Tag diet

Printing & Dieting

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Printing & Dieting Printing & Dieting

I don’t print very often but when I do, it’s usually for some last minute emergency thing. This is roughly what happens when such an event arises …

  1. Wireless printer connection lost.
  2. Reboot printer, laptop, modem & any other piece of electronics within a 100 yard radius.
  3. It comes alive!
  4. Print a draft copy of aforementioned critical document to see if everything is okay.
  5. Everything looks great, so now print a best quality page.
  6. That doesn’t work, so must change printer cartridge.
  7. Don’t have new cartridge, swear several times.
  8. Go to store & buy new high capacity color cartridge.
  9. Come back, stick it in, & print alignment page.
  10. It doesn’t look right & the scanner can’t scan it. Error!
  11. Twenty minutes later, discover that it was the black cartridge!
  12. No spare black cartridge either. Back to the store.
  13. Leave store, only to realize that all the good paper has been used up testing.
  14. Phew! At least I hadn’t gone back to the office again.
  15. Come back, spend another twenty minutes & a dozen more pages of paper to confirm that everything is working correctly.
  16. Admire first good print. And yes, it’s good!
  17. Go for coffee & cigarette to de-stress.
  18. Now have coffee ring on the corner of the good page! S@#$!!!

Despite how many times I’ve printed stuff over the years, this seems to happen all the time.

My experience with starting diets, & adhering to them, sometimes resembles this process. But it’s particularly difficult to stick with the dietary plan when you’ve got to deal with this printing challenge to kick the day off!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

Dieting on the Road

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Dieting on the Road

Tandoori Platter

It’s not as challenging to eat “well” on the road as we dieters like to imagine. I’m not talking about going the chicken salad route (hold the chicken skin, the croutons, the dressing and the dried fruit & nut pieces) … you can do that if you want but that’s not how I diet!

Yes, you have to have some dialogue with the server. And yes, they’ll probably think you’re a bit of a pain. But better that than blow the diet. Again!

On the road last week, I was led towards an Indian restaurant this particular evening. And that was just fine by me. I pretty much love all food but if you forced me to pick just one national cuisine, I might have to go with Indian. As it happened, I was on a low-carb regimen that particular day. Oh boy!

I love rice, naan, samosa & pakora but those were not going to be allowed today. Yes, there were salad options. And yes, there were vegetarian dishes aplenty. But I was drawn to the Tandoori Platter. Right away, the word platter promises a gut-busting feast of goodies. And it was. Beef, chicken, lamb, shrimp and who knows what else. There were some token veggies in there too, just to assuage any little fear I might entertain of it being an unhealthy choice. One of the key reasons for this choice was that it didn’t come with a sauce, Tandoori dishes are dry spiced. And I refused to ask about their spice recipe … just in case there were any bad ingredients in there that would have forced me to order that chicken salad! I do love those sauces, by the way, but there’s always some bad stuff hiding in them. And today was to be as sugar & starch-free as any reasonable road warrior could make it.

The bottom line was that it was delicious. I was stuffed. And I was sufficiently fortified to resisted all the starchy temptations offered by my dining companions!

But did it work?

I don’t know!

I’ll have to wait for the official end-of-month weigh-in on October 1st to see how it all plays out. Though I might have been grateful that I didn’t have my scale with me during my travels!

 

The Chicken or the Egg?

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The Chicken or the Egg?

Stormy Weather

This is not about protein! It’s about the mental & emotional mood swings that sometimes happen during the course of our weight loss endeavours. Sometimes the diet is the downer. Other times it’s just the daily grind. Then there are those times where bad stuff is happening in our lives. Regardless of circumstances, it would be nice to think that we could have an eating strategy to help us through such times. A strategy that would help us hang in there ’til we reach calmer waters.

After a fantastic vacation, & despite trying to stay ahead of work during it, I was backlogged when I returned. Over a week later, I’m still backlogged. And I’ve got those projects that I really meant to finish before I left on vacation. But I didn’t! I developed a cold immediately after I returned & it still hasn’t quite gone away. A couple of challenging decisions have come along this past week, when I’m least ready for them, all adding to the burden. No wonder I was a bit down yesterday. The dark & stormy weather at the waterfront was the perfect accompaniment for my generally gloomy outlook.

So how is the diet holding up during this turmoil? Pretty good actually. Though I’m not in weight loss mode, I’m bouncing around at one or two pounds below my post vacation weight. I am eating a lot more than I typically might were I to be a little more focused on weight loss. And I’m eating some bad stuff along the way too.

To offset those bad impulses, I decided to make a big pot of comfort food. Something high volume, filling & very capable of giving comfort. It was a vaguely vegetarian curry. A cup of olive oil in the bottom of the pot to brown the garlic & onion. A heaping tablespoon of curry powder, along with salt & pepper, for seasoning. A litre of organic chicken broth for the fluid. To this I added three large potatoes, cubed small. These will help thicken the sauce, along with providing some much needed comfort! A full head of shredded cabbage adds some serious bulk to the pot. I do like a little meat flavour so this is where we depart to the vaguely vegetarian description. Three Octoberfest sausages, cut into quarter inch cubes, went in next. And finally, a cup, maybe a cup & a half, of whipping cream to enrich the sauce. A cup of basil leafs towards the end. Probably sounds awful but the sausage & cream overcome the veggie bias. And you can eat an awful lot without impacting the scale too much. For “normal” people, this might have made eight servings. For me, it’ll be gone in three, maybe four, sittings at most!

I wish I could say that was the worst I’d done through the past week but it wasn’t! Still, I’m surviving a little blue phase without totally destroying my program. Sometimes, just hanging in there for a little while longer is all that’s required.

The chicken & egg conundrum is based on my questioning if my mood is the result of eating poorly? Or if my downer triggered the poor eating spell? Perhaps it circular & both might be true?

The 2nd Month’s Results

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The 2nd Month’s Results

That’s 17 lbs total loss since the start of this experiment on July 1st, so it’s only a 6 lbs loss for this month. It really is pretty good but I’m totally depressed about it though. Why? Because I’ve just come back from a two-week vacation in Canada’s Maritime provinces & Quebec, during which time I ate more bread than I typically would in about 6 months. Maybe even in a year.

Now I thoroughly enjoyed eating the bread. It was on my plan to do just that during vacation. But, as I’ve written about before, bread seems to depress me. So I’m depressed writing this morning! 🍞😁

Let’s be not-so-depressingly realistic here though: that’s a pretty good result for a month that was half consumed by the culinary debauchery of vacation eating. It’s still too soon to say for sure but this flexible dietary strategy seems to be working. I’ve got some work travel planned during the coming month but I continue to be intrigued by the potential.

Though feeling as I do this morning, it’s challenging to feel optimistic about the outcome!!! 😂 😭 😂

Those emoticons are a bit of depression humour right there! LOL

PS … I’ll cover the vacation eating in a little more detail, & its impact, in another post.

Disaster Management on Vacation

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Disaster Management on Vacation

I mentioned vacation eating in the 2nd month’s results post but this deserves some space of its own. It’s very important that our diets allow us the luxury of eating well, really well, while on holiday. Or is that really badly? We all need to fulfill the desire to be just a little wicked every now & again!

My recent vacation put that theory to the test.

A quick plug for Canada’s Maritime provinces & Quebec here … they are all amazing. We left Ontario, by car, with stops in Quebec City (you’d think you were in France!) & Fredericton, New Brunswick. All on the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia. We were in Nova Scotia almost a week, a stunningly beautiful place, before taking the ferry across to Prince Edward Island. Yet another gob-smacking adventure of one postcard-like scene after another. After a few days there we went back to the banks of the Saint Lawrence river, in Quebec. One last stay in Montreal was the perfect finish to a great vacation, before we reluctantly headed back home.  Amazing scenery, incredible food & great people everywhere we visited. I can’t wait to go back. The “incredible food” component is what concerns us most here, of course!

My plan was, & deliberately so, very loose. I wanted to see the impact of a pretty free flowing approach to eating while on vacation. I generally tried to avoid known bad things. For me, those include processed & packaged snacks, doughnuts & other such food-like products. Normally, I would consider bread off limits. Not only because it more closely resembles a modern snack food than it does a grain-based food, but primarily because it doesn’t agree with me. For me, it is both mood altering & gut damaging. However, I know the Maritimes are famous for their lobster rolls. And Quebec is famous for its smoked meat sandwiches. I wasn’t missing out on either, I was committed to indulging in the full experience, bread & all!

During the first week of the adventure, I generally tried to make better choices. I had my lobster but with a salad. Though I did have those breaded Digby scallops with French fries. And I seem to remember some beer battered fish & chips along the way! I’m pretty sure that I left some fries on the plate for one of those meals. Not something I’ve been know to do very often. As time progressed, I was allowing myself a little more freedom. Typically, & during times when I’m trying to lose weight, I tend to avoid eating significant amounts of starchy carbs with my proteins & fats. This strategy sometimes went out the window!

The traditional maritime “lobster supper”, for example, included the starch-laden seafood chowder, the endless bucket of mussels (for three but I was the only one eating from it & almost finished it!), the PEI potatoes swimming in butter, & the lobster (all shown in the bottom left, center, & top right pics in the collage above). I did manage to avoid the freshly baked bread, & dessert, on this occasion. Primarily because I was stuffed! The lobster roll (bottom right) was delicious. And the smoked meat & chopped liver sandwich (top left), with fries, is still a mouth-watering memory. I actually left some fries on the plate this time too. While getting fat, I was never leaving anything on the plate so this involuntary action is a pleasing outcome of the diet. Along the way, I did have one ice cream, cone & all. And a bar of chocolate that was less dark than it ought to have been. Okay, I admit it … it was a totally bad bar of milk chocolate. But it was different & it had bits of vaguely healthy ginger & fruit in it!

Ironically, one of the poorer meal choices of the trip happened when we got home. There was a big bag of frozen, & breaded, calamari in the freezer. These were even quicker than ordering in so I had I had two panfuls of those. OMG, the heartburn & indigestion! What do they put in that breading?

To counter all this, I only had breakfast on 4 or 5 occasions during our holiday. No big sacrifice this, since I almost never eat breakfast at home. And I skipped lunch, probably about 3 days a week. This was unnoticeable on driving days, when I was quite happy with my coffee. With cream, no sugar, of course.

My control “group” for this “experiment” was my skinny wife, who effortlessly maintains a BMI of 19. And she does this while eating all sorts of garbage. I know, infuriating, eh! While I was sometimes making good choices, & skipping a meal here & there, I still out-ate her by huge amounts. Yes, I’m bigger. Yes, my resting metabolism will burn more. But I still ate with the kind of freedom that I thought appropriate for a big guy on vacation. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

At the outset, we both weighed in. And at the end …

My wife had gained 5.2 lbs … while I gained 0.4 lbs!

Come on, tell me you’re not impressed! LOL

Of course she has already, without thought or effort, returned to her normal weight. While my body really has no idea what normal is any more. I should probably try to outline a more detailed vacation diet but with a result like this, who cares! Though next time, I will try to have something waiting in the freezer that doesn’t punish me like those breaded calamari did!