I do my darnedest to eat healthy when I can, but I will admit that when my schedule gets overwhelming (as it is wont to do all to frequently) I will go long stretches of time where I fall back on eating a lot of high fat comfort foods and junk. That happened a lot this year and I’m paying for it now as I search my closet for jeans that don’t cut off all my circulation when I try to put them on. I’m not doing too badly on the weight scale, but I could stand to get back to high fiber, low cal, veggie-focused meals again.
To that end, I picked up a cookbook a few weeks ago – Cooking Light: Fresh Food Superfast. Now, I am not the greatest cook in the world, but if you give me a decent recipe that doesn’t tax my tiny brain too much, I’ll do pretty good with it, and this appears to be the case with the Cooking Light cookbook. I made a soup and sandwich combo from it last week, garbanzo-carrot soup with feta-olive sandwiches, that turned out perfect. The recipe made enough to last me all week long. This morning I just made smokey shrimp gazpacho, and again the recipe came out great and again I have enough to last me the week. That’s the thing, I am frequently so crunched for time, I usually only get to cook once a week. So what I cook has to make enough for multiple servings and it has to taste good enough that I’ll be willing to eat it all week long. Cooking Light seems to have succeeded on both accounts with this book.
So I’m investing an hour or two every Monday morning now to make my lunch for the week. Hopefully, this will prevent me from reaching for the Doritos or Ramen noodles every time lunch comes around. I’ve also asked the Hubster to stock the fridge with more fruit. We are subscribed to the Harry & David “Fruit-of-the-Month” club, and this month we got a huge box of peaches and a huge box of nectarines. Our fruit for August was delayed by Hurricane Irene, thus the two boxes of fruity goodness arriving at once. The only problem with getting both boxes at the same time is that they both then have to be eaten within the week, so now I think it will be a while before I can get anyone in the family to even look at another peach or nectarine for a while. But Hubster did get me grapes, pears, oranges and strawberries, along with some salad greens and cherry tomatoes, so I now have enough raw fruits and salad stuff to easily add one more serving of fruits and veggies to every meal.
My weight is at the highest it’s been in years, despite all the bike riding and deep water aerobics, so I really do need to rethink my diet. I’ll let you know in the coming weeks how I do. I dropped about a pound last week then went to DC and indulged in a couple meals that weren’t as healthy as they should have been, so I’ll have to work that off again this week. But I’m hopeful that a combination of veggie-heavy meals and lots of exercise will put me back on the right track.
