Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Week 11 summary

Last week I had a really good week! I made the 160s!! My body likes to stall at 170 a lot of the time, then I start gaining and losing the same few pounds.

Today's weigh-in: 168.5 - 2.5 pounds.

The weekends are definitely a problem, but not going to beat myself up about it because while I did have ice cream and some Popeyes fried chicken, I did not have popcorn, multiple ice cream trips or any junk foods at the many places we went.

I dubbed the three-day weekend "The Weekend of the Bean Burrito!" (my daughter). We spent a ton of quality time together, I unplugged a good bit of the weekend. We went skating, to the spray pad, to the playground, to see Angry Birds (no popcorn did sort of put a spoiler on that one - movie was really good though). We read a bunch of books together and watched movies at home. Anybody seen Goosebumps with Jack Black? That was also really good.

We didn't have any barbecue and that's ok. This time of year always makes me miss my grandfather who was at the beaches on D-Day. He passed away a couple of years ago and I still miss him and my grandmother terribly. That time in the military set the path for a not-so-great life for him, but I value the sacrifices both him and my grandmother made for our freedom.

Some of the eats from last week:


Amy's Butternut Squash Soup - I'm a big fan of Amy products, but not this one. Way to bland and dense.


Homemade salad with baked chicken and peaches.


I used to be into breakfast bars until I realized they made me even more hungry. But these Clif Bars are outstanding and don't have too many bad-for-you ingriedients.


Sometimes we go to a cheesesteak restaurant. No cheesesteak for me, but this chicken chef salad was not that good. 


Roasted bell peppers with quinoa, cheese, onions and parsley. Very good but today I brought Cajun seasoning to spice it up.

This week I'll try a couple of new things and spice up some of the old recipes. I'm very excited for this four-day work week and am looking forward to another fun weekend. Hope you had a great weekend!








Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Roasted cauliflower

One of my friends introduced me to a roasted cauliflower. ROASTED CAULIFLOWER!?!?! Yes, and believe it or not, it's quite good. I am not a big cauliflower fan. It's kind of eh, blah, on my salads.

I really like cauliflower rice because you can season it up with onions, parsley and whatever you choose! But it's a bit time consuming to chop up the cauliflower for the rice dish.

For those with busy evenings (too busy to spend hours on a side dish), I give to you the roasted cauliflower!



 It's quite lovely and weird, no?

The recipe is from NomNomPaleo and is here.

The above picture was my cauliflower and here is NomNomPaleo's cauliflower. I'm so excited they sort of look similar!



Just be warned it will make your house smell for a bit. 

I ate the cauliflower as a side with baked chicken too. Good combination. I think, however, next time I will add Cajun seasoning to spice it up. 

Total cooking time was an hour and a half. But you literally wash it, cut off the middle, sprinkle oil oil, salt, put aluminum foil over it and stick it in the oven.




Monday, May 23, 2016

Week 10 summary

Gahhh, I had to redo this post. Blogger is a real pain sometimes. It didn't include my pics. Let's try this again, I lost 3.5 pounds!! I really worked this week on reigning in my diet. It worked out really good until the weekend. I see weekends are the biggest problem for me.

So now I'm at 171.0. I can tell I lost an inch or so based on my clothes.

So let me try this again with the pics. My pics will never be pretty. Props to bloggers who have beautiful food pics, but I'm not talented like that.


Chicken Enchilada Soup - homemade, but was more of a stew. This was fantastic!


Chicken Ceasar Salad from the local Mexican restaurant. This is my favorite item on the menu.


Baked catfish with sweet potato with butter and cinnamon. 


Applegate sausage - spinach and feta with a few eggs.


Post kindergarten graduation Izzos' salad.


Celebration custard with Reeses! Perfect sweets cheat for the week! Amazing and this small probably still has 800 calories. Oh, well. My daughter survived kindergarten (and so did I)!!

So this week will be more of the same. Going to watch my diet. Surprisingly I did not have a lot of withdrawal symptoms. I cut out dairy and grains the first four days. I was very tired though, but other than that I held up well. I think it's because the foods I ate were healthy with lots of nutrients. Cherries anyone? I also drank a ton of water. Back at it today.

Hope you had a good weekend!






Monday, May 16, 2016

Week 9 summary

Well, the wheels fell off last week and it's both good and bad. Basically my knees are shot. I'm not surprised by this and I already have an action plan.

The main goal right now is to lose weight. Now I'm not talking anything ridiculous like 20 pounds in a month, but I'm going to chip away at this in a patient grasshopper way. Which sucks, but considering I'm about 14 pounds heavier than I was at my first half three years ago I'm not doing myself any favors by running and eating with the same diet I've had.

That diet would be 'everything in moderation' - which ends up being - 'no one can eat just ONE.'

So I'm going to buckle down for a few weeks and see where that leads me. Worst case scenario - I lose nothing and have to figure out something else. Best case scenario - I lose a few pounds and lighten the load on my knees and feet. Worst case scenario - I miss out on my favorite foods. Best case scenario - I replace those junk foods with foods that will nourish me.

So let's talk numbers, I'm at 174.5 this morning. I've got my spreadsheet ready, I've got my lunch and supper for today already prepared, I've had my cup of coffee sans creamer and sugar, I've got my 32-ounce ice water ready to tackle this week.


It's a shock, but black coffee is not all that terrible!


Monday, May 9, 2016

Week 8 summary

Well, I've been officially doing this workout routine for two months now. I'd like to say it's helped me lose weight. It hasn't. HAHAHAHAHH!!! BUT, I can tell I'm getting physically stronger. So, I'm really happy about that.

And I'm happy I've made it through two weeks of running (3 days a week). This is a very joyous occasion for me.

So, let's get to the stats, they aren't great, but they are improving somewhat:

Wednesday - 1 mile - 16:11 - this is inaccurate because I was having watch issues, but I'm quite sure I was not faster than a 15-minute mile.

Thursday - weights - my usual 8-pound weights routine (I guess it's actually 16 pounds total? I am not sure how to measure that)

Friday - 1 mile - 15:03 - ooooh, so close to 14. So close, but no dice. My legs were tired and I had to really talk myself into getting out there. The payoff was the weather was amazing! A nice chill in the air.

Saturday - 1 mile - 15:07 - I ran two days in a row because I knew the next day we were going to the New Orleans Zoo. I didn't want to walk at the zoo all day on tired legs. Well, after that 1-mile run Saturday my legs were trashed. And then Sunday we spent about 4 hours at the zoo walking. So needless to say I wasn't surprised I was 3 seconds slower.

Overall I feel like I'm doing ok. I was supposed to start 2 miles - three times a week this week. I felt like I just wasn't ready. A huge part is my fear of getting injured again. I feel like compared to all these people I see on Instagram doing shitloads of cross training, maybe I'm not doing enough.

I'm going to attempt the Hansons Half-Marathon Method (maybe). And they say it's ok to do cross training, but the theory is if you want to get better at something specific, you need to focus on that. I want to be a better runner. Period. I'm not interested in getting toned up (although I want to lose weight), I don't necessarily want to look good in a bikini, I don't want to lift 200 pounds, I'm not trying to win some competition. I just want to be a better runner.

Hansons emphasizes over and over you can't cross train a day and have that as your substitute for a run. If you want to be a better runner, you have to put in the mileage. I agree with that because even though I'm running a very slow mile, I'm beat. But in a good way.

This week certainly had it's challenges. I talked about in the last post my daughter's friend's leukemia diagnosis. For a number of reasons that aren't worth getting into, this has brought back a lot of bad memories from my experience with cancer. I've explained to my daughter what is going on with her friend and what happened to me. I'm just praying and hoping that the treatments will help her BFF. She's a lovely and sweet girl and it's hard to see her beat down by this. Her mom - gah, I just can't imagine how she's holding up so well.

I had a fantastic Mother's Day and through all the challenges of being a mom, I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. When I had my cancer, they told me to expect to NOT be able to get pregnant and here I am...the mom of a 6-year-old.

In the grand scheme of things, a pace goal, losing weight, or even doing well in a race is very small. My main goal is to be a good mom.

And because I have zero pics in this post, here is a picture of Krispy Kreme donuts we had on the way to the zoo yesterday. I'll be honest, I like Mary Lee donuts better. LOL!!!!



Wednesday, May 4, 2016

May The Fourth Be With You!

Next to the day of the Boston Marathon, today is one of my favorite days of the year on social media. Oh, the creativity! If you aren't a Star Wars fan, yeah, today probably sucks for you. My apologies. Today is also my husband's birthday. So it's a celebration yo!


Tonight we have plans to go out to a local diner-type-cafeteria-style place for supper. It's not a place I would pick, but he luvvssss this place so off we will go. I am picking up a cookie cake for him as well. 

I got my run in this morning before work. The weather was AMAZING! I'm drinking coffee right now, can you tell I'm wound up? In all seriousness though, it was in the high 50s, low 60s when I ran. I only look at the weather to see if it will rain and never pay attention to the temps. I walked outside my door and ahhhhhhhhh, so happy.

My Soleus watch (I will write a review about this watch soon) worked great. But when I went to stop and save once I hit a mile, I hit the wrong button. While I was trying to figure it out apparently the time was still ticking and I ended up with a 16-minute mile.

I know I ran faster than that because a few times I glanced at my watch I saw 13 and 14-minute paces. So disappointing, but I am getting stronger (maybe not faster) and didn't want to vomit until right at the end.

Today would be a perfect day for an excuse not to run. When I'm stressed, I want to lay in bed. My daughter's best friend was diagnosed with leukemia yesterday. I love that little girl so much and I know it's a really rough time for her and her family.

She is heading to St. Jude today where I know she will get the best treatment there is. To be diagnosed on your 6th birthday - it's too much to comprehend right now. I had lymphoma 19 years ago and I know the road ahead for her is very long.

Yesterday I signed up for a local children's hospital's half marathon for next March. Which coincidentally is the place where she was diagnosed. I'm very much looking forward to this race. I'm trying to convince my friend to run it with me. She has run a 10k so I know she can do this.

So my "training season" stands like this - summer, base-building. Sept/Oct start a real training plan for the Louisiana Half Marathon in January. Then I'll run the hospital half for fun.

I'll pretend I'm a real runner and say my "A game" race is the first one in January.

Yes, better get to running. In the midst of this week I completely forgot to workout last night with weights.

I hope you have a great week and weekend. I'm looking forward to Mother's Day. We are planning a trip to the New Orleans Zoo if all goes well with the weather.




Monday, May 2, 2016

Week 7 summary

Week 7 went really, really well. I was able to complete three runs! It was only for a total of 3.5 miles, but I don't care. I returned to running!!!! This makes me happy more than I can say.

Monday - the "death" run - I wasn't in too much pain during the run, but for the rest of the day I felt like death. To be expected.




Tuesday - weights - I'm using 8-pound weights for only about 10 minutes.

Wednesday - better with my breathing. I swear I feel like I'm going faster than a 15-minute pace. WTH?


Sorry about the duplicate pictures. I realized after I published this post I already used these two pics.

 Thursday - weights

Friday - completely forgot to do yoga or weights or anything. I had to get my daughter packed for her Girl Scout day camp on Saturday. I volunteered to make snacks for the girls and yeah, working out slipped my mind.

Saturday - this was a tough run because of the headwind. It stormed not too long after this run. And la la la, my monthly friend was with me and that made things worse. Still, I was glad my time wasn't a lot slower.

15:22 - a second slower than the previous run. Also, my phone is completely out of memory so I couldn't take a pic of the watch for posterity sake.

Sunday - REST

I have found over the last week I've slept like a brick. This is really good. I'm currently in a very content and happy state so I find my body likes to try to catch up on sleep when I'm feeling good. I definitely think the workouts are helping and I am not overly stressed about getting the runs in. I'm also happy with a few other things in life so ahhhhhhhhh that makes for good sleep. I'm also listening to my body and if I want to sleep at 8 p.m. I do it.

Saturday and Sunday I got in multiple naps. My daughter was gone Saturday so I took advantage and slept. I also slept for like three hours yesterday. I'm tired yo!

This week's goals are the same:
* Run three days for a mile each day
* Weights/yoga or stretching the other days
* Did a nice grocery shop of healthy foods and am making bone broth this week too
* Aiming for 100 ounces of water each day

Hope you have a great week!