Monday, 16th of August 2010 at 12:37:42 PM Lydia is visiting her family’s hardscrabble no tech farm in Pennsylvania (detoxing from the luxurious cheeses of France, no doubt) so will not be back with us for a few more weeks. I am therefore posting a little early. LA LA!
Hello, WW! According to my icons, I like cats and books and...boat building? being a pirate? Wheelies shapes???
Per week one, I am exercising 6 days a week again. Per week 2, I have upped my intake of fruits and vegetables, trying to get 5 a day and mostly succeeding. Even so? The post surgical Schubert I gained is still exactly an entire Schubert. No movement on the scale, and, more telling, no movement in how my clothes fit. In the wake of the surgery with my body still kinda…freaked out, I think I am going to have to be HUGELY disciplined to get my body to change at all.
I had a BAD moment rejoining, where I could see the GRAPH, you know? The one from when I did BETTER U? And the line on the graph goes down and down from when I felt puffy and sluggish to where I ended, pre-surgery, two sizes smaller and feeling and high energy and pleased and healthy. Yesterday it showed me the line POST surgery, going RIGHT BACK to sluggish and puffy. It was hard to look at that. To see how much ground I have lost, and how far I have to go to get back to how GOOD I FELT after Better U.
I allowed myself a quick-n-dirty weep with a single self-pitying screaming email to Sara, and then wiped the chart. I am starting fresh. One push-up, one healthy food choice, 1/17th of a Schubert at a time.
I know South Beach works FASTER but…I also know I just got a Bread Machine. Weight Watchers works, too, a little slower, and I get to eat my own bread. YAY! I am RABIDLY excited about this bread machine, let me tell you. The way it makes my house smell is worth the price of admission. And there was a price…
I got on Freecycle to stalk a free bread machine last year. It’s EXACTLY the kind of thing people buy or get for Christmas and never use, so they are quite likely to show up on Freecycle. My friend Julie saw a couple given away right before I joined. But from the moment I signed up, there was a bread machine DEARTH. All the unused bread machines scuttled to duck back behind olf blenders and waffle makers, which were grabbed and freecycled with mad abandon.
Worse? I learned I could never give anything away. It freaked me out. Every time I tried to post one of the MANY too-large-to-easily-get-to-Goodwill furniture type items I WISH was not currently clotting up my garage, the novelist in me would construct elaborate and HIGHLY unlikely plot arcs involving stalkers, cannibalism, and my head on a pike in some freak’s basement. I always backed away, and all of the items in questions are still sitting in my garage. Meanwhile my car is still sitting in the driveway with no place to go. *martyred sigh*
Then one day, WOOT! had a VERY nice Cuisinart bread machine for about 40% of the retail price. Scott jumped on it, and right now, the smell of perfect bread is making me crazy with carb-lust. YAY!
If YOU have a bread machine you never use, but you are too afraid of cannibals to freecycle it, you should dig it out NOW. My friend Katie sent this recipe to me It is from an out of print book called “The Bread Machine Cookbook. It is awesome; I mess with the proportions a little, using more wheat flour and less bread flour to fiber it up some. I leave out the nuts because Sam is allergic. The items go in the pan in the order listed.
Carb-TASTIC!
2 2/3 Tb. vegetable oil
2 2/3 Tb. honey
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/3 c. oatmeal
2/3 c. whole wheat flour
2 c. bread flour
1/4 c. nonfat dry milk
2 1/2 tsp. yeast
You can also add 2/3 c. chopped walnuts, if you like.
This makes a WIDE loaf! I cut it down the middle, to divide it in half, then cut each half 8 times, so each half yielded 9 slices. (Each slice is only 2 WW points. Each slice is also completely AWESOME.)
Enjoy, and hopefully by next week all my little steps forward will begin to give me those coveted partial-Schubert-loss returns.
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MMm. I was thinking of South Beach. I have a bread machine. Fall is coming to Illinois. *sign* I didn’t like WW online. More diet angst.
That’s MY bread machine…the one that helped me gain ten pounds! The one that is now boxed up as I, once again, enter the world of low-carb.
Mmmm. I can’t do low carb. I love carbs! Carbs are my favorite. I love good bread. And good cheese. So I guess chances are I will stay puffy and sluggish, but I’m hoping to be inspired to change some things.
You know what? I love good bread and cheese, too. ALso wine. And chocolate. And I loved them and ate them the whole time I did better u, and I loved and ate them after, when I was unsluggy and unpuffish.
I plan to eat them NOW, and in a box, and with a fox, and in the rain and on a train. I WILL EAT THEM, EDJ YOU ARE.
Just maybe not as much of them as I would like, left to my own devices….Because I know NOT eating them? Leads to me feelign all PUNISHED and then I eat great steamign of heaps of them in rebellions. SO. No low carb. Even though it works faster….
I love South Beach! And actually, wine, chocolate, whole wheat are on the diet…just not in Phase I. Limiting them is the thing that sometimes trips me…you know, if one is good….
*HUGE SIGH*
The downside, the serious ugly downside to being pre-diabetic or diabetic, as our household is, is that carbs are sugar and sugar is bad.
I mean, yeah, we have to have some carbs, but having a whole freshly baked loaf of bread in the house is to invoke the unbearable temptation of over-carbing.
So let me say once again *HUGE SIGH* because that recipe sounds fabulous!!
I have an ancient bread machine from the dark ages of bread machines, and still luuuurve it. Though I mostly just use the “dough” setting so I can shape my loaves and do any recipe I like.
I can’t stand the thought of low-carbs, so I just try to involve more whole grain and fiber, and a little less of smearing huge hunks of freshly baked bread with quantities of creamery fresh real butter.
*sigh*
Yay for WW – I’m on it, too, and down 20 pounds… feeling great because it really is a lasting change, whereas no-carbs would surely be the death of me.
I may be convinced to WW-it-up with you since the whole non-diet thing tends to degrade into snit fits of melty cheesy goodness on nacho chips whenever my mood dips. I always think the cheese will stabilize me, but it never does. Oh well. The bread sounds divine and I bet it smells even better. I like to do mine in the stand mixer since I never could successfully figure out the bread machine my folks gave us years ago. I think I actually did Freecycle it. I have no fear of cannibals. Though at my size, perhaps I should.
I just started WW last Friday. This is my first time to do it, and it is way overdue. I have been faithful to my daily points this week, and as of yesterday’s meeting, I have lost 11.4 pounds. That is a lot of motivation to continue. I know that the first week’s weight loss is not typical or indicative of how the following weeks will go, but I at least feel an incentive to continue. If there are any tips you can give to a first-timer, please let me know. I am in bad enough shape, that I am going to have to slowly, really slowly, begin a exercise program. Right now, I have to work on getting my endurance up to more than a few minutes at a time. I also broke my leg last year, and I am very careful now to not overextend myself. I am not too sure about all the rah, rah, people types at WW yet, I am not that involved with people, more hermit-like really. Is WW online really worth it? I could only do it at work, and some at home, as I do not have a cell with internet capabilities. I just need some perspective from someone who has been there. Good Luck and Thanks.