This lovely Thursday morning started off with a great bowl of oat bran. I’ve seen other bloggers use tea in the place of water, and I’ve started doing that myself. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, bloggies! That was a great idea. I don’t know who came up with it, but I am glad that the idea made its way into my bowl. Thanks to you, whoever you are! I brewed up some sticky toffee tea that I got in London a couple of years ago to use in making my oat bran. After the oats were cooked, I added 1 Tbsp. of maple syrup, 1 Tbsp. of chopped walnuts, 1/4 package of vanilla whey protein and some blueberries. It was gooooood! I also had more of the tea with a bit of almond milk, but I apparently cut it out of the picture. Oops!
Before I headed off for my lunchtime kickboxing class, I had this Siggi’s orange and ginger with a chopped up date. I’ve been trying to figure out what was missing from this little cup for several weeks now. Today, I nailed it: Dates! This was such a good combination. I’ve always loved dates and orange together. It was so obvious! I don’t ever want to have Siggi sans dates again!
Kickboxing was good, and it seemed challenging enough, but my heart rate monitor told me that I had only burned 350 calories. Huh? It seemed harder than that. Anyone with a heart rate monitor knows that they aren’t infallible, but I checked mine from time to time and it didn’t seem to be doing anything weird. It never told me that my heart had slowed to 10 beats per minute or anything too unbelievable. I used to burn around 700 during a class, but I’ve seen the number drop as my body has adjusted to the new moves. Overall, I don’t want to complain because this is a big sign of progress. I was just a little puzzled by it.
At any rate (excuse the pun), I was hungry when I got home, and I had a huge bowl of food. There is a serving of my bulgur chili in the bowl along with a corn vitatop, an ounce of Cabot 75% reduced fat cheddar, a Tbsp. of 0% Fage and a spoonful of salsa for a little extra kick. This was a cozy bowl of goodness! I love working from home because I can add little embellishments like the salsa and yogurt without having to drag in extra containers. Even so, I may be dragging in some extra gladware tomorrow, because this combo was awesome!
Despite the huge bowl of food, I still needed some dessert. The dessert I had today is going to be featured as my favorite weekly snack tomorrow. I’ve been enjoying it a lot this week. Because I don’t want to spoil my own surprise, here’s a placeholder. Oh, the suspense. 
I did not eat the glass bird or the rose, by the way.
As the afternoon wore on, snacktime grew closer. I had another of my favorite yogurt combos today. I’ve probably posted pictures of this particular mix at least four times now. In the bowl: Lemon yogurt, Fiber One and blueberries. Seriously, lemon and blueberry together with a crust like crunch of Fiber One can fool me into thinking I’m having dessert. I love this mix!
Since my kickboxing calorie burn was less than I had hoped for, and because I had some spare energy lying in wait, I decided to put my dinner in the oven and head to the gym to burn a few more calories. I never work out twice in the same day, but I was just kind of in the mood. Plus, I hadn’t showered since kickboxing so I was already stinky anyway. My time in the gym was even more intense than usual. Weird! It was a strange sort of workout. I really pushed myself rather than just slogging along as I sometimes do. I’m wondering if it is because I knew that it was “bonus,” and that I could stop any time without guilt. Whatever the reason, I felt great!
Before I headed up to the roof (my gym is on the roof…), I had a piece of Nature’s Own Double Fiber bread with Dark Chocolate Dreams PB and sugar free raspberry jam.
After my second workout of the day, I came home to find that my dinner was ready. I’m so excited! I tried the baked tofu that I’ve seen other people raving about. Gliding Calm, this is genius! I used the measurements for the rub provided by Kath. Oh my good gravy. Look at that tofu. It had a crunchy outside, a perfect inside and the flavor was amazing. I’m so glad that I tried it. I’m going to have to try the barbecue sauce method next. I put a little bit of Virginia Gentleman Bourbon Barbecue Sauce on the sandwich thin along with some lettuce. This was good eating! Back in the corner, you see some of the baba ghanouj that I made last night. It just gets better with age. I had it with my bright little veggies. All in all, this was a very enjoyable dinner!
Of course, I needed dessert. I had a peanut butter vita top with a bit of fat free Cool Whip and a sliced red pear. I’m out of my usual strawberries, but at least the pear is red.
After a long bath, I decided that I needed something more. Here’s a problem: I wasn’t really hungry. I’ve eaten several things over the past few days when I haven’t really been hungry. Part of me says that it’s fine because I haven’t exceeded my points for the week. The other part of me says that I should be more concerned with responding to my body with a sense of reason than satisfying a mathematical equation.
The part of me that likes chocolate and peanut butter trumped everybody else. I think I’m ok with that. I’ve had this can of cocoa mix in the cabinet for a bit, and I’d like to use it up along with all of my loose tea. I love using things up. It makes me feel like I didn’t waste my money! I decided to put half a serving of cocoa mix in a bowl of oat bran. I also had a tablespoon full of mighty maple. The oat bran turned a lovely chocolate color once I stirred in the cocoa mix. Sorry I didn’t snap another pic! I kept the peanut butter in the spoon and sort of dipped little bits of oat bran into it a little at a time. I feel like I enjoy the peanut butter more when I can see it than I do if it is all blended in. This bowl was the perfect mix of flavors to satisfy my chocolate and peanut butter craving, and now I have a great use for the cocoa mix. Hooray!
I really enjoyed doing today’s post. I didn’t start my blog with the plan to keep a daily food journal. I do that elsewhere, although not with photos. After posting pictures of a day’s worth of food a number of times now, I have to say that I really kind of like it! I’ve always loved reading everyone else’s, and I’m thinking about starting to do it twice a week instead of just on Thursdays. I seem to learn a lot about my eating habits when I see my food staring me in the face. If you are a blogger who frequently posts all of your daily eats, I’d be interested to know what you have found to be the most useful part of that exercise! If you don’t blog about it, but you keep a food journal, I’d like to know how that has helped you as well. I’m always so happy to read comments, and I often find them incredibly useful! Thanks to those of you who chime in!
I hope everyone has had a great day. Tomorrow is Friday, and I’m so glad because this week has seemed very long. I always look forward to my Friday’s off from the gym too. I do love working out, but a girl has to have some balance… and time to socialize! Have a good night, kids! I will see you tomorrow with my weigh-in results (I think it is going to be exactly the same again, by the way… hmm… ), and my surprise snack. It isn’t anything exotic, but it is really good!
After kickboxing, I had a Gardenburger grilled chik’n patty on an Arnold thin with some dill pickles and light Hellman’s. I love the combo of pickles, mayo and chicken (or chik’n as the case may be.) Back in the day, I ate a lot of fast food chicken sandwiches, and I became hooked on that combination. Now, I’m glad to have a healthier way to enjoy it. The real star of my lunch was this enormous salad! In addition to a huge pile of lettuce, it contains tomato, cucumber, carrots, Cabot cheddar, and a serving of my 
Of course, I had to have dessert. I had a triple chocolate chunk vitatop with berries and fat free Cool Whip. I seemed to be craving chocolate today. That’s odd for me. Chocolate isn’t usually my thing. I’m much more of a coconut or caramel girl. I’m not sure what’s going on, but, as you will see, this was not the day’s only chocolate. 
I had a couple of snacks between lunch dessert and dinner. My favorite snack this week has been a mixture of Kashi Honey Sunshine cereal and lightly salted pumpkin seeds. Sweet… salty… perfect!
I also had half of a serving of my new favorite granola, Galaxy Granola Vanilla Almond Munch, mixed with a few bittersweet chocolate chips. Yep. Chocolate.
For dinner, I was in the mood for a classic. Along with my leftover roasted broccoli, I whipped up a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato and basil. This was no ordinary grilled cheese. I love the basket of cheese scraps at my local Whole Foods. I always poke around a bit in the basket when I’m there, and I like buying little remnants of interesting cheeses. The cheese on this sandwich is called “Amadeus.” I’ve bought it several times before. I’m not sure if it is the creamy nuttiness of the yummy cheese or the fact that it shares a name with a famous composer, but I always bring a piece home when I find it in the scrap basket. You can take the music teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take her out of the kitchen?
I’d checked out 
Oh look! More chocolate. I had a vitabrownie later in the evening.
Finally, I was mixing up a batch of cheesecake flavored fat free sugar free pudding cups. Of course, I wanted some right then, and I wanted it with pumpkin and cool whip. So… I had some. I’m always amazed at how filling the 1/2 cup of pumpkin is when mixed in with a bit of pudding. There is no chocolate here, but the thought did cross my mind… Are you sure that there aren’t chips hidden in the bottom? Hmm? Well, there aren’t, but they would have been yummy!
In just a few hours… it will be Friday! Hooray!! This has been a hectic week. I didn’t get to work from home this Thursday, like I usually do, but I decided to do a food journal post anyway. Oh, and before I go on, you might notice something new over on the right hand side. I’ve joined the Foodbuzz featured publishers program. I’m excited! I’ve really been having a great time meeting new people on the foodbuzz site, so I decided to go ahead and jump on the bandwagon.
This photo makes my lunch look weird, but I promise that it was really yummy. My office seems to be a bad place for photography! I had the last piece of my B
Around 1:30 an e-mail went around about some leftover “cake and other food” from the awards ceremony that was held in my office yesterday. I wasn’t planning to go and check out the leftovers, but a healthy eating friend sent me an e-mail to tell me that the “other food” was fruit and veggies! I decided to go and get a little plate and, since I skipped the reception yesterday, I decided to have a very tiny piece of the cake. Two bites did the trick! Other snacks this afternoon included:
For dinner, I decided to get creative. I seared some tofu, topped it with Trader Joe’s roasted vegetable tapenade and a bit of parmesan, broiled it to brown the cheese and then had it “open faced sandwich style” on some of my homemade 
I had another vitabrownie for dessert with some fat free cool whip. I usually try not to eat two vitas in the same day, but I got a big on-line order yesterday, and they were so fresh and moist! So good! They are all in the freezer now, so I won’t be as tempted to have two tomorrow. The vitabrownie and Cool Whip combo reminds me of a Hostess cupcake. Yum! I used to love those things!
After I went to the gym, I was hungry so I had a bowl of oat bran with honey and cinnamon honey almonds. I ate it pretty late, and I may be sorry when I do my weigh-in tomorrow morning. I was hungry. If I weigh more, so be it. I know it will all average out eventually anyway and my one snapshot on Friday mornings is just that– a snapshot. I’m making excuses already, which seems like the wrong thing to do, but that was my thought process when I decided to go ahead and have a bowl. It was lovely and sweet and very satisfying. 
Maybe it’s just me, but I think honey, almonds and cinnamon make a pretty combination. They certainly taste awesome together!!
I love oat bran!! I’m also a big fan of anything involving honey and nuts. Speaking of honey, do you know the Van Morrison song, “Tupelo Honey?” I’m a fan of it. I was thinking of it when I chose the Tupelo honey over the other honeys at the store. If I need to laugh, I just listen to that song and focus on the back up singers. They make the song. Their part is hilarious. Speaking of focusing…. Sorry about that…. 
For lunch, I made a salad with Boston butter lettuce, roma tomato, carrots, onions and celery and then topped it with my favorite creamy dressing. 
My dressing is made of 1 Tbsp. of Greek yogurt, 2 Tbsp. of Forty Spices Hummus, and a little bit of salt and then thinned out with a bit of lemon juice. Since there are about a zillion flavors of hummus available, the possibilities for this dressing seem endless.
I also had a serving of my 
Time sort of got away from me this afternoon. I spent a lot of the day on the phone with my boss and with the analysts I work with trying to get things squared away before my two day hiatus. At some point, I realized that I was past due for a snack so I doubled up and had a bowl of fresh pineapple and a piece of peanut butter toast with sugar free jam.
After that, I had a vitatop…
That was followed by one last snack before I went to kickboxing. Despite being sick, I’ve mostly kept up with my workout schedule. It has been tough to muster up the energy to go, but I find that I feel better afterwards. At the very least, my nose unstops for a little while. I went to class tonight since I can’t go tomorrow during lunch, and I needed something that would hold me past my usual dinnertime and through the class. Siggi’s Pomegranate and Passion Fruit (with its 16 grams of protein) was the winner along with some Fiber One. I tried the orange and ginger flavor last week and posted about it. I tried the blueberry yesterday, and really liked it. I’d been saving this one since it involved pomegranate (which I LOVE), thinking that it would be “blow my mind” good. Unfortunately, the passion fruit flavor is predominant, and, well, I don’t love passion fruit. I think that the orange and ginger is my fave, and I’ll definitely be stocking up on it and the blueberry in the future. 
After class, I made dinner: 
Finally…. Pavlova’s swan song. I ate the last of my four little pavlovas this evening. I’m going to be sad when I don’t have one to eat tomorrow night, but I’m determined not to get into a pavlova addiction/dessert rut. The last pavlova was topped with some fat free cool whip, a Tbsp. of Dark Chocolate Dreams peanut butter, and fresh strawberries. It was a pretty classic flavor combo with a bit of peanut buttery goodness mixed in, and it was yummy. I think that the Baklava Pavlova was my favorite, but this one is probably the runner up.
Since today was a “work from home” day, I decided to do another post to show you what a typical day’s menu looks like for me. This morning, I started off by making a little pot of espresso. I added the rich espresso to 1/2 cup of skim milk and 1/2 cup of unsweetened vanilla almond breeze with a bit of sugar free chocolate Torani syrup. You may wonder why I mix almond milk and skim milk. Well, I love the almond milk, but it doesn’t count as a dairy serving for purposes of weight watchers. I hate to miss a perfect opportunity– a morning latte, to get in some “official” dairy so the mixture is my compromise. 
Along with my latte, I had a serving of 
Since I was planning to kickbox at noon, that meant that my lunch would be late and also that I would be in for a challenging workout. Today’s class was definitely tough! I felt pretty energetic start to finish and noticed that my form is starting to improve, which made me happy. My kickboxing class is always the toughest, but most fun workout I have all week. I’m so glad I got brave enough to try it!
For lunch, I had some of my leftover 
My salad was a mix of romaine, grape tomatoes, celery, carrots, goat cheese and pumpkin seeds topped with freshly ground pepper and my mustard and cherry vinegar mixture. Yum! I thought it was too pretty not to have its own close up.
Are you a fellow 
One of my snacks this afternoon was the rest of my 
I also had a beautiful and sweet cara cara red naval orange. It looks like a grapefruit, but tastes like an orange. Tricky… and delish!
For my last afternoon snack, I had a Cascadian Farm organic fiber right dark chocolate almond chewy granola bar. I bought these on a whim, along with the Siggi’s, at Whole Foods the other day, and I will be buying them again. I love Fiber One bars, but they do have a lot of strange ingredients in them. This was very similar, but its ingredients are a bit less mysterious. I don’t expect it to replace my Fiber One bar addiction, but I do expect to keep some of these around. I really like them a lot. In fact, I bought them on Sunday and there is only one left. 
For dinner, I sauteed some shallot, garlic, mushrooms and spinach. I made enough to fill several omelets or to make several frittatas. I really do love leftovers! I put some of the spinach mixture in my little skillet, topped it with egg beaters, cottage cheese and reduced fat parmesan, and then popped it under the broiler. I had this along with a lovely sliced tomato topped with fresh pepper and a piece of Nature’s Own Double Fiber bread topped with Better ‘n Peanut Butter and sugar free raspberry preserves.
After dinner, I had a bowl of Trader Joe’s Fruit and Fiber cereal with a splash of almond milk. A bowl of cereal like this would not keep me full for very long, but it makes a good snack or bite of something sweet.
Speaking of bites of sweetness, I finished the night off with a little bite of chocolate. I am usually immune to post holiday candy sales, but these Lake Champlain chocolates from Whole Foods looked too good to pass up. I’ve been eating one piece each night, and enjoying them completely! Tonight I ate the one with the tree. It had pieces of mint in it. Yum! 
