Explorations in Food

Chicago's a great city for food. You can pretty much assume that any restaurant that's been around for more than 6 months is good, since otherwise nobody would eat there and it would go out of business. Kraig and I have continued to find restaurants in our neighborhood that we like, but the most exciting food thing we've been doing lately actually has more to do with the food that we're making at home.

An organic foods store down the street offers half and full farm shares each week that includes vegetables and fruit (there's an optional expanded fruit share). They also do a meat share, but we haven't tried that yet. For the past few weeks, we've been getting shares (mostly half, for the two of us, but a full one if we're having company) and the result is that we constantly have tons of really good produce in the house. We're basically forced to cook at home most nights, since otherwise we wouldn't even be able to eat a half-share quickly enough to keep the food from going bad. We're also eating a larger variety of foods since what we get varies from week to week and we don't fall into the trap of going food shopping on auto-pilot.

What we get from week to week varies a lot, so it's hard to give you an idea of what we're getting. Generally, though, we get a head of lettuce and possibly also cabbage or kale (kale chips=AMAZING snack) along with some potatoes (russet or red), a few apples and carrots. They might throw in a few bananas or grapefruits. We've been getting various squashes and small pumpkins lately along with a zucchini or two, as well as beets, turnips (surprisingly yummy), green beans, and a few tomatoes and possibly shallots or onions. We got a huge clump of cilantro the first week that we did not make it all the way through, and some basil the week after that that I think ended up in a stew.

We pick up the half or whole share from the store on Friday evenings (it's about 3 blocks away), but this week, since Thanksgiving is a big food day, they're having people pick them up on Wednesday instead. Doesn't that make so much sense? Amazing. I just hope that there are more green beans and some sweet potatoes. ::crosses fingers::

Proud of Myself Today

Hi all. Sorry I haven't posted at all in a really long time. The quarter has swallowed me. Fortunately, my last lecture is on Monday, so things are starting to wrap up. I have lots to write about, so I'll try to start doing that regularly again.

I'm feeling super positive right now, so I wanted to share/record the feeling. Here's the back-story: I've been on Weight Watchers since the beginning of August because I realized that, with all of the excessive amounts of exercise I got as a teenager and through college, I never learned to regulate what I ate. I always sucked down as much food as I could get my hands on, and if I started to feel a little chunky, I'd eat salads for a week and be back to normal. During grad school I started swinging between weeks where I would pig out and weeks when I would starve myself to try to "diet," and I eventually found myself miserable and starting to hate food. In particular, I was starting to hate going out to eat/having dinner with friends because I knew that I would inevitably eat too much and feel sick for hours afterward.

Well, Weight Watchers has worked. I still pig out sometimes, but I'm more conscious about only doing it rarely and picking better foods to pig out on. The rest of the time, I'm eating consistent meals from day to day. I still get the occasional day or two when I feel hungry and "diet-brained," but for the most part I've found that I can live long term with my new eating habits.

I weighed myself this morning, and I have officially made my 10% weight loss goal. (WW has this thing where they say that pretty much everyone should lose 10% of their body weight. I don't know that I believe it in general, but it was definitely true for me.) More importantly, I'm back at my "pretend weight," meaning the weight that I used to lie and put on audition forms and that I think of as "my weight." I haven't actually weight this little since before college (not counting my junior and senior years of college when, let's face it, I wasn't doing too well on the eating disorder spectrum). I also retook my measurements that I haven't checked since I signed up in August, and I've lost almost three inches from my waist, two from my thighs, one and a half from my hips, and half an inch from my arms. My clothes finally fit again and I feel like I recognize my own body when I look in the mirror.

I'm still going to go for another couple pounds of weight loss before I start focusing on maintaining my weight, but mostly so that I can eat a lot over the holidays without feeling like a stuffed pig.

I also think that next spring/summer I'm going to try the couch to 5k program that a friend of mine did recently. (Read her blog!) I might be feeling better about my overall body, but I'm still in woefully bad cardiovascular shape. I've never been able to run without feeling like I've been hit by a truck, but maybe following a structured, well-paced program will help me ease into it.