Can't say I didn't try!

Experiments
Thanks to a reasonable sounding suggestion, I tried taking my vitamins with almond milk, truvia and a bit of unsweetened chocolate (because my store doesn't carry choc almond milk). It was only slightly better than SoBe Lifewater for coating the vitamins, which is not saying much. I definitely have the 'ghost pill' in my throat, which I will try to drink water to get rid of. Stomach hasn't weighed in on whether I'm going to be nauseous for the rest of the afternoon yet. These vitamins are crucial to me keeping my mouth free of canker sores (due to a sulfate allergy), and I haven't taken them in almost a week because I couldn't stomach taking them without Orange Juice.
Edited to add: Ugh.. yeah. There's the nausea. Almond Milk is a Bonafide Fail.


Menu
We tried the Mahi Mahi dinner from the Ultimate menu last night, with summer squash, brown rice and a salad. It was fantastic! And we had plenty enough for lunch today. The summer squash was so tasty.. JUST what I needed four days into Spring when it was snowing outside.

Today
1 egg, sunny side up, over 1 slice of Ezekiel Sprouted Grain, toasted
Coffee with 1/2 & 1/2.. probably 20 oz. (it's in a travel mug)
Mahi Mahi with pepper salt and olive oil, grilled, 1/2c brown rice, 1/2c summer squash
1c baby spinach nuke-steamed
Hershey's Unsweetened Cocoa, Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk, 1 pkt Truvia

Rewards
I decided to have a protein smoothie for dinner (with coffee cubes and almond milk), to keep my tally low to allow for a dessert of sugar free angel food cake, reddiwip and blackberries. I am looking forward to that!!

I started to get excited at the store because I thought I found some thin mint sugar free cookies, but a closer look showed Aspartame in the ingredients. I avoided that sh!t long before I was on this diet!

How's that waking-up-early plan going?
Ha!

Cooking... FAST

Weigh-In!
Yesterday is where I'm marking our weigh-ins (weighs-in?), even though it was actually 10 days since we started, it was the week mark from when I actually thought to weigh myself first.
I didn't remember to weigh myself on the same scale, though, so results may be off a bit. If all scales are similarly calibrated (ha!), I lost 6 pounds! I have definitely been feeling thinner, so I'm going to believe at least four! I'm also down almost 3 inches from my first belly measurement, which I think was last Monday. I'm thinking I might weigh myself on the old scale, which usually reported 165, and then again on the new one, adjust for the difference and use the new scale's equivalent of the old scale's 165 pounds as my start weight. LOL, you get a (sugar free) treat if you comprehended what I was trying to say there.

Breakfast, in 8 Minutes
I think I mentioned that my husband has not been feeling well this week. For the past two days he had not eaten breakfast, so I told him I was going to insist he ate a nice solid and not too exciting breakfast to start his day!

I know I mentioned that I had to take the Honda for its recall service this morning, so I had the heating pad ready for its experiment. At the very least I thought it should make me warm and uncomfortable so I'd get up earlier! No luck! Despite somehow becoming aware enough to turn it on BEFORE my first alarm went off, I was not ready to get up and the dry heat was nice and cozy. So I got up later than I'd have liked to with having to drop off the car. And there was no snow storm to note, so I didn't even have the excuse of a delay! ;)

Anyway, I went through my morning routine, noting that my back felt better but still not normal until I had showered (and even then toweling off my legs was uncomfortable), so I don't know if the heating pad helped, or if my oversleeping countered the positive effects (I always feel stiffer the longer I sleep).

After my shower I woke my sleeping husband and came back downstairs to put my make-up on, feed the pets, and then start cooking. I made three eggs each, because I was sleepy and forgot we had agreed two each, and was recalling the number per serving for one of the book recipes we already had. Added pepper and some shredded cheddar to the pan and stirred that up while the pan cooled. Made Ezekial sprouted grain toast (2 pc each).

My husband was still stretching in bed before I left, but he sent me a text later to thank me for the breakfast waiting for him in the bread warmer. :)

I was happy it took mere minutes to make eggs and toast. Unfortunately I couldn't eat very fast and I still ran late to the dealership! :P

For lunch I realized that making breakfast made me forget to pack a turkey wrap! So I went to Taco Bell and got two crunchy supreme beef tacos, as allowed in the book. No tea for me, I had water.

Dinner will be the Mahi Mahi w/ Brown Rice dish from the various menus that were doled out from the email list. I need to remember to pick up squash on the way home. Don't trust those shopping lists from the PDFs!

There has been a Lyman's Orchard  Mile-High Apple Pie sitting in the kitchen since Tuesday, which I have stared daggers at but have not touched. I was better able to ignore it last night after reading yesterday that thinking about the food we wish we could eat is enough to trigger the insulin. Wow, no thanks! I didn't even eat the usual treat of a couple Dove sugar free chocolate pieces, as I was working on transferring the food diary sheets into a binder and when I looked up it was bedtime. I did go to bed hungry, though, for the first time on the diet.

Reflections
I've got to say I am SHOCKED at the weigh-in results. I really thought that the difference would be negligible. "Too good to be true" was nagging at my mind as I went through the week, though I definitely was proud to be consuming less chemically-enhanced sweetness.

The shopping is still expensive.. It would be okay if the $130 grocery bill from Saturday was it for the week, but then we spent $30 at Trader Joe's on Sunday, $20 at Stop & Shop on Monday, $8 at Stop & Shop on Tuesday. Compared to grocery shopping AND eating fast food all week, I'm hoping it balances out. Also hoping we start to figure out our own staples list and don't need a new container of everything on each visit.

My current mission is to try and find something.. ANYTHING.. that I can take my vitamins with. I need my daily cocktail of vitamins to keep my allergy to sulfates at bay, and I can't stand taking them with water, sparkling drinks, sobe lifewater... pretty much only orange juice has ever been tolerable. I have SO many pills and so many have that funky flavor going down that I end up avoiding whatever drink I was having when I took them because of the association with that horrible feeling. So I need to find SOMETHING. I don't want to cheat every morning and have orange juice because the glass it takes to down the vitamins can be as much as 29g of sugar! What a way to blow EVERY day on this plan!

I don't yet find the taste of the unsweetened Almond Milk palatable on its own, so I've got to find SOMETHING. I would try creamy iced coffee but the ice cubes will throw off my ability to get the liquid in fast enough to mask the pills. I suppose I could chill coffee in the fridge overnight and see how that goes. But I do miss the sugar in cold coffee, I've noticed. I'll try it anyway!

Looking forward to my next weigh-in! The scale I got tracks to the tenth of a pound, records measurements for two different users and displays their weight difference from the last measurement (up or down and by how much). $20 at Walmart!

Custom Food Tracker

[ Link: Custom Food Tracker ]
Since I've been the "Food Diary keeper" at home for the last two weeks, I've wished for other features that I can track. With some input from my husband I put together this one and will print out a couple and see how it works. I'll be putting these in page protectors but for anyone else who wants to use it, I left room for a three hole punch in the margin.
There are other things to record on the BFC that I just didn't feel like I had much of a place to do so. This tracker has spaces for recording weight as well as belly measurements, plus any notes ("discouraged this week", "the burritos we had Wednesday would be AWESOME with _____" and so on). There's also a circle to fill for the days I took my vitamins (I take them to control allergies so it's doubly important I keep up) and my husband asked for a space to record exercise performed. Hopefully this will make for a more well-rounded record of our progress.

BFC Menu Today

• Breakfast:
  a bowl of Uncle Sam
  a packet of sun crystals (MAD – these have cane sugar in them! Shoulda stuck w/ xylitol)
  coffee with 1/2 & 1/2

• Lunch:
  Nature's Promise all natural sliced turkey breast
  romaine lettuce
  chipotle mayonnaise
  1 slice pepper jack cheese
  1 Flat Out® italian herb flatbread wrap

• Snack: part-skim string cheese

• Dinner:
  Grilled chicken
  1/2 c. brown rice
  1/2 c. fresh brocolli, steamed
  spinach salad with olive oil & vinegar dressing

Exercise
I still have not been able to drag myself out of bed to get any of the martial arts homework in. When I do get up my back hurts until I get in a hot shower, so I'm not sure how well I'd do anyway. I'm thinking of sleeping with the heating pad tomorrow night and turning it on with the first alarm to help loosen up the muscles before I get up. If I don't strangle myself on the power cord in my sleep. At the very least maybe it'll get me out of bed cause I get too warm!

I can only try the heating pad experiment for tomorrow, not the "getting up early enough to do anything" bit. I have to leave early to drop off our Honda for recall service before work.

How Quickly We Forget

BFC Reflections

• It struck me this morning that plain Cheerios, which I could never eat without the help of raisins, are now delicious.
• I'm drinking my coffee without sugar for the first time since a classmate in High School let me try a Dunkin Donuts Light and Sweet.
• I put Stevia on my oatmeal last night and said "WOW that's good!"

They say two weeks of anything becomes habit. I'm hoping that's true. This morning I had planned to have a Jay Robb Vanilla Whey Protein Shake with breakfast, but it was too sweet after the Cheerios, and I was feeling full, so I put it in the fridge for my husband if he wants it.

Food Diary
I was hungry last night after martial arts, so I enjoyed two of the Dove Sugar Free Dark Chocolate pieces last night (0/1). Those things are amazingly rich. Thank goodness there's Maltitol in them to be wary of or I'd eat the whole bag! ;)

Tonight we're having Skyline Chili (1/0) over all natural hot dogs (0/0) on Portuguese Rolls (0/2) with Ore Ida Extra Crispy Tater Tots (0/1).

Today at lunch I'll have the last of the Tuna Salad over Mixed Greens with Baby Spinach, which my husband didn't want yesterday since he wasn't feeling well. I had two packages of chicken breasts that I thought we would go through this week but it doesn't look like we're on track to finish them all so I opened one, wrapped the breasts in pairs and put them in the freezer for next week. The grocery bill is much higher on this plan, so I don't want to waste anything.

Proactive Planning
I'm going to create a new food diary sheet with space for a weigh-in and measurement each week. We haven't been tracking the weight on schedule. I will also stop at lunch and get a new scale. I got an auto "First Week" email from the Jorge email list last night that reminded me it was time to weigh in. I realized I couldn't remember my exact measurement from last week. I need a place to write it down.
Wish the book was binder formatted so we could save our past items. I have two spare binders at home so I'll turn one into a record book to control the flutter of papers currently all over the fridge and table.

First week of Jorge's Belly Fat Cure

Introduction
My name is cuddlefish and at the end of April I'll be turning 31. I have been attending Martial Arts classes since August 09, usually three times per week. Other than that I work in front of a computer all day and usually in the evenings as well. My husband and I decided to start Jorge Cruise's Belly Fat Cure plan after some friends of ours recommended it, and we began on Sunday, March 13.

I'll be keeping a record of my own progress, maybe a comment here or there about my husband's, but if he really wants to go into it he can do that and I'll link to him. :)

Diet Progress
Yesterday marked a week on the BFC plan. We totally BLEW last Monday's sugar when I miscalculated Polaner All Fruit last Monday for breakfast - I didn't realize the book's recipe called for a double helping of preserves, and the sugar content was already higher than 5g at one serving! I had really been looking forward to baking those blueberry muffins the first Sunday to eat all week, but without the 0g sugar preserves, that wasn't doable.

We took a 'break' on St. Paddy's day because we agreed we were not skimping on the traditional Corned Beef dinner, but we didn't do too poorly at the end of the day. Our green beer was Michelob Ultra at 0/0. We had Corned Beef (0/0), Potatoes, Carrots and Cabbage. I did indulge in a slice of Irish Soda Bread, with Olivio. At the end of the day I believe we still had sugar to spare and were at 12 servings of carbs. Way less than any typical day under our previous eating habits.

I ordered some Nature's Hollow Preserves, along with Joseph's Maple Syrup and Chunky Peanut Butter on Friday, figuring it would get here at the end of this week (husband and I are currently following the Ultimate menu). Not a moment too soon, too, as my husband and I agreed that the sausage and bacon breakfasts that Jorge recommends are just too heavy for us. We rarely eat the kind of fatty meats that Jorge recommends and it was making us both feel a bit queasy to even think of eating bacon this morning. I can't wait to get the preserves and have the toast with cream cheese and blueberry preserves again! And to make those muffins!

I weigh myself on Wednesday after my martial arts class. Normally I weigh around 165lb, but my baseline for this diet is 158 last Weds. My goal is about 125 - 130lb. I'd like to have my flat belly back (I currently have the little pooch that came with the death of my metabolism at age 25) as well as slimming to my arms and a "heavy chin".

Current Thoughts on the BFC
I'm finding it exceptionally easy to follow this diet so far. Yes, I'd still kill for a handful of EL Fudge cookies, maybe some Apple Pie a la mode, and a McCafe Frappe from McDonalds. But I can already feel the general sluggishness starting to slip away, and I even have been drinking my coffee without sugar OR xylitol for the past two days – something I swore I'd never do. Seriously, I said I'd switch to tea first!

The biggest challenge for this diet is shopping. We've run to many more stores than we ever would have normally, just trying (and usually failing) to find the items on our list (either the name-dropped brands or anything similar). We had Steak on Saturday because the Ezekial burger buns called for in the book were no where to be found (though we finally discovered Ezekial in the freezer section of all major chain groceries). Don't get me wrong I prefer a steak to a burger, but it's not the first time we've had to alter a recipe.

There's also the possibility that my husband's body isn't a fan of the sugar alcohols. He may also just be coming down with something (he has no immediate reaction, but since last night has had symptoms of a stomach bug), so the jury is out on that, but we will back off on the Dove and York treats for him at night while he recovers.

What Else
For my Soo Bahk Do class we have been instructed to complete daily practice at home. I'm really struggling with finding the time. I'm sure they think we just veg in front of the TV when we are not at class, but I am always doing something, whether it's freelance work or being in class. Now with the diet, and cooking real meals instead of just grabbing a can of chili and a hot dog, it's getting even harder. The only part of the day I can conceive of squeezing any time out of is pre-wake up. And I'm afraid I've failed miserably on that front so far. I got up 20 minutes early this morning but when I do the exercises I time it all at about 1.65 hours. Not to mention my back is super stiff when I wake up (I injured it falling in November), so I can barely get myself warmed up until I've showered - at which point I have no intention of sweating all over again!
I'll have to keep you updated on that one.