

I usually just sit on floor and watch whatever’s on while I do them. The hardest part is that my cat thinks it’s time to rub against me while I’m stretching. I love doing these at night because my muscles feel much more relaxed and comfortable before bed.

Later today, or this week I’ll go through the exercises from the library book and see about incorporating some of them too.

I don’t like diets

January 25, 2012 Health and Fitness No comments

I find them restricting and complicated. I need something simple, just like, what do I need to eat to be healthy and how much? A drag and drop system would be lovely, and maybe I’ll make one someday. I went to the library the other day and brought home 4 books, remarkably, after flipping through most of them before coming home, the most helpful (so far) has been Food Rules.Food Rules

It’s kind of…perfect, and freeing. I was almost lamenting the other day about how if I’m really serious about this (and I am), it seems so complicated that it’s probably going to turn my life on it’s head and I’m going to need to become a food/nutrition guru just to be healthy. Unfortunately, as nice as that is…it’s not really my personality and the idea of putting all of my energy into some kind of plan just seemed…daunting and a bit suffocating.

Library Books

Especially with the books I brought home. Admittedly, I brought them all home for different reasons. Food Rules seemed like it’d be a great guide (and it is!), the Mayo Clinic book has colorful charts, and The Perfect Body Diet I ironically didn’t get for it’s diet, but because it lists and describes some interesting exercises that I think I can do in my second floor apartment. Ideally, I’ll get a $10 yoga mat, because I don’t like slipping on my hard floors. The um, encyclopedia I got because it’s an encyclopedia and seemed handy, though it’s remarkably hard to hold open.

Maybe I’ll garner up the nerve to watch Food Inc. on netflix. Food Rules was great in that it explained everything clearly and took off a lot of the pressure I was feeling to focus on individual elements in food, rather than how healthy and processed it is as a whole. So while they’re important I feel less need to think “okay, I’ve eaten 8 grams of protein and now I need to eat 12 grams of  vitamin __” because honestly, that was just stressing me out.

As much as I want to lose weight, I want to be healthy more. I’m not sick, but I’m definitely not exactly healthy either. I think that if I can eat well (which sadly means cooking, but I’ll be 21 in February so maybe if I drink a glass of wine while torturing myself by cooking, it’ll be more tolerable…and also healthy. Though I guess it’s better to have with food…but I’ll experiment) then my weight (and possibly hormones) will start to balance out as well.

This weeks’ diet of frozen dinners and ramen noodles has definitely angered my system enough for me to be open to change (I don’t think there was any chicken in my nuggets :S). The biggest and most helpful thing I’ve gleaned from Food Rules is basically that the biggest thing is how processed everything is. If you can stay away from as much processed stuff as possible and eat small/proper amounts (and lots of plants) of food in moderation, then you’re good. Which for me means I’m not restricted with what I make or what I eat, as long as it’s in moderation (which I kinda have down, because I get sick if I don’t :P ) and as un-processed as possible.

While I don’t feel the need (or have a big enough wallet) to go to whole foods every week (as ideal as that would be) I’m okay (now) with spending more, for better quality food and shorter shelf life. Food Rules in combination with this article kinda helped with that. I tend to be a bit uptight when it comes to buying food…since I don’t particularly enjoy it anyway.

So that’s a step.

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