Like A Rock

I'm down to 174.6 this morning - a drop of 3.4 pounds (98.4 total). At least a pound and a half of it is suspect, though, since I was sick yesterday and only ate about half my points. And even if it's real, well, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. So I might gain some of that back before next week. We'll see, I guess.

BUT! But but but! I've been mostly keeping up with doing my yoga on the Wii Fit every weekday morning (with some breaks in recent days due to illness) and this week, for the first time, the Wii moved me from "obese" to merely "overweight"! I don't know if it'll survive the holidays, but at last I'm out of that whole horrible obese category!

Shooting Distance

Well. I guess my trip wasn't as bad for me as I'd worried it would be -- all that walking around doing tourist things must have balanced out the eating. I'm down 2 pounds this morning, which puts me at 178 -- that's 95 total pounds lost.

That means I've passed my 4th 10% goal! I'd say it's time to decide on a reward for it, except...

Five more pounds gets me to 100 total pounds lost, and under the 30.0 BMI threshold for obesity (I'll be merely "overweight") for the first time in over 20 years. (I'm not sure exactly when I crossed that line the first time. The summer after my first year of grad school, I was horrified to realize I'd stress-eaten my way all the way up to 195, and I dieted and exercised my way down to about 175 before my feet betrayed me. The 30.0 BMI threshold for me is at about 174 or so.)

Anyway, those are some milestones really worthy of a major celebration, so I think I'll hold off and have one big reward when I get to them. Not sure when that will be, with the holidays right on top of us to lure me into Temptation and interrupt my exercise routines. But that's okay, really, because I don't know what my reward should be, either. Feel free to chime in with ideas!

Big and Round

This morning's weigh-in was 180 on the nose: down 1.4 for the week and 93 overall. That puts me exactly 1 pound from my 4th 10% goal.

I'm just pleased that I managed to avoid gaining weight through both Hallowe'en and my birthday, honestly.

Of course, I'm about to go out of town for four days, which upsets both my exercise and eating schedules, so I'm probably not expecting to hit that goal next week. On the other hand, I'll be doing a fair amount of walking on this trip, and the relatives I'm staying with are used to be sort of health-nut-y the last time I checked, so it's possible that I'll be able to stay on plan and hit it. You never know!

After that, the next big hurdle is Thanksgiving. I'm planning on bringing roasted pumpkin soup and the Weight Watchers recipe for candied yams, to help reduce the damages, but I think aside from that and some common-sense damage control (have a glass of water before eating and take big servings of the soup and veggies to help fill me up, be the one to get up and chase the kids after dessert so I'm not tempted into seconds, etc.), I might give myself permission to ignore the points counter for the day.

We'll see how I do in the two weeks between now and then, I guess. 'Tis the season for diet backsliding, but I really don't want to lose too much ground.

Dodge!

This morning's weigh-in was 181.4, which is .6 lost this week, 91.6 total.  Not an outstanding loss, but given the lack of control I was having with the Hallowe'en candy, I'm happy to have lost at all.

This week's challenge:  my birthday.  We're having dinner with my family on Sunday, and my actual birthday is Monday.  I executed some preemptive damage-reduction and told my mom and husband that I'd make my own cake, and then I spent a day or so trolling the Weight Watchers recipe database for lower-point desserts.  (I finally decided to make two of them:  a two-layer meringue/mousse, and gingerbread cupcakes.  I'm doing the cupcakes for the family party because my sister-in-law is allergic to both strawberries and chocolate, and also because I can slather the cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and no one will need to know that they're diet friendly.)  Still, the possibility for excessive dessert consumption lingers, so that's what I'll need to try to avoid.

I'm also looking ahead to the challenge that is Thanksgiving.  I've volunteered to bring pumpkin soup; I may also offer to bring lightened dressing and sweet potato dishes.  And possibly dessert.  (Honestly, I was going to volunteer to have Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, but my mom is insisting.  I don't think she'll object, however, if I take some of the cooking off her hands.)

I also dusted off the Wii Fit this morning (pretty much literally -- I haven't so much as looked at it for three months or more) and did a little yoga.  That's got less to do with weight loss (yoga isn't exactly a calorie-burner) and more to do with my noticing twinges in my feet again lately, and yoga did more to help that than anything else, ever.  So I want to try to do a little Wii Fit yoga in the mornings.  The goal right now is to do about 15 minutes of yoga, at least 3 times a week.  Ideally, I'd like to make it part of my weekday routine, but I don't want to get too ambitious too fast -- and I need to see how it fits into the morning schedule, anyway.  If it works out well (and I can adjust to not hitting the snooze on my alarm three or four times in a row) I might start to tack on some of the strength training exercises, as well.  But for now, just the yoga, just 15 minutes, to get my feet back in line.

The Great Pumpkin

When we went to our favorite pumpkin patch this year to pick out our Hallowe'en pumpkins, we got a pumpkin for each member of the family.  My husband and I each picked out nice-sized carving pumpkins with sturdy stems, and our daughter picked out her own smaller stemless pumpkin, and I grabbed a small "pie" pumpkin for our son, because he's not quite two yet and had no idea what was going on, and he's not going to be carving his own jack-o-lantern for several years yet.

At some point, it occurred to me that the thing to do, once Hallowe'en was over and we no longer required the pumpkins for decorative purposes, would be to make some pumpkin-based culinary treats.  My daughter's been crazy about "helping" me cook lately, and I thought if I could find a diet-friendly recipe or two, I might give it a go.  All in all, the experiment was a wild success, so I'm sharing it here, if for no other reason than it'll be handy when I want to repeat it later.


Step One:  Preparing the Pumpkin.
Most recipes call for your pumpkin to be precooked and pureed.  So Hallowe'en night, after we'd turned off our porch light, I brought in the pumpkin.  I cut off the top (just like for a carving pumpkin, though with more difficulty, since pie pumpkins have thicker skin and meat), then cut it in half and scooped out the seeds and the goopy strands they hang in.

(As a side note, pie pumpkins have fatter seeds than carving pumpkins, and I was tempted to collect these and roast them...  but pumpkin seeds have an insane amount of calories and/or fat, even if you toast them without using butter.  And while I like pumpkin seeds, I don't like them enough to burn that many points on 'em!)

I got a baking sheet out, lightly sprayed it with some cooking spray, then put the two pumpkin halves flat-side down on the sheet, then covered them with foil.  I put the sheet in a 375-degree (F) oven for about 90 minutes.  (A little less than that, actually, when I started to smell something burning.  The burning turned out to be some juice that had leaked out from under the foil and run to the far edge of the pan.  The pumpkin itself was not burnt at all, though the skin had turned dark brown.)  By then, it was bedtime, so I left the baking sheet on the stove to cool overnight.

In the morning, I went to turn one over and got a fun surprise:  The inedible outer skin of the pumpkin lifted straight off the meat.  So much for having to "scoop it out"!  The instructions I was following recommended that I go through all sorts of weird steps to puree and strain the pumpkin, but I wasn't planning on making haute cuisine with it - a few lumps would be fine.  So I just dumped the meat into a large plastic mixing bowl and took my stick blender to it.  (I love my stick blender.  Though I should mention that it probably wasn't necessary in this case.  The pumpkin was so soft that it probably would've been perfectly pureed given about two minutes with a manual potato masher.)

Anyway, when it was all done, I spooned the puree into one-cup tupperware containers.  I got three full cups out of the pumpkin (which was probably about 5 pounds?).  Plus a couple of spoonfuls for my son, who was wandering around underfoot.  He was pretty enthusiastic about the stuff, and I tried a bite, myself:  All by itself, without any seasoning at all, the pumpkin puree tasted almost just like sweet potato.  And it was weird to know that I hadn't seasoned it at all, because I would otherwise have sworn it had some cinnamon and cloves in it already.  Very tasty stuff!

Recipe #1:  Pumpkin Muffins
I got this recipe from the Weight Watchers site, and if you're a WW member, you can probably go straight to it at this link.  But in case you're not a member, or they get rid of the recipe at some point in the future, here it is:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp table salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
2/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup pumpkin puree (can use canned, but fresh is better!)
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup egg substitute (e.g., Egg Beaters)
2/3 cup fat-free skim milk

1. Preheat oven to 400ºF. Coat a 12-hole muffin tin with cooking spray. (I recommend not using cupcake papers, because this is an oil-less recipe and they will stick to the muffins. If you really want to use them, spray the insides of the liners as well.)
2. Combine flour, baking powder, salt , baking soda, and spices in a large bowl.
3. Combine applesauce, pumpkin, sugar, egg substitute and milk in a medium bowl; mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon.
4. Add applesauce mixture to flour mixture and mix until completely incorporated.
5. Pour batter into muffin tins so each hole is about 2/3 full. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.

• Note #1:  If you compare to the original WW recipe, you might note that I reduced the amount of nutmeg and added some ginger.  I did that because I love ginger and I don't much care for nutmeg.  Adjust spices at your own whim; just try to keep the total amount more or less the same.
• Note #2:  I made both mini-muffins and regular-sized ones.  I used 1 heaping Tbsp of batter for each mini-muffin (baking for only 12-13 minutes), and 3 heaping Tbsp of batter for each  normal muffin, and that netted me 24 minis and 10 regular muffins -- which works out to 18 servings, if you assume a serving is 3 minis or 1 normal.  The WW recipe says it makes 12 servings of 3 points each, but if you get 18 servings like I did, then they're 2 points each.  Either way, they were really tasty!

But when that was done, I was still left with 2 cups of pumpkin puree, and I didn't really want to make that many muffins.  Which led me to...

Recipe #2:  Pumpkin Soup
I adapted this from another recipe online, so I'll just post what I've got:

2 cups cooked pumpkin, pureed
8 oz sweet (e.g., vidalia) onion, diced
1 tsp butter
4 cups chicken broth
1/4 tsp salt (may need a touch more if using low-sodium broth, but this is a good starting place)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp black pepper
2 Tbsp packed brown sugar
12 oz fat-free evaporated milk (1 can)

1. Saute onion in butter (and some cooking spray, if needed) until it just begins to brown.
2. Add 1-2c of broth, remove from heat, and puree until smooth.  (I have mentioned that I love my stick blender, right?  You can also do this in a regular blender or food processor, but then you have a larger doodad to clean.)
   
3. Put it back over heat, and add remaining broth, pumpkin, spices, and sugar.  Bring to a boil and simmer 10 min.
4. Remove from heat and add milk.

• Note #1:  The entire recipe is about 13 points; I got 4 meal-sized servings of about 2 cups each out of this, so that's 3 points per serving.  I want to make this again for Thanksgiving dinner (if not before that), but that will probably be smaller 1-cup servings for half the points.
  
• Note #2:  The recipe I adapted it from recommended serving it with cinnamon toast, which sounds really quite lovely.
• Note #3:  The soup was wonderful, but a) a touch thin, and b) almost too sweet.  For future batches, I might reduce the amount of brown sugar (just 1 Tbsp for that dark flavor, maybe) and add a tablespoon or two of either cornstarch or flour to thicken it up a bit.

I had a muffin last night for a snack, and the soup today for lunch.  Both were absolutely wonderful, well-worth the effort involved in cleaning/roasting/pureeing the pumpkin.  And as a bonus, my daughter really enjoyed helping me cook!  I've definitely found myself some new fall favorites.