Category: baby weight

#37: Focus on the Progress…

…not the slip-ups!

Focus on your progress, not your slip-ups. For slip-ups there will inevitably be. If there were no slip-ups, there would be no challenge, and life would be easy, and everyone would be healthy and skinny and“The Doctors” would go off the air.

Focus on the now. What can you do, say, think, feel, eat right now that will make you a better you? Just because you ate a huge dinner out last night does not ruin your diet and give you carte blanche to continue eating badly until Sunday night at midnight, at which point you will virtuously start from scratch and never slip up again. Start right now. The body is amazingly forgiving.

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Meatless Monday: Soyrizo Tacos

You won’t believe how “meaty” these tacos are.

Soyrizo Tacos 

Hello, delicious! You won’t believe how easy and non-meaty these meaty-tasting tacos are.

  • 1 package veggie chorizo (We love Trader Joe’s Soyrizo)
  • ½ onion, diced
  • Shredded cheese (Trader Joe’s soy shredded is our pick)
  • Small flour tortillas

Toppings:

  • Tofutti sour cream
  • Taco sauce

So easy: Sauté the onion until translucent. Add the soyrizo and heat through. We like to sear our tortilla shells by holding them over the burner with tongs for 10-15 seconds per side. Don’t burn your house down, though—cover them in paper towels and warm in the microwave if you don’t want to sear them!

Put the soyrizo mixture in the shells, add sour cream, taco sauce, and any other toppings that suit your fancy, and you’ve got dinner!

(Based loosely on a recipe in The Kind Diet)

#36: Food Is Our Fuel

Do you REALLY know what you’re putting in your body?

I don’t pretend to be a nutritionist, but I am very interested in the human diet. You can exercise as hard as you can every day of the week, but if you eat a crappy diet, you won’t look as good as you want to look, and you won’t be healthy. Fortunately, usually when you exercise regularly, you tend to eat a little better because you don’t want to screw up the hard work you just put in at the gym. But there always seems to be room for improvement.

Eating virtuously is pretty much impossible, especially if you want to have a social life, or any fun at all. And you’ll recall, too, that I don’t believe in all or nothing behavior. So in terms of eating a very good diet, let’s assume that we’re talking about most of the time.

See if this will click for you the way it clicked for me: Think of food as fuel. Our cars need gas to go, and we would never put anything in the gas tank but gas. So why do we clutter our bodies with so many non-energy-producing edible things? They clog up our plumbing and make us feel sluggish, ill, or heavy. Foods that are not fuel are extraneous. They just get in the way of health.

If you don’t already, take an interest in the nutritional content of the foods you eat. When I put carrots on my daughter’s plate, I’ll say, “Oooh, these are good for your eyes, so you can see better at night!” When you know what amazing things different foods do for your body, you might be more interested in consuming them. If Omega 3s are going to help my brain function, protect me from heart attacks and stroke, and keep my menstrual cramps from being very painful, sign me up—how can I not try to find a way to include them in my diet every day?

Which leads to a thoughtful idea: Maybe you can learn to choose your foods according to the nutrients you need, rather than grabbing whatever foods are closest and then wondering (later) about what might be in them.

It’s empowering to be in control of what goes into your body. It’s empowering to know about the foods you are eating, and what they are doing for you. We are not helpless creatures, with no hope but to suffer saggy bellies for the rest of our lives. You have everything you need to run a smoothly operating system. Just don’t look for it in the middle aisles of the grocery store!

Meatless Monday: Santa Fe Pizza

Meatless Monday week 2

Santa Fe Pizza (adapted from Bon Appetit’s fast, easy, fresh cookbook)

  • 1 fully baked thin whole wheat pizza crust (we love the ones from Whole Foods)
  • 1-2 c grated sharp cheddar cheese (we use Trader Joe’s shredded soy cheese)
  • 2 c “chicken” strips,* cut into cubes and browned lightly in a T of olive oil (it will continue to cook in oven)
  • ½ t ground cumin
  • ½ c thinly sliced red onion
  • Small can of no-salt-added corn
  • 1-2 T chopped, fresh cilantro
  • 1-2 jalapenos, seeded and coarsely chopped (jarred works great)
  • Salsa of your choice

*Our favorites are Morningstar Farms and Gardein—any that sound good to you will do!

Preheat oven to 425. Place crust on baking sheet. Sprinkle about half the cheese, chicken cubes, and cumin over crust, leaving a 3/4-inch border. Top liberally with onion, corn, cilantro, remaining cheese, and jalapenos. Bake pizza until crust is crisp and toppings are heated through, about 10-12 minutes. (We like to broil the pizza for 1 minute at this point to melt the soy cheese and brown the crust a tiny bit more.) Top with dollops of Tofutti sour cream, salsa, and avocado when it’s in season!

This is the basic recipe, but feel free to add toppings you think sound good—I’d love to hear what you come up with!

#35: Overdoing It

Be consistent without overdoing it—or it will not last.

I’m not a fan of deprivation. So if you ask me what I think about your “grapefruit cleanse,” I’ll probably tell you what I think, and it won’t be, “Well, get to it!”

Have you ever tried to go without sugar for a week? Alcohol for a month? Meat for a day? Then you likely know that for that sugar-free week your mind was racing….and all it was thinking about was the jar of Hershey’s kisses on your co-worker’s desk. Deprivation doesn’t work. It makes you crazy in the head until you break down and eat not just one Hershey’s kiss, but half the jar. If you had rather taken just one candy for after lunch each afternoon, you would have been satisfied of your sugar craving, and would have moved on to the rest of your day just 26 calories heavier, rather than the embarrassing number of calories heavier you are now that you ate seven kisses without taking a breath.

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Meatless Monday is back!

Make a big pot of this soup and enjoy for dinner as well as lunch the next day. You’ll love it!

Tortilla Soup 

  • 1 t olive oil
  • 1 small onion, thinly sliced
  • 2 jalapenos, seeded and thinly sliced (we use jarred, pre-chopped)
  • 1 poblano or green pepper, seeded and chopped into ½-inch pieces
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • ¼ t red pepper flakes (optional)
  • 1 t salt
  • 24-oz can whole tomatoes
  • 24 oz vegetable broth (we love no-chicken broth)
  • 2-ish cups baked tortilla chips
  • 1 T ground cumin
  • 15-oz can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
  • 1 can no-salt-added corn, drained
  • ½ cup chopped fresh cilantro
  • Juice from 1 lime

Heat the oil in a 4-quart pot over medium-high heat. Sauté the onions, jalapenos, and poblano pepper in the oil until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes. Use a little nonstick cooking spray or broth if needed. Add the garlic, red pepper flakes, and salt, and sauté for another minute.

Break up the tomatoes with your fingers and add them to the pot, including the juice. Fill the tomato can with the vegetable broth and add that to the pot. Mix in the cumin. Crush 2 ounces of the chips into crumbs (some bigger pieces are okay) and add those. Cover and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer, add the beans, corn, and cilantro, and let simmer for 5 more minutes.

Add the lime juice and taste for salt and seasoning. Ladle the soup into bowls, crumble the remaining tortilla chips over the top, and garnish with cilantro. YUM! (Thank you, Isa Chandra Moskowitz—Appetite for Reduction)

#34: Small Steps Forward

New Year’s resolutions are oh-so cliché. And yet…

There’s something about the new year, the clean slate, that motivates us to make positive changes. I see it maybe more than a lot of people because of my business, since starting a new workout routine ranks pretty high on the list of all-time-most-cited resolutions. I get it, I really do. It’s more “me” to use every new month—or even week—as a chance to start fresh, but how wonderful it must be to be able to put something you really don’t want to do off for months at a time! I’ll start next year! Really! In 2012 I’ll be ready!

Maybe one of your resolutions this year can be this: Resolve to use each new day—each new hour!—as a jumping-off point for those things you’d really like to see yourself do. Resolve to start now. When you take baby steps—walk just 10 minutes on the treadmill; eat out just one less time a week—your stride gets stronger fast. Soon you’ll be walking 20 minutes and buying new cookbooks. But you can’t rush to the end result. You have to be patient and see those baby steps as part of the entire picture. Without them, you’ll never get to the long strides. The baby steps are all part of the plan. That weight won’t just fall off because you worked out really hard one time. But you’re better off than you were before that one workout.

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Wish for a Workout?

Add fitness to your wish list.

OMG. Did you know you can add Karen the Fitness Girl classes and training to your Amazon wish list? It’s true!! Amazon lets you add items from outside the Amazon world now. You have to install an add-on button through Amazon, and thereafter, anytime you see something you’d like to add to your wish list, you just click on the button. For classes or sessions with me, you just go to karenthefitnessgirl.com, click on the Amazon button, and input the amount of moolah you’d like to see go toward precious moments with the Fitness Girl! Giving the gift of “you” time (or should I say “me” time?) just got even easier. I love it!

#32: Morning Pages

Write it down.

I was just in the shower thinking about writing, and how I love to write, need to write a blog post, but don’t know what to write about. I was thinking about how I used to do “morning pages,” the daily ritual writing prescribed by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. There was no “I don’t have anything to say,” because there was no choice. I had to write. Every morning. It was so good for me, as a writer in training and as an evolving person. So just now, in the shower, I thought, what if I do that again? My morning pages? It might not be done in the morning, but if I could sneak in a few paragraphs every couple of days, I might just rediscover the therapy of writing.

It’s totally facing a demon, isn’t it? If you’ve ever tried to write before (without particularly having anything to say), you know just what I mean. It makes me nervous, a little nauseous, forcing myself to face a blinking cursor. What is so valuable about it makes it worth it, though. It’s a purging of sorts, and also, wondrously, the written word tends to hold us accountable. In that way it can be hugely therapeutic.

Case in point: One thing I suggest frequently to people frustrated by their inability to lose weight is to chronicle their eating and/or exercise habits. Whether for my eyes, a public blog or just their own private use, writing it down is surprisingly effective. You might think you eat healthfully, but when you look back at a week’s worth of brought-in lunches you ate standing up in the conference room, you realize that extra roll on your tush might just be made of mozzarella.

Logging your workouts can also be tremendously eye-opening. It doesn’t have to be fancy; just a note penciled into the corner of a box on your calendar will do. Look back at two weeks of exercise notes and you might find that you’re neglecting your weight training and running a bit more often than your knees would prefer. Or you might see that you’re never finding more than 30 minutes at the time you go to the gym…maybe an earlier arrival is necessary to get in a more worthwhile workout.

So…let’s write it down. Frustrations, successes, big dreams and letdowns. Whether you share yours with me is up to you. I’ll continue to share my journey with you!

#30: Staying Motivated in the Colder Months

When the thought of taking a shower gives you the chills

Lovely fall, magical end to the heat of summer. Smells of burning wood seem to come out of nowhere. And thoughts of warm bowls of chili, oversized sweatshirts, and couch time start sneaking in.

So how can you stay motivated to exercise in the chillier months? Usually when you are leaving for your exercise class the sun is still up, but now it’s getting dark and your sofa is beckoning. It is hard to keep it up! It is! But you must! Here are some ideas to help you make it through the colder months:

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