2009 July | Healthy and Sane

No bad attitudes here

July 28th, 2009

Thank you all for your comments on my previous post. It’s hard for me to write posts like that but I’m glad that my honestly is appreciated. I just want to get to a place where I can eat delicious healthy foods in moderation and give you guys advice about how to keep up with life and food and stay healthy and sane One day!

Hope your week started on the rights foot. I saw a funny post yesterday in a doctor’s office that said: “Bad attitude is like a flat tire – you can’t go anywhere until you fix it!” There was a silly picture of a cat on a bike with a flat tire that went with it. Funny stuff. Anyways, I thought that was good message to share. We all need to be good to ourselves and leave the bad attitude behind.

I don’t have much to say this morning, so here are yesterday’s eats (scroll over for descriptions).

Dinner was a little special and featured a beautiful piece of local and grass fed filet mignon we bought at the Tendercrop Farm on Saturday. I followed this recipe from Cooking Light for filet mignon with cabernet sauce and the haricots verts and wild mushrooms with hazelnuts recipe from the same The Best of Cooking Light 9 issue for the green beans (the recipe does not appear to be online, I substituted almonds for hazelnuts and omitted the mushrooms).

I got impatient and didn’t let the sauce reduce enough but the flavor was excellent. This is also the first time I had beef in ages. I was really craving beef so it really hit the spot! I had a splash of red with it

+ ww wrap with nutella for dessert.

We ended the evening by watching lots of home improvement shows. I can’t believe we’re moving into our new condo in 3.5 weeks. Exciting and scary!! Enjoy your Tuesday… and be good to yourself! No bad attitudes, ok?

Major IE setback + Tendercrop farm and Newburyport

July 27th, 2009

Hi all. Sorry I took a few days off blogging. I had some rough time with intuitive eating. Not sure what happened; I just snapped and binged for what seemed like 2 days straight. I’m learning that Intuitive Eating is in a sense like dieting – you need to be careful and not only be aware of how you feel (i.e. whether you’re hungry, eating out of emotion, etc.) but also make the decision to “do the right thing” (i.e. stop eating if you’re eating for all the wrong reasons). It’s the last part that I was having major problems with this weekend. I knew I was just stuffing my face and not even enjoying it; yet I couldn’t stop the train wreck. Clearly I have issues. I’m working on figuring out what the triggers were and why I keep doing this to myself. Anyways, I’m writing this not because I want you to feel sorry for me; neither because I feel like you guys can “figure it out for me.” I’m even embarrased to admit that this madness was going on this weekend, but at the end I want to be honest and share this journey to Intuitive Eating without editing. Know that it is hard but I think the end justifies the means. I’ll keep you posted on how everything goes. Today has been going great so far.

Before the stupidity began, I actually had an amazing time with Adam. Breakfast was another apple cranberry muffin with crunchy Barney Butter (new shipment – oh how I missed crunchy BB!)

Then we decided to go to Tendercrop Farm to buy some local/grass fed meat. Since we were in the area, we decided to stop by Adam’s hometown, Newburyport, pretended to be tourists (window shopped and took lots of pictures) and had lunch at the famous Michael’s Harborside. The weather was gorgeous! I really felt like we were on vacation

Oh on the way to Newburyport I busted into this passion fruit/macadamia nut KIND bar. I actually had a few bites from it at a time throughout the weekend. This was when I was still trying to eat intuitively and tried to balance not ruining my appetite with not letting myself starve and trigger overeating.

Some pics in Newburyport…

This duck was so cute! It was just chilling by its little “Inn”

Newburyport is right on the water and is known for their fresh seafood so of course I got seafood for lunch. Before our main course arrived, we were served some fresh rolls with butter…

… but after having a bite of it I realized it tasted like regular bread and just “wasn’t worth it.” The appeal of warm bread kind of dissapears when it’s sweaty mid-80′s. For my entree I got the grilled swordfish in citrus ponzu glaze, with asparagus and rice on the side.

The asparagus was drenched in butter. I was so disguisted. Thankfully they had some steamed asparagus in the kitchen (waiting to be buttered) that the waitress was able to snag for me. It made this meal a little better. The citrus ponzu I thought was too intense and actually masked the flavor of what otherwise was a nicely grilled fresh piece of fish. It’s a little sad that this is what most people want – butter on asparagus and thick sauce on their fish. Most food was fried of course, so I guess this was still one of the healthier meals.

After lunch we finally drove to Tendercrop farms. We were both happy to find out (especially me!!!) that we could pick our own blueberries. Yay!! My outfit doesn’t exactly scream “ready to blueberry pick” but it was actually really easy (i.e. no crawling required) and sort of therapeutic. The best part – a whole pound of blueberries was $2 (if you picked them yourself). We got 2 pints for $3. Sweet! I was really happy at this moment.

At Tendercrop farms we got some local meat, fruits and veggies and these 2 baked goods that I had to dig into in the car (ate the rest later that night). First up: whoopie pie – tasted like chocolate cake with frosting. Yum!

And a rocky road bar. OMG SO good! I want more now (actually that’s a lie… after a weekend of serious overeating all I want it salad and fruit to cleanse my body but this brownie thing really was amazing!)

Dinner that night was a whole bunch of (unpictured) walnuts and probably more than 1/2 a box of these Russian chocolates (they have some kind of peanut paste in them that doesn’t taste like peanut butter).

Addictive stuff. I basically finished this box on Sunday morning. Yeah, good times. Anyway, that’s Saturday’s eats. The first half of the day was so amazing, I just had to share it with you. Hope your weekend was good. I’m back at work today with a reignited fire to eat healthy. What else is new?!

Organic fair trade coffee + dinner on piggy bank $$

July 25th, 2009

It’s Friday night, hallelujah! Man, these last 2 months were looooong, and today at noon I finally finished my last project! Woohoo!! To do that, I worked until 10 pm last night, so my apologies for not blogging. There wasn’t much too exciting to share anyways, so let’s skip straight to today. It was a much better day!

I started the morning with Zen Bakery apple cranberry bran muffin + Dean’s Beans organic fair-trade hazelnut dream coffee with organic skim milk and agave nectar. Wow, this is one healthy breakfast!

I love the ingredients list of these muffins! They taste a tiny bit like cardboard but kinda in a good way. And these guys are really filling! A 220 calorie breakfast would never fill me up, but the last few days I had one of these muffins + coffee and I was good to go. Kewl

The muffins were totally an impulse purchase at Whole Foods the other day, but the coffee was not. I was completely out of coffee and wanted to do some research before buying a new batch. After figuring out that organic and fair trade coffee is the way I wanted to go, Dean’s Beans coffee popped up in my search and I was happy to find out they sold it at my local Whole Foods. So exciting!

Now organic seems to be a new buzz word that’s popping up everywhere. I think food marketing experts are doing a great job of milking this new trend to their desires. The good news is that organic does mean that the ingredients are grown in a more environmentally friendly way and no artificial ingredients or pesticides are used. The bad news is that there is still a lot of organic junk food out there (organic potatoes fried in organic oil are still junk!) so don’t fall into the organic trap. Choose foods that are healthy first, and organic second (at least that’s my personal order of preference…).

I’ve been aware of pesticides used in growing fruits and vegetables and have been trying to buy organic F&V as much as possible over the last few years. Watching Food Inc. opened my eyes to why organic dairy and meat are also important, but is organic coffee really necessary? Is this another marketing scheme to charge me double for my coffee? After doing a bit of research (and clearly you already know the answer to my own question given my new purchase) I found out that coffee is the most chemically treated food commodity in the world. Synthetic petroleum based fertilizers are used in coffee production. Coffee trees also do not naturally grow in direct sunlight but under the shade of dense rainforests. To increase productivity, the coffee industry has developed sun-resistant coffee tree hybrids that have come to comprise approximately 70% of the world’s coffee production. As a result rainforests are being cleared at alarming rates to make room for new, sun resistant coffee trees.(source). Organic coffee is grown using methods and materials that have a low impact on the environment. Organic production systems replenish and maintain soil fertility, and reduce the use of toxic and persistent pesticides and fertilizers. Fair Trade certification focuses on labor and trade standards to provide small-farmer co-operatives a guaranteed price above the conventional market (source). Coffee can be organic and not fair trade, and the other way around. Choose what’s important to you… supporting smaller farmers with my dollars is a way for me to make a small difference. That’s why I choose to get both organic and fair trade coffee! Oh and I forgot to mention, this particular coffee is the best I’ve ever had! It’s just so flavorful and complex. I’m a huge fan, and now want to try every flavor they have.

Rest of the eats…

Mid morning snack: oikos organic greek yogurt + fresh blueberries, 1/2 kiwi + 2 medjool dates. Dates are such a great natural sweetener. I can’t get enough of them!

Lunch: organic grilled chicken with bbq sauce, avocado & laughing cow cheese on a Food for Life 7-grain english muffin + corn on the cob.

Oh yeah, I’m the dork that brought corn skewers to work

Adam and I started a new tradition – going out to eat on Friday nights. It really marks the beginning of the weekend and gets us out of the house. Well, as you know we recently bought a condo (closing on it in 4 weeks) so we’re really trying hard to stay within our budget. Unfortunately we already used up our “going out budget” for the month, so Adam had a brilliant idea of using our piggy bank $$ to fund dinner. He’s so cute sometimes!

That is $28.63. Not a whole lot of dough to go around, so we had to find “a deal” to stretch our money. Burtons Grill has a July special – on every Red Sox home game night from 7-10 pm all entrees are buy 1, get 1 free (of equal or lesser value). Adam got a steak&cheese sandwich ($14) and I got the bbq chicken salad: lettuce, bbq chicken, corn, black beans, cheddar cheese, tortilla strips, bacon bits and tomatoes ($13). That’s $14 for both of our meals! Awesome!

I ordered my salad with dressing, cheese, and bacon on the side.

I used a little bit of the dressing but the salad was so flavorful on its own, that I didn’t even touch the cheese or bacon. The tortilla strips (although fried I’m sure) were worth the extra calories. This salad was really delicious and I think with my modifications, quite healthy. Adam helped me finish it

So food was cheap, but we still got some drinks which put us a bit over the top, budget wise. It’s ok, the drinks were well worth it! I got a nice glass of chianti and Adam got a 22oz belgian ale. Liquid yum

Of course my sweet tooth kicked in after dinner. We decided to skip out on dessert at Burtons and went across the street to Shaw’s to buy some Ben&Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie frozen yogurt. I love this stuff! Quite a bit of sugar but nothing artificial. I went back for seconds after polishing off this serving It was too good!