Cooking :)

Broccoli Salad:

I added purple cauliflower to it! YUM! (No flavor difference, but sure made for a nice color.)


Shrimp, Tortellini and Spinach:

Peanut Butter Cookie Cups:

I got this recipe off the Pilsbury website. (I am having trouble locating it on the site.) You take ready made cookie dough (peanut butter type), and put a piece of candy in the center. Ben and I chose to put Rolo in the middle. :)

Last night was a good time with the DS group. Ben got to meet other DSers, and I'm so thrilled that our group is growing! Ben and I came back to the house and watched a movie.

My dad and Ben enjoyed the lunch. Cooking like this is EXPENSIVE. I am not used to this. The Kraft website has some budget recipes that I want to check into, as well as a "5 meals 1 bag" recipes for things to get for the entire week. It even comes with a handy checklist to take to the grocery. Again, I'm starting at the ground up here, so I am more than willing to learn by what may seem to be so basic to others.

At the grocery store, I also bought four different types of Larabars. These are not very carb friendly, but are overall healthy (and supposed to be very filling). Since I am more in the maintaining mode, I am going to give these a try. I'll update my thoughts on them as I eat them this week.

Slept In...

I was able to sleep in this morning, and boy did it feel GREAT! :)

I don't really have a lot of exciting updates to give about myself. This was my first week back to work. I feel so blessed to where I am at in my life right now.

Last night Ben and I went out to dinner at a new restaurant called Smoketown USA, which was so good. I had smoked chicken salad, and it was out of this world! I also had this yummy sweet cornbread. When we asked the owner about it, the cornbread is half cornbread mix and half cake mix. It was truly a great dessert!

Afterwards, we went to watch my students play basketball and cheerlead. We had a blast at the game. I love watching my students play sports, they are so adorable at this age!

Tonight Ben is going to meet the people from my DS support group. It feels so good that he knows everything about my weight ups and downs, yet loves me still. I really could not have asked for a better guy.

I am not giving up on cooking. I am cooking for Ben tomorrow after church! Pictures will follow!

Sad

Last night I taught my GED course. This is a five week crunch course for those who are close to getting their GED. I looked at the list, and I recognized one of the names. When this student arrived, I realized that I had him as my student in 4th grade. It was my first year of teaching. He was not the type of kid that I pictured would have ever dropped out. I would love to know his story since being in my classroom. I did tell him at the end of the night that I was his fourth grade teacher (I was at least 140-160 pounds heavier at the time).

Check 'Em Out!

Since I am working on learning to maintain my weight, I am becoming very interested in other people who have been successful at it. WOW....there are a LOT of people who are successful at this! (Good thing, I'll need a lot of help!) I had commented way back that since having WLS, I had noticed that many people who I thought were "naturally thin" really had to work at it, and by evidence of some of these blogs, many people are working hard. I want to maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle, so I'm savoring every word.


Here are a few new GREAT blogs I have been reading:

The Inner Workins of a College Graduate

Winning Friends with Salad

A Year in the Kitchen

On the Threshold of Greatness

A Fog of Thoughts....

It is amazing how long it takes for things to sink in this thick skull of mine. Yet sometimes I wonder how I'm expecting myself to blink and erase almost two decades of being fat. In certain times, I think I am being way too hard on myself.

Facebook has been an interesting thing the past week. I've had two friends from college, and one from high school give me the whole, "Wow, I didn't recognize you....you look amazing," response. I was about 220-230 pounds when I left high school, and around 275-280 pounds when I left college. (Gee, I really pushed that freshman fifteen huh? Guess I thought that was a YEARLY suggested weight gain.)

Today at our faculty meeting, I was sitting with some teachers that I don't normally sit by. I was talking with one of them, and said how good she looked, etc. She said how she had lost twenty pounds. I said some comment about weight, to which she replied, "but your not heavy." Words like these are still hard to sink in and really stick.

Ben and I went to eat at Outback tonight. He is in the middle of a crunch class to work towards finishing up seminary (he should graduate in December). It was good to spend a little bit of time together in the middle of the start back of the new year.

Tomorrow night I am doing a "first." I was quite the wallflower when I was huge. It was such a risk getting out and meeting people. On Halloween, I met an acquaintance of Ben's named Veronicka. It was a very brief meeting, but we seemed to hit it off. She emailed and asked if after the holidays if I would like to start hanging out some. I was pretty excited about it. She seems like a nice girl, and I am open to learning more about her. Having a friend is always good... :)

I stayed up for about two hours longer than I should have last night. I did NOTHING productive. I'm going to go to bed tonight.

Picked the WRONG Week to Quit Sniffing Glue....

Seriously...scratch my last post. I'm going to try to clean up and declutter some, but I'm not feeling it. I got home from GED, and I filled up one whole bag with trash tonight. That is all I'm doing. I'm not getting up early to do more in the morning. I'm going to sleep in, get ready, grab a coffee, and head into work.

Night all!

Getting My Ducks in a Row

I am back home from North Carolina. I'm not quite ready to go back to work, but the break has been wonderful! :)

I'm a very organized person. My classroom at school is amazing to look at. I love finding new ways to be more efficient and productive. I've always been more lax at home, primarily because I don't have a zillion children running around, and I don't have mounds of paperwork to keep up with. I basically kept the problem under taps at home until this summer. I was doing a ton of trainings, and teaching GED classes (dating Ben), etc.

I'm determined to get back on the right track. I can keep my place looking nice without a lot of work. I know I let the computer sidetrack me. I was amazed at when I wrote a list down and set the timer for thirty minutes just how much I accomplished. I love "Flylady's" website, who talks a great deal about home organization/cleaning. I don't know what my system is yet, but I am developing one that will work well for me. The next two weeks are going to have a lot of heavy cleaning to get done, but then the AM and PM things for each day will be more of a "maintaining mode."

This is not a New Year's Resolution....this is something I want to do anyhow. I would never let my classroom get in the shape that I have let my home get into. Time to do something about it.
Off to bed now.

Cooking for Today

Barbecue Ranch Chicken Salad

Beef Noodle Bowl

Stuffed Zucchini Boats

Tonight's Dinner

Three Cheese Chicken Penne Pasta Bake

I'll be posting pictures tomorrow of my salad for lunch, and the dinner I have planned. :)

A Tale of Two Moms...

I'm still down in North Carolina, and I've had quite a bit of time to hang out with Ben's mom. I'm a big time observer, so here are some thoughts....

His mom:

I know that she is 67 years old. She is a breast cancer survivor. Until about the past ten years, she has weighed at the most 130 pounds. She currently weighs 170 pounds. She takes no regular medication outside of some vitamins. She has a great amount of energy, and appears to walk with great ease.

My mom:

My mom is 56 years old. She has had her gallbladder removed, some thyroid problems, and a knee replacement. I know she takes quite a few prescription medications, but I'd have to call my sister to find out what they were all for. (My sister used to be a pharmacy tech.) At our Christmas celebration, we watched a home video when my siblings were 2 years old. My mom probably weighed 150 in that video. I honestly never remember my mom being that small. I know she had lost a lot of weight (roughly 50 pounds) to get to that. I always remember my mom being over two hundred pounds. My mom is getting closer to 300 pounds now. She is pre-diabetic (having to closely monitor her blood sugar.) She has very little energy. She is always complaining of her back hurting.

And me....

I've been given a second chance. While there are genetics that I cannot escape, my health story doesn't have to go the route of my mother. I want to become more like Ben's mom....eleven years older than my mom, and so much more vibrant. I cannot help but believe that not having all that weight on her up until the recent years has affected her quality of life later in life. I don't want to blow my second chance. I spent from age 9 until age 27 from the ranges of overweight to super super morbidly obese. I don't know the long term effects of that. I do feel that I got my weight off "just in time" before long term adult things started to set in.