Weight Watching

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Dinners This Week

After a VERY frustrating month and a half of trying to lose any, any at all, of the weight I gained from eating my feelings all autumn (and, simultaneously, a month and a half of reminding myself that weight has nothing to do with my self-worth and that maybe I am just This Size and should embrace it and worrying that I am setting a bad example for Carla by “dieting” and churning with ALL of the Fraughtness that comes with wanting to be a certain size in our society today and facing a truly insurmountable resistance to buying myself new jeans), I have persuaded my husband to try the Keto plan with me. This is literally Day Three, so please understand that I may give it up any second now and never speak of it again. (I mean, no carbs I can sort-of live with… but NO SAUCES? No BEANS? And the limit on Healthful Vegetables – like, I typically have to restrict myself to two cups of LETTUCE!!!!! to stay within my carb allotment – has me in a panic.) (I understand that I am CHOOSING this, by the way.) (I don’t really plan to speak of keto/diet stuff, that often, but it may shift the tenor of my weekly dinner plan posts and/or the tenor of my general complaining, so I am warning you about it now.)

Anyway, meal planning is newly challenging because I am trying to emphasize fat and protein over carbohydrates. Here’s what’s on the menu this week:

Dinners for the Week of February 24-March 1 (WHAT. HOW IS IT MARCH ALREADY SLOW DOWN TIME OMG)

Note: There were some absolutely beautiful tuna steaks on sale at Costco this weekend, so I snapped them up. We will not be eating the sautéed red pepper portion of this meal; instead I will be sautéing some green beans. This is because I already have the green beans and I don’t want to waste them, not because of some red-pepper-related bias.

Note: I fully realize that the Internet has been swooning over this recipe for eons. I have read about it with suspicion for many years and NOW is finally the time to try it out.

 

 

Note: I haven’t figured out what I will pair with this yet. Maybe some avocado?

 

  • Leftovers of some sort or possibly eggs

 

  • OUT

Note: My birthday is this week, so we will be going out to celebrate. I am already feeling grouchy about not being able to eat all the things I want to eat — solely because of completely voluntary and self-imposed restrictions! — but I think we have found a restaurant that serves some nice fish options. And the whole point of doing Keto is to reset my eating habits, so a little limitation on the all-out scarf-fest I would otherwise be doing on my birthday is probably not a bad thing.

 

What’s on your menu this week?

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Oh! I Thought of Another One for the List!

I did not think of it quickly enough to add to Friday’s post, but I am IN LOVE with this workout video:

Shape: Best-Ever Hollywood Workout

 

Shape best ever Hollywood

Photo from amazon.com. Every time I put this in my DVD player – EVERY TIME – I think about Paul Hollywood, of Great British Baking Show fame. I think I might prefer a Paul Hollywood exercise video. Especially if it involved cake.

I really hate going to the gym. Likewise, I hate exercise classes of any type. If I’m going to exercise, I’m going to do it in my own home where no one can hear me huffing and grunting or see how inflexible I am.

It took me… nearly 40 years to figure to this out, but my library has a lot of exercise videos that you can just… CHECK OUT! For FREE! So for the past six months or so, I have been adding two or three of them to my pile of books every time I go to the library. Some of them, as you may imagine, are terrible. Others are so good I plan on buying them.

The Shape: Best-Ever Hollywood Workout is my current favorite. It has lots of benefits:

  1. The “star” or “host” or “exercise guru” or whatever you want to call him is Gunnar Peterson, and he is not annoying at all. Some of the stars of these videos make me want to turn off the video. They can be too peppy or too aggressive. Jillian Michaels, for instance, is constantly reminding you that you have to WORK to see results. Don’t just sit there and eat ice cream while she’s working out. You have to DO THE EXERCISES. You want your abs to look like this backup exerciser right here? Well, you have to WORK to get them. Rock hard abs aren’t FREE. Sigh. It’s true and a good reminder and all that but it annoys the crap out of me. I’m DOING THE VIDEO, all right? Lay off me! Gunnar Peterson doesn’t really do any reminders like that. He basically says, “Do this exercise” and then he does some counting down to the last rep and then he moves on to the next exercise. Once in a while he’ll say, “Great job” or “Don’t let your arms gets sloppy” or something along those lines. That’s it.
  2. It has OPTIONS. There are two 20-minute workouts for the whole body and two 10-minute “targeted” workouts (one for your arms, one for your buns and thighs). I like to have options. It gets boring to do the same thing over and over, and so this allows me to rotate things.
  3. It’s FAST. You can do a whole workout in 20 minutes! Or 10 minutes, if you want to! And even in 20 minutes, I get my heart rate up and my muscles are noticeably sore the next day. I feel like it’s a worthwhile 20 minutes. And if you have 30 minutes, you can do one of the 20-minute workouts and then one of the 10-minute ones.
  4. It doesn’t really require special equipment. You can use hand weights, if you want. But usually one of the two backup exercisers isn’t using weights at all. You can use a yoga mat, if you want. Depends on how hard your floor is. But that’s really it. No exercise bands or balls or whatever else the kids are using these days.
  5. The exercises go by really quickly. If I’m doing a plank, I get to the point where I don’t think I can hold it much longer and it’s over. I’ve tried (vaguely, lazily) to count how many repetitions of each exercise you do, and it’s not many. Maybe 10, tops? It’s doable, is what I’m saying. So if there’s something you hate, you can get through it pretty quickly.
  6. It’s fairly low impact. I have bad knees, so I steer clear of anything high impact. One of the workouts has a small section of jumps, but it’s very fast and hasn’t bothered my knees at all. And you can skip it if you aren’t interested.
  7. There’s an option for “customizing” your workout – i.e., you go to a menu of all four workouts, and you can select which ones you want to do. And then they will play automatically. I feel like this should be #20 on the list, because it’s not really that great. I mean, it prevents you from having to press a couple of buttons on your remote, that’s all. But it’s a nice idea, I guess. I still end up fast forwarding through the cool-down of the first session and the warm-up of the second session. There’s only so much warming-up and cooling-down I can handle.

Disadvantages:

  1. This is a DVD, from 2010, which is nearly a DECADE ago. So if you don’t have a DVD player or a PlayStation that can play it, you are out of luck.
  2. Somehow, even though it’s a DVD, it’s still $14.98, which seems like a lot for a piece of near-defunct technology. I am still going to buy it, though. But maybe you could get it used, or check it out from your library. Or, for all I know, it exists in the ether in some digital form that you can access for free.
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How to Give Up Carbs

Step 1: Renounce carbs.

 

Step 2: Plan week’s meals with husband; discover that pretty much every meal you like includes carbs in some form.

Step 2a: Commence weeping and rending of clothes.

Step 3: Make tacos for dinner.

Step 4: Ignore husband when he asks, “You know taco shells are carbs, right?”

Step 5: Contract raging case of Bagel Craving.

Step 6: Forego a package of Lender’s bagels (what? I LIKE them) for a single bagel from the grocery store bakery.

Step 7: Respond to husband’s question, “Isn’t a bagel pure carbohydrates?” by saying “I’ll show you a carbohydrate… right to the junk!”

Step 8: Decide to eat bagel.

Step 8a: Discover that, unlike Lender’s bagels, this stupid bagel is not pre-cut.

Step 9: Commence cutting bagel in half.

Step 9a: Stab self in middle finger with tip of knife.

Step 9b: Do not look at blood do not look at blood do not look at blood.

Step 9c: Hold bleeding finger under ice cold water; feel grateful for the first time ever that the water is so goddamn cold.

Step 9d: Wrap a bandaid around frozen finger, effectively cutting off circulation.

Step 9e: Inspect knife for errant blood spatter.

Step 9e1: Determine that errant is not the word you mean; keep it anyway.

Step 9e2: Poetic license, y’all.

Step 9f: Resume cutting bagel in half. Carefully this time.

Step 10: Place half of bagel in toaster oven.

Step 11: Place other half of bagel back in bagel bag.

Step 12: Put honey in the microwave.

Step 13: Briefly consider asking Twitter if butter that’s been left out on top of the toaster oven for three weeks is okay to eat.

Step 13a: Decide, Naaaahhhhh about asking Twitter. The butter’s fine, man.

Step 14: Hear a pop from the microwave.

Step 15: Open the microwave just as the honey bottle tips over and squirts honey all over the microwave door, the stove, and the floor.

Step 15a: Briefly consider closing the microwave door and moving.

Step 16: Turn on the hot water while mopping up whatever honey has not immediately congealed into a sticky, impossible mess.

Step 16a: Chant new mantra of “at least it’s not sugar” whilst mopping.

Step 17: Run a paper towel under the hot water.

Step 17a: The goddamn water is still ice cold.

Step 17b: BLARGH.

Step 17c: Run paper towel under lukewarm water.

Step 18: Clean up remaining honey mess.

Step 19: Place toasted bagel on plate.

Step 20: Slather with “butter,” if you can call it that.

Step 21: Sprinkle buttered bagel with salt. (YUM.)

Step 22: Squirt honey onto bagel.

Step 22a: Miss bagel entirely and instead squirt the Giant Crevasse of Doom that lies between the counter and the stove.

Step 23: Is this really worth it?

Step 24: Clean up the honey as best as possible.

Step 24a: But obviously you can’t clean anything inside the Giant Crevasse of Doom.

Step 24b: So just leave that alone.

Step 24c: Consider fashioning some sort of “Welcome, Ants!” banner to affix to the honey inside the Crevasse.

Step 24d: Decide, Naaaaaaaahhhhhhh, ants don’t read so good.

Step 25: Sit down.

Step 26: Eat bagel.

Step 27: Endure hours of mild stomach discomfort, possibly related to the “butter” substance smeared all over the bagel.

Step 28: Vow to never eat a carb again.