Archive | October, 2014

Low Is Optimal?

31 Oct

I’m not a huge obsessor over blood pressure. I know some people have to keep track of their blood pressure quite frequently because of health concerns but mine, not so much. Part of that is probably due to age, and how I live my life, and other random factors but sometimes I feel it is just fluke-ish good luck lol

High blood pressure runs in my family so I tend to think I’m probably going to end up with high blood pressure at some point, it is partially hereditary isn’t it? Kinda like cholesterol? I think…shrug, I dunno.

My blood pressure is always low.

I don’t mean low as in its in the normal range, I mean low as in low. When I am having a medical emergency and have to go to the ER I always have to explain that my blood pressure is naturally very low so if it is reading as normal that means it is actually high. They never listen to me *rolls eyes* which is annoying, sigh.

Today I was in a PharmaSave and they have one of those do-it-yourself blood pressure machines. I haven’t checked my blood pressure in ages so I thought, meh, why not, I have time to kill.

According to the chart on the machine Optimal Blood Pressure is 120 & Below for Systolic, 80 & Below for Diastolic, Normal Blood Pressure is 139 & Below for Systolic, 89 & Below for Diastolic, High Blood Pressure is 140 & above for Systolic, 90 & above for Diastolic.

2014-10-29 16.06.36

My readings showed my blood pressure as:

105 Systolic

59 Diastolic

Pulse 64

There was no chart explaining about heart rates so I’m not sure if 64 is good or bad, I suppose I could google…

…ok, I just googled and 64 is good. Yay! According to the Mayo Clinic:

“A normal resting heart rate for adults ranges from 60 to 100 beats a minute. Generally, a lower heart rate at rest implies more efficient heart function and better cardiovascular fitness. For example, a well-trained athlete might have a normal resting heart rate closer to 40 beats a minute.”

What I’m curious about is the blood pressure readings. When I google about that most articles are talking about high blood pressure and the dangers of having it, they pretty much ignore low blood pressure. One article I did find said as long as you aren’t having any symptoms associated with low blood pressure then it’s ok if you have low blood pressure, sure it could be an indication your heart isn’t able to pump blood as well as it should and you could have heart problems but if you aren’t dizzy, fainting, having blurred vision, nausea or other symptoms than you’re most likely ok.

While that isn’t alarming, it also isn’t comforting lol

I’m not actually worried about my blood pressure readings, since I’ve always had low blood pressure I just take it that is how my body does things. The chart giving the numbers for how to know if your blood pressure is ok or not leaves something to be desired though. I mean c’mon, 120 and below is optimal, but how far below 120 do you go before optimal becomes low? Sames goes for the Diastolic, how far below 80 can you go before it becomes a concern? Shouldn’t there be some kind of cut off number? I’m just sayin…:P

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Halloween Candy Can Be Your Friend, Honest!

30 Oct

I know a lot of people who get all “omg keep the halloween candy away from me! danger! danger! ack!” but it doesn’t have to be like that, honest! 🙂

Unless you have the most amazing willpower ever you will, at some point, have a treat. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you aren’t over indulging and in general are eating in a healthy manor, treats can be your friend. If you don’t feel deprived, or like you aren’t allowed anything treat like, you’ll be less likely to ditch the diet or healthy eating plan (or whatever you want to call it) so that you can plow your way through a cake or a tub of ice cream.

The trick is to find ways to give yourself little treats that don’t completely derail your eating plan. There are lots of ways to do this! Think of small, portion packaged treats. 🙂

Weight Watchers makes all sorts of portion packaged treats, from chocolates to mini cakes to ice cream to, well, almost anything. I used to buy these…

So yummy. So hard to find.

So yummy. So hard to find.

They are by Whitman’s and it says right on the bag how many points per chocolate, within the bag each chocolate is individually wrapped so you don’t have to worry about the chocolates going stale if you don’t eat them quickly. They have a wide variety of flavours (as you can see from the above picture) and they are goooooood. Mmm! However, they are hard to find, at least where I live, sigh. There are a lot of Weight Watchers foods out there, but most of them are not in Canada. Why? I’m going with the world is a cruel place. 😉 lol  Really, I have no idea why every other country seems to have a wider variety of Weight Watcher’s foods in the stores than mine. When I would come across these I would stock up because there was no telling how long it would be before I would find them again.

Another option are these cute little mini ice creams. Ben & Jerry’s, Haagen-Daz and even Magnum all do mini sizes. I haven’t tried any of them because I have never seen them in stores. There is however a mini ice cream I have tried and really liked. It is by Nestle and looks like…

nestle sundae

Most of the flavours shown in that picture have not been in the stores when I’ve seen the Nestle ice creams lol and I can’t recall right now which of the flavours I have tried but they were good, and the perfect size. I would lean towards trying the ice creams that don’t have smarties or oreos or rolo etc in them as the added candy will just make it that much worse for you lol the ones I’ve eaten were more traditional flavoured ice creams.

Something I discovered at my friend’s place was a Costco find. I absolutely love the Brookside chocolate covered fruit, well, let’s be honest here, “fruit” pieces lol But whatever, they are so good! I have tried the pomegranate and the acai berry.

brookside

Only problem is they come in a fairly large bag and if you have problems with mindless eating, or aren’t good at portioning your food, or just kinda go over board, you could very easily eat waaaaaay too many of them. Well, my friend was at Costco and discovered Brookside sells their chocolate covered “fruit” in packages sized to put in lunch boxes. So you can grab one small package and have yourself a little treat while watching tv, or sneak it in to a movie theatre or have it as a snack at work.

I could go on with all these awesome mini food finds that are available year round but the point I am wanting to get to is this. Halloween candy is mini. It is perfect. If you are someone who likes chocolate bars, or tootsie rolls, or really, almost any type of candy, halloween can so be your friend. Think about it. Instead of indulging in a full sized Twix bar you can eat a mini one from the halloween candy stash, get the same yummy taste and enjoyment as the full sized bar but none of the guilt and nowhere near the same amount of calories. I know for a fact halloween candy can last an entire year. I don’t mean because of rationing it, I mean it will still be ok to eat in a year…which if you think about it, is kinda freaky…anything that lasts that long is unnatural, but hey, like that’s gonna stop any of us from occasionally eating it? Ha! 😛

So why not wait until the day after halloween, buy a big ol box of discounted halloween candy and use it throughout the year as your treat to yourself every now and then? When you really want that Kit-Kat, or Skittles or some other candy you can easily grab a mini version, enjoy, and not have any worries afterwards…just make sure to not eat it all at once! 😉

halloween candy

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A Loud Empty Lot

22 Oct

How much thought have you ever given to the length of time it takes to tear down a building? Or how loud the process of tearing down a building is?

The house next door to where I live got bought by some guy who decided to tear it down so he could build a bigger better house. The tearing down process got delayed because the house had asbestos and I guess that means special care has to be taken, shrug. I figured with fall here the house would stay with it’s yellow warning tape wrapped around it until spring, I mean, no one starts construction right before winter, right? Um…wrong apparently.

This past Wednesday morning I got woken up niiiiice n early by my landlord knocking on my door (I knew it was my landlord because I am in a basement suite of a house and my “front door” opens to a hallway within the basement of the house so the only people who can knock on my door are my landlord and his wife). So, yeah, super early I get woken up by knocking, which to be honest, I am surprised I even heard since I sleep like the dead lol I go stumbling to my door in mismatched flannel pj’s, crazed hair and my eyes squinting out from behind my seriously outdated glasses and mutter a “yeah?” as I open the door a crack. He found this all very amusing 😛 lol he said the workers for next door needed to bring in a large piece of machinery and they needed me to move my suv. I just sorta stared at him in confusion, said wait a minute, grabbed my keys and handed them over, no way in hell was I gonna go out there in my pj’s with my bed head and glasses to move my suv! 😛 Luckily I have an awesome landlord so he went and moved my suv and I crawled back in to bed, ahhhhh bed, such a good place to be.

I got all comfy, the cat crawled back in to bed and got all comfy, I was almost unconscious and Oh.My.God. the loudest noise in the world started! Right outside my bedroom window! Oh, and yeah, the noise didn’t stop. The cat freaked out and went running, I groaned and tried to bury my head under the pillow but oddly enough I don’t like being smothered *rolls eyes* so I lay there, so comfy, so cozy, so miserable because I was being deafened.

Eventually I decided screw this, get up and watch out the window, how often do you get to watch a building be torn down without leaving your place or having to put on real clothes? Wasn’t till I put my glasses back on and went over to the window I clued in someone had put a piece of wood over the window to protect the glass from shrapnel, which sure is a good thing but to me that just meant I had all the volume but none of the viewing opportunity. Lame!

Turns out it takes all day to demolish a house. A very loud long day.

Thursday, I got woken up bright n early by the sound of horrible horrible machinery because apparently Thursday was clean-up-the-mess-that-was-created-by-demolishing-the-house-on-Wednesday day. Lovely. *rolls eyes* Neither the cat or I were impressed.

I figured for sure it won’t be like that Friday, what else could they possibly be doing over there now that the pieces of the house were gone?

I was wrong. Bright n early Friday morning that god-awful piece of machinery was turned on again. By this time the cat had given up running in to other rooms trying to escape the noise and instead crawled under the blankets, who doesn’t like a blanket fort when they are upset? lol

Day three of this process involved making the hole in the ground even bigger *groan* Stop the madness!

Least they didn’t work Saturday or Sunday, phew!

On Monday when I got home from work I stopped and took a long look at the hole…

This was a house three days ago

This was a house three days ago

That big ol mess used to be a house filled with asbestos.

As I was walking away I noticed this…

random vegetable

random vegetable

A random zucchini. I went and poked it because it seemed so odd to see a zucchini sitting on top a pile of dirt that was part of demolishing a house. I guess there was a vegetable garden in the back that got demolished along with the house…or the earth is randomly spitting up vegetables, and if that is the case I’d like some squash to appear in my backyard thanks, lol. 😉

The noises are still happening but not as loud, or maybe I’m just used to the volume now? Either way, I am now able to sleep through the madness, yay! My ability to sleep like the dead is such a wonderous gift lol

Now the hole is more defined, has straight edges, a flat bottom, and has been lined with a thin layer of some sort of rock, to me it looks like a really large litter box lol

I’m kinda regretting not taking that zucchini…

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Spider Protein

21 Oct

Depending on which internet meme you believe we all either eat 7 spiders a year while sleeping, or we don’t. I prefer to think that we don’t cause the idea of eating anything while I am asleep is disturbing, ick! lol

Last week I was cooking dinner and I decided to boil some pasta. I keep the pan and pot I use most often on top of the stove instead of putting them away in the cupboard, cause you know, I’m lazy like that – don’t worry, when I have guests coming over I put them away *rolls eyes*.

Anyways, I grabbed the pot off the burner it lives on and measured some dry pasta in to it, then I realized I was an idiot and needed to take the pasta out of the pot so I could put the water in and bring it to a boil before adding the pasta so I started taking the pasta out. When I lifted a couple of the noodle pieces out there was a fluff dangling off of one of the pieces. I was all, “huh, guess there was a piece of fluff or something in the pot” I brought the pasta closer to my face so I could see the fluff better while separating it from the pasta and it turned out it wasn’t a fluff it was spider webbing and dangling at the end of that suuuuuuper fine piece of webbing was the world’s smaaaaaallest spider. It was a little dot of a spider, practically not there.

spider

Obviously it died a quick death.

The disturbing reality is, if I hadn’t put the pasta in the pot and then realized I had to take it out I would have added water to the pot, brought it to a boil, added pasta, cooked the pasta, drained the pasta then eaten the pasta. The spider would have been present for each of those steps and unless it went through the strainer when I drained the pasta, it would have ended up in my tummy. Ugh.

Granted, I would most likely have not even noticed it, it was such a teeeeeeny tiny spider, but knowing I might have eaten it makes me shudder. 😛 …shudder and wonder if the meme that says we eat spiders in our sleep is right? 😉

 

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Fort Langley Cranberry Festival 2014

13 Oct

This past Saturday was the Cranberry Festival, yay! 🙂

It is a dragon boat festival that isn’t a dragon boat festival lol The teams competing are dragon boat teams but we race in canoes, with canoe paddles, the boats hold 10 people (instead of 20 paddlers, one caller and one steers person), the first bench has only one person on it instead of two, the steers person sits instead of stands, the boats purposefully collide with each other and the races are a lot longer (2km minimum instead of 500m).

These races are wicked fun and are a great way to end the season – no pressure, no worries, just go out and have fun with the team. There are no prizes, no medals, just bragging rights lol 😛

My team

My team!

At the Cranberry Festival it is all about the final race, it is an obstacle course and really, it’s the only race we care about on the day lol From the start line you head towards a bridge where people have dropped pumpkins, you have to scoop up a pumpkin, go under the bridge, do a figure 8, go back under the bridge, turn around, partially beach the boat while one paddler jumps out and does an on-land obstacle (they take their paddle, have a cup of cranberry juice balanced on the flat side, run down the beach without spilling any juice, collect a bag of cranberries), the paddler jumps back in the boat, we unbeach ourselves, turn to go in the opposite direction we are facing, go around a buoy, go under the bridge and get past the buoys that represent the finish line. Awesome huh?

Someone cheering for another team took video of part of the race so you can have a look and see a bit of what it was about. The boat that gets away from the beach first and gets an awesome breakaway lead, that’s my team *nonchalant shrug* Cause ya know, we’re awesome like that. 😉

After that turn (when the video cuts out) we headed straight, went under the bridge, passed the finish line and had time to turn around and watch the rest of the boats finish the race, it was a crazy long lead lol

We were especially happy with this win because our team had never won at this festival before, we broke our curse! wOOt! 😀

 

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These Shoes Ain’t Made For Walkin’

9 Oct

Oh my poor feet!

I own a pair of shoes that look like this…

converse

Well, they almost look like that, just think of those shoes but grungier lol and nooooo internal padding left, sigh.

I like to walk, especially when doing errands, it’s multi-tasking at it’s finest! Exercise and errands all at one time, plus the added bonus of saving money by not driving (not using any gas) and being a bit environmentally friendly. 🙂

Normally if I am walking longer than a half hour I wear the runners I wear when I run, they have great padding for the feet, are super comfy and well, duh, are meant for things like long walks. Today however I decided to wear my converse. Dumb, dumb move.

See, my converse are old, and I don’t mean 6 months old but 2-3 years old. I know! I should have replaced them ages ago, but I can’t afford to and I love em too much to get rid of them. Besides, they are ok for shorter outings lol

I didn’t take in to account how long I would be walking, mostly cause I mis-remembered how far the store I was going to is, oops! By the 40 minute mark of my walk I was really regretting the shoe choice. It had been so long since I’d worn them, I’d forgotten about the lack of padding within the shoe and the ball of my left foot was blistered, sigh.

I got to the store an hour in to my walk, wandered the shop for a while, I was looking for items for my halloween costumes (yes, the pluralization of the word costume is correct, I need two!) then started the walk home. I was sooooo tempted to catch a bus but I just couldn’t bring myself to take a bus when I could walk and burn calories.

So, hour two of my walking happened, and by the end of it I had a matching blister on my right foot, oh and the left foot’s blister had grown, ugh.  I hate blisters, not cause of the pain (which is there), or because of how I am now limping (which makes going back and forth to the laundry room all kinds of fun), but because of the squishy feeling I have with every step, the feeling of walking on two water balloons that are just waiting for the perfect time to pop! Ick! Ick! Ick!…did I mention ick? 😛

Least I got a decent walk in, 6.7 miles or 10.8 km, guess that’s worth two massive blisters, right?

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Aquafit Tuesdays

7 Oct

Normally Tuesday and Thursday evenings I am in a dragon boat, training. I’m so used to that schedule that when training season ends and I have those evenings free I feel a little lost…what am I supposed to do now? Usually, for a month or so I just have fun doing whatever, either staying in or going out, doesn’t matter what I do I feel like I am in the wrong spot, like I’m cheating on the team lol

Training has been done for quite a while now and I’m trying to find something to replace it, I’m much more likely to not skip a workout if it is planned and I’m expected to be there. Gotta love accountability! 😛

A teammate suggested I join her at aquafit class on Tuesday evenings. Normally I would have begged off, uh, bathing suit? No thank you! But ever since my cliff jumping and subsequent swimming in the ocean I have been wanting to get back in the water. I had so much fun swimming in the ocean that I spent the rest of the summer wanting to repeat the experience. Every body of water I saw while on the rest of my vacation elicited the question “can we swim in that?” and the answer was always “no!”…makes you think about just how horrible humans are to the planet that there are so many different water sources and none of them are safe to swim in, what’s with that?

When I got back from vacation I thought I’d hit up the pool near me but it was under construction and wouldn’t be usable for a couple months, sucky timing that. I have been waiting for the pool to re-open when KR texted me about going to aquafit with her at a different community centre and I figured, yes, go for it! Forget about the whole people-seeing-me-in-a-swimsuit-thing and go, swim, enjoy!

This has been my third Tuesday in a row going to aquafit and I’m really liking it. I always thought of aquafit as something old ladies did lol but this class is an intermediate to advance and has a wide variety of ages, oh, and there are guys there also, not cute guys, old guys, but whatev.

The class is an hour long with 40-45 minutes of cardio, the rest uses these dumbbell foam things to do resistance work in the water. It works the muscles surprisingly well! 🙂

the foam dumbbells

the foam dumbbells

This evening I messed up on the time and was an hour early, oops! Last week I purposefully went early to use the fitness room in the community centre, I hopped on a treadmill and went for a run before meeting my friend for the aquafit class. Apparently my brain is easily confused because when I was getting ready this evening I was remembering being there for 7pm but thought that was for the class, not for the run then the class *rolls eyes* I didn’t take my running clothes because I wasn’t planning on running before the class, and I didn’t realize my error until I was in the hot tub waiting for what I thought were the last ten minutes before class started. I wasn’t about to go get dried off and try to find something to occupy myself for a little under an hour just so I could come back and get dressed in a wet swimsuit lol So I sat in the hot tub for an hour, oh the hardships! lol I actually spent most of that time sitting with my legs dangling in the hot tub, but close enough lol 😛

I know some people scoff at working out in the water, everyone knows it is easier on the joints but somehow working out in the water, in a lot of people’s minds, equates to a less effective workout. Perhaps because you can’t see the sweat? Here are some facts about water workouts that may surprise you…

– Working out in water means your muscles are forced to work harder, burning more fat and toning them up faster than land-based exercises. This is because they are fighting the water every time they move.

– Jogging on dry land will only burn up approximately six calories per minute. But aqua jogging can burn over 11 calories a minute, giving you a better workout.

– The extra pressure of the water on your legs also pushes more blood back up into the top half of your body. This makes your heart work harder, raising your heartbeat and burning even more calories during your water workout.

– Aqua-exercises also have a cooling effect on the body. Because you are working out in the water, your body is not sweating as much to cool the muscles down. This means there is less chance of you becoming dehydrated during your workout.

– People with lower back problems can benefit from aqua-exercises as the water supports them, taking pressure off the spine.

So there ya have it! Don’t mock those of use that work out in the water, we’re getting in shape faster than you are! 😉 lol

I bought a ten visit pass and plan to go to aquafit every Tuesday, most Tuesdays I will go for a run first, might as well utilize as many of the community centre’s resources as I can. 😉

Now to find something to do the rest of my evenings…

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Best Foodie Website Ever!

4 Oct

Today was a Subway kind of day. Actually, I didn’t want food, all I wanted was the fountain diet coke but I figured that the pop alone didn’t qualify as lunch sooooo I got a sub also.

Because I forgot to take a picture of the sub before I ate it...

Because I forgot to take a picture of the sub before I ate it…all I have is a picture of the logo lol

I went with my standard option, a 6 inch turkey sub on 9-grain wheat bread, with white cheese, toasted, loaded with veggies and topped with mustard and light mayo. It may seem boring but I really like it – and not in a it’s-a-healthy-choice-so-I’ll-eat-it kind of like it but I legit like it. 🙂 I  love that you can have avocado, I thought it was supposed to be a limited time offer but it’s been around for ages and doesn’t seem to be getting phased out, maybe it’s so popular they realized they should keep it? shrug. I dunno, I’m just happy it’s a choice.

My sub is more veggie than meat lol I get spinach, avocado, tomato, cucumber, green pepper, red onion, black olives and banana peppers. Mmm! Don’t you love how many different colours veggies come in? My sub always look so purdy 😉 lol

I still remember by heart how many Weight Watcher’s points my sub is but now I’m counting calories and those I do not have memorized. I checked out the Subway website this evening to find the calories and discovered they updated it quite a bit since I last took a look and holy cow, amazing website!!

You pull up a chart that has all their items listed, just like every other nutritional information chart you find on restaurant’s websites but! this one is different! You click on the item you ate and it takes you to a new page where it explains the nutritional information you are seeing is if your sub was on white or wheat bread and had no condiments. But c’mon, who doesn’t put some sort of condiment on there, right? So then you click on a button that says “Calculate Yours” and boom! you get this amazing page that has all the options listed, you can say exactly which vegetables you had, which cheese, which condiments and as you pick and choose what you had on your sub the nutritional information that is showing on the side of the page updates itself.

Seriously, best. nutritional. website. EVER!

Turns out my sub with all it’s modifications is 440 calories – good to know! )

As I was googling for a picture of the Subway logo I came across a Subway scandal! *shocked face* Turns out people have been measuring their subs and they are shorter than they are supposed to be, the footlong is coming in at 11″ which makes me wish I’d measured mine before eating it lol Next time! 😛

If you want to check out the Subway nutritional information page click here.

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Hunting For Information

3 Oct

I met a friend for coffee today which turned in to lunch at White Spot which turned in to my first meal that I can’t properly track because I didn’t cook it at home. Erg.

I knew this was bound to happen but why-oh-why did it have to happen so soon? *pout* I’m weird in that if I am tracking I want to be able to track perfectly for every single thing I eat, if something happens and I can’t track a meal then I feel “what is the point” and I usually quit. It’s stupid, I know. It’s just that if I’m doing something, I want to do it right, shrug.

So for the rest of the day I didn’t know what to do. Should I eat? Should I assume my meal was all my calories for the day and my punishment for eating something I shouldn’t have is that I don’t eat again today? What do I dooooooo?

Well, duh, I went online and went hunting for the nutritional information lol Gotta love the internet!

At first I couldn’t find what I needed, the salad is new and I wasn’t seeing it on any of the nutritional information charts that White Spot has online…granted I was searching while at work so I couldn’t fully dedicate my focus to my sleuthing lol When I got home I was all ready to admit defeat for tracking my food today but I decided to give it another go and boom! Found it! *happy dance* Actually, more like horrified gasp…

I am not so dumb that I don’t know that restaurant salads are not always healthy, that in fact, they can be hiding a huuuuuge amount of calories, fat etc and you might just be better off buying a chicken burger or sandwich or some other dish, that knowledge didn’t stop me from buying a salad though…and no, it wasn’t one of the salads marked as a healthy choice, it was a new salad that sounded tasty…I let my desire for something tasty dictate my food choice and I am now kicking myself for that. Kicking hard!

The salad that I ate (ate every single bite of I might add) is the Candied Salmon Spinach Salad. I know, I know, the word “candied” is a dead give away, sigh. I somehow thought the spinach and salmon in the salad would counteract the candied part and the dressing…obviously it did not.

Here, this is the salad description, how can a girl resist the sound of this salad?

Candied salmon, fresh strawberries, gingered pecans, red onion & Okanagan goat cheese on spinach dressed with our champagne vinaigrette. With garlic panini bread.

white-spot_candied-salmon-spinach-salad

And yeah, I ate the bread too…

After my second round of internet searching I learned that my lunch was 868 calories! Broken down that is 682 calories for the salad and 186 for the garlic bread.

Yes, I do know I could have saved calories by getting the dressing on the side but I didn’t so no point in lecturing me about it now. 😛

Here comes the second problem with food…when I was at work I had to decide if I should eat dinner or not. I decided I should, cause if I skip eating that’ll mess with my metabolism, right? Right. So, I ate dinner.

Dinner at work today was salmon (not candied!), with squash and other veggies on top of couscous. Soooo, healthy? I dunno, shrug. The salmon didn’t have a sauce or anything, so I’m leaning towards that part being healthy, and the veggies were probably ok too, but what about couscous?

After some hunting online I came up with approximate numbers for dinner, 88 calories for the couscous, 82 calories for the veggies and 354 calories for the salmon. The calories for the salmon pains me, pains! That’s a total count of 524 which puts me at a total of 1392 for the day.

I can’t decide how I feel about that number. *confused face*

My first two days tracking my calories I wanted to be under 1200 calories a day, the second day I went over a bit and ate 1263, but I thought that wasn’t sooooo bad. After lunch today I was all ready to be super pissed off at myself but I was talking to a friend at work who is a personal trainer and she said I should not be eating under 1200 calories a day, that is too few calories and I’ll put myself in to starvation mode. I’m still not sure exactly how many calories I should be eating, but if I am aiming for 1200 now, then 1392 isn’t so much over that I can’t recover from it, right?…Riiiiiight…ok, so maybe I am trying to make myself feel better and I could be way off, I dunno, sigh.

What sucks is that it is now almost midnight and I am hungry *pout* Looks like my two high calorie meals today didn’t keep me full, nor did all the drinks I had which no, I don’t mean alcoholic drinks but diet coke, water and tea.

So yeah, that is how my third day went, ordering ridiculously bad for me food and ending up being hungry at the end of the day. I want a cookie *pout* 😉

 

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The Smell of Stupid

2 Oct

You might not think that ‘stupid’ can have a smell, let me assure you, it can.

I was cooking dinner this evening and two things happened. The first is this semi-yummy meal…

Mmm, pasta, shrimp and veggies.

Mmm, pasta, shrimp and veggies.

It is Catelli Healthy Harvest pasta, no name mixed veggies, 9 frozen pre-cooked shrimp all mixed up with Classico Alfredo & Sun dried Tomato pasta sauce. I rate it a semi-yummy because I prefer a higher sauce-to-pasta ratio so to me it was a bit bland. I cooked 85 grams (1 cup) of pasta because the box said that is a serving, ummm, yeah, way too much! Next time I will half the amount I cook and that should be plenty, bonus is that I can keep the same amount of sauce (1/4 cup) and that should be a much better sauce-to-pasta ratio for me. 🙂

But really, the meal is not the most important thing that occurred during the cooking of dinner. This also happened…

How lovely, melted plastic!

How lovely, melted plastic!

Something you should know about my kitchen, I have almost no counter space. I don’t mean I have a normal sized counter and it is covered with stuff, I mean to the left of the sink I have a space wide enough to have two cups side-by-side (so, tiny space!) and to the right of the sink I have just enough space to hold a dish drainer…is that what it’s called? I mean the thing you put your just washed dishes in to so they can air dry. And that is it. That is all my counter space.

This means a lot of food prep happens on top of the stove because there is nowhere else to do it.

Soooo, this evening I have water in a pot coming to a boil on one front element, on a back element I have a pan heating up to eventually cook the shrimp in and on the other front element I have my kitchen scale, which I am using to measure out my veggies. The veggies are kept frozen so I kept having to pause in the pouring of them in to the bowl that is on top of the scale so I can hit the bag against the edge of the sink in an effort to break them apart.

Then…the smell starts. It doesn’t smell good. I couldn’t figure out what it was, none of my food should smell like that, but I don’t have any candles burning, nor is anything else in the apartment creating a smell, so what the heck is it?

Even though I don’t like the smell I can’t figure out what it is so I keep doing what I am doing, figuring whatever is causing the smell will stop eventually, or make itself known.

I take a look at the pan on the back burner and realize it isn’t warming up, which makes me take a look at the stove knobs which made me realize holy shit I’d turned on the front element and was cooking my kitchen scale! Ack!

I immediately pulled the scale off the burner and strings of melted plastic spread from the bottom of the scale to the element, like melted cheese on a pizza, but smellier.

Sigh.

I put the scale upside down on the edge of the sink, I couldn’t think of any better place it should be put to cool down lol and stared at it in horror. Horror! This oh-so-awesome scale was a gift from my brother yeeeeears ago! I’ve been using this scale at least 7 years…holy crap I feel old now…but that’s besides the point! This scale is awesome, and I cooked it! Who does that?!?! 😦

Not gonna lie, I started to get upset not only because I was stupid and cooked the scale but because now I was going to have to try to find money to buy a new scale asap so I can keep on with weighing out my food, sigh. Then I remembered I have a back-up scale, yay! Couple years or so ago my mom got given a scale from a friend and she passed it on to me, it is a Weight Watchers scale that can calculate the points of a food while it is on the scale, cool huh? I didn’t use it because I wasn’t following Weight Watchers at the time and if I did need to weigh something, well, I already had a scale, shrug. Me being me though I kept the WW scale, in the box, in perfect condition, in a rubbermaid container where it would be safe.

Point to me for keeping the scale! 🙂

I pulled the WW scale out of storage after I finished dinner and was so close to being relieved when I realized it didn’t have a battery and it takes a 9V battery, not exactly something I just randomly have lying around. I know, I’m so weird right? 😉 lol

But fear not! When I went to put my dishes in the sink I tested the scale. It had cooled off so I flipped it over and tried turning it on and holy crap it works! Wowza! 😀 I cooked the scale so much I can see clear through to it’s innards but that sucker still works! Talk about quality made! lol

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get the melted plastic that has become one with the burner off the burner…and ideas?

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