The Good, Bad and the Ugly on my diet!

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

I have completed one round of Power 90.  I  enjoyed the process of it a great deal.  I was even able to lose 27 pounds.  I intend to continue doing Power 90 through the school year and then start P90X at the end of next May.  The one thing that I'm still really struggling with is eating well.  I could sit here and make excuses for why I haven't quite accomplished breaking my bad eating habits yet, but I'm not going to.  It's a daily struggle and I think I'm slowly getting better at making food descions.  Mostly.

About a week ago my wife and I started using Shakeology as a substitute for lunch at our jobs.   We love it.  It tastes great and its really good for you. We both love dark chocolate and Shakeology does a great job satisfying that craving for us as well. We did the math and figured out that it's actually cheaper for us to use Shakeology than to eat school lunch everyday.  Our school lunch program is very good as far as school lunches go, however, I still don't believe it's designed to really meet good nutritional needs.  I've been pleasantly surprised by how good I've felt the last week simply by changing what I eat for lunch.  Then today happened.

Today I decided to eat lunch at school instead of taking the 45 seconds this morning it takes me to mix a shake.  School lunch today was pizza.  I love pizza.  In fact pizza might possibly be my favorite food.  In high school I ate pizza everyday at school.  I worked at a pizza joint in the evenings and ate pizza most nights as well.  In college I memorized Domino's phone number, I think I still know it.  Even after all of that I still enjoy pizza.  A LOT.  Which is why I didn't make my own lunch today.

By 2:00 I regretted my decision. While lunch was really good, I didn't particularly great just an hour and a half later.  I wasn't really sick, but I noticed the energy I had all last week wasn't there.  Also my stomach while not really upset just didn't quite feel right. Then during my prep period at school a stumbled across this article written by David Zinczenko.   Talk about guilt and bad timing.  Now I realize some of this could be psychosomatic, but I really think after having eaten healthy lunches for a week my body was yelling at me.  I realized the pizza wasn't worth how I felt the rest of the day.

This morning I took my son to the doctor for his 24 month well check up.  He did great.  While waiting for the doctor to see us I read over and over a poster he has hanging in his examination room.  It says, "People who don't make time for diet and exercise now will have to make time for sickness and disease later."  Talk about the world conspiring against you especially since I read that before lunch.

I'm really starting to make exercising a priority, now I need to make eating healthy all the time a priority as well.

Can someone please tell me about a really healthy pizza?  I don't think I can give that one up just yet.

Custard's Last Stand

The Editor here.  My husband and I celebrated our 8th anniversary today, though it was really on the 3rd of August.  Aaron's sister got married that day, so we put off our dinner until today.  His mother gave us a creme brulee torch, and I just finished making chocolate pots de creme.  Aaron's on his way home to enjoy the chocolatey goodness, and as I sit and write, I reminisce about our mutual love of creme brulee.  Though it's definitely not on the Beachbody diet plan, they can sit and spin tonight for all I care because it's our ANNIVERSARY.

A few years back, I decided that I must be a bitchin' enough cook to make creme brulee and not have to buy it at fancy restaurants.  We borrowed a friend's torch the first time, and damn!  Not bad, if I say so myself. 

The second time I made it, I didn't have any of the proper (insert French accent) "accoutrements" to make it correctly, but I grew up with the Montana spirit of (insert hick accent) "jerry-rig the sumbitch."  We had just used a thousand degree heat gun to remove tile from our bathroom floor.  Janet thinks, "Hmmm....a thousand degrees should do an awesome crust."

In many ways, I am just like my dad.  We both love creative problem solving and ingenuity, but unfortunately, we both occasionally think our bitchin' ideas don't require the use of safety equipment or common sense.  For those of you who have never used one, a heat gun is like a blow dryer on crack.  Aaron, to his credit, had just started the sentence, "I don't think this is a very good...." but Janet didn't listen.  I sprinkled the top liberally with white granulated sugar, and grabbed my trusty heat gun.  Drooling in anticipation of carmelized awesomeness, I flipped to high. 

Did you know that really hot sugar burns and flies?  I didn't!  As soon as I turned the superheated air onto the top of the custard, flaming sugar threatened to ignite our ceiling.  It flew willy-nilly and burrowed into our skin, not badly, but it sure didn't tickle.

I've noticed that I keep getting equipment from my husband for our anniversary that involves the correct process for making creme brulee.  Coincidence?  I think not!  Tonight, we enjoyed for the first time creme brulee made properly with our own equipment.  Look out, Paris!  Here I come!