Day 3

I hope everyone is doing well on the challenge, and if you aren't, it's not too late!  You can get on track and still reach your goals.   Please don't be discouraged yet if you got off to a rocky start.

We have over 50 entrants to the challenge!  I think this is a good number.  It gives each of you a pretty good chance to win the vita-mix.  I'll post more when I finish putting your info into an excel spreadsheet.

Saturday can be a challenge for me when I'm home more and doing more food prep.  I think knowing I will post here makes me behave!   So I did behave and here is what I ate:

brekky:  some frozen fruit, mangos, cherries, blueberries, and some fresh local spinach.  One reason I'm liking the frozen fruit is that I bought a bunch of fresh blueberries from Michigan (not too far from here) and froze them to make them last longer.  They are really good!  And I love mango but don't get good fresh mango here in Wisconsin.  I ate a light breakfast because I had a yoga class.

Lunch:  big ole' salad.  It's a sign of Fall that we now get local spinach and lettuce again, both requiring cooler temperatures.  I got a bunch so I just made a huge salad to split between lunch and dinner.  All ingredients were local except the seeds and vinegar:  cabbage, spinach, salad greens, cucumber, patty pan squash, yellow bell pepper,  tomatoes, seed mixture.  I also had corn on the cob.  I ate a few grapes, carrots and sugar snap peas after yoga, sort of a finish to my brekky.  Here's lunch.

Dinner was the rest of the big ole' salad and a small baked oriental yam (sweet potato).  and a big ole' ripe peach (yum!).  and a few more carrots and celery and kohlrabi.   I did some soup prep, making carrot and celery juice.  I'll post about that tomorrow.

Total calories 1424: 56 g protein (12%), 22 g fat (13%), 285 g carbs (75%), 71 g figer.

I was surprised to see I lost 2 lbs this week.  I didn't go hungry, just didn't overeat.  My average caloric intake over the last 7 days was 1446.  I gained about 6 lbs this summer from my deviations from healthy eating.  I bet it was less than 10% of my total calories but they were very unhealthy foods, not at all what Dr. Fuhrman recommends for your 10% allocation of less healthy foods.  It really is true that that stuff just goes right to fat on your body.  I wouldn't mind converting that fat to muscle as my BMI is reasonably low (18.8).  I had a good workout yesterday that should have helped.

Forks over Knives

This movie is good for motivation even if you've read all the books and know it all.  It makes you say I wanna be on this team!   that's the plant-based whole foods diet team.  yes!  This is the cool team.  This is the team everyone will want to join eventually and we are at the forefront.  Say yes to transforming your health and life.

Day 2!

I'm posting while watching "Forks over Knives."  I know, I shouldn't multitask!  I figure I know it all already.  I'll let you know if it's good motivational material.    It's fun to see pictures of Campbell and Esselstyn as young men.

Here is what I ate today, very similar to yesterday.
brekky:   frozen cherries, blueberries, mango.   raw carrots and kohlrabi.  ate this while preparing the day's food.

lunch:  same beans, greens soup as yesterday.  salad made from cabbage, cucumber, yellow squash, cherry tomatoes from the garden, scallions, seed mixture.  baked sweet potato (actually it's an oriental yam and it seems sweeter to me---really good!).

dinner:  large ripe peach at the co-op after exercising.  It was fantastic.  Then at home, I had the same salad, beans and greens soup, and a piece of fresh sweet corn.    Here's a picture.   That's tomorrow's peach just for show.   I had already eaten tonight's at the co-op.

Everything I ate except the frozen berries was locally grown.  and ever so good!

Total calories 1486, fat 17 g (10%), protein 60.5 g (12%), carbs 308 g (78%), fiber 79 g.

How you doing?

Day 1, how's it going?

Hi everyone!  I had a fabulous day off from work today where I exhausted myself hiking and mountain biking in the heat and humidity.  I think I'm overflowing with sun happiness and endorphins.  Does anyone else get all happy from being in the sunshine?

Here are my food logs for the day.

Brekky:  some frozen fruit while making housemate's smoothie.  (yummy bing cherries, sour cherries, mango, blueberries).  It quickly frosted over in the humidity:

some raw veggies while making lunch and dinner (I'm still eating brekky here).  (carrots, kohlrabi, sugar snap peas, celery):

Note:  it's probably not good policy to eat while preparing food but I'm allowing it for myself during breakfast because, well you choose your battles and I'm not choosing this one right now.

Lunch and Dinner were 4 course meals (prepared during brekky).  I forgot to snap pictures.  The courses were:  1/2 baked sweet potato, beans and greens, salad, and peach or nectarine.  The peach and nectarine were at perfect ripeness and were super juicy, yum.  

The beans and greens were prepared a few days ago from  beans, wild rice, barley, kamut (wheatberries), eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, collards, kale, herbs from the garden (basil, cilantro, dill, oregano, chives, thyme), mushrooms, mustard (salt-free).  These will last through tomorrow.

The salad would have been perfect with tomatoes instead of apples, so I will do that tomorrow.  It had cabbage (local and really good), apple, cucumber, spinach, basil, yellow summer squash, broccoli (from the garden), seed mixture, and balsamic vinegar.   Tomorrow I'll do the same but with tomatoes from the garden.

Total calories 1415.  fat 16 g (10%), protein 57 g (12%), carbs 291 (78%), fiber 75 g.

Challenge motivation

Hi everyone, The 6-week challenge starts in 2 hours.  Here are some motivational thoughts that help keep me on track:

1) I live in my food universe.  There is infinite variety of delicious foods to choose from in this universe.  I will be satisfied and happy if I stay in this universe.   Today I watched a friend eat a big ole' burger and fries.   It did not compute.  :)

2)  Now is as good a time as any to get started, regardless of our current circumstances.  Once you are healthy and thin, you will have circumstances too and that won't stop you from continuing to be healthy and thin (I hope).  I'm happy to see a lot of people doing the challenge even though circumstances during the 6 weeks are not ideal (vacation, parties, restaurant plans, hanging out with old buddies).  That is life!

3) I am most likely to stray and overeat when I'm tired.  Maybe I should just go to bed early if I'm tired.  I consider that a luxury!  more satisfying than eating!

Tomorrow I'm taking the day off.  When I get back in the evening, I'll post the challenge participants and brief goals--unless there is objection to the latter.  I'll also post my food logs since some people like to see an example.

I think I will go experience the luxuriousness of bed now.

Challenge starts in 27 hours!

Well, some of us eager beavers started already.

So far I have 26 participants though I don't have all the info for all of them.  I will post all the participants (screen-names) on Sept. 1 so you can check to see if I missed you.

If you have any questions, please comment to any post or email me at bwhitney@chi-squared.org.   If you want a review of the challenge, you can just scroll back to read some posts, or go directly to these posts:

http://veganbarbie.blogspot.com/2011/08/6-week-challenge-for-vita-mix-heres.html
http://veganbarbie.blogspot.com/2011/08/join-my-6-week-challenge-and-you-are.html

I wrote some tips for beginners here:
http://veganbarbie.blogspot.com/2011/08/tips-for-beginners.html

Some people like me to post my daily meals so I am fine doing that during the challenge. For fun, I can even log my food with cron-o-meter.  Talk about making me accountable!   Just note that I consider my food to be pretty boring.  I like it, but I don't do anything gourmet.  During the week, I throw together my meals in the morning before work, and during the weekend I'd rather play outside than cook.  I like veggies a lot and stay away from the sweet treats.  I link to other blogs (below at right) that show much more thrilling recipes.   I love healthy sweet treats and would like to convince all my nutritarian friends to make them for me on special occasions but I'm not interested to make them myself.  I'm looking forward to eating great food at Dr. Fuhrman's weekend immersion in November.

Add your comments/progress reports to any post and I'll note them.  I get an email notification of each comment.

Eating Healthfully when traveling

Excellent travel advice from Carrie on Vegan:
http://www.carrieonvegan.com/2011/08/29/4-ways-to-eat-healthfully-when-traveling/

I've got several posts describing what I do when I travel:
http://veganbarbie.blogspot.com/search/label/travel%20logs