An update! (not in a series!)

Hey look internet! It's aliiiiiiiive!

Sorry I haven't been blogging. Long story short, I am working really hard on losing the end of my baby weight (and working on approaching my long-term body health goals) and it just doesn't make for the most interesting food-related conversation. Basically every post would look like:

Hey guys! Today I ate some healthy food. Plenty, but not too much. Here's a picture of it, it's mostly green. Okay bye!

More or less, anyway. I had a revelation when the Emperor was a baby and I was losing the weight from him (which I did, all 55 freaking five pounds of it!) which went like this: oh man! I don't have to be hungry all the time when I'm trying to lose weight! I just have to eat mostly healthy food!

Lemme unwrap that a little. I'm not saying that I could, say, eat 3000 calories of healthy food in a day and lose weight. I couldn't. What I'm saying is: if I eat mostly healthy, mostly unprocessed foods, I can cram a lot more food in for the same amount of calories. OH MAN. For me this is huge, because I a) love the physical process of eating and b) hate feeling hungry for any sustained period of time.

I guess maybe this is the sort of thing that lots of people know their whole lives, but really, it didn't hit me until I was 26 ya'll.

So I've been having a lot of dinner salads, fruit and small servings of nuts for snacks, huge platters covered in raw vegetables with various dips/spreads (including this phenomenal and phenomenally easy Cashew Queso from the PPK blog... it is surprisingly healthy and goes with everything, even cucumbers), beans, oats, stuff like that. It's working well, I'm not feeling frustrated with food tracking over a month into it (whoa!), and I've lost just over half of the 20 lbs of baby weight I was looking to drop. Woot.

On top of that, I just came back from going for my third run in a week! After not running at all for um... four years? Not counting one time that I went when the Emperor was like 8 months old and which I never did again. Running makes me really happy... it makes me feel all strong and powerful and capable. I am not at ALL a natural runner-- anyone who knows me knows that my body is built about the opposite of how you want your body to be if you're going to run. Which makes it all that much more satisfying when I do it and accomplish my goals.

I had been planning on starting again after I lost the baby weight and then maybe a week and a half ago I thought: why the hell wait? Why not see if I can do it now? And while it is not easy, it is happening, and it is just making me feel so damn good.

Anyway, that's my update. I think I'm going to try to blog more but you know... we'll have to see what comes up that's interesting. (Oh! I do want to blog about what nutrients I am surprised to find I'm getting/not getting on a regular basis... maybe next time.)

In closing, some pictures of some food and some kids:



Quinoa Caesar Salad - an Isa tester. I have made the tempeh & avocado topping for like six other salads since then because just look at... if that combination doesn't make your mouth water, I don't know if salad's ever going to do it for you.



Hot & Sour Soup - so pretty.



Bagels... the Emperor and I have been baking healthy-ish treats together once or twice a week. (He asks to bake pretty much every day now, but I try to keep it to 2 times/week or less!) These are whole wheat with a variety of toppings. He was so amazed that we could MAKE bagels... it was so fun to do with him.



Speaking of which, he's as wonderful as ever.



And so's this little (drooly) guy.

And that's what's up with me.

5 days of food tracking...

That's how many I've gone in a row so far. It's going well. I've stayed on my target every day without too much trouble. I'm using this iphone app called MyFitnessPal which I'm really happy with. Over the years, I have experimented with a LOT of different food tracking software, and I think this is probably about the best I've come across. One of the coolest features is that you can scan the UPCs on packaged foods (even things like bunched cilantro, it turns out-- anything with a barcode!) and it'll pull the info from their database. Awesome.

That means that when I made this Pad Thai for dinner tonight:



It only took about 5 minutes to enter the ingredients for the recipe into the program, as opposed to the, I don't know, half an hour it would've taken if I'd had to type in all of the 30-some ingredients, then choose the right one from a list of similar options, etc. For someone who cooks a lot (me), this sort of time saving feature could be the difference between whether or not I keep using the program or give up food tracking.

Oh, I wanted to briefly note an interesting development re: the Emperor. When I went on maternity leave, we cut back on his preschool hours-- first dropping him down to 2 days, then back up to 3 for a while, and now down just to one (Wednesdays). I had noticed that on days he didn't go to school, he tended to be more open to trying stuff I made for dinner even if it wasn't his favorite. This week? I think he tried dinner every night, despite the fact that I made a lot of (to him) weird stuff. Tonight he tried EVERYTHING in his dinner-- noodles, bean sprouts, tofu, broccoli, peanuts-- and ate a ton.

I don't know if it's that I feed him less during the day (maybe? we do 2 snacks & lunch, just like his school) or just that he's resigned to eating my food when he's with me or what. But it's a pleasant change and I hope it lasts!

He also finally went up a shoe size for the first time in about a year. Here he is modeling his new shoes:



And here's the little one, modeling his cute face:

My triumphant return! (Return to... Normalcy?)

Okay, my hell cold is finally abating. I am pleased to report that (knock on wood) no one else in family seemed to get it. Maybe the Emperor, but even with his reduced preschool schedule, he has a cold more often than not so it's hard to tell where one ends and a new one begins.

Anyway, I've been cooking through it mostly, just not finding the energy to post. So here is a photo blast of the stuff I've been making:

Today's lunch - Sesame tofu (Isa recipe) with a pound of steamed asparagus. Yes, I ate a pound of asparagus for lunch by myself. It was great.



Dragon Noodle Salad... last night's dinner, a big success.



Tamale Shepherd's Pie from the weekend.



Creamy garlic scallion bowl.



Korean BBQ Portobello sandwiches.



All good stuff. Josh also made tofu buffalo wings at some point in there, and we must've eaten something else I'm forgetting. Oh, and I made muffins last Friday with the Emperor (Maple Blueberry, so good!) and cookies with him on Monday (healthyish thumbprint cookies) and forgot to take pictures of either. So yeah.

Now that the yummy pictures are over, a brief announcement: now that I am approaching 3 months postpartum and am back in the general swing of having an infant and still functioning, I am feeling ready to start purposefully losing the 18ish lbs of baby weight that I still have. (I lost about 35 lbs right away. Human bodies are amazing. Not another pound has budged in the intervening months.) So, to that end, I am doing food tracking again. Yaaaay, what fun.

I'm not going to post calorie counts here because I feel like that's triggering for a lot of people (myself included), but I think that the theme for next month is going to be photographing and posting what I eat daily, along with (maybe) talking about what exercise I'm doing. Wish me luck!

Also, cute baby photos will continue because no matter what size my butt is, these guys are always adorable:

Not so normal after all...

Oh, I know, I know. I just missed two days in a ROW people.

But I have an excuse. I'm actually finally sick after trying to outrun this cold for 2 months. My throat is like sand paper and bleh. Food is the last thing I want to think about.

Anyhow, I'll be back with updates as soon as I feel better, if not sooner. In the meantime, please enjoy this photograph of the Emperor doing what he does best: being silly:

2 months and risotto (Return to Normalcy #20)

1. The Magician is 2 months old today! To celebrate his month-day, here he is first:



2. I made risotto for dinner. Awesome. Here it is too:



3. Tonight I biked to the store to get a can of coconut water because I was so thirsty for something other than water. Is that weird? Shouldn't one want water when one is thirsty? Sometimes I get into this mindset where I feel like: I am so thirsty. I must drink ANYTHING BUT water. Weird.

It was a great coconut water. I really need to find somewhere to buy coconut water by the case or um cut it out though because it is an expensive treat.

No food! It's Monday! (Return to Normalcy #18)

Nothing to blog about today (no pictures, anyhow) but I'm posting anyway.

Monday is a lazy food day... whatever passes by my mouth tends to fall in. Today I had PB&J for breakfast (sometimes I fall into a weird PB&J breakfast rut... I don't really like peanut butter, except for breakfast), leftover baked ziti with greens for lunch, a slice of pineapple upside down cake, a tiny orange, some pistachios, a piece of chocolate, a sandwich of leftover tofurky (Josh and the Emperor ate another one while I was at my class). And 2 big cups of coffee.

I think one of these upcoming months, I am going to photograph and blog seriously everything I eat in a given day... I think it might have the consequence of making me eat better or at least more thoughtfully, which has got to be a good thing.

Two more little good things:



I'm sad that this picture is so blurry, because they're both making great faces.

Aaaah! I missed a day! Also: pasta. (Return to Normalcy #17)

Well, damn. I missed a day of blogging this month. I've felt a cold coming on literally since the Magician was born and yesterday I thought it'd finally caught up with me. Felt achey and worn down all day and I ended up falling asleep on the floor in the evening. Doh.

Anyway, I'll try to catch up with a double-post later in the month. We'll see. Keeping up momentum this week has been hard for some reason.

Here's what we had for dinner tonight:



Baked ziti. Yum. The Emperor called it pasta with tofu scramble on top. (He's not super far off.) He actually ate a ton despite the fact that there was SAUCE on his NOODLES.

What exactly is ziti? I was trying to figure this out at the grocery store. I checked at 3 different stores and none of them had anything marked ziti. Penne, penne rigate, rigatoni, "smooth" penne, etc... lots of variants with names like that. But no ziti. What gives?

I read the wikipedia article on the subject and I still don't understand what separates ziti from penne. Oh pasta, there are way too many types of you for me to keep track of.

Okay, cute baby pictures and then I'm off to fall over:



It was crazy windy out today, as you can see above.



And here you can see that the little one is plumping up nicely.