Day 8 of the no-sugar #7daychip, going strong.
I’m excited that Tracey (aka TJ) is sharing one of her awesome healthy recipes on my blog today! Her blog is full of fantastic, easy recipes that are super WW-friendly. Check out her fantastic progress – inspiring isn’t it?? One of her greatest strategies is coming up with wonderful recipes to keep her satisfied and on track. Take it away, Tracey!
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Hi guys! Tracey here from tj’s test kitchen! Special thanks to Foodie McBody for allowing me to post a recipe over here today. 🙂 I made this just this past weekend with my Mom and the whole family loved it. Beef Stroganoff SCREAMS comfort food if you ask me but sometimes with comfort comes calories. My mission along this weight loss journey is to make the foods I love…. HEALTHIER!
Beef Stroganoffserves 84PointsPlus*add additional PointsPlus for noodles1 lb package lean ground beef 90/101 can Campbells Healthy Request Cream of Mushroom soup1 can Campbells HR Cream of chicken soup1 Cup Fat Free Sour Cream1 envelope onion soup mix1 1/2 Cups sliced fresh mushrooms1/2 Cup waterpepper to taste
First brown beef over medium heat until fully cooked; drain any fat after cooked.
In separate pan- even at the same time the beef is cooking saute mushrooms in a small pan sprayed with PAM.
Ingredients all lined up….
These are the noodles I used 1 cup for 5 PointsPlus
1 Cup Sour Cream
After draining any fat, add onion soup mix, sour cream, water, and both soups to the pan. This looks weird, I know, but wait! haha!
Give it a stir….then toss in the cooked mushrooms.
stir again…mmmm nice and creamy! Add in pepper if you like!
Serve on top of cooked noodles. YUM! After I took this picture I tossed in some peas. It was delicious!
Easy and tasty! My two favorite words to hear when I am cooking dinner! Hope you all liked my recipe! Make sure you stop by my blog to let me know if you decided to make it! I would love to hear all about it! 🙂 ENJOY! tj
I’m thrilled to host author and blogger Karen CL Anderson here at my blog. She was one of my first friends in the blogosphere, and we “clicked” right away because of our love of writing and our desire to tell the “inner stories” of our bodies, our weight journeys. I think she’s awesome and so excited about her new book!
Ten years ago, if you were to ask me which would be the greater accomplishment – being thin or writing a book – I would have said being thin. No question about it. At the time I weighed ~230 pounds and even though I actually was a writer (at the time I was a plastics industry trade magazine reporter and editor), I had no confidence in my ability to write. In my mind, I wasn’t a “real” writer.
And very much like I used say, “someday I’ll lose weight,” I also used to say “some day I’ll write a book.”
Five years ago, I was the thinnest I’d been in my entire adult life. I had really worked for it, too. Not only was I was counting calories and exercising regularly, I was working on the emotional stuff. I was fully aware that this was a “lifestyle change” and that figuring out the “why’s” was just as important as the calories in/calories out equation.
I was also a weight-loss “success story” with my picture on the cover of a weekly women’s magazine and I appeared in a national commercial for a popular weight loss web site. I thought I had it all figured out and wanted to share my secrets with the world. That is the book I was going to write.
But.
But there was something holding me back…even though I had achieved something I never thought possible, I still had doubts and no real confidence in myself. And the biggest problem of all was that I hadn’t reached my goal weight…I was still 20 pounds away. Deep down inside I didn’t feel worthy.
What happened next was predictable: over the course of a year or so, I regained half the weight I had lost. Along with the pounds came panic, shame, frustration, and anger. I wallowed in self-pity a bit, I punished myself a lot, and I was desperate. I hated my body.
And that’s when I started to really write. My best writing was born out of pain and frustration, not success. At first, I did it for myself. Then I started blogging. It didn’t take long before I realized that I had found my voice, and along with it came a bit of confidence. Then came self-acceptance and the realization that if I could just love and accept myself enough, my body might just respond in kind. And it did.
And that’s when I realized that I truly had something of value to say. And so I took what I had written, edited it, added to it and published a book. It seemed like the right thing to do…a natural progression of the love and acceptance I was finally allowing myself to feel.
I can honestly say now that I am glad I regained that weight. It gave me an opportunity to really know and understand myself in a way that I never had before. I am more than just a number on a scale. My value does not depend on whether or not I’ve lost weight. And because I know that, my body does too.
Karen’s book, AFTER (the before & after) is the result of her belief that having a healthy body (mind and spirit) shouldn’t be a life-long struggle. It is NOT just another book about how to lose weight. It’s about the power of self-acceptance, and it’s about realizing that it takes as long as it needs to take. And that’s okay.
Her blog, “Before & After: A Real Life Story” (http://kclanderson.com/before-and-after) chronicles the lessons she continues to learn.
To learn more about AFTER (the before & after) and to read excerpts from the book, please visit: http://booklocker.com/books/5321.html
Foodie Mcbody?
I’m thrilled to bits to introduce my readers to Jack Sh*t, who is one of the funniest (and underneath it all, most serious about health & weight loss) bloggers out there in the blogosphere. He is one of the first bloggers I found on my “journey” and he has been a constant reminder that if we don’t laugh and have a good time on the way, there’s really no point. I consider him the King of the Index Cards, made most famous by his WIDTH (Why I Do This Here) campaign – Why DO you do what you’re doing?? (feel free to answer this on an index card of your own and send it to him!)
Jack, thanks so much for visiting, and, um… completely forgetting my name! Ah, maturity, it’s a lovely thing.
My long-running (38 and 31 days) goal chips both broke yesterday and I am looking at Day Ones for both of them (probably tomorrow).
How did this happen? Well, for the no-sugar one, it was like this. Friend and I went to awesome restaurant for lunch. I Tweeted about how excited I was to be there and try there awesome mac and cheese (<< only thing on the menu!). While I was eating lunch, I receive a Tweet FROM THE RESTAURANT saying, “When are you coming in? Say hello!” I Tweeted back, “In the red chairs!” Allison, the fabulous owner of Homeroom, came out and we chatted a bit, both of us swooning over the yummy lunch. She then brought us a piece of peanut butter pie. As a present. OMG.
I ate two teeny tiny bites, each the size of a kidney bean. They were exquisite. Amazing. One of the best desserts I have had IN MY LIFE. Then I whispered, “You didn’t see that.”
But you know, that’s the point of #7daychip. If you’re not gonna be honest, there’s no point at all.
I was wearing my exercise clothes. I wore them all day. But by evening I still had a huge to-do list for my trip TODAY, and my throat began feeling like glass shards, and by 10pm I knew it was not going to be one of those days in which I jumped on the elliptical late at night. I was completely spent. And then I knew it was over.
I don’t feel terrible about it. I knew this day would come eventually. It’s okay. I’m not going to stress about trying to exercise today (travel day). I’m going to start anew when I get to my destination (tomorrow). It will be a new day.
Number 4… aka Erica Greene! Congratulations, and thanks to everyone who entered this giveaway. I wish you all the best in finding this delicious treat in YOUR town.
Erica, the Chobani Fairy will be visiting YOU soon!
(btw, I just went to our winner’s blog and see that she recently achieved Lifetime status at Weight Watchers! – so this is also a great celebratory woo-hoo!!)
Well, the Chobani Fairy was certainly smiling on me this week. I was greeted one day by a GIANT BOX that had been delivered to my door, containing this stunning array of Chobani yogurts! I have to admit. I love a certain Other Greek yogurt and had never even TRIED Chobani until this week. WELL.
Where have you been all my life?
Since then, I’ve been eating Chobani for breakfast and snack (and sometimes dessert) all week. It is WONDERFUL. I’ve had the peach, the mango, the pomegranate, the blueberry and the pineapple. Members of my Extremely Helpful Family have tasted the vanilla, the black cherry, the strawberry, the lemon and vanilla. All of them have been given the thumbs up but my hands-down all time favorite is the MANGO. All of them have chunks of real fruit and not just the weird jam-like stuff that other yogurts have. It is so, sooooo goooooooooooooood.
I just emailed all of my local grocers and begged them to stock the Mango, if not all the other flavors!
And you know how awesome and generous the Chobani Fairy is? She has agreed to bestow the same awesome sampler case upon one of my very very lucky blog readers! Yes, this is one of the sweetest giveaways ever.
To be eligible to win win win all of this yum yum yum, you need to do the following things:
- Leave a comment HERE telling me which flavor you are most excited to try.
- Go to Chobani’s Facebook page and “like” them. Which is certainly not hard to do. Say something friendly to them. 🙂
- Go to MY Facebook page and “like” me. (but I hope it’s real like, and not just airquotes-like!)
Leave a comment on Chobani’s facebook page that says “I hope that I win @Foodie Mcbody’s awesome yogurt giveaway on http://www.foodfoodbodybody.wordpress.com!!” (<<copy and paste so the links all work)NEVER MIND! Don’t do this one anymore! Do the next one instead.- Go to ANY post on this blog, read it, and leave a comment (not about yogurt, about the contents of the post!)
Okay, got it? The giveaway starts NOW and will run until 5pm (Pacific time) on Tuesday, April 5th! Nearly instant gratification!
GOOD LUCK, everyone!!!!!!
I haven’t done yoga in many, many years. In fact you might say I have had a yoga phobia. I’m not even sure why.
When I was in college (like a million years ago!) my boyfriend and I took up a home course in Bikram yoga after seeing the extremely sexy and appealing yoga-in-a-Turkish-prison scene in Midnight Express. It looked pretty irresistable. So we bought this book, and I bought a Danskin leotard (LOL) and we commenced to learn the poses along with Bikram and his cast of inflexible movie stars. (he had these hilarious pose photos – you can do it perfectly like Bikram here, but if you are a normal person with hamstrings of concrete, you may do it like … Debbie Reynolds!) But seeing the imperfect movie stars was kind of reassuring.
After that one stint of doing yoga in- what – 1978? I stopped and actually have not been back since. I’ve had a weird chip on my shoulder and I don’t even know why. At some point I came to associate yoga with sanctimonious Cafe Gratitude– type vegans AND with women who put on makeup and $150 Lululemon clothes to exercise. I mean, if you’re going to do yoga, I kind of think you ought to be doing it while wearing rags on a concrete floor. LOL. It’s supposed to be a spiritual practice, not a practice in consumerism and looking stylish.
Also, I can’t sit upright with my legs extended and since you have to do that ALL THE TIME in yoga, it makes me feel cranky and inadequate. Maybe that’s the REAL reason.
BUT… my friend who moved to New York was back in town for just a few days, and she invited me to her favorite yoga class, and said the instructor is AMAZING, and then we were going to go to the Bakesale for Japan together, and it’s really the only opportunity we had to get together, so… what the heck. I went.
First of all. This was a Level 2-3 class. Hahahaha. Second of all, it was PACKED. (popular teacher/ Saturday morning) Thirdly, I thought it was an hour class but it turned out to be 90 minutes more like 100 because he went overtime. YOW.
It started out innocuously enough. Some “getting in touch with your breath/body” stuff which segued into some very gentle neck stretches, and it had been going on forever, and I thought, not so bad.
Then it got bad.
There was a lot of downward dog and plank activity, and warrior pose stuff and even flying on one leg, but the thing that got to me was the Rabbit. (picture above) Except we not only did it like the picture, we also did it while our back quarters were still downward dogging, and one leg up in the air. We were to put all the weight of our bodies on our HAIRLINE. I mean, ow.
This yoga is no joke, people. I have had a few forays into “gentle” yoga or “restorative” yoga and this was a total kickass workout. I was shaking and trembling and sweating and really FEELING IT. It felt like it went on and on forever, but in fact it was around 95 minutes. Give or take.
When it was over, I was trembling like a scared Chihuaha for about an hour. I felt really… shaky. But then after that I felt good. Really good.
That’s my takeaway message. I’m probably going to do more yoga because it’s like good medicine. I think it’s good for me and does things that my other workouts don’t do. I’m going to start investigating different classes and see which ones might be a good fit for me. This one was pretty hardcore. At one point people were actually doing HEADSTANDS and I was like… whaaaaattttt? No way I was even going to go there. But it was good, and I do think another barrier was broken in Foodie McBody-land.
After the class we went over to the main Bakesale for Japan location. In my mind I was thinking this might be a day when I’d break my chip vow and try some sugar. Everything looked freaking AMAZING. But in the end, I decided it wasn’t worth it to me. I took a tiny nibble of something called a “sesame stick” and it was on the sweet side so I didn’t eat any more. But I also got some miso pork (made from Sendai miso, how perfect could that be?) and some farm eggs and little cheddar crisps made from cheese and black rice – wow, right? Yum.
It was a good day. And I definitely stayed on track, both exercise and sugarwise. Yay!
Tell me: what do YOU think of yoga? What kind do you do? What kind do you like?
foodfoodbodybody 
