Diet – Lisa Holcomb

Day 8: Food, Fitness, and Faith

Happy Mother’s Day!

Since it’s Mother’s Day, I didn’t get up and do my exercising right away. I got up, threw on clothes, and took my family over to wish my mom a happy day & give her our presents (a book full of prompts for her life story and a pink bromeliad). She suggested that we go to Einstein’s Bros. for bagels, so we took her up on it. I had a whole wheat bagel with onion & chive schmear and a cup of coffee (450 calories).

After we played a while in the backyard, we had lunch: leftover pizza (380 calories for 2 slices, I didn’t finish my entire portion, though).

Nick had to work today, so the kids and I played in the backyard a while, then did some shopping for my mother’s day gift (jewelry from the $1 jewelry store), and watched Battle for Terra on Netflix. We had a little snack: sweet tarts and Reese’s mini eggs. I had a small serving (8 sweet tarts= 60 calories and 1 Reese’s mini egg = 21 calories).

Then Nick came back and took the kids to the grocery store while I did my exercising. Today I didn’t follow a video. I got some medium strength tube bands and did 10 reps each of the chest/arm exercises. After they came back, a friend of David’s showed up unexpectedly, so I took another walk (I don’t get why D’s friends keep appearing out of nowhere uninvited) to calm down, about 30 minutes.

Dinner was beef & barley soup, bread, and a bit of cheese, with some wine for the grown-ups. I don’t have calorie totals for this particular meal, but based on some internet research of similar soups, I’d guess it was around 250 calories for the soup, another 100 for the wine, 100 for the bread, and about 50 for the cheese. After dinner I had a tiny little serving (measured on our food scale) of ice cream for another 250 calories.

So all in all, I was a bit high today, but I did do 2 bouts of exercise instead of one (that “calm down” walk was a planned one, just made more frenetic by my lack-of-calmness.)

health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day 7: Food, Fitness, & Faith

Day 7 fell on the Sabbath and my parents were in town. We got up, walked over there (the short way), and had what passes as breakfast at my mom’s house: store bought sweet rolls. Checked the calorie count and ate just one (220 calories). Also had a banana and a cup of coffee.

Took a long walk with my mom just before lunch, slower than I’d have liked, but still we were out and about. Lunch was a turkey bacon, cheddar, and toast sandwich (total calories: 350).

Snack at church was a glass of artificially sweetened lemonade (0 calorie), a handful of popcorn (55 calories), and a devilled egg (approximately 65, which is pleasantly low).

Dinner after a long day of walking around doing hospitality (putting out snacks, cleaning tables, sweeping floors, washing, drying, and putting away dishes, etc) and waiting for kids to finish filming their program was pizza & salad & more 0-cal lemonade. I ate two full pieces of pizza (380 calories) and a small salad (50 calories) and a mini cupcake (80 calories) and a mini brownie (100 calories). (Most calorie amounts approximated from Calorie King.)

I felt like I’d indulged a bit, but looking at the numbers I am very cheered. So actually, all in all, not a bad day at all.

health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day 6: Food, Fitness, & Faith

Day 6 I got up and tried to do my 10 minute Dance Solutions video. I have several problems with it: 1) There’s no instruction, just dancing. 2) I am trying to lose weight, which means that I cannot see all my muscles, so I have no idea which ones are moving. 3) I can’t dance. So after several minutes I gave up trying to figure out what she was doing and spent the remainder of my time bouncing around energetically whichever way I could. I figured that cardio was cardio at this point. My heart was beating super fast, my arms & legs were flailing around, it was all good. I also ended up walking back and forth to my parents house a few times (and mostly took the long way ’round).

Food: I had another one of my less-than-inspiring-at-this-point breakfasts. Skipped morning snack because I knew I was meeting my parents for lunch. Lunch was at a place called The Purple Pig. I should have realized that this would mean less-than-stellarly-healthy, but I did expect there to be some sort of salad option. Alas, no. Even the safe-sounding new potatoes turned out to be cooked mush with a pound of butter in it. I ate the brisket sandwich (surprisingly small compared to my parents food) and some of the broccoli rice casserole (I farmed out the rest under the flag of “You don’t have any of this, try some!”) and since everyone agreed the potatoes were bad, I didn’t feel bad leaving them on the plate. So I didn’t really do too terribly badly. Skipped afternoon snack as well, since we were doing Mother’s Day Celebration dinner.

We went out to BJ’s Brewhouse and Grill. Even though I’d declared it my “cheat” night, I still wanted to not go too overboard, so I chose off the “under 575 calories” menu and had a yummy chicken pesto flatbread with a side salad. After dinner I had a Klondike bar (only 220 calories, much less than regular ice cream, strangely).

health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day Five: Food, Fitness, & Faith

Day five was when I fell apart.

I got up, couldn’t find the exercise video I wanted, so had to do a different one. It was for the balance ball, an upper body workout, and really, it did go okay, but my head was down towards the ground a lot, which made my headache (day 5 of headaches, day 5 of fitness. a coincidence?) so much worse. Surprisingly, as the day wore on what I missed the most of my workout was the cardio part.

Breakfast was fine: another variation of oatmeal, fruit, and tea. Snack was unexpectedly a mini muffin at Greg’s MDO (muffins for moms, whee). Lunch was a small portion of a low-calorie version of mac-&-cheese with some yummy herbed zucchini. Dinner was pasta & sauce leftovers.

Everything was all right to that point, but after the crazy day I had (nothing went right. nothing. And then the kids brought other kids home, which I’d forgotten entirely) I really wanted a beer after dinner. So I had one. And then I wanted just a few Reece’s Pieces, so I had some of those, too. And then another high calorie bit of junk before bed. Like I said, after days of denial of things I really wanted, I caved.

I was going to allow myself a cheat night for Mother’s Day and I’ll just have to think of this one as this week’s cheat and Mother’s Day as next week’s cheat come a bit early, right? Tomorrow is, as they say, another day, so I’ll just have to start over and be good again.

health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day Four: Food, Fitness, & Faith

Day Four was my last day of the week with my Nancy Marmorat video. Today’s focused on the "butt-ox" (I can’t help but giggle when she says it like that; it sounds like some ugly beast, silly, but true). I like to refer to it as the "booty" instead. 😉

Foodwise: breakfast was at my friend’s house and she’d made yummy sausage rolls. I had two of those, some grapes, and half a banana, encompassing both breakfast and snack times (we were there all morning). Lunch was leftover sausage & polenta & green beans. After-school snack was pistachio pudding (oh, and I was wrong earlier this week: we use 1% milk, so it’s even fewer calories). Dinner was beans & cornbread & pickles (Wednesday night is vegetarian night at our house).

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I usually drink black tea at breakfast, green tea at lunch, then water at all other times. Sometimes I drink extra tea, but my rule is that I have to drink another half glass of water with my tea to rule out any dehydration that might come from it. (And that’s what keeps me from drinking too much tea)

health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

around the house

If you come to my house this week, you’ll see a whole lot of little blue post-it notes around on the walls like this:

If you are a guest here, please ignore these signs, as they are for family only.

Nick and the kids have been asking for things they could do that would help me out, but by the time they ask, I’m usually in that lost-from-words state of exhaustion and frustration where I literally cannot think of a single thing that they could do for me. So one day when I was alone, I got to thinking “Wouldn’t it be great if they could ask me right now? I could come up with an awesome list!” So I started putting up notes right where activities could be done, so when we’re in the kitchen and Nick wants to know how to help, I can point at the wall and he’ll take out the compost or when the kids are in their room looking for a “help mama” chore to complete their lists they can look to their closets (which normally need things tidied up before they can close).

(I noticed last night that there were bizarre things in the sink from the dinner Nick had made, but I was too tired to mention them. By the time I got up this morning they were out of there. From my list to an empty sink. WHOOP!)

health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day Three: Food, Fitness, & Faith

Day Three I had the same kid-in-my-bed situation, so I put off exercising until that small window of time between taking big kids to school & Greg to MDO. Greg burst in on me at some point with a "What are you doing that for?!" The look on his face was priceless.

I got in some extra exercise today as well, in the form of walking up and down all the bleachers three times fast and walking to the car and back (at the very end of the parking lot from the stadium) a few times. I also had to dig some holes for the azaleas we got from church (I dug the 3 easy ones; Nick did the harder ones later).

Food-wise: Breakfast was a different oatmeal, a different fruit, and a different kind of turkey bacon (did you know they make one that tastes just like regular Canadian bacon?! I was so happy to find that out.) Lunch was very difficult, as I was stuck at Track & Field Day over at the Rose Stadium…without cash. I don’t know where it went, I just know I didn’t have it. A very nice family brought me a meal, unexpectedly, so I ate it: hamburger, fries, and a coke. So yummy. Fortunately I’d skipped morning snack (no time for that lately) and then skipped afternoon snack as well to make up for all those calories. Dinner was sausage, polenta, & green beans, all of which I ate reasonable sized portions of (double the green beans in proportion to the polenta).

health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day Two: Food, Fitness, & Faith

Day Two was all about your partnership with God. It reminded us not only to avoid unhealthy foods, but to remember that you can ask God to help you with that part of the journey. That God is always protecting you and to try to remember that when you’re faced with unhealthy choices of all kinds.

So today I got up and had a stumbling block right away: a kid in my bed. I exercise behind the closed door of my bedroom because I find exercising to be super-embarrassing. So this was hard: do I wake up the little one to exercise or put it off hoping I’d find willpower later? Well, I ended up letting him sleep a while longer and then trying to transfer him to his bed, but he woke up anyway. I left him out on the couch with his brothers and went off to do my exercising.

In terms of exercise, I’m currently doing Nancy Marmorat’s video series on low-impact exercises. There’s one dealing with different groups of muscles each day of the week for four days, using simple items like towels and one pound weights. Yesterday worked on the stomach area and today worked the chest and shoulders (plus a warm up and several minutes of cardio). Then I’m doing balance ball exercises from physical therapy the last official exercise day of the week. I’m hoping to also walk the other two days, but I’m not going hinge all my plans on those two little walks.

Eating wise, I did okay most of the day. Breakfast looked like this:

(oatmeal, an orange, a slice of turkey bacon, and some green tea)

We skipped midmorning snack entirely. Lunch was some baked potato with very carefully measured sour cream and butter and a whole lot of chives (yum!) for only 400 calories of goodness.

Afternoon snack was chocolate pudding made with 2% milk (only 140 calories a serving for a 1/2 cup of yum).

Dinner was pasta & sauce with broccoli. I tried to eat more broccoli than p&s. And then I had a small piece of birthday cake (which I found to be totally reasonable given the skipped snack earlier).

Books, health, I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day One: Food, Fitness, & Faith

During the spring campout a church a few of us ladies were chatting (while making lunches for the kids) about how we were all in need of a little help with our waistlines. Most of us had gained 40 or more pounds since our weddings (although one had gained a lot less, she was a lot closer to her wedding than the rest of us as well) and we had all tried lots of diets or exercise plans and not had them work.

Well, one of the ladies had a new plan: God, by way of the Sam’s Club book counter:

Food, Fitness, and Faith for Women: A 21 Day Journey to a New You

We all agreed that God had been the one thing really lacking in our past plans, so we got hold of the book and we set a start date and now that day is here.

The book is pretty simple and slim on details: you find your own diet and exercise plan, something doctor approved, and then this book provides the Scripture and encouragement and opportunity to journal daily. A little paragraph about health, a lot of quotes from the Bible and elsewhere, and then a journaling prompt.

Here’s how today went:

I did really good in the morning: got up, read the chapter, made myself a little plaque with the main quote from the book to put up in my kitchen, worked out, ate a reasonable breakfast & skipped snacking.

Afternoon wasn’t bad either: a decent lunch, then skipped the afternoon snack because I was having a high calorie dinner, walked a fair distance to the car & back.

Evening though, well, some of you know that I went back home after the play. Nick didn’t go back to work (surprise!), but had been preparing a special dinner.. So I did not do well in the evening after all that work the rest of the day. *sigh*

But that’s okay! The book didn’t really have any goal for today other than make a list of healthy choices you’d like to follow and unhealthy ones you’d like to drop and an admonition to look at portion sizes, which I totally did.