Tag weight loss

Bubble ‘n’ Squeak

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Bubble ‘n’ SqueakBubble n Squeak

Bubble ‘n’ Squeak might be familiar to anyone with a connection to the British Isles. In our house, it is very much a part of our Christmas tradition. It is a pan-fried collection of Christmas dinner leftovers. And we very deliberately cook Christmas dinner to excess, with a view to eating bubble ‘n’ squeak for several meals afterwards!

We start out by adding diced turkey and ham to a pan swimming with your fat of choice. Though butter is highly recommenced! Adding the Christmas veggies next, Brussels sprouts and carrots are among my favorites, starts the whole bubbling and squeaking symphony that gives the dish its name. Chop up some leftover roast potatoes, and in they go. Next it’s the mashed potatoes, to glue the whole mix together. These should have been mashed with ludicrous amounts of butter and heavy cream! When the first evidence of pan singeing appears on the potatoes, turn the mess over to brown the other side. Now add heapings of stuffing on the already-browned side. Next comes a strained jar of sour pickled onions. And finally, just before serving, add a big splodge of Christmas gravy, and blend.

If you haven’t had bubble ‘n’ squeak before, it probably sounds disgusting. Trust me, it’s not! Indeed, we have an annual debate about which meal was better … Christmas dinner on Christmas Day, or the first Bubble ‘n’ Squeak meal on Boxing Day. Or St. Stephen’s Day if you prefer.

We went out for Christmas dinner this year. But we cooked a full Christmas dinner on Boxing Day anyway. Just so we could have bubble ‘n’ squeak. No kidding, we didn’t eat the food when it was hot and freshly cooked, we just tossed it into the fridge so we could make bubble ‘n’ squeak later.

I’m really not sure what this all says about my weight problem! LOL

The bottom line is that we need a diet that tolerates occasional bouts of delicious insanity. And what better time is there to go nuts than Christmas. Just now isn’t the right time for me to discuss the impact of all this on the bathroom scale. We’ll get back to worrying about all that nonsense in the new year!

Whatever your traditions, I hope you are enjoying them to the fullest this holiday season. And if you have any good recipes or food traditions to share, please do. I love to learn about new cuisines and cultures. And I’m an equal opportunities eater! 🙂

PS … Next time, I must remember to tell you what those closest to me think appropriate as Christmas gifts for a fat guy trying to lose weight! And no, it’s not socks!

Results … Month #5

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Results … Month #5 (Down 33.8 lbs)Results Month 5

Is this a diet that is beginning to fail or do I have a good excuse for such a modest loss in this, the 5th month of the program?

I’m going to claim that I’ve got a good excuse! And I will use that same excuse for being almost two weeks late in posting my weight loss for the previous month. I think I’ve just come through the most harrowing couple of months of my life. I’m not talking the extreme stress that might be the consequence of the loss of a loved one here. Nor am I talking financial ruin, nor any major health issue. What I am talking about is taking one of those life-changing decisions that saw me pick up all the dominoes & just toss them in the air!

In a nutshell, we decided to move to the coast. At the 11th hour, following a vacation, we changed direction & switched coasts! Our house sold quickly. With a short closing. And the maelstrom began. I won’t bore you with all the details but let me share one anecdote from the adventure that that typifies how totally upended our lives have become. En route to our new destination, we left our hotel room to eat. When we returned, the cat was missing! We were stressed enough already, this was just too much. Had housekeeping opened the door to let our moggie escape? After half an hour of searching the room, wandering the lobby and corridors of the hotel, we finally discovered our missing pet. She had, somehow, found a hole in the fabric of the box-spring and made her way inside the box-spring base of the bed!

Amid all the turmoil of fast-closing houses, finding a replacement home with a short closing was a huge challenge. Scheduling movers, cancelling services, signing up for new services, & all the stuff of moving are challenging at the best of times. Doing all that over long distances more so. Having to do everything under the pressure of such short, & tight, deadlines gave me an enduring dose of stress the like of which I had not experienced before. And it’s not over yet.

Needless to say, eating well ceased being a priority. And yes, I’ve eaten all the bad stuff you could imagine over the course of the past six weeks. I’ve had fish ‘n’ chips, Chinese take-out, & I’ve even eaten pizza, bread base & all. I’ve munched cookies & sucked on sweets to keep me alert as I’ve driven through snow storms. I’ve fallen down so many times that I can barely recognize which way is up any more. Mea culpa.

On the bright side, since I started this whole exercise, I have learned a lot about what & how I should be eating. And I seem to have developed a penchant for doing the right thing. Even under such pressure, I have a noticeable bias towards making better food choices. While bread is so easy to eat on the road, I veered towards better eating following every bread binge. While the sugar fixes kept me going on long drives, I tended to avoid sugar the following day. The upshot of it all is that I was down two pounds in a month of some serious stress, some serious dietary abuse, along with a total lack of routine & familiar surroundings.

All in all, given the circumstances, I’d say that my two-pound loss wasn’t all bad for that particular month.

Now, in advance, I’m trying to come up with an excuse for this month’s possibly disastrous outcome! And if our new appliances aren’t delivered before Christmas, it might be a turkey sandwich picnic on the beach for Christmas dinner! 🙂

PS … I carried the scale with me on the drive to our new home. The weight recorded is the weight on December 1st. My intentions were good!

Shameless Self-Promotion!

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Shameless Self-Promotion!For a Man or a Dog

Just in time for Christmas & the holiday season, I cut the price of my book … “For a Man or a Dog” on Amazon. I’ve read it & I think it’s great. I highly recommend it! 🙂 🙂 🙂

About one third of the stories in this collection should give you a chuckle, another third will bore you to death, and the rest fall somewhere in between! Hey, I might as well be honest but I still think it’s worth the price for the good ones. Go get yourself a copy. Or pick one up as a stocking-stuffer for that friend with an interest in Ireland & things Irish. If you do get around to reading it, please review it on Amazon. Unless you think it’s awful. In which case, just skip that step!

For those who follow my weight-loss exploits, some of the stories might give you an inkling as to why I got fat in the first place! My Mammy’s Irish food was really good! 🙂

The Kindle version is down around 60% & the paperback is down around 20%. Wish I could do more with the paperback but the printing cost is the primary driver on that one. The new pricing is in effect on all the regional Amazon sites (Americas, EU & Asia) that it’s available on.

I also clicked a box for “other distribution”. I have no idea what happens with that but Amazon says it makes the hard copy version available for purchase by libraries & bookstores. Needless to say, there aren’t a line-up of libraries & book stores that were waiting for me to do this but if you happen to know of a library or a book store that might want to carry a copy of something with an Irish interest, could you let them know.

And could you please share this post with your friends for me. Especially those with Irish connections, or those that might have a trip to Ireland on their bucket list.

Thank you.

Paul

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!

Results … Month #4

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Results … Month #4

This is big. No … it’s huge. Results Month 4

And I’m now a little less huge after 4 months of this DIY hybrid diet!

Only avid students of diet might understand how big this is but let me see if I can explain.

This past month, the 4th month of my weight loss attempt, probably qualifies as one of my top 10 more stressful months. The physiological response to stress inhibits weight loss. And as most overweight people can attest, one of our typical responses to stress is to seek comfort in food. And I did that. I lost weight while under a burden of stress, and I was stress-eating. But I still lost some weight. If I wasn’t so stressed, this would be cause for great jubilation and celebration. Instead, this morning, I am simply grateful.

The other big thing about this is that I lost weight in the 4th month of a diet. Many of my previous weight loss efforts resulted in a plateau far earlier in the attempt. More often than not, the first plateau hits after about two months. Many times, this is justification for bailing on the diet. On those fewer occasions where I successfully made it past the 2 month mark, there is less doubt that a stall would have occurred in the 3rd month. And it was pretty much guaranteed to have happened by the 4th month. But not this time. And I’m not being cocky here, quite the contrary, I’m now stressed about when that stall will finally happen!

My regular reader might attribute this month’s loss to that 4 day fast I did during the 2nd week of the month, but that’s not the case. Whether it was stress, or a reaction to the extended fast, I pretty much binged ’til I regained almost all the losses resulting from that fast. And I then spent the rest of the month getting to this morning’s weight. Which is still slightly above my post-fast weight. I’m not discounting the value of an extended fast for weight loss. But I think I’ll wait for a more serene month before attempting another!

I should also disclose that I didn’t eat particularly well this month. There were more French fry days than I would have liked. I was adding more chocolate, much of it not the dark stuff, to my home made ice cream. And there were more ice cream days than a better planned month might have had. My body was screaming out for something green and I think I had my first salad of the month yesterday! Looking for the positives in all this chaos, the program seems pretty robust. If I can lose weight during times like this, while eating that poorly, this might be a good diet for me. Real life carries on, regardless of our weight loss goals. And we need a diet that can handle real life.

I’m not taking it to the bank yet though, who knows what pitfalls lie ahead. I’m expecting November to match the past month for having to worry about things. Hopefully, some solutions will fall into to place and all will turn out well. But if not, I hope the diet continues to do its thing for the next month regardless.

Wish me luck!

Speaking of luck & diet … I don’t think I’ll go Trick-or-Treating tonight! 🙂

And a Happy Halloween to all!