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Top 10 Things to Irritate the Irish with on St. Patrick’s Day!

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Top 10 Things to Irritate the Irish with on St. Patrick’s Day!
Irish Habanero

Some Irish facts for the day that’s in it …

  1. If you want to use the diminutive of the name of our patron saint, the correct version is St. Paddy’s Day, NOT NOT NOT St. Patty’s Day. I’m sure St. Patricia was a lovely woman but we don’t celebrate her on March 17th. Remember that we have Liam Neeson, with that special set of skills, for folk who get this wrong!
  2. I’d have to be under severe duress before I’d even look at green beer, never mind drink it! And no, you do not contaminate a good pint by putting green sprinkles on the top of a Guinness!
  3. Irish nachos are not corn chips with some green crap thrown all over them. Irish nachos are made from spuds! Preferable thinly sliced (to maximise grease absorption!) & fried, of course. Then you throw the bacon, sour cream & green crap all over them!
  4. While I love corned beef & cabbage too, the traditional Irish dish is bacon & cabbage. There’s no point in looking for it outside of Ireland, it doesn’t taste the same. That’s why the Irish adopted the corned beef thing when they came to America. If you’re outside Ireland, you might be forgiven for going with the corned beef & cabbage.
  5. Don’t assume we all know Bono! Though I did work with the Edge’s brother for a while! And now that I think about it, I think a lad I worked for at one time, actually worked with Bono’s brother!
  6. I don’t think I have ever said “Top o’ the mornin'” to anyone in my entire life. Nor has any Irish person ever said it to me!
  7. No, I have no idea how to spell leipreachán. Feck off & look it up yourself!
  8. A four leaf clover does not represent the Irish shamrock. If you smuggle the real thing out of Ireland to plant in your foreign garden. It will die within 24 hours. But remain green after it’s death. (You know I make some of this crap up, right!?!)
  9. We tend to overlook the fact that the lad was English. And we’d be grateful if you didn’t ask us to explain all that to you!
  10. And last, but not least, it’s just pointless me trying to adhere to a diet on St. Paddy’s weekend. So I’m off to have an Irish coffee to start off the day. And I’ll probably have a pint for my morning coffee break. NOT!

Spread the green love … Happy St. Paddy’s Day to all! 🙂

Mood Altering Foods

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Mood Altering Foods

Sourdough Bread

I’m being lazy, sorry. I am recycling this bread pic because I wolfed down the tomato sandwiches too quickly!

I generally don’t eat candies so I have no idea if that red food dye still gets kids going crazy in the classroom. What does seem to have an impact on me is bread. Though I’ll admit sugar might also be making a contribution. Whenever I fall off the wagon and eat bread, I’ve usually fallen so far off the wagon that I’m devouring cookies, candies, and who knows what else. None of which aid weight loss. And some of which may be playing with my head.

I’m generally an optimistic person. On a bad day, I’m probably just a realist. It takes a really bad day for me to feel depressed. Though on any given day, regardless of mood, I can certainly be anxious about uncertainty. Or about something that matters to me. Whatever my mood, I can make the situation feel worse by eating bread. I was feeling a little anxious the other day. My diet was off the rails and I simply couldn’t get it back on track. I have no idea why but, in the midst of this, I was inspired to test the bread theory. Again!

Growing up, I absolutely loved bread. There is probably no better way to eat food than stuffing it between two, heavily buttered, slices of a crusty loaf, is there!?! Bacon and eggs, ham and cheese, cheese and onion, French fries (the amazing Chip Buttie!), cold cuts, hot meats, even potato chips! Fresh bread, toasted, it doesn’t matter, all are simply great. Just on its own, there’s nothing like oodles of melting butter on an oven-fresh hot loaf. My mouth is watering as I write, though I only had a couple of almost-boring tomato sandwiches for lunch the other day. Even they were delicious. I couldn’t help myself, I ate more bread with dinner that evening. That evening I felt great. No indigestion. No feelings of malaise. No depression. Had I overcome the effect? Could I safely eat bread again?

Unfortunately, the physical and mental challenges caught up with me through the night. Disturbing my sleep and leaving me to lie there worrying about how I might ever get back to losing weight again. The next day was challenging, I couldn’t stick with the low-carb regimen I had planned during those sleepless hours. I felt quite miserable about it all.

Yesterday, I thought I’d try fighting one kind of starch with another and I committed to a predominantly potato day. I had hash browns for lunch. And a ludicrously large bowl of home-fried potatoes for dinner. Okay, I admit it: I went back and had a second bowl.  I started out with at least a cup of olive oil (it’s a really big pan!), along with six or 8 cloves of garlic, one medium onion, and some hot peppers for added flavour. And then that huge pot of cooked-and-cooled potatoes hit the pan with a sizzle. I did sneak in a chocolate-nut mix dessert too, drenched in heavy cream.

While my stomach was a little distended as I trudged up the stairs at bedtime, the noise in my head had abated. After a good night’s sleep, imagine how elated I was to find myself down 0.8 lbs the following morning!

Had I banished the bread banshees? Was it the feel-good butyrate produced by my tummy bugs from all that resistant starch in the cooked and cooled potato? Who cares! Feeling good is feeling good.

I’m not sure that I’m back on track yet. But I am cautiously optimistic!

Let’s see if I can make it through the rest of the week without making any more silly dietary decisions. Even if I have to force myself to eat more of those amazingly delicious absolutely awful potatoes! 🙂

Results … Month #6

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Results … Month #6 (Down 35.8 lbs)Results Month 6

Happy New Year to all. May 2019 bring you nothing but the best of times!

Mind you, I’m not too happy starting out the new year myself, this morning. I’m down another 2 lbs this past month. A month that included the challenge of settling in to a new home, AND the Christmas holiday binge season. Yes, I’m down 2 lbs. But it could have been so much better.

It seems like I couldn’t stop myself eating garbage for the past week or so. The closer I came to the monthly results day, the worse things got. I was trying to justify my behavior on the grounds that if all the bad stuff was gone, I might get off to a great start in the new year. But I managed to change all that for the worse when I went shopping yesterday!

The only new year’s resolution that I’ve successfully managed to keep in recent years is the one where I resolved not to make any more new year’s resolutions! Despite sticking with that philosophy, I still feel like I ought to be doing something bigger, better & bolder on January 1st each year. In anticipation of that, I thought we’d try something different, something a little more diet-friendly, for the New Year’s Day dinner today. We decided to go with the traditional Irish meal (North American version!) of corned beef and cabbage. With potatoes, of course. That should work well with my dietary ambitions. I could reduce the number of potatoes. And I could devour a whole pot of cabbage if I wanted. Of course everything would be heavily buttered too.

We went shopping for the beef brisket yesterday. Now you probably won’t believe this but all the Christmas chocolate was on sale too. Half off! Seriously, who could resist? I’ve loaded up on those delicious Swiss chocolate balls. Some holiday-sized slabs of those English chocolate bars that I grew up with. And some other silver-wrapped Christmas chocolate figures, they were just so cute. I really looked hard for the dark chocolate versions of all those items. But they must have been very popular for the holidays, they were all sold out! 😉

Already, in my head, I’m writing excuse for next month’s results. I don’t know what else to say!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

But really … losing weight, even just a little, over the Christmas holiday is good. Isn’t it!?! LOL

 

 

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?

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! 🙂 🙂 🙂