It's Working...

Well, despite an on-again off-again relationship with Paleo during the holidays, I'm getting back into the swing of things. It's hit and miss, but more hit. I'll be sharing a recipe for a Phenomenal Awesome Salad of Doom - probably tomorrow, since I'm planning to make it again as soon as humanly possible.

In any case, Long-suffering Trainerman Alec weighed me this Thursday during our session to see how things are going. The scale (and my pants) say that to date I've lost about 15 pounds. I don't see much of that happening in my face or my waist, and for that I blame the steroids. But seeing the difference in my strength, my stamina in terms of the repetitions I can do and the weight I can work with, and watching my pants get longer because there is less booty to inflate them makes me feel very, very good. I am making good choices more often than not (though I'm probably only a B student, since I still occasionally indulge), and that is a major improvement.

And so, back to Paleo, back to the gym. The funny thing is, the more I eat well in terms of more salads and lean meats and fewer fast food/junk/carbload meals, the more the food I crave is of the good-for-me sort.

The Incredible Shrinking Booty?

2012 started out well, wonderful and rested after a week at home with mom and visiting family. Lots of sleep, lots of bonding time, and my sister and I trying to explain the phenomenon of hashtags to the Reilly clan. It was a great time.

I spent the first weekend of 2012 back in the hospital for tests, all seems okay for now. My slacks have been slipping off my waist a bit, looking a little droopy. (One of the first signs of weight loss for me is that my pantlegs suddenly get longer when my behind is not taking up as much room. Since I'm already short, this leads to me walking on the edges of my pants. Not fun.) Anyway, I thought I might have lost enough to try on some old pants, and so tonight after seeing Trainerman Alec for my workout, I came home, showered, and broke out The Pants The Preceded My Current Behind. (Also known as The Size Before, Minor Goal Pants, and The Pants of Hopeful Thinking.) Slacks one size down are just a little snug in the middle, but jeans one size down fit nicely. Hooray!

Four pairs of jeans have been resurrected from the Drawer Of No Return, and I've decided to have Trainerman Alec level up to Necromance Trainerman for bringing the pants back from the dead. I'm still a large lady, but things are moving in the right direction, and that makes me terribly happy. It also helps fuel me to stay on track in terms of hitting the gym, eating properly, and resting well.

Now, hashtag practice:

Do your booty fill your jeans? #mybootydo
Do your booty bounce? #mybootydo
Do your booty shrink? I can happily say, #mybootydo

Egg White Omelets and Boxing

My newest favorite fast recipe: a spinach and mushroom egg white omelet. Essentially, I throw a handful (or two or three) of spinach, a drizzle of olive oil, and a fistful of sliced mushrooms into a frying pan and cover it until the spinach is wilted, pour egg whites (from a car4ton) over it, do a messy flip that really more resembles scrambled eggs, and voila. Dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. It's not pretty, but it's delicious. I'll try to get a recipe with pictures up soon.

In any case, I threw that together tonight and ate it about 45 minutes before workout time in the hopes that it would keep me from keeling over (or gnawing on Trainerman Alec). When he asked me if it was okay to try something new, I was afraid he'd want me to run sprints up and down the highway. Turns out, he wanted to teach me to box. I was game, so he wrapped me up, gloved me, and proceeded to make me sweat for an hour.

My reaction: so, I have a bit of trouble both moving my feet and swinging at the same time. I start feeling clumsy when he starts moving the pads around quickly, and I quickly lose whatever "right vs left" knowledge I may have had. But it was cathartic, it was fun, and I sweated my butt off. I have a mean right hook, but everything else could use work. In any case, Trainerman says it's not the worst start he's seen. I'm hoping we do more of that soon, and maybe I'll acquire wraps and gloves to hit the heavy bag on our off days. It was that much fun. And I like to hit things. But I also appreciate staying out of jail. This is the best of all worlds.

Magical Paleo Crockpot Chicken Soup

There's little as satisfying on a cold winter night than a good, hot, hearty soup. If it's made with chicken, even better. I will say that I've made this before not even thinking about Paleo-anything, and recommend it no matter what your diet.

Ingedients:
1 yellow onion, chopped into 1/2"-1" pieces
One 16-oz package regular whole white mushrooms, washed
4 stalks celery, washed and cut into 1/2"-1" pieces
4 carrots, washed and cut into 1/2"-1" pieces
2 chicken breasts, cubed in about 1" pieces
Penzey's Forward! spice

For liquid, I used 1 1/2 quarts homemade chicken stock (this recipe, but using chicken carcass and scraps instead of beef bones). You can also use water, or canned chicken broth, but this tasted much better!

I chopped all the vegetables, tossed them into tupperware and stuck them in the fridge, because I'm leery of refrigerating my crock overnight and then pulling it out to put in the element while it's cold in the morning. I had the broth already in the fridge from Sunday's crockpotting. In the morning, my only prep was to cut up the chicken breasts, coat them in the Penzey's spice mixture, throw everything into the crockpot, and pour the broth over it all. I turned the crockpot on low at 10am, and ate at about 6pm and everything was cooked through.


The cooked soup isn't as pretty and bright as the raw ingredients, but it is delicious. It did not need any salt, and I find that the full flavor cooking the ingredients in broth delivered is far more satisfying than when I do essentially the same recipe with water instead of broth. (You can do it, it is just less rich.) In terms of servings, I'd estimate 6-8 good sized servings, depending on the size of your bowl and your appetite.

Future changes: I'd love to find a way to thicken the broth a bit to make it more stew-like; I'll have to review some paleo blogs to see how they do that without using flour or cornstarch. Because I prefer my soups more like stews, I would add more vegetables - it's a lot of broth and could use more things to chew on. And it would have been delicious had I been able to sop up the dregs with bread, but drinking the broth kid-style from the bowl was also pretty satisfying. I'd also like to find a way to incorporate sweet potatoes without the potatoes getting mushy.

Change is Hard. Change is Necessary.

<-- My beloved, Otto. Interestingly, this also resembles me in my natural habitat. Lounging. Lazy. Generally Jello-ed out and splayed comfortably over whatever surface I can lounge on (usually the couch).

Part (most) of the reason I am trying this paleo thing is for health reasons. Otherwise, let's be honest, I would happily live life in a series of decadent, beefy, sauced, followed-by-cheesecake meals. Since health issues now preclude such a life of tasty bliss, and are also requiring me to take a serious look at my stress levels, I'm trying to make some serious changes.

Change 1: First is the eating, which is a challenge because I'm a lazy eater - I skip breakfast, I rarely eat lunch, and by the time I get home for dinner, I'm tired, crabby, and uninclined to cook. So far I've found that crockpotting on the weekends and keeping fresh veggies on hand to toss into the crock during the week comes in handy. I started out strong, but have only maintained at about 50%, largely because whatever I cooked over the weekend is gone by Wednesday night. I need to do some better planning and portioning.

Change 2: Fitness. I'm overweight, it's tiring, it's no good for my joints, and it's preventing me from putting on some pretty smokin' clothing that is hiding in shame in my closet. It's frustrating, because back in '07-'08 I was seeing a trainer and got down to a svelte and buff (for me) 180, and I was strong and felt great. I moved, got a stressful job that took up too much time, stressed, ate a ton of cake, quit gymming, and generally didn't just fall off the wagon, but off the planet. I'm ashamed that I've fallen so far. I'm frustrated beyond belief that getting back into the swing of workouts is so difficult, both because of the fatticus factor and because there are some things I simply can't do because of joint flares and muscle spasms. I have a great personal trainer that I see three times a week, and even though he has modified a lot of exercises to take away the impact that my knees and hips despise, he makes me sweat like a moose (or like I imagine a moose would sweat, were it hurling medicine balls and doing resistance training stuff) so at least i know I'm getting a good workout.

So, Trainerman Alec is helping, and he's good humored about it, even when I shoot him Death Looks about having to do the handbike and ropes. Push-ups and pull-ups frustrate me so that I want to hurl cars across a parking lot - except, of course, that my wimpy T-rex arms that can't do a push-up or pull-up are also unable to throw vehicles. I don't cry a la the Biggest Loser folks, but oh my goodness do I get angry when I can't do something. And poor Trainerman can probably see (due to my lack of pokerface) that I want to nuke the whole place from orbit when he tells me "Good job!" after what I know was not a good job at all. AUGH. Frustration.

I let Trainerman know that as a good nerd, while I hate gymming amongst the Beautiful People, what I *am* good at (aside, bizarrely, from anything that involves a rowing/pull motion) is homework, and I asked him to assign me off-day homework to make sure I get my butt to the gym, since three hours a week is not going to cut it. I'm to come in on at least two non-training days to hit a class (yoga, Zumba, etc.) and work the bike, rowing machine, or elliptical for 20 minutes to improve my cardio. I'm hoping that making the gym more of a daily habit will help reduce both the size of my ass and my feeling of being so far out of my depth. Maybe the gym thing the Beautiful People have going for them is catching - like the flu, only better for you.

Change 3: Stress levels. I tend to channel most of my energies into work - the work I do in the library itself, and work-related things like committee work, scholarly writing, and presenting at conferences. Given that my body has taken to tapping out on things requiring late hours, long-term concentration, and strenuous travel, I am trying to recalibrate. Primarily, I am working on reducing my commitments so that what I do work on is high quality, which means less travel and fewer projects. I am working on committing to an earlier bedtime; I feel better and function better when I am rested, which nowadays means a full 8 hours (sometimes 9 or 10 during a bad flare). Losing two to five hours out of each day has been frustrating since it usually comes out of my study time, as I'm working full time toward my doctorate in addition to my job.

Because of my nature, if I am not allowed to stress or over-commit to work, I have been tapping my teeth trying to figure out where to put all that mental energy. Even pleasure reading leaves me restless. Now, my sister is a bad-ass competitive triathlete. Reading about what she does makes me wonder if I can channel all this mental energy into some sort of physical competition. Which is sort of laughable, since I am as slow, clumsy and fat as she is lean and fast...but if I need to shift my obsession to something new, maybe fitness is where to go. I've interlibrary loaned a copy of Jayne Williams's Slow Fat Triathlete: Live Your Athletic Dreams in the Body You Have Now in the hopes that it will inspire me to figure out a way to build a decent fitness program that I will stick to. My attempt to become a fauxthlete, if you will.

Triathlons likely won't be it for me, since I don't know how to swim (though I do a mean dogpaddle and can stay afloat for days if survival is all that's required), my balance is terrible on a bike (I've been known to run into parked cars), and running will make my knees and hips secede. But I've found the one thing I'm good at in the gym is rowing (either on the row machine or using the weight machines or resistance bands), plus flipping a giant heavy tractor tire over down a hallway. (Hooray for gyms in the South!) At least, those are the things that make me feel strong. In any case, I'm trying to at least steer my obsessively competitive nature to something sport-like instead of sedentary. Any and all recommendations appreciated; I'm way out of my depth on this one.

[For those of you more interested in the food side of things, there will be more paleo food posting tonight, as I have a scrumptious chicken soup crockpotting at home.]

Avocado Apple Chicken Salad, You Complete Me

I have only recently discovered the magic of avocados. Out of nowhere, I began craving them on a regular basis. Well, I craved guacamole. Then I discovered it was made of avocados. So, I bought some avocados, and stared at them in my kitchen, until I finally broke down and googled how to get the gooey green goodness to come from the weird-looking thing I bought. At that point, I put avocados on everything - toast, salmon, chicken. A fork. No telling if this was my arthritic body screaming for Omega-3s or just another delicious discovery by a fat lady. In any case, thus my love affair with avocados.

Since I roasted a chicken in the slow cooker yesterday largely for the bones so I could make stock, I wanted to do something with the meat that would last me all week. I had been thinking of chicken salad, whcih I've never made before. Then I thought, Hey! I have both apples, and onions, and celery, and avocados. I wonder if I can throw that all in and make deliciousness. So, I decided to try it. This recipe is an epic success, though I'm certain I'll be fooling around with it in future weeks to tweak it. What you'll need:

Ingredients
- The breast meat from a roasted chicken (or 2 large breasts, baked), cubed
- 1/2 yellow onion, diced
- 1 stalk celery, diced
- 1 large Honeycrisp apple, diced
- 2 small avocados (or 1 large Hass avocado), diced
- 2 tsp lime juice
- 1 cup mayo
- 1/2 tsp black pepper

I started in my largest glass bowl, and had to transfer to a large pot for stirring room, so make sure you use a large bowl. Literally combine all ingredients and fold gently with wooden spoon until everything is mixed. Best if served cold, so refrigerate once you either cover the bowl or parcel it out into smaller containers.

Note on the mayo: I used Hellman's Light because I didn't have eggs in the fridge to make my own, and because after comparing the ingredients, the Hellman's Low Fat mayo had high fructose corn syrup and food colorings in it than did the Light. Normally I'd shrink from using mayonnaise (it's an ingredient I rarely touch unless I am making deviled eggs), but I'm not sure what you can replace it with in a chicken salad. As for the fat content, well...I'm seeing a personal trainer. Plus, the calories are actually probably an improvement over my usual practice of don't-eat-anything-all-day-until-7pm-and-then-EAT-ALL-THE-THINGS. *Ahem*

For next time: For some more tang, next time I might (1) make my own mayo, and (2) try it with 1/2 cup of light mayo and 1/4 cup of brown mustard or some such (recommendations appreciated), or (3) replace the mayo altogether with something else, though I'm not sure what. You could easily use another stalk of celery if you like the stuff. Also, I'm not terribly adventurous with spices because they so easily mess up a dish, but fresh parsley or cilantro would probably go well in this dish. You could probably add raisins, but I'm not a fan; red grapes would work equally well. Other recommendations - please do add them in the comments!

I used my cup measure, and with an overflowing scoop into smaller containers, this netted me four large lunch servings for the week. (I also ate a few tablespoons of it, to test it. Delicious - the apple really makes it, and though I usually despise raw onions and celery, I can completely deal with it since they're offset by the sweetness of the apple and the creaminess of the avocado. I'll end up eating it out of tupperware for this week, but I think this would be delicious either served on lettuce leaves, or atop tomato slices for the acidity.

Considering this one a raving success. I can't wait until lunchtime tomorrow!

Scallops, Spinach and Mushrooms, and the Importance of Organized Spices

Tonight's recipe is a lesson in organizing your spices and knowing the properties of your ingredients, so this recipe is a bit of an "oops," though it came out fine in the end. It also encouraged me to add a spice rack to my kitchen wish list.

So, to start and have on hand, in addition to two frying pans, you should have on hand:

Ingredients
- coconut oil
- 6 large sea scallops
- 1 9oz bag of baby spinach
- small package of white button mushrooms
- cumin
- pepper
- cinnamon

I'll also let you know the ingredients I wish I had had on hand:

- white wine, for deglazing the scallop pan

Wash and slice the mushrooms while the coconut oil heats up. Rinse the spinach too - even if you get your produce bagged and pre-washed, you should still give it a rinse. With all the e. coli badness going around nowadays, you can't be too careful.

I put the spinach and mushrooms in my smaller frying pan and covered it to steam. Once my coconut oil was hot, I plopped the scallops down. Having not really worked with coconut oil (and trying valiantly to replace my usual use of extra virgin olive oil), I was surprised that the coconut oil doesn't actually keep things from sticking to stainless the way olive oil does, so I shuffled the scallops around a bit more than I usually would while trying to get them seared. I gave the scallops a barely-there light dusting of cumin (it's strong, you don't need much), and then did the same with the spinach mixture. Intending to give the scallops a wee bit of pepper, I grabbed the container handy on the counter and did that.

But my pepper dusting was a light brown - should I say, cinnamon! - oops. Hrm. Apparently I left the cinnamon out from this morning. Unfortunate. But cinnamon and cumin both go in chili, right? And there was barely much there, thanks to my light spice hand. I could rescue this. I added the intended pepper. Once the bottoms were seared, I did the same dusting - minus the unintended cinnamon - on the other side of the scallops. The scallops stuck a bit (yes, I found myself wishing for olive oil), and I used a bit of broth to deglaze the pan a little (here's where you might use white wine), added that liquid to the spinach. Move both to the plate (the spinach finishes faster than the scallops, so keep an eye on it), and mangia!

The oops-cinnamon and the cumin combine to give the dish a vaguely Moroccan flavor. Given that it's not one of my favorite flavor profiles, I consider this recipe a bit of a mistake, but if you enjoy Moroccan food you may want to try this. As usual, I'm working without salt, so if you need a bit more bang, you may want to add a bit.

When I was finished, I still had a bit of a spinach craving, so I cooked the rest of the 9oz bag with another few sliced mushrooms - just steamed them in the same pan. Ate a whole bag of spinach. And I don't even feel guilty.