40 Minute Meals | Healthy and Sane

Intuitive eating, what?

June 9th, 2010

I stress ate today, I boredom ate, I ate and ate. And I took no pictures. For some reason I lost that “oomph,” that desire to be intoxicated by healthy living and balance and SANITY. I feel like I’m in a rut and I can’t get out of it. I keep telling myself to “just do it” and then don’t. It’s a problem. I keep going back and forth about doing a self-intervention and laying down some rules (which I kind of have in my head anyways and have been diligently ignoring) and just completely letting go in hopes that just easing up will take care of the issue. I actually feel pretty good about how I ate during the weekend, when I didn’t care about caloric intake, exercising and the like. And then I starting royally blowing it right after that. Any advice?

I did “force” myself to take pictures of my breakfast and dinner today. Lunch was yesterday’s dinner leftovers.

BREAKFAST

2 multi-grain waffles with Maranatha almond butter, fresh local organic strawberries (amazing!!) and strawberry rhubarb jam. Good stuff.

After writing my previous post, I actually did end up making a virgin bloody mary to-go. It was gone too soon. I was dreaming of having another one all day. And I did when I got home. Yes, I’m addicted.

Snacks throughout the day included an orange, a banana bread clif bar, some cookies, cheese, bread with baba ganoush and I feel like there was something else but I really can’t remember.

DINNER

Grilled lemon-soy mahi-mahi with noodles and snap pea-radish salad (based on this recipe from Cooking Light)

This dinner had so many components, I was pretty proud of pulling it together in roughly 40 minutes. It was pretty yummy but nothing extraordinary. I actually think the leftovers will taste better (I doubled the recipe) since the sauce will have time to absorb into the fish, noodles and veggies. The noodles were definitely my favorite part. The mahi-mahi is also a great meaty fish.

Local snow peas and radish

Mmm, noodles. I felt pretty fancy making the carrot ribbons.

No workout today but I do have a pilates session scheduled tomorrow morning (eek, I am NOT a morning person) that I have to attend, otherwise they’ll charge me for it. Hopefully starting the day with exercise will put me in the right healthy mindset. Plus it’s farmers market day. That always makes my day.

See you later, alligators. I’m hoping my next post will be a lot more upbeat.

First real day of intuitive eating

July 12th, 2009

Yesterday was my first real day of intuitive eating. I actually tried to intuitively eat on Friday as well (recaps can be found here and here) but because the night ended with a meal + drinks out, I had no way of counting calories anyway. In the past, if I went out to a restaurant that did not provide nutritional info, I didn’t count calories that day. What’s the point of estimating? I’m sure I would be way off anyway. A meal out is always a bit of an indulgence anyway, so the best one can do is make good choices and the final calorie content will be what it will be. By the way, this statement may sound contradictory to this post, but it’s not. I still believe that restaurants should provide us with nutritional info so we can make informed decisions but if this info is not available and you believe the experience of a meal out may still be worth “the unknown” then make the choices you’ll be happy with at the end of the night and enjoy it! That’s my approach to eating out

By anyway, I digress… yesterday all of my meals + snacks were prepared by me, so it would have been very easy to calculate exactly how many calories were consumed. But in line with my recent decision to stop calorie counting and attempt to eat intuitively, I resisted the urge to weigh my food and plug it all into Sparkpeople and just went with my gut. Let me tell you… this is going to be hard! I felt hungry a lot, and I didn’t know if I was hungry because I didn’t eat enough or because I just like eating all day long It was so strange not to have the reasurance of “math” telling me how I really feel. I had a bunch of snacks throughout the day and tried to make healthy choices. At the end I was happy with how the day went. I have no clue how many calories were consumed, but I know I ate well and treated my body with respect. That’s all I can ask of myself at the end of the day

So here are my eats… how do you think I did?

Breakfast starred this new almond butter (for me) that my friend Katie swears by:

I made 1/2 cup of oats with 1/2 cup of organic skim milk, 1/2 cup of water, 1/2 banana + a handful of golden raisins… and topped it with 1/2 of the packet you see above.

The almond butter was slightly grainy (not necessary a bad thing) with a clear maple flavor. It was nice but I’m not in love. I think flavored nut butters are just not for me. What can I say, I’m a nut butter purist and a Barney Butter junkie

Oh and this sweet giant date jumped into my mouth too

Then I went to work and packed up a huge salad to go… farmers market mixed greens, strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries + herbed goat cheese and a few pecan pieces. I dressed it with 1T of Annie’s balsamic vinaigrette when lunch time arrived.

So many fun goodies in there!

I ate it with 1/2 of Food for Life 7-grain english muffin to add some complex carbs to the mix. The other half of the english muffin was consumed later as a snack with remainder of hummus (I didn’t end up needing the laughing cow cheese):

More snacks! Eaten over 7 hours or so…dinner was late!

KIND bars are one of my favorite kind of bars, and the yogurt coating is so good. It’s quite sweet though (especially since I haven’t had much white sugar lately) so I decided it was my dessert for the day. I think that’s a good compromise – having things with white sugar just once a day. The huge chunks of almonds in the bar (you can’t see them here, but trust me, there are WHOLE almonds in there… yum!) were awesome! Love KIND bars!

sprouted grain bread with Barney Butter

Dinner came out really well. I was starving when we finally came home after our Costco + shopping trip, but was determined to make a home cooked meal. On the menu: bbq chicken, red skin potatoes + sauteed spinach. All 3 came out so well!

For the chicken, I followed this recipe from the Cooking Light magazine for barbecue chicken with mustard glaze. I used boneless chicken breasts instead of bone-in chicken thighs since that’s what we had on hand (and I like leaner cuts of meat anyways) but otherwise followed it to the T (we use organic ketchup btw, regular ketchup contains HFCS – yuck!). I loved how a few ingredients made real bbq sauce! So cool Look at that juicy sauce… mmm.

The red skin potatoes I stabbed with a fork a few times and microwaved for 3 minutes. Then I cut them into little pieces and sauteed them with garlic and fresh rosemary. Hearty, healthy and delicious!

Lastly for a side of veggies, I sauteed some baby spinach with EVOO and garlic. My husband requested fresh cucumbers as his side dish but I like warm sides with warm entrees. This perfectly rounded out the meal

I didn’t eat all the chicken (trying to listen to my body!) so as a result, soon after dinner (despite being super full right after) I was hungry again. I waited about an hour (we were watching a movie) and finally grabbed a peach chobani (unpictured) to calm my stomach. Ok, now I was done By the way, the movie we watched was Milk. A little graphic at times, but very good (I can’t believe it was a real story… crazy!). Have you seen any good movies lately?

Temptations everywhere

May 6th, 2009

So the title refers to this:

walnut brownie

[613 calories - I'm probably overestimating, but it doesn't really matter since I ate it regardless, right? There was another small piece (unpictured)]

How could I resist this gorgeous walnut brownie?!! Our evil sweet secretary at work baked some brownies with walnuts for everyone as a little something before she goes on vacation for a week. The worst thing is that she emails all of us to tell us she brought brownies. Every time I get an email like that, I start a pep talk in my head that I never ever works. The brownies are amazing, though, so I’m going to say it was worth it

Oh yeah, after work we went to our friends’ house to watch the Celtics game and although we had a light dinner beforehand, I still couldn’t resist this tempting slice of heaven from Cafe Nicholas. I was planning on just having a bite of Adam’s slice (who caved in first) but upon a taste I grabbed my own slice. It was amazing! Adam had a second slice and I took a few bites of that too. At least both of my indulgences for the day were well worth it. I love food and both the brownie and the pizza were beyond delicious!

chicken fingers/bacon pizza

I blame the wine for letting my guard down (I had 2 glasses):

glass of merlot

So these two were pretty much the highlight of my eats today, but there were also other very delicious and much healthier eats. Let’s review those, shall we?

OTHER EATS

1/2 english muffin with Barney Butter and banana + TJ's european style yogurt, banana, kashi autumn wheat and 1/4 honest foods cran zest bar

yogurt closeup

[349 calories including coffee] Btw, I can eat Barney Butter again like a normal human being… in reasonable portions Small victories…

lentil soup + ww toast with light laughing cow wedge

[216 calories - I cut out a few extra lunch ingredients due to the ahem, the brownie binge indulgence]

adora disk

[30 calories] Delicious calcium boost!

apple

[81 calories]

baked shrimp with feta, quinoa and broccoli

[240 calories - I used no onions, no oil, and light feta] The baked shrimp with feta was based on this Cooking Light recipe. It was yummy but I’d use more feta next time.

TJ's 100 calorie dark chocolate bar

[100 calories]

Total calories for the day: 1887 + pizza! Eek, that’s a bit much for one day.

WORKOUT

Heather asked to see my new training schedule. Heather, this is for you I created this tentative schedule because I like to follow something. You can find it here. I just realized we made plans for one of the weekends in June to go to NYC so I may have to modify it slightly (any bloggers want to meet up on June 13th or 14?). Of course, life always happens and often interferes with my training, so this will surely be amended as I go along.

So yeah, today (as per the schedule) I took the abs + spinning classes. I haven’t taken spinning in weeks (since my cardio has been mostly running) so I was a bit nervous but today’s class rocked! The instructor is really good and he’s so funny that you forget about the fact that he’s kicking your ass. Awesome! I also did 18 minutes on the elliptical after the class and foam rolled for a few minutes. The foam roller is killer but I hope it keeps me injury free! I don’t have my HRM on me right now, but I burnt around 550 calories at the gym. It’s like the brownies never happened

Can you believe tomorrow is Thursday already?!! I have a fun girl date planned for tomorrow night. I’ll be sure to share the details when I get home