Tuesday – The Blog Is Back!

Hey All – Happy Cinco De Mayo.  After a week long hiatus, the blog is back. Things have been so busy around here that the blog was put on the back burner last week… sorry for no advanced notice on that one.  I have been so busy at work, etc. that by the time I would get home from work, I would turn on my computer and work through the night until going to bed around midnight for the last week. But my project is DONE now, and I’m so happy to have my life back!

I did not take pictures today, but here is what I had – with some old photos when available:

Breakfast:

Iced coffee with 1% milk and a scoop of protein powder (still one of my favorite morning drinks!)

Egg white sandwich – one egg white, english muffin, 1 piece of TJ’s string cheese.

Morning snack (didn’t get to have lunch until 2pm!) 110 calorie Pria bar – it saved my life today!

Lunch: one cup of soup from ABP, a piece of whole wheat bread, and a salad with spinach, red pepper, cucumbers, carrots and one hard boiled egg.

PM snack (I was working late tonight) one piece of Dove dark chocolate, six almonds, and a small handful of raisins.

Dinner: veggie burger wrap. Spinach wrap with a Morningstar veggie burger, spinach, red peppers, brocoli, TJ’s light Mexican cheese and one teaspoon of fat free sour cream.

Wow – that about wraps it up!

Over the past few days here are a few things I’ve had:

One day as I was running out of the house, I grabbed this Luna Sunrise bar…. I really loved it. It had a great flavor (Vanilla Almond) and had a really great layer of yogurt on the bottom of the bar.

One of my new afternoon snacks is a few (unsalted) walnuts and semi-sweet chocolate chips. Yum!

Red grapes are so great when you’re short on time and looking for a healthy snack. They are really filling too.

On each of my stressful days, I’ve had an apple either with lunch a morning or afternoon snack. Apples are great on the go foods!

On Saturday Ben and I had my mom over for the DERBY! It was a great day, before the Derby Ben and I went out to play tennis. For our first outing of the season, Ben and I played really well and had a lot of fun.  For a late lunch / early dinner Ben brought out the grill and made everyone turkey burgers – it was our first grilling of the season, and my burger was fantastic but I couldn’t finish it! I had lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, on a whole wheat roll.  It was awesome.

Below is my bowl of oatmeal / oat bran from Sunday… yum! It was sooo good. Here is what I started off with:

1/4 cup dry oats

1/4 cup oat bran

1 cup skim milk

Once the oats started cooking, I added one teaspoon of ground flax and one scoop of protein powder. Obviously the oats got quite large, and was definitely enough for two servings. I think i ended up eating maybe 3/4 of a cup of oats, and then I added a sprinkle of granola and a spoonful of peanut butter and a couple of dashes of cinnamon.  I saved the second serving of oats for Monday morning. 

Here is a hummus, lettuce and turkey wrap that I had for lunch last week – umm yeah, it was awesome!

OK, well I am going to do my best to get back to normal blog postings starting tomorrow. I’ve missed writing and posting, so I’m glad to report that I’m back!

See ya’ll soon.

Busy day – and a lot of oatmeal…

Hey All -

Happy Saturday! Hope everyone is still having a great weekend.

This morning got off to a weird start… I was hungry, but as I was looking around for breakfast, nothing was attractive. Eventually I settled on oatmeal (what’s new?).

I’m not exactly sure what happened to my oats today – but the oatmeal basically doubled in the pot! Here is what I added:

• 3/8 cup rolled oats
• 1/8 cup oat bran
• 1 scoop aria protein powder
• 1/2 a banana
• 1 teaspoon of ground flax

I ate half of this and saved the other half for tomorrow.  Here is what the bowl looked like after I added a couple of toppings:

The toppings were:

• Mix my granola (I love this stuff!)
• a tiny bit of brown sugar
• a teaspoon of peanut butter

After breakfast and reading the paper, we eventually headed out to find some antique stores for Ben’s parents to shop in.  We ventured in to Newton Upper Falls, Norwood and a few other towns to seek out antiques. I mostly walked around in the beautiful weather while Ben’s parents shopped. In Norwood I found a great coffee shop and enjoyed an iced coffee with skim milk and a little bit of sugar water.  Perk’s Coffee was a super cute place, and the iced coffee was really good!

I love iced coffee – and today was the perfect day for it, it was 68 degrees as we walked around the main street in Norwood.

After antiquing, we went to the Blue Hills Reservation to show Ben’s parents one of the places that we hike.  After walking around a little bit, we realized that it was well past 2 o’clock and we were all pretty hungry.

For lunch we ventured out to Not Your Average Joe’s – it was new to all of us and we were all very impressed!  Ben and I  enjoyed a crab cake slider…

For lunch I enjoyed half of a  Tuscan grilled chicken sandwich and a house salad with lemon vinaigrette dressing on the side.

The sandwich was very good – it had sun dried tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, arugula and was served on toasted ciabatta bread. I had the basil pesto aioli on the side. After a couple of bites of the sandwich, I took the chicken off of the bread and ate it “naked”.  The salad was also very good – but I took the cheese off of it.

Here is the sandwich:

After lunch, we went off to Ikea, and then Target. After getting back to our house, Ben and I went off to the driving range to practice our golf swings.

OK, well I’m going to sign off for now.  Enjoy the rest of the weekend, ya’ll!

Thursday

Hey All -

Wow, I am so excited that tomorrow is Friday!  I got up at 6:30 again this morning and I did make stove top oats. I can officially say this was the best bowl of oats I’ve ever made! Here is what the oat combo was:

3/8 cup dry rolled oats

1/8 oat bran

1/2 cup skim milk

1/2 cup water

Once the oats were almost done cooking, I mixed in a teaspoon of ground flax. In the bowl I stirred in half a scoop of protein powder. The toppings for today’s oats are as follows: a sprinkle of granola (more on this soon – Mix My Granola and my mix has dried blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries and Chai seeds!), a smidge of brown sugar, a spoon of Teddie peanut butter.

I enjoyed the oats with a mug of coffee with skim milk.

Breakfast did a great job of holding me over until after my lunch time walk. At 12 o’clock two of my colleagues and I braved the WINDY April day for a walk. Walking by the water was so windy that we took a short cut through UMass campus to get back to our offices. During this short cut we happened to discover that Starbucks was giving out free coffee today! We particularly enjoyed having our coffee on the walk back to the office:

Lunch was on the small side today because I was not thinking very creatively this morning.  However, the lunch was amazing and really satisfying.  I mixed the granola into my Chobani yogurt and the banana was perfectly ripe – so good!

The Granola, by Mix My Granola:

I must say that I love my Sugar & Spice Granola that I custom designed and ordered on Monday… and I could not believe that it was at my door on Wednesday! So far everything I have added my granola to has been even better than usual – the sign of a great add in!  If you are a fan of granola, I totally recommend checking out their website and taking a moment to design and order your own custom mix!

At 4:15 this afternoon I had my PM snack (I love the fact that I made it until 4:15 – who would have thought my lunch would have kept me going for that long?) For my snack I tried another new bar…  a Clif Nectar bar.

This bar was very good and I liked that it was lower in calories compared to the Larabar and Pure Bar… but if I’m going for over all taste, etc. I think I would pick Pure Bar first. All three of these bars are wonderful though – the ingredients are fantastic and the bars will keep you going for a long time. I did not have another snack until 7:45 tonight!

After getting home from work, I went out on a 2.6 mile run.  I changed my route a little bit today and it was nice to run on streets with less of an incline. I did do most of Heartbreak Hill in the middle of the run, but because it was the only hill it was not that bad – considering I was only running 2.6 miles!

About an hour after the run (and re-hydrating) I enjoyed a salad and two pieces of pizza (!) dinner was very good. No post dinner snacks needed!

The salad had mixed greens (mostly green lettuce) with red peppers, carrots and tomato – croutons were also added! The dressing was balsamic vinegar drizzled over the salad.

I love cheese pizza from our neighborhood guys at Newtonville Pizza.  I added red pepper flakes and garlic powder to the top of the pizza. It was great!

Ok, I am signing off for now. At the moment I am sipping on coffee with honey, trying to get this soar throat to go away once and for all! I feel like I could be paying the price for walking in the wind and cold this week! Boo.

See ya’ll tomorrow – have a great Friday!

A successful Monday… and turning over a new leaf?

Hey All -

I hope everyone had a nice Monday. Personally, I was happy to see the sun – I had enough rain on Saturday to last me a few days!

This morning I actually got out of bed at 6:30 AM. I realize that for a lot of people this would hardly be called an accomplishment and for some of my friends and family, this would actually be considered sleeping in.  But for me – this was the first step in my effort to turn over a new leaf in life.

I have never in my entire life been a morning person. Mornings are a struggle for me in many aspects.  But this week I am going to work hard at getting up at a good time and enjoying a bit of my day before rushing off for work.

This morning I woke up and made coffee (tonight I prepared the coffee and pre-set the coffee maker!) took a shower, got dressed and made stove top oats for breakfast!  For those of you that follow the blog, you might realize that I never make stove top oats during the week. It is not that I prefer instant oats or the “microwave technique”.  It is that I simply never have the time. By getting up early today, I made the time for breakfast at home.

Today’s mix included:

• 1/2 cup of dry rolled oats
• 1 cup water
• 1 teaspoon ground flax
• a palm of raisins (about 12)

These were all mixed in while the oats were cooking. The toppings were:

• a dash of cinnamon
• a pinch of pumpkin spice
• 1 teaspoon of peanut butter

Breakfast was 230 calories. I also had a lovely cup of coffee.

Because I ate breakfast about an hour and a half earlier than normal, I had a mid morning snack or two! I had four small pretzels at 10:45 and then at 11:45 I had half of a blueberry Cilf Zbar.  At 12 o’clock I went for a walk… it was soo windy on the water I only lasted twenty minutes. But I figured it was better to walk and be in the sunshine for twenty minutes than not at all.

For lunch I used one of our Easter hard boiled eggs to make a mini-egg salad. I have never actually made egg salad before – but it was great. I cut up one egg, added a pinch of onion powder, cyan pepper, black ground pepper, a tiny smidge of salt and a teaspoon of light mayonnaise.  This was so easy, and really quite good (especially due to the extra spices!)

At 12:40 I had the egg salad on two pieces of the light oatmeal bread (200 calories total). It would have been even better with lettuce and mustard, but I didn’t have any this morning when I was getting things together. Oh well, I did buy some great Dijon tonight at Trader Joe’s.

Twenty minutes after lunch I enjoyed a 90 calorie Reeses Peanut Butter egg. Yum.

My afternoon snack was a vanilla Chobani and 1/4 cup of honey nut Cheerios.  I had this at 3:45 and it kept me going until 7:30pm tonight. (After the camera store, gym, and grocery store – impressive!) The yogurt and cereal was a total of 160 calories.

After work I took another ten minute walk while I waited for Ben to get out of work. I figured walking was a more productive way to wait for Ben   After I picked him up, we went by our local camera shop – where the oh so helpful person there said the camera repair would only be about 15 dollars cheaper than getting a new camera.  Since my camera is about three years old, the upgrade is much needed but I just was not exactly mentally prepared to buy a new camera today. Thus the blog entry without photos. How boring.

We left the camera store without a new camera… and headed to the gym. We did about 40 minutes of weights and a few minutes of cardio after as a cool down. After the gym, we hit TJs and then we made dinner.

For dinner I made a sort of fajita… I cut and roasted one red pepper and cooked up some turkey.  On a whole wheat wrap, I put light Mexican cheese and heated this in the microwave, added the peppers, turkey, salsa, 1 teaspoon of light sour cream and lettuce for a really good dinner!

Well, sorry for the super boring post. I hope to have a camera soon.  I also hope to get up early to enjoy another morning before heading to work tomorrow! I’ll let you know how I make out.

Good night everyone!

Lovely Berries..!

Hey All -

Spring is here (sort of) and with the season comes berries. Wow – I have been enjoying some fresh berries over the last couple of days. I love them! It has been a long winter, and I love seeing fresh strawberries, blue berries and raspberries in the market.

Here is what my breakfast looked like this morning:

It is amazing what three strawberries and a handful of blueberries can do to a bowl of Cheerios!  I added a spoonful of Teddie peanut butter in hopes that the cold cereal will keep me full for a few hours. Ben and I are planning a day hike in the Blue Hills Reservation and I need my breakfast to hold me over for a few hours!

I also added some blueberries to my oatmeal on Friday.  On Friday I took a container of milk, a handful of blueberries and a teaspoon of peanut butter to work with me for a pretty good bowl of oatmeal.  Here is what the oatmeal looked like:

And breakfast was at my desk with a 10 Calorie Vitamin Water which is pretty good! I used to really like drinking Vitamin Water – but I always thought of how many calories I was drinking, and finally realized it just was not worth the extra calories – since normal water tastes great to me, and it’s calorie free.  For those of you who do not love plain water, try adding a couple of slices of lemon or a couple of mint leaves to your water bottle to add a little bit of flavor to your water.

On Thursday night, I was reading part of a new blog that I saw on Kath’s blog… this post talks about the true signs of hunger. (click on the words to read the blog entry!) It’s gotten me to thinking of when I am actually hungry, and when I am not. It was very interesting and thought provoking. I am definitely guilty of sometimes eating when I am bored. Most of the times I feel that I am about to snack when I am not 100% hungry, I will make a hot cup of tea… and that usually gets me out of my “snacky” frame of mind.

But back to Friday -  breakfast  held me over for four hours, and when my stomach started to make noise I realized it was time for lunch. I was not going to have lunch until my stomach told me it was time for lunch. I had left over Mexican food – one enchilada, some rice and refried beans. It was the perfect mix of protein (the enchiladas are amazingly full of white chicken that tastes soooo good!! Lots of protein!) and carbs, and of course some fat from the cheese.  I am warning you – left over Mexican food does NOT look pretty! But I took a picture of it anyway. 

Because the food was in a styrofoam container, I brought a Fiestaware sandwich plate with me to work, other wise I wouldn’t have been able to heat up my food! Here is the photo:

I know. It looks pretty gross, but it was soooo good! On Friday I ate lunch while reading Walking Home which got me excited for hiking this weekend!

I was exhausted on Friday – but got through the day, with the help of a Clif Bar. I had the remaining half (?) of the Blueberry Clif bar I had earlier in the week. I had this snack around 4pm.

Clif and water… yum!

Ok, I’m going to sign off for now. I have to get ready for the Blue Hills!! It’s still only in the 40s outside – but it is supposed to get up into the high fifties – I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Hope you all have a great Sunday… see you later tonight!

Is it Hump day already!?

Hey Guys-

Wow, I am such a blog slacker this week! I’m sorry. I do not know how it is Wednesday night already, and this is my first post of the week. Oh well. Things have been so busy – and I have accomplished a lot, so I guess that is a good thing.

This is going to be a basic catch up post… so forgive me if it is a little hard to read!

This week I have been enjoying oatmeal for breakfast. On Monday I had oatmeal at home before heading to work, I added a spoonful of peanut butter and a small amount of trail mix… here’s a picture:

This oatmeal was the best of the week – because I made it with skim milk instead of water. The milk adds more protein, and the peanut butter adds some protein and fat which keeps you full for a long time. Sweet!

Today I got to work before 8 o’clock (at 7:45 to be exact!) and had oatmeal before my two new interns started their first day. I was relieved that I got to work early enough to have breakfast before my super busy day started.  I even had enough time to snap a photo:

This oatmeal was sort of boring because it was made at work (with water – meh!) but the trail mix on top was pretty good… almonds, peanuts, dried raspberries (my favorite!) and little pieces of dark chocolate… For some reason I got super hungry at 11:15 this morning. I totally ate half a Cliff Bar!

This Blueberry Crisp flavor was awesome! I had not tried it before, and I really like it a lot. I can see how this will definitely be in my pack this summer while we are on hikes and camping trips.  I did not get around to having lunch until about 1 o’clock (so glad I had my mid-morning snack!) and my options were very limited. I decided on a tuna sandwich from the caf… and didn’t have time to take a picture. The protein was great though, it kept me going until I left work.

Yesterday after getting home from work I went on a three and a half mile run.  It was my first outdoor run in quite some time… and I’m feeling it today! Our neighborhood is sort of hilly… for those of you who follow the Boston Marathon – have you ever heard of Heart Break Hill? Well, that’s my neighborhood – and  I run that hill almost every time I run outside.   Yesterday I was so pleased to see  that my Road ID had arrived in the mail. I actually felt safer wearing it!

After the run, Ben and I went over to our friend Jenn’s house.  We had dinner (I had two pieces of pizza and one boneless chicken wing – and chips! SO glad I went out for that run before hand!) and we watched the Twilight movie. I had read the book – and I started reading the second book, and have not gotten through it yet, but I might just be inspired by the movie to give it a second try. The movie was really entertaining!

A couple of days ago, I picked up a load of bread from our neighborhood Great Harvest:

This bread was wonderful. I made turkey sandwiches, peanut butter sandwiches and toast with this stuff. Yum.

Here is what I had for lunch the other day – an awesome salad, and a little while later a great Larabar.  As I have said before, I simply LOVE Larabars… because so often I am very hungry, and this bar is one of the few things that will fill me up for hours. LOVE IT!

Another reason I have not blogged in a while is that I have been reading some great books!  I have to say, I wish there were a few more hours in the day. After working, commuting, making breakfast, lunch and dinner, and exercising – there just IS NOT that much time left in the day. So I have been spending my extra hour or two a day reading instead of blogging – so sad that I have to choose, but that is life.

SO – right now I am reading Walking Home: A Woman’s Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail. I really like this book a lot – and if any of you like reading books about the outdoors, camping and hiking – I highly recommend it!  It will also make you appreciate your bed, WATER and food a lot   While I have been reading this book, I think about how you have to be a good writer to keep people interested while you are walking 2,100 miles in the forest!  But Kelly Winters definitely does it. She will keep you turning the pages. I am really enjoying it.

Well, I’m going to sign off for now and get back to my reading. I will be back tomorrow! Hope ya’ll are having a good week so far.

Ben’s making dinner while I’m posting!

Hi Everyone!

I’m celebrating the fact that it is Thursday evening – and BEN is making dinner while I am relaxing and working on my re-cap post for the day. Fantastic! I’m really looking forward to dinner, I’ve already enjoyed an appetizer of french bread, tomato, fresh mozzarella and basil. It was wonderful!

But more on dinner in the next post…

I started off my morning running late – so I went back to my old faithful breakfast of oatmeal at work! I stirred in a small spoonful of Teddie PB, protein powder and a few raisins… it made for a really great combo.  (for the record, this photo is a substitute – because I realized this morning that my camera on the kitchen table at home!!)

Lunch was brought from home again. (I’m so glad that I brought my lunch four days in a row this week!)  I had two small pieces of last night’s pizza and a really big salad. I took photos with my camera

For the second day in a row I had 8 ounces of skim milk with lunch. I am sure that this addition did wonders for keeping me full for so long after lunch!

At 4:30 I had my afternoon snack of Stoneyfield low fat vanilla yogurt and 10 almonds.

My calorie count before dinner was 860 calories, and I was feeling really full and happy!

I’ll write more soon about dinner tonight soon! Hope you’re all having a great Thursday night.

Friday

Hey Guys -

Well, it’s Friday. TGIF. This morning I went to the grocery store to get a few things for this weekend. Our friends Nicole & Dwaine are staying with us over the weekend so I needed to stock up on coffee and breakfastie things and snack things. Milk, grapes, apples, coffee, peanut butter (we’re almost out of Teddie) and I also needed instant oatmeal for next week at work.

I came home to make my stove top oats, and discovered that we are somehow out of OATS!!!! I briefly thought about walking back to the the store, but that was not happening. I am actually at home sick – with a head cold, and other stuff. So going to the store at all was a struggle.

I was so mad when I discovered that I did not have oatmeal for breakfast. I was so excited to make them on the stove and add some great stuff to them.  Oh well. I settled on one of the instant oatmeal packages I bought at the store.

Because I did not go to Trader Joe’s, I had to decide what type of oatmeal to get at the store. I settled on Quaker Oats weight control oatmeal – the banana bread flavor.  The oats are 160 calories, 6 grams of fiber, 3 grams of fat and 7 grams of protein.  The oatmeal actually tasted really good, and kept me full for a while. I also had a glass of skim milk along with the oatmeal.

I had lunch a few hours later.  At first I wanted a bowl of soup, but I noticed there was left over tuna in the frige (from my lunch on Wednesday) so I decided to use it for lunch.

Here is what my plate looked like for lunch:

The wrap was very special. A weird combo of things, but it was soooo good!

The wrap was a whole wheat one from TJ’s (130 cal) the first layer of the wrap had a sprinkle of lite Mexican cheese from TJs (60 cal) I heated the wrap up in the microwave… then I added a lot of lettuce, tuna, and a tablespoon of hummus (8, 45, 25 cals) on the side I enjoyed carrot sticks (12 cals) and a bunch of red grapes (68 cals) for a total of about 350 calories for lunch.  The lunch was soo good and filling! I really enjoyed it.

Now if only this headache would go away. I’m going back to bed.

Wednesday & Thursday

Hi guys -

Well, the week is almost finished.  I hope everyone had a fun and productive week. I was very busy at work and managed to stick to eating really well all week, too! This is very exciting for me.

I don’t really know what to say about breakfast these days! It’s basically repeating itself day to day especially during the work week.  Yes, on Wednesday and Thursday I had the SAME THING! TJ’s instant blueberry oatmeal. I love this stuff – and it does really keep me full all morning long.

On Wednesday, I put half a banana and a spoonful of Barney Butter in the mix. On Thursday, however, I just added a small handful of raisins and a scoop of Aria protein powder. This kept the calories and fat lower. A few raisins is probably 15 calories and a scoop of Aria is 40 calories. When you add BB and half a banana, the calories increase by 135 calories.  On Thursday I lowered my breakfast calories because my department at work had planned to take out one of our colleagues for a good-bye lunch .  But it turned out that a few people had meetings come up at the last minute, so lunch was canceled.

But back to Wednesday – on Wed. I had an amazing salad for lunch! I added a hard boiled egg, and 1/3 cup of tuna to the salad. It was so good and filling due to the extra protein.  Yum:

I also had 130 calories of Rosemary and Sea Salt crostinis – my favorite crackers in the entire world!!!

The salad was about 190 calories: 40 calories for the lettuce and veggies, 15 for the dressing, 60 calories for the tuna, and 75 calories for the hard boiled egg. The total lunch was 320 calories.

On Wednesday I had to work late at work so I planned a good snack to get me through the long afternoon / evening. This snack was soo great! The almonds added fat and protein and the banana added carbs.

Oh yeah, the Diet Coke was also key – for the caffeine!  The almonds were 111 calories (for 16 almonds) and the banana was the other half of the banana I added to the oatmeal in the morning – another 40 calories. Total:  151 calories for the afternoon snack.

Once I got home, I was pretty hungry for dinner. I had 724 calories remaining for the day.  I had 110 calories of pita chips and 50 calories of hummus while I was waiting for my dinner.  For dinner I had the other tamale along with a table spoon of light sour cream and more salsa.  This time I remembered to take a picture!

Once again, the tamale is 240 calories, the light sour cream is 15 for a tablespoon and the salasa was only about 5 calories!! All together (along with the pita chips and hummus) dinner was about 420 calories.

Later that night I had a couple of snacks, a piece of dark chocolate (33 calories) and three Twizzlers about 100 calories.  Not a smart choice, but that’s ok – sometimes you need to eat what you are craving!
Thursday started off the same, with the lower calorie oatmeal…. and then the discovery that our work lunch fad been cancelled. So, because I had not brought my lunch to work, I decided to go out to Lamberts for lunch.  I was going to get a salad for lunch on Thursday, but I had eaten salads for three days straight. Instead I had a turkey sandwich made at the sandwich bar on whole wheat bread. I had yellow mustard on it, white onions, tomato, and lettuce. I asked for pickles (which is the #1 thing I really, really, wanted!) but they forgot the pickles… bummer! Here is what the sandwich looked like:

I ate half of the sandwich, and I think it was about 300 calories.  My sandwich was amazing even without the pickles. It kept me soo full for the rest of my day at work!  At around 4:30 I had two Starburst candies that had been  in my lunch bag for about a week. I think the candies added up to 50 calories. (Bad eating choice!!)

After work, I picked up Ben from his office and we went downtown to meet up with our friend Nicole!! Nicole lives in DC and we are so excited that she is visiting Boston this week!  Once we all met up we had a great walk over to The Other Side cafe, where we had dinner.  I really love The Other Side Cafe -  but last night was the first time I had gone there. I had heard about it for years though.

So, last night for dinner I ordered a grilled cheese with tomato on multi-grain bread. Unfortunately, the sandwich came with potato chips (yikes!!) If I had known the chips were coming on the side, I would have asked for no chips, and maybe some mixed greens instead. Oh well.

I did not have my camera at dinner, but I had my cell phone. It was pretty dark at the cafe, and my phone does not have a flash… but with some editing, I think you can almost see the sandwich. It was sooooo good!

When Ben and I got home from dinner we watched the second half of season two of Weeds.

I think that about wraps up the last couple of days! See you guys soon.

Tuesday…

Hey All -

I must apologize because I am NOT creative with my blog titles. I just cannot think of good titles, so I go with the day of the week usually… maybe I’ll work on it… maybe.

So, today was day two of the calorie counting and seriously keeping track of what I eat.  Last night I was smart enough to pre-set the coffee maker to start at 6:20 AM. That made getting up this morning a lot easier, I think!

This morning in the coffee I used about 20 calories of skim milk in the coffee. I warmed up the milk in the microwave which made it almost a misto… but not quite. I wish I had time in the morning to steam milk…. that would be awesome.

I got to work at 7:55 this morning!! What a great start to the day. I made my oatmeal at work…

This is a picture of what the oatmeal looks like before it goes into the microwave. After one minute I took out the oats and stirred them, and added 1/4 cup of blueberries and two raspberries to the mix! I nuked them again for another 30 seconds.  The end result was this:

Amazing oats… oh and a teaspoon of Barney Butter mixed in. This bowl of oats really kicked some butt! The calorie total for breakfast was 328 (160 for oatmeal, 23 calories for blueberries, 80 cals for BB and flax, 45 calories for the banana and the 20 calories for skim milk in the coffee).

Lunch was another salad and the last piece of whole wheat pizza . For this salad, I added a hard boiled egg and this made the salad really good and added some extra protein.

This lunch was sooooooo filling! The egg added an extra 75 calories to lunch. The total calorie total of lunch was 355.  (125 total for the salad, and 230 for the pizza)

I almost forgot to eat my pre-gym snack. At 4pm I had a Stoneyfield low fat vanilla yogurt. (130 Calories)

Ben and I went to the gym directly from work! We packed our gym bags last night and put them in the car this morning. It made such a huge difference going right to the gym and not stopping at home first. At the gym we did our weight lifting together for about 25 minutes and then we split up to do cardio. I did elliptical for 30 minutes. I burned at least 330 calories at the gym.  I also had a super busy day at work and probably burned a few extra calories through out the day. After the gym we had a few errands to run (library, Blockbuster, etc) and I was so happy that I still had half a banana in my lunch bag. At 45 calories it got me through until dinner.

For dinner I had a tamale from Trader Joe’s – it was great! The chicken & cheese tamale is 240 calories. I had a tablespoon of light sour cream which was 18 calories and salasa for ten calories. Guess what?! I was so hungry at dinner that I forgot to take a picture. I even had the camera right next to me. Oops.

With all of the eating I did today, I still have 277 calories left over. I’m about to go into the kitchen and pop some light popcorn to split with Ben as we watch the first couple of episodes of Weeds Season 2.

I’ll see you guys tomorrow!