Conquering the Late Night Munchies

I have gained four pounds.  I say this with great joy, actually. Since January, which is the last time I worked out, I have only gained four pounds. In the tussle for supremacy between diet and exercise, I must acknowledge that diet has won out every time.

I start working out again next week when the weather will be consistently above 50 degrees (or so we are told - this winter is tenacious!).

I haven't been perfect about eating clean. Those four pounds mainly come from a period when I was cocky and went on a Veggie Ho Fun bender. And then there were the french fries. And potato chips. BUT! As soon as I felt my pants feeling a little tighter, I stopped. That is the break through for me.

Prior to the October Juice Feast, I would have been binging by now, feverishly gaining back the 20 pounds I have lost (so far). Since I have not had any cheese or gluten since October, I also have not had urges to binge. I do still think about cheese but I don't experience that overwhelming primal fury that demands that I must gorge on it. I can leave it alone. So I do.

I still have other habits to transform. Eating late at night and eating potato chips and french fries have been two remaining habits that contribute to weight gain for me. Today I celebrate victory over the late night munchies.

The trick to stopping the late night munchies is really simple. Are you ready for this? Here it is:

Carob Banana Smoothie with Almond Milk

A smoothie or "custard" at around 5pm. Something about having a sweet treat in the late afternoon keeps the late night munchies away.

But that's not all. I have refined the Bento box idea, playing with ingredients and portion sizes and thus I have arrived at a way to eat that works perfectly for me. FINALLY.


Breakfast is two veggies and a protein in tomato sauce with onion and garlic, seasoned with turmeric, sage and cumin and some kind of rice/grain. The two veggies are sweet potato with either spinach, broccoli, or green beans. The proteins are eggs or organic tofu. When I use tofu I add Jamaican Curry Powder. In this photo I have used eggs.











I make enough for two servings so lunch is the other half of breakfast.

Pineapple Banana Custard.
Recipe: 1C frozen Pineapple, 2 fresh, ripe bananas

At around five in the afternoon I have a very sweet delicious banana based smoothie or "custard".  My three favorite flavors are blueberry, pineapple and cocoa (I use carob to avoid caffeine so it really isn't chocolate). When watermelon comes into season I'll probably add a huge bowl of fresh cubes to the rotation. In the summer, I will freeze the bananas and make ice cream.

Gluten Free Mac with Dairy Free Cheese and Peas n' Carrots

For dinner (which I eat around 7pm, at least 2 hours after eating the fruit) I'll either have a gluten free pasta with dairy free cheesy sauce (it is soooo good!) or some form of beans and rice with the cheesy sauce and two veggies: Carrots and peas or beets and peas, or beets and carrots.



I either use a salad plate or the Bento box for portion control.

Jumbo Medjool Date

The final piece is a huge, sweet and gooey date at around 8:30pm and sleep before 11:30pm, which is when the naughty food gremlins really come out.  I don't know why the gremlins come out at 11:30pm specifically, but going to sleep before then is essential.

As I was taking this photo, I noticed where the date originates. Because of my concerns about what is happening in Israel/Palestine (I love my Jewish friends but take issue with the Israeli government) I will likely be switching to figs and prunes from California.






And there you have it. What I eat in a day. For the past two days, anyway. It is about time I figured this out, too, because I have run out of "not from scratch" meals on my sticker chart. The orange smiley faces are days when I only ate from scratch.

400 Things in 28 Days from Scratch from Scratch

Ok - I'm back. I could have blogged the 28 days. Then school started and my focus went in that direction. And I made a more basic error.  While I did create a calendar for the month, it looks like this:

I never got the proper stickers! Took that little sticker in the March 1 box from a different project. It fell off. I tried using these as stickers.

They are left over from my moot court days. But they are too big and not very inspirational. Don't get me wrong - the month itself was not so bad. I stayed completely dairy and gluten free. But I ate restaurant food about four times rather than the twice I had challenged myself to do. And I didn't always observe the carb/veggie/protein ratios. It wasn't a disaster but it wasn't a triumph either.

Breakfast:
Oatmeal, Steamed Purple Cabbage, Scrambled Eggs.
We call this "Struggle Breakfast"

Steamed Purple Cabbage with Red Lentil Mash

Scrambled Eggs with Tomato;
Spinach and Mashed Sweet Potatoes 

Scrambled eggs with Corn Phutu; Steamed Purple Cabbage and Carrots
Finally got the ratios right

One lesson I have definitely learned is this: Losing weight really isn't about exercise. Exercise is about physiological health - muscle strength, cardiovascular performance, balance, agility, flexibility. Those kind of things. Weight loss is about nutrition. It is quite possible to lose weight and keep it off without ever breaking a sweat. I am not recommending that; exercise is essential. However (and I say nothing new here), one cannot hope to lose weight by exercising and eating junk.

No amount of exercise can compete with what you eat. I worked out once for ten minutes during January. That's it. Aside from the work of lifting boxes, I really have done no exercise since then and yet I have maintained my weight and still lost inches. What's that about boxes, you might ask?

Remember the 400 things project? I heard Dee Williams, a bright light in the Tiny House Movement, mention that she was inspired to simply her life following some time she spent in Guatemala. She sold her big house, built a tiny house (84 square feet), and reduced her possessions to about 300 things. I was intrigued and I wondered whether I could do something similar.

I have a storage unit full of a lifetime of junk and memories. I have things in for about six years. For many reasons (and I forgive myself for all of them) I have not been able to touch that storage unit . . . until now. The time has come for me to clean out the closet.

In September I moved from the large storage unit . . .

 to a smaller one.

The Much Smaller Unit

I started working on the storage unit around February 10th. The goal was to sort everything into shred, trash, donate and keep piles. I rented a much smaller unit for my keep items.

It just kept on going!

I looked into my medium-sized storage unit and thought, eh. Two weeks. I can do this in two weeks. And I set to work. When I thought myself half way done, I patted myself on the back, took a short break, and then moved a stack of boxes to discover, to my horror, that the unit was actually twice as deep as I had remembered it. I was in serious trouble.








My new plan is to finish by the end of March. I cannot afford to rent two units, so I am returning the smaller unit until I am done with the primary unit.


So, March is the month of the 400 Things in 28 days from Scratch from Scratch, proving that you can always start again.

Twenty-eight Days from Scratch Day Two: Feeling Full

Steamed Cabbage and Red Daal Curry (it turns yellow when cooked).

I couldn't finish my lunch yesterday! I posted a picture of yesterday's breakfast in the last post. This is a picture of lunch: Well steamed purple cabbage seasoned with a bit of salt and a teaspoon of olive oil and red daal cooked to thick but soupy consistency and seasoned with red onion, garlic and a yellow curry bullion cube.

I gave myself an out for this meal (it is only two colors) since I had just added the new three colors rule and hadn't yet gone shopping for the veggies I needed.

The Daal was so wonderfully seasoned that about half-way through, I suddenly felt satisfied. I was done.

To this day I am a dutiful child, however, and my mother's command to clean my plate stuck with me. So I valiantly chowed on. Again I got the full signal. So I put the food down for a bit and did something else until it seemed I could eat again. This time, when I felt full, I remembered how folks in Okinawa, which is a Blue Zone, advise only eating until one is 80% full. I put the lid on that puppy and called it over.

One Granny Smith Apple, four carrots, ginger to taste

I have a pineapple banana smoothie on tap for later in the week (the bananas are ripening) so, for something sweet, I decided to make a carrot-apple-ginger juice. That, and the left overs from lunch, was dinner.

Apple Carrot Ginger Juice

Surely, I feared, I would be ravenous by bedtime so I decided to go to bed early and hope that I didn't wake up in the middle of the night gnawing off my arm. Anyway, going to bed a little hungry is also a recommended Blue Zone habit.

I wound up blowing my bedtime (Superbowl). While I felt a bit of tummy growling when I did go to sleep, it wasn't that gnawing hunger that leads to shaking and thoughts of ripping apart the fridge. I slept pretty well.



I felt fine when I woke up in the morning. Again, a little hungry but not ravenous. So i did what has been recommended all my life: I started the morning by drinking a quart (four cups) of warm water. I didn't down it all at once; I drank it over the period of about forty minutes. I'll try this again tonight. I get the sense that, as with the Juice Feast, day three will be the proving ground.

The 28 Days From Scratch Challenge: Day One

Breakfast!

28 Days from Scratch Challenge Day One: Today I followed the spirit if not the letter of law. It looks like a slight modification might be in order. I am working on a project that involves interviewing people and my interviewees are demonstrating a distinct preference for meeting at restaurants. And eating food. My first meeting coincided with the first day of the 28 Days from Scratch challenge. This created quite the . . . opportunity. Let's be optimistic about this.

The challenge does allow me to eat two restaurant meals during the month. I'm the cautious type. If I have a "Get out of jail free" card, I like to hold on to it for a while before choosing the most strategic time to use it. Here I was on Day One, famished and holding a Brunch menu describing the most scrumptious sounding food. I agonized over whether I should just throw in the towel and use that card on Day One.

I took my time reading that menu. The hostess must have though that something was wrong with me considering how intently I read that menu. I read every ingredient in each description and (except for the meat) imagined how each morsel would taste in my mouth. I settled on two choices.

I read further down the menu and there in the bottom left-hand corner was a little box labeled "Sides". What happened to be one of those sides? The Fruit Bowl. Ah. Hmmm. What to do? The fruit bowl would technically get me out of using the card. It was just fruit, after all, no manipulation or other ingredients involved. But I was SOOO hungry! And the whole restaurant smelled SOOOO goooood! I could hear my taste buds chanting: Choose the food! Choose the food! Choose the food!

My guest arrived and we sat down. I explained the challenge to her and when our server arrived I asked her to get my guest's order first so that I could have a few extra moments to think. My guest ordered and then I decided to use conditions to help make my decision. If the fruit had been frozen I would not eat it. I'd order the regular brunch. My mouth and tummy reluctantly agreed that, fine, that would be the test.

Of course our server said that the fruit was not frozen, it did not come from packages. The restaurant received the whole fruit from the vendor and chopped it up right back there in the kitchen. Yes, it was refrigerated but never frozen. I knew what I had to do. My taste buds and my stomach said, "Heeey, wait, hold up a second, we had an agreement here!" I bowed my head for a moment, took a deep breath and charged forward.

"I'll have the fruit bowl," I said as my face crumpled up with fake tears. My guest laughed and so did the server. "Ahhhhh!!!" I wailed, "This is sooo hard!" I could hear every taste bud shouting, "Nooo, stop! Take it back! Take it back!" My competitive streak is too strong, however, and the strategist said, "Don't use the card today!!!" And so I ordered the fruit bowl - with some modification.

I told our server that I don't like fruit cold - I like it at room temperature. I really don't understand eating refrigerated fruit. One loses out on so much of the juicy sweetness. We improvised. She brought the fruit bowl (which was generously sized, to my pleasant surprise) along with another bowl filled with hot water.

We placed the fruit bowl in the hot water and that actually did the trick. Eventually the fruit came to room temperature and I really enjoyed it. In fact, by the time I finished, I felt satisfied. When our meeting ended, I got up and felt really skinny! My pants felt loose and my tummy wasn't heavy as it usually was after eating at a restaurant. I was really pleased with myself and now I have a viable solution for how not to use the card and still eat at a restaurant.

Because I am never satisfied with accomplishing a challenge by anything more than the skin of my teeth, I've upped the ante on this challenge. It isn't enough that all but two of my meals be cooked from scratch, they must also be balanced and must follow the 1/2, 2/4ths rule. Also, except for soups and other liquids, I must eat my meals with chopsticks. Eating with chopsticks means eating more slowly which means feeling fully satisfied with less food.

Here is how the 1/2, 2/4ths rule works: Divide your plate in half. Fill half with vegetables. In the other half, fill 1/4 with protein and the other 1/4 with grain. To accomplish balancing, make the plate as colorful as possible. Aim for at least three colors per meal. Your plate should look something like this:

Top left: Scrambled egg whites with caramelized onions, garlic and olives 

Top right: Steamed purple cabbage with olive oil

Bottom left: Stiff Mealie Pap

Bottom Right: Steamed carrots with olive oil

I chose this container because it came with a divider, provides for reasonable portion sizes and because claims to be leak proof so I can cover it and take it with me.

I tested it with water and found that there was was a little bit of leakage. That only happened if I vigorously shook the container, though, so I think it will be ok. Next time I'll write about how to make time for all of this.