Good Morning.
I'm trying to eat healthier, but I have my own take on it that will hopefully keep me from doing things like yelling at passing cars or throwing a can of paint at the wall. I don't like sacrificial eating, never have.
We'll begin with peanut butter. I love peanut butter spread on a warm piece of toast. I have peanut butter in the cupboard
because my dog gets a kong filled with it as a bedtime snack. She prefers Jif that happens to be my favorite too and watching her extract Jif from her kong is very difficult for me. I keep a can of unsalted peanuts around, but the texture isn't right.
Bacon. When I mapped out my new eating plan, I considered for about five seconds eliminating bacon and decided I just could handle it mentally, so I got the center cut variety that is supposed to be slightly better. I no longer fry up a few strips for a weekend breakfast; I cook one strip, smush it in a paper towel until there's no grease, and crumble it up for a salad. That makes bacon okay in my view because salads are better than a peanut butter and bacon sandwich, for instance, or a BLT with mayonnaise, or a bacon cheeseburger on a buttered, grilled bun.
Ice cream. I actually managed to get rid of the ice cream, even my beloved chocolate or the kind with the cookie dough in it.
If I have a chocolate attack, I make hot chocolate with 2% milk. (1% is out of the question.) Unfortunately hot chocolate is
absolutely crummy without whipped cream, so I combed the substitute products and found a topping that is lower in fat and calories. It looks like whipped cream even though it doesn't taste like it, and I also use it on sugar-free Jello. I haven't had Jello since the age of five, but I have Jello now. Sometimes I mix my sugar-free Jello with a container of fruit yogurt, the lighter kind, top the whole thing with my lower fat whipped topping and feel relatively pleased. Relatively.
I have no potatoes in the house and it's sort of like having no electricity. I love potatoes, any kind of potatoes but I have given up potatoes. I do have angel hair pasta. It is thinner than pasta like fettuccine or rigatoni or those ear-shaped things, so I figure angel hair is okay. My new spaghetti is made with stupidly lean ground beef, diced tomatoes, garlic, and herbs but no jarred spaghetti sauce. I have some low-fat mozzarella I throw on top to console me. And just a titch of Parmesan.
I now have only chicken breasts, boneless, skinless ones I pound with a hammer to get rid of my frustration that I cannot have juicy dark thighs and beautiful little tenderloin filets wrapped in, what else, bacon. I get something called a turkey filet and cook it in low-sodium chicken broth with herbs and a splash of white wine so it won't dry out completely. Wine is good for the heart, so I throw wine in a lot of things. The other night I drizzled some on my sugar-free Jello with a container of fruit yogurt and lower fat whipped topping.
I found a whole wheat bread that I like quite a lot. The slices are thinner and smaller than a regular sandwich loaf and it makes great toast. The problem is what to put on it. I can't have my peanut butter or my regular butter or even a big smear of marmalade, so I leave it plain and top it with an egg, one lovely scrambled egg with chives. I use cooking spray in my skillet now, and I'm certain there's something wrong with it. Cleaning products should be sprayed, not whatever that cooking thing is.
I have bottled water in my house because the dog doesn't like tap water. I don't like any kind of water and I don't like the iced tea I planned to drink instead of my cherished Pepsi. I tried making a lemonade with my bottled water, some lemon juice, and sweetener, and it was okay, not fabulous, but okay, and then I thought, gee, I could make an Arnold Palmer with my iced tea and my okay lemonade, but it still wasn't as good as my cherished Pepsi. A few days ago I was driving down Minnesota Avenue, a main drag in my city, and I had a major, four-alarm Pepsi attack. I honestly thought I was going to start foaming at the mouth so I pulled into a fast food joint, one that I knew served Pepsi instead of the other one. "Please give me a Pepsi," I begged the order person when I got to the speaker. "Regular or diet?" she asked. I paused, said the first line of the Lord's Prayer, and replied "Diet".
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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