Monday, March 31, 2014

Week 5 Begins

Homemade refried beans with
Spanish rice and Cheesey Pepper
 & Onion enchiladas.
I am starting out the week at 210 pounds (a 1-pound increase). Lee is holding fast at 220.

I am not so much concerned about weight as I am about losing inches and feeling healthier so I am not worrying about a little fluctuation. I will measure tomorrow and start watching my measurements as much as I am my weight.

I figured it would be a good idea to share a lot of recipes so you can see that there are really good things to eat that won’t make you feel like you have totally lost it and become a turtle. So here are a couple of today’s meals:

For lunch I had a Hot Pocket. I know, not the healthiest thing on the planet but I can eat like that some times because they make Four Cheese Pizza flavor Hot Pockets that don’t have meat in them. I also had some tortilla chips and homemade guacamole. To drink I had Red Zinger iced herb tea.

Lee had leftover cheese enchiladas with grilled bell pepper and onion with refried beans and Spanish rice (see picture).

For dinner we had spinach tortellini with creamy pesto sauce. The tortellinis were pre-packaged and a convenience to make. I usually try to make homemade stuff but today was a very busy day with my catering business, so I made a few easy, pre-made meals. The sauce was just a half a jar of Alfredo sauce with a few tablespoons of pesto. Easy and yummy.

Lee had a bit of salad with his pasta and we both drank a lot of water.

We also made (even though we didn’t eat it yet) homemade refried beans. Here’s a super easy, yummy recipe. As I said before, I am not normally a “bean” person. I just don’t like them, generally. But these homemade beans are really good. Especially with a little bit of cheese on top.

Refried Beans
1 bag of pinto beans
1 Tbl olive oil
1 medium onion, sliced
2/3 cup vegetable broth
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp chili powder
salt and pepper to taste
2 Tbl chopped fresh cilantro

Soak the beans in water (with a little salt in it) in a bowl overnight.
The next morning put them in a crock pot and cook all day until soft.
Mash the beans with a fork.
In a saucepan, heat olive oil. Add in onion and cooked until carmelized.
Add onion and all other ingredients to beans.
Stir and then let warm through.
Serve with cheese (if you are eating dairy) or just enjoy plain!

Hope you enjoy your day!
Hugs and cheers!

Denise

Friday, March 28, 2014

It All Starts With Diet (which is just Die with a T)

Me with my homemade sushi!

Welcome back!

I have so much to tell you about this lifestyle that I feel like I’m going to explode. But I’ll pick one area at a time and tell about that.

So I will start with diet.

Becoming vegan/vegetarian wasn’t as hard as I first thought. (And even though we are technically “vegetarian,” we are not strictly vegetarian.) We went to Sam’s Club for our usual grocery shopping and instead of buying chicken and beef, we bought more vegetables. It wasn’t that hard.

Then we got home and had to find recipes to make all this food. So I got on Pinterest and looked up vegan recipes. Wow! Lots of stuff there!

One of the first things we tried was black bean burgers. We bought some already made at Sam’s Club because I figured we ought to see how they were suppose to taste before we made our own. If you remember that they are NOT hamburger, they taste pretty good. If you are expecting an almost exact replica of burger, you won’t eat it. But these ones are flavored with jalapeños and corn and other spices so they are pretty good!

We have had a lot of salad, too. I make a pink vinaigrette that Lee loves. It doesn’t have any dairy so it fits his mostly-non-dairy diet. Here’s the recipe:

Pink Vinaigrette
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt and pepper
1/2 red onion
2 tsp mustard
1 cup olive oil

Mix all ingredients except oil in a blender.
Add oil and blend until smooth.
(You can also find this recipe on my recipe blog: chefmamanise.blogspot.com)

We also discovered that there are some restaurants that serve vegetarian choices and some that have naturally vegetarian menu items. For instance, one of our local Mexican food restaurants serves vegetarian burritos, enchiladas, tacos and chimis. They use bell peppers, onions, potatoes and corn, served with rice and refried beans. And we got side salads and lemon water. And we really didn't miss the meat! (I think that surprised us, since we both really like chicken and beef.)

Besides a lot of vegetables, we have been eating more rice. And I’ve even tried to change our rice up a bit so it’s healthier. We normally just use white rice but we’ve been adding/changing to brown rice and jasmine rice, depending on what we are eating. We love to make stir fry, so that’s not much of a change.

The other night we made portabello burgers. I found a recipe on the Internet to make stuffed portabello mushrooms and we did that then put them on homemade biscuits. Mmmm, they were good! We dressed them up with sautéed onions and lettuce like a real burger and I have to admit - they were better than the black bean burgers. (Here’s the site where I got the recipe for the stuffed mushrooms: Easy Stuffed Portabello Mushrooms) I will have my version of this recipe on my recipe blog soon...

For Lee’s vegan days, I started finding substitutes for dairy products so I could make his favorites without the milk or egg. One of his favorite things to eat for breakfast is Brown Sugar Muffins. It’s actually a favorite of the entire family. Here’s the recipe (which is also on my recipe site) and the substitutions:

Brown Sugar Muffins (substitutions in parentheses)

1/2 cup shortening
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg   (1/3 cup applesauce)
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (may use wheat flour or gluten-free substitute)
3/4 cup ground oats
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk  (1 cup rice or almond milk)
2 tsp vanilla

Cream together shortening, brown sugar, and egg. (May also add 1/2 cup white bean puree to make it healthier.)
In a separate bowl, sift together flour, oats, baking soda, and salt. Add to creamed mixture.
Add milk and vanilla, stirring until mixed well.
Pour into greased muffin tins. (You can use papers, but this will peel off a lot of the muffin when you take off the paper.)
Bake at 400°F for 18 to 20 minutes. High altitude, about 22 to 24 minutes.
Makes about 12 regular size muffins, 6 large.

Also, I found a few sites through Pinterest that list egg substitutes. Here’s my favorite ones:
For each egg, sub:
1: 1/3 cup applesauce
2: 1/4 cup applesauce + 1 tsp baking powder
3: 1/2 pureed banana (1/4 cup)
4: 3 Tbl pureed fruit
5: 1 Tbl gelatin + 3 Tbl warm water
6: 1 Tbl white vinegar + 1 Tbl warm water
7: 2 heaped Tbl potato starch
8: 1 Tbl corn starch +2 Tbl water
9: 1/4 cup vegetable oil
10: 1/3 cup cooked pumpkin

For cakes, use #1-7.
For cookies, use #8 or 9.
For muffins, use #1, 3 or 10.

Mixes you can also use:
2 Tbl flour + 1/2 tsp oil + 1/2 tsp baking powder + 2 Tbl liquid (water, juice, milk, etc)
or
2 Tbl water + 1 Tbl oil + 1/2 tsp baking powder.

I will post more recipes as I go. These are just a few to get you started. My recipe blog has a bunch of great recipes but some of them are not vegetarian so pick which ones you want.

Hugs and cheers!
Denise

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Hooray for Healthiness!

Lee and Denise,
catering at a wedding in
September 2013.
HI! I'm Denise and I am fast becoming a health expert on me! I am not a doctor or health specialist and I have no educational or professional training, but I'm smart and curious: and that is helping me take control of my own body and be a positive, healthy person. Yay!
Just to let y'all know, I have been losing weight on a steady scale for the first time in my life. And it feels good! I've tried a few "diets" before just because I wanted to shed some extra pounds, but I have never had my heart in it because I know there are dangers to losing weight fast and that "diets" never work. I've even tried weight loss supplements and drinks. Nope, nothing.
Okay, so the quotation marks are there for a reason. A "diet" is something you do temporarily to lose weight. "Changing your diet" is something you do for life; for weight loss, for healthiness, for permanent.
I went in to this about 3/4-heartedly. I wanted to do it because I want to lose weight, I want to be healthier and it made sense. But there was a small part of me (a 1/4?) that had doubts.
But it's working!
I stepped on the scale this morning and I had lost another pound!
I am so motivated now. I have been wanting to tell everyone about this plan and so the first thing I thought was "I'm going to start a blog!"
So here I am, blogging. This is meant to be helpful to whoever wants to read it. You can see what I am doing and maybe it will work for you, too. But, and here's the disclaimer part, I am no expert. If you have any dietary issues or health risks or whatever, please consult your doctor. I can't be responsible for what happens to YOU, but I can share what is happening to ME and possibly inspire you to be healthy as well. And I really do hope that that inspiration happens!
With this in mind, I hope to share my entire healthy lifestyle ways, not just diet, for I believe that being healthy involves your body, your mind and your emotions. It's all-over wellness that makes us healthy, not just cutting out certain things we eat or adding in some exercise. So here we go!

Health Is Wealth
Today I'd like to share a few thoughts and my beginnings.
I am a mother of five. I got married at 19 to the kindest, cutest, most loving man in the universe. We had our first child when I was 20 and our fifth when I was 30. It was exactly what I wanted. The extra weight I gained after each child? Not so much.
My hubby worked for many years at a desk job and probably gained a bit of weight out of sympathy for me. And because he wasn't so active any more. Throughout his college years he worked full time at a block plant and was lean and trim from the physical labor. Then he graduated. He had a high-stress job working for large corporations as an accountant, a very stressful commute (2 hours each way, every day), and would leave early, come home late, so he wasn't about to do anything but veg. Poor guy!
I have had my share of part-time jobs but mostly I've been a stay-at-home mom. And I was busy enough that I didn't "have time" to be healthy. When was I supposed to exercise? How could we afford the healthier foods that I should have been feeding my family? So was my thought process. I thought taking the kids to the park and shopping and all the housework should have been exercise enough.

Now our kids are grown. Our oldest three are married and starting their own families. Our two youngest are adults and mostly on their own. So now we are left with just the two of us and we are still not slim or fit. So we decided we had to make a change.

My husband's father died from prostate cancer and he has family history of diabetes. My very active, healthy, fit dad (who was a fireman and, after he retired, an EMS) discovered he had heart disease and had to have quintuple bypass surgery at age 69. And we both went to a health screening and discovered that, while we both have healthy bones, we have high cholesterol and are at risk for diabetes, along with a few other health problems that aren't a concern yet.

So this inspired us to get on board with a change in diet, a better exercise program, and a change in attitude.

My husband Lee watched a program on Netflix called "Forks Over Knives." This inspired him the most because of what he learned. In a nutshell, doctors did studies and found that changing people to a vegan diet gave them longer life and actually reversed some of their health issues such as diabetes and heart disease. (Watch it to learn more!)

Okay, if you're like me, you just thought "ugh, vegans!" Yeah, I have always been averse to going strictly vegan or even vegetarian.

First, the difference. A vegetarian is "a person who does not eat or does not believe in eating meat, fish, fowl, or, in some cases, any food derived from animals, as eggs or cheese, but subsists on vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, etc." A vegan is "a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet." (Dictionary.com)

So, according to these definitions, they aren't very different. But it seems like our society has basically defined a vegetarian as someone who doesn't eat meat and a vegan as someone who doesn't eat meat or any animal products. For simplification in understanding throughout my blog, I will use these latter definitions.

Going Vegan
Neither of us wanted to do this based on any beliefs, basically. Eating meat is just fine in our book. But after learning a few things from this movie we watched, it made sense to cut out meat - at least, for the most part. After learning that these men (scientists, doctors) made a direct link between cow's milk and prostate cancer, Lee decided to go vegan. That was understandable, since his dad had lost the battle with prostate cancer a few years ago. I, on the other hand, wasn't so sure about cutting out eggs and cheese. Not totally, anyway.

Sometimes when you want to get from being a one to being an eight, you need to go to ten and slowly come back. So that's what we did. We dove all the way in, then slowly came back a little.

Lee decided to totally cut out ALL meat and dairy (and eggs can be considered dairy, since they come from a farm). I cut out meat, except for small amounts of fish, and most dairy. I still put a little cheese on my veggie pizza, ate sushi, and had some products that contain egg or milk such as muffins. I even put a little butter on things once in awhile. But for the most part, we became vegetarians. Not totally and forever, but for now and for however long we decide to keep up this change.

Weight Loss Happens
We began our journey around Feb. 15, 2014. Lee's weight was up at 238 and I was 221. (He's 6'2" and I am 5'7"). We also joined Anytime Fitness (gym) just before that and decided to make a habit of going. Mostly Lee works out on a few of the machines then does cardio on the elliptical and I jog on the treadmill. We decided to go 3 times a week but sometimes we only make it twice in a week.

On Feb. 24 I was down to 213. Lee weighed in at 232.

Today I weighed myself and I was 209! I can't tell you how excited I felt! And Lee is at 220. I have lost a total, so far, of 12 pounds and he has lost 18!

Diet
Changing your diet isn't easy. But the thing that helps the most is finding recipes that sound good and trying them out. I have found so many good recipes on the internet (food sites, Pinterest) and whenever I go to Barnes and Noble, I stop and check out the vegetarian cookbooks or any kind of recipe book that has healthy eating in it. I even buy some of them once in awhile, too.

When you focus on what you CAN eat and not what you CAN'T eat, it helps, too. And that's not always easy, but when you make that shift, you can do it.

Background: I am a caterer. I fix cakes and cookies and cheesecake and steak and chicken and all sorts of yummy things for people all the time. Do you think it's easy to be around all that food and not want to eat it? Yeah, NO!

So if I can do it, you can, too! And here's a little hint for ya: once you start focusing on nutritious food and trying to fix healthy vegetables and eat more beans and rice (and I am NOT a bean person. Yuck!) then you find that all the cravings for those cookies and things disappear. I really like eating some of these foods that I didn't like before!

And I feel good. I feel like running (which I swore I would never do). I actually choose to eat beans (which I hated before). And I don't miss meat. Okay, I really miss bacon but the longer I go without it, the more I just admire it from afar.

We cut out meat (except the sushi for me) for 3 weeks. Then we decided that eating meat once in awhile wasn't horrible so we went out to Panda Express and had some Kung Pao Chicken. Mmmmm.

So, if you are interested in finding out the end of this story, follow this blog and watch what happens. I will update as much as I can and keep telling you all the things I am doing to make a Healthy Me!

Here's to all-over health and happiness!
Hugs and cheers!
Denise