Gurtrude’s Super Smoothie Recipe

This seriously is a friggen healthy delicious smoothie.  It’s the perfect way to start a day.  The spinach sounds a little weird, but its soo good for you and you really don’t taste it.  It just gives it a pretty weird color.  But every ingredient has some health benefit. 

• 1 cup unsweetened green ice tea ( I like Trader Jo’s Orange and bergemot, but you can steep your own)
• 1/2 cup nonfat (or lowfat) plain yogurt
• 1 tsp flax seed oil
• Protein Powder (one serving)
• 1 cup frozen fruit – at least half should be a dark berry, but you can use any combo of fruit you like- my favorite is blueberry and pineapple
• About 3 cups fresh spinach

Put it all in a blender and blend.  Depending on your protein powder this smoothie is approximately 250-300 calories. It’s not the lowest calorie smoothie you can make, but it is packed full of fiber, anti-oxidants, probiotics.  Everything in it is healthy.  I promis you, that if you make this your daily breakfast, you will start to feel tantaztic almost immediately.  

A friend gave me a re-usable plastic cup that looks like a Starbucks iced coffee cup and I would make my smoothie up and then drink it on my way to work.  So I made sure I was eating a healthy breakfast ever day.  Even on the run.  Yummy!!

I know the spinach sounds crazy, but just think about how good it is for you.  Remember Popeye! He was strong to the finish because he ate his spinach.

Sunday = Gluttony Day

I have a fairly new friend who is my neighbor.  She is incredibly sweet and funny and I love spending time with her.  She has been great these past couple months helping me deal with my boyfriend (I’ll talk more about him in another post.) She has had a rough several years and is just recently coming through the other side.  I think the things she has been through have given her a wisdom and a sensitivity.  She is a diagnosed bi-polar and is pretty heavily medicated. She is also a recovering addict, so doesn’t drink or do any sort of drugs besides the ones prescribed to her,  which right now is good for me because I was heading down a road of partying a little too much.  It really is crazy how much can happen in a year, yet how stagnant it can be as well.  I’ll write some more on that in another post too. 

Anyway, when she stopped using illegal drugs and went on the prescription ones to control her manic depressiveness, she put on quite a bit of weight, so she is a chubby girl as well.  Not as big as me, but definitely bigger than she would like to be.  So we talk about going on long walks with our dogs, swimming in the pool for exercise and just eating healthier, but we are both lazy and find it hard to get started. 

Today was sunday and I made some coffee and headed over to her balcony to start my day and chat.  We talked about how poorly we had been eating recently and how we both have had some stomach issues because of it.  We talked about how we really needed to start eating better. “But wait, I am really craving McDonalds. McDonalds or fro yo.”  And then we decided to go to The Sizzler for lunch.  Yep the Sizzler, with their all you can eat salad and taco bar.  All you can eat desserts.  We planned to get the all you can eat Shrimp with it, but that would have cost us $24 a piece.  Now I am waaaay to cheap to spend that kind of money on a marginally ok lunch even if it is all you can eat.  So we opted for the 6 piece shrimp meal that ended up with drink and tax to be about $14.  That was including the salad bar.  We stuffed ourselves until we were stuffed.  And feeling a little ill.  Then we ate dessert.  In my defence, I did bring home four of the shrimp  and most of my baked potato for the boyfriend. 

The funny thing is, that before I even went over to her house today I had been thinking while I was doing my dishes.  I remembered a book someone had given me when I was a chubby teenager.  I think it was called Feeding the Hungry Heart.  It’s all about basically people who use food for comfort and how to break out of that.  I definitely use food for comfort.  When I am stressed/unhappy/lonely/bored I want a pint of ice cream or a bag of potato chips.  Food is the one drug I can’t seem to kick.  I KNOW what I need to eat to eat healthy, but I don’t do it.  The beginning of the book says to start out by giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want.  And while I was doing the dishes, I started to wonder, if that was really the only message to took from that book, because I pretty much eat whatever I want, and I am huge! Maybe I never finished the book. 

So, when we left Sizzler feeling overfull and a little ill, I said, maybe that should be all we eat for today.  But then at 8pm, we decided we still had that McDonalds craving, so we went to the drive-thu.  I got fries and a double cheeseburger.  And so now here I sit, overfull again.  We laughed the whole way back from Mickey-Ds, but we both know this has to end.  I dubbed it Sunday, Gluttony day. 

So, I am going to make a commitment in writing… tomorrow (well actually today, because its now one am) I will eat all whole foods, or very minimally processed foods.  I will start with one of my power smoothies – its so healthy- and I will finish the day with a spinach salad and maybe I will have poached eggs on whole grain bread for lunch- I’ll have some sensible lunch anyway. 

And for all that are interested, I will post my smoothie recipe.

The past year – Weight loss update

I let my blog go.  I let myself go.  It’s been a long crazy year and I am trying to think about where to start.  I will start with updates on the two biggest recurring themes of my blog last year:

First: weight loss update.  Well.. when we were still having the challenge at work, I continued to do really well.  I lost quite a bit of weight, was eating and feeling really healthy and I was exercising daily.  I ended up losing the competition on the last day, because I had some wine at a friends birthday.  (I had given up alcohol as part of the competition, so I lost points on the last day) I was ok with that.  Losing weight and getting healthy was what was important to me, not the “prize” we got, which I don’t even remember what it was at this point. 

After the competition ended, I continued to eat healthy and exercise for a while, but then I got a boyfriend and it all went to hell.  (More on him in another post.) My boyfriend had the worst diet of anyone I knew.  Fast food, tons of processed food, SODA and all sorts of bad stuff.  Seeing him eat it made me want it and little by little I introduced all those terrible things back into my diet.  The funny thing is, that I had been eating so healthy that he picked up some of my healthy eating habits and we kind of met in the middle and although my diet was way worse, his was way better even though we were pretty much eating the same things.  I’m not blaming him.  I made the decision of what to put in my body.  I just need to be a little stronger. 

I put back on a lot of the weight I lost.  Not all of it, but a lot.  Although I don’t know exactly how much, because I have been avoiding the scale like the plague.  Today I will do it.  I will get on the scale and get motivated to eating healthy again.  Thats part of what this blog is about and I am going to use it to give me motivation.  I can do it.  I can get healthy again. 

So thats the short of it as far as the weight loss goes.  There is a lot to update you about in this past year.  Stay tuned.

The problem with H

Another blog post I never published back from 8/02/2009.  I titled it based on an email that a friend of my lying ex sent me with the subject ”the problem with charlie. ”  I think I decided not to publish it because I wrote it during an angry moment, but almost a year later, I think it can be said.  I will post some more about where my friendship with H went over this past year.  There is a lot to catch you all up on, reader. 

Here is the post from last year:

Okay, pretty much right after I posted the update about K and H, H did something that really disappointed me.

As I am starting to think about writing it out, it really sounds pretty bad.

First off… H told me a few days ago that he invited a friend of mine out. I’ll call her M. And it bothered me. He’s told me about hanging out with other girls, which hasn’t really bothered me, but it just felt weird that it was my friend. So I told him it bothered me, but that really, it shouldn’t so he could do what he wanted. And he defended it… it was only lunch, I could come along if I wanted to. And I just told him to do whatever and he kind of laughed and said that he would anyway, but he would at least take it into consideration if it bothered me.

Their lunch plans turned to dinner plans, but even then it was going to be “just dinner”

Because I knew “his other girl” (my term not his), J, was going to be on her own that night and I didn’t have plans, I told him I would invite J to hang out and I did and we did.

H actually had to meet some people from work regarding a big project he was working on before he met up with M, so that was the only part he told J about. Again, lying by omission. *A note on that: H claims that J knows that he is meeting up with other woman, but that he just doesn’t want to rub it in her face. I honestly am not sure that she does know.

Anyway… he told us before he left that he was going to try to make it an early night so he could come back and hang out with us.

And he didn’t. Close to midnight, when it was getting time for J to get to bed, because she had to work the next day, he texted her and asked how she was feeling so she gave him the out and said she was heading off to bed and she would see him tomorrow. And then she turned to me, and I could already tell she was disappointed, and she made all these excuses for him about how he was clearly caught up in this work thing, and how important it was to him, so she was giving him the out.

And I felt TERRIBLE. Because I knew he wasn’t at the “work” thing anymore and that he was actually hanging out with my horny friend, M.

Joyce and I spent all this time earlier in the evening talking about how much we hate liars. And that people choose to be in relationships and put up with certain things, but if you are being deceived, it’s a whole different thing. A friend of mine put it perfectly a while ago: “Being lied to inhibits your ability to make good decisions in your life.” Because you don’t know all the facts.

Ugh!! I told H that I wouldn’t say anything to J about M. Again, the whole not rubbing it in her face. But it really upset me to see J disappointed and making excuses for him when I knew what he was really up to. I texted him to let him know I was disappointed in him after J left and he called me back to defend it… that he had really wanted to leave an hour before (my response was, so why didn’t you?) and that M didn’t want him to go and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. And that he wasn’t really attracted to M and didn’t want to have sex with her, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings because she was a “hoot” and he wanted to hang out with her again. He said he was just about getting ready to leave and asked if I was going to be up for a while. And right after I answered he said really quickly, “Oh wait, M’s back I got to go.” and hung up on me so shady like. And then he never came home that night.

I think he is way more like my ex from a year ago than I gave him credit for. I think I need to have a big all in blow out with H and maybe he will help me get some closure on that whole thing with my ex, because I was never able to get my ex to admit that he did anything wrong even when there was irrefutable evidence. I don’t know. The deception really bothers me, but I just feel like there is some lesson to be learned here.

Pshhhh. I guess I should have expected this, right?

Keep on keepin’ on…

I found this draft saved that I never published back from August 10, 2009.  I can’t believe its been almost a year since I’ve written in here.  I decided I might as well publish this as well as another draft that is in here as well. So here goes:

Oh my… I know it’s been a few days, but I’ve been so busy this past week and so much is going through my brain, it’s hard to think about how to form words into a cohesive blog post.

First… I went out on a date with a guy I knew from high school, that I hadn’t seen since. (Thanks Facebook!) It was an interesting date that ended up getting a little too intense.  He’s a nice guy and he’s good looking and he definitely likes me, but I am a little freaked out.  “What’s the problem?” you may be asking yourself.  The problem is, it was a little too  much too fast.  So, being the newly responsible adult that I am, instead of just avoiding him like I may have in the past, I let him know I was a littls freaked out and I, at the very least, needed some time.  So I will keep you posted on that one.

I’ve gotten really mad at my neighbor H at least twice over the past week.  We seem to make up pretty quickly, but I am starting to question the worth of our friendship to me.  It’s starting to feel too much like a fucked up relationship than just a friendship. I am also getting closer to J, his other girl,

And that’s where it ended.  I am making a commitment to myself to start writing in here daily.  I will start with a couple updates as to what has been happening in my life in the past year, including dealing with my weight and with boys, so stay tuned.

Candies, Cookies and Cakes, Oh My.

I have been working on a project out in the main office of my company for the past week.  It is only my small office of 5 that is doing the weight loss challenge, so nobody in the main office cares about it.  And there is junk food everywhere.

About 2 feet from my desk is a shelf with a large bowl full of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, Twix, Hershey’s Kisses, and snickers. Next to the bowl are three packages of fudge dipped cookies.  At one point someone walked by my desk and dropped off two tootsie rolls.  They keep a fridge stocked with soda.  We celebrated two birthdays during the week and for one we had carrot cake and for the other, and ice cream cake.

All I can say is THANK GOODNESS I gave up sugar.  Because if I hadn’t I would probably just keep walking over to the bowl all day and eat chocolate.  Instead, I had none of it.  And because I am not eating any of it… I don’t even really feel that deprived.  I’ve almost forgotten what cake tastes like at this point.

K and H update

Alright… those of you that have been following my blog may be wondering about that fact that I haven’t posted anything about either K or H lately.  You may remember that in my last post about them, I thought I may have permanently damaged my relationships (whatever form they may be in) with both of them.  Well.  Not so much.

The day after K apologized for making me feel bad and saying he would step back or step off or something, he emailed me several more apologies and then asked to make plans to hang out the following evening, in his neighborhood, because he is allergic to my cats.  So we did.  The day that we hung out, he texted me earlier on and asked if I was still planning on coming over that night.  I texted back and said, “are you planning on coming to pick me up?”  His answer was, “On Bart?” (For those of you not in the SF Bay Area, Bart stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit and is our rail system that goes all over the Bay Area.)

So I thought about how to answer that for a bit.  I didn’t want to take Bart to meet him.  I was over it enough at that point, that I wanted to be picked up at my apartment.  While I was contemplating my answer, he texted back saying he would come get me and asked for my address.  I wasn’t even “waiting” to answer on purpose… just trying to figure out what I was going to say, but the waiting worked because I got what I wanted.

We hung out and had a really fun time.  We talked about the old days and I saw his apartment, which was really cute.  Although I still like mine better. And he drove me home at the end of the evening.  Since then he has emailed or texted me at least once a day to find out how I am doing.  Which I have to say feels nice.  I know there is no real romantic potential here, but it’s nice to have a friend and feel more appreciated. 

As far as H goes.  He was totally fine after that first few minutes after he read the blog that pissed him off.  He just had his feelings hurt, but he got it.  And I think that there is a purpose for him in my life.

In some ways, he reminds me of the bastard I dated last year, yet for the most part he is honest with me and I still like him.  I enjoy hanging out with him.  I think seeing how he is from the outside, because although H is honest with me, I don’t think he is with everyone,  gives me a little insight into my relationship with the bastard from last year.

Again, I don’t think H outright lies, but he omits and lies by intention.  The difference was that the guy from last year outright lied.  So I think that by appreciating who he is as a person, I can perhaps start to understand a little who the guy from last year was.  And although he treated me poorly, there were a lot of things I clearly liked about him and maybe now I need to just forgive him, and leave that whole thing behind.

Wow. Advertisements.

I haven’t been watching too much tv lately. And when I do watch it, I generally am watching it on my DVR, so I fast forward through the commercials.  So it’s been a while since I have watched a lot of commercials.  I think when you see them all the time you get a little desensitized. 

I was home late afternoon on sunday watching repeats of “Dance Your Ass Off” where they get a bunch of fat people, they learn a dance performance each week and try to lose weight at the same time.  The lowest score each week gets sent home and the score is a combination of their performance and how much weight they have lost over the week.

It’s pretty funny.  I love watching the dancing, but what surprised the hell out of me was seeing all the commercials… they were all for food! Blizzards, candy, snacks… everything I am trying to avoid.  It almost seemed surreal. Talk about target marketing.

First Meet on Chemistry.com

I had my first “First Meet” tonight.  He was pretty cool.  I don’t think there is a looove connection.  But he was nice and I had a nice time talking to him.

We talked about online dating. And our lives.  He asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  A very good question.  I wish someone would tell me the answer.

The weird thing was that we were in this coffee shop and this guy was set up playing blues… but not is such a nice way.  I don’t know if it was the acoustics in the room, or that he was turned up to loud, but it was truly cacophonous. Screechy and grating.  But we still had a nice time.  And after, he walked me the several blocks to BART.

It was definitely a good way to get my feet wet.

Cakes, cupcakes, cookies and danishes

Wow.  So I went out with my co-workers for coffee this morning (I actually had some Snow Leopard White Tea from Peets) and they wanted to stop at a bakery nearby to get pastries.  We walked in and it was all filled with so much delicious looking stuff.  There wasn’t anything in there that I didn’t want to eat.

I probably could have eaten a whole cake to myself.  I totally felt like an alcoholic about to fall off the wagon.  That red velvet cake just looked so delicious.  I was walking along the display counter reading the names of all the delicious treats out loud.   One of my co-workers was like, if you really want something, just get it.  You’ll just have to take the points off. (I lose 5 points in our challenge for eating sugar since it was a food I gave up – I do get an extra point a day for giving it up though.)

So I didn’t get anything.  I am ahead in points right now and I am just competitive enough that I don’t want to lose that lead. So no sugar for me.  Especially considering my reaction today, I think it was definitely the right thing to give up.  I am a little PMSy, so that might be part of it.

It makes me a bit worried for when the challenge ends though.  Will I go crazy and eat the entire contents of a bakery?  I have an image of myself lying in a fetal position on the floor with remnants of my gluttony all around me with chocolate smeared all over my face.  GROSS! Okay, maybe keeping that image in my mind will prevent it.

Maybe the challenge will go on just long enough that I won’t resort back to wanting cake so much.