She's ba-aaaaack...

OK, I should probably be happy that my appetite has sort of returned, rather than wishing the nausea would stick around. But… but… eating less is so much easier when the thought of food makes you want to hurl! #firstworldproblems

I’m not quite as nauseated as I was during the awful first week of birth control. Now, it seems I’m hungry during the morning and around lunchtime, and then I get nauseated in the late afternoon/evenings. Over the weekend, though, I was STARVED at lunch every day. On Friday I felt insatiable around noon, and that terrified me because I felt like I wanted to eat everything in sight. I was worried I wouldn’t have enough calories left for the evening and that I’d end up bingeing or chucking the diet. But it turns out that after I would eat a decent meal, I felt better, and then didn’t seem to get hungry for dinner. These appetite changes have been weird because I’m normally one to save a bunch of my calories for the evening, since that’s when I enjoy eating the most. I know that’s not necessarily healthy, so maybe the meds will retrain me a little. Maybe.

On Saturday we celebrated my nephew’s 4^th birthday with lunch at Fridays and an afternoon showing of Despicable Me 2. I planned my eating in advance, and did pretty well at TGIF. I had a couple bites of the soft pretzels and beer cheese appetizer, then ate a petite sirloin with mashed potatoes and veggies. I wasn’t completely satisfied after lunch, so I got some popcorn to share with the birthday boy. He was incensed that the entire bag wasn’t for him, even though he ate a ton of lunch and got a free birthday sundae to top it off. I finally convinced him to let me hold the bag between us… um, he takes after my side of the family in the eating department, can you tell? We call it “high food pressure.” ;)  His brother is 7, and takes after his dad when it comes to eating. He won’t indulge if he isn’t truly hungry, and he will pick veggies and fruit over French fries any day. I gave him a cup of popcorn and he didn’t touch it. So strange how brothers can be so different! I, on the other hand, touched WAY too much popcorn. I didn’t put butter on it, though, and then I didn’t eat anything the rest of the day, so it wasn’t too bad.

My mom texted me during church yesterday (she is the worst pastor’s wife ever…) and told me she wanted meatloaf and mashed potatoes for lunch. Comfort food sounded SO yummy, so after my church service ended I went and bought the ingredients and made a meal for my parents. We ate kind of late, and I had two helpings (oops), but I ended up not eating supper for the second day in a row because I was still full. I also had no energy yesterday, so I ended up sitting around watching like 562 episodes of Property Virgins and House Hunters on HGTV.

Did I work out this weekend, you ask? Uh… does thinking seriously about working out count?

My weekend from the hot place...

What started out as a really fun weekend ended badly on Saturday night. I had managed to avoid the whooping cough that plagued all of my coworkers for the last few weeks, but as I sat watching a movie with my sister, I felt that gross tickle in the back of my throat. Then came the coughing. Then came the upper respiratory infection and the worst two days of my life (OK, maybe a slight exaggeration.)

I didn’t sleep at all on Saturday night, and spent all day Sunday about as miserable as I can remember being since I got swine flu four years ago. Disgusting chest congestion made it hard to breath, and I had a fever off and on for 24 hours. Fever is a big deal to me, because it happens so rarely—I once went 10 years without getting one. True story. I think. Anyway, I spent Sunday and Monday in bed watching episode after episode of House Hunters and Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives, but forced myself to go in to work today, against my better judgment. (And based on the death glares from the now healthy people in the office, it was against their better judgment, too.)

I’m still not feeling great, but I feel sooo much better than I did Sunday, and I’m definitely headed in the right direction.

Out of nowhere this weekend I dropped a couple more pounds, and surpassed my “10 lbs down” goal for the month. I’m at 10.5 lbs lost since May 29^th, and I’m hoping for a little more by Saturdays weigh-in. Weight loss is so funny (well, not funny when I’m frustrated and ready to smash the scale with an axe)—one day I’m furious that the numbers haven’t moved in two weeks, and the next, I’m giggling with glee at an overnight loss of 3 pounds. This last month of living healthfully has at least reinforced that I can truly “trust the process.” It’s so easy to get discouraged and think that I just physically can’t lose weight, but after seeing how the scale has been weird over the last 4 weeks, and seeing that the results are there, just not as uniformly as I like, I’m encouraged that I really can trust the process. Eating fewer calories and moving more really does work! Who would’ve thought?

Speaking of weight loss... My mom is a nurse, and she stopped in to see how I was doing on Sunday night. While she was listening to my lungs, she kept commenting about how my heart was racing. Since I'd been sitting motionless for a full 24 hours, that was odd. We finally realized it was the Maximum Strength Mucinex liquid I'd been taking every four hours. It had my heart rate way up... no wonder I lost a few pounds! Disclaimer: Do NOT go to Wal Mart and buy a case of Mucinex to try and speed up your weight loss. Go to Costco. Much cheaper. ;)

I hope your week got off to a much better start than mine! J

Mmmm, Pizza...

Since I don't have to work on Fridays (best thing in the WORLD, I'm not gonna lie), I wanted to have something fun and figure-friendly for dinner to celebrate the start of my weekend, and to serve as game food for game seven of the NBA finals (Go Heat!). I decided to make some quesadilla pizzas, and was pretty happy with how they turned out.

I bought whole wheat, low carb tortillas because 1) they only have 81 calories each, and most large tortillas have at least 120, 2) I figure the more calories I cut, the more pizza I can eat, and 3) the higher fiber is also nice and filling.

Classico has a new fire-roasted pizza sauce that I decided to try, and I chose store brand 6-cheese Italian shredded cheese since it was BOGO. Aside from being cheap, it also had only 80 calories per 1/3 cup, which is lighter than most shredded cheese. And obviously, the more cheese the better. ;)

I sprayed a half-size baking sheet (one of the perks of owning a dessert company is access to these big, luscious baking sheets) with cooking spray and assembled the pizza/quesadillas. I could have been more creative with the toppings, but olives and baby portabellos sounded good tonight, and I was really hungry, therefore didn't want to take extra time to chop more veggies.

Popped them into the oven at 400 degrees for about 12 minutes and...

It was a very yummy dinner. The pizzas were a little easier to eat folded in half, because of how thin the tortillas were, and that gave it a thicker, more-like-real-pizza bite.

Each quesadilla pizza had just 200 calories--yum!

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Any fun plans for the weekend?