Monthly(!) Construction Update

I must apologize to my many readers (all one of you) for not writing for so long.  I got caught up with studying for the finance certification test I took the first week in June and then I was caught up in celebrating my new-found post-test freedom.  You may have been worried that the radio silence was indicative of me tumbling off the wagon into a box of cookies, but fear not - though I did gain a bit following the post-test celebrations, I have since taken off that weight and I am down 10.6 pounds overall.

There are a few things that helped me be successful over the past month despite the test madness:

• When I gained the 2 pounds after the test, I did not freak out.  This was a huge accomplishment because typically I would melt down and decide that it was entirely impossible for me to lose weight and give up.  Instead, this time I just about what I had been doing differently from what I was doing when I was losing steadily, and it was pretty easy: I was eating a lot of take-out instead of cooking.  So, I took the simple step of restarting my pursuit of the title of Weight Watchers Casserole Queen by cooking a casserole once a week on the weekends.  That way I always have something healthy at home to eat.
• I also got back into the swing of working out, including doing lots of fun summer activities.  I've attended a several outdoor yoga events with my friends and I've also been riding my bike a good bit, in addition to my regular yoga and running.  Here's a photo of yoga in Times Square on the Summer Solstice:

At times, we were heckled, but what would New York outdoor yoga be without some heckling?

When I refocused on my weight loss this winter/spring, I set a goal for myself to lose 15 pounds by the time of my first wedding dress fitting.  My first fitting should be in about 4 weeks, so over the next 4 weeks I need to lose on average 1.1 pounds a week to reach my goal.  Since I began going to meetings I've lost about 0.6 pounds a week on average so this would require me to up my pace of loss slightly.  That worries me a little bit but I am cautiously optimistic that I will make it as I'm now able to spend more time working out/cooking than I could over the past few months.  I'm also preparing myself for the possibility that I might come close to my goal but not reach it exactly.  If I lose 13 or 14 pounds, I will still be very happy with that.

Finally, I have decided that once I do lose 15 pounds, I am going to buy myself a new bike!  My current bike is the 15-speed mountain bike I got when I turned 12 years old.  It gets the job done but it's not that fun.  I'd love to have a city bike that is a little more relaxed to ride and looks stylish.  These are my current loves:

The Linus Dutchie 3

The Biria Citibike

So here's hoping that tomorrow's weigh-in goes well bringing me one step closer to my near-term weight goal and my new wheels!

Weekly Construction Update

Week Ending Monday, May 2
Despite struggling to stay within my points over the past few weeks (except for this past week) at my weight-in I was down 0.8 pounds, a decrease of 9.2 pounds overall, which puts me just over my 5% weight loss goal!  I think what helped me this week was that I only had one big night out, which helped keeping me within my points.  Also, I got sick towards the end of the week, so that put a damper on any extra eating which helped, though it also caused me to cut back my activity. One note: I weighed in earlier than usual on Tuesday (around lunch time rather than dinner time) so my weigh in next week might be higher in comparison.

Moments of awesomeness this week:

• I worked out one day and earned 6 activity points.  While that's pretty low (even for being sick) I'm still proud of that since before I got sick I was super busy at work, so it's good I managed to get any APs in at all last week.
• Even though I was sick, I did not use that as an excuse to pig out on unhealthy foods.  While it's true that I wasn't cooking or watching my food as closely as usual, I did not give myself a to eat whatever I want to "feel better", as I often do.  I had extra reason to cave this time too because I still had to drag myself to work for the early shift (5am!) for much of the week.  Instead of giving myself a food break, I gave myself a study break and vegged out on the couch rather than trying to study when I felt so bad.  It wasn't exactly the best thing for  my test preparation, but at least I didn't derail my weight loss.
• I wore a skirt to work that previously was one of my "tight" skirts, that now fits just fine and might even be considered a bit on the loose side for a pencil skirt.  Yet another reason to keep up my new shop-more-frequently habit.

That's it for the week.  I'm still working on getting over my illness (I'm a sniveling coughing disgusting mess), but I'm trying to not to get distracted from my weight loss as I've had a string of really good weeks recently.  Here's hoping next week is another good week.

Holy Jean Nidetch: Weight Watchers App Released for Android!

Before getting my Android a few months ago, I actively searched the Weight Watchers forums for information on an app for droid phones similar to the one that exists for the iPhone that everyone raves about.  I never really considered getting an iPhone - my fiance has one and thanks to his iPhone's stellar reception, he has to make all his phonecalls in the back yard.  Now, I don't know about you, but I personally require my phone to have phone call-making functionality.  Crazy, I know.

Anyway, I had pretty much decided to get a droid (I was one of the last living Palm users in the world at the time) but I wanted to make sure there would be some Weight Watchers functionality on the phone.  The mobile site on Android was pretty good and according to the forums, Weight Watchers had promised to release an app for droids in the spring.

Lo and behold, while fiddling with the Android market this weekend I found the new Weight Watchers app!  This is different from the calculator app released previously that just let you calculate the points plus values of food and activity.  This is a full fledged app.  It should be noted that the app is in beta so it is a bit buggy (it crashes on me every so often and has some ease-of-use issues I'll discuss below) but for the most part I'm loving it.

The app has a ton of features outside of the regular Weight Watchers mobile webiste, most of which you can see in the photos below:

Some of my favorite features include:

The PointsPlus Tracker (of course).  You can look at stuff you entered in over recent days to help you add in new items, and in general its faster than the weight watchers mobile site.  My one complaint is that when you search for food, it shows everything in one list instead of breaking out resteraunt food and regular food.  Since I very rarely eat at chain resteraunts, I usually prefer to look at the regular food list instead of having to scroll through a billion listings for Chili's.  Here's a peak at the PointsPlus tracker screen:

Another key feature the tracker has for us city folk is the option to enter food items into the tracker when you do not have reception (i.e. on the subway).  Those items then end up in the "Unsaved items" menu.  Once you get back within reception range, you can choose to add those items to the points tracker fairly easily.

Also helpful is the meeting finder.  You can type in a zip code or have your phone's GPS find your location and see all the meetings near you and their times.  Again, very helpful for city folk like me when  I can't go to my regular meeting but want to find something near where I happen to be that afternoon:

I am also a big fan of being able to read Weight Watchers articles on my phone while commuting and having the ability to whip out the portion estimator at any time.  I'm always trying to remember how much an ounce of cheese is, and now I'll only need to look at my phone to check.

My main gripe is that the app does not rotate horizontally, and since I have a slide out keyboard on my phone, whenever I'm typing something I have to look at the phone sideways:

I'm living with it for now but I hope they sort that out in the future.  There are a few other little bugs (crashing, having to click twice in a cell to type there, etc) but I'm sure they'll work those out over the coming months.  So, if you're an Android user, check out the new app!

Kitchen Construction: Baked Pasta with Butternut Squash and Ricotta

In my efforts to cook every casserole on Weight Watchers website on my road to becoming the Casserole Queen, a few weeks ago I made Weight Watcher's Baked Pasta with Butternut Squash and Ricotta, and it was a smash.  I've done a lot of cooking from the Weight Watchers recipes over the past few months and while most have been very tasty, not only did I find this recipe delicious, my fiance loved it even though it was made with wheat pasta, which he calls "dirt pasta" and generally avoids.  The only downside to this recipe is that it took me forever to make this: it took me around 2 hours (maybe more?) to make this while the recipe says that preparation time is 25 minutes (haha!) and baking time is 60 minutes (ha!).  However, it doesn't bother me too much when my casseroles take a long time as I only cook one a week on the weekends.

To start the recipe calls for you to roast pre-cubed butternut squash on a baking sheet.  Fresh Direct (my online grocery) did not have pre-cubed butternut squash, so I ended up just roasting it whole and scooping the squash out of its skin.

Doing it this way made it a bit more labor intensive as I had to scoop the squash out and avoid the seeds, but I doubt it added too much time (to what was already a very time intensive dish!).  Here's my gratuitous cooking-blogger-displays-all-her-ingredients photo:

If I was an organized cooking blogger, this would actually be a photo of all my ingredients, but as I'm a disorganized cook (see previous posts) this is missing the squash, the pasta, and the walnuts.

After I smushed up all the squash and made the squash-milk sauce, I combined that with the pasta and put it in the casserole dish to bake.  After baking for 15-20 minutes (ha! try 25) I took it out and here's what it looked like:

Tasty!  As is usual, I paired my serving with a side salad.  My fiance paired his serving with a side of another serving.

It was really tasty and extremely filling for 7 points.  Some of the recipe reviewers on Weight Watchers said that the thyme was overpowering, but I found it to be the extra addition that made this more than a boring pasta dish.  

Here are my ratings:

Ease of Preparation: B-

Cook Time: B

Taste: A+

Fiance Rating: A

Despite the time it took to put it together, this recipe was a resounding success and I highly recommend it. 

Weekly Construction Update

Week Ending Monday April 18

I was doing quite well last week until a dinner Monday night pushed me over my points for the week by 16 points.  However, I still managed to lose 0.2 pounds.  

I planned my week very well for my big night out on Saturday night for my friend's birthday.  I even managed not to go too crazy Saturday night by balancing all the wine I drank with good food choices including oysters and grilled fish.  However, Monday night was my downfall for a few reasons.  First, I totally forgot that I was going out to dinner Monday night and hadn't really put any points aside for it.  Second, once I got to dinner I let myself get talked into eating family style and sharing a bunch of unhealthy dishes instead of ordering the healthy dish I had previously picked out for myself when I checked out the menu online.

My Weight Watchers meeting leader always says that when we think everyone is judging us by what we choose to eat, we're just creating drama that's not really there.  In this situation, I felt like I would have been letting everyone down by not joining them in sharing food.  And maybe they would have been a little disappointed if I had said no, but at the end of the day I ended up letting myself down and I doubt they really cared that much.  I have a hard time making myself a priority, but I need to remember that I'm much nicer to be around when I feel good about myself.  Taking care of yourself was a Weight Watchers meeting discussion topic a few weeks ago, so I should probably revisit the handout they gave that week.

Regardless, I'm still happy to have lost last week, and since I tend to lose in an every-other-week pattern, I wasn't expecting much anyway.  Other things that went well last week:

• I worked out 4 days last week, earning 19 activity points.  I wish I had earned a few more APs but a few days when I planned to go running it was raining so I ended up dusting off my Wii exercise games.  I played Wii Fit and Dance Dance Revolution.  They're fun to do, especially when I'm really not feeling like working out, as it's a little easier to motivate to play a game. But they do tend to be a little low on the activity point spectrum.
• I kept up my habit of cooking one large dish a week, this week cooking Weight Watchers' Polenta and Eggplant Stacks, which I will write another post about later.

Unfortunately, this week is not going as well as the last few weeks.  Work has been super intense lately and I've been simultaneously too tired to work out but stressed enough that I've been enjoying quite a few beers.  I'm trying to not be too hard on myself as I am exhausted.  However, I have to get my game face back on next week.

My goals for the coming week are to:

• Get back to going to yoga most days.
• Refocus on my eating and make sure I only indulge if it's a night out.

Kitchen Construction: Mediterranean Three-Cheese Lasagna

I've writen a few times about how cooking one large casserole a week has helped me stay on track the past month or so.  I have a pretty busy life between work, working-out, and studying (I'm taking a finance certification test in June) and I don't have time to cook every night.  What I've done instead is invest a few hours every weekend making a casserole that makes 8-12 servings, which usually lasts me through the week, since my fiance usually eats some of it too.

For recipies I've been mostly using the Weight Watchers website, which really has an excellent selection of recipes for pretty much everything you would ever want to make.  One thing to note though: I find that the recipes almost always take significantly longer for me to make than the recipes say.  Granted, I'm no Top Chef contestant (like my neighbor Marcus Samuelson!), but I do think the recipes are a little agressive on the timing.  Okay - on to the recipe!

Recently I made Weight Watcher's Mediterranean Three-Cheese Lasagna.  

To start I had to combine the cheese and spinach into a mixture.  This is the ricotta, spinach, mozzarella, feta, egg, oregano, cinnamon, and nutmeg mixed together.  

As an aside, that bowl is from a super cheap Kitchen-in-a-Box set I got at Target when I moved into my first apartment in 2002, so I have to say it's done pretty well that it's still in usable condition almost 10 years later.

The next step was to spread the tomato sauce, on the bottom of the casserole dish, then put a layer of the ricotta mixture, and then top with lasagna noodles and repeat.  I planned on using Fresh Direct's Extra-Chunky Putanesca sauce, but I quickly realized that this was the wrong type of sauce for this recipe.  The recipe called for thin layers of tomato sauce, but since this sauce was chunky, it was basically impossible to make a thin layer.  I ended up having to use more of it than I had planned and I had to bust out some canned tomatoes too as I ran out of sauce at the end.  

Other than running out of the tomato sauce, this was exceptionally easy to put together as I used no-cook lasagna noodles. It was realy just a matter of throwing ingredients together and assembling the lasagna.

This is what it looked like before I put it in the oven:

Finally, I stuck it in the oven for around an hour (longer than the recipe said) and ta-da:

Looks great, right?  How about paired with a side salad?

Excellent!  It tasted great - the combination of the different cheeses with the cinnamon and nutmeg was very original.  It was a bit watery as I had to use more tomato sauce than was called for, but it didn't hurt the taste too much.  I used full-fat feta cheese (since Fresh Direct didn't have low-fat feta), so that plus the additional tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes pushed up the points value of this to 9 points per serving, which is still very reasonable given this was so filling.

Overall, here are my ratings:

Ease of Preparation: A

Cook Time: B (but since I do this on the weekends, it doesn't matter too much)

Taste: B+

Fiance Rating: B+ (We're so compatable!  Good thing we're getting married)

Finally, you know how whenever you're reading a blog and someone is showing their kitchen, and all the ingredients are all nicely displayed and it looks like they are the most organized cook ever?  Yeah, that's not me:

When I cook it looks like a tornado hit.  Luckily, the food still tastes good.

Weekly Construction Update

Week Ending Monday April 4*

I had a bit of a rough weekend Weight Watchers-wise.  I went out for drinks with friends on Friday night and we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner after, which was probably not the best idea since at that point I had consumed 4 beers.  At the restaurant, I thought I was ordering really well by ordering a margherita pizza and a mixed seafood appetizer.  Stupidly, however, I didn't realize the "frito" in the in name of the mixed seafood appetizer meant "fried", which resulted in my fiance mercilessly mocking me for the rest of the weekend (thanks, honey!).  I tried to not eat too much of the appetizer, but I was starving, so I did have some.  That, plus the beers, plus the pizza, put me over my points for the week by 9 points.  Given that I went over in my points, I was very happy at my meeting when I lost 0.6 pounds, leading my total weight loss to 5 pounds.  

The big thing that helped me even though I had a close encounter with fried calamari was that I worked out 5 days last week earning 26 APs.  I ran in Central Park twice, ran around my neighborhood once, and did Vinyasa yoga twice.  Also, I continued my recent habit of cooking a large dish on the weekend  - I made Weight Watchers' Layered Mexican Chicken casserole, which was really tasty (even my fiance loved it!), and fed me for the week.

The one thing I wish I had done differently is I wish I had had dinner before I went out Friday night, since I could have had a slice of the Layered Mexican Chicken and some salad and it would have only cost me 7 points instead of the 19 points I ended up using.

*Tuesday is my weigh-in day, so that is why this recaps the week ending Monday.

Inaugural Blog Post!

Hello Interweb!

It's been a long while.  I'm a former blogger who burned out several years ago (2 posts a day and a full time job will do that to you) and stopped blogging.  I have since turned my attention to work, school, and life.  However, I have tended to focus more on work or school than on myself, and I would like that to change.

Though there are many things about myself I would like to work on, this blog will be focused on my attempts to lose some of that junk currently residing in my trunk and on fitness in general.  I have to thank Ms. Bitchcakes for inspiring me to return to the interweb.  I can see that chronicalling her successes on her blog has been a major motivator for her, and I am hoping it will be the same for me.  Though my dog does pant happily when I tell her I've lost weight, I'm hoping writing it down and sending it out into the internerd will help me celebrate my successes even more, thus inspiring me to keep going.

To lose weight and get fit I am a Weight Watchers meeting member, I do yoga, and I run.  I have been an on-and-off Weight Watchers member since I was 19 (wow), but for the most part I always did it online.  I started going to meetings about 5 weeks ago and I have lost 4.4 pounds.  In the past I was always too embarrassed or busy to go to meetings, and on the rare occassion I tried meetings, I was the youngest person in the room by 20 years.  Now I'm not embarrassed, I'm making the time, and the meeting I'm going to has a great cross-section of New Yorkers, several of whom are like myself - youngish kidless career-types who like beer (well, maybe not exactly like that, but close enough).

I plan to write about once a week (no blogger burnout this time!), but as I'm a very busy career lady, I might miss a week now-and-then.

Thanks for reading.

-Ellen