Tag lobster

Surviving a Bad Diet Week

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Surviving a Bad Diet Week

Lobster Poutine

Lobster Poutine!

I was travelling all last week. I’m usually better prepared for eating well on the road but the stress overload on this particular trip was way above & beyond anything I would consider normal. I won’t dwell on the details now, for fear that I’ll bring on another panic attack! But believe me, this was a heavy-duty week. When I tell you that the healthiest meal I had all week was a lobster poutine, you might get some idea of just how poorly my diet fared.

Don’t know what poutine is? Get ready to have your mind blown!

It’s a dish that originated in the province of Quebec. The basic version consists of French fries, loaded up with a big fistful of cheese curds. And all of that gets slathered in gravy. Gravy so hot that the curds melt into the matrix of fries! You can nuance the dish by adding all sorts of other ingredients. I like chunks of German or Hungarian sausage myself. But you can add pepperoni, perhaps with a dash of Parmesan cheese & some chili flakes, to give it a little Italian pizza-like flair. The lobster poutine I’d never had before though. And, despondent though I felt about how I was eating all week, I just couldn’t resist the temptation. Once again, I was so enamored of the dish before me, that I attacked it before remembering to grab of a shot of it. Apologies!

I didn’t get home ’til almost midnight on Saturday. I was so exhausted on Sunday that I was couch-bound all day. The scale mocked me that morning, I was up 5.6 lbs after my week of debauchery. Horror! I stuck with a low-carb regimen through the day, on Sunday. Though I did have some baked beans. And some mustard pickle. And that cherry ice cream. With dark chocolate thrown in for good measure. Please … cut me some slack, I was hurting!

Monday showed a drop of 4 lbs. Phew! The big gain was likely water retention from all that starchy eating the previous week. In any case, I’m not quite back on track yet. And I’m looking at a pretty daunting schedule between now & Christmas. I’m really not sure if I’m telling you all this in anticipation of failure over the coming weeks. Or maybe I’m preparing to test myself, and the robustness of the program, during such trying times. Whichever it might be, it’s going to be an interesting time. Please send me a word of encouragement here and there. I could use the help!

And if you’ve never had poutine before … give it a try!

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!

 

Our Friends Don’t Care if We are Fat!

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Our Friends Don’t Care if We are Fat!PEI Lobster Dinner

I’m being a little callous here but I’m guessing that more than half our friends don’t really care if we lose weight or not. Yes, they would worry if we fell ill because of it but, on a day to day basis, they probably love us for who we are. But they don’t really care much, one way of the other, about our weight. Or how we might feel about our weight. The other half, some of them may be trying to lose weight themselves, might even be hoping we fail! 🙂

Dieting is a lonely endeavour. That doesn’t mean we can’t feel empathy for each other, even if only for brief periods of time. It doesn’t mean we can’t share parts of each other’s journeys. And those things too can be valuable. But for the most part, we’re left to our own devices when it comes to weight loss.

Below is the text of a Facebook post that I shared with my friends. The pic that accompanied it is above.

Poor man’s dinner in PEI …
Endless bowl of seafood chowder.
A salad (wtf is that for? Though half the plate was potato salad, so not bad!) 
Endless bucket of mussels (ate them all but did not ask for more!)
PEI spuds swimming in half a pound of butter.
And, of course, a sea cockroach!
I didn’t eat the delicious, fresh baked little loaves of bread that sang out to me the whole time!
AND I skipped dessert.
Good boy, Paul!

Most will give it a like. Or rejoin with a little humerous comment of their own. But very few will comment on the diet & weight-loss parts of the post. Not that I would want them to do that publicly. My skinny friends might be horrified! LOL

But you’d think one or two might share a word of encouragement by personal message or something, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps they’ve seen me fail too many times before & they don’t want to embarrass me? And yes, now that I think about it, I might actually be embarrassed. Worse yet, is it possible that I might perceive the message as insincere? Supporting each other can be a complex thing sometimes. Despite the challenges, I’m grateful for the friends I have in my life anyway.

On the other hand … screw them! I’ll get my revenge when I strut into the next social gathering several pounds lighter! 🙂

PS … The funny side of dieting & life aside, I am actually a little worried at the moment. I haven’t really tested this level of looseness, of so little dietary restriction, previously. Have I been too loose over the course of this holiday? Did I go overboard a couple of times too many? When I look at that pic, & realise how much I ate at that one meal, I have to say … I’m a lot worried! The scale will tell the tale this coming weekend.

I know you don’t care all that much but please cross your fingers for me! 🙂 🙂 🙂

Bread Depresses Me!

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Bread Depresses Me!Nova Scotia Lobster

I still don’t know if this is real or imagined but bread definitely does something to my mood. I keep coming back to this because it’s the one thing I haven’t figured out how to integrate into my dietary regimen. Yet! I’m sure there’s a solution out there, maybe an old strain of the wheat grain will work for me. Or an alternate grain, but I haven’t bothered to chase it down yet.

Meantime, I’m faced with the fact that I pay a price for eating bread. I pay with reduced impulse control. I pay on the scale. And I pay by feeling just a little blue afterwards. And often this persists through to the following morning. After eating bread, I am tempted by other treats that, typically, don’t cross my mind. I try to buy a bar of dark chocolate in anticipation of the loss of control but even that doesn’t provide sufficient resistance sometimes. Most interestingly, I tend to have feelings of light despair, uneasy anxiety, or perhaps it’s just a hint of melancholia. None of these feelings are normal for me. Circumstances don’t change but, after eating bread, I do. It’s possible that the other items I eat, because of the lack of impulse control, are contributing but I think I’ve narrowed it down to bread.

So why do you eat it then, you idiot!

Well sometimes you just do, don’t you! The past week vacationing in Nova Scotia has been wonderful. And one of the great things about being in Nova Scotia is the wide availability of seafood, particularly lobster. Once considered nothing more than a sea bug, an ocean cockroach, it’s now a luxury dining item. Because of demand, it’s not cheap here either. But it’s a lot cheaper than back home so I’m indulging! Anything you can imagine is done with lobster here. And it’s available everywhere. Forget gourmet restaurants, you can get lobster from diners & food trucks in Nova Scotia! Sure you can eat just lobster but you can also have lobster salad, lobster Cesar salad, lobster cakes, lobster club sandwiches, even lobster mac & cheese. And a big favourite with the tourists is the lobster roll. It’s exactly what you’d imagine … a big roll of bread, stuffed to overflowing, with lobster meat. I just knew I’d have to have one. And I did. Yesterday.

So today, I’m just a little off as I write. I’m looking forward to eating far less today. And definitely no bread. I hope I didn’t do too much damage & that my scale will forgive me when I step aboard.

PS … I have to add that this is a fantastic place for a holiday. It’s just ridiculously beautiful, the air is clean, the beaches are glorious. The people are great & the food is to die for. I warn you though, don’t think you’ll accomplish all you set out to do. Maps & the internet do not provide insight into all the distractions you’ll face along the way. Everything takes longer, way longer, than you imagine because it’s impossible to resist the impulse to follow one more sign, to a place with some unpronounceable name. And then you’ll find yourself sitting on a beach, in a deserted cove, that you can call your own for an hour or two. It’s magical. I highly recommend a visit.

And yes, the lobster roll was worth the pain! 🙂