Yesterday was quite an eventful day on the food and fitness front I woke up bright and early to make some real lunch for Adam and me. I was just sick of throwing random stuff together for lunch and then not really being satisfied with them. Also I’m guessing you guys wanted to see some new recipes on here. Well, I have recipes for you! But before we get there, let’s talk Intuitive Eating for a minute, shall we?

I’m still going through the book and hope that they address all of my questions. I’ve been allowing myself to eat whatever I want (the first stage) in order to free myself from food related guilt. The thing is so far, despite my mouth being satisfied, I can’t get my brain to catch up. I know I’m doing this for a reason, but I can’t help but feel like I’m doing horrible things for my body by allowing consumption of 2 cookies/day.  This is the point of this first stage – breaking the connection between food and guilt.  But… how can you not feel bad about certain foods if you eat them and gain weight and you KNOW they are not doing anything for you nutritionally? And how can you stop thinking about this first stage of unconditional permission to eat anything as a temporary thing? Even if it’s thinking that one day you’ll want to eat less of it, desperately waiting for that day to come before you balloon up? Apparently as long you continue to think of it as temporary (i.e. not really believe that you can have it any day if you want it), then you will continue overeating these foods because you know it will eventually end.  This is supposed to be a freeing experience, to stop the cravings and the “deprivation backlash” (basically bingeing) that inevitably follows. I am SO ready for the next stage! I guess patience is a virtue I do not possess

All right, so this is what I had yesterday… you’re missing a picture of 2 Paradise Bakery cookies. You know what they look like, right? SO good! (But I SO need to stop craving them!)

1/3 c rolled oats, 1/3 c skim milk, 1/3 c water, dried bing cherries, bottom of the jar Barney Butter and apple butter. Yum!

And this is the aforementioned lunch. I used this recipe from the Cooking Light magazine for stir-fried bok choy and lettuce with mushrooms. It was in the Jan/Feb 09 issue in the Chinese New Year section. I bought bok choy at the farmers market the other day and thought this was the perfect celebratory dish to star it. It was very time consuming (took me over an hour to make, something I certainly don’t recommend doing in the morning!) but I was happy to be finally cooking, even if that made me a little late for work. Plus, who doesn’t love a little Chinese food bright and early in the morning? Not you? Oh, ok

We ran out of lettuce in the house, so I omitted it. I also added some massive shrimp to complete this entree (just stir fried them a bit before adding in the bok choy) + served it on the side of brown rice to soak up the sauce. This definitely tasted like authentic Chinese food to me! The mushroom sauce was thick and yummy. De-licious

Some snacks…

Yeah, sun-maid. I don’t know about this message…

Am I living up to “Elina”? What do you guys think? Haha

I ate 1/2 of these. Just wanted something fresh to munch on before my run. Speaking of the run, I tried the Boston Nike running group yesterday. Yeah, I don’t know… it was a little bit a waste of my time. It was quite disorganized, and I ended up running with a guy that did not want to push himself as much as I would have if I ran by myself. The loop we ended up doing ended up being only 4.3 miles (I planned on doing 5) so I left him off and ran another 0.7 to finish myself off. I sped up for that last part, but the average speed was still 9:05 minute miles. It was crazy humid, and the run was tough (kind of made me nervous for 13.1 miles – eek!), but I know I could have done better than that. I was hoping to find someone running at my speed that I could befriend and train with for my first half marathon (signed up yesterday, btw – SO excited!!!!!) but that didn’t happen. I hear Lululemon has another running group starting on Thursday nights, so I may check that out. We’ll see.

By the time I got home (after a shower at the gym) it was nearly 9pm, so dinner was quick, but still crazy awesome I followed this recipe from the Eating Well magazine for tijuana tortas. We used a french baguette form Panera (Adam refuses to eat whole wheat ), omitted the onions, and sliced the avocado instead of mashing it. The result? So simple and flavorful. I discovered recently that Adam is a HUGE black beans fan. He was practically moaning while eating this, and said he could become a vegetarian if he could eat this every day. I liked it a lot but for me the avocado was the star. I love avocado!!

Messy but yummy

I wanted chocolate for dessert and grabbed a healthier chocolatey treat:

Unfortunately this kind of overstuffed me. Damn. Why do I keep doing this to myself? This is like the 3rd day in a row that I went to bed in pain. Ugh. Apparently the sensible thing would have been just taking a few bites of it and putting it away. The “finish your plate mentality” needs to stop. Like asap. Of course I’ll keep you posted on my progress Does anyone else feels like they have to finish their plate? How often do you realize it wasn’t a wise decision after all? Happens to me more often than I’d like it to be, but I am determined to get better.

Happy Thursday! The weekend is just around the corner

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