Tasty Friday

Had the usual kind of day - green smoothies for breakfast, celery with almond butter, cucumber sticks, peaches and banana for lunch, and for dinner, a Mock Chicken Salad on tomato with a fruit smoothie on the side. The Mock Chicken salad was really good! I didn't have the cucumber it calls for in the recipe, but I made it the way it was written otherwise. Definitely a keeper!

What day was it again?

Not much to blog about, kind of a stressful day. I'm just going to list the things I ate today. Most were in multiple quantities, so even though there are only a few things listed, I ate 'til I was satisfied at each meal.

Green smoothie
Peaches
Banana
Almonds
Watermelon
Apple

Scratching my head...

Trying to figure out where today went! It was a little nuts around here. One thing after another, I tell ya. Nothing serious, just lots of little frustrating bits here and there.

Had a good day, food-wise. Green smoothies for breakfast, a huge fruit salad for lunch (2 sliced peaches, a dozen strawberries, some grapes and a banana), plus 3 long stalks of celery with a smear of almond butter. Had to head into town (part of the little bits adding up...) and didn't have time to grab any dinner, and knew it would be late by the time we were able to get back home.

Thankfully, I had read about a drive-thru coffee place in town that sells Green smoothies. Yeah, I know I had one for breakfast, but really, another green smoothie sounded more appetizing than a pitiful iceberg salad with a few shreds of carrots, a couple cherry tomatoes and a slice of cucumber! And at least it would probably get me through the events of the evening with less hunger than the salad! These green smoothies were GREEN! Ours are fairly dark green because of the berries we add, and this place doesn't put berries. The smoothies are mango, guava juice, banana and spinach. It was a lot sweeter than the ones we make, because of the more tropical fruits, but it was pretty good. Especially since I'm not a fan of mango or guava! Ha!

Gotta get to bed... day 4 of Curves for the week comes early tomorrow morning...

Ooohhh I figured out my "hitting goal" reward!

Ya know how most people like to set themselves a reward for reaching their goals in weight loss? I got to thinking about it while I was at Curves this morning and I realized I know exactly what I want my reward for hitting my goal to be!

When I get to my goal of 23% body fat, I am going to have Patrice of Beautiful Life Images take our family portraits! She's in southern California, but we go down there a couple times a year to see family in the next town over. Patrice and I graduated from Academy together, and I found her photography blog earlier this year. I really love her work! She took some quick photos of my kids a few weeks ago while passing through town on their family vacation, and I can't wait to see them. But when I get to my goal, I am going to book an actual session with her for our whole family the next time we're in SoCal! Hee! I am so excited now!

Week 2, here I come!

Here I am with week one behind me. It went great, and I'm continuing to move forward. I lost 11.8 pounds! Had a good workout at Curves today, and talked to a couple other ladies about raw while we exercised (Hi, if you're reading!). It's exciting, and it's fun to talk about.

Nothing fancy in the food department today, just yummy breakfast smoothies, a huge bunch of grapes for lunch, a small handful of raw almonds for a snack, and for dinner we just had a big salad with lots of different colors in it. Yellow bell pepper, cucumber, tomato, carrots, romaine lettuce... I threw in a few almonds, too, and topped it off with the raw Italian dressing I made earlier this week. I've been reading lots of recipes on some of the forums and blogs that I've found though, so maybe one of these days I'll actually try something more advanced!

I'm thinking about making my big "goal" for loss a body fat percentage rather than an actual weight. An ideal weight is so hard to figure out, but a body fat percentage is pretty much across-the-board. It doesn't matter if you're 5'1" or 5'9", an ideal body fat percentage is going to be the same - 18-25% for females in my age range, as best I can tell. I'm going to shoot for 23% body fat and whatever what that gets to me is fine. I'll still track my weight progress, too, but that won't be my big goal, really. At Curves earlier this month I believe my body fat percentage was around 43.5. Yikes. It was over 44% when I started going to Curves. Nearly HALF my body!!! Gross. I'll find out next week at weigh-n-measure where I am now - that'll be a once-a-month measurement, which is why I'll keep tracking the pounds lost on a weekly basis.

Week 1 draws to a close...

Today is the end of week 1 on RAW! It's been a good week, without giving in to any weaknesses - really, no temptation to speak of at all! Actually, I've noticed that the cheese snacks the kids were having me open for them (string cheese or little 3/4 oz squares of cheddar) didn't even smell good to me, and that used to be one of my favorite snacks!

I worked out pretty hard at Curves today - got all green lights on the CurvesSmart! Yay! I'm feeling it a bit in my shoulders, but nothing too serious.

Had the usual green smoothie for breakfast - more on that in a minute. Had a huge bowl of sliced peaches, red grapes, strawberries, and celery with a teeny smear of almond butter (maybe 1 tbsp total, it was two stalks of celery and I didn't fill the sticks like I would've with peanut butter, but just put a light spread on the inside. Had a couple of raw walnuts too - not even a handful, just a couple nuts.

The kids wanted clementines for an afternoon snack, so I chowed down on some as well. Yum! I don't even remember how many I ate, just enough that the afternoon munchies were gone.

Dinner... wowie WOW was that ever good! I made RAWfredo sauce from a recipe my friend sent to me. I could probably eat that stuff almost every day. Yum!!!!!1!!eleventy!!!! I can't find it online so instead of posting a link to it, I'll post the recipe here.

RAWfredo Sauce

• 1/2 cup pine nuts, soaked 2 hours, rinsed, and drained
• 1/2 cup cashews, soaked 2 hours, rinsed, and drained
• 1/2 cup water, more water if to thick
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 2 teaspoon agave nectar
• 2 teaspoon nutritional yeast
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon Himalayan crystal salt, or salt to taste
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Blend it all in a Vitamix or food processor until smooth and creamy.

I didn't have pine nuts, and they're really expensive, so I used all cashews. And I used regular sea salt.

Then I just spooned it over zucchini "noodles". I don't have a spiral vegetable slicer and I didn't feel like flat noodles, so I used my Zyliss mandolin on the julienne blade. Perfect!

Tomorrow I'll update my weight loss ticker to show how much I lost this week, I'm pretty excited to see the final number for the week! LOL And for once, I'm looking forward to my weigh & measure at Curves next week.

Now, back to the green smoothie breakfast thing. I've had a couple people ask me about having them every morning. What's wrong with that? We need the greens, and it tastes good, so until I feel like I have to have something different, why not have the smoothies every day? I do plan to make some raw granola and almond milk sometime, but I haven't found a recipe for the granola that I want to try yet. I have a recipe that a friend gave me for the almond milk, and I've tried it at her house. Yum!!

Until tomorrow...

Lazy Sunday

Didn't get the day started too bright and early, but that's ok. We started it out with our green smoothies, anyway! Yum! The girls love that.

Lunch we had leftovers from the taco salad the other night. Well, the leftover taco "meat" and the cashew "sour cream" anyway. The lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, pico de gallo, etc., was still fresh. I added a whole orange bell pepper to my salad today, and it was good! It was nice and crisp, so it kind of took the place of any need for crunchy chips.

Went to town for groceries this afternoon. We were out of some of our produce, and I also picked up some raw Almond Butter. Had a little bit on celery sticks when we got home, and it was good! Not the same, exactly, as peanut butter, but good in its own right. It almost had a sweet taste to it, as if there was honey added, but I checked the ingredients "list" at least three times - "raw almonds" is all it had listed.

Going to have a nice fruit dinner here soon - I have some watermelon chilling in the fridge, and I'll have peaches and maybe some grapes if I'm not stuffed by then.