Detox Day 3 – Cleansing Energy Rocks!

Today is day three of my detox cleanse and I have to say I feel really, really good.  Yesterday I felt like crap so I am glad that was short lived. I woke up this morning and felt an over abundance of energy, I  just leapt out of bed and I can’t remember the last time I actually did that. Usually I just lie in bed wishing I had about two hours more till the alarm goes off.

I ate quite a bit more today, probably because I didn’t really have much food yesterday because I felt a bit sick. I also tried some fruit that I haven’t had in twenty years: grapefruit. The last time I ate grapefruit I hated it, and kept with me the memory of how bitter it was, and how much sugar I had to pile on it to make it taste okay. But seeing as there wasn’t that much fruit on my list that I actually wanted to eat, I gave grapefruit another try. I’m glad I did.

I’ve been eating a lot of baby carrots. They’re really good as they’re easy to munch on. I was getting a little bored of broccoli and cabbage, but again, it’s the lack of flavoring that was making it all a tad boring. I am a spice person, I love hot foods. Eating veggies with no salt is tough after a few days.

On this cleansing plan you don’t eat anything past eight o’clock in the evening, and that really didn’t bother me. Not that I usually eat very late anyway, but sometimes when I’m watching TV at night I like to have something sweet, like hard candy. I didn’t do any of that, and I didn’t have cravings either.

Example in point: My hubby came home today with a bag full of Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins. You’re probably thinking, “Fran why didn’t you strangle him?” You know what? I didn’t even say a word, and he should be very very thankful for that! Actually it’s interesting how without the sugar, I haven’t been thinking much about sweet foods. I didn’t feel bad that I couldn’t have donuts at all. I found that enlightening.

So this is the last day of the fast/cleanse and tomorrow I will continue on till lunch time and then start eating some ‘regular’ foods again. It will be interesting to see what types of foods I eat – will my love of bread go into overdrive? We’ll just have to see.

The Ups and Downs of Dietary Cleansing – Day 2

This is day 2 of the limited fruit and veggie detox cleanse that I have embarked on. Day 1 was a lot easier than I thought it would be, and I am very grateful for that. After just eating plain fruit and vegetables yesterday I really thought I would be going nuts, but strangely enough the day passed with me drinking plenty of water and not eating that much – and not feeling hungry either. I felt like it was mind over matter on my part: I had willed myself not to feel deprived during this cleanse and my body obliged.

Today I started getting a headache about lunch time. I knew it was a caffeine withdrawal headache and it was going to hurt. By about 3pm my head felt like it had suffered a brutal kick, but only on the right side.

The morning eats were delicious: apples and oranges. It feels as though my taste buds, after not being assaulted with sensory overload from all the flavorings in commercial food these days, are hyper sensitive. The apples I ate this morning tasted like the sweetest apples I have ever had. They were from the same lot that I ate from yesterday that had not seemed as sweet to me then.

I ate a little more today than yesterday. But at dinner time I didn’t really feel like eating anything, I felt a little sick. I guess that’s the toxins doing their thing, coming out of my tissues etc.

I tried to do some housework today. Vacuuming the house made me feel really tired and a little shaky. It’s crappy when you don’t have enough muscle power to do simple things like cleaning carpets.

I really want to eat some salt or other flavoring on my food! I just wish I could have enjoyed a good curry for dinner this evening. The upside of all this clean eating is that without sugars and overly starchy foods, my teeth feel so clean, so that’s a plus.

It’s late in the day now and the update is I felt like absolute poo all evening. Driving around after dinner I thought I was going to throw up. Awful! But opening the window for some fresh air helped immensely. The headache is still with me, on the right side of my head only. It better be gone when I wake up tomorrow or I will be a very unhappy camper.

Detoxing with A Fast/Cleanse

Have you ever felt like you were trapped in a much older person’s body? That’s how I have felt for about 6 months now. Yes, I have been working out and getting ‘energized’ but I have continually felt like it was all way too hard, or at least a lot harder than it used to be.

To give you a bit of background information: I am a certified personal trainer who worked at a gym that just ran its PT operation counter to my training. The gym’s view was the customer needs to be in and out, nothing more than some weight training exercises and goodbye – so I got very discouraged and quit.

I was so ticked off with the gym that I, subconsciously at first, started avoiding working out at all. Then, after several months of inactivity, I couldn’t take the lethargy anymore and started working out at home to DVDs – hence the name of this blog. Well, that went well for several months but then I just started to feel sluggish most of the day, like I was much older than my 39 years. Some days my body just didn’t want to move much and I felt like I had a lead ball in my stomach!

Now this lead ball in my belly meant that I felt like I had eaten a lot more food than I had, my whole midsection felt really hard most of the time, like it was under pressure. I started thinking that the food I was eating was causing me some issues.

I went to the library and found a detox book called “The Seasonal Detox Book” by Carrie L’Esperance and I was very interested in its content. I have been eating seasonally, as best I can, for about 6 months but still my nutritional needs seemed to be out of whack. In the book read a lot about fasting, mainly of the juice variety, and I remembered a weekend about 20 years ago when I had done that and felt like utter crap. I did not want to repeat that weekend so I glossed over those kinds of options. But one actually contained solid food and was dubbed a good beginners fast/cleanse for the spring. Although not yet spring, I figured I would give it a go.

So today, as I write, I am on the fast/cleanse. It started at 8am and up until 12pm all I could do was eat fruit. On the list were about three fruits I could eat easily: apples, oranges and grapefruit. Lemons and limes are not fruit I can eat without something to balance them out, so I didn’t even buy those.

For a few months now I have been weaning myself off caffeine and I was down to about two cups of caffeinated beverage a day – tea is my choice for caffeine. I am not going to be ingesting anymore caffeine so I am not looking forward to the headache I am going to get tomorrow!

For the rest of the day, until 8pm, I can only eat steamed, baked, roasted or raw veggies from this list: asparagus, beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, dandelion leaves, garlic, leafy greens, olive oil, parsley, parsnips, potatoes with skins, sprouts; and drink pure water and herbal teas.

I am going with the potatoes and carrots. I have to say it will be weird not eating any bread or flour based products for a few days, but I think I’ll survive. Actually my biggest dread is the hunger, but I haven’t felt hungry so far, so I am pleased.

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes. I am not doing this for weight loss, as I know that the weight lost will be water and I will put it back on. I am doing this to sort out my gut, or at least improve it. I know my body can run better, so now is the time to see just how much what I eat affects my body.

Jillian Michaels and Workout Weirdos

I just want to have arms like Jillian Michaels, that’s all, it’s not too much to ask is it? Check out her guns in this video!

I thought I’d add this clip not just because her biceps and triceps look so admirable, but because of what she says.

The question she answers is posed by a lady who has a workout junkie ‘weirdo’ friend who works out like a crazy person and eats a vegetarian diet but cannot lose those last 10 pounds.

Jillian uses a little formula in conjunction with BMI to work out how many calories a person needs to eat every day so as to not go into starvation mode – which is exactly what the workout ‘weirdo’ is in.

It’s a good reminder to us all that sometimes working out and consuming less calories is not the winning combo it may seem. Our bodies are all unique and what works for one person [especially Jillian,] does not work for all of us [like me – when I was did personal training and taught Turbo Kick I still didn’t have arms like Jill’s 😦 ]

So enjoy the video, it’s only a few minutes long.

How Many Calories Are in my Recipe?

This New Year I decided to just have a few New Year’s resolutions so that I would most likely stick to them. One of them is to eat better.

I realized that last year my eating was pretty poor. I didn’t eat lots of junk food or anything; instead I ate nutritionally poor foods like bread instead of veggies. Some days my meals were toast, toast, and more toast; or toast, a Panini, a burrito – not a lot of veggies there at all.

My slow cooker, my trusted friend from West Bend, decided to molt its Teflon coat so I decided that I didn’t need to eat micro pieces of Teflon and I binned it. My error then was not to replace it. I slowly forgot how a slow cooker had been the main work horse in my kitchen, I guess in part due to the carb induced amnesia I was under! But something pushed me to get another one over the holidays and I am so glad I did.

I am now the happy owner of a 6 quart Set ‘n’ Forget slow cooker by Hamilton Beech. I have to say it rocks! It’s pretty huge but it looks very contemporary and it’s stylish enough to keep out on the countertop all the time.

Since getting it I have cooked curry, soup, chili and seasoned ground beef to add to a ton of recipes. I’ve cooked in such large batches that the freezer is starting to get filled again and I am so happy [it doesn’t take much, does it?]

My plan is to have plenty of high quality prepared meals in the refrigerator and freezer that I am not tempted by snacks, or bread!

But now on to why I am actually posting today. I thought I would simply calculate the calories of the curry I made last night so that I can track my calorie consumption at sparkpeople.com [which is the only website I have used to this, on and off, for about four years now.]

It sounds simple: add up the calories and then divide by the 10 servings I made to get a serving to be listed under ‘lunch’ today. Well simple it was not. Boy, sometimes I think the old ways work better. I used to get out my calorie book and write all the ingredients down in a notebook, then get the calculator out, and voila.

So sparkpeople.com lets you manually add foods that you eat that aren’t in their database, but I had a recipe I was following so I couldn’t add that – but I could add a food grouping. I added all the items into a food group and saw that the ten servings added up to around 1500 cals. Great – a serving would be a mere 150 calories.

Then I went into the food tracker screen and added 0.1 of my food group, as that’s my serving size for lunch. Lo and behold all the ten items from my food group then appeared under ‘lunch,’ instead of just the group item’s name. Crap.

Google was my next stop. I looked for ‘how to calculate the calories in my recipe’ and stopped off at a few sites but none of them helped me in my quest. Recipecal.com wanted me to sign up [which is fair but I didn’t want to]; fitwatch.com didn’t have the units that I had used for different items among their recipe analyzer so that didn’t work – where I had used my ounces scale they had listed cups and I didn’t want to google for a conversion calculator; finding just a plain boiled potato listing in caloriedatabase.com was a pain; and finally at theofficediet.com I downloaded an excel spreadsheet to help me but it was for grams, and again I didn’t want to convert.

I was about to lose my mind: my calorie counting book was nowhere to be found – had I thrown it out with the Teflon peeling slow cooker last year? I have no clue. All I know is that manual calculation was not an option at this point.

Google then lead me to sparkrecipes.com, by none other than my trusted sparkpeople. Bingo! I filled out all the details and hit the button to calculate the nutrition info for my one serving. It read 394.1! What? When I did the food grouping I got 150. I then had to go through the ingredients to see where the error was coming from. In the end it was that darned sneaky mango chutney! For some reason it was showing up as coconut oil and so the numbers were totally skewed.

Then I looked for the button to let me import the data into my food tracker, but I couldn’t find one! What? These are the same people, right? The spark people? There must be some way to be able to import this information, but I couldn’t find it, so I manually entered the data into my food tracker.

Finally, after about 40 minutes, I was able to select one serving of my homemade veggie curry!
The lesson I take away from this complete and utter rigmarole is to go out and buy a calorie book today. If you cook and calculate the calories in your recipes let me know how you do it, I’d love to hear from you!

Muscle Milk – Is It Worth It?

I just finished a container of Muscle Milk protein powder. Not sure what to think of it. It was very expensive, as protein powders go, so I don’t know if I’ll get it again. I had the chocolate one and I really liked the taste of it. Even though Body Fortress protein powder, which is also sold at Wal-Mart, is much cheaper, it tastes gritty, and quite foul.

Muscle Milk has a quite a bit more fat than regular protein powder and you need a couple of scoops to get the same amount of grams of protein as in other powders’ servings, so it really is quite pricey per scoop. If any of you have used it, maybe you can comment on it – did you see greater muscle growth while using it?

It’s funny, I don’t see myself as a big supplement taker, but I recently stocked up on a couple of supplements from Puritan’s Pride when they had a Columbus Day sale. I was stunned at the noticeable improvements I felt not only within my body, but also emotionally. Within 24 hours I felt like I had so much energy and I felt so good! And what was I taking? Well for the last few months I have just taken a daily vitamin, but I had just purchased a vitamin B complex and some Co Q10.

I swear my hair is shiny again – it had been looking a little dull – and I don’t feel so tired. The good thing with Puritan’s Pride is that their products are value for money. With their Columbus Day sale I got three bottles for the price of one! A real bargain. I got my hubby some Fish Oil capsules and we have enough for about a year! Personally I like to use Barlean’s lemon flavored Omega Swirl which is so delicious you will swear it is liquid candy, not fish oil! My daughter begs me to give her fish oil every day – how many kids do you know that do that? This stuff is beyond yum, with no after taste. 

Well enough of what sounds like a sales pitch [go get yourself some!] and back to the Muscle Milk.

I think I have seen more muscle, or what appears to be muscle under some flab! But it’s hard to say. I took the Muscle Milk each time I worked out over a two week period – just one scoop each time. That translates into 16g of protein, which with ‘regular’ protein powders is less than I would usually take.

So now I’m wondering whether I should buy some more or just go back to the EAS protein powder I get cheap[er] from Costco. At least I can afford to make that stuff into smoothies. I’m thinking I’m gonna go on a Costco run tomorrow…

Working Out While Sick – Or Not!

Day 111

Well my cold continues on and for a day or two it has been mixed in with serious allergies too. Man, this sux! So, I have promised myself, irregardless of how crap my head feels tomorrow I am just going to ‘grin’ and bear it, and workout with Jillian Michaels.

I know about the ‘neck test’ – if you are sick from the neck down don’t work out – but this cold has made my head feel so pressurized that I just couldn’t exert myself;  the thought of even light exercise made me wince.

Ans so I feel pretty annoyed with myself – I mean just when I am really enjoying this new workout I get sidelined. As I have written earlier about the body adapting very fast to stress and one day’s workout with Jillian seems like death, while the next day not as bad at all, it makes me think that whatever gains I made last week are now lost. I must seriously have backtracked with taking the last 5 days off. We’ll see how poorly I do tomorrow. I may have to drop back down to level 1! Oh, please no – I need progression!

One thing that I have been doing the last 5 days though is getting in some great veggies as well as fruit – a lot of strawberries from the nearby farm stand. I have eaten a ton of vegetables. I love to cook and with the long weekend I just took the opportunity to cook up a feast for a few days in a row. I got a load of shrimp from Harris Teeter and grilled those up and they tasted like heaven! 🙂

It’s funny, usually my nutrition sucks because I am busy working and just grab crappy fast eats from my fridge, but being off work meant that I could take the time to prepare lots of healthy meals. I guess I need to try and find more of a balance otherwise shifting any weight is going to be hard…

OK tomorrow – bring it on!