I haven’t posted in a while. It’s not because things have been busy, or because we’ve been moving, or any other reason. I just don’t know what to say anymore.

I started this blog for some ambiguous reason I can’t quite name. I don’t know what I want from this experience. Companionship? Someone that understands my issues with food more than my carnivorous, high-fat boyfriend? I have no idea.

I don’t have interesting recipes to share. The first thing I’ve attempted to cook on my own (chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting for the boy’s birthday) was an unmitigated disaster. So what? What the hell is the point of this?

I have always been overweight. I have always hated the way I looked, and the way I interact with people is heavily tempered by this fact. I need to be healthier, and I need to eat better, and I’m at my wits end trying to figure out how to accomplish this.

Part of me wants to give up. My parents are both overweight – my father’s entire family struggles with this, and he went through gastric bypass a year and a half ago to combat it. Obviously, I don’t want to get to that point. How do I stop it, though? Surrounded by people that love food, that don’t understand my relationship with it, I find it hard to be ok with myself.

I’m afraid of food. I’m afraid of what people think of me. I hate eating in public, because I’m positive that everyone is staring at the fat girl, judging what I eat. I feel bad about myself, and feel trapped, and eat to comfort myself.

Sixty pounds. Sixty fucking pounds, and I still feel as gross, if not MORE gross, than I did when I started to lose that weight. How is that normal? How can I possibly learn to have a healthy relationship with what I eat if I judge myself every time I put something in my mouth? Food is necessary, I have to eat it. I just don’t want to. How much weight do I have to lose before I realize that?

The cupcakes I made today sucked. They were dry, super thick, and not very good. Edible, but not satisfying. D tried to say he liked them, but it’s obvious he didn’t. I tried to conceal my hurt feelings, but he saw right through it, of course. How can I explain that his dislike of the cupcakes spoke more about his general dismissal of my food choices than of this one particular mishap? Organic cake mix, organic peanut butter, a general healthy upgrade to all the ingredients…to me, this is more than just cupcakes. It’s me trying to come to some kind of agreement between what I eat alone, and what I eat with him. He tries, bless him, he tries so hard to be supportive…but it’s just not there in the way I need it to be. I am forging my way alone, and trying to figure out how our individual desires will eventually meld together. It seems impossible.

In short, I don’t know what to do. Food equals guilt in my mind, and I can’t ever eat without being wracked without guilt about it afterwards. I can’t make recipes, because they’re all terrible. I started a blog with no real purpose, and I feel guilt for not posting here. But…why? What’s the point?

I’m 26 years old, I hate my body, and it’s sabotaging my relationship with D, and with food, and with friends. What now?

I’m back! It’s been two (and a half?) weeks, and things have been absolutely nutty. As I mentioned, I was moving to a new apartment. My little brother came into town, and those two weeks were filled with things like this:

and this:

Food has been rough lately. There was just so much to do, and both my boyfriend and brother eat anything disgusting and unhealthy that crosses their line of site, so I gave in. Stouffer’s and diet soda all around! Little brother left on Monday, and I’ve spent the week detoxing. My binges are exacerbated by exposure to crappy food – refined sugar, flour, diet drinks, alcohol. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things this week, but it’s proving to be more difficult than I would like. Baby steps, right? Ugh. I have a wedding to go to in just over a week, and I feel greasy and bloated and gross. And nearly incapable of fighting off bad-food urges.

So today started off pretty well. I had some fruit and a coffee with vanilla rice milk and stevia.

Question for you Northerners – how do you keep the fruit flies at bay? I’ve been keeping all of my produce in the refrigerator to mitigate the fruit fly problem, but as a result my bananas are cold and my peaches hard. It’s frustrating. Oh, Upstate NY – you and your fruit flies.

Lunch was a delightful salad, seen here prior to the addition to a Sunshine burger – my new favorite thing.

The salad included:

- spiralized zucchini pasta (local!)

- baby carrots

- goat cheese (local!)

- raw broccoli

- cherry tomatoes (local!)

- Sunshine Burger – garden herb variety

Pictured directly to the right of this delightful salad, you’ll see a second salad…my dinner. That’s right, I doubled it up and made the same exact thing for dinner.

With a Coconut Cream Pie Larabar thrown in for a mid-shift snacky. I also am eating this salad sans-Sunshine Burger. In desperate need for some kind of protein, I picked up a block of Ithaca Soy Tofu-kan. I’m trying to eat significantly less soy, but it’s one of the only things I can buy in Collegetown that isn’t completely over-processed and unhealthy and disgusting. The Ithaca Soy is local, and delicious. It’s a good stop-gap.

So, I just got a spiralizer. Know why I love it? I can do this:

I am an epic and relentless food-mixer. I love to mix textures, especially in my salads, and the zucchini pasta rocks my face off when it comes to fun and interesting textures. Love love love.

So, I’m back. And the move is over, so I might actually have something more to say than, “oh god, cat,  get off the boxes of dishes!”

Forgive the pajamas and over-all gross factor of this picture…it was at the height of moving, and I was up to my ears in stupid cats and boxes and stress. It just so perfectly sums up the ridiculousness of the last week. Let’s end this blog with a happy picture, though. My new kitchen:

Later this week I’ll post pictures of the shelf – it’s my favorite part of the kitchen. So beautiful. SO HAPPY.

I know it’s a little early to fall behind in the daily blogs, but we’re moving in a week and things are just going crazy. There’s no food in the apartment, all of the pots/pans/dishes are packed, and I’m basically living off of Pita Pit. Awesome, right?

I’ll be back once we get to the new place.

dieting vs. healthy calories and fats

I was in Target yesterday at about noon, and my energy was flagging. Lunch was still about an hour and a half away, so I went to the soda cooler and grabbed one of these bad boys:

I LOVE Diet Dr. Pepper, it’s one of my favorite “guilt-free” treats.  But as I walked to the register to pay, I had second thoughts.  Sure, it’s zero calories, but does that necessarily mean that it’s “good for me”?

All of my life has been a diet.  My mother always dieted. I was raised thinking that diet sodas and sugar free puddings were inherently better than other items with more calories or fat.

This is one of the habits I’m desperately trying to break. I put down the soda and grabbed this:

, which came in at a whopping 190 calories for the whole bottle. So which is better, the diet soda with zero calories and a ton of unidentifiable chemicals, or a bottle of high-calorie 100% juice?

My “diet” self tells me that the soda is the obvious choice, because it won’t contribute to my daily calorie intake. The thing is, I haven’t had soda for over a week…and I feel less bloated and more energetic. I can’t seem to go with the idea that a low calorie, artificial product isn’t in fact WORSE than fresh juice.

I experience this with my typical salads, too.  Normally I’d put some fat free bottled dressing on top, but lately I’ve been trying to go with mashed up avocado with some lemon juice. So fat free chemical-filled dressing, or fatty avocado?

I keep saying that I don’t want to diet anymore, and want to come up with a healthy style of eating. So, what is healthy? A diet would never let me eat avocado, but I’m pretty sure it’s better to eat that than fat free ranch.

Confusing.

My bad day yesterday? Got worse. D came home from work at 8:30, covered from head to toe in hives. I rushed him to the hospital, where he got an epi shot and a prednisone shot, plus a copious amount of benadryl. He still looks awful – by the time he went to bed half an hour ago, the hives were back in full force. I don’t really know what to do at this point, and I’m trying really hard to not completely freak out. He looks awful, and he’s obviously in a great deal of pain. Let’s just say that once I got him into bed both last night and tonight I’ve been pacing around the apartment with these clutched desperately in my hands:

That would be a piece of 70% dark chocolate and a glass of shiraz.

I made an excellent chili recipe today, which I’m just not going to write about now…I couldn’t do it justice. Given the teeny amount of sleep I got last night and the incredibly arduous 10 hour shift I worked today, I’m barely capable of writing this.

Happy thoughts to D, please. I’m more worried than I’d like to admit. I’m sure he’ll be fine, but the boy has never had an allergic reaction to ANYTHING before, and the cause is still unknown. Ugh.

birthdays, boxes, and stomach bugs

Hey hey, I haven’t posted in four days!

Ready for a list of excuses? Well, we’re moving in a week and a half. Please note the giant pile of boxes creating an oh-so-cozy fort for my little  monkey-cat.

And the time-crunchy issue of the moving is that I am doing *all* of the packing. See, I love it. I love packing and unpacking, and I get a pretty huge amount of joy out of it. So D isn’t allowed to do anything other than little tasks I relegate to him, like “clean out your yaffa block” or “pull all of the clothes you don’t wear on a daily basis out of the closet.” It works out well for him, because he doesn’t have to pack. It works out well for ME, because I get total control of what goes into each box.

Which I love.

Another excuse is that Wednesday was my birthday, so my food consumption has been wonky. The good (no, great!) news is that I have gone four days without a binge. Yeah, I shouldn’t have had two glasses of wine or 2 ounces of goat cheese last night, but it didn’t set off a bout of uncontrolled eating. I don’t know if I’ve lost any weight this week, but I don’t particularly care. Not being wracked with guilt over eating cheese is a huge HUGE victory for me this week.

So today! Woo! I had to get up early to get a health form filled out at the school I just transferred to. You know, “do you have TB” kind of stuff. I decided to make a Green Monster from some almond milk, frozen peaches, spinach, and stevia.

First problem: there wasn’t much of it. Probably only about a cup. Problem two: it was VILE. Oh my goodness, I’m talking gag-worthy. I choked it down, because I didn’t have time to make something else…it wasn’t the best start to my day.

This was followed by spending a rare two hours with D in the early morning hours, which never happens on week days. Which we promptly ruined by bickering the whole time. So, the horrible green monster followed by  fighting with the love of my life put a real damper on the pre-10am hours.

How else could my day suck, I ask you? I got home and was hit by this crazy 4 hour stomach bug. It was pretty bad, although I managed to sleep through most of it. I woke up at noon to choke down some chicken noodle soup. I haven’t eaten chicken or white flour in a while, so I just stuck to the broth.

It sat pretty well, but then I found a pint of Haagen-dazs strawberry sorbet that’s been in our freezer for approximately five million years. I was so hungry, and so unsure if my stomach could handle anything else, so I cracked it open and ate the last 1/2 cup of freezer-burned goodness.

Appealing, right? Whatever. This was followed an hour later with a piece of toast with butter and homemade jam. Accomplishment time – toast is a trigger for me. I eat one piece, and then follow it up with four more, all smothered in butter or jam. Today, I had the teeny butt end of the bread, and no more. No binge! Yes! I didn’t take a picture, though. It was ugly.

So, finally! I felt good enough to eat an omelet with Egg Beaters, goat cheese and a metric ton of spinach. It was possibly the sexiest omelet I’ve ever made, so let’s give me some props.

For dinner, I had a small salad with lettuce, corn, carrots, goat cheese, and crumbled sesame crackers…plus some tasty homemade sweet potato fries.

And now…well, now I’m trying to make ice cream without an ice cream maker. Exercise in futility? Perhaps.

Happy Monday!

Can I confess that I love Mondays? It’s a leftover of the days I used to work in professional theater – Mondays were usually my day off. I associate the dreaded first day of the workweek with Florida beaches and hanging out with friends. That’s not the case these days – I worked a 10 hour shift today – but I can’t shake off the Monday-love.

As a matter of fact, I’m listening to one of my Ultimate Summer Album – Rilo Kiley’s Under the Blacklight. I think it came out last year, but we used to listen to it while driving around with the windows down. Love.

So today, as I mentioned, I worked. I live in a major college town – one of the Ivies is here, and the coffee shop I work at is in a neighborhood named Collegetown. It’s right on the cusp of campus, so the cafe is an excellent place to study or drink a lot. As much as I detest a great number of the Ivy’s students (self-righteous, entitled, spoilt bastards), there are SO MANY great regulars. It’s big for grad students, and almost all of them are fantastic…as a matter of fact, one of my favorite regulars is moving to Germany on Friday. Sad face. Anyways, I make a ton of money because we serve a full menu of food and some people tip really well. In short, it’s the perfect job to hold while putting yourself through college. Plus, it’s just really fun to get to play with an espresso machine. I love making coffee beverages.

When I work the opening shift, I have to get there at 7am. After chugging three pints of water (I’m sooooo thirsty in the morning) I made myself an Au Lait with skim milk sprinkled with cinnamon. Confession – I forgot my Stevia, so I used sugar-free vanilla syrup. I am trying SO HARD to wean myself off of it.

Taaaaaaaasty.

So, breakfast rolled around at 10. I knew the nice chef was working, so I brought lunch and planned to order breakfast from the kitchen. The picture is terrible, so I apologize (the cafe lighting is awful for picture taking), but what I’m eating is sauteed egg whites with spinach and mushrooms, and a side of smoked salmon. It’s my favorite breakfast. So delicious and filling.

Around noon, I had a macaroon. Hush. It’s delicious and healthy, and keeps me from descending upon the muffins. Lunch occurred around 2, and I had a (very very blurry) salad:

which consisted of:

- spring mix

- broccoli slaw

- carrots

- broccoli crowns, raw

- zucchini, raw

- tomatoes from the garden

- 1/3 of an avocado

- juice of half a lemon

It was great, and very filling. That didn’t stop me from having a second macaroon as I counted my drawer. Whoops.

Dinner! The boy wanted beef again (twice in three days!), so I let him go crazy with burgers, but only after he promised to cook my vegan Gardenburger on the grill. I made a medium-sized salad that was full of romaine lettuce hearts, raw zucchini, tomatoes, 1oz of goat cheese, and a sprinkling of lite ceaser dressing. It was a strange combination, but I really liked it. Plus, I took the time to cut all the veggies and lettuce super thin. That pleases me aesthetically in ways I can’t even describe. I really enjoy thinly sliced food.

I really need a new camera, don’t I? =)

So after dinner I was feeling that old familiar craving for something sweet, and instead of grabbing a handful of chocolate chips I made a compromise and made some hot chocolate with cocoa powder, agave nectar, and skim milk. It was chocolaty but not overly sweet, and it knocked out the sweet tooth. Yay.

Delicious, no?

So for the rest of the evening, I’m planning on raw zucchini sticks with salsa around 8:30, or maybe some banana soft serve as a treat. All in all, I feel really good about today. The macaroons are the only iffy action, but I stand by my feeling that they’re good for me! =)

A less than stellar day.

Want to know a secret? I woke up craving hummus so badly that I had this for breakfast:

It honestly wasn’t very filling, and an hour and a half later I made an Au Lait and munched on some black raspberries we picked from the woods the other day.

After that, I was a little stir crazy, and the sun was actually out. Hooray! I threw on my shoes and badgered D out the door so we could go to the Farmer’s Market. The cute little town I live in has a fantastic farmers market. Sometimes there are more food vendors than farm stands, but the food is always excellent. What I WANTED was a gyro or coconut sorbet. What I GOT was:

As a Florida girl, this made.my.day. Oh man. 8oz of fresh squeezed OJ, unsweetened. Heaven in a cup.

So lunchtime came at around 1:30 today, and I had half a bowl of Progresso Vegetarian Vegetable Soup with Barley and these fellas:

Tasty, but I was hungry again by 3. So…I broke out the Magic Bullet and made my very first Green Monster! It was a bunch of spinach, 3/4c skim milk, and some frozen pineapple, papaya, and strawberries. Delicious! It was accompanied by three of the four figs you see in my hand. The fourth was stolen by a hungry D.

So at 4, I headed in to work to do inventory. Work is one of my major weaknesses – it’s a coffee shop, and we sell a ton of delicious baked goods. Fortunately for me, one of our amazing chefs came up with this chocolate macaroon that is to DIE FOR. It’s unsweetened coconut, coconut milk, cocoa, egg replacer, and 3 tbs of powdered sugar FOR THE WHOLE RECIPE. They’re unbelievably good and relatively guilt free. So I ate one while I did inventory. That was followed by a half hour spent at the bar with friends, nursing ten ounces of locally brewed beer. I shouldn’t have done that.

So…dinner. Bleh. I’ve been kinda just grazing around, not eating anything of note. I have these small packs of Starkist tuna (80 calories a pop), and I had one with some leftover pickle slices, and one on its own. That was followed by another pair of sesame crackers and Laughing Cow cheese wedges, but this time I sliced some tomato up on top of it. Oh yeah, and a small bowl of Chex mix. It was a lot of food, and I really should have taken the time to make something filling instead of just grazing.

It’s amazing how laziness can mess with the whole day. I would have eaten significantly less today if I had taken the time to MAKE something…a big salad, some protein, anything. How do you guys handle time constraints?

Good or bad?

So, the rest of my day! Things got unexpectedly awesome when my boyfriend surprised me with an early birthday gift – a Magic Bullet. I’ve been wanting one for a while now, and I immediately set to making  a batch of hummus. Around 3:30 I had a snack of raw zucchini, red bell pepper, salsa, and hummus. The hummus was so tasty that I cleaned the bowl while neglecting the poor salsa.

I was correct in assuming the boyfriend was going to want steak for dinner…here’s my 4oz organic grass-fed strip steak and a giant salad consisting of: spring mix, asparagus, red peppers, raw broccoli, carrot matchstix, a few globs of hummus, and a healthy squeeze of fresh lemon juice. It was delicious. Can you tell which placesetting is mine and which is my carniverous, carb-loving boyfriend? His steak was HUGE.

Everything was delicious, and my cat wanted a piece of the action. Desperately.

Following dinner, I had to make a sweet treat for a party we were going to. I settled on the incredibly simple childhood favorite, Puppy Chow.

My goal was to not blindly munch as I mixed, so after all was said and done I carefully measured out a single serving (one half cup).

This stuff is evil, but not as evil as the chocolate chip cookies at the party tonight. I’m wracked with guilt that I ate two of them, but I’m trying to remind myself that my snacking was controlled. I measured out the Puppy Chow, and ate no more. I ate two cookies, but I ate them slowly enough to get me through the entire evening.

I did not at any point mindlessly eat, or binge. So that’s a victory, right?

My tummy disagrees, and is incredibly upset by all that dairy and sugar. Oh well.

Tomorrow is going to be better, although I’m not entirely convinced today was that bad. No binges!

So far, so good!

I woke up at 9:00 (so luxurious!) and forced myself to shower and drink a glass of water before making breakfast. My breakfast, as usual, consisted of the last bit of Greek yogurt and a handful of blackberries. Some mornings, when I’m craving something sweet, I put a scoop of my homemade jam in the mix. It’s just strawberries and a hit of honey, no sugar. Delicious.

Is it wrong that the end of the yogurt is my favorite bit, because I can fit more berries into the yogurt containter than I can fit into my bowl? So many berries. While I was waiting for the boy to get home with coffee (we ran out yesterday! oh no!), I munched on this fella:

Tasty looking, no? The man with the coffee beans arrived back around 11, and I decided to try something new. Normally, I drink strictly iced coffee, but I grabbed my Bodum frother, heated up some skim milk mixed with fat free half and half, threw in a packet of Stevia, and made myself an Au Lait. It was really delicious. However, I got so distracted by the beautiful peach that he brought me from his mom’s house (she’s out of town and we’re under strict instruction to eat all of her produce), I didn’t take a picture until most of the glorious foam settled down.

Look at that peach! I normally dislike white peaches, but this one was so tasty. I think I may eat too much fruit. All that sugar probably can’t be good for me, but reaching for a peach keeps me from going to something worse. I’m not sure what to do about that. For now  I’m just going to enjoy the fruit without guilt, because it’s better than candy or sugary cereal.

Anyways, lunch! I had some romaine lettuce that was on it’s way past usability, so lettuce wraps were in order. Because I have a sinking suspicion that my heavily carnivorous boyfriend is going to want red meat for dinner, I wanted something light but filling. So I baked some tofu, seasoned with a splash of lite soy sauce and sesame seeds, and had tofu avocado lettuce wraps. As a side, I grated some sweet potato into thin wafers and baked in the oven for a few minutes. It was probably only 1/3 of the potato, but it was filling.

It’s a pretty ugly lunch, but believe me – it was tasty. The only thing I’d do differently is less avocado – I only used half, but wow. It was a lot. Lunch was finished with a small, slightly under-ripe mango.

So that’s my day so far, and I’m pleased with the choices I’ve made. Right now I can tell that I’m not hungry, but I’m fighting the urge to go much. Afternoon, from about 1-4, is my Bad Time. I tend to graze and make most of my mistakes during this time. It’s worsened by the boy not being home right now. It’s hard to remain accountable when you’re alone.

This blog will hopefully provide that sense of accountability I need. While the weekly weigh ins certainly helped, I was never able to find a group of people I fit in with.

Anyways, here’s hoping I keep up the binge-free day. I’m planning on having some raw zucchini and red bell pepper dipped in salsa as my mid-afternoon snack, but that’s going to be it before dinner. In theory, at least. =)