Update--Four Weeks

Let me start with the good news. Four weeks into Nutrisystem and I'm down 10 pounds. Yay!  But I am a little concerned. Here's how the weight loss went by week: Week 1: -7 lbs; Week 2: -2 lbs; Week 3: -1 lb; Week 4: no change. Sigh. First, let me say, I haven't lost ten pounds in four weeks in a very long time. And, showing no loss at all in the last week was a real drag. One I'm used to, to be sure, but none the less disappointing. I have ordered the second month, and while the packaged stuff came right away, the frozen stuff has yet to ship. Still sitting in their warehouse, 9 days after it was ordered!!! Someone needs to tell Nutrisystem that I regularly get shipments from a shop in the U.K. in 3-4 days. Shipments from China usually take a week. Hey, Nutrisystem, have you every heard of Amazon??? Now that they bought Whole Foods, I can get groceries from WF in ONE HOUR. And if you think Amazon is not coming after you, Nutrisystem.......WAKE UP! Does this sound like a broken record? It should. I had the same trouble last month. They told me it was due to the hurricanes in Florida and Houston. Yeah. What now? The real issue, of course is that while the non-frozen breakfasts are palatable, the lunches and dinners are really, really awful. So I switched up most of my lunches and dinners for frozen food. But now I'm out of frozen food and who knows when it will be replenished.

I confess. Yesterday, I went to the store and bought two Lean Cuisines and two Smart Ones to try to get me through this week. It's hard enough having to sit and smell real spaghetti or salmon or steak that Tom is cooking for himself and Tim, while staring at a Lean Cuisine Mac and Cheese. But try doing it when you're eating a 5" cardboard pizza with three slices of mushrooms and a tablespoon of fake cheese. Oh yuck. If I make it through another four weeks, it will be cause to celebrate....(with a bottle of wine and a bag of Fritos).

In the meantime, I am trying to fill the void with the vegetables. Home made soup helps.  Here's a Butternut Squash and Mushroom number I whipped up one day and then ate soup for my veggies for the next three:

 I sauteed the squash and mushrooms with onions and garlic in cooking spray. Then I added loads of seasonings. Salt, pepper, thyme and chili powder. Added chicken stock and simmered for about 20 minutes. Then I pureed it with my stick blender. If you don't have a stick blender, put it on your Christmas list. It's definitely one of my top ten favorite kitchen gadgets......And since I have at least a thousand of them to hear my husband tell the story, you can see that I love it.  Oh, and the soup? Very tasty and filling.

BTW, many of you have been asking where my next book is.  Well, I have been working on #11 on and off for a year now. (Mostly off). I have been having a constant battle in my head and heart between the writing and the sewing. Most of this year, the sewing has won. Here's my latest craze: Halloween Hats!

 I made three of them for Julie and Melissa and I to wear up at Big Basin where we will be camping the end of October.  Our campsite will definitely win the Halloween contest.

Okay, well, now back to the d%$#& diet.  Many times I really wonder why I'm doing this. With who knows how many missiles pointed at California, I will be really, really mad if my last days are spent eating this crappy food. Oh, sorry. I guess I need an attitude adjustment.

Anyway, the book, The Breach at Briar's Burn, is 50% done. I guess I'll quit whining and go finish it.  Afterall.......

SALLEE??????

Hang In There!

I know, I know. I'm not supposed to weigh-in every day. But honestly, I do better overall if I am constantly stepping on the scale. If I were being honest with you, I'd admit that sometimes I weigh myself twice a day. Argggh. But I am now into the fifth day of my second week. (Actually, it's the fifth day, third hour, and twenty-first minute. Who said that?!?) I have not lost one more ounce. I know all the proper lines: Well, I lost a lot of water the first week and now I am actually losing real fat. My body is just adjusting to the large weight loss last week and if I stick with it, I will wake up some day soon and have lost two more pounds. Right. I also know the improper line: Damnit!!!!!

I really hate dieting. And I'd really like to give up and call my sister and suggest we meet at Big Bear Diner. But I have all this food in my cupboard and my freezer and I don't really feel like throwing it out....despite the fact that it is garbage day....no, Sallee....well, maybe I could just count calories on my own.....no, Sallee......You get the picture.

So I persevere. I did try a few new recipes in the last couple of days. First of all, with Nutrisystem, you get a bunch of waffles and pancakes and stuff like that. And starting this week, I also get one extra protein with breakfast. Oh, sorry, Nutrisystem calls them Power Fuels, PF. Whatever, I decided to make a Pumpkin Spice Cheese Waffle for breakfast:

I toasted the waffles in the toaster and then spread them with low fat cottage cheese (my PF) and sprinkled them with pumpkin pie spice.

I put these under the broiler. My intention was to get the cheese hot and bubbly. Maybe some color on it. But I had to pull them out sooner than that because the edges of the waffles were getting pretty brown. Still, the cheese was hot and then I poured on a tablespoon of sugar-free syrup.

It was a very satisfying and tasty breakfast. So overall, I'd give it a thumbs up.  

And while we're talking about thumbs up, let me tell you the best Nutrisystem snack that I've had so far: The Chocolate Pretzels. Oh yum.

They taste so good that I went to the Nutrisystem site and I changed my next month's order to include five of these puppies. So good.  And that's important, because chocolate is the most important food group if you ask me. Well, no. Wine is the most important, but chocolate is a close #2. And the two together are just incredible. I can just see me now with my chocolate pretzels and a big glass of Zinfandel.....Stop that, Sallee. Well, a girl can dream......

One Week Down!

Week one under my belt. Down 7 pounds! Now, I have to say that I don't think I have ever lost 7 pounds in one week, so I am a very happy camper about that. I am also happy that my frozen food FINALLY came and so far, it's really pretty good. I now get three meals and three snacks. In the Turbo Charge week, week 1, it's only two snacks. And I now get one extra protein at breakfast. That helps too. But, as hard as the Turbo Charge week was for me, (only about 800-900 calories a day), it did prove to focus me on a few things that I think are very important in this journey.

Up Your Vegetables: Like a lot of these programs, on Nutrisystem you get four or more servings of non-starchy vegetables. You can have them in an unlimited quantity if you want. At first, I was struggling to get all those vegetables. I'm a one serving a day kind of gal. So I ate carrots and celery and radishes the first day and the first serving of them was good. Then I went the salad route, although salad with just vinegar or lemon juice is self-restricting too, if you get my drift. So then I got creative. First of all, the packaged food (non-frozen) that you get the first week is really pretty bad. There is some sort of processed tomato sauce that they put on 99% of the dishes in all these packaged foods that tastes really artificial, like some sort of non-toxic red glue that I guess serves to keep the five noodles from falling off the edge of your plate. And the whole meal is about one cup of food. For those of you that don't measure, a cup of food is the size of a baseball. Not a softball. A baseball.  At least it's not a golf ball. But there you go. I roasted a bunch of vegetables with cooking spray and seasoned them and tossed them into my Rotini with (microscopic) Meatballs. Quite an improvement.

Herbs and Spices: I use a lot of herbs and spices in my own cooking. I grow most of my own herbs.I doctored everything up with herbs and spices. It makes a huge difference, whether in my own cooked vegetables or in the Nutrisystem foods, they help a lot. And now a special word about.....

SALT: I get it that packaged food uses a lot of sodium as a preservative. But did you ever wonder if there so much sodium in that food, why does it taste like it never met a salt shaker? The food needs salt. The food needs pepper too, but the food needs salt!!! And when you're drinking 19 gallons of water a day, I don't think most of us need to worry about retaining water.

Salsa: I also grow chili peppers and this year, I have been having a bumper crop. Between my peppers, my tomatoes and my first mediocre crop of tomatillos, I have been making some lip smacking salsa. And if you don't make salsa, go buy it. There are about 100 different kinds on the grocery store shelves. It can take any food from crappy to happy. Or at least burn your mouth out so you can't taste that awful tomato glue.

Soup: I learned this from Weight Watchers. Make a big pot of vegetable soup. It's "free". It's delicious. Ignore the fact that it's still 90 degrees outside. Winter will come, I promise. Just let them eat soup.

So, there it is. Add vegetables to everything to both bulk it up and add flavor. Use herbs and spices, including salt, and salsa and make a big pot of vegetable soup. Today I made mushroom. Yes, thank God, mushrooms are considered vegetables. And they are soooo good.

Here's this week's score for Nutrisystem:
Weight Loss: 10
Food: 6
Customer Service: 8
Shipping: 3? (Happy to have gotten my frozen food, but reserving judgement until my next shipment.)

Next time I'll post some of my recipes for vegetables and soup.

P.S. Just a side note: I sold my first handbag on my Etsy Shop. If you'd like to have a look, here's the link:SewSallee

NutriSystem? Time to Get Serious

Okay, it's now time to get serious about my weight. It's a health thing. Sure, I'd like to look better and feel better in my clothes. But the big thing is, I like to live an active life and when every joint in my body hurts, it's hard to move. And sitting makes it worse.

Please do not tell me to take tumeric, or to cut out bread or to try Tai Chi. The fact is, I am at least 50 pounds overweight and no matter how I cut the mustard, the first order of business is going to be to relieve my joints of this extra baggage. And I want to do it as fast as I can.

I have been a Weight Watcher member for at least 30 years. It's a great program for someone like me who loves to cook. But it is pretty tough when you live with a really picky eater who has a requested change to everything you cook because he only eats about 20% of the foods that farmers can put on our tables. So, honestly, I am tired of the battle of meal planning and cooking and serving. Plus Weight Watchers is slower than molasses in January. Members "can expect to lose 1/2 to 1 pounds a week'. At least that's the last I remember hearing. I went to their site to look for an update on that, but couldn't find it anywhere. And, in fact, even in the FAQs, after clicking through "more" about twenty times, it still didn't come up. Hmmm. What's the first thing I want to know about a weight loss program? How much weight can I expect to lose?

I've done Jenny Craig and was pretty successful, but it, too, is pretty expensive and not very flexible if you have special occasions where you don't need to buy 21 meals a week.

My doctor has really been encouraging me to go on the Opti-Fast program that they sponsor (but insurance doesn't cover). First thing he said, though,was that I would need to cut back on my exercise because it's under 1,000 calories a day. No, I want to move. And it's hardly any chewing (mostly shakes) and it's really, REALLY expensive. But it is fast.

I checked out Ideal Protein after a friend of mine had great success on that program. But the person who runs our local program here didn't impress me at all. And again, it is expensive, and there are no provisions for days off. When I mentioned a planned three-day vacation, she suggested that I take my shakes with me. And while you cannot have store bought barbecue sauce or salad dressing, you can buy theirs, which is, of course, extra.

So, after being inundated with commercials, I checked out NutriSystem and decided to give it a try. Good price, and while I had heard in the past that the taste of the food was pretty questionable, I'd also heard that the newer, frozen food was pretty good. So I took the plunge. and now, you're going to take it with me.😀

I received my non-frozen portion within two days of ordering. Cool!! Breakfasts: Good. Lunches: Not too bad. Dinners: pretty yucky. Although, with free vegetables, I doctored them up to be palatable.  But, I was excited to be able to try the frozen food. And that's where the snag hit.

While the website is screaming at me constantly to buy more food, they can't even manage to ship the frozen portion of my first shipment out of their warehouse. It has been 8 days since I ordered it and still nothing. I have chatted with them every day (until today, when they have disabled their chat capability) and I have called them three times, each time being promised the food would ship the next day. Still, no shipment. I do seem to losing weight, though, and I will update you on that after I have completed my first week. So far, here is my rating of the program on a scale of 1-10:

Weight Loss: ? Stay tuned
Food: 5
Customer Service: 5 (assuming they re-enable their chat)
Warehouse and Shipping: 1

Keep in mind that if I never get the food, it will be hard to stay on the program........