I Fell Off The Wagon.

"Even if a person is getting the daily-recommended exercise of 30-60 minutes, being inactive the rest the day is still a health risk. The best strategy is to alternate between sitting and standing throughout the day."

I read this lovely little piece of advice in a wellness newsletter that is sent out by my place of employment. Talk about a buzz kill! Even if I was able to get my lazy ass to exercise 30 to 60 minutes EVERY day (right now I'm shooting for ONE day and thought I was doing well), I still wouldn't be healthy? Come on! That's just a mean thing to say.

They are trying to tell me that I should get up and wander around to the printer (whether I printed anything or not, and considering we're all about saving the environment, printing is discouraged which makes this even more ridiculous) every few minutes. Somehow I think that might put a damper on my productivity level and might even be frowned upon if my boss was to catch me walking aimlessly around for no good reason. Well, it is for a good reason but I have a feeling he might not buy it.

But seriously....talk about making people want to give up! Realistically, I can't get 30-60 minutes of exercise AND walk around for half my work hours. So why even bother?

In other news...I was invited to go to Red Robin for dinner. I perused the menu online so I could make sure only to order something with a decent amount of calories in it. I decided on the Avocado Cobb salad, which would have given me about 400 extra calories to have a few fries dipped in ranch. Seriously, if you're not going to eat at least a few of those why bother going to RR?

Once I got there, I had the bright idea to order the California chicken sandwich instead. I figured it was a grilled chicken breast so how bad could it be? Sadly, when it came it was served on grilled butter bun and was dripping with mayo. Had I been paying attention, I would have ordered the whole wheat, non butter bun and no mayo. But I wasn't. And I ate the whole thing, along with more than 400 calories worth of fries and ranch.

So later I did what anyone else would do when feeling guilty about over consuming tons of greasy, fatty food. I agreed to split a Mountain Mudd Pie for dessert. OMG was it good. I felt less guilty about eating this than I did all those fries and buttered buns.

It appears that I may have fallen off the wagon. That's okay...I have all weekend to get myself back on it.

Chicken Flavored Popcorn?

OK so it has been a few days since I posted about the plethora of healthy things I have been doing for myself. That's because I really haven't been doing any. This past weekend I had a three day weekend for my birthday, and the time was filled with wine tasting, skinny iced tea drinking, and eating stuff like chocolate, peanut butter and pretzel pie, clam chowder in a bread bowl, and even a burger from In and Out. But calories don't count on weekends and especially on your birthday, right? Plus I have already decided that wine is a health food and I did choose the 'skinny' iced tea over the fattening long island kind. So I didn't completely fall off the wagon.

I started to get back on track yesterday but didn't do anything mind blowing. I came in under my calorie count and managed to do about 3/4 of my stretching video. You can see why I didn't bother posting about it.

Today, though, I have to brag about the great decisions that I have made so far. First of all, we have an all day meeting at work and I go to the meeting room to find mini chocolate bars spread all over the table I had to sit at first thing in the morning. Now, that's just mean. I barely am even awake and I have Twix, Snickers, Kit Kats and Hershey bars staring me in the face. They are all wrapped in beautiful Valentine's Day wrappers which makes them look even more appealing. I feel powerless against their pull. I did eat one mini Twix, but before I downed everything else on the table, I got up and went over to the area where there was a bit of real food. I had a strawberry, half a banana and a handful of raw almonds.

Then, lunch time rolled around. I was offered a meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken for free! My god did it smell good. Free delicious food? Come on... I am so being tested today. But I actually said no. I walked away and came back down to my office with nothing but a memory of how amazing it would have tasted had I chosen to eat it. So now I sit here starving and craving KFC.  Guess I'll go make some popcorn or something. Hope it tastes like chicken!

That's Not Pasta...It's Green!

 

See this? This is all I did today. Mind you, it took some effort....I made marinara sauce from scratch...well if from scratch means opening up cans of tomato paste and sauce. When I say from scratch I mean it's not Ragu. I actually had to put some effort into it. I even diced up zucchini, sauteed it with garlic and onions and threw it in there. While it was cooking in the crock pot I took a nap. A three hour nap. And that's after waking up at noon.

 

I really don't like drinking anymore. Sure, it's fun while it's happening...you get to be social and do things you normally wouldn't do (this time included going dancing at the local gay bar). But when I woke up at 5 am because my head had developed it's own heartbeat that was pounding out of control, I really regretted having that last cocktail. And the one before that. You get the picture.

 

I have a to do list of about a million things, and weekends are really the only time I can get this stuff done. So you can probably understand why I might be a little upset with myself when my entire Saturday was spent nursing a hangover. So next week I'm switching to O'Douls. Wait, not next weekend because it's my birthday. But definitely the weekend after.

 

So getting back to the picture....My marinara sauce went on eggplant parm that I baked, not fried. And instead of pasta and/or bread, I made a side of sauteed mushrooms and Swiss chard. This healthy eating nonsense isn't half bad!

Electric Wine Glasses Make Drinking Even More Fun.

It's day number two of my commitment to drink one glass of red wine every day. I was planning on going home and starting to scrub the filth out of my house so I didn't have to spend the entire weekend doing it, but along came a call from my friend Erika wanting to know if I would meet her for happy hour after work. Since I am a sucker for happy hour, and the place we went was right on my way home from work, I agreed. Normally I would have screwed up everything by going out to a restaurant where I don't seem to have control over my calorie consumption, but I was actually good today. The restaurant had the amount of calories in each dish listed on the menu so it was pretty easy to keep track. We opted to share the Thai shrimp lettuce wraps (420 calories divided by two) and a small deep dish pizza with whole wheat crust (150 cals a slice). Of course I had my glass of wine, and even had a pint of berry flavored hard cider. When I got home (by 7pm, mind you) I logged my calories in MFP and saw that I went a mere 15 calories over my daily limit. That's easy enough to fix. I did my stretching video and burned another 243 calories. So technically I can go eat something else right now for 228 calories, but I'm not going to. I'm going to bed early. Nite!

 

No it's not really electric but it sure looked that way.

PS did you know a plate of nachos has something like 2300 calories? Yeesh.

Baby Steps and Chocolate.

Today, after eating my rather large half sandwich for lunch, I sat at my desk trying to overcome the overwhelming desire for potato chips and chocolate. I would have settled for anything sweet and/or salty and/or crunchy. I couldn't stop thinking about carbs, which really bothered me because the reason why my half sandwich was rather large was because it was on this super thick, rosemary infused, super fluffy and delicious bread. Give me some of that and a tub of butter and I could eat it all day, every day for the rest of my life (just kidding. Please don't because I really will). Then I remembered reading something a while back about how you should go for a walk when you're craving something unhealthy and by the time you get back the craving will have subsided. Being that it's a nice, cool, sunny day here in Fresno, I really didn't have any excuses not to give this theory a try.

Although I didn't time myself, I think I walked for about 20 minutes. Not great, but not bad considering it was on my lunch break at work where I usually do absolutely nothing but eat lunch. I didn't speed walk, but I walked fast enough to elevate my heart rate slightly, become a tiny bit short of breath, and to create a cramp in my calf that felt like it was being stabbed with a knife. It's all good though because if there's no pain, there's no gain, right? Although I'm not trying to gain, I'm trying to lose. I'm hoping it helps with that, too.

As an added bonus, they say that it's good for you to get a small amount of sun everyday sans sunblock because it's supposed to fight depression and increase vitamin D levels (which, according to my doctor I have unbelievably low levels of). Unfortunately, I haven't been out in the sun in what seems like months. The warmth did feel good on my face. I may even do it again tomorrow.

After my walk I came back to my desk and ate an apple. I can live with that choice.