Episode 77: 60 days

60 days ago, AM challenged me to a walking challenge.  Today, I have completed the challenge.  Because I messed up my knee (something about bursitis), my doctor recommended that I walk for 20 minutes a day, as just light exercise to get the knee going and work out some of the muscles.  AM said that if we created a routine, a daily regime of walking, I could buy myself one small fitness item that will help me continue to get healthier.  That item is a FitBit.

I have been trying to track my steps, exercise and diet on my phone, but I am beginning to find that it drains my battery pretty quickly and it's not really all that constant. I have to have the phone with me, it can't be on the charger, if I want to track the steps that I take.  While they have apps for it, there are no really good apps to track your sleep patterns and sleep quality.  The Fitbit promises to do all that.  It's a gadgety thing that goes in a wristband that you keep on you at all times and tracks everything you do and then syncs wirelessly to your phone or computer or whatever to help you track.  And I get this neat little gadget probably tomorrow (if I can find money in my budget for it) because I kept a goal and I stuck to it for 60 days.

They say that it takes 27 times of doing something in the same way to create a habit.  60 seems excessive, but it works for me. I feel wrong if I don't do my walking every night now.  In the last 60 days, I have walked.  Sometimes I walked during the morning, sometimes I walked in the evenings. Sometimes, after coming home from gaming or a movie or just hanging out with our friends, we have walked past midnight.  The track that we take is simply around our apartment complex, two laps, which equals roughly between 2/5 and 1/2 a mile.  I didn't always walk in the apartment complex. Sometimes on rainy days I would walk the same approximate distance twice around the grocery store from the produce section to the bakery section and back.  Most of my random zombie walks down to the market and back counted for my walk for the day. Some days I exceeded my half mile by a lot, and sometimes I barely made it, either because of injury or illness (when you can't breathe for coughing, it may not be the best time to walk).  But I made it.

I finished my challenge tonight with one last walk past the mostly brightly lit windows around the apartment complex.  Inside, families and friends were going about their business, most of them watching television, or gathered in some other fashion. Some were using computers, and some were cooking a late meal.  Over the last 60 days, I have gotten to know some of these people. The gentleman in the balcony on the opposite building always smiles and tells us to have a nice evening.  A young mother yesterday told us that she felt it was a strange day when she didn't get a chance to say hello to us.  Though we don't know names, only faces and location, our walks have helped us get to know our neighbors and our neighborhood better.

My next challenge is not to end the walks, but to continue them and add some more to them. Another lap perhaps, or some weight training that my doctor recommends for weight loss.  Perhaps I will do both, but I know that I can create and maintain a habit for 60 days, and I plan on making more plans to become even healthier.

What do you plan to do with the next 60 days?

Love and Lollipops,

ToryLynn

Episode 76: Happy!!

Every night before we go to bed, we sit at our dining room table, fountain pens in hand, and write on small 2"x2" pieces of paper that are cut from 24lb stock.  These pieces of paper are light blue and pink, the color of youth, the color of gender and for us, the color of happiness.  With my pen, filled with a beautiful hot pink ink called "Hope Pink" for breast cancer awareness I write my happy thoughts for the day.  Across the table from me, AM, with his turquoisish pen, filled with Bahama Blue, writes his happy thoughts for the day.  Our world is color coded in this way. When we are finished, we put them into an 8 cup Ball jar and seal the lid.  In this way, we record our happiness, one day at a time and fill a jar with love and hope.

We've been doing this since around February. Originally the thought had been to start January 1st, but we are slow to get organized.  The jar in the picture is our happy jar, with our happy thoughts color coded to suit us.  We put the day's triumphs, the happy little things that we did for each other, or that we talked about, or even just what we ate for the day.  They can be any thought, as long as they are happy and not negative.

The plan is to open the jar at the end of the year as a New Year's ritual and see all of the happy thoughts that we have created over the year.  Ideally, if we had started on January first, we would have 730 happy thoughts in it by the end of the year.  730 happy memories, 730 meals, 730 joys that we could share.  I am not sure what we will do with them as we review them. Perhaps we will create a scrapbook, putting them in order and gluing them to pages as a reminder of all the happiness that we had the year we got engaged and then got married.  Maybe we will let the jar fill (though it is already getting pretty full and we have to pack the slips down well) until our first anniversary, so we can have a record of our first year together and the time that we were engaged.  Maybe we will just tear them into smaller pieces and throw them over ourselves and our friends at our New Year's celebration.  We have a while to go until we pick out those pieces of paper and find out all of our happiness throughout the year.  I'm excited to see what he wrote, since our happy thoughts are private until the end of the year, locked up in our little jar on little pieces of blue and pink paper.

I hope that you all have your happy thoughts and that you share them with the ones that you love, today and every day.  Keep them somewhere safe, even if it is a journal or notebook, a planner or just in your memory, but my hope is that everybody has at least one happy thought a day, even if it is as simple as "the cute guy on the bus smiled at me" or "I ate all my vegetables" or even "I am still alive and my heart is still pumping blood through my body", everybody should be happy, every single day.

Here is to all of your happy thoughts!

Love and Lollipops,

ToryLynn

Episode 66: Putting Color Into Life

Today we went to the Farmer's Market behind the Weberstown Mall.  We got up, even before breakfast, put on clothes, braved the cold, crisp morning (at 8:45) and went out to see what sort of fresh produce they had for us today.  What you see in the picture is what we bought.  Fresh veggies, raspberry jams and some pomegranates.  They are all glorious (and barely fit in our tiny tiny apartment fridge).  The plan is to make some really awesome veggie soup, since we're on a type of Weight Watchers.

 In fact, I'm sort of cheating.  I have no money and very little resources to rejoin Weight Watchers at this time, but I have all of my old book and all of my old program stuff, so we're using these as resources, with some help from some web sources, to create our own version of Weight Watchers.  I haven't given up on the whole milk or the whole fat yogurt, as they seem to be better for my digestion than the low fat stuff (I don't get nearly as may ucky tummies), but we are adding many more veggies and things to our diet.  I feel healthier.  According to my Wii, I have lost about 5 pounds in the last two weeks.

Just looking at that picture makes me happy!  The colors, the vibrancy, and I've noticed that since we have been eating better, cleaning our apartment more often and working out a bit more, my whole life seems to be coated in this new vibrant color.  A year or more ago, I was feeling kind of in the doldrums.  I lived in a beautiful place, I had everything I ever wanted, but it wasn't satisfying. I was unhappy.  I was overweight. I was lazy and in pain and everything seemed like crap.  I was taking medication for bipolar disorder and it wasn't helping much.  And the food I was eating was awful!  Looking back at my Weight Watcher's books from a year ago, I was eating fast food daily.  One day was Wendys. One day was Subway. One day was Taco Bell.  Fried foods, foods full of fat, foods full of fillers. These were the things that I was putting into my body, and my body fought back with depression, acne and weight gain.

Now I eat what you see on the table.  Fresh fruits, fresh veggies. I make my own breads sometimes.

 I take a vitamin daily, and I cook my own food. I have even, on occasion, made my own butter (which is absolutely delicious!)  I know exactly what goes in my food. If I write down a recipe, or a list of ingredients, I can pronounce every single one of them.  I still eat meat, though we do have our Wegitarian Wednesdays, and Pizza Fridays (our one little concession to the "how do you pronounce that?" foods).  We will eat out, but we go places where we can eat healthfully.  We found this great little sushi place (at Sherwood Mall, no less) that makes great rolls and you can watch them make them, so we know exactly what goes into them.  All of these things have greatly improved the quality of my life.

I plan on keeping up with this blog some more.  I want to write and keep track.  I want to post about how I organize my life, how I make it can make it better, and how I have learned to enjoy a life lived in less space and fewer calories but much more enriched.  I'll post some of my recipes that we have found particularly yummy, some ideas for keeping life organized, and my adventures of jumping off the high dive of life and just, well... Weighting in the Deep End!

Keeping happy and healthy!

ToryLynn

Episode 53: Super Sunday

I am at a loss for words today.  My life has been great lately, and I have nothing to complain about and I haven't been following the WW lifestyle (though I did do some point counting at the beginning of the week), but I didn't do nearly enough and I am sort of glad that I have gone to a  biweekly weigh in.  I have enough motivation to eat right at home, right now.

Today is the Superbowl, and honestly, I couldn't really care.  The only team I care even vaguely about (since I'm not a huge football fan to begin with) got kicked out with the NFC Championship game.  So, I think I will spend my time grading during the Superbowl.. aah.. an old standby.  You will all let me know about the awesome commercials, right? So I can look them up on YouTube later on this week?

Actually, I  love SuperBowl Sunday just for the ads.  They give me a great lesson plan that my students really get into.. they let me show my students the way things are marketed and let them look at how media influences their lives. It's actually a pretty fun lesson plan, if I do it right.

I have been pretty exhausted lately, fighting off an ear infection which has evolved into a sinus infection of some sort.  I could totally go back to bed for a few more hours, eat some sub sandwiches and just sit back and enjoy life.  With the CAHSEE coming up, as well as two three day weekends, and the greatest holiday of all (also known as my birthday), February is going to be a busy month.  I can't afford to be sick!

Ok, so, I'm kind of rambly today, so I will get to the point of the post, which is this picture!  AM and I went to a great Dim Sum place called Fu Yuan (where Louis' Chinese food used to be for those who know Stockton) and we didn't have any Dim Sum! What the heck!  What we did have was a great recommendation from the waitress!  Just a tip, when you go someplace new, completely ignore the menu. Ask the wait staff what is the best food on the menu and order that. You get to try something new, and they usually have great recommendations, and will ask you about your own culinary tastes as well.  So, what you see in the picture is the shrimp dumpling soup, which was the first thing that she recommended. We got ours with Yau Choy (what our waitress called Chinese tender greens), but there were a few vegetable options for the soup.  The broth was tasty, and didn't need any extra salt, and the dumplings were perfectly soft and filled with delicious shrimp.

The next thing that she recommended was Pot Stickers.  She proudly told us that these were handmade in the restaurant, not frozen like many of the area places make, and when we tasted them.. we could taste the love!  These Pot Stickers were filled with tasty meat mixture, folded in a tender wrapper and offered with a very flavorful sauce. Altogether, they were wonderful!  

I did not get my usual Sweet and Sour Pork, but instead tried for fried wontons.  I originally was going to get the thin crispy fried wontons that come with the sweet and sour dipping sauce, but the waitress recommended cream cheese filled wontons. (I asked for half and half, but they couldn't do that, but they wer still yummy!)  Bad for the diet.. so tasty on the tongue!  (Those are the fried triangles you see in the picture.)  The filling was hot and I burned the roof of my mouth a bit, but they were incredibly tasty. Where I had kind of expected a sort of savory, perhaps a bit garlicy taste, the filling was sweet and almost honey tasting.  Once they cooled off a bit, the filling was complimented by the traditional sweet and sour sauce for a delicious dinner pastry.  It was almost desert like!  Very good food!

We finished our meal with something sweet. My companion had asked if they had any black bean cakes, which he described as sort of rice type patties with sweet black paste in the center.  Our waitress brought us sesame balls, which he said were similar, but sticky and round.  As I had had neither before, I didn't have anything to compare it to, but these little balls were delicious (and not shown in the photo).  They were covered in sesame seeds, which made them not sticky to the touch, but the insides were soft, sweet and sticky in the mouth.  The dollop of what I have to assume was black bean paste added an almost raisinlike flavor to it, but without that edge and tongue feel like you get with raisins. (I dislike raisins because they feel like the coat the tongue a bit and the fact that they are desiccated grapes always bothered me).  Tasty little dumplings, these were, and AM and I split the last one.  They were incredibly delicious. 

It was late afternoon when we went for lunch, but the restaurant was deserted, which was unfortunate, since the meals were delicious.  I wondered if there was more of a rush with the dinner hours later, or a lunch rush for the dim sum earlier.  We went at an odd time.  I would hate to think that this wonderful restaurant, with the very nice waitress, would eventually close because they don't get enough business. I didn't try the sweet and sour pork, but the food was excellent (we actually cleaned our plates at a Chinese food place!) and the service was wonderful (probably because we were the only ones there, but still!) 


Ratings: 
Food: Totally Five Stars. It was yummy, and well prepared.  I loved it!
Service: Three stars.  She didn't bring us the Dim Sum menu until halfway through our meal, but she didn't push food on us and actually recommended that we not order more, since we had ordered enough for a full meal.  
Cleanliness: Four. They had lovely white tablecloths, but they also had plastic sheets on the table. Easier to clean, but not as classy. It was a nice place to eat though.

Final Rating: Four stars.  Food for 2 was about $29, with a tip, and the food was good quality and very tasty.  If we weren't on a culinary adventure, we would definitely be returning there again and again... if only just to try the Dim Sum!  

I hope your culinary adventures are just as fun! If you have a blog that you think I should read, or that I can put in my blog roll, please leave me a message with the address! I'm always looking for interesting things to add to my reader!

Love and lollipops,

Tory (geez, I'm rambly today) Lynn