Okra

This is Okra:

This is Fried Okra:

After a garage sale, we went to celebrate our good sales by going to a local restaurant called Golden Chick. It's fried everything. It's a dangerous place. I didn't realize how much our attitude had changed until I sat down with the food. Everything was the same color. Golden. :)

My method? Peel off the fried skin on the chicken and enjoy. There was no way I was going to risk having a gallbladder attack or having a clogged artery, or anything else by eating a TON of fried everthing. I peeled the skin of my daugher's chicken as well. (We actually just got one entree for the three of us- the portions are big enough!) She wouldn't eat the fried okra. My husband would show her how fun they are, and she just wouldn't eat it.
So...
I peeled off the 'fried' part while she wasn't looking and put it on her plate. A minute later when she saw the green- she popped it in her mouth, loved it, and gave us a good laugh!

My thoughts:
1- don't visit restaurants too often- I want to know what I'm eating. (a past post on the subject)
2- COLOR, color, CoLoR!
3- Watch out for the portion size (this is how you can actually save money by eating healthy!)
4- eat closer to the 'natural' state. Okra vs. Fried Okra.

Buen Provecho!

My Confession

I love bread.

I eat bread.

I now make bread.

When my husband and I were first married we gained. We gained a new apartment, new jobs, new life, and new weight. I weighed more 4 months after we got married than I did full-term with my daughter.

What did it?

I blame Me. My weakness. My bread.

Hot Ham and Cheese Bagel for Breakfast,

Bagel with jelly for a Morning Snack,

Sandwich for Lunch,

Banana Bread for afternoon Pick-me Up,

And Chicken breasts with Bread Crumbs for Dinner.

Don't even ask about dessert....it wasn't pretty.....

Along my quest to be aware of what goes in my body, I found that buying bread was one of the hardest things to do. There was the healthy bread, but even that had HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) in it, and a whole bunch of other things that I don't recognize. I did find some natural stuff, but really.... $4 for a loaf of bread?

Yes, my bread addiction has been under control for 3 years now, but really, $4? It just wasn't in our budget. So...I began my search for a breadmaker! And FOUND ONE! (Brand-new Betty Crocker at Goodwill for $15)

I was hesitant that my addiction would come back. Reading in SuperSized Kids today, I found this quite fitting to my situation:

"Another patient...carefully preserved a picture of his grandma, a woman the size of the Titanic who had a great fondness for baking bread. He loved his grandma and he cherished that picture. Yet... [he said] time and again, "I just don't want to be like her." He love her, admired her, respected her- but he absolutely did not want to wind up morbidly obese, like her."

Meet more families studied by clicking here.

"Parents, the time to prevent or reverse SuperSizing in our kids is always now. Don't wait until the problem gets worse. Don't wait until serious physical problems appear. If your child has an apparent obesity problem, start today to deal with it. Why? An average-sized adult may have 20billion to 30billion fat cells; a moderately obese adult, however, can have 60billion to 100billion fat cells; and a morbidly obese person in excess of 300billion fat cells. Obese children can have five times more fat cells than children of normal weight!"

"Once formed, these fat cells can decrease in size, but they do not decrease in number....

"Today is the best day to start!"

The Coolness Factor

I love friends. I love my family. I most definitely love my family more though. So, when I think about what others think about me, I think about my family. Am I Honest with them? Hard-working in serving them? True to myself?
So naturally, my family's health comes before my coolness factor.

Now to define 'cool'. My definition of 'cool' in this situation is minimizing akwardness. :) Wikipedia says that cool "often is used as an expression of admiration or approval." Okay, so social approval.

Enough background, now for the story. I have friends. I have family. I most definitely control my family's health, and not that of my friends. When my friends go to a certain fast 'food' place every week after a get-together it's hard. It's hard on a lot of people. It's hard because it's now socially expected, not just accepted.

I have found myselft not going to the weekly get-together to avoid the situation. Do I have problems saying, "Naw, I'm not going to go this time." or "No, she's ready for a nap." or "Naw, have fun though."? No, I can do it, but it gets old. Just like we get old. And we become what we eat. And I don't want to be a re-heated science experiement served on a tray with a side of diabetes and preventable heart problems.

My point? It's not easy to eat healthy, but it can be cool.
I think it cool, who's with me!?

And friends, if you read this too-my cool group is accepting applicants! :)

oh, and just to clarify, this isn't the only place that the 'coolness' factor comes into play. It's really any type of social gathering that is loaded with a whole bunch of stuff that the guests get to choose from. Luckily though, in those situations there are CHOICES! :)

Why?

I thought I'd take a post to tell the story of how this all started.

Once upon a time (seriously) I ate 2 double cheeseburgers while working 12 hours at a movie theatre. I was alternating between: trashing theaters (lingo for cleaning up after a movie was over), ticket checking, kicking people out, running up 32 stairs to thread-up the movie (lingo for getting the projectors ready), run down 32 stairs and back into concession to be a runner (lingo for doing the extra jobs for all the registers to make the line go faster). I looooved it. I didn't work 12 hours everyday, but when I was assistant manager in college- I did that quite frequently. I loooved it. I ate something that would last a while.

Then, I graduated, got married, and got a job as a sign language interpreter. Not quite the running that I used to do, instead it was driving from place to place and I understood that 2 double cheeseburgers once a day was not the way to go. So, I didn't.
*****************************************************
Then one New Years Eve, in 2007 we were at a friend's house and we were having a fun time eating, socializing, and playing the Wii. The next morning- Happy 2008: I'm sick. My stomach feels horrible, but after about a day, I'm back to normal.

2008 New Years Eve repeats. Happy 2009: I'm sick. A few months later we went to a friends house for a kids play-date/lunch. She had tons of goodies that I couldn't resist. So, I didn't! That night, I was sick- AGAIN.

Do you know why?

This is why:

This little piggy went to the market, bought a crescent wrap and went "weee wee wee" all the way through my digestive system. I finally made the connection. Okay, got it. No lil' smokies. No Pigs In a Blanket. None. Check.

Then, New Years 2010 starts approaching. No lil' smokies- got it! Buuut, I got sick BEFORE New Years. Happy New Years Eve 2009, and happy, "loose stools" along with my upset stomach. No party for me, but at least I felt better the next day, to start out 2010 healthy instead of sick- like the past 2 years.

Then, a couple weeks later, I suffered from the same nursery rhyme without having eatin any lil' smokies....strange. Then, at the end of January, I was starting to feel better. We thought it'd be fun to grab a bite out to eat cause we hardly do. Sonic was the destination.

No tots, no cheese, just a wrinkly jr. burger. I ate it. What else was I going to do? Not eat it is what I should have done. I still had a case of the 'lil' piggies' but was on the curly tail end of it. This- did not help. My stomach was a rock. In a few hours I could barely move. I had a more intense case of "loose stool" and was in pain. Then I was on the bathroom floor in pain- not moving. I felt like I did the night we went to the hospital and 4 hours later had a baby. But worse, there was no baby.

We decided to go the ER- they did some tests, but said it was a virus and sent me home with instructions to do a followup with my Dr....Great- I already had my yearly appointment scheduled for that Monday. My mom sent me with a family tree of how many people in our family were without gallbladders.

My mom, my grandma, my aunts, my great grandma, my great..great...you get the point. My genes were not helping any more than the Jr.Burger was.

After an ultrasound and HIDA scan- the conclusion was that my gallbladder wasn't bad enough yet to take out. But to try to regulate it with diet. My response: we don't eat that bad! I mean seriously, we make most our food at home, we eat out like hardly ever- where is all the fat coming from that was stressing it out?! Their response: it's just bad genes.

In conclusion:

The more I read about it, and asked questions, I realized that everyone has their gallbladder out these days. Our diet is so awful that we destroy it. But wait- mine's not THAT bad yet. Still functioning about 7% above the average removal functioning of 30%. Great, right? Well, for me, yes. I am not one of the people who came equipped with a functioning part. My factory settings came with a handicap. My galbladder started the food consumption, fat break-down process race with bad genes.

My goal: To limit fat intake so as not to put additional stress on my already genetically stresssed-out galbladder AND while I'm at it, take out everything else that's not good for the rest of me. I want to know what I'm eating.

Why? I want those lil' piggies to go home and stay there.