Impossible is a typoRunning my pants off and loving myself along the way

And FatGirl says: NOOOOOOO! For the love of all that is good and holy, why, why dear god are you taking away my coffee?? I’ll be good. I promise. Just don’t take the coffee. Woe, woe is me!

It’s a new year and I have several pounds of Christmas cookies strapped to my butt right now and what better way of dealing with that than torturing myself by giving up coffee, sugar, white flour and dairy for a week. Yay!

Everyone and their cousin Bob has a detox program right now. Basically, the idea is to remove food science chemical additives from your diet as well as common allergens and “toxic” crap like sugar and coffee. Then you add them back into your diet in a controlled fashion to see if your body reacts to it. Keep what foods work for you, get rid of what foods don’t. I’ve done several detoxes over the course of my weight loss journey, most on my own which basically consisted of eating brown rice and veggies for a week or so. I did almost a whole year of “No Processed Foods” which was great and I’d love to do that again. I was cooking professionally at the time in a cafe that did all scratch cooking so it really wasn’t a big deal for me to whip up homemade pasta or crackers. I did an official detox with a wellness coach and bought some fancy herbal supplements that were supposed to support the detoxification process. It was alright, no complaints really

I can’t say that I lost a substantial amount of weight or felt remarkably better after a detox program, but doing a detox breaks me of some bad food habits. I really don’t need 8 cups of coffee to be productive in my day. I don’t really need Ritz crackers and butter for a snack. I don’t need a half dozen Dove chocolate squares after dinner. I’ve been pushing my schedule really hard and I’ve been pretending that it’s easier and faster to eat crap. Sure, in the moment, a slice of pepperoni pizza IS faster than eating a salad, but I totally pay for it later by feeling bloated and yuckie. And really, it’s just habit and mindset and a pattern of settling for less. And that’s what I find beneficial about a detox program – pressing the reset button on my food habits and getting back to healthy eating.

I’m going to start a detox program next week, and I have a ton of content lined up. I can hear the chant resonating through cyber space – “Next week?? Do it now!”. I may be fat but I’m not stupid. I know full well if I go cold turkey on sugar, bread, coffee and butter someone will get hurt and it won’t be me. So I’m easing out of those foods over the next few days to get myself really well set up.

Let me know your detox experiences? Do you think it’s all just marketing and nonsense? Have you detoxed and what were your results.

It’s going to be an interesting ride. Oy.

You talkin' to me Watermelon?

I’m having some food issues. Yeah I know, this is a “Fat Girl” blog, so you’re expecting me to wax pathetic about how I just ate a box of donuts and now I’m all weepy about it. That’s not the kind of food issues I’m having. Well, not right now at least.

Go FatGirl Go

I have a lot going on in my life right now. I’m taking a class that requires a good deal of travel to NYC. I work. I run. I blog. I write. I blah blah blah. I’m in hustle phase right now and it’s super fantastic. But what I’m not doing is putting a priority on health and fitness. I’m not taking the time to plan food and cook so I end up trying to throw together a lunch at 7am with snacks  and odds and ends rescued from my freezer and oops I forgot I have class so that means pizza while running to catch a train. Or I simply don’t eat and try to go 12 hours on a single Lara Bar, counting on the nutrition in the milk in my 4th cup of coffee to get me through the day.

This way of being isn’t working. I get irritable. I spend far too much money on food I didn’t really want to eat in the first place and I’m not meeting my heath and fitness goals. And I physically feel like crap, which leads me to Problem #2

Problem #2

And yup, we’re talking about “Number Two”. And no, I’m not going TMI here. I’ve been having tummy troubles off and on for the past few months. I feel like my body has to work really hard to digest the food I eat. My tummy makes noise that are not hunger-related noises. I’m all bloated at times and well, poo is an issue, that’s all I’m saying. I was worried for a while that I’m developing food allergies. Yes, I’ll go get tested at some point. I even did a wheat-free-week to see if gluten was the issue. No dice.

What I’m feeling right now takes me back 10 years to when I decided to go vegetarian. I feel like my whole body has to work extra hard to digest animal protein. This is a problem for me. I’ve got it that to achieve weight loss, you need to up your amount of protein. The whole new Weight Watcher’s Points Plus program is structured around that. So I started eating eggs and meat for breakfast, chicken with my lunch and some other animal for dinner, sometimes tuna as a snack. Whoa, meat left and right! I’m eating my veggies too but maybe I need to take a break from the meat.

The Meow Detox

I’m house sitting this week because Charlie, pictured above, can’t be trusted to take his seizure medication on his own. I went food shopping for what feels like the first time in a very very long time. I got spinach and kale and almond milk and apples and pineapple and holy cow, a “personal” watermelon! Isn’t that melon like the cutest thing ever! I made a superfood smoothie with spinach, ginger, pineapple and apples! I dived into Foodily to find a breakfast quinoa recipe (super yums but I didn’t rinse the quinoa enough as its a touch bitter). So I’m going to spend a week eating green things and enjoying whole food and not being as crazy on the run as the past few weeks have been. And hopefully by the end of the week my tummy will settle down and Charlie and I will still be friends. Getting a cat to take a pill is slight more dangerous than taking a cupcake away from a crying fat girl. Just sayin’.

My parents are fantastic people. There are many things I’m grateful for about how I was raised and one of them is a love for food. Yeah, yeah, I know, that love of food accounts for the size of my ass, but that’s not thier fault. Some of my best memories are food related. Mom sending us to school with thermos full of milk dyed green for St. Patrick’s day. Dad going on a massive Quest(tm) for Exploding Noodles.

We do a lot of Food Adventures(tm). We’ll discover an ingredient, or a style of cooking or an international cuisine and explore it fully. I got my love of travel from my dad and that translates into a love of international food. I can hold my own in a “Strangest thing I ever ate” contest with just about anyone (Whole baby sparrows, deep fried, on a stick. Ha! Beat that!). International cuisine has some strage stuff.

We did Chinese food for Chinese New Year (Go Bunnies!) and I was surprised by the vastness of choices I had. This past week has been a bit of a struggle because I was thinking very small. I forget that there’s entire cultures that only do wheat because of western influence.  This particular resturant doesn’t do a lot of batter fired food, so as long as I stayed away from noodles, I’d be set. I had rice dumplings, sushi (don’t get me started about sushi served at a Chinese joint. That’s another blog post), stirfried veggies, grilled mushrooms, assorted meat dishes AND DESSERT.

I’m a big dessert fan. Hello? Have you seen the size of my bottom? I need a little sweet treat after dinner. Going wheat-free took away all my dessert options. No cake, no brownies, no cookies. Le sigh. I’ve been making due with hot chocolate. And that don’t cut it.  Imagine my absolute glee when I encountered my favoite all time Asian snack – Seseme Seed Rice Ball filled with red bean paste. Yeah, I know, you’re saying “ew” right? Oh ew is not the case at all!!!!!

Sesame Ball - A gluten free gift!

It’s made out of a special type of rice flour that is chewy and subtly sweet. Since it’s deep fried, the exterior is just slightly chrunchy and the sesame seeds are alive with flavor. So, your teeth crunch through this crispy outside and then hit this soft and warm and chewy inside and then you encounter the red bean paste.

Red Bean Paste, or Anko in Japanese is the only substance on this earth that could rival chocolate in it’s deliciousness. I’m sitting here stumped on a way to describe the taste and texture as we don’t really have anything like it in the West. As the name implies, the texture is a paste, that can either be smooth like silk or a wee bit gritty, like when you cream butter and sugar together for cookies, you can feel the grit of sugar on your tongue. It’s dense and sweet but not overly sweet, just perfectly sweet. And when you encounter it in a baked good, oh my it’s like angels singing.

I mean seriously, if you put Red Bean Paste and Milk Chocolate in a Caged Death Match, I don’t know who would win but the carnage would be delicious. I can eat the stuff straight up, on ice cream, in desserts but hands down my favorite incarnation is Sesame Balls.