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It’s a Core Plan Chop Salad! (Alas, no pictures. It was all gone before I thought to take out the camera!)
Ingredients:
a handful of baby carrots
1/2 a cucumber
1/4 or 1/2 of a red bell pepper
one or two teaspoons of olive oil
a tablespoon or so of rice vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
Roughly chop the veggies into chucks and toss them in a bowl. Drizzle with oil, splash with vinegar, season with salt and pepper. Yum!
Old Fashioned oats with bananas, raspberries, and a splash of milk. Yum! What are you having for breakfast?
I don’t know about you guys, but we had some crap weather here today. It was a typical New England spring day: misty, cloudy, gloomy–perfect weather for making a nice lamb stew! I’ve cross-posted the recipe on my other blog (didn’t know I had two, eh?)
Core Plan Beef (or Lamb) Stew
1-1/2 lbs lean beef (or lamb), cut into chunks for stewing
1 Tbsp canola or olive oil
1 medium onion, frenched
3 carrots, cut into large chunks
2 ribs celery, prepared similarly
4 parsnips, ditto
4 or 5 medium-ish red potatoes, again, cut into chunks
2 cups beef stock
2 cups canned, diced tomato
2 Tbsp tomato paste
Garnier Bouquet (I used bay leaf, thyme, and sage, but any old seasoning combination that plays well with beef’ll work. Dry herbs are OK, too.)
Salt & Pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 250 degrees. Meanwhile, in an oven-safe dutch oven, heat oil over med-high heat on the stove. Add the meat (seasoned with some salt and pepper) and sear it. When it’s got some good color, remove it from the pan and set aside. Toss in the onions along with a good sized pinch of salt and saute them until translucent. Add the remaining vegs (and a little more salt) and saute them for 5 minutes or so–just to give them a little jump start. Then, add the broth and the tomatoes and tomato paste, along with the herbs. Bring it up to a boil and throw in the meat. Cover and move the whole operation into the oven for 2 or 3 hours. Yummy! And enough for eight 1 cup servings!
If you’re following the Flex plan, there’s 4 points* in each 1 cup serving, leaving enough points left over to enjoy with a hunk of soft and chewy bread brushed with a little olive oil (and still be a relatively low point and hearty meal).
Next time I’ll add a tablespoon or so of mashed potatoes to help thicken it up a bit. Otherwise–delish!
*points calculated with the WeightWatchers.com eTools recipe builder.
Getting back on track is particularly difficult for me. It’s so easy to let one slip become an excuse to eat poorly the rest of the day, which, in turn, affects how I eat for the rest of the week. I missed weighing in this past Saturday, and will probably miss this coming Saturday as well. While I have been sticking to the Core plan in principle, there has been an unknown amount of off-plan eating. Perhaps I should find a way to weigh in this week, even if it’s not on my regular WW day. Even if I have to bring the children. Even if I think I might see a gain. Even if. That’s what WW has been for me. To keep on trying, even if.
Tomorrow is my weigh-in day, the culmination of two weeks on the Core plan. I’m not sure how I’ll do this week. Last week, I was confident the scale would show a loss, but this week feels like there’s been more off-plan eating. You see, this week marked the arrival of a certain time of the month, and there has been some rather a lot of food-based emotional support. And let’s face it, baby carrots, however adorable they may be, are not comforting. Neither are salads or non-creamy soups. So tomorrow should be interesting. How do you handle your period week? Are you more likely to eat for emotional reasons? Or have you conquered this particular demon? If you have, I’d love to hear how you did it. Wish me luck for tomorrow and for a better week on Core next week.
Saturday is the day I go to Weight Watchers. My DH watches the kids and I head over there after breakfast to face the scale. Surprisingly, I was looking forward to going today. I’ve been doing Core all week and, with the exception of running out of “extra” points by Wednesday, I felt I’d done okay. I mean, I drank a lot of water this week, and I managed 10 whole activity points! All my hard work paid off–I posted a 1.8 lb loss! Yay me! I’m going to stick with Core another week and see if I can keep this up. 
How was your week? Good? Bad?
It is the day before my “first” weigh in, after having been off the wagon, so to speak. I have no idea why I am sitting here, fearing a small electronic device. Maybe it is because I have spent so much time watching it move in minute increments up and down. I seem to stay the same weight, regardless. I’ll go down as much as 5 or 6 pounds. And then gain it back in a week. Stay on a plateau for a while. Lose 2 pounds. Gain 1/2 a pound. And so on. I really need to break this cycle. The funny thing is, I know it isn’t Weight Watchers that is the problem. I just don’t like to say that the problem is me. I know that I cook good food. Not fatty food – usually. Good, WW approved, low fat food. But somewhere along the line, I am eating too much. Or not good things.
I love waffles. I love bread with butter. Add nut butter, and I’m in heaven. When I crave a snack it is bread that I want. Or chocolate. But chocolate cannot live in my house. The last time I tried to have chocolate in the house it was gone in less than 2 days. Sigh. I have had to come to the conclusion that bread is not my friend. I want it. I love it. I crave it. I cannot control it. But I cannot simply remove bread from my house. I have children that I need to be making lunches for, and they eat the waffles from the toaster most mornings for breakfast… But I have to be really honest here… I don’t need to eat the waffles. And I don’t need to have the English Muffins (oh sweet temptation!).
The other thing that I am realizing is that I go back for seconds. On the flex plan I lose faith because I consistently go over points. I GET HUNGRY! I am hungry a lot on flex. Really hungry. I don’t do hungry well – just ask the extra hundred pounds hanging out on my lush Rubinesque body. But with core, I just don’t like not having bread! (see above) Or figuring out how to fit in chocolate and ice cream on occasion. The sad thing is that once I get it into my head that I am being deprived, I NEED TO EAT. So I was just getting started on the Core plan. Good point? It is forcing me to find alternatives to the foods I usually eat. Good alternatives. Bad thing? I eat when I should not. I go back for seconds because I want to eat, not because I am hungry. Getting in touch with my “inner hunger” is proving to be a challenge.
Some one just beat me over the head. Please?
So. Tomorrow. Me. The scale. The paper – I don’t like the paper when it tells me I have gained weight. Hopefully the person behind the desk will be someone I don’t know. I haven’t been back since the person to weigh me in was Jessica from my old city college. Looking slim and lovely. (She lost a whole 25 lbs to be behind the desk. Pardon me – I apparently have fat prejudice. I need to see someone need to lose at least 75 pounds before I start to feel like they might get the place I am in.) There I stood, fat, in my sweats, having gained 2 pounds, covered in baby snot, and toting a toddler. Sigh. Life is just not fair. But – I will go back. I will weigh in, and I WILL get past 10 pounds this time! And perhaps if I have to stare at her pert little self each week, I will be more inspired to not be a fat slob. One can hope. I’ll post the scale reading tomorrow. Will I be 235? 240? Gasp 245? Who knows.
The suspense is killing me.
Literally.
I’m not comfortable in my body. My skin feels too tight and I don’t like the way certain parts of me jiggle when I walk. My knees hurt. I fear that my fatness will kill me one day. I suffer from sleep apnea. I have dreamed on more than one occasion that someone was strangling me and I couldn’t breathe. I know that it’s because I had stopped breathing in my sleep. I’ve been lucky. I still wake up in the morning.
I’ve been doing Weight Watchers since the Fall of 2006. I lost about 24 pounds by January, 2007. I felt great, but I still had a lot to lose. I quit smoking in February, and I stopped dropping pounds. I got frustrated and “took a break” from WW, and also from quitting smoking. I smoked and ate almost what I wanted all summer. In November, I quit smoking again. I was depressed over the holidays. In January this year I decided to go back to WW. I had gained all but 3 of the 24 pounds back.
I now have eleven weeks of meetings under my belt but only a 6.4 pound weight loss to show for it. Clearly I have not been applying myself. This week I decided to switch from the Flex plan (where you count the points value of every bite you take) to the Core plan (following a specific list of food and tuning in to your hunger signals). Core is difficult for me and in the last six days I’ve realized why–it forces you to change the way you eat in a way the Flex does not.
It’s been a tough week. There’s been chocolate (not Core), McDonald’s food (definitely not Core), and ice cream (can you see where I’m going with this?). But, until I went over my weekly points allowance (on McDonald’s day), I kept track of every single extra point I ate. I didn’t eat much bread. I only had McDonald’s one day this week. I changed the way I do my morning coffee. Tiny changes, small steps.
My oldest friend is also struggling with her weight and is also doing Weight Watchers. Ideally, we would go to meetings together, go grocery shopping together, workout together. But she is on the left coast and I am on the right. Weight loss is a journey, made by taking one tiny step at a time. This blog is born of our desire to support each other, to make this journey in tandem. Won’t you join us?
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