In any case, last Saturday, the number of cookies wasn’t pretty.  Or vegan.

This week has been an effort to largely get back on track with my eating habits, but I have been HUNGRY.  I’m not sure if it’s the workouts or what.  So I’ve upped the food a bit.  But it was time for me to take a little break from the PB Loco.  I’ve been putting it on the side of bananas and apples.  I’ve been putting it on toast.  I’ve been depositing it directly into ma mouf via spoon.  I’ve been doing this multiple times a day.  I strongly suspect the combo of sugar, salt and oils (all of which are additives in PB Loco) are just too much for my taste buds to resist.

So these bad boys are going to have to be hidden away in my freezer:

In the freezer, sorry guys

I think I’ll try and make some of Tina’s Peanut Buttery Bars with the White Chocolate Peanut Butter just to get it out of the house.  I’ve had enough of it .  I wish I was the type of person who could eat one cookie or one teaspoon of PB and be satisfied.

As soon as I’m done with these, I’ll be switching back to my regular TJ’s raw almond butter and peanut butter — I still eat it quite enthusiastically, but it’s not quite such a compulsion.  I think because it doesn’t have the added sugar/salt/fat.  Has anyone read The End of Overeating?  He makes the point that companies know the proper balance of sweet/salty/fatty that triggers our brain’s reward center and they engineer their junk food so that it is virtually irresistible to mere mortals.  That certainly has been my experience, so I think avoiding engineered foods sounds like a good idea for me.

Moving on to some yummy drinks:

Hemp-a-licious

That’s cooled coffee shaken with some hemp milk, a few drops of Vanilla Stevia, and ice.  I also made some coffee ice cream using coffee, maple syrup, coconut milk, dates and a bit of carageenan.  It was delicious.  Unfortunately, I meant to take a picture but it was gone before I knew it.  My one trouble with making homemade ice cream is that it freezes too hard in the freezer.  Directly out of the ice cream maker it’s wonderful.  But any leftovers turn out rock-y.  I added carageenan hoping that would keep it slippery, but no luck.

Oh well, it’s probably a good idea to learn patience and let it defrost.  :-)

I made this GM (I think it was this one, it’s the only pic I have left on my camera of a GM) with a frozen banana.  All other things were equal (strawberries, almond milk, etc).  The frozen banana really made it extra delicious — creamier and sweeter.  I recommend freezing your bananas before blending them.  Oh, and you have to peel them first.  I learned this the hard way.  Same goes for avocados.  Peel them and take the pits out.  That may be obvious to everyone, but it wasn’t to me.

Have a great weekend!  Happy Independence Day to my US readers.  And I hope my non-US readers enjoy their July 4th.

Peace!

E.

Ah.  Weight.

The short answer:  about the same. 

The long answer:  Sigh.  Thanks to ladies like Angela and Gina, I’m trying to get away from the neurotic calorie counting and scale hounding that I’ve subjected myself to for the past 20-ish years of my life.  First, I’m really bad at math, and turning each meal into an algebra assignment where I have to research calorie contents, multiply by serving sizes and divide as necessary were not fun.  Also, the stricter and more crazy I got about the calories and the scale, the more resistant things seemed to get.  It was like trying to force two magnets together with the same polarity.  The more I pushed, the more they pushed back (they being my sanity and weight).  

Have I shed millions of pounds as a vegan?  Well, no.  The scale is still showing that I weigh pretty much the same as when I was eating 1/2 a pound of chicken breasts and 2 eggs every day.  But when I went in for my annual doctor’s visit this morning, I am six pounds lighter than I was last year.  That’s even after all my snacking yesterday and pizza night (yes, I am so neurotic that I know the scale should be two pounds higher the day after pizza night).  Why this is showing up on the doc’s scale and not on my Tanita scale, I dunno.  It’s not the clothes I wore because (again, revealing my neuroses) I always wear the lightest possible clothes to the doc’s.  I also try to schedule it early in the morning and eat breakfast afterwards so the scale isn’t affected by the weight of my food or clothes.  Crazy?  Yes, but accurate!

As an aside, I always find myself a little surprised when the nurse asks me if I need to “empty my bladder” before I get on the scale.  I immediately revert back to when my mom used to always ask if I needed to go potty every time we passed a bathroom (obviously, that was back in my toilet training days).  I always think about her question for far too long.  Isn’t that too personal to answer? Also, is it really necessary? I mean, I’m just stepping on the scale, it’s not like I’ve got a long car trip ahead of me or something.

Anyway, that’s sort of the update with how veganism is treating me.  I eat when I’m hungry (obviously, just look at my snack record for yesterday) and can eat lots of yummy fruit which is very satisfying.  I still catch myself worrying about the calories in things because, let’s face it, the behavior I began learning when I was 10 isn’t going to go away overnight.  Ironically, because veganism has such a restrictive connotation, I’ve found eating this way surprisingly freeing.  I don’t have to worry about any HFCs, sodium, fillers, or hormones added to my orange.  It’s really an amazing thing.

Peace,

Elizabeth