Working, Eating, Cooking…

So this week was my second week of work at school post broken hip.  Last week was a three day week, and this week was a four day week. Let’s just say I hit the sofa at 5pm yesterday and pretty much stayed there until this very moment right now (fifteen hours later).

I forget easily how far I’ve come.  Just two weeks ago, at Freshman Orientation, I hoofed around with a significant limp and a crutch in my car that I had just stopped using.  I was slow and sore.  With both exercises at home and formal PT, I have gained significant strength.  When I am well rested, I have hardly any limp at all.  I can stand for a whole class period.  I still am slow when I walk, but not as slow.  I feel stronger.  People are commenting that I am looking better.  

But progress always comes at a price.  These longer days with more standing and more aggressive PT have lifted me tired.  On Wednesday, I had sharp, shooting pains that woke me up overnight.  I am accepting that when I do more, I can do more….but I must recover and rest to keep those gains and not go backwards.

With work has come more planning to try and stay on (or close) to the new eating plan I am working on.  I am happy to say that I just started the third week of the plan and it feels like something I can stick with long term.  I am modifying it to fit in my lifestyle, which means I’m not dropping jaw dropping weight every week.  But you know what?  Two pounds is what I lost last week.  I lost three in the first week.  These are results I can live with, and if a modified plan is working for me and giving me results I like, and I can stick with that plan?  I’m in.  I am so happy to feel like I have finally gained some control over my eating and drinking.  

The basic tenets of the plan are that you eat different foods on different days, with some foods completely off limits.  Some days are more restrictive than others.  You can have most fruits only two days a week, although there are some that are good for five days.  You can only have nuts, avocados and oils on three days of the week.  Dark, green leafy veggies are always OK in unlimited amounts.  Never any corn or dairy (I have had small amounts of cheese and yogurt since I am still healing from surgery).  For the most part I have been able to find foods and recipes that work for every phase of the program.  When we have family dinners, it’s grilled meats and veggies, all of which are good most every day.  

Here are a few recipes that I want to remember for myself.  You’ll notice a lot of these are from Skinnytaste.  She has some great stuff!

Phase One:  Cucumber and Strawberry Salad (I omitted the nuts)

Phase Two:  Raw Cucumber Salad (For Phase Two you can eliminate the olives, tomatoes and oil…still very tasty.  I kept a very small amount of crumbled feta on top for flavor)

Phase Three:  Raw Zucchini Salad With Avocado  This recipe as written has edamame in it, which I skipped.  Herbs could be varied in this.

Spiralized Sweet Potatoes with Roasted Tomatoes:  I used the linked method to roast my spiralized sweet potatoes (Rosemary was my fresh herb of choice, plus red pepper flakes).  Ten minutes into the roasting I popped some cherry tomatoes in the oven tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper.  Both were done at the same time, and I threw them all together.  The juices from the tomatoes coated the sweet potato noodles and it was insanely good.

I am still looking for some bigger recipes that include proteins.  For now we’ve done a lot of grilling and I’ve used foil packets in the oven for fish.  As I find more, I’ll record them here so I know where to find them!

What I loved about these recipes is that they reminded me that eating clean, low calorie, healthy food can be delicious.  I needed that reminder.  🙂

It Is Time

So it has been a few weeks since I wrote about my life changing hip fracture and subsequent surgery.  It has indeed been a long road.  I am so grateful that the worst of it does seem to be behind me, and life is starting to get back to normal.

I have a few more weeks left of PT, which I am grateful for, because I still am not walking well.  I definitely have a limp with my right side, and I’m told it is due to muscle weakness.  The muscles had over two months of none or minimal use.  It has been nearly a month since my doctor said that I could start walking again, but it just wasn’t that simple.  At first I used one crutch on the opposite side from my injury, and still used the walker if we were doing any significant distance. But as I grew stronger I started walking without it.  I was sore at first, but as the days have worn on, that has gone down too.  The cliche of “I feel stronger every day” is bearing true.

Work started back last week, and it starting to finally feel like life is returning to normal.  The routine of it is exactly what I have been missing, not to mention the social aspect.  One of the harder parts of my recovery was the isolation of it.  While many people will tell you they are there for you, it turns out very few actually make the effort to do so.   

Unfortunately for me very little of my work clothes fit.  I honestly gained very little weight during my recovery; only about five pounds.  But, I lost so much muscle tone that everything loosened up and now very little fits.  And to be honest, I wasn’t happy at all with my weight at the point I was injured; I had gained ten pounds over the last twelve months, and another ten in the year before that, putting me a good 20 pounds above where I had been just two years ago.  

I spent the last month kind of floundering around trying to find direction in the weight loss department.  I was tracking my food intake on My Fitness Pal to no avail.  Since I still can’t do much in the way of exercise, my calorie budget is extremely small with nothing getting burned off.  I was over calories every single day I tracked.  It wasn’t helping.

Then a friend told me about the Fast Metabolism Diet.  She had been following it for nearly four weeks and raved on and on about it. She had lost 11 pounds in those four weeks and she was willing to share the knowledge she had built up about the program.  

I was a little unsure about it at first.  I had a vacation coming, so I told her to send me the stuff and I would start after the vacation.  I downloaded the app and looked around on the Internet a little.  It seemed mostly doable, but I wasn’t 100 % sold.  

Then I went away on vacation and managed to eat and drink so much that I gained four pounds on vacation, officially putting me at my highest weight ever, outside of pregnancies.  That was it.  Even if I didn’t follow the plan perfectly, I reasoned, it had to be better than what I was doing. 

So I started about a week ago.  I am mostly following it, with a few exceptions.  First, I am still having coffee.  On weekdays I am only having one cup, which is less than I had been drinking.  On the weekends I am allowing myself two, since I can compensate with more water intake.  I replaced the second cup of water with a second water bottle at work, so I am able to consume 48 ounces during a day at work.  This won’t work forever, but with my current teaching schedule it does.

Second, I am not cutting alcohol out entirely.  I had been drinking more than I should, that is definitely true.   I have scaled back to one or two most days, which sadly is a lot less than what I had been drinking.  It is a work in progress.  Ideally I will scale back a bit more each week.  

Other than those two things, I have been pretty good at following the program with no deliberate cheats (accidental ones, like not realizing zucchini isn’t a Phase 2 food have happened).  And even if I am not perfect, trying to get as close as possible is helping me remember the important things I used to know about weight loss:  eating real food, eating small portions often, drinking water, not adding artificial sweeteners.

I’m down about four pounds so far.  I am hoping that I can work with a modified version of the program long term so that I can continue to take off the twenty pounds I’ve gained in the last two years.  I’m hopeful about this for the first time in a long time.  I’m feeling like I might finally get back to a place where I like this body I live in instead of feeling like it has betrayed me.  

I feel like I am finally ready to start moving forward once again.