Different people make oatmeal different ways.  I’m sorry but restaurant oatmeal is about the least tasty of these ways.  So, here is how I make my morning bowl of oatmeal (and one for one of my co-workers, Joe).  I’d love to know how you make yours!

Start off with old-fashioned oats – no they aren’t “quick-cooking” or “instant.”  Real, old-fashioned oats taste the best, in my opinion.

Then add a healthy dash of cinnamon,

either some brown sugar or honey (I use honey at home and brown sugar at work),

and some dried fruit – I switch back and forth between chopped dates, raisins or dried cranberries.

Then add ¼ cup of milk and ½ cup of water.

And it’s ready to be cooked.

Stick it in the microwave for two minutes, stir it, and then cook it for 2 more minutes.  During the second two minutes, keep an eye on it because it will want to bubble over.  Every time it rises to the top, pause the microwave oven, stir the oatmeal down and restart the cooking.  You will have to do this several times.

Once the second two minutes are up, you have a hot (and I must emphasize the word HOT) bowl of yummy, nutritious oatmeal.

This breakfast holds me for about 4 hours and, together with my cup of hot tea, makes me energized and alert for a morning of work.

Now, if I were Julia Childs, I would tell you that you can substitute wine for the water, but I’m not, so I’m not going to tell you that. 

BTW, I’m hovering right at 160 right now.  I’m busy enough this week that adding any new exercises to the regime isn’t goint to happen, but next week I will.  Time to meander my way down through the 150’s.

Scott and I have been trying to follow the Eating Clean way of eating (although last week’s vacation didn’t count).  We love the food, the cooking is easy and I have lots of room for experimentation (only one complete failure so far – even I couldn’t eat it and I should be nicknamed “Mikey”!)

So, I thought that since we are supposed to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, I would buy some different things to try out.  This week, I saw that my local grocery store had apple-pears on sale, so I bought two.

As you can see, they are shaped like an apple, look like a pear, and are advertised to have a flavor that combines the two.  Now, I love apples, and I LOVE pears, so I thought this would be a great thing to try.

Boy, was I wrong.  Either the ones I got (and yes, I ate both of them – one yesterday and one today – because I wanted to make sure of what I found) were picked at the wrong time or something went seriously wrong with this batch.  The flavor is not unlike eating textured, slightly crunchy water.  Not even a bit of salt could bring out any flavor in these.  Bleh!  Since I am being careful of my portions, I feel cheated because I wasted approximately 100 calories and have absolutely no satisfaction.

Has anyone else tried these?  If so, what did you think?  Did I just get fruit from a tree that should be cut down and used to warm someone this next winter, or is this how they are supposed to taste?

In a world where so many of us are going back to eating “real” food, flavor is very important.  Heirloom tomatoes taste so much better than the pithy red ones at the grocery store.  Grass-fed beef has more flavor and yogurt made from organic milk from grass-fed cows is heavenly (I love Trader’s Point Creamery).  To waste money and time on something that has no flavor when I could have had something that satisfies both my body and my taste buds should not even be an option.

Other news – I have weighed 163.4 pounds for three weeks, now. (Updated note: 5/19/10 I weighed 161.6!!)  So, my eating basically whatever sounded good last week, coupled with my working my butt off shoveling stone, planting stuff, moving furniture and lugging an umpteen-million bags of books to Half-Price Books didn’t hurt me any.  I know my pants are getting baggier, so I’m losing inches.  Surely all that stone that got spread out with a shovel grew me some arm muscles, right?

I bought the companion cookbook to Tosca Reno’s Eating Clean and I have been trying things out of it.  Would any of you be interested in hearing my opinions on the recipes in this book?  I have tried a couple of them, and will be trying more over the next several weeks.

This week, I’m back to walking every morning and paying close attention to what I am eating.  Since Easter Sunday, I’ve only had sugar twice – once was half a piece of cheesecake at Bravo’s and the other was two pieces of chocolate (one with caramel and one with coconut crème) from Abbott’s on our anniversary.  I don’t want to eat processed sugar at all, but a treat on a 25^th anniversary was excusable in my book.

I really want to lose about 5 pounds a month.  If I can do this the rest of this year, I can get down to the place my cardio doctor wants me by the end of the year.  One thing I do know is that I need to kick the exercising up a notch.  Still trying to figure out where to add this into my schedule, though.  I have weights in my car (one-pounders) that I plan to use while walking with my walking buddy here at work (as soon as I no longer need to be holding an umbrella) and I am looking at purchasing a weight vest to use on the treadmill and while I’m working around the house.

So, that is where I stand at the moment.

Sandy and I spent yesterday afternoon at our LYS working on two looms.  The 50” cherry Norwood loom is all assembled and ready to go.  We laid out the yarn color choices and decided on what the warp is going to be, so, now, I need to get it measured off.  This will end up being about 7 yards on the loom because we both want throws that will be about 6 feet long after hemming and fulling.  Plus this loom is going to have more than the usual yard of loom waste.  Since it is Sugar and Cream cotton going on there, and as that is pretty inexpensive, I’d rather have a bit more than we need than be short.  Besides, I can knit the thrums up into dish rags and face cloths.

The other loom we worked on was Susan’s walnut Baby Wolf.  We managed to get the wheel package assembled to the legs, but let me tell you, that was hard to do.  I went back and forth between the instructions that came with the stroller kit and the pictures off of Dave Daniel’s site and we finally figured them out.  Some of it could have been a little better designed – like the bolts you have to take a rubber mallet to and beat into the wood so that the lock nut will actually tighten onto the bolt.  Really, a square hole for the bolt flange and a Phillips head on the bolt would have been MUCH easier to do than what we were supposed to do.  I will give them credit for one thing, though – those casters are never coming off no matter how much traveling you do with the loom.

We still have about an hours’ worth of work to do on the Baby Wolf, but that will wait until next time.  It’s a good thing there were two of us working on it yesterday, because with one person, it would have been much more difficult.

I’m on Day 8 of the cleansing and I promised my coach that I would refrain from weighing again until Thursday.  This is very hard for a curious person like me.  I can say, though, that I feel much more energetic (once I got past days 4 and 5 that is) and I am looking forward to the next phase of this diet.  I brought to work several items to put together for a salad and am trying to keep salads interesting and tasty.  I relied too much on tuna last week for my protein, so it will be a while before tuna finds its way onto my salad.

This morning, I read this article on the web and found it to be very interesting and educational.  I already avoid most of the items on the list like artificial sweeteners, preservatives, HFCS, MSG, have never had Olestra, etc.  But I had never thought about artificial colors and flavorings before now.  Of course, they are chemically derived and I can’t believe I had not considered that.  It’s a good thing that most of the food I eat anymore is made from fresh or frozen ingredients from scratch, but there are still several pre-made items I buy and I will be looking closer at the labels for these ingredients.

Just in case this article disappears from the web, I have made the chart they included into a pdf file and will put it at the right under the 10,000 Step Club.

Speaking of the 10,000 Step Club, does anyone need the Excel spreadsheet I created for monitoring your steps?  I can easily email it to you if you want it.  I’m still trying to figure out how to set it up so you can download it whenever you want it.  Also, don’t forget that you can order your T-shirt to let everyone know that you are walking 10,000 Steps on a regular basis and doing your part to become more fit and healthy.

Before I start, I want to thank everyone for your comments about the weight I have lost.  Your saying how great I am looking at this point is a big help especially when I am seeing no budging in the scales.  I know the toning part is continuing because I can feel it in my clothes, but I am still frustrated in the numbers.  It is the numbers that count with my heart doctor and until I can get that number below 130, I am stuck taking medications costing over $100 a month.  I can think of more fun things (like yarn, books, fiber, yarn, errr… fiber) to spend that $100 on.

I have read there are different types of eaters – Boredom Eaters, Panic Eaters, Stress Eating, Tired Eaters, Habit Eaters, Happy Eaters, Depression Eaters, Tired Eaters and those who only eat when they are seriously hungry.  After thinking it over, I think the only categories I don’t fall into are the Depression Eaters and those who only eat when they are seriously hungry.  When I’m depressed, I have no appetite whatsoever, but wanting to lose weight is no reason to be purposefully depressed, and I’m rarely depressed.

So, that leaves Boredom eating, Panic eating, Stress eating, Tired eating, Habit eating and Happy eating – and that is a LOT of reasons to eat.  So, let think this thing over and see what we can do.

Boredom – I need to do something to stem boredom – especially in the afternoons at work when I really need a change of pace.  I’ve been trying to do one area of tasks in the mornings and change to a different area of tasks in the afternoons, but due to the small size of the company I work for, I cannot plan how my day is going to go because we all wear many hats and I’m never sure which hat I’m going be wearing from one minute to the next.  Still this is something I am working on – even if it is to just have some music going on my computer to occupy one part of my brain while the other is working on the task at hand or drink a cup of hot tea to boost my energy.

Panic – This is where you get it into your brain that you might not get something to eat for hours and you have to eat NOW before you starve.  Okay, you’ve seen my picture – I could go for days – maybe weeks – and not starve.  So, I need to get past this negative/lacking thought process.  Still working on this one, so I’m open for suggestions.  This is one area where I eat first, then think about it afterwards.

Stress – Well, that one is a tough one for me because it is such a mindless sort of thing.  When the boss is yelling at someone for something or equipment is breaking down all around me or any of those times when I feel like hiding (“lie low and serpentine” types of things).  These times, I tend to head for the candy bowl on the conference room table and that is such a not good thing on many levels.  I know it’s easy for people to say, “Work on having less stress in your life,” but I think I just need to work on how I deal with what is going to be there through no control of mine.

Tired – There goes the afternoons at work again.  At about 2:30 – 3:00 in the afternoon, my energy level begins to flag.  I am a morning person plain and simple.  So far, I have been combating this by having an extra cup of hot tea early in the afternoon.  As long as I remember to do this, I tend to be fine.  It’s the remembering part, though…

Habit – Both Scott and I have a problem with this one.  Scott wants to eat every time he gets into the car.  This habit was created by years of suffering through sleep apnea and using food to stay awake on his drive to and from work.  Me, I want to stop and get something to eat on the way home, which actually brings in panic and tired eating as well.  I panic because there won’t be anything to eat for me at home (because I used to buy all the groceries and cook all the food with Scott in mind and never had any for me at home – stupid, I know) and I’m tired on my drive home and my will tends to get weak.  So, I think I’ll combat this problem one phase at a time.  First I’ll take a baggie of carrots to munch on while driving, then once I can pass up Wendy’s with nary a glance, begin to back off until I am able to drive home food-free.

Happy – When I’m happy, surrounded by good friends, having fun, I like to eat.  It’s like I’m having a good time, my taste-buds ought to be having a good time as well.  Unfortunately, in most of these cases, eating is expected, but I need to watch how much and what I eat. 

So, I have ideas and tricks for Boredom, Tired and Habit.  The rest need work.  Leave it up to me to have multiple problems! 

Which of these fit you and your personality type?  How do you deal with them?

My being sick so much for about 6 weeks (two bouts of that nasty head cold) completely killed the momentum I had built up with the walking.  On top of that, I have plateaued once again on the weight loss.  Time to kick start this thing back into action.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before on here, but I suffer from a heredity weak heart muscle.  Both my grandfathers had their first heart attacks in their 30’s and I was 39 when I had my own “cardiac event.”  With this I now have unstable angina, which means I can have an angina attack without cause or reason.  So, now I’m a statistic.

I have decided to change the direction of the 10,000 Step Club in one way.  While I am still very much interested in helping people lose weight and overcome obesity and the myriad of health problems associated with that, I am going to use my own experiences and steer this club more toward helping prevent or overcome heart disease.  Of course, one way to help prevent heart disease is through exercise and healthy eating.

The American Heart Association has set up a website called Go for Red for Women.  It is free to join.  On it is a 12-week program to help you work toward living a healthier lifestyle, and I have signed up for it and will be starting it next Monday morning.  My #1 goal is to lose 1 pound per week over this 12 weeks, which will get me off the plains and back to walking down into the valley.  By the end of the summer, I want to have to start looking for size 10 pants.

Also, you can take a quiz that will help evaluate your chances of developing heart disease or having a heart attack.  Take it.  I did, and even though I have already had a history of heart problems, I found out some valuable information that I plan to work on.

Here I am at my 10 pounds of weight loss so far this year, and please notice I am wearing red.  This is to announce my commitment to helping me and other women not be more heart statistics.  This June, I am scheduled to have a nuclear stress test, and I will talk more about that when the time comes.  If my doctor’s office is willing, I will ask them to photograph my own procedure so I can share it with you.

I will be adding a new 10,000 Step Club T-shirt design, one with the person wearing a red shirt.  This is the one I plan to wear.

Well, I gained back .2 pound, but I didn’t walked on the treadmill last week past Monday.  My stupid cough was still stalking me and the additional exercise only made it worse.  So I gave it another week before hitting the treadmill again.

That being said, I did start again this morning and walked 45 minutes.  It was so nice having in over 6,000 steps before arriving at work!  I have missed that.

My new pants arrived today, and all four pairs fit nicely.  I am officially, completely in size 12’s now and all the larger sizes are in the Goodwill bag.

Other than that, I measured off the other two warps tonight and filled out my census form.  Wow!  That was a short one.  I really expected more than that. 

Keep an eye on the store.  I will be adding roving to it in the next day or so, and Scott and I both are working on new T-shirt designs.  I think you’ll really like them.

This is the first week in a while that I am starting to feel myself after being sick for most of February.  Scott said it right when he said the energy is the last thing to come back.

I walked on the treadmill for 45 minutes yesterday morning and got in over 9900 steps yesterday, but this morning my cough came back a bit, so I opted to rest and not walk.  I’m hoping that an every-other-morning build-up will let me start getting in my 10,000 steps every day next week.

Of course, with the time change on Sunday, next week I’ll be getting up at what really is 4:00 in the morning to hit the treadmill.  Sheesh!!!  I hate Daylight Savings Time.

Good news, though – I have officially lost my first 10 pounds since I started this diet on the day after Christmas.  I weighed 172 that morning and this morning I weighed 161.6.  A couple more pounds and I get to take my next progress picture.  Once I get below 160, I hope to never see it again.

Scott has been commenting on how “skinny” I am.  I love my husband!  I can tell the treadmill walking has really paid off in the inches.  I’ve been this low once before last fall, and the pants I wore today didn’t fit me as good then as they do now.  While the scales may not show it as much, the clothes do show that I’ve toned up. 

My next thing to do on the treadmill is to fix up a strap that keeps me from walking off the end of the treadmill without holding on to the handles, and let me carry small hand weights.  I used to do this on my old treadmill and it worked out great.  I know I need to start working on the upper body and 45 minutes to an hour of walking with the weights will be an excellent start.

The pants I wore to work yesterday have seen their last time with me.  They are 14’s and were so baggy that I felt sloppy all day.  So, I’ll wash them and put them in the Goodwill bag.  I am both tickled and sad.  I loved these pants!  I loved the color, the fit and how lots of my wardrobe worked so well with them.  So, I ordered four new pair of pants today - taupe, dark burgandy, gray and dark brown.  Just think, this time last year, I was wearing 16W’s and now I’m in 12 normals.  Woohoo!!!

So, how are the rest of you doing on your diets?  How many of you are getting in 10,000 steps a day?  Now that the weather is warming up, let’s start trying to get others involved and see if we can get some groups together for some 10,000 step walks.  I have several people around here interested and I’m going to see what I can organize this spring.

I’m sorry I haven’t posted much in the way of creative or fibery projects in here for a while, but between being sick (twice), tax season, house rearranging, newsletter prep, and such, the creative stuff has been on the back burner.

March is going to be a very hectic and busy month for me, too.  This weekend is the SWIFT annual meeting on Saturday, and I will do my best to get both my taxes (company and personal) taxes done on Sunday.  The weekend after that is preparing for the weaving workshop I am teaching the 19^th through the 20^th, then the workshop itself, then I am taking a silk workshop on the 27^th and 28^th of the month.  And there goes March.  Of course, I get to spin while at the annual meeting on Saturday, and you’ll get to see what my students produce while I’m teaching, and the silk workshop will be something I will definitely share (we are going to reel silk off of cocoons and spin it and dye it and all sorts of cool things!).

At that point, though, life opens up for me and I get to go back to working on my studio, fiber prep, spinning, knitting, weaving, dyeing and all that jazz.  I have many things I want to do this spring, summer and fall, so bear with me a bit until we get March behind us.

In the meantime, starting Saturday, I’m back on the treadmill (I want to make sure this cold is good and gone before I go back to stressing out the body), and I want to make it the rest of the month at 10,000+ steps daily, getting up to 12,000 steps on the days I can.

Here is my February steps chart and you can see I was all over the board this past month.  You can see the days I was sick and the days I was on the treadmill.  The rest was just getting through.  March is starting off slowly, but, with luck and perseverance, the rest of the month will not fall below 10,000 on any given day.  Actually, I’m rather embarrassed to show you this chart after my challenge at the beginning of February, but I am nothing if not honest and I will not hide from or lie to you guys.

On Sunday, I will be participating in the Blogger Run Day 5K as talked about on Shelley’s site, except I will be walking it and not running it.  If the weather is nice, I will be walking around my block that morning (3 miles), but if not, then on the treadmill.  For those of you in the 10,000 Step Club, join me!

By the way, you can now get your 10,000 Step Club T-shirt through my store.   I’m going to create a discount coupon for those who send me a picture of their pedometer with more than 10,000 steps on it as a reward for making it to the club.  I’ll let you know as soon as that coupon is ready and send it to those who’ve already sent me their pedometer picture.

Oh, and I weighed 162.2 pounds on Tuesday morning, which is .2 pound from my first 10 pound weight loss goal.  I still don’t have an appetite, which can remain that way if it wants to.  I have put three pairs of pants into the Goodwill bag because they are too big for me.  This means I’m definitely into size 12’s, although I’m still wearing some of my size 14’s until I can no longer stand the bagginess and break down to buy more pants (I hate shopping for pants!).  I bought a cute size 12 pantsuit last summer at Goodwill that I am hoping to get to wear this summer ($3.99!).  Also, I have three pair of size 10 cords in my closet that I have never worn (bought on a clearance sale last spring) that I’d love to be able to wear this fall.  So bear with me on this, too.

Don’t forget to tell all your friends about my T-shirts and I’ll let you know when I add new designs.  This is going to be lots of fun!!!

One of the problems I am having is afternoon cravings.  I get tired at the office, a little bit hungry, and I want to munch something.  Now, on the weekends, I don’t have this trouble, mostly because I’m doing something that interests me more than coding invoices and doing journal entries, but, also, because my eating pattern is different.  During the week, I’ve been eating a small breakfast (1 T of hummus on whole wheat toast and a cup of hot tea), but on the weekends, I eat a larger breakfast (two pieces of whole wheat toast, 2 scrambled eggs and a slice of bacon with 6 ounces of OJ and 2-3 cups of hot tea).  During the week, I’m hungry within three hours of breakfast, but on the weekends, I don’t eat again for 6-7 hours and then I want something light only.  Hmmm…

So, starting today, I am eating a larger breakfast on the weekdays.  I still like the hummus on toast idea because it is a good carb paired with protein, but I am adding either ½ a smoothie (if there is any left over from making my co-worker’s smoothies) or an organic yogurt, and a fruit (right now that is ruby red grapefruit).  This comes to about 400 calories, which still leaves me with 1,000 calories for the rest of the day (until I get down into the 140’s, then I’ll decrease my daily calories).

And, today, it worked.  Four and a half hours after eating this breakfast, I still wasn’t hungry, but Sandy was, so I ate my lunch (2 cups vegetable soup with whole wheat pasta and a sandwich consisting of some new bread called Slimwich bread, which is 100 calories for two slices and whole wheat, with turkey breast, a slice of Swiss cheese and two Claussen pickle slices).  Again this is about 400 calories, still leaving 600 calories for the day.

Before I left the office, I made a half PB&J and took an apple for the trip to the grocery store and this was about 250 calories.  Hmmm…  I guess I could add something in the veggie area for this tomorrow.

Of course, eventually, I want to come up with something healthier for supper, but for this week, this will do just fine.

Also, last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I purposefully did not walk on the treadmill.  I was very tired and run down from all the extra hours at the office, getting the newsletter out the door and from being sick a couple of weeks ago.  So, I rested and did nothing more than run a few errands, get some new glasses (progressive tri-focals! – Yeesh!) and visit with Scott’s folks.

And, on the 10,000 Step Club front, I have upped my goal.  Since I am plateaued in the mid-160’s in weight, I have decided to kick my personal minimum steps up to 12,000 a day at least through the week.  Saturdays, I’d like to get above 10,000, but I think Sundays are going to be slower and if I hit 10,000 fine, but, if not, I’m not going to sweat it.  I really need one day a week at a slower pace to recoup from the week, and Sundays are as good a day as any.  Besides, I find I have tons of energy on Mondays when I rest on Sundays.  Of course, the Bible says we should rest on the Sabbath, and now I am beginning to understand why.

So, today, I walked what is effectively a 5K this morning (3.1 miles) and started the day with nearly 7700 steps.  Not bad, not bad at all… 

So, what do you do to get off of plateaus?  Which is your largest meal of the day and how do you get in enough veggies?  Any quick and easy suggestions for a supper that I can eat while driving on the way home?  Since my bedtime is about 2 hours after getting home each week night, I need to eat before I get home, and that doesn’t mean stopping at Wendy’s or McD’s.  Besides, eating before I get home leaves more time to do laundry and other little bits of housework that I need to do.

Can you believe I did not eat any chocolate for St. Valentine’s day?  Scott and I have never celebrated Valentine’s day because we see no reason to limit showing how much we love one another to one day a year.

I weighed in this morning and gained back 1.4 of the 3.8 pounds I lost from being sick.  That’s okay, though.  Weight lost during illness rarely stays off and it still is a loss overall.  I weighed 165.2 pounds this morning – here’s to less than 163 next Monday!  I am back to full energy after the cold and upped my speed on the treadmill this morning from 3.2 mph average to 3.3 mph for the 45 minutes.  In fact, I hit 10,000 steps today before 2:30 this afternoon!   Also, I am carefully monitoring the calories I am eating and trying to get in several servings of veggies each day, although I could do better there.

For your convenience, I have added to the right-hand sidebar a page for the 10,000 Step Club and the posts about that.  Also, I have an Excel spreadsheet for you to keep track of your steps with graphs for the year and each month, miles walked on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis and a column calculating your average steps for the year.  If you are interested, let me know and I’ll email it to you.  As soon as I can figure out how to make it available on the website (if that is even possible), I will and let you know.

We did get snow today, but it was warm enough to melt off the roads pretty easily.  It did clean up the dirty snow with a new coating, though.  Still,  I have been narrowing down my seed choices and should be making my order in the next week or so.  Sure would like to see some signs of Spring!  36 more days until the first day of Spring!!