The Only Thing I Cannot Resist is Tempation...

It is always easier to resist those sweet deliciously evil little treats we all indulge in, at the beginning than at the end.

G'ahhhh Twinkies!

There are moments, silent moments, where a person will be staring at that one, or maybe more than one, tantalizing treat with longing. Maybe what you like are Twinkies, or nectarines, or maybe its diet coke? But we all have something that makes our mouths water, our knees quiver, and our wills disappear. 

I was once deprived for 6 months of bread and candy. Now when I say deprived, I mean that everyone in my house would eat tons of it in front of me, made me feel excluded and shunned for being unable to indulge in it, and actually swat my hand if I went for any of it. So one day when I was completely alone in the house, I tried to binge on black cherry war heads, and Salsa Doritos. I tried...and failed so miserably, that it proved I could never truly over eat! My mouth was cut open by the Warheads, and the spices from the Doritos made me so dehydrated that the room was spinning. I spent the night by the porcelain throne with 2 water bottles, desperately trying to save my equilibrium. Because of that, I don't really eat candy or sweets much, though I'll make then often enough. Too much of a good thing...well, not a good thing exactly, but my point is still valid, I swear!

Then there are those pesky habits we try to shake in order to shed a few inches. From Fad diets, to starvation, we trick ourselves and each other into thinking that these will work. Reality Check! Come on! How will you lose weight, or stay healthy and fit enough to escape an attack from zombies or thugs, by not working out ever and/or only eating the very absolute minimum? You make yourself sick during this 'diet' and then blow up like a hot air balloon the minute you go off it, that is what always happens! I had a friend once who ate nothing but kiwis, toast with hummus and water and would only travel by walking or rollerblading for a whole month just to lose 10 lbs! Crazy, right? But wait! How about the guy who used to drink nothing but Muscle Milk, Slim Fast, and laxatives during the week, but on Saturdays would eat anything and everything he could get his hands on? That one freak you out? Just wait: Once he ate 3 large pizzas, 2 large orders of fries, a grilled cheese, and 2 large cucumbers all by himself, in one siting, and 2 liters of Diet Coke. He was addicted to diet coke.


But hey, I am nowhere near saintly! Evey single one of us has a habit they cannot break or, at best, a food they will not be able to give up. Before you start journaling, you should identify what your temptations are, and note how much you love it, how much of it you eat, and at what time/how many times per day/week/month.

 My List of Temptations

(When it comes to weight loss)

 

Foods I love/Cannot Give Up:

 1. Nectarines

2. Chocolate

3. Spicy Things

4. Tea 

5. Pastas/Rices

6. Wine 

(Red & White)

 Activities I love/Cannot Give Up:

 1. Watching movies on Laptop

 2. Lazy Morning Ly-ins 

 3. Relaxing Baths 

  (Introverted Time)

 4. Baking Desserts

Once you have identified your own personal lists, you can begin to substitute certain bad habits for healthier ones.

For example, I now eat spicy hummus and carrots instead of spicy chips or pretzels and I sometimes watch movies while on the treadmill instead of just kicking back to watch them. I also ride my bike into town to keep in shape, save on gas, and work on my tan.

Now . . . What can you do to help you? Set out some short term goals for yourself. Its summer in a couple of weeks! Make some plans to stay active in the hot air, the cool waters, and always remember to wear your sun block! No one likes melanoma. xx

Just Checking In!

Hello to you all!

Tomorrow is my last very day as an undergraduate student. Such a weird feeling, isn't it? Four years and POOF! After all the late nights, memorizing, and under appreaciation is coming to a close at last. What am I gonna do after I graduate? PLEASE don't ask! I have only the vaguest ideas, like the majority of the 2012 graduates. This world is in need of us all, but there are hardly any jobs, and everything is about who you know, right? But if another "adult" asks me one more question about the future, or how I am going to make money, or how I should be scared of my future:

 THIS IS WHAT I SAY TO YOU ALL! 

But thanks to the goal for the year (Starting in 2 days!), I feel a bit more in control. A teacher of mine once said, "The world is like a thick forest. Our job is to give you the axe. Yours? To hack your own path through. So start, young Lumberjack." Wise words from a weird man. But it is very true. There are times in life, especially when we are young, when we think life is a straight path, but we are wrong. We are trained to think that the path is direct: Middle School, High School, College and/or Grad School, Dream Job, Marriage, Kids, Life, Grand Kids, and then BOOM. We meet the dust we all came from once more. Whoever started this lie should be hanged in a tree, and it should be televised! There is no one path, success is not a straight line, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something, so shoot them. Life is chaos. Life is beauty and pain. Take the quiet moments when you get them, and just keep going when you feel you're lost. You'll get to where you need to be eventually.

But for right now I honestly feel like this:

See you all soon, when the bell rings. xx

Let The Self Hate Die, Already!

Ever Had to Deal With One Of Those People? You know the ones I mean! The girls who cry cause they ate a grape, or those guys who are so obsessed about being ripped that they don't own shirts that fit them properly?

What do I do if I ate too many carbs yesterday?

None today? None for the rest of the week?

God, I'm such a fat ass, I ate that whooooole  cookie! Should I just live on the treadmill or what? Wahh... Wahh ...Wahh!

 Just shut the hell up!

Trust me, hating yourself over what you eat is the hardest habit to break. I have been there, a few times...maybe like hundreds...but the point is, STOP! Hating yourself is not gonna help you. There are plenty of people in the world who will gladly shred your self-esteem to tatters - DON'T HELP THEM DO IT! You are your own master, to quote Aida. No one but you is in charge of you. Yes, you will eat junk food, yes you will accidentally eat too much of your favorite food, and yes sometimes you will even have more than one glass of wine...for fun...not to help your heart. We all do it. There is no shame! People lay on the guilting just because they want to do it! I am not gonna tell you, "never eat cake." It just won't happen, it is unrealistic of me to lecture anyone. Cake is AWESOME! Well...except American fruit cake...that stuff is shit - But the point is RELAX!! No one is a saint when it comes to their favorite foods ( I myself am addicted to nectarines), and it is every one's cross to bear

 

...unless you are Jewish like me.....and then its our star of David to bear....

ANYWAY!

Yes, over-doing anything is bad for you. And why? Because life is all about moderation. The human body should not binge drink daily, because it would die right? So, given the same logic, eating copious amounts of non-healthy foods will also put your body out to pasture at a much earlier date.

This being said, there is a way to help make you honest about what you eat, without the self hate and residual longing stair at that box of donuts at work.

WRITE IT DOWN!

I started keeping a food journal when I was 8 years old, thanks to something I like to call Fat-camp-Auschwitz (that is not the true name of the camp, but let's pretend shall we?) "Nutrition classes" were all about "healthy substitutions" and we had to write down all our unhealthy decision, and we were told exactly why we were making stupid choices. Now, of course this is traumatizing and in no way shape or form am I suggesting this blog be about publicly flogging its followers into embarrassing situations. But as an adult, there was one thing that made sense. I would forget to eat on a daily basis, and I am the type of person that remembers everything she writes down. So, to keep me on the straight and narrow, in this case 'actually eating 4 times a day', I kept to a schedule. I would have 4 designated times to eat, and I would either make or buy something to eat at that time. This took 3 months to flesh out into a much better, much more flexible eating day. Now, this is what my food diary usually looks like:

Food Diary Example

  8:30 am

2 eggs over easy with 2 pinches of Cayenne pepper

4 medium strawberries and 1 kiwi sliced

2 slices of whole grain toast

1 Earle Grey tea (light and sweet)

1 pm

My Tuna Salad Recipe 

(see recipe)

 Small garden salad, drizzled with the juice of half a lemon, pinch of cracked black pepper

(cucumbers, tomatoes, green olives, thinly sliced onion and carrot, etc)

3 pm

Small apple, 1/3 cup of spicy hummus, 1 - 2 cups of carrots 

(depending on how hungry I am)

7 pm

Veggie Stir Fry 

(Many different variations and recipes)

10 pm

Something Sweet 

(like cookies I have baked recently, or popcorn if its a movie night)

"This will be the hardest step in the direction of healthy living. When to eat, what to eat, and how much to eat will be difficult for those first few months."

- Jason Verdisco

If I have to be totally and bluntly honest, there is a reason this process took so long to stick. It is tedious, annoying, and people made comments ("who does that?" was a popular one). Social pressures, like going out to lunch and/or eating unhealthy foods at social gatherings, are always difficult to navigate. Most of the time, when I was growing up, it was a wright of passage to leave the school grounds and go out to lunch with people. Most of the time, these restaurants were Chinese take-away, pizza places, sushi bars, or fast food chains. And being the only one getting a chopped salad and water, when every one else is devouring garlic knots and slices, and guzzling down soda, can be awkward. As we get older, however, everyone becomes obsessed with health, which flips the social stigmata in the opposite direction (if you are the only eating bad things, everyone else will judge you). 

So my advise? 

• No one is perfect, and everyone will eat bad stuff sometimes. So take a breather! You can eat your favorite foods, you can eat health foods, you can do whatever you want! But remember it is all about moderation!

• Buy a nice, small book and start writing down what you eat.  The more you write, the more you will be aware of what choices you make. The only thing you loose by eating healthy and being more active, are unhealthy habits and the excess fat.

Blow Out The Candles, And Make A Wish...

Birthdays & All Their Glory

Another year, another day older. The old days where birthdays were momentous occasions with themes, invitations, guest lists, goodie bags, and sometimes pinatas, are, as the raven would say, nevermore. Now, if one is lucky, one's birthday is filled with possible facebook well-wishes, possible hangouts if people are not busy with other things (and usually those are in bars, or in apartments, with so many liquor bottles it will seem like you are a party of pirates just after a raid), or like me, spending your day trying to find things to do to make the day seem even a little special.

Today's Agenda:

1. Laundry
2. Cleaning:

   (Room, Kitchen, & Car)
3. Skyping with British Boyfriend

4. Pick Up Indian Take-Away (or take-out) From New Favorite Restaurant
5. [And Lastly, if at all possible] Watch a movie, either at the cinema or in my bed, alone. 

I am sorry world, but does that not sound like a pathetic birthday? First world problem, I know, but come on! Everyone deserves an amazing birthday. It is the one day a year we all get to be a bit greedy, and no one judges us on it! The day we can eat anything we want, do anything we want, drink anything we want, dress like escaped mental patients and sing in the streets! . . .or is that just theatre birthdays?...Whatever! This is one of the key philosophies of my life, and I try to keep to the code every chance I can! 

{In fact, last year for my boyfriend's 23rd birthday I had a huge weekend planned: First, I let him have introverted time (Another personal philosophy: Everyone should spend at least one hour per day alone, to detox from the stress of life and stupid people, to do something relaxing and/or fun), while I created 30 cupcakes from scratch! I made 14 Piglets (strawberry frosting and sponge cake), 14 Owls (chocolate frosting, and sponge cake), and 2 Abominations (half piglet + half owl = POWEL). Then we went down to Brighton, UK, for the whole weekend, and met up with his friends in a bar (originally this bar had been filled with old school video games, and pin ball machines, but they were moved without a website update!), and spent the whole night traipsing about, looking for funny drinks and fun times (a.k.a. bar hopping). The next night, when we got back to his place, I cooked dinner (Sweet Potato Mash, Red Wine Sauteed Mushrooms, and Grilled White Truffle Fillet Minon, wrapped in bacon). Best girlfriend of the year award, check! Great birthday memory, check! }

I love planning parties, but I never seem to have anything fun planned for my own. My family goes in five different directions, and ever since my 16th birthday, not even a family dinner has come together. For my 21st birthday, all I wanted was a family dinner where I could drink as much wine as I wanted and not worry about having to drive home. But my father took everyone out to dinner, thinking my birthday was the next night, and I ended up having my mom yell at me in a hotel bar (which was text-book sad movie bar: blue lighting, windy boardwalk backdrop, sad jazz music floating in the stale air, and only 4 people in the whole joint) claiming I was ungrateful and negative. This year, I fear, will be no different. 

How can it be, when everyone who cares about me is busy or in another country unable to celebrate with me? If I could have my secret heart's birthday wish, and it could only be for the 24 hours of my birthday, what would it be? I would want to have a lovely picnic in a meadow, relaxing and quiet, with nothing to worry about...or at least a full night of drinking, singing, and dancing at my three favorite bars/dance clubs, back in London.

CATCH 22 - Shoreditch, London

But with any {birthday} luck, this year will be different.

Birthday Luck

There is something to this, at least in my life. There may have never been a birthday where I got exactly what I wanted (parent planned parties, people invited who didn't like me/bullied me, or family dinners that were filled with in-fighting), but I always end up with what I need from the outside world. Birthday luck, according to Urban Dictionary, is "a nuclear explosion of luck that happens inside you. It causes you to have the ability to do anything". In my personal history, May 11th has given me some beautiful gifts: one year I found a book in the middle of a parking lot (it became one of my personal favorites), another year I found eighty dollars, and once I even went backstage to watch a Broadway show! Tonight, I walked the streets of my town, door to door, filling out job applications for every bar, bar &grill, and restaurant in there area, crossing my fingers and focusing all my positive energy to get me a job! With my charming smile, my pretty face, and my winning witty self, I shook every one's hands and hopefully got my foot in the door for something that pays and has consistent days! Birthday luck, work your magic!!

So, as of now, my birthday is in 10 minutes. Maybe I used up all the luck tomorrow has to offer? Maybe I wont even get one of the things on my to-do list done? Or worse! I could get called into school to do something utterly pointless, the equivalent of busy work for kinder gardener.

Now, for bed!

And may tomorrow be filled with luck, gifts, and happiness!