Good Food

I received this in my email from my “almost” sister-in-law this morning and thought it was interesting enough to share. Some of you may have seen this already. I couldn’t help but notice that sugar, bread, and white potatoes didn’t make the list.

God’s Pharmacy
 
  This is absolutely amazing – and makes perfect sense!!
         
    
   
  It’s been said that God first separated the salt water from the fresh, made dry land, planted a garden, and made animals and fish… all before making a human. He made and provided what we’d need before we were born. These are best & more powerful when eaten raw.  (I don’t know about eating fish and meat raw. I don’t know where that came from. A lot of them eaten raw make you sick.) We’re such slow learners…God left us a great clue as to what foods help what  part of our body!

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye.  The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye… and YES, science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

 
A  Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart has four chambers and is red. All of the research shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopine and are indeed pure heart and blood food.

Grapes   hang  in a cluster that has the shape of the heart.  Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.

A  Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums.  Even the wrinkles or folds on the nut are just like the neo-cortex. We now know walnuts help develop more than three (3) dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney  Beans  actually heal and help maintain kidney function  and yes, they look exactly like the human  kidneys.

Celery,  Bok Choy, Rhubarb  and many more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don’t have enough sodium in your diet, the body  pulls it from the bones, thus making them weak.  These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.

 

Avocadoes,  Eggplant and Pears  target the health and function of the womb and  cervix of the female – they look just like these  organs. Today’s research shows that when a woman eats one avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this?   It takes exactly nine (9) months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them).  

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the mobility of male sperm and increase the numbers of Sperm as well to overcome male sterility.  
  
  
  Sweet  Potatoes  look  like the pancreas and actually balance the  glycemic index of  diabetics.
 

  
  Olives   assist  the health and function of the ovaries  
 

  
  Oranges,  Grapefruits ,  and other Citrus fruits look just like  the mammary glands of the female and actually  assist the health of the breasts and the  movement of lymph in and out of the  breasts.
 

  
  Onions look like the body’s cells. Today’s research shows onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells. They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes. A working companion, Garlic, also helps eliminate waste materials and dangerous free radicals from the body.

If I could stick to this list, weight would never be a problem! LOL

Wednesday Weight Loss Tidbits

On Thursday. I actually gathered this stuff yesterday. I don’t know why it never made it this far, but it didn’t. I thought some of it was interesting enough to share so here it is today.

Did you know?

Research shows LAP band surgery is a cheaper way to fight obesity and diabetes than diets, exercise and other weight-loss methods Tracking 60 obese patients for two years, the study found the lifetime health care costs of gastric banding was $98,900, compared with $101,400 losing weight through conventional methods. Now I don’t know if that included the $6000 to get it done or not, but for the $2500 difference I think I’ll do it the good old fashioned way.

In addition to prevention of diabetes, decreased urinary incontinence may be an additional benefit of weight loss. I know even skinny ladies that wet themselves a little when they sneeze, cough, laugh to hard. I guess they have to figure out their own way to stop. I just need to lose weight. I wonder if this works for stress incontinence too?

The American College of Sports Medicine has release new guidelines for adult exercise. The average adult should get between 150 and 250 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week. So what’s that, 2 and a half to 4 hours a week? This exercise should burn between 1200 and 2000 calories per week. This level of exercise, coupled with a reasonable diet, will prevent unwanted weight gain. A greater volume of exercise or more intense exercise will lead to greater weight loss. Duh? Therefore, there is a “dose-response” effect for exercise. Activity levels of less than 150 minutes per week will result in minimal, if any, weight loss. Exercising more than 150 minutes per week will result in mild, 2-3 kg weight loss. Activity of 225 to 400 minutes per week (4 to 6 hrs) will result in 5 th 7.5 kg weight loss. An average of 200 to 300 minutes of exercise per week is needed to maintain weight loss, but more is better when trying to prevent weight re-gain. I don’t know how much a kg is equal to in pounds, but obviously I want less of them.  To me this is a pretty disappointing picture and not very complete, as I do know some exercises are more beneficial than others for less amount of time.

I read an article on dieting that finished with  ”make dieting fun” yesterday. I can see making exercise “fun”. Go out and play like you did as a kid at recess, get an exercise buddy, play things you liked to play as a kid (when age isn’t a problem. LOL) but dieting? I don’t see any way to make that fun. As close as I get is trying a new recipe and to me even that’s work. I’m open to suggestions here if any one has any.

We all know beans are a great addition to any diet. They add fiber so they’re filling, loaded with good stuff, usually hardly any fat, etc. Did you know that there is an enormous amount of people who don’t eat beans just because of the “fart factor“?  I have always known they can cause gas, but I never really thought that much about it. Beans contain a sugar called oligosaccharide and we lack the enzyme required to break the sugar down. When the sugar arrives in your lower intestinal tract intact, it ferments, creating a buildup of gas. The gas isn’t absorbed into the intestine, so the body expels it. I had heard once that if you cook a potato with your beans that it absorbs the gas. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but this article says if you soak your beans, the sugar slowly leaches out. It says to change the soaking water a few times to keep the sugar from being reabsorbed. You just need to be sure and rinse them and then rinse them again. It says to rinse after cooking also, but I use that water as the base for my beans because I’ve usually thrown onion and/or garlic into cook with them, so I think I’ll skip that part. I have heard that product “Beano” was pretty good. Anybody try it?

And last but not least, until yesterday I would have said YoChee? WTH? I guess it’s the next big thing coming down the pike for weight loss edge. You take nonfat, plain yogurt and drain it through a cheesecloth or coffee filter for 8-24 hours. Once it’s completely drained of all it’s liquid you can spread it and use it to replace cream cheese, mayo, butter, etc. It’s also supposed to be good for cooking etc. in place of cream. It makes smoother, creamier, whatever. The website is www.YoChee.com and it’s pretty cool. Has recipes and tells what it is and how to use it. I may actually give this a try. It’s good for up to a week in the frig. I can’t remember if they tell you on the site that you can use cheesecloth or a coffee filter because they have drainers for sale. I picked that up in another article.

Sorry this is so long. I just had so much to share. Anybody else?

How Many Weight Watchers Blogs Are There?

Hungry!

This morning I was doing some research about exercise, calorie intake, and plateaus. I was looking for an old blog where the writer had been on Weight Watchers and done really well. One of her last posts was some advice she had gotten from a fitness trainer and I thought it was excellent. It  explained how even tho we exercise more, we don’t seem to lose any weight. I was really sorry when she quit blogging. I thought her writing was interesting and I was still learning quite a bit. Alas, she decided her weight loss blog had done it’s job and decided to move on to other things.

The post made a lot of sense to me. She had really stepped up her exercise routine, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He told her that when you do that, you need to step up your caloric intake also, otherwise your body hoards fat just like it does when you first start dieting and it thinks you’re going to starve it. It explained it a lot better and more concise.

When she quit blogging, I took her off my blogroll. Silly me. I should have left it there for inspiration if nothing else. This morning I thought I would google “weight watchers blogs” and see if I could find it that way. As far as I know she didn’t take it down. I went through 43 pages of WW blogs, articles, news, etc. before AOL through me off. The one I thought may be her, blogger says the blog has been removed. I hope not.

I know nothing lasts forever, but I am really hoping I’ll run across it again some day. Then I’ll be smart enough to copy on a notepad the advice I thought was so great instead of counting on my “memory”.

Pork Loin and Acorn Squash by WW

Sticking to my plan of cooking more WeightWatchers recipes last night I cooked a pork loin with acorn squash. Pork loin was on sale super cheap if you bought a big one, so I bought one that made about 3  three or four pound roasts. I usually don’t have a special fondness for pork loin because it always seems to come out so dry. This was really nice and there was glaze left in the bottom of the pan to spoon over the pork after it was cooked.

I need to get used to acorn squash again. With this glaze it had just a nice, slight orange and sweet flavor without overpowering it. The BF said it was really good and he knows not to say that if he doesn’t want to eat it again. LOL.

Usually when I do a roast I just sprinkle some tried and true combo of spices out of a jar, but this calls for a little salt, pepper, sage and garlic cloves. Here’s what I did.

• 3 lb. pork loin roast
• 1/2 TBLS. salt
• 1/2 TBLS. fresh ground pepper
• 4 TBLS. sage
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 3/4 cup orange juice
• 6 TBLS. real maple syrup
• 2 acorn squash, halved and seeded

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a roasting pan with foil. Spray foil with Pam or whatever you use. Rub roast with about 3/4 of your spice mix and garlic. Cook for about 20 min. Take the balance of the mix and rub around the edges of the acorn squash.

Take the pork out of the oven and put the squash, cut side down around the pork in the roasting pan, and shove back in the oven for about 30 min.

Mix the orange juice and maple syrup. Pull the pork and squash out of the oven and turn the squash cut side up. Baste everything with the orange juice and maple mix. Cook 15-20 more minutes or until internal temp of pork reaches about 160 degrees and the squash is done. Baste 2 or 3 more times while finishing the cooking. I finally on the last 5 minutes just poured what I had left all over everything.

Enjoy. If you’re counting points, this is approx. 7 points per serving. I’m open to suggestions if you want to put any in the comments below.

Self Sabotaging Our Weight Loss

Why? Why do we sabotage our own efforts? What are we really saying to ourselves? What are we hiding behind being over weight?

My mother was heavy all my life. I can remember it tormenting her when I was a child. She used to take me with her on occasion to a doctor she drove to 30 miles away to get diet pills. (This was prior to my own appreciation for “bennies”, ”crosstops”, ”whites”). She drank what then were those God-awful shakes twice a day for meals and then ate a ”reasonable” dinner. She did lose quite a bit of weight, until they took her off of the pills and she actually began eating again.

As I grew up I was finding my own diets to follow. Once I reached ”womanhood” I not only “blossomed” I was the whole darn bush!  At 16 and 175lbs. I discovered WeightWatchers. At that time I couldn’t afford the meetings, but I bought the first ever book and followed it religiously. It worked great, although a lot of their recipes were quite strange and I lost 38 lbs. in 6 weeks. I actually kept that weight off for quite awhile.

Later on when in my early 20′s my mother had come to live with me and we were on WeightWatchers once again. My mother had previously tried TOPS (can’t remember what it stands for) and a couple of other diets that were the latest and greatest for their time. It was during this inbetween time that I noticed every time my mother found something that actually was working for her, she would quit. It was so blatant, that I finally came out and asked her why she complained about her weight and then quit any thing that helped her lose some of it? Now years later I find myself doing the same thing.

For me one of the first things to wane is motivation. I start out all gang-ho how this time I’m going to stick with it, how I hate the extra weight and how I hate the way I feel carrying it around. I hate it that I can’t fit into my clothes and I hate both my chins. LOL. So why do I not start my day reading the stuff that motivates me to stick to what I’m doing instead of ditching all that stuff completely?

I belong to SparkPeople which is a free weight loss site that is just terrific with the advice, the articles, the tools, the friendships. Very motivating. The last two days were the first time I’ve read a couple of the emails and visited the site in quite awhile. I belong to another free site that was put up by my own “parent” company called “My Best Site”. It’s also very encouraging and enlightening. I haven’t been on that site in I don’t know how long.

Last but not least is the WeightWatchers site itself. Over the last couple of months I’ve probably talked to at least 3 people who have lost weight strictly by joining the site and taking advantage of everything they have to offer there. No meetings. No nothing else, and they’ve lost a lot! Here I am one of the biggest WeightWatchers advocates I know and I haven’t visited that site in months.

Am I just old enough now that I figure I can eat what I want no matter what it does to my body? (My mother uses the “age card”  excuse for a lot of what she does). I can’t say I have the strongest willpower but is it a matter of willpower or a matter of not doing what works?

I have noticed that my parenting skills were quite lacking when it came to teaching my youngest kid some actual “life skills”. I will be teaching him about goal setting over the next couple of days. I think while doing that I will write down a daily schedule for myself that starts my day with actively participating in the sites I mentioned above instead of reading whatever (usually and often repeated) jokes that are sitting in my email.

Wednesday Weight Loss Tips

I get so tired of the same old advice about losing weight. Everyone gives the same tips year after year, pound after pound. Occasionally I run accross good ideas that I’ve never seen before or some new news that I think is interesting to share. I think today is one of those days.

I was reading an article in my local newspaper (Wednesdays have the food and wine section) about freezing treats. I found this article interesting because 1) the writer is on her own weight loss journey 2) it made sense.

She freezes almost everything she eats to fulfill her sweet tooth desires from brownies to peanut M&Ms. Her idea is that it takes her so long to eat 2 Double Stuffed Oreos when they’re frozen compared to 4 to 6 she would have eaten had they not been frozen. Because it takes so long to eat them, they’re also much more satisfying. I can remember eating Snickers frozen as a kid. They would get so hard it would take forever to finish one. She does warn about being careful as you bite so you don’t crack a tooth.

She also freezes certain fruits and vegetables and eats them that way. I went to the store the other day and bought blueberries and grapes. She had mentioned these specifically (she’s addicted to frozen grapes) so I thought I’d give it a try. I didn’t have room in my freezer for the big bag of grapes, but did freeze the blueberries.

When they come out of the freezer it seems so strange. They’re beautiful, but they sound almost like you’re banging marbles together. I tried one and I really thought the freezing had taken a lot of the flavor away, but when I had a bunch in my yogurt this morning I thought they were quite the little surprise for the mouth. Now I’m looking forward to freezing the grapes with anticipation. I’m always looking for something that moves my hand to something healthy the way it likes to grab at cookies, so hopefully this will be an enticing answer. I like grapes a lot already but if it’s a choice between a handful of grapes and a handful of Doritos, sorry to say grapes aren’t the first thing I go for.

I know. Some old, sage advice. Keep cookies and Doritos out of the house. LOL.

I Try To Be Good And “They” Screw It Up!

Grahm crackers

Starting in kindergarten, graham crackers have always been the snack of the hour holding a special place in the hearts of most children everywhere. My love for graham crackers didn’t just stay at school during snack time though. My Dad used to break up graham crackers in a bowl, pour milk over them and eat them like a breakfast cereal. Just about anything my Dad did must be good, so I have carried on the habit and passed it on to my children.

As a dieter they were always the less evil choice between them and cookies. I was thrilled to death when they came out with the low fat version. This morning as I’m opening one of the pouches, getting ready to break some of them in my bowl, I couldn’t help but notice they now boast 5g of whole grain on the front of the box. If there really is whole grain in there, shouldn’t it boost the amount of fiber? As I’m reading through the ingredients to find what kind of whole grain, I can’t help but notice the high fructose corn syrup making the list. Now why on earth do they need HFCS when they brag about the honey that makes them “honey grahams”?

It just goes to show how important the little list of “stuff” on the side of the box really is. It’s so easy to be deceived by their fancy marketing tactics thinking we’re doing a really good thing towards our own health and obesity only to find we’ve been foiled again.

Don’t Mess With My Coffee

When I wake up in the morning while I wait for the coffee to get done brewing, I have gone back to drinking a full glass of 1 part unsweetened cranberry juice and 7 parts water. It wakes me up pretty fast, it hydrates me from sleeping all nite (altho I keep a big glass or bottle of water on my nightstand for during the night), and it flushes my body. The unsweetened cranberry is pretty tart so I’m not sure if that’s what wakes me up or the fruit itself, but it works well for the reasons I drink it.

My true love in the morning, after a big meal, or in the afternoon when I really need a pick-me-up is coffee. I pretty much gave up diet sodas for water a few years ago per WeightWatchers instructions to drink at least 8 glasses per day.

I probably only took up coffee because my Dad used to drink it. I was definitely a “Daddy’s Girl”. I remember he used to drink it with cream and sugar and it would just taste so good. I wasn’t really allowed to drink it at home except when I would steal a sip while getting it for him, but every Sunday in between the 2 services at our church I could get coffee and stand there so grown up for my 9 years.

Later in my teen years, when my father affectionately started calling me “Bubbles” because of getting fat in puberty, I laid off the cream and sugar as a way to decrease my intake of calories. I’ve drank it black now for so many years, that I can’t hardly stand the sweet in it anymore if I actually get one with sugar.

I probably drink at least 12 cups a day as a minimum, so you can imagine my dismay a few years back when they came out with the big coffee scare that it was so bad for us. Like most things to do with health they have done a backflip on that and now say it’s actually good for us and has antioxidants that prevent certain diseases. (I wish they’d come out with a study like that for a fifth of vodka. LOL)

The other day in my inbox is the headline “Coffee Could Be Sabatoging Your Weight Loss”. My heart jumped. I drink so much coffee, and I never thought of it having any calories. I just don’t count it at all. Most of the article talked about all the stuff we put in our coffee, or the special coffees we get at those “special coffee” places, but it did get me to wondering how many calories I was consuming per day.

The internet seems to be a bit confused as to whether an 8 oz. cup has 2, 5 or 9 calories per cup. A lot of the sites that have their oppinion on how many calories don’t tell you anything about what else is in there.  The nutritional facts below is the one I’ve decided to go with, and at 2 calories per cup, I don’t think it’s going to make or break me. Notice the “B” vitamins and the amount of protein? Who’da thunk? No wonder we get moving. LOL

Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 8 fl. oz.

Amount per Serving     8 oz.
Calories 2 Calories from Fat 0
% Daily Value *
Total Fat 0g	0%
Saturated Fat  0g	0%
Monounsaturated Fat  0g
Polyunsaturated Fat  0g
Cholesterol 0mg	0%
Sodium 5mg	0%
Potassium 116mg	3%
Total Carbohydrate 0g	0%
Dietary Fiber  0g	0%
Protein 0.3g	1%

Vitamin E	0%
Thiamin (B1)	2%
Riboflavin (B2)	11%
Niacin (B3)	2%
Folic Acid (Folate)	1%
Magnesium	2%
Panthothenic Acid	6%

---

Est. Percent of Calories from:

Fat 0.0%     Carbs 0.0%

Protein 60.0%

I Feel Better Now

Not because I’ve lost a ton of weight, hell no, but I spent the first part of my morning this morning looking at female celebrities. You may ask how that would make someone like me feel better? These were side by side pictures of some of our favorite stars with and without make-up. I am here to tell you, without make-up there are some ugly women who are superstars. LOL. 

What got me there was a little blurb about how JLo has lost all the baby fat since having her twins back in February. While through the months she has been seen by papparrazzi working out, it seems the secret no one knew is she sleeps 10 hours a day. Must be nice, aye? How can you do that when you just had a set of twins? With lots of money and a very involved father, that’s how.

It seems her routine is to not eat anything after 5 pm. That’s one rule I’m having trouble with. I end up eating way to late, because I know if I eat dinner I’m done for the night and I usually have more stuff I want to get done. I know a lot of advice is to not eat after 7 or 8 pm when trying to lose weight.

After dinner the only thing she has is a some green tea, and then off to bed by 8. I don’t know how she’ll keep that schedule when she’s working. I guess she probably won’t have to since she’s already lost the 40 lbs. of baby fat she had gained.

According to this “sleep therapy”, in the same way 10 hrs. of sleep keeps you trim and younger, they say that naps make you gain weight. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am to hear that one. I love my naps and according to everything else I had read they are supposed to be so good for you. They’re a stress reliever and also I thought since I don’t sleep that long at night it would help make up for some of that on the “sleep to lose weight” issue. Guess I was wrong on both counts, although the article did say her husband has gotten pretty thin and he’s the one who takes care of the twins when she’s getting her beauty rest. 

I’m going back to bed. LOL.

I Love Science And Weight Loss

When you’ve dieted as many times and for as many years of your life as I have, you get to a point where just about everything you hear is the “same old stuff”, which I guess no matter how you cut it, it keeps being the same old stuff because that’s what works.

“Watch the calories. Burn more than you eat.” blah, blah, blah.

Every once in awhile science makes a breakthrough that helps the same old stuff work better or faster. One of those new things is the way we exercise.

I get a lot of health magazines and newsletters. I sell vitamins and nutritional supplements so I like to keep up with that kind of information. Some of the newsletters I get are from doctors that don’t necessarily “conform to the norm”. LOL. They do a lot of their own research, come up with their own theories, and fight an uphill battle until the regular populous of doctors “get it”.  One such doctor is Dr. Al Sears.

I have read his articles and looked at his P.A.C.E. program for exercise for years. His big thing in life seems to be making people aware that cardio is actually bad for your health (heart) and the way we should be exercising for health and weight loss. Now his way of thinking has pretty much taken off. While they don’t tell you how bad cardio for extended periods of time is for you, they are preaching more about circuit training and interval training as a way of boosting your metabolism and burning more fat.

The first one to “get it” was Curves, the gym that was basically women only and you move between resistance training and cardio every 30 seconds. They had everything set up in a circle and you move from machine to running in place to machine to running, until you completed the circle twice. For a beginner, I thought that worked pretty well. If you were more experienced you could always ramp it up.

Now as I look at some of the trainings for these marathon and half marathon runners, they are teaching the interval training. The “Couch to 5K” is a great example of that. It’s where you do bursts of high intensity in between regular brisk walking. This kind of exercise is supposed to strengthen your heart, plus keep your metabolism working long after your done. They say their interval training will have anyone running 3 miles in just 2 months following their plan.

Since getting older and so much more sedentary than I’ve ever been, strengthening the heart is a biggy for me. They say the reason that people run marathons and then kiel over dead when appearing to be in perfect health is that while running, the heart is under constant stress. The interval training “conditions” it vs. stressing it.

Did you know if you just stand instead of sitting one more hour per day, you burn an extra 100 calories? I thought that was interesting.

Also being post- menapausal the things that used to work for me to lose weight aren’t working any more. My body reacts differently to things than it used to. I’ve been using the interval training and the circut training, and I do feel a difference. Now I just need to be a bit better about my eating plan.

Speaking of eating, any body else go to Superbowl parties yesterday where there is much more food on the buffet table than there are people to eat it?