my stomach thinks my throats been cut

Seriously folks! The problem with being overweight is it didn't take long before I've reached my first brick wall. I am eating healthy as I've talked about in previous blog posts. I have been a busy bee keeping active in the garden my ass is no longer plastered to the couch as much as it used to be.

But.....the scale has not moved in two whole weeks. [btw....my doctor is thrilled with my progress, when he saw me last week.] So back to the scale, not up and not down, not by one tenth of a pound! My mother has one of those fancy digital scales I want to throw it out the window.

I'm sticking to it. I'm eliminating flour or sugar and butter. I'm enjoying veggies, fruit, fish and lean meats, oatmeal, organic yogurt and good olive oil and some eggs and cheese once and a while.

So my dilemma, how do I get over this stuckness? If that isn't a word it is now!

So I did some research and my body has hit its first plateau. Great! And rather quickly I might add. Basically what I've learned is that my body is reacting to the changes in eating habits and lower caloric intake. It's basically thinks it's being starved so it's shut down.

My weight loss has stopped.

Notice how I've used the term eating habits? Diet seems so temporary I'm feeling like this is a life change that I could actually live with.

I found this article which i thought was pretty interesting. And although I don't count calories I am just eating healthy to shed the pounds I think I can use these  principals and apply them to move past this plateau.

Tip#1: Calorie Cycling

In order to lose weight, you need to cut back on your calorie intake. But if you do that for a sustained period of time, your body may play a nasty trick on you: It may start conserving energy by lowering your metabolic rate. The result? You don't burn as many calories and your weight loss slows -- or stops altogether. Although this feels like the worst kind of sabotage, your body is actually trying to look out for you. Your lizard brain has noticed that food supplies seem to have been scarce for an extended period of time. It's trying to increase your chances of survival in case the famine continues. Of course, when you're trying to lose weight, this is not very helpful.

You're stuck between a rock and a hard place: You could try eating even less in order to nudge off more weight, but that just confirms your lizard brain's suspicions about the dwindling food supply. Or, you could eat more in an effort to restore a more robust metabolic rate -- but that's hardly going to help with weight loss. There's a way to outsmart old lizard brain: It's called intermittent fasting, or calorie cycling.

What is Calorie Cycling?

Let's say you've been eating about 1800 calories a day and steadily losing weight. Now suddenly, it's not working anymore. Rather than trying to eat even less every day, try alternating high and low calorie days. For example, you could alternate between 2000-calorie days and 1200-calorie days. Over the course of a week, you'd trim an extra 1400 calories but the higher calorie days should help keep your lizard brain from panicking -- and your willpower from flagging.....

You can read the rest of this Huffington Post article here.
Regardless of the scale not moving I feel great and I notice the clothes are looser. I put on a pair of shorts the other day that were to tight last summer, so that makes me happy. I'd like to see the scale move but I'm not going to let it get me down, or have it throw me off my promise to myself to get healthy. 

I'll let you know how it goes....

And don't forget to visit me over on A-Z where I did a guest post... maybe you missed it!

You can read it  here.

My next post will be a thanks to my friends Jolie over at Precious Monsters and Angela over at Whole Foods Living who were very sweet and each gave me a blog award. I'll be answering some questions and giving you some facts about myself. I thought I'd give them an early shout out now. They are such nice women and they have great blogs. If you haven't done so please go visit them, you won't regret it!

Gastronomic goodness

Things are going well here in healthy land!  Bill and I are still sticking to our pledge to eating and living a more healthy lifestyle. I know I had said in my last blog post that I would share a few recipes and I keep my promises, so here are a few.  I might just stick one at the end on every update since putting a bunch together seems like a lot of reading.  And then I feel guilty about saying anything since the recipes and picture make this blog post look a mile long. 

The big thing I learned this week is people think cottage cheese is a healthy food- and it is in moderation, as you can see it is one of the ingredients in the pancakes. Did you ever read the label of cottage cheese? It had tons of sodium please be aware if you decide to have a dish of it ! tip*when I went to the grocery store different brands had more or less sodium content as much as 100mg. per serving, so check to see.....

These pancakes by the way are awesome...

No Flour No Sugar Pancakes

Ingredients
1/2 cup dry oatmeal [not instant]
1/2 cup fat free cottage cheese
4 egg whites
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1tsp. vanilla
1 packet of stevia  or 2 packets of sweetener of your choice.
Have a small amount of low fat or skim milk handy for thinning the batter if necessary.


You will also need
A blender to blend this mixture.
Pam spray for cooking.
Jam or Jelly that is sugar free to spread atop.


Directions
Blend all the dry ingredients together in one bowl, then blend all the wet ingredients in another. When this is done add them to your blender and blend. I've found that many factors like the oats you use, cottage cheese and the size of your eggs might determine the thickness of your pancake batter. I've always had to add a bit of milk to make it the consistency of real pancake mix.


Spray a twelve in pan with Pam and cook your pancakes three at a time. This recipe yields nine pancakes.  We like to top our pancakes with a tsp of sugar-free jam.

Here's a nice little carrot salad that's good to have with dinner. We just had this the other night with a grilled turkey burger and some fresh steamed green beans....yum!

CARROT SALAD

Ingredients
8 fresh carrots washed unpeeled {organic if you can}
1 tbsp of stevia
3 tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp. black pepper
2 fresh lemons or the equivalent of 1/2 c. lemon juice

Directions
Grate carrots either with a box grater of with the Cuisinart grater, then add all the other ingredients toss and chill. This is a great little salad to add raisins, sun-flour or pumpkin seeds, chives, cranberry raisins. { I like to take my micro-plane grater and put the lemon peel in this salad for extra flavor }I like to serve this in a lettuce cup.

This is a fabulous quick little soup, its filled with healthy vegetables and easy to make. If you don't want to use chicken stock, use veggie stock. If you want a bit of meat add some chicken then again if you don't do meat, add some tofu! Then enjoy!

White Bean Soup with Greens

Ingredients
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 large onion chopped
1 c. tomatoes in bite sized pieces
1/2 c. celery
1/2 c. carrot
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped
2 tsp. of Italian seasoning or 1 tbsp of fresh basil and oregano 
pepper to taste
28 oz. of chicken stock or veggie stock [low sodium]
2 cans of cannellini beans, rinsed
2 cups of greens of your choice, escarole, spinach,  beet greens arugula

Directions 
Heat oil in a large dutch oven or pot on medium heat. Add onion celery, carrot and garlic. Cook for a few minutes until softened then add tomatoes. Then add herbs and continue to stir until the onions look translucent. When that occurs, add stock and brink to a simmer  and cook for 20 minutes or until veggies are tender. At this point add the beans and greens  and cook for an additional 15 minutes. Add pepper to taste. 


This soup tastes yummy especially if you sprinkle it with  Parmesan, Romano or Asiago cheese... if that's your taste or you want to add this to an Italian meal.

I hope you try these recipes, if you do, let me know..

weighing the benefits

I can easily say that I have eaten more fresh vegetables and fruit in the past two weeks than I can remember in my recent memory. Eating fresh foods and excluding sugar and flour has been good for me for many reasons some of which I will touch on in this blog post.

To keep me honest I go over to my Mom's on Saturday mornings with my coffee and weigh in. My first week of healthy eating netted me a loss of 6.3 pounds. I'm pretty proud of myself..

no sadly i am not 16o lbs!

I have not skipped any meals, where before I never ate breakfast. I snack on healthy foods such as unsalted/unsweetened almonds and fruit or organic yogurt. I have not eaten any fast food or cheated, in fact Mom and had dinner out the other night and I had  fish and double veggies. I wouldn't even let the server put the bread on the table! Then a few days later when I went to my hairdresser to get my roots done; Bill and I successfully ate lunch out at a restaurant and didn't eat potatoes we substituted veggies with our lunch, again no bread.

I hadn't mentioned this before but I gave up salt last month which just adds to this little health kick I'm on which is all good. The benefits so far keeping in mind that I haven't and excess salt in six weeks other than in the smallest amounts while cooking. I find that the use of fresh herbs from my garden are a great substitute for adding additional flavor.

What amazes me is that in less than two weeks I'm already feeling and seeing many changes in my body besides this first bit of weight loss.

1. I have not had a migraine. {wouldn't that be a kicker if my neurologist decreased my med's in July when I have my check- up?} 
2. I don't have clogged sinus' especially at night when I lay down, it helps with my snoring.    OK be nice with the comments please :) 
3. I'm sleeping better, my guess the phlegm and snoring might have something to do with this.
4. Although my body still aches they body aching is less and I'm hoping it will go away eventually.
5. My fingernails are growing like crazy and are not splitting like they used to.
6. My skin isn't as dry like it used to be either.
7. No bloating and no edema around my ankles {I had a little if I spent long days on my feet} even the right leg below my healed wound site (shocked about that) 
8. No cravings which is really weird for a carb addict. 

Finding and creating recipes or taking the regular recipes I used to cook and making it into acceptable sugar or flour free recipes will be the subject of my next blog post. 

Stay tuned and I'll share a few of our favorites....with pictures.

do you grocery shop with your eyes open?

Do you grocery shop with your eyes open? From atop my new soap box I would like to tell you I never have.  I've been pretty blind; foolish if you will, big time. The kind of foolish that's had my blood pressure on the rise and the weight packing on a few pounds a year over these past years and before I knew it my girlish size eight figure now had a one in front of it.

Size 18, how the hell did that happen? Bad food choices, that's how!

So as I said in my things ` a changin post hubby and I have made some big changes in our lives.

What happened when we went to the grocery store the first time after committing to those very changes? What changes you ask? Well I'll tell you...cutting out all wheat/flour and sugar from our diets and which basically eating fresh veggies and herbs, all fruit, fish / shell fish, lean meats, yogurts, cheeses, eggs, beans, brown rice....you get the picture.[organic whenever possible]. Activity lots of activity....eventually exercise once the doctor approves something for us when we go later this month.

credit

Needless to say going to the grocery store was an eye opener. We went in the store and spent a good amount of time picking through all the fresh produce, fruit, veggies, herbs. That department is located on the right side of the store, then towards the back corner we stopped by and picked up some fresh fish. Directly along the back we picked up some chicken, turkey, pork tenderloin and some lean beef.  The along the other side of the store we went to the dairy and picked up, low fat milk, organic Greek yogurt, some goats cheese as well as some other cheese selections that we'd use on salads. We pretty much traversed the three sides of the store never visiting one aisle in the middle of the market at all.

Then we realized we did need a couple of other things but our time spent in those inner aisles was minimal, some good olive oil, oatmeal, almonds, brown rice and beans; lot of beans in may varieties!

Then we were gone we paid first though...
No boxes, very few cans [which I now read the labels], no processed foods, nothing frozen, all fresh!
My eyes are open now!
Hopefully my health and girlish figure will return some day in the future....
Or should I say womanish!

There's a lot of money to be saved not spending a lot of time filling my cart with food from middle aisles. My bill at check out is a lot less than it used to be. Now I can't say that I'm not going to be shopping more frequently because it hasn't been long enough to say.

We are already feeling the positive effects from changes and it's only been a week. In my next post will I'll fill you in  on what we've noticed so far.

things a ~ changin

My husband and I have decided to make some changes in our life. Basically we've decided to eat better and live a more healthful life style. We're committed to doing this together, which I would highly recommend doing with your honey.

We have no excuses for being over weight or  lazy  inactive  but that weight; it just seemed to creep up on us pound by pound as did the excuses. So today I write this without offering any excuses for my ass being plastered to the couch or my hand being on the refrigerator door, or the one to many passes thru the drive thru, that my dear blog friend was all me!

And because I'm one for personal accountability I thought I'd just put it out there that this chick will be getting fit, by being more active and eating right. The result will be what I hope is a decent amount of weight loss and a more healthful Jen and other half.

I'd like to share this journey with you as I experience it, and it's my hope you be be rooting for me-us.

Let me just say my first visit to the grocery store with my new attitude about eating and was a trip- what an eye opener.

I'll tell you about it in my next post....stay tuned.