Paleo – SuperSonnek

Reflect and Resolve

It’s New Year’s Eve!

Yawn.

I’m of the age where I don’t go out on New Year’s Eve anymore. Too much responsibility and not wanting to be out and about on what I believe to be the biggest drunken driving night of the year. Plus, I have booze at home.

What New Year’s Eve does for me is make me pause to reflect on the past year and to resolve my plans for the upcoming year. Looking back on what I planned on doing last year, I failed miserably. Mainly because my world turned upside down with depression, we moved halfway across the country, lost my best friend, and the loneliness that goes along with starting afresh in a new city.

Lose weight! Stop drinking! Eat clean! HAH.

I’m in my 40s and I like booze and cheese, but I work out to help counteract that shit so I don’t weigh 300 pounds. I’m lucky I survived.

Speaking of weight…

I made the mistake of weighing myself today.

HOO BOY.

Let’s just say it’s a number ten pounds heavier than when I started Crossfit.

Which is BONKERS to me. BONKERS.

Why? Well, because my pants still fit. Granted, they fit a bit differently due to all the deadlifts and squats I’ve been doing. Baby got back, y’all! 😀

Admit it. You're hearing it in his voice now. You're welcome. — Admit it. You’re hearing it in his voice now. You’re welcome.

Still, the number itself bothers me. But then, have I changed one iota of my diet since starting Crossfit? Nope. Add to that the fact that you can exercise all day, but if you eat (and drink) a lot of calories, you’re not going to lose weight.

After tonight (because I have a night of cheese and bread planned…heh), I think we’ll be going back to the paleo plan we did last spring because it worked really well for us. Plus, we finally found a place around here that has gluten-free beer/cider (OK on our plan), hamburgers, and sweet potato fries.

Yes, I know it’s a burger and sweet potato fries. But we get the burger without the bun and cheese and sweet potatoes are on the paleo plan, so if we’re going to eat out, why not make a choice in fries that does fit? If we didn’t, we’d fall head first into a large pizza on those nights where I don’t want to cook. Which seems to be often lately.

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In other news, it’s below freezing in Oregon.

Goddammit, I moved here to not deal with this shit again. But, at least it’s not 10 below zero like it was in MN last year. Remember the Polar Dash? Remember this day in February?

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Fun fact, that was 10 inches of fresh snow and those drifts on either side of my driveway were 5′ deep at that point.

Yeahhhhh…I can’t complain too much. 😀

Happy New Year!

Onward and Upward

I decided to try a new theme on the blog. I kinda like it.

This weekend, we had a good friend of ours visit from Minneapolis. His wife is off galavanting with her friends in Europe, and we convinced him to come hang out with us for a few days. We’ve been both feeling a bit homesick, so it was awesome seeing a familiar face.

It was a lot of fun! On Friday, we took a rainy drive to the coast where we enjoyed some burritos and toured the Tillamook cheese factory. Yesterday, we took a tour of wine country and did all sorts of touristy stuff.

Stoller Vineyard’s tasting room

Raptor Ridge Vineyard

Penner-Ash Vineyard

SakeOne tasting room

Penner-Ash Vineyard

Stoller Vineyards

Inside the Stoller tasting room

View from inside Stoller tasting room

Penner-Ash Vineyard

Side note: touring wineries (and doing wine tastings) is exhausting!

Now that we took him back to the airport this morning, we have a full day of doing nothing. Well, “nothing” in that we don’t have plans. But I have some plans of my own.

After seeing some weight creep back on the past few months and our eating habits devolving into something resembling a character in the movie Idiocracy, it’s time to hammer down.

Seeing photos of myself at my company’s Grand Meetup didn’t help either. When did I become so old and stodgy? Who’s that overweight old lady? OHMYFUCKINGGOD IT’S ME.

Thus, we’re going back to the Near-Paleo diet we had such success with. No grains, no dairy, and for the first week or so, no booze. I know I say that every other goddamn time I do these things, but I need to focus on other goals I want to do and boozing it up doesn’t help with those goals.

How can I go wrong with food like this?

Eggs and Asparagus

Romaine, roasted sweet potato and chicken

Paleo meatloaf, sautéed mushrooms, mashed cauliflower, and sautéed broccoli slaw.

Whole Foods garbage salad – all Paleo

Roast Chicken, roasted Brussels sprouts, and mashed garlic cauliflower

Carne Asada steak over sautéed peppers and onions, topped with avocado, lime juice and cilantro.

The other thing I’m going back to is my exercise routine. I need to get back to running at least three times a week and I’ve only taken advantage of the fitness center in my apartment complex ONCE since we moved in over a month ago. ONCE.

I also want to make sure I’m hitting my Fitbit step goal every day. Ten thousand steps is not a huge thing to do.

Does it sound like I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew? Perhaps. But I want to tackle this. Fuck feeling sorry for myself and making excuses. Time to put up or shut up. That’s what this blog is all about, right?

Going grocery shopping today and the plan for the week is:

Monday: Run
Tuesday: Upper body strength training
Wednesday: Run
Thursday: Lower body strength training
Friday: Rest
Saturday: Run
Sunday: Walking with hubby

Should be doable. I’m not setting distance goals for the running as that would be a one-way ticket to Injuryville, and I don’t want to go there.

Will post an update next week to see how I did! Wish me luck!

Carbs, Carbs, Carbs!

Marsha, Marsha, Marsha! Oh wait, this isn’t The Brady Bunch. Things don’t get resolved in a single half-hour episode!

Although I could go for some sweet 70s fashion right about now…

KEEP ON KEEP ON KEEP ON KEEP ON DANCIN' ALL THROUGH THE NIIIIIIGHT! — KEEP ON KEEP ON KEEP ON KEEP ON DANCIN’ ALL THROUGH THE NIIIIIIGHT!

Ahem.

Today I had been feeling run down and I got to talking to my soul-twin Elaine. She’s big into weight lifting and has fully switched to clean eating over the past few months and is an overall badass bitch (this is a good thing). She thought I was missing some nutrients and asked me what my carb/fat/protein ratios were in what I was eating now.

I was all like “uh…I eat foods and stuffs” because I had no fucking idea. I’M NOT A ROBOT.

She ordered me to figure out what I had been eating so I started calculating my food intake for the day, and two things became glaringly obvious:

1. I wasn’t eating nearly enough calories.
2. I wasn’t eating enough fat or carbs.

The beauty of the plan I’m doing now is that I don’t have to count calories. The downside is that while I’m not hungry, I had been inadvertently been starving myself nutritionally. While I’ve been eating very well, those vegetables are really low in calories! Also, since I’m training for a half marathon, I really needed to make sure I was getting all the carbs I needed.

Thus, she gave me marching orders to consume more carbs – and good carbs! Guess I need to go to the store!

Since I was really low on my carbs today by the time I talked to Elaine, I made the call to add a pseudo diet-friendly bit of quinoa to my chicken Mexican bowls¹ tonight. I say “pseudo” because it’s technically a grain, but since it’s so high in protein, the less-strict grain-free/dairy-free² people out there say it’s “ok once a week.”

Now I need to really make sure to keep my carb/fat/protein percentages (40/30/30) in check and to make sure I eat enough calories. Blah blah blah….PROFIT!

Fun stuff!

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¹ – Chicken and jalapeños sautéed with a bit of chili powder and cumin served over 1/2 cup of quinoa, a bunch of halved cherry tomatoes, an entire avocado (healthy fats, y’all!) and some salsa and lime juice. Fucking delicious.

² – the diet I’m on is based on the paleo plan, but I’m not going to be all crazy-strict about it. Plus I like butter, so I’m gonna use it.