Shredding Day 1 & Meals

I'm back doing Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred this month. Hopefully it will help me get under 180 pounds and help me shred some inches. I did this workout back in January and had great results, so I'm doing it again. However, this time I am not going to do it on the weekends to give my body a rest and do other things like hiking.

Day 1 Measurements:
Bust: 38
Waist: 40
Hips: 45
Thighs: 27
Arms: 14.5

The last time I did the shred I ended up with a strained shoulder which is why I'm taking breaks on the weekends. I think the workout is great overall, but working out every single day for a month is not. I've certainly lost the endurance I had after the last time but give me a week; I'll get it back.

In conjunction with working out I will continue to eat healthy. I stocked up on oatmeal and eggs for breakfasts. Lunches I miss sometimes because I wake up late, but sometimes I will bake a chicken breast and have some bread. Here is what today's brunch looks like. It was 10 points total.

Home made bread, eggs, mushrooms, and lean ham.

The weather is getting warm again which means cold salads doesn't make me shiver eating them in our cold office. So I made up a batch for dinners and they're quite satisfying.

It's herb and garlic dressing from Home Plus, half a tomato, garden vegetable salad mix, 10gms of cashews, 10gms of parmesan cheese, and 5 quail eggs. I put them in a tupperware in that order and then I don't have to make them  before work. Just grab and  go. The eggs and cashews give them the filling feeling a salad needs, as does the cheese. They're 7 points each. If usually take some fruit with me to work and something else to snack on in case I get hungry.

Sideways, I know. The tomatoes are on the bottom to keep the lettuce from getting too soggy. Grapes are my snack of choice this week. 

We'll see how it goes. I'll give another report next week.

Bacon Egg Cups

The big trend is to use Pinterest to keep track of all that stuff you want to try but most people never get around to it.

Well, I try to.

Here's the location of the pin: http://www.recipebyphoto.com/minibacon-egg-cups/

I've tried a few recipes I've found browsing that site and some of them are now staples in my routine. Today I'm going to give a review and my own instructions to the bacon egg cups for you all to enjoy.

How are they? In a word: Amazing 

They are incredibly simple. You will need four things.

An oven, muffin tins, bacon, eggs.

You may also want seasoning and cheese.

One egg per cup.

Season and whip the eggs. I add a tablespoon of milk. You can whip with a whisk or with a blender.

Line the outside of the tin with the bacon and pour the egg mixture into the center. Bake at 350°F/180°C for 30-35 minutes. Then eat them.

The eggs fluff up very nicely and aren't hard at all. The bacon comes out chewy.

As for health, they are fatty,  but not terrible. Bacon is not something you should eat every day, but it is something you can eat. Use lowfat, low sodium cheese if you can. I found low sodium cheese in Home Plus and snatched it up. 

Two cups is 5 Weight Watchers points. Two cups with 20gm of parmesan cheese is 7 points. 

That "Time of the Month" & Weightloss

Warning: This post will contain "female" or "period" talk. If you don't want to read it, here are some kittens. 


For about 85% of women, PMS symptoms pop up every 3-4 weeks [1]. When you're trying to lose weight, this can be a downright nightmare. It certainly is for me. It starts out slowly. Suddenly my brain is subtly telling me "you need some chocolate." Since my diet is going well I think "Okay, let's have some chocolate." Then it becomes a downward spiral.

Usually my body wants sugar and chocolate. Sometimes it even screams for fat. This week it has already been both, and I gave in. Working at night, with my teaching hours 5-10pm, I come home tired. Sometimes I even come home hungry. I try as much as possible to curb this by bringing fruit to work to stuff my face with between classes, but it doesn't always work.

We can blame this PMS craving insanity one our hormones. Usually feminists don't like to blame things on hormones, but you know what? I will. Suddenly I am crying while watching The Big Bang Theory over empty candy bar wrappers and the next day I'm wondering what is wrong with me? Then the breast tenderness starts and I think: "Oh, so we're back to this, now, are we?"

As it turns out, before the actual period part happens, the estrogen levels in our body rise then drop suddenly. This triggers the release of cortilsol, which is a stress causing hormone. It triggers the fight or flight response [2]. What this means to me is that your body is freaking out and telling you to EAT ALL THE THINGS while you can...because stress means run away and store energy.

A few things I have done in the past that worked okay you can find by just Googling "PMS Cravings" and there are a bevy or articles telling you what to eat instead. It's usually a good idea to try to substitute fruit for sweets, but at the height of my cravings my body just kind of says...

What I (try) to do: 

Chocolate Cravings 

To cope with chocolate cravings I splurged at Home Plus and bought a large 16 piece box of Lindor Milk Chocolate Truffles. The box is about 15,000 won, but it was totally worth it. I made myself this promise: I will only eat 1-2 at a time and I will let them melt in my mouth and savor them. This actually worked really, really, well and I didn't even finish the box until a month later. One truffle is 2 Weight Watcher's points. Since I usually leave some points for the end of my day, it was the perfect craving curb.

The bottom line is this: pick your favorite chocolate and savor it. Spend some money on it. You're worth it.

Sugar Cravings

Eat fruit. Eat a lot of fruit. Drink water with your fruit. Go to the store and (in Korea) spend like 10,000 won on a big old box of grapes or strawberries or blueberries and eat that fruit until you're full. I mean bursting oh-my-god what have I done? Full of fruit.

I know fruit is expensive in Korea. Especially since most of that stuff is seasonal, but usually you can find something on the shelf that won't put you in the poor house. The good news is that Korea almost always sells things in bulk which mean that when you spend about 10-15,000 won on a big old box of fruit...you now have a BIG OL' BOX OF FRUIT. Which is good for you. Eat it and stop complaining about the price and start thinking about how happy you'll be next week on weigh-in day.

Fat

I definitely ate fried chicken this week. My body decided to tell me, while I was hungry and tired, that I needed some fried chicken and I gave in. I did not feel good about it afterward. I still could feel it the next day. Fat is one of the hardest cravings to do well because the kind of fat my body thinks it wants is not the stuff that contains 'good fat.'

The best thing I try to do is turn to unsalted nuts or avocados if I can find them ripe enough to eat. Usually they are not ripe when I need them to be, so nuts it is. An ounce of nuts is, sadly, about 4-6 points depending on the nut. However, if you portion control it might be the kick you need to make your body happy.

Finally, the last bit of advice I have is to try to fit more complex carbohydrates into your meals because they take longer to digest, can improve your serotonin levels [2], and contain essential vitamins [3].

Good luck, ladies.





References:
[1] "How to Cope with Food Cravings and Keep Losing Weight" Charlene Laino, Charlotte Grayson, MD. MedicineNet.com <http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=56732>

[2] "8 Healthy Ways to Deal with PMS Cravings" Charmaine Ann Enerio. Fitday.com <http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/fitness/8-healthy-ways-to-deal-with-pms-cravings.html#b>

[3] "8 Diet Dos and Don'ts to Ease PMS" Cari Nierenberg. WebMD.com. <http://women.webmd.com/features/diet-and-pms?page=1>

Weight Watchers in Korea 1 : Nutritional Values

A few people have asked about doing Weight Watchers in Korea. I'm going to do a short series of videos to give people tips to help get started.

First of all, let me tell you, I do Weight Watchers Online. I got a nice deal last summer for 3 months at a reduced price and I keep paying the monthly fee. I do so through my American bank account since there is no way to set it up for a Korean account. It is worth it to have, even when I'm getting lazy about tracking, because I can always go back to the website and look for recipes and ideas when I feel like I need to get back on track.

This first video is about nutritional values to help calculate point values for foods you find in Korea. This would be useful when you are grocery shopping to help you decide to buy or at least to help keep your consumption under control.

Forget About "Cleaning Your Plate"

As I woke up bleary eyed this morning I went to make myself some oatmeal. Mmmm oatmeal. Homely, delicious  healthy. However without morning Joe to kickstart my brain I found myself dumping 1 cup of oats into 1 c of boiling water...meaning I made twice as much oatmeal as I usually would for breakfast.

Ooops.

As you start losing weight on weight watchers you'll notice your 'daily points' goes down ever 5-10lbs. It makes sense, because when there's less of you, you should need less calories. However, it does take some adjusting at times. You realize that you can't eat exactly the same the whole time because eventually you're going to have to eat less to lose more.

Something we have to hurdle over is an idea implanted in our head from the time we are young. "Clean your plate." "There are starving children in Africa/China." However, we need to take a moment to think about why our elders told us such things. When you're young, you're finicky. Kids don't want to eat half a cup of broccoli just because it's healthy. It's yucky. So we're guilted into eating it so our parents don't have to worry about treating us for nutrient deficiencies later on.

Now that we're older, wiser, and trying to eat healthy, we have to think about what we really need in our bodies. When you're at a restaurant and they give you enough rice to feed a small army, don't eat it all. If your friends make you a meal and they give you tons of bread, eat what you know is right for you, then say you're satisfied.

We don't have to eat until we're bloated. It's that kind of thinking that got you to where ever you don't want to be now. So, forget about cleaning your plate. Recycle that food. Start a household compost bin. Ask someone else if they're hungry still. Just don't think that starving children in Africa will suffer more because you didn't finish your oatmeal. Honestly, would they have ever gotten a chance to eat YOUR oatmeal anyway?

Next stop: compost bin.

Who's THAT?

This is my journey so far.

One of my students when I come into the classroom instead of saying "Hello" or "How are you?" he thinks it's funny to say "Who are you?" I don't know why.

The point is this: sometimes, I look in the mirror and ask the same question.

Who is that? 

I mean, I know it's me. Most of the time. That isn't to say that I haven't caught the reflection in a store window and couldn't figure out why I wasn't in it. The amazing, yet scary, thing right now is that I'm starting to look the way I always thought I should look. There is this weird dichotomy between what I was used to seeing in a mirror for ten years and what I believed to be the person trapped inside.

Like most adults, my peak was in high school. Unlike most adults, I actually only had about 2 years of peak because mostly through high school I was still overweight until I dropped weight one summer and kept it off until halfway through my first year of college.

Just before graduation.

Poor choices and lack of exercise in college and the following years my weight crawled up over 250 lbs (>113kg) and stayed there for more than 5 years. I don't remember exactly when it got that high, but I know it had been there for a while. I was complacent with my weight because other people would tell me I looked good. And despite protests from my doctor and continuous cholesterol and diabetes checks, I always came out safe. After 2-3 years of regular diabetes checks I started to refuse them because I don't like needles and they never came out close to positive. My only major health problem is that I have PCOS, which I have known since high school. It isn't caused by weight, it's caused by hormone imbalance  I had no reason to be unhappy with my weight...other than I didn't really like how I looked.

Christmas 2008

Recently I have gone back through old photos of me and I have a hard time believing how much I have changed. I know that in 2006-2008 I was over 260 lbs and wearing size 22 clothes. There were a lot of other factors keeping me there, stress, lifestyle, willpower, etc. It took some major changes in my life and friends and family introducing the tools to me to help me get to where I am going now.

One of the most major changes was moving abroad. I hope to get into more depth about this later, but most of us Westerners have a strange logic about living in Asia. We think: Asians are small and skinny. If I'm living in Asia and live like they do, I will become small and skinny too! It's wrong.

3 months after arrival in Korea: still 250+

I dropped about 15-20 pounds after moving to Korea just because my body needed to adjust to what was going on. I did walk a lot more because...well you walk a lot more when you live in the country and don't have a car. However, it was still more than a year before I was straight up in size 18 jeans again.

This is where looking at old photos starts to get strange.

I started Weight Watchers and doing exercise routines on and off in June 2012. I am not perfect and don't always stick to my diet, but in the 8 months since I started I have lost about 48 pounds.

Team vests given on arrival...the biggest they had didn't fit me.

My friend on the left there gave me those pants...they're already getting loose.

This post is simply to show how far I've come. It's an odd feeling to look back at where you were after a long journey with losing weight. I think it's also important. It's painfully obvious that it's possible, just by looking at me here. The most important thing is to know my own history so that I never repeat it.

Edit: I was told I should include pictures from my trip to Tokyo last weekend, so I will.

Kyoto August 2012

Tokyo March 2013