Superfoods and weightloss

I know that I'm a little behind the times, but I feel like the latest nutritional buzz word is "superfood".  According to urbandictionary.com, a super food is,

"a food that is so high in trace minerals and other nutrition that has never been isolated to make a supplement. Therefore a superfood cannot be replaced with a supplement."

 Normally when I think of a food that is high in nutrition and minerals I think of coarse grainy stuff like granola.  Granola isn't bad, but the texture kills me after a while.  Or the title superfood is only reserved for nasty greens like kale and stuff that breaks your jaw while chewing it.  Nevertheless, I decided that I would try to consciously add a superfood to my diet once a week.  I was ready to steel myself and suck it up until I actually researched what foods are superfoods.  Health.com came up with a list of 27 superfoods that are good for you and will help you lose weight.  Here is their list seperated up into various food groups:

• Grains and starch
• oats
• brown rice
• almonds
• potatoes
• pine nuts
• pearl barley
• quinoa
• Fruit and vegetables
• avocados
• blueberries
• broccoli
• pears
• grapefruit
• bananas
• oranges
• plantains
• Dairy:
• cheese (fresh goat or feta) [I wish brie was here, le sigh]
• low fat milk
• Proteins:
• black, white, kidney, garbanzo beans
• lentils
• salmon
• eggs
• Other:
• wine
• dark chocolate
• green tea

I must say I was SUPER surprised!  Except for three things (grapefruit, goat and feta cheese, and wine) I actually like most everything on this list.  In fact, I eat a lot of these foods already.  So here is what I would like to do.  Once a month, I want to highlight a SuperRecipies.  A SuperRecipe is a recipe that contains at least two superfoods and is under 400 calories a serving for a meal and 200 calories for a snack.  I'm basing my calorie cutoff on my personal Calorie max of 1,400 Cals/ day.  That means that I can portion off my day into 400 cals/meal and have 200 calories left over for snacks.

So stayed tuned for these tasty recipes and please share any of your SuperRecipes!

New Year, new start

Okay, so I'm going to get on the bandwagon with pretty much EVERYONE else on the planet and make the resolution that I want to lose weight.  I was doing somewhat well and then right around Thanksgiving I was like fuck it and now I'm almost back to where I started from. :(  However, I am down two pounds overall still, so I'll take the small victories :).  To combat my frustration at myself I have reset my progress graph to my 2014 weight (198 lbs).  I feel like it is slightly cheating, but I know myself too well.  If I spend too many weeks above my goal weight, the cookies became REALLY appealing.

So here are my New Year's Resolutions:
1) Lose one pound a week 
This is the main goal for me.  Working on a reward system if I make my monthly goal weight, taking suggestions ;)

2) Get one hour of exercise a week
Ain't no one got time for the gym, so I found a SLEW of 10-min workouts that I'm excited to try out.  I can do ten minutes a day.

3) Do not eat after 9:00 p.m
While late night snacking isn't directly related to weight gain, I have a tendency to crave sweets right before bed, so if I don't allow myself eat after 9:00 pm I won't dig into the Christmas cookies. 

I want to keep them simple and obtainable, because once I gain some positive momentum it will become easier!

Clearly the cold weather means hibernation mode right?

you take my covers, you die

So I don't know about where you are, but this has been a FREAKING cold winter.  I know that all my East coast friends and family would be wearing a t-shirt and shorts in this temperature range, but I'm a Californian and it should NOT be below 40 degrees in the Bay Area.  I totally blame the cold weather for my lack of motivation to work out and lose weight.  It doesn't help that all I want to do is cuddle under the covers like my cat and eat really warm carby food.  I would think that it being this cold would make me want to run in place just to be warm, but I literally feel frozen and everything is sore from shivering and holding myself as still as possible. 

So I will do my best to avoid the alluring steam coming off the mashed potatoes and warm bread and decide to eat soups with lots of vegetables.  Also I'm going to try and stay away from hot chocolate and switch to herbal teas instead.  I think if I can keep my insides warm, then my outsides will become more motivated.

So here's to keeping warm and keeping the SAD away.  Though I have a confession, the cold weather makes it really feel like Christmas.  :)

So I dodged the turkey, but not the cake

Okay so I didn't stick to any of my goals last week, but I think I made some good last minute adjustments. 

1) Get a smaller plate if possible.
So that didn't happen, but instead I followed the Healthy Eating Plate model as best I could.  It helps that my cousin made a bitching spinach and berry salad that I didn't need to put any dressing on.  The berries were sweet and juicy and amazing on their own.  I had respectable amounts of turkey, the one downside was it was dry and there was no cranberry sauce (my favorite!) so I HAD to have gravy.  I was forced really.  But I didn't have a lot.  The other quarter of my plate was pasta and bread, sad to say there were no whole grain options.  Next time I'll bring some whole grain options to the table!

2) Don't have second helpings.
So totally failed.  But I made sure to heap on that salad 'cause it was DELICIOUS!   And I still took some home.  Best intentions.

3) Stop when full.
This I did do.  I did not get the feeling of about to burst open Henry the Eight style.  I was full, but not overly full.  I think it also helped that I didn't fast before the big meal.  I find that when I don't eat anything and then I'm really hungry, I eat a lot more because my body is in starvation mode.

So one out of the three isn't bad.  Besides it just isn't fair that I had TWO Thanksgivings, one for each side, back to back.  I know for a fact I was worse at my Asian side, because rice is like ninja calories.  You don't realize how much you've consumed until you put it into fitnesspal and you look like this guy:

Also you metabolize Asian food HELLA fast!  The joke is you eat Asian food and an hour later you're hungry.  IT'S TRUE!!!!  So I tend to pig out more when I'm with the Asian side, simply because 1) there is so much good food that is my favorite that I hardly get to eat and 2) I don't get full and stay full like I do on Western food.

Let's also be real, the true culprit of the four pound weight gain this week was the desserts.  Why did there have to be chocolate cake???!!!!  My will was already weakened by the tantalizing smells of turkey and potatoes, but add apple pie (which I STILL haven't had yet :( ) and / or cake.  It's over. 

Well it is time to hit the gym to work it off and prepare for Christmas and the deluge of cookies I'm bound to get from my students.  It would be rude not to eat them ...

In all seriousness, I am quite proud of how I handled the gluttony of Thanksgiving and I am going to get right back on the good train.  I had a salad for lunch when I could have had fries.  The four pound weight gain is still six pounds lost all these weeks later, and I'm feeling great!  It's all about the small steps adding up to one huge pay off!