The First Aquarian Celebration

Week#3

Well a bit of a setback this week as everything earnest was thrown off by the fiance's birthday. If you don’t believe me take a look at the menu from the Rosemede where I treated Adam to a winemaker’s dinner!

saltspring island fresh goat cheese &preserved lemon mousse
organic mesculin salad
kettle valley sauvignon/semillon 2005

hand made prawn ravioli, creamed leek,lobster oil, prawn dust
kettle valley chardonnay 2004

warm sweetbread & woodland mushroom terrine,
truffled cabbage, beet root reduction
kettle valley pinot noir 2004

12-hour braised boneless beef short rib, crisp root vegetable strudel,
shallot confit
kettle valley syrah 2004

elderberry pannacotta, blood oranges & butterscotch
ketttle valley chardonnay ice wine 2004



My word, this meal was too good to be true. Everything was outstanding especially the lobster ravioli and the short rib. The wines were all flowing freely and all good; the pinot being exceptional. I do recommend for anyone who truly loves their BC wine to get onto the mailing list of this winery. Most of their really good wines just don’t make it into many stores.

Alas t’was not our first night of excess during the birthday boy’s reign. Let’s just say- a few friends over, lots of good cheeses, meats and olives and a chocolate symphony birthday cake make for too many tasty leftovers!! So, both Saturday and Sunday were write-offs. It’s really hard to see that scale register in at 8lbs more than you were the day before- my body is probably a record holder for bloat capacity. It took me two days to lose the bloat. I chose to eat only fruits for breakfast and lunch and then have lots of veggies, grains and a little lean protein for dinner. It’s sort of a “Fit for Life” theme. I am officially off the cleanse although now with the fruit based mornings it seems that I’m eating even more fruit!! Not as much juice though- save for watered down, pure cranberry juice.

I’m feeling pretty good. I wake up in the mornings without a headache. I have not had heartburn once since I started the cleanse. You have to understand that I was having heartburn pretty much every night. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I was on the brink of a major gal bladder collapse. I am starting to feel like I have less weight- although nobody except for Adam has noticed. He compliments me every day and says that I’m really slimming down- that’s always so nice to hear!

Brandon was over to watch our workout a couple of days ago. He ironed out a few issues and now we’re feeling really confident about what we’re doing. After the seven sets of seven I am pretty sweaty and feel pretty good. I’m even doing squats and abdominal work which is hard and requires confidence.The trick is to do only what you’re capable of. you don’t have to do a full-on sit up until you’re ready. it’s hard to do a sit-up when you’ve got a huge slab of fat around the middle. Go easy and the rest will follow.

Anyway, 14 pounds lost so far!!

End of Week Two

End of week#2

Well I am starting to feel better , the cold is mostly gone, all being left is the constant nose-drip. I have settled into the eating plan and in fact have made a few changes. I’m switching from orange juice to grapefruit juice in the morning because OJ has so much sugar and although it’s beneficial for cleansing ...the weight-loss part has to have priority. As of the end of the week I’m also switching the afternoon snack to a whey-protien drink rather than fruit.

This current plans has it’s pros and it’s cons. There is a lot of work in the food prep. It seems like I’m always doing dishes or making big-batchs of that Super-cleanse soup- (I perfected the recipe by adding garlic and hot-sauce). I’m also out nearly every day trying to find fresh fruits and veggies The supply runs out pretty quick when you’re eating 4-5 pieces a day- which is one of the reasons that I switched the afternoon snack to protein. It’s also hard to find certain food such as watercress- or any interesting veggie without spending a fortune. I’m now making a weekly trip to Chinatown for those needs but would like to arrange for a weekly organic delivery which I’ve been considering for years.

And now...enter the Personal Trainer!!

We started our training routine with Brandon who is a good friend and very devoted to the subject of food, nutrition and exercise. He is currently finishing up his personal trainer’s certificate and sees working with us as being the ultimate challenge!!

We met with Brandon at his house and he went over out goals and physical data. He lent us some weights and we’re going to start up a program of seven reps of seven different exercises which will hopefully get us prepared. We start at the gym in a couple of weeks. We’re also doing a cardio routine of walking up hills which we’ll do on the opposite days of the 7/7. It’s been a lazy winter so far for us- especially since the windy,rainy and icy weather has kept us in general from not doing our usual nightly walks.

Anyway 12 pounds in total down by week’s end- very nice!

End of Week One

Basically this cleanse omits, caffeine, sugar, dairy, wheat and alcohol. It’s not that bad. Here is a typical day:

Breakfast

Antioxidant cocktail: a smoothie made with one cup of orange juice and a pile of berries.

Bowl of bran cereal (it’s hard to find one without sugar but I got something at the health food store) soy-milk (go for the low-fat vanilla), handful of prunes.

Snack - two pieces of fruit

Lunch-

Chelating cocktail-( freshly squeezed carrot, beet and apple juice).

A big bowl of coleslaw, onion, beets, watercress, a little flax oil, lime juice.

A small portion of lean protein- 3 oz of tuna

Snack- two more pieces of fruit

Dinner- start with the chelating cocktail or have a serving of Super-cleanse soup-( a watery blend of onion , potato,spinach and watercress)

More of the massive amounts of veggies- big stir-fry- light on the oil

Small amount of brown rice

Small amount of protein- tofu

Snack-Piece of pumpernickel toast with 1/2 banana and bit of honey.

That’s it- a lot of food- don’t you think?

Also: 30 minutes before breakfast and lunch you start with drinking a glass of water mixed with psyllium husks- this helps with the cleansing part. I’m also taking a good quality multivitamin and I’m supplementing with 4000-5000 MGs a day of CLA- Conjugated Linoleic Acid. More about this later.

Well- it’s not been a great week- although sticking to the diet was not the problem.

I picked up a cold on day #5 and felt like crap! Actually I was feeling like crap before the cold because it took a few days to come off of caffeine. My body was used to one fine cup of espresso each morn or at least two good cups of English Breakfast tea. I suffered with nasty headaches for a good four days and the muscles in the back of my neck felt like they’re made of knotted rope covered in shellac.I had to relent and take some Ibuprofen, hoping that one of those chelating food would just flush it out of my body!

I guess that you get the picture- I was miserable and sick but never-the less I enjoy the diet There is a lot of fruit so you don’t really get that hungry. Often I would skip one of the snacks but I tried to follow it closely. Rarely would I have the bedtime snack because I kept on forgetting to buy bananas.

Now- If you thought that I ran out and bought a Champion juicer- you must be nuts!!! In a perfect world one would have the time and money to plunk down on a Champion juicer but even I don’t have the time to be juicing everyday and I’m currently unemployed!! Since I’m unemployed I certainly don’t have the money for a juicer. When you’re juicing , a lot of the fibrous part of the fruit ends up in the compost. It seems wasteful and too expense for me, especially since I’m trying to buy mostly organic fruits. So for the juice part I bought a nice veggie juice and an organic apple juice and mix then together.

By week’s end I had lost 9 lbs but as you know much of that is water weight and weight lost from the body going into shock because it has not been fed it’s usual serving of one million grams of fat each and every day!! Poor thing!!

Yet another diet blog

Well here it is, something that I have been putting off for a few years- my own blog! It’s a little late in the making, after all I understand that blogs are passe- but what the hell, I have much to say and I might as well say it.

This is a blog about food and food deprivation. Right now I’m focusing on the deprivation part , that’s because I have a wedding coming up in about six months and I'm too damn fat!! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be a stick-insect bride but I would like to shed some of the excess poundage before my big day. Really it’s not only about the wedding. I need to get back to a point where I’m not huffing by just walking up the stairs. Where I can get up from the couch comfortably or out of the car with ease. It’s hard to move this much bulk around and although I carry the weight well, there is a difference between “big” and “too big” It is time to make some changes and considering my lifestyle for the past six years the changes are going to seem drastic but they are really not by any means!

How Did this Happen??

Well, I have always been rather large. I was born nine pounds and rumor has it I asked one of the operating room nurses to fetch me a milkshake because I was tired out from my participation in the exhausting cesarean delivery. I was a fat little kid which was weird because my parents and brother were not heavy. I think that I went on my first diet when probably in about grade 4 or 5. It never really worked. Being a pretty resourceful child I quickly learned that I could eat a lot more than what my mother gave me- there was always the ice-cream truck that would come around when she was working the afternoon shift. Life went on and by grade 9 I weighed in at a whopping 209lbs!! There was a lot more dieting and in university I discovered the secrets of bulimia!! After that my weight would fluctuate but eventually I was approaching 300 lbs !! My doctor gave me a warning that she did not want to see me hit that number. Well, things changed- I had been involved in a long relationship and that ended. I lost over 100 lbs through exercise and cutting out pastas with cream sauces and lots of cheese,( that was and still is one of my favorite foods!!) By the time I was forty I was on top of the world- looking good, single and going out with lots of losers.Then my mom got sick and I was on antidepressants. I was too tired to go to the gym- I just felt like sleeping. The weight came back on in five pound increments. My mom died and I was so sad because I lost pretty much the most favorite person in my life. I just kept on gaining weight. Then I met the sweetest most darling man and he didn’t mind if I was chubby in fact he enjoyed feeding me! We explored the pleasures of delicious foods and wine together. I found it hard to believe that he had been a vegetarian for many years because he sure had a fondness for rich cuts of meat. Here is a typical Sunday meal- a big rib-eye steak, some pasta tossed with butter, garlic, and regiano., some Swiss chard and a bottle of really nice Australian Shiraz- or Californian.Oh yes... an evening like that would probably end with a serving of Haggen Daz. You probably get the picture by now. I can’t say that I am one of these fat women who try everything or eat very little and just can’t lose. Hell no, my best friends are blue cheese and butter (well almost any dairy fat makes the cut). I'm too fat because I ate too much of many of the wrong foods and I did not exercise enough. That is about to change.

The purpose of this blog is to explore different eating plans. My goal is to lose 60 pounds in seven months. That seems like a lot - but it’s not . I’ve got a lot to lose so it should not be too much of a reach. I hope to try out a plan for a few weeks , write about the pros and the cons and then switch it up to see how other things work. In the end I hope to develop a plan that works best for me and my lifestyle.

Plan #1 Weight -Loss Cleanse!!
I found this cleanse in a book called DETOX CLEANSES by a British journalist named Helen Foster. I picked the book up a second hand store and it’s basically some well marketed eye-candy that features a lot of good information on cleansing, getting massages, using aromatherapy etc. The photos are very nice- typical shots of enticing, delicious looking smoothies.Slim women,who look good from the outside but are probably full of toxins, doing simple yoga poses or running along the beach!! It’s not a fast, in fact there is a lot of food to eat each day. The diet is based on lots of fruits and juices. The focus is on chelating foods; apples, watercress, avocados,garlic,beets. These are supposed to bind to pollutants in the body and help to detox them from the body!? Who the hell knows how that works but it sounds good and I’m up for it. I’m also going to attempt to detox my liver a t the same time by taking some Milk Thistle on a daily basis.This seems to be the number #1 recommended thing for helping out the ole liver and believe me, mine needs as much help as it can get!! I will go into more detail about the cleanse on my next post.