Day 3 - Feeling Better and Getting It

When I came home from work, I took a shower and then sat in the bath and meditated. I feel like it really helped to calm my mind. I am going to try to do that more often. Also, slept last night with no sleeping pills. I was feeling a bit anxious when I got home, but after I meditated I felt it go away. I listened to some audios yesterday with Natalia Rose and Macha, those really helped me to remember what it was I was  trying to do before, which is be healthy in body and mind. I think I have always been trying to be healthy in body, but never really practicing the mind part. I think taking some time out to mediate really does help, it took me a while to get all the thoughts running out of my head. As I am a bit OCD, I kept thinking I had to repeat certain mantras or wishes in my head over and over again and trying to make it perfect, but then I realized that wait meditating is about not thinking. I then tried to calm my mind and be still, finally after some time I heard nothing. Instead I heard myself saying let it go.. strange right. By the time I was done with my shower and dressed, I felt much more relaxed then I normally do when I’m at home. I think I’m like a lot of women, when I get home I unload all my stress and anxiety and then use food to help me relax. This is going to be a long process but it’s a start.

Macha and Natalia's Audios I like...

Emotional Eating:

http://www.byoaudio.com/play/WqRrqjGs

http://www.herfuture.com/profiles/blogs/talking-with-natalia-rose-1?xg_source=activity

Starting Fresh: Day 1

I am starting clean today. I had a rough weekend with drinking. I feel like I drank and ate too much. But really I feel like this every Monday and I want to stop feeling like this. I was just reading Montel Williams’ book “Living Well” and I like how he asked himself at one point, what if I took this healthy living to another level? What would the possibilities be and bring? I feel like I have a lot of the healthy living aspects in my life, but they are constantly deterred by my way of thinking. I want to lose weight, so I try not to eat, which ends up back firing on me and I end up eating too much. I exercise 4-5 times a week and then I unravel my hard work with binges and drinking too much on the weekends. My goal right now is to just do better in all those areas of my life. I want to try to do this for 30 days and see what happens.




My plan:

1. Drink one green juice a day

2. No alcohol

3. Cut out processed foods completely

4. Portion control and no overeating

I feel inspired, I feel like I have my mojo back. I just wrote a post recently where I said I felt like I had lost all feeling and motivation for work, but I have to do work that I am passionate about. I just went to meet with the PhD program coordinator at ucsd and she gave me a lot of good tips on getting started and hopefully getting into the program. Only 6 people were accepted last year, so it may be grim, but I have to at least try. I am going to try my best and make this happen. I want this more than anything else right now! I know I can do this. When I was on the campus I felt like I was home, that is where I belong. I love school, I love being immersed in that world. Being able to do what I love, wow that gives me chills. Now I just have to get started! First step, write some emails to professors and tell them about my plans for research. Second, dig up old papers and start expanding on them. Woo hoo I can do this.


Pictures to inspire… Diego Rivera working on a mural and Frida Kahlo in front of her infamous painting. Love IT!

Portion Control - Totally Need it

I was thinking of writing a post on what I normally eat and my issues I have had with food in general. I got turned onto eating raw last year and I was doing good with that for a while, but the past couple months I have diverged from this a bit. I do eat cooked food, as in steamed vegetables, tofu, usually for dinner. I try to follow the tenets from Natalia Rose’s book “The Raw Food Detox Diet,” and drink juice in the morning, fruit as a snack, salad for lunch, and some combination of salad, vegs, sweet potatoes for dinner. Where I have been verging off lately is drinking way too little juice, having too many coffee days in the morning, adding feta to my salads, eating cottage cheese (which I can’t believe I have reverted back to), eating out too much, drinking and indulging on the weekends (so hard in the summer!), all of which have led to a 5 or so pound weight gain. I think I have also been eating foods with lots of salt, like the fat free feta, too much hummus, egg white salads from trader joes (each one has 600mg of sodium), kettle corn popcorn. As of this week I have started limiting the feta and cutting back on snacking on popcorn at night, so far I think it is working.


My other issue even with eating raw and cooked, is that I tend to over eat and my portion sizes are huge. I am really trying to work on this starting this week. I am going to be more aware of the sizes of what I eat and if I am really truly hungry. I just found this on the site www.greenlemonade.com. I just love this site! She talks about eating the amount of your two hands cupped together. Geez I normally eat so much more than that. I am going to really give this a shot!

Introduce the concept of the “Buddha Bowl” into your life.

Serving size is the secret to not packing on the pounds, and allowing more of your body’s energy to be spent on healing and repair work (vs digestion all the time). A Buddha bowl is roughly the size of your cupped hands. While it may seem small at first, give your body and mind time to adjust. Practice eating mindfully and then go for a short walk after you finish eating to set the end of the meal in your mind. If in the beginning after eating this portion of food you find that you are still hungry, add another half of a Buddha bowl portion. Some of you might appreciate a little more direction here – so consider this buddha bowl in your daily routine.

I just googled buddha bowl and apparently they sell them, check it out.

I feel like I am losing my mojo, my confidence. I don’t know if it’s just because I am tired today and woke up late and it’s making me feel just overall very unmotivated. I feel like I don’t do anything of importance at work and no one really cares what it is I do. Therefore, if this job was obliterated no one would give a damn. That actually kind of made me laugh, haha. I have no voice at my job, no thoughts, nothing to call my own, this leaves me wafting through the day with nothing to really hold onto. My cousin just got awarded unemployment after quitting his job, how fair is that? The days and months are flying by lately and I need to something significant in this world, now what it is I don’t know??

 I guess I just need to start doing things that make me happy and give me satisfaction and maybe everything will come together. Art inspires me, beautiful photography inspires me, writing, thinking, that inspires me. This photo of Salvador Dali inspires me because I feel like it represents the true nature of a lot of artists. They are free thinkers, people who think about the world and see the world in a different light. They convey what so much of us cannot. Passion, tumultuousness, love, fear … You can see here that he had so much on his mind, I think he was one of those people who had a constant stream of thoughts and ideas. Ferociously painting, trying to put together the pieces and thoughts flying through his mind. Here he shows his jewelry pieces, his lover, himself, all with a beautiful subtleness that is created by the lines of her body and the contours of his face. Truly beautiful!

Philly Game and iPhone 4 - should i get it??

I am going to a baseball game with my husband tonight, that should be interesting. I have to say it’s not the most exciting thing in the world for me as I am not really into sports, but it should be fun. My usual yearly quota for baseball games is one per year and I went to a Yankee game in NY a few months ago, so this is me going way over my quota. I am looking forward to it though, ever since we’ve been dating we’ve gone to a Phillies/Padres game together. Anyways, I couldn’t sleep this morning so I got up and went to the gym. It felt like torture being on the elliptical at 6am!! But at least I got my workout of the way and I don’t feel guilty for indulging a little bit today. Although tomorrow I’m planning a happy hour date with my cousin. We never do anything with just each other, so we’re excited to do something together and catch up.


I am still debating the iPHONE4!! I think I’m going to take the leap and get one this weekend. If I post new pictures up here it’s because I got one. I really want to get one because I like the camera on it for both photos and videos. I’ve been wanting to get a Flip cam, so this may knock out any need to get that. I really love taking photos in the moment and I don’t always carry my camera with me or remember to take it, so I like the idea of being able to take a photo that doesn’t look like a grainy obvious phone photo. The only thing scaring me is the keyboard, I am so used to the one on the blackberry. I also do NOT want to part with BBM, I just love the messaging ability with that and it’s going to be hard to do without it, but I figure I’ll get used to. Oh well.. plus I can try it out for 30 days and if I don’t like it, I can get the Torch, so we will see.

Night Eating

I’ve been sitting here thinking about why I cannot lose weight. I definitely think I eat too big of portions at night. Given I’m not eating anything very unhealthy, I guess I am still taking too much in. I started recording everything I eat on Livestrong lately, being totally consistent and honest, and I realize I’ve been having a lot of sodium. Primarily from hummus, fat free feta, and salad dressings, so the past two days I cut down and I did drop some water weight. Still my issue is in the evening, I get home from work and the gym, and usually eat dinner around 830-9pm. I am sure that is way too late, but I don’t go to bed till almost midnight usually. My dinners usually consist of the same variation, a bag of lettuce, a tomato, bean sprouts, about ½ piece of tofu cooked with onions and tossed in, depending on what else I have on hand usually beets, avocado, or feta, or all of the above, with about 4-6 tablespoons of dressing. I either use a whole foods fat free balsamic or a vons brand of honey mustard dressing. The whole foods has 25 cals for 2 tbsp and the vons kind has 40 cals for 2tbsp. After I eat dinner and I’m sitting around watching TV with my husband, I end up 9 times out of 10 snacking on something else, either a glass of wine, popcorn, an apple, a banana, whatever is around. At that point I am not even hungry but I eat anyways.


I really want to get myself back on track and not eat so heavily at night. That is probably why I have a hard time going to bed earlier because I am so full. Another thing that bugs me is that I am not living up to the advice of the vegan/raw/any community that eats healthy ideals. I always end up thinking “I shouldn’t have had that or this or cooked that.” Tomorrow will be a better day and I end up doing the cycle all over again. I guess I need some advice, so I started googling this and I got some tips. I need to try to incorporate at least one of these. I think I am just bored at night and eat as a habit. Ugh this is so frustrating….

Tips to Not Eat at Night

-The other option is not to eat anything. Give this a try: After dinner do not eat anything. You will get hungry and you will feel the urge to go into the refrigerator. Please resist the urge. Go to bed hungry. When you wake up in the morning you will notice two things. You will be hungry (time to "break" the "fast") and your stomach (guess what?) will be flatter

-Ban nighttime boredom. Late-night eating often is a result of having nothing else to do. Pick up a new hobby, connect with your spouse, take a walk.

-Form new habits. Stop eating after a specific time — say, 7 or 8 p.m. — for a week. Then aim for a month. By that time, your new pattern should be set.

-Go to bed. An earlier bedtime will keep you from eating and control production of hunger-triggering hormones.