Lately I have been trying very hard to lose weight, and instead, I'm losing the battle of the bulge. I've gained a few pounds instead of losing them, and my clothes are getting tighter. I've been exercising a decent amount, mostly training for a bicycle race that's coming up, but I'm also eating with abandon. I'm not sure how to go about breaking the cycle, but I have a few ideas...
For one thing, I eat too much dairy. Dairy makes my stomach upset, and has a lot of calories for how filling it is. I've been eating toasted whole wheat bread with butter for breakfast, and the butter has a whopping 1oo calories per tablespoon. I think that from now on, I will have some hummus on my bread instead, which clocks in at a mere 26 calories per tablespoon, and is more filling to boot. I'm going to make some fresh hummus tonight and give it a whirl tomorrow. Another thing that I've been doing is using balsamic vinegar and red wine vinegar as flavoring. They're both quite low calorie, only 10 calories per tablespoon, and add a lot of flavor.
I also need to try to eat more veggies and more fiber. For this week, I'll be having some leftover pasta salad (unfortunately with cheese), some asparagus and mushrooms in oyster sauce with brown rice (and I know the asparagus is out of season, and I feel completely guilty about it), some grilled veggies one night (with a tomato and cucumber salad), and perhaps towards the end of the week, some black bean soup, risotto, or pasta primavera, depending on what my garden provides me with.
Speaking of my garden, things are progressing well. The corn is huge and is producing ears. The pole beans are going crazy, and also producing. The tomatoes aren't doing quite as well, for some reason, although the peppers are doing great, and the tomatillo is growing like a weed. The plants that i'm having the most trouble with, though, are the squash. For some reason, squash doesn't like to grow in my garden, and i have no idea why. I'm going to have to do some research and figure it out.
Until then, happy eating!