Bleah. I am sick. I woke up this morning with a sore throat and that kind of feverish feeling you get when you've got the flu. I am not a happy bunny. I'm great at injury and stuff like that, but being sick turns me into a whiny annoyed baby, especially when it's like this, sick but not so sick that you just want to sleep.
And I've been craving junk food all day.
Probably because I've been sitting around all day scanning a novel whose ending I could see coming halfway through, watching bad TV, and reading everything I can think of on the computer. I am so bored I could scream.
So, food.
Quiche and protein shake as usual. But Michael heated up the quiche this morning, and he'd been rummaging in the refrigerator before that, so he added a little of the leftover steak from Sunday to the plate... maybe 3 oz.? A weird combination, I have to say. He has been moving around a lot more these day few days, which from an overall health point of view is great, but he also keeps handing me food, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. Today I've had 2 small slices of Cheddar, 2 crackers with hummus, 2 chicken wing segments, and a bowl of soup from Sunday. The soup was the only one of those things that I made. I think I need to start slipping things to the dog...
For dinner, we had beef stir-fry. Light on the beef, heavy on the lower-carb vegetables, so I feel ok about this.
Then we had some dessert. If you read about the great Jell-O pudding experiment, I have an update.... BAD idea. This very pretty dessert picture is the almond milk version of the instant pudding with a few berries.
The trouble is, the pudding, which tasted really ok when I made it, became incredibly bitter as it sat for a day. The runny soy milk version was not a lot better, so I tossed all of it. And had a sugar-free chocolate.
I am just hoping that I feel a lot better tomorrow. I had the day off teaching, fortunately, but I have two lectures tomorrow, and if my throat doesn't feel better, it is not going to be fun.
And here's a bonus picture of the dog, who I think is going to be getting some extra snacks... although what he really needs is a good brushing.
If you enjoyed the Aristotle quote yesterday, here's a related one... "We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action." This week, I am thinking, perhaps I can become more at peace by performing more peaceful actions.
Weight Wednesday a.m. -2.2
Oh, ugh, it was not a good food day yesterday, not really. And I don't have pictures much, either, except one gorgeous dinner pic.
So yesterday was a quiche-making, and I tried making two at once, to save some later in the week time, but I'm not sure that this really was a time-saver. It's pretty quick to make this anyway, and doubling the recipe just made it fiddly and something I actually had to think about.
We had quiche and protein shake for breakfast as usual. This morning I made the protein shake with soy milk instead of almond, which was not a great idea, double the calories and not really a taste improvement. I'd bought some soy milk for the great Jell-O pudding experiment...which I'll digress to tell you about here, on the off chance that anyone else cares about this. Michael likes those Jell-O sugar free pudding cups, but they always seem to me to be a huge money ripoff, so I started making the sugar-free instant pudding at home, really easy. But then I noticed that if you make this at home, it's actually about double the carbs of the cups (the sweetners are different, but I can't really tell why else). So I thought, let's try making this with a lower-carb alternative like soy milk or almond milk. I tested this Sunday with the sugar-free white chocolate pudding and unsweetened vanilla almond and soy milk. Result: Both way taste great, actually better than the original pudding, in my opinion. But the almond milk thickens the pudding about 60% of what it should be, and the soy milk thickens it not at all, so you have yummy vanilla/white chocolate soup. I have absolutely no idea why this happens, and if anyone understands the chemistry, I'd really like to know.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled program...
Quiche and protein shake for breakfast. Then they were having a lunch thing at school, so I had some sliced roast beef (hard to guess how much? Couldn't take a picture. Maybe 4-6 oz.) and two slices of Swiss cheese. Then say through a meeting with a plate of chocolate chip cookies behind me, breathing chocolate aroma. I did not have any cookies (ok, partly because I know that the campus food servce cookies smell great but are actually pretty nasty), but it made me think a lot about how much easier it is to maintain eating the way that I prefer to when I'm not in a room filled with chocolate aroma and people eating potato chips. Got home and was hungry, and instead of eating something sensible, I ended up picking at things until dinner... a chicken wing segment, a couple of slices of leftover steak from the other night, a spoonful of hummus.... and I didn't take pictures...
And then for dinner, we had this lovely curry. Excellent, but I have to say, with chickpeas and tomatoes, more carbs than I'd prefer. And then I nibbled a slice of cheese and a few pork rinds before bed, and that's really got to go. I can't say that I'm at all happy with what I ate yesterday.
So I've been doing this photo food thing for a week, and I'm trying to figure out if it's doing some kind of good. On the plus side... my weight was down 2.5 lbs. for the week, and I've been having a terrible time losing weight at all, so that's pretty good. It's also deterring me from eating extra crap (although we have to give me a big FAIL for that yesterday). And I feel better. But as always, if this makes any sense, I'm having a hard time connecting exactly what I eat with how my weight changes. So I think I'm going to add the change in my weight for the day (Monday, +0.9). I realize that there are a lot of issues about charting daily weight and that a lot of fluctuations are random, but let's see if it makes any difference. I also think that there's a portion size issue here. I mean, look at the curry. I know it's hard to get any sense of scale (plus ravenous teenage boy ate twice that plus rice), and it was my only real meal of the day, but still, I wonder if I should be eating half of that.
On another note... MizFit's comment yesterday reminded me of the Aristotle quote, "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way." (Yes, I had to look that up, and in the process, realized that Aristole said a lot of good stuff that I either didn't realize was attributed to him or I had totally forgotten. Check it out here.)
There are, I suppose, lots of ways to read and think about that, but I think about it two ways... first, that when we act in particular ways repeatedly, we reinforce those actions until we become that thing. Secondly, if we want to be something different, we need to behave in different ways... and what we are will follow. I quit smoking years ago by choosing to act like a nonsmoker. I can choose now to act like what I want to be. Although some days, it's hard to know what that is...
For dinner, we had beef stir-fry. Light on the beef, heavy on the lower-carb vegetables, so I feel ok about this.
If you enjoyed the Aristotle quote yesterday, here's a related one... "We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action." This week, I am thinking, perhaps I can become more at peace by performing more peaceful actions.
