Drinkingoutofjars

It's my new thing.

I may change the whole blog to center around that, honestly, instead of just focusing on my diet-thang. Because, really, I have a lot more to talk/write/ramble about.

I'm going to need a pretty rad collection of jars

(that should go a little something like this...)

I will not drink out of jars that I put lights in if that's what you are worried about.
I cannot wait to have my own house (read: place to live that is entirely and/or mostly mine - does not have to be an actual house - will most likely be an apartment) to decorate. I'm really swimming with ideas of what I want a house to look like and I'm ready to put my thoughts into action.

Unfortunately for me, time is not on my side with this. Sorry Mick.

Weekend recap:

I went to LA Friday-Saturday to help feed/serve homeless people on skid row. We worked at the LA Rescue Mission and got to serve dinner Friday night & breakfast Saturday morning.

Besides all of the emotional/spiritual/relational awesomeness that happened during the trip, avoiding sugar and starch went very well, too. I was able to pick noodles out of my lasagna at dinner and had fruit and scrambled eggs for breaky.

And when I got home and weighed Sunday morning I was actually 2lbs down from Friday's weight.

Now don't go getting too excited about it, though. I messed all that up nice&good Sunday evening. But it was worth it. I celebrated some good news with some lovely Downtown Disney coffee drinks and my friend Matt who was more than helpful in my decision to "cheat" on the diet.

I am not very good at using my camera phone, obviously.

So of course the 2lbs I lost came back, but I was prepared for it and can actually handle it because I wasn't planning on them being gone so suddenly anyway. Life is too short to pass up celebrations, and I'm too aware of what's going on with my eating habits to be afraid of a little indulgence now and then.

By the way, does anyone know how to spell cinnamon? ( <--- Is that right??)

Cinnamon

Cinammon

Cinnammon

Cinemon

Sinamen

Synuhmon

I think I forgot how. But almond bread should never be eated without it.

Drinkingoutofjars!



Magical Tricks

I've come to the conclusion that my body is now involved in some sort of magical trickery against me.

Wait, no - magical trickery for me.

As in, in my favor.

Because yesterday I made and consumed this beaut' right here:

And I did not gain any weight. At all. We're talking no interruption in stabilization, people.

Never in my life have I been able to eat such great foods and not gain weight or the impending guilt that comes in a pretty little package with said great foods. It's got to be magic.

That up there is called Cheese Crust Pizza, and it's my new favorite thing. Not being one for illusion, Cheese Crust Pizza is exactly what it sounds like. It's pizza with crust made of various cheeses (and eggs, but they're just in a supporting role). So again we have no sugar or starch in sight. Just a tasty, yummy, magical dish of wonderfulness.

Now, obviously I did not consume the whole thing and not gain weight... that would be a few major steps backwards physically, mentally, and self control-ly. But I did have two pieces and did become insanely full afterwards. My dumb braincells ridiculed me all night for my full feeling, too. It's tough to retrain your logic to a new style of living when you've settled it in so securely to demeaning you for bad choices.

When things like this come around - good choices that so resemble bad choices they even fool your smartest, most hard working braincells - it's just a battle you have to fight through. Some people will understand this, because you've made some sort of transformation like this before, and some will not. If you are part of the latter group then just let me inform you - telling yourself that you are a different person and making better choices does not always do the trick. It's like retraining trust in yourself. You broke it, now you gotta fix it.

Luckily for me, the fixin's taste so damn good....

On my pizza I put mozzarelli cheese (Yes, I know that it's mozzarella cheese, but my mother - for some reason - always calls mozzarella "mozzarelli" and I'm trying to keep that going because it's funny and sort of Italiano sounding), grilled chicken, and mushrooms. The recipe calls for pizza sauce as well, but eh.

You have been following the saga of Car + Tomatoes while reading this blog, and a connection between us has been established, it's true. But I draw the line at red saucemush. I don't think I'll ever befriend the tomato sauce.

So, like a good little cook, I cooked to my own tastes&preferences and just left the sauce right off of this sucker. I'm selfish like that.

Anyway, this stuff is dang good. I cannot even go into anything else right now. It would be wrong to take attention away from it.

In fact, here's the picture of it again because it deserves to be shown off twice:

Car + Cheese Crust Pizza = BFF

Ups & Downs

It's happened. My first cooking failures :(

There's not much else to report right now besides that. My weight is stable. In the past 5 days it's only faltered .4lbs in either direction or it's stayed exactly the same. I can't ask for much more than that right now. The best part is, with these new eating habits, I don't even feel like I'm "dieting" or missing out on anything that I "can't" have.

So... my kitchen short comings...

On Monday night I made almond bread. It's pretty hearty but not quite as sweet as I imagined it being. I had to alter the recipe from the Trader Joe's cookbook a little bit, because it called for agave nectar as it's sweetner. And while that's definitely better than just straight up sugar... it's not entirely sugar free. Again stevia came to the rescue. That always makes me nervous, though, since I never know exactly how much stevia to substitute in due to it's stronger-than-most taste.

In the end I think it turned out really well. My parents and I all like it a lot, and it lives in our house, so that's good. My grandma didn't care for it much, I don't think. I visited her yesterday and brought her some. She ate her whole share but said to me,"You know, I think the taste isn't my favorite because things with no sugar in it are just a little weird."

Of course they are grandma. If by "weird" you mean "not posionous" ;)

The almond bread

Now for the bad part of Monday night's endeavors: the egg salad attempt.

I've made egg salad before. Quite successfully. So I didn't think there would be any problem attempting to do it again. I love egg salad and am thrilled it's something I can have. The only stipulation is that I have to use sugar-free mayo in it this time. I did not know this until quite recently, but mayonaise has sugar in it. I knew it had a bunch of icky crap in it, and I'd actually cut down my consumption of it quite signifigantly prior to this diet. But egg salad has always been an exception to the Mayo is Nothing But Fatmush (so don't use it) rule. So, even though it's allowed in egg salad and egg salad is allowed in my belly, just any kind won't do. I found out that my options were few.

1. Order Duke's sugar free mayo online

2. Make it yourself

I love ordering things online. I think it's brilliant and fun. But I have never ordered a food product online and I thought it would be silly to start. So I chose option #2 and dove into making my own sugar-free mayo from scratch.

This is what happened:

I cannot tell you what it tasted like, since I did not dare taste it. But I can tell you that it smelled as gross as it looks. No way was I letting that thing go anywhere near my egg salad. Or really anything besides my garbage disposal.

Ugh.

So, that was Part 1 of my Egg Salad Disaster Experience.

Part 2 is this:

That eggmush right there is supposed to be my 6 hard boiled eggs. Guess not.

I'm not quite sure what went wrong with the hard boiling of the eggs. I followed every instruction I found online about how long to keep the eggs in the water and all that. I even asked my grandma her opinion when I saw her yesterday and she couldn't think of anything I did wrong. I guess I'll just have to try again later.

Perhaps once my shipment of Duke's comes in (because, yes, I did break down and order some). I had to. It was inexpensive and I really really do want egg salad on this diet, dangit!

So that's where I'm at today. I now have a few failures under my belt kitchen-wise, but it's all good. You can't win them all, and all that. I made some flaxmeal muffins yesterday, too. I don't count those as a win or a loss. They turned out exactly how they are supposed to, they are just kind of bland. So we'll see. The next step I want to take is experimenting with my own ideas a little bit. I want to try the muffins with almond meal instead of flax, because so far all of the almond stuff has been really yummy. Also, I'm thinking of trying the strawberry cream pie as a chocolate cream pie using cocoa powder.

Until I get a chance to do all of that, though, I think I'll attempt some simple recipes from the TJ cookbook. Like more stuffed mushrooms... yum. That's a definite "up."

Stable?

I think I'm stablizing, which is great because it means that my body is getting used to what I'm giving it and not having any crazy reactions to anything.

We had to negotiate a bit on this, my body and myself, but I think we've found some understanding between us. I've moved my cheese intake down from "Obsessive" to "Reasonable". My muscles have stopped being sore after enduring any sort of workout, and therefore have stopped hording water (that shows up on the scale as extra poundage). And most importantly I've started accepting myself how I look right now, and come to terms with the fact that this is how I'm going to look for about one more month... and it's a heck of a lot better than I looked about one month ago!

My eating has been pretty much the same for the past few days. Chicken salads, veggie scrambles, and more chicken dishes at night. I've been dabbling in greek yogurt + strawberries and I'm really loving that combo.

The sad news is that the strawberry cream pie is gone. The happy news is that everyone who tasted it enjoyed it greatly! I'm so excited about cooking... I'm making almond bread tonight. I cannot even wait. I have so many lists of things I want to try and make, but I'm being patient and not making them all at once since then I'd want to eat them all at once. And that's not really part of the agreement me and my body are in right now. I've agreed to pace myself... so yeah. Almond bread only tonight.

Oh, and sugar free mayo! I am making that tonight, too. From scratch! For egg salad. That's going to be exciting for me, let me tell you.

So, I made more of this the other day:

To review - it's tomatoes, motzerella, spinach, and balsalmic. That's slightly different from the batch my friend Ashley made for the picnic about a week ago... but I think it'll be good this way, too. The motzerella I got was marinated in italian spices, which I think will be tasty. I have yet to try this, I'm thinking tonight with some chicken. I don't want the tomatoes to think I've forgotten about the relationship we're building.

I've finally found a balance with working out, too. Which is nice. My body's not freaking out everytime I move. I've now got a good routine worked out at home between the treadmil and the weights we have in our garage, so I've been doing that nearly every other day. No hot yoga for me tonight :( I went on a pretty extensive hike with two friends yesterday (in the mountains, to a waterfall!) and slipped on  some rocks and managed to pull a muscle in my ankle. Boo. No lunging or balancing for me. Perhaps Wednesday I'll be all healed up and ready to yoga in the sauna again.

The hike yesterday was amazing, btw.

I'm told that the hike is 2.4 miles each way to the waterfall. The drive there was pretty enough, but hiking through the mountains was pretty dang impressive as well. This is why I love southern California - we have so much within driving distance of us, even mountainous waterfall landscapes. I didn't even know all of what I saw yesterday was there.

A view into the valley from our hike down the mountain

(taken with the Hipstamatic 1969 camera app on my phone)

This is the waterfall we hiked to

The hike was all down hill on the way to the waterfall, and all up on the way back. Needless to say, the way there was a breeze. Once we got down the mountain we had to hike quite a ways into the rocks and such to reach the actual fall, which also involved forging a small river, haha. That was fun. The boys I went with probably could have lept over the thing on a few of the more closely placed rocks... but me, not so much. We ended up having to cross on some rocks that were nestled under a tree in the middle of the river that was covered in fire ants.

Yay adventure!

Both boys I went with love things like climbing, so we managed to get ourselves to the top of the waterfall, too. I'm pretty sure it's the most intense climbing I've ever done. I felt really great about having done it afterwards, though. And I know that I probably wouldn't have been able to do it without being completely misarable 30lbs heavier. Being out there, walking and climbing and not feeling insecure all of the time was incredible. It's really something I only thought I could imagine, not achieve. I'm so excited to think that by summer I'll be down 30 more!

Anyway, it was a great day. The hike back up wasn't so bad. Once we got past an initial steep incline it felt just like a bit of a challenging walk. I really need to get hiking shoes, though. Up until now I've been using some old Vans and their traction is not going to cut it. I've got a throbbing ankle today to remind me of that fact. Hiking was just never something I thought I'd get into. But really, what's not to love? Being outdoors is pretty great.

And, amidst a pretty reliable, stable life (thankfull for that, of course), a little adventure every weekend or so is greatly appreciated. 

Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Cheese

Did you know that cheeses can be put into the category of either "Hard" or "Soft"? I guess it makes sense the more I think about it. Some cheeses are really soft, and some are not. Some come in bricks, in fact. I guess I overlooked this because, until recently, I've only really tossed them all under the category "YUM".

So, another day another steak.

I ate this last night at the Olive Garden:

That is the mixed grill and it's pretty fantastic. I had chicken only on mine and only got through 1/2 of it before I knew I was d-o-n-e. I also had some of their salad (sans the little crunchy bread squares) with the italian dressing already mixed in.

So I expected a gain today. I just had to.

I don't much care for being tricked, but that's the restaurant business for you. They are full of things they have hidden up their cooking sleeves that they love to slip into your meal when you're not looking. So I almost expected the need for another steak day today. I went up about 2.5lbs because of the hidden sugar that I know was floating around somewhere in the Olive Garden's air filters.

I had a fun time with a good friend, though. And - score one for Car here - I also found a new, much healthier dish that I like at the OG. I used to consume multiple breadsticks and get the 3 cheese ravioli with alfredo sauce every time I ate there. I think no breadsticks, a plate of salad, and 1/2 of this grilled chicken&veggie meal is an improvement and a victory for life, no matter what the numbers say. Go me.

My yesterday went well. I had a normal-for-me-now egg, mushroom, and cheese scramble for breakfast. Still no coffee, though I did pick up some half and half so the reunion won't be long, me thinks.


I visited my besties, Trader Joe and Henry, after work. I really think those two are in cahoots about not carrying a lot of the same stuff. I'm being totally serious right now, too. They make you go to both to get what you need for all of this "no sugar, no starch business." It's got to be an alliance of some sort. So far, I know this:

Almond meal - TJ only

Brand names in the TJ cookbook - TJ only

Flax meal - Henry's only

Coconut oil - Henry's only

Flavored Stevia - Henry's only

Agave sweetner - (if you don't look hard enough at TJ's then you think it's) Henry's only

There might be a slight chance that Henry's is just larger than TJ's. And that I may need to look for a Henry's Cookbook for the future, to condense shopping trips. Or that perhaps I should buck up and actually ask a sales associate for assistance everytime I cannot find something I need. But I'm trying to be independent here. I'm trying to be a real lady that knows her way around a store.

I'm also apparently trying to waste an extra 45 minutes everytime I hit the health food scene.

Anyway, I picked up some stuff I needed for more calorie intake (an odd thing to be aware of on a diet) and a strawberry cream pie I really wanted to make. Always a woman of my word, I ended up getting a reusable shopping bag from Joe's.

My mom didn't quite understand why I wanted this one when she had already informed me that we had some at the house I could use... but the other side of this pretty number has a ship on it. So, come on. I knew I needed it. Also, the Kitten figured out how to make it work for her as well.

So we're all good.

While the kitty claimed her new fort I had myself my new favorite meal. This lovely salad made with Annie's Organic Goddess dressing. My only big problem with steak days is that I cannot have this salad for lunch.

Mmhmm. I totally got a piece of that. Be jealous. Eating this salad is like the equivalent of this salad being, like, the popular girl of all the salads, and she just confirmed that her and I are "in a relationship" on Facebook. That's how jealous you should be that you haven't been having this for lunch and I have.

Later that afternoon I really did a good, though. I made a strawberry cream pie. I got it off of the forum I go on for support on this diet. It obviously has no sugar or starch in it. What it does have is a whole lot of awesome. I am so glad I started cooking. It's fun, and fulfilling, and when you produce something healthy that tastes this good you just can't help but feel like it's a good day.

That piece missing is from when my parents tried it while I was out to the dreaded Dinner of Tricks at the OG. It finished "chilling and setting" while I was gone, so I told the parentals to dive in if they so wished. That resulted in me getting a text from my mother around 8:30 that said: It's so damn good.

When I got home later that night I pulled it out and had a few bites myself. My mother is no liar, people. This thing is my new favorite dessert, and I don't even like pie. I only made it because I'm trying to make new things and expand my new found love for cooking. I honestly wasn't expecting to love it. The plan is to now keep this as a default dessert for parties and holidays.

So today is another day of waiting to see what will  happen tomorrow. The good news is that I'm still excited on this journey and not discouraged. I'm having more fun learning about being healthier than I really thought I ever could or would. It's like a challenge that I'm living up to for once. These steak days are really not tough at all. It's actually comforting to know that there's a solution out there for the days when you allow yourself to be tricked by chain restaurants.

It's tough to be social and healthy in this world. That's just the truth, and I don't think there's an easy solution to it except for being carefull and being aware of what your body needs each separate day. Just like that guy that James Franco played in that movie about the time he got stuck in a cliff for 127 years (that's what the movie felt like), sometimes you need to cut off something you thought you needed when you get too stuck to get out of the situation any other way.

That movie really was the best thing I never want to see again.

Raising the Steaks

So. Today is a steak day.

That may not mean much to you, but to me - to where I'm at in my crazy diet plan - it means a lot.

I means a lot mentally and emotionally.

But really, when you are trying to better yourself and you hit road bumps, what doesn't effect you mentally and emotionally?

Let me re-cap the past few days and then I'll get to the goods on this steak day nonsense...

Monday was a good day. I went to hot yoga again for the first time in months. It felt so good. I love hot yoga, which is funny because I sort of dislike regular temperature yoga. I think it's kind of boring and hard, but hot yoga I love. There's just something about the excessive sweating and suffering that really makes me feel great, you know? ;)

Anyway, Monday was good for me. The scale went up a bit, but that was to be expected since I was eating cheese and a myriad of other things for the first time in a month. I still cannot have sugars or starches, but dairy being re-intorduced to one's body will cause one's body to weigh at least slightly more. It's science (I think). I know this, I understand it, and I accept it. Sort of.

I ate the rest of my friend Ashley's tomoato/motzerella/basil/balsamic salad lovlieness for dinner before yoga:

And it was delightful. Well, ok, I'm still having some issues with tomatoes. We aren't the best of friends yet... but we're working on it. I definitely do not hate them anymore. But we're not like, picking out curtains or anything.

Yesterday, Tuesday, was much the same as Monday. When I woke up the scale had gone slightly higher again, but I tried to keep my spirits up as well. I was only around a pound or so up, and that's not bad when your body is getting used to consuming more calories. Like I've said all along, so much of this journey is mental.... it's just hard to take any gain with a nonchalant attitude, no matter how natural, when you've worked so hard to be disciplined and been successful for a month straight.

Anyway, I sucked it up and focused on getting through the day making good choices. I had a quick breakfast (if you know me, you know that I'm usually rushing to get anywhere that's the first place I have to be during any given day, no matter if it's at 8:00am or noon). I whipped up one whole egg + 3 egg whites with some cheese and had myself a nice little breakfast before I ran off to meet my very best friend Natalie for some tea in San Marcos.

That's us on one of my birthdays. I love her. She's my forever friend, and she's moving to New Zealand, and I'm so excited for her but jealous of that whole dang island. Sigh. Anyway...

Tea was nice. I've really gotten into tea on this diet. I'm allowed coffee, but for some reason I'm not drinking it at all. Perhaps I will give some sugar free vanilla iced coffee a chance next week sometime.

For lunch I had a lovely grilled chicken salad with romain lettuce, mushrooms, feta cheese, and oragnic "Goddess" dressing. It's the best thing ever. I might eat it every day for the rest of my life. I want to. I mean, I can't today because of the steak thing, but the days I'm not having a steak day I will probably be making some version of this salad.

After meeting with my growth group coach, Jess, I went home and ran a mile on the treadmill. Let's get one thing straight, people. It's not easy for me to do this. The running part isn't the worst part, it's the getting myself to just start doing it. I'm pretty good at disciplining myself to work out once I get something going, but I battle myself in my head all the way up until I step on the darn thing and start running. I always, always feel good after I do it, though, and I even upped my usual casual regiment to include some work with the weights we keep in our garage gym. I had grileld chicken with bacon and avo for dinner, and that was tasty as well.


When I got to growth group that night one of my lovely ladies had made these babies:

Yes, you are seeing that correctly. Dino chicken nuggs. They smelled awesome, and they are so freaking great because they are dinosaurs... but I knew I couldn't indulge sicne they are all covered in bread. I ended up biting the head off of one and giving the rest to my co-leader, Ryan, who can eat that whole darn tray and still remain a bean pole.

What I learned from my beheading is that I wasn't actually missing out on much. I'm sure they were nice and tasty, but my body did not want anything breaded or fried in my system and immediately sent the, "Ewie, no more of that please, Car," message to me. Which is good. No, it's great! There will always be a time and a place for the likes of dino nuggs, but every Tuesday at a growth group get together is not going to be it.

I went home after that, had a sugar-free caramel pudding, and actually told my parents that I wanted to live in that little cup of goodness. Not having anything sweet for 30 days will do that to you, you know.

All of this nonsense brings us to today.

This morning, Wednesday the 16th of March, I got on the scale and the number on it had risen just a bit to much for my, or my diet protocol's liking. I'm officially 2lbs over the breathing room I'm supposed to have with numbers on the scale in this stage of the diet, and that means it's a steak day.

Steak day means exactly what it sounds like. All I get today is one big, juicy steak. I eat nothing until dinner but can consume as much water, coffee, and tea as I please the rest of the day. For dessert (I'm telling myself it's dessert, it's really just with the steak tonight) I get either an apple or a tomato. Not much of a contest there.

So that's where I'm at. Steak day supposedly fixes any "over 2 lbs" problems and gets one back down to where one should be stabalizing. I'm doing good so far. I'm not hungry or anything, just stuck in the mental battle again of not walking around feeling like a failure. My family is being so supportive of me, reminding me to be patient and that we cannot always control what our bodies hold on to, and all that good stuff. I know the past few days I've been making good decisions and sticking to the protocol of phase 3 of this diet, and that might actually make this more frustrating.

I still have so far to go on this journey. But I'm really trying to take every step one step at a time, and give all of my successes and frustrations to God. I've been praying all day today for my mental state to change and He's provided me with a lot of help in that area already.

Today is just another day in the battle of life. Sometimes things go smoothly and sometimes we hit bumps that we have to work our way over. I know I'm working hard to change my life for the better, and I know I'm taking the right steps for me to get there. The one thing I don't know, is how it feels to reach this particular goal in my life.

But with everything in me I still believe that someday (sort of soon) I will.

Seconds (but not thirds)

This weekend brought an end to my 500 calorie a day portion of the diet (also known as Phase 2) and the begnning of my 1500ish calorie a day for 3 weeks portion (Phase 3).

To say this weekend was an emotional food rollercoaster is an understatement.

Entering into Phase 3 is odd. I really miss being in the strict guidelines of Phase 2, honestly. At least there I knew what I was getting, and I knew what I was doing, and I knew I would be losing. Of course I've read enough about Phase 3 to know and expect a gain in weight intially since I was re-introducing so many foods at once at the picnic I had with my friends. I didn't imagine it to be so hard to accept, though. It's only 1lb, but after all the work I've done in the past month to lose 30lbs... it's odd. And hard. But I'm determined to stabalize my weight in this range for a bit until I can go back to Phase 2 and lose lose lose again, and finally reach my goal :)

So here's a recap of my weekend in cronological order... despite all the stuff I had going on about transitioning between P2 and P3, it was one of the most relaxing, fun weekends I've had in a while.

Saturday I went shopping, real grocery shopping, for the first time since I lived alone in Chicago about 3-4 years ago. The only difference was that this time I went to health food stores! I really wanted to make some yummy, P3 friendly, healthy food for a picnic my friends and I went on Sunday afternoon. It's a new tradition we're starting (I named it the "The Bi-annual Classy Classic Company Picnic Brunch) and the idea was for everyone to bring something to share. I planned on bringing a few somethings, to ensure that I would have some food present that I could eat since on P3 I'm not allowed sugar or starch. I have this great Trader Joe's cookbook I picked up from Barnes&Nobel a few weeks ago, so I took a few things from that and decided to start my cooking career there.

Trader Joes and Henry's are my new BFF's, I swear. I'm not very good at grocery shopping yet. I wander around aimlessly and have to ask for things like dates (not with the cute bag boys, sillies. I literally had never known what a date was until the nice TJ lady took me to the fruit section and handed me a box of them).

But, after a trip to TJ's, a trip to Henry's, then a return trip to TJ's for things I forgot, I was ready to go.

I think I'm going to buy one of those reusable Trader Joe bags. They are only $1.99, they are pretty, and they are not made of layers of paper like these beauties. The only thing about that is that my Kitten loved playing in these bags after they were empty... but we can figure that one out.

One of the things I've been eager to re-acquaint myself with in P3 is cheese. I love cheese. Almost every single kind. It was the only thing I struggled with missing, and part of this whole picnic plan was having wine & cheese as a main course... so I was excited about that. But I may have gone a bit overboard:

Haha... ok. So this wasn't all for me, or for the wine & cheese protion of the picnic. I used most of it in the things I made. The feta is my own personal stash, though. I love feta on salad.

After I put all of the new goods away I made myself my last P2 dinner for a while. I did a simple 3oz piece of chicken with some cooked asparagus. I topped it all off with some italian vinagarette (P2 friendly, of course) that I'd made a few days prior. The Vinagarette is so good, I will make it for the rest of my life!

It's sad looking, but it's so good and meals like this have reshaped my life (not to mention me!) so it's close to my heart :) Excuse the Little Mermaid plate. I'm still a child sometimes, haha.

After dinner I dove into cooking for the picnic. All in all everything turned out awesome. I'm so excited to know I can cook. My friend's reactions to everything I made were so nice and encouraging. Even though nothing I made was too difficult, it did feel good to know I can cook, and that this basic female-esque skill is something I can provide for people I love and hopefully someday a hubby of my own.

These are cream cheese clouds that I found on the forums I go on for support on this diet. They are a nice little frozen treat, and were pretty good, but a bit too sweet. The original recipe used Splenda but for a year now I've been using Stevia pretty exclusively (an all natural sweetner) so I stuck with that. Only problem is, oops, Stevia is pretty dang strong and provided a little too much sweetness on these guys. Next time I make them I'll probably cut the portion in 1/2. Later on I put sugar free chocolate syrup on the top of them. I think that the few I have left will at least be appreciated by my parents. These little guys will be good in summer, I think.

These are bacon wrapped dates from the TJ cookbook. My guys friends lovingly renamed them cooked cockroaches, because they sort of do look like that, especially when you whip a bunch of them out at a picnic in the woods. I was skeptical of these, I'm not going to lie. Only because I'm a picky eater and I'd never had dates before. These went fast, though, and I grabbed one to try before they were gone. And oh my yum! I do love them. I think I'll pull these out for parties and Christmas and stuff. They aren't the best for you because of the bacon, but I got uncured (read: sugarless) bacon from TJ's so it's not so bad. Also, dates are huge anti-oxidant fruits. So it's a good alternative to cupcakes or cookies or whatnot.

Next we have stuffed mushrooms, also from the TJ cookbook. These are by far my favorite. The mushrooms are stuffed with garlic&herb cheese and spinach. I love them. So much. Also another thing I will be returning to for parties and any general gathering. You can see the spot at the top of the pan where one is missing - that's the one I tried. That's the one that changed my life, haha.

Lastly I made this warm brie cinnamon pear baked pie thingy, another from the TJ cookbook. It seemed to go over well with my friends. I'm not a huge brie fan so I didn't have any, but it smelled good. I brought about 1/2 of it home and it will go to the parentals as well. I hear it's good on crackers. I'm not sure if I'll make it again or not, but it was fun to make something I normally wouldn't even think of putting together.

All in all it was so much fun, and such a success. I had good food to eat at the picnic that I had a great time making, and I also munched on other fine cheeses, fruits, and meats that my friends provided. One of the other ladies made a lovely basil, motzerella, tomatoe salad with balsamic dressing that I ended up taking home with me. It was so refreshing and totally P3 friendly... how could I resist? I don't normally like tomatoes at all, but I'm trying to overcome our differences and repair our relationship. I think it could be good for me.

I also had some mimosa and wine yesterday (plum wine & chardonnay) which all no doubt had sugar in it. I was a bad girl on that side of things, but I decided to suck it up and face the consequences this time.

So, for today I'm concentrating on the weight gain I had from yesterday, and trying to stick to protiens and veggies to see if that at least helps me avoid another gain. I'm going to hot yoga tonight for the first time in a while, so that will be challenging but very good. Hopefully it will clear out some of the crap (read: sugar) I put in yesterday with the alcohol I consumed.

Mostly I really, really cannot wait for the next Bi-annual Classic Classy Company Picnic Brunch to happen in August. We really had a classy, good time.

The fellas

Us ladies

Firsts

I really hate the first post.

Always, on every blog I've ever attempted I've hated it.

But it's good to get it over with. So here I am...

I'm doing this mostly for me, to keep track of how I've been doing on this journey of losing myself (as I've so lovingly started calling it).

My whole life I've wanted to be healthier than I have been. Now, for the first time ever, I'm actually doing it.

I've lost 29lbs and I feel like a whole new person already. I have about 30 more to go and I cannot believe I'm finally within range of reaching this goal I've had since high school.

A huge part of my journey so far has been preparing meals for myself, by myself. Healthy meals. Healthy, tasty meals. It's true that, with the diet I'm on, I have been restricted to very few foods over the past few weeks. Learning to say "no" to everything I've been offered and chosing to eat in instead of out has been a huge mental shift for me, but it's been a good change.

And, get this - I love cooking!

This new stage of my diet allows me much more food, basically everything except for sugar and starch, so I can share some of my meals with my family. This thrills me, even though I'm nervous to be responsible for two other people's taste buds' happiness, haha. I've already gathered some yummy sounding, healthy, recipes that I hope to use and love for the rest of my life.

I don't want to be a crazy person about this, but right now I'm in the zone and I know I need to focus. I've never been happier than I have been these last few weeks taking care of myself. And I hope to someday at least have a husband of my own (the jury's still out on whether or not kiddies are part of my future) and I like the idea of this process helping me to be able to cook and care for him in this way, too.

Anyway. This is the blog for all of that up there that I just rambled about. I'm much better at making progress mentally when I put my thoughts down in any written sort of form. Also, taking pictures of things you successfully cook looks fun. I want to do that :)

I start cooking tomorrow! Get ready.

This is the first time I've ever been this good at losing.