One week down.

This one surprised me.  When I saw the photo from today (right) I thought "Oh, I look the exact same" but when I put it next to last week's (left) I realized there is a difference...a small one, but I can see it.

Same here.  I think I've cut just a tiny bit off my hips.

So, it's been a week.  Not a long week, not an arduous week...just, a week of thinking about food a WHOLE lot, being hungry (but not all the time) and working out even when I didn't always feel like it.  It's been a week of feeling better about what I've been eating...better physically and mentally.  I can honestly say that almost everything feels better (I'd say everything if only I were never hungry).  Well, I was very whiny before bed last night because I got it in my head that I really really REALLY wanted a grilled cheese sandwich (which I did not eat) but it was a moment of pain, I tell you.  And then I wanted key lime pie with graham cracker crust (I think that's how it's always made?) and I just kind of fell asleep dreaming about that.

I have lost about 4 pounds.  It's funny because those pounds dropped off within the first few days and now my weight has remained the same.  But they are 4 solid, real pounds, not a fluke...since the scale has been pretty consistent.  I don't have a set goal in mind in terms of weight loss and I'm not going to post my weight here (well, maybe at then end of the challenge...maybe) but it was still cool to drop four.  Also, I think in the above photos I see some slight changes.  Anyway, Rome wasn't built in a day so I'm not going to focus on weekly changes.  The bigger picture will be what the change is like after a month.

In a week, I've learned a lot about how to zone...what works for me and what doesn't, etc.  Here are a few observations:

(1) My white board has to change.  As appealing as the idea was to plan out every snack and meal for the week, that was not realistic.  I guess I underestimated my ability to do this thing successfully without planning everything quite so much.  Today, I will change the board completely.  It will have a few different sections -- common block portions, go-to snacks, etc.  It will also have a place to track my blocks for the day.

(2) Comparing my diet to Jeff's, it seems that 12 blocks for me is a lot harder than 17 blocks for him.  He has trouble eating enough and I am hungry a lot.  But he's the type of person who is not used to eating evenly throughout the day...he typically will work straight through lunch and then be starving for dinner, at which point he can't eat, you know, 10 blocks of food at once.  So there have been days where he has fallen way short of eating 17 blocks but I have always eaten every single one of my 12.

(3) I've said it before and I'll say it again...roasted broccoli.  It's seriously one of my new favorite foods and I don't just mean favorite icky healthy vegetable.  I mean favorite foods, period.  Who knew?

(4) I'm not sure if I'm ready for a cheat meal yet.  I had one on Saturday but I kind of went off the rails...not with the dinner, but after dinner.  I think it sent me down a "bad" path.  I'd rather just have two cheat "foods" in a day rather than a whole meal.  But those cheats would probably take up so many of my much-needed blocks that who knows if it's worth it.   Which teaches me one of the most important lessons of zoning, which is that I'd rather "spend" my blocks (i.e. my calories, nutrient allotment, however you want to think of it) on a larger quantity of quality food than on a small portion of gross food.  It just make sense.  And because so much of food quantity and quality consumption has to do with how we perceive our food, this is a very important lesson.  If you look at a bag of chips and think, wow, I could have this little bag or I could have four cups of roasted broccoli...well, the chips start to become pretty damn unappealing.

That's all for now.  My kids are home today for MLK day...after having been home for over two weeks at Christmas...and only several weeks until February "vacation" and with the possibility of a snow day this week.  I should tear them away from the tv and take them somewhere somewhere intellectually stimulating like Target.

For the love of all things sacred...

The fact that this is on the bottom of my knitting pattern makes my life seem even...quainter.

I had to do ALGEBRA this morning to calculate a block amount. Old school, eighth grade algebra. Remember when you learned this crap and thought, "When will I EVER need to do this?" Well if only your teacher had told you that someday, you'd be 40 and trying to drop fat off your hips and you'd be weighing and measuring everything you ingest...well, you'd probably have just opened up the window to that Catholic middle school building and jumped on out. "Thirteen years...that's a good long life," you'd tell yourself.

Eight.

1D cupcakes, baby!

This girl made me a mom eight years ago today. So I'll be back to blogging tomorrow after the "cheat meal" buzz wears off...

Elvis oatmeal.

I cleaned the cups out of my car this morning.  Pretty indicative of my life...one CF water bottle (um, Mel, we need some DCF bottles,yo), one coffee mug, one triathlon water bottle, one Jeff sippy cup and one child's sippy bottle.

I wanted to post last night but here's the thing: I passed out on the couch watching American Horror Story at around 10pm, maybe sooner.  And then I slept solidly until 7am.  That's 9 hours of great sleep there, folks.  And you know what...that is what is required to keep this shizzle up.  I am now remembering the last (ok, the only previous) time I did a challenge.  It was a paleo challenge through my old gym and, like this one, we got a point for working out.  So I was pretty rigorous about making it to the gym and also eating right.  (Of course, this challenge makes a paleo challenge look like a walk in the park...an apple with, like, 5 TB of almond butter sounds pretty awesome right about now.)  What I noticed then, and I am noticing now, is that my energy is super great throughout the day.  Evenly great.  Not highs and lows like it normally is.  But when it's time for sleep, well, it's lights OUT, baby.  I'm not sure if this is a result of the change in diet or the increase in exercise or a combination of both.

But I'll tell you what, it's a change I can live with just fine.  It actually forces a change I have been meaning to make for a while, which is to get ready for bed before bedtime.  I think we can all relate to this...I often delay getting into bed because I am too tired to get ready for bed.  That's just a dumb problem to have now, isn't it?  But it's true.  Before bed, I MUST: (1) wash my face; (2) brush my teeth; (3) take my "vitamins" (we'll go with that); and (4) pee. (Confession: one time in college I peed in the bed.  I may or may not have been alone.  And ever since then I have been convinced it will happen again unless I pee right before bed -- as in, if I read in bed for 10 minutes I need to go pee again -- or if I drink water during the night.  Jeff has assured me that I will not pee in bed and if I do it is ok and that I should drink water at night but, nope, I'm taking this one to my grave. If I die in bed, at least my sheets will be dry.)

With the knowledge that these "tasks" must be completed before getting in bed, I will often lay on the couch going in and out of crappy sleep rather than just going up and settling in.  And then I have to do all that stuff in a haze or, even worse, I come out of my haze and then I'm up for another 1/2 hour when really my body just wanted to go the f&%$ to sleep.  So, yeah, I am going to do all my crap early tonight, like right after the prison guards deliver my final meal for the night I eat my last blocks for the day.

Here's a positive note: I had Elvis oatmeal for breakfast today and it was a hunka hunka burning delicious.

Elvis oatmeal: 1/3 cups steel-cut oatmeal with 1/3 a banana and 2/3 tsp. raw peanut butter.  2 blocks carb, 2 blocks fat.  Oh and that's just my jerky (2 blocks protein) in the background because who doesn't love a little jerky for breakfast?

Roast that broccoli.

I started my day with a HUGE mistake.  Not a point deduction kind of mistake, but the kind that sort of shot me in the foot...I had a four block breakfast by accident instead of three.  I blame it on the fact that I had a smoothie and smoothie is a gross word and that is why.  So I skipped my morning one-block snack to make up for it, which made me hungry for lunch way too early.  Having lunch early made my afternoon pretty dicey because oh wowzers was I hungry by 3pm. My one-block snack didn't help much.  But you know what saved my ass?

Roasted.freaking.broccoli.

I wasn't going to get to the gym until 6:30pm and was super starving at 5 so I decided to have a mini dinner of two blocks.  Reason #1 being that a full dinner pre-rowing-and-burpees did not seem like a good idea and reason #2 being that I wanted to save two full blocks to accommodate my cheat food...allowed because IT'S WEDNESDAY, FOLKS!  Anyway, I needed to have some good bang for my two-block-buck.  And that is when I decided to roast four cups (that's two blocks...four, yes four, cups) of broccoli.  And no, my insides have no exploded.  Yet.

I must say, for the first time in all my forty years I genuinely enjoyed eating broccoli.  I really can't stand it steamed, though I find it ok raw but generally only as a conduit for, say, onion dip.  Oh good Lord, did I just say ONION DIP?  What I wouldn't give, ya know?  Anyway, I added a three ounce turkey burger in for my two-block protein and it was great.  The perfect little mini dinner.  I had energy at the gym and made it through a tough WOD with a good energy level.  All thanks to roasted.freaking.broccoli.

When I got home, it was cheat food time, baby.  I chose a low-fat cookies and cream ice cream (gross, I know) and it was SO F&%$ING AWESOME.  Half a cup of that was two blocks of fat and two blocks of carbs.  I added some Steve's chicken jerky in for protein (that stuff is amazing and it's also a great company so go order some stuff from them).  And that was my day and this might just be the world's most boring blog post!

Amazeballs.

It was actually enough.

I don't care how cute you are, you're not getting near my ice cream even if you sit in my face and stare at me while I eat it.

Some really great positives: Again, no afternoon crash.  One yawn at 5pm when I was in need of dinner but other than that, great energy.  And I weighed myself this morning and was down three pounds...which could totally be a fluke or maybe I was standing on one foot or something but at least it was some good feedback in the right direction.

Also, I discovered that the 1/2 cup of ice cream really was plenty.  Maybe it's because I've been eating nothing but very healthy food for three days and that amount of ice cream felt like such a luxury in comparison...which it did.  I know that is part of it.  But I think it's also a realization that a reasonable portion of something actually feels much better than mindlessly eating ice cream from a container (if you don't put it in a bowl, does it count?).  This whole process is about learning...learning to change what we eat, how we eat and when we eat it.  Tomorrow, I am going to focus on changing how I distribute my blocks throughout the day so that you can stop hearing me bitch about being hungry.

KEEN-WAH.

Ok, first, let me get this out of the way.  Blending Progenix chocolate protein powder with cold coffee and ice does NOT mean that you have just become the world's most brilliant girl by creating a zone/paleo version of the Frappucino.  It just means you've made a damn mess in your kitchen that sort of tastes like a wet chocolate ash tray.

Moving on...

Breakfast today was the same as yesterday.  2 eggs, 2 sausages (Applegate Farms chicken and sage) plus 2/3 cup oatmeal with 1/3 of a mashed banana.  Plus loads of black coffee so that I didn't kill anyone.  I like this breakfast...it's 3 blocks...but Jeff does struggle a bit to finish his 5-block version.  We may tweak his breakfast to 4 blocks soon and move a block to dinnertime when he is hungriest.

I had a snack before the gym.  Thank GOD for my new bestie, Progenix.  It has some sugars in it but Mel said it's ok and she's basically like the zone diet rabbi, so I'm using it.  I made a little smoothie, which is honest to God my least favorite word in the English language.  Seriously, it's worse than panties and moist and hubbie and veggie and preggo combined.  And that's saying a lot.  Smoooooothie.  Barf. Anyway,  after ditching the aforementioned wet chocolate ash tray version, I screwed my head on straight and made a "blended beverage" (I didn't say the s-word) with a scoop of chocolate Progenix, 1/3 of a banana and 1/3 tsp. of peanut butter (i.e. baby monkey turd) plus some water and ice.  Now THIS was good.  Super good.  Score one for me and my morning.

I went to the gym at 12:30 and felt really great.  Not hungry and not tired.  I PR'd my deadlift, which made me oh-so-happy because it's the one thing I think I do pretty well.  215 pounds today.  Couldn't get 220# but this is not the Olympics now is it?  I also did my first ever "all by myself" WOD -- well, not exactly all by myself, but I did a different WOD than the rest of the class because they were doing Jackie as a bencmark for this challenge and I did Jackie recently enough for it to count.  If you're not a CrossFitter and you're reading this, know that I'm not a lesbian (well, not entirely) and I don't run around "doing" women unless, you know, they're really worth it.  Like Jackie.

Lunch was a salad with grilled chicken...again, same as yesterday.  But Mt. Vegetables was scaled back a bit and some of the carbs were replaced with quinoa.  For those that don't know, quinoa is pronounced KEEN-WAH.  In addition to being a "species of goosefoot," a "psuedocereal," and a "chenopod," Quinoa is also the name of the "Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler" on Pinterest and you really need to check her out.  Little Quinoa has friends with names like Crostini, Endive and Chevron and a nanny named Fontanelle.  I wish I were as funny as the woman who comes up with this stuff.

So fond was I of the quinoa that I substituted it for all the damn vegetables at dinner.  Not the smartest move, but allowable under our rules and tomorrow my over-vegetabling will resume.  But my shrimp sauteed in grass-fed butter was just calling out for a decent portion of KEEN-WAH, so I went for it.

I mean seriously, right?  SO GOOD.

After dinner, I had an awesome one-block snack.  I chopped the hell out of half an apple in the blender (or, the NINJA as we call it) and then nuked it for a bit to warm it up.  Sprinkled some cinnamon on it and added a tiny bit of almond meal.  It was really delicious and tricked my brain into thinking it was eating apple crisp for a moment.  Of course, I ate the g-damn one ounce piece of turkey meat on the side just to remind myself that at the end of the day, this whole thing really does suck donkey balls more than a tiny bit.

But ok, I am willing to admit something and it's only day two.  I had ZERO afternoon crash today.  Afternoon crash is pretty typical for me.  Around 4 pm, after the kids get home and the sun is starting to set (because winter hates me), I get freaking exhausted.  Sometimes I find myself making another pot of coffee just to make it through the rest of the day.  But today I was running to and fro (home-ballet-home-ballet with my daughter), I realized that I genuinely still felt awake and alert and pretty damn awesome.  Hungry as shit, but otherwise super duper.  It's too early to say if this is a permanent change, but it's something and it sort of makes eating my meals next to a calculator worth it.  Sort of.

One small step.

Today was day one of the challenge.  Just to put the details out there, I will be following a Zone diet (look it up...I'm feeling too lazy to find a link) for the next four weeks.  I am allowed 12 "blocks" per day.  Not only will I be following the Zone requirements but I will also be eating "real" food...so, no processed garbage.  Also, no sugar or sugar substitutes, no gluten and no alcohol.  And I have to work out pretty much every day.  Basically, zero fun will be had by all.

In all seriousness, day one went pretty darn ok.  Breakfast was easy -- eggs and some sausage links as well as a modest amount of steel cut oatmeal mixed with banana (<--really yummy). Totally a normal breakfast for me...bigger than normal, really.  I did notice that while I was cleaning up the kitchen after the kids went to school, I almost reached for a banana on the counter just because it was there.  Pre-Zone Sara would have TOTES eaten that banana.  But yes, I had no banana.

So then my mid-morning snack.  Let's just say that 1/3 teaspoon of peanut butter looks like a little turd on your plate.  I'm so tempted to not even bother with it because of the ridiculousess of it.  I mean, just look at my plate:

Did a baby monkey just crap on my plate?  No, wait, that's just one block of fat.

Which brings me to lunch.  Oy.  Jeff and I decided we would do big salads with grilled chicken all week.  And we kind of had been dreading the damn salad because we knew how large and in charge it would be.  Our fears were realized when the salad became a reality and looked like this:

I'm looking at YOU, Mr. Salad.  Oh, crap...you're looking at ME.

 Good.Lord.  Jeff couldn't finish his.  I finished mine and was really full for a few hours at which point I suddenly became so I hungry that I could have eaten one of my kids.  I e-mailed my friend Megan, who is doing the challenge as well, and she said she was in the process of gnawing her arm off.  I offered to bring her three f*&%ing almonds when I saw her at the gym to round out the fat portion of a one-block snack that would include a Fuel for Fire.  The scene upon arrival at the gym was classic.  I made her hold out her hand in front of the entire class as I carefully doled out 1-2-3 almonds.

3 for me and 3 for Megan.  Go nuts with yer donuts, kids.

I kind of felt like I was going to die while we warmed up for class, but then Mel came over to me like a magic Zone fairy and gifted me with an extra block.  "You should do 12 instead of 11," she pronounced.  Why? Because I am so darn good looking.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Dinner was fine.  Turkey burger plus what we have come to call "ROO" -- rice, sauteed onion and olive oil mixed with salt and pepper and some garlic powder -- which was actually quite good.  But it's 9:30pm now and I am hunnnnnngggggrrrrry.  Ok, maybe just plain hungry.  Ok, no, HUNGRY.  But this is where the magic happens, right?  Hunger is fat leaving my body?  I'm going to go to sleep now, mostly just to avoid eating, and then I will wake up and promptly make love to some blueberries in the morning.