Tag Archives: healthy living

Biblical Responses To Hunger

Got the munchies? Not sure what to do? Let’s take a look at the Bible to see how our spiritual ancestors handled their growling tummies. Some of these people showed wisdom and some showed folly. Let’s see if you can spot my 2 favorites for application in our own lives!

1. Sell your birthright for red lentil stew. (Genesis 25:29-34) Poor Esau. Let’s hope it was the best stew he’d ever had! Think he got seconds?

2. Threaten to wipe out an inhospitable man and his entire family. (1 Samuel 25) I don’t really blame David here. Hungry war bands should be fed right away, especially if they asked nicely. Good thing Abigail was there to smooth things over.

3. Borrow a kid’s lunch and share it with five thousand men and their families. (Mark 6:30-44) This one might be above our pay grade.

4. Eat only vegetables. (Daniel 1:8-20) Daniel and his friends did this for ten days and became the best looking young men in Babylon’s captive-to-magi training program.

5. Give the last of your food to a prophet. (1 Kings 17:7-16) You’re going to die anyway, right? May as well please God before you do; He has a way of taking care of his own.

6. Drink some water and wait for God to send you ravens carrying food. (1 Kings 17:1-6) This is a good idea even if you’re not hiding in a desert ravine to save your life. God might not send ravens your way, but the concept is good: drink and wait.

Did you catch my favorites? That’s right: #4 and #6! Eat vegetables, drink, and wait. When your body asks to be filled, do it right! And for the entrepreneurs out there, make some really, really good lentil stew and buy your family’s inheritance cheap.

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: SOUP: Water and Vegetables. Tags: Bible, Drink Water, healthy living, humor, maintaining a healthy weight, Soups and Stews. Leave a comment

Nov. ’13

Jurkey and Junesgiving

One time per year; that’s it. Pecan pie, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and turkey are limited to one day out of three hundred and sixty five, but I say “NO MORE!” (Or should that be “Please, sir, I want some more.”?)

I’m starting a new holiday: June Turkey. (Jurkey, perhaps? Or Junesgiving?) Thanksgiving dinner is so good, we need to eat it more often, and eating it in the summer might be even better than November. Here are the benefits as I see it:

1. It never hurts to be thankful. The USofA would be a better place if we gave thanks more and ate less. Chew on this for a moment: If your family income is $10,000 a year, you are wealthier than 84 percent of the world. We’re struggling to eat healthier in the face of an overabundance of junk food; much of the world is struggling to eat enough in the face of an under-abundance of any food.

Maybe Gratitudiet should be a new diet craze: write a thank you note to a farmer, grocer, or God before you eat…EVERY time before you eat. The eventual hand cramps will limit our ability to use forks or spoons and slow down our caloric intake.

2. No more pressure to stuff yourself silly on Thanksgiving Day. You only have to wait 182.5 days for the next turkey instead of 364; ie the world will not end if you don’t eat another mountain of mashed potatoes.

It’s actually a great idea to fill a second plate, just make sure you save it to eat later (hours later, people, not minutes!). Sometimes knowing I get to repeat a great meal helps remove the temptation to go for seconds NOW.

3. Better veggies. Let’s face it, summer is the time of year when vegetables are growing, so it’s easier to find them fresh and cheap. Instead of green bean casserole, you can have fresh green beans. Peel and cook some turnips and mix them with the potatoes for some extra nutritious mashed tubers. Take the recipe for sweet potatoes and cut the “good stuff” (butter, sugar, marshmallows) in half, or try roasting them with olive oil and cinnamon. The more vegetables you add to your meal, and the closer to “naked” you eat them, the more you can fill your plate, fill your belly, and stay on track for a healthy lifestyle.

4. Practice, practice, practice. Ladies of my generation, if your mother, grandmother, or mother-in-law usually cooks the turkey, then you probably have no clue how that sucker gets from fridge to table. But your day is coming! Granted, by the time we’ve become the matriarchs, we’ll probably be able to click on a turkey on Amazon and it’ll be shipped directly to our oven fully cooked, but it’s still a good skill to have so you can brag to your grandchildren that you cooked your own bird back in the “good old days”.

I used to think it was really complicated, but one day I saw turkey on sale for 69 cents a pound and thought “It’s just a giant chicken! At 69 cents per pound, I’m willing to take a risk and try it.” I discovered it’s pretty easy. The hardest part is manhandling the slippery carcass. Rinsing the bird is like giving a one year old a bath in the sink, just less messy.

Here’s what you do: buy a turkey now while they’re on sale. If you’re an awful cook, buy two: you need the practice. Put it in the freezer. (I once forgot about a turkey in the back of my freezer for a year and it cooked up just fine. Make sure you grease the chain saw with olive oil before you slice it. Just kidding :)) Check the weather in June and pick the hottest, most humid day you can for your Junesgiving; you’re not going outside anyway, so you may as well make the house smell good!

There are two traditional Thanksgiving dishes that I haven’t found a healthy “fix” for: stuffing and pecan pie. I made a sweet potato-pecan pie last year that my husband loved because it wasn’t sickly sweet, but I can’t call it healthy. And stuffing is stale bread baked in turkey grease; if you remove the grease part, you’re left with bad croutons instead of turkey-belly-ambrosia. I think this calls for some experimentation! What if it were zucchini cubes baked in turkey grease?

That’s what’s so great about Jurkey! You can try new ways to eat great food without 17 relatives critiquing your stale bread and turkey grease! I’ll let you know how the zucchini stuffing turns out. I’m off to buy my June Turkey; it’s on sale today for sixty EIGHT cents a pound.

“I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving.” Psalm 69:30

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: Interesting Tidbits, TWO FISTED EATING: Portion Control and Enjoyment. Tags: Cooking, Diet, God, healthy living, humor, maintaining a healthy weight, portion control, Thanksgiving, Weight loss. 5 Comments

Nov. ’13

2 Comments

Nov. ’13

Be A Better Loser

I’m a pretty good loser, but with help, I’m a great loser. Help can be an app, a website, a book, an accountability partner, a support group, or a lock on the fridge. For me, it was Loseit.com.

When I first started losing weight, I didn’t want help. Don’t give me a list of rules. Don’t tell me any foods are off limits. Call it stubbornness, call it arrogance, call it refusal to let go of a baking addiction…the point is, I wanted to do it on my own terms. Also, on my bad days, I did NOT want to have to tell someone how bad I was. My shame is my own, thank you very much! But after four months of losing weight and two months of plateau-ing, (P.L.A.T.E.A.U. stands for Please Let my Attempts Take Effect…ARGH!! U’ve got to be kidding me! Really body? All this effort and the scale doesn’t budge?) I was ready for help.

Loseit.com is a free, easy, online calorie diary of sorts. You know it’s quick and easy if a stay at home mom with four computer-crazy little kids can use it. When I sit down at the computer, I have about 70 seconds before the boys swarm all over me, asking for a turn. One of them will actually climb up the back of my chair and onto my shoulders.

Anyways, you create an account, telling them how much you weigh now, your weight goal, and if you want to lose 1, 1.5, or 2 pounds a week. I love the realism here; notice that you may not choose to lose 20 pounds per week. They calculate how many calories you should eat each day to reach your goal. You type in a food and it tells you how many calories that food has and adds it all up for you. So easy! No math skills needed!

You can also create custom foods (such as a favorite homemade soup recipe or how you take your coffee) and name them. Whole meals can be repeated with one click; useful if you eat the same thing for breakfast five days a week (like coffee, juice, and oatmeal), and previous meals are automatically saved and available to add; useful if you have leftovers for lunch the next day or you cook similar dinners every week.

You can also enter any exercise you do which ADDS calories to your daily allotment. They even include housework and gardening. If there’s chocolate in the house, my home gets a good cleaning!

Loseit even has a community feature where your friends and family can join as friends and see one another’s progress and leave comments. It’s a great way to stay encouraged and be held accountable….as much as you want to be!

By the way, I am not being paid to talk about Loseit. I wish I were. If anyone would like to pay me, I would enjoy that.

So, how does this help?

Imagine that you’ve lost fifteen pounds and need a new outfit to go out with your girlfriends. You have $80 to spend on clothes and your favorite brand of jeans is on sale for $40. At the store you find a fabulous shirt that you love, but it costs $60. If you buy the shirt, you can’t buy the jeans. So, you have to choose: marvelous shirt and mediocre jeans OR spectacular jeans and second rate shirt. No, put those credit cards back in your pocket! In this metaphor, debt turns into love handles!

That’s what Loseit does for me; it helps me budget. I want to eat marvelous everything, all day, all the time. But that’s how I gained my weight in the first place. So, a budget example: After entering my breakfast, lunch, dinner, and exercise, I have a whopping 150 calories left for snack time. I want to have a brownie and a cappuccino, but I can’t do that and stay within my calorie budget, so I have to choose: a brownie and tea OR carrots and cappuccino.

Not so bad, is it?

Loseit has shown me where my calorie bombs were hiding; those foods that seemed innocent, but in reality have a lot higher count than I imagined. Muffins, for example, and spaghetti. The first time I entered my breakfast of muffins into Loseit, I cringed: the muffins used up almost half of my allotment that day! Score one for the learning curve. And over time I’ve learned which foods I can fill my plate with and still have room for treats. (Vegetables! Not surprised? What, have you been reading my blog or something?)

Loseit is not the only website out there, but it’s the one I know. The point is, at some point most of us will need some help, be it encouragement, accountability, or a dose of reality. So, when you’re ready, don’t be afraid to get help!

“Note this: Wicked men trust themselves alone…and fail; but the righteous man trusts in me, and lives!” Habakkuk 2:4

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: Putting It All Together. Tags: Calorie, Diet, God, Health, healthy living, humor, Loseit, low calorie diet, portion control, Support group, Vegetable, Weight loss. 2 Comments

Nov. ’13

1 Comment

Oct. ’13

Halloween Battle Plan

Do you have your battle plan draw up yet? Halloween is almost upon us, and even if you don’t participate in the festivities, chances are good that your home will be awash in high fructose corn syrup and yellow dye #5. If you prepare your mind ahead of time, you can avoid that fistful of wrappers “ARGH! What have I done?!” moment.

Here are a few tactics you can try:

1. Buy candy only at the last minute. Who are you kidding? How many times have you purchased your Halloween candy at the end of September and had any left on the 31^st? You end up buying a replacement bag on the 29^thanyway, so skip the 15,000 calorie bag of temptation until you absolutely can’t avoid it. (40oz bag of assorted non-chocolate candy = approximately 15,000 calories = approximately 4.3 pounds of weight gain. How much in chocolate candy? I was too afraid to look!) The stores will not run out of candy. They will run out of bread and milk before they run out of candy. They may even have it on sale.

2. Donate extra candy to charity. Samaritan’s Purse runs Operation Christmas Child where volunteers pack shoe boxes with toys, hygiene items, clothes, and/or school supplies and give them away to poor children around the world, many of whom have never received a Christmas gift before. The collection week for this enterprise is, conveniently, the second week of November – ie, AFTER Halloween. If you don’t want your family to eat that entire bucket full of sweets, take the extra goodies to one of the drop off locations. They’ll be happy to portion the candy into little baggies to add to the shoeboxes. (They do not accept chocolate; it tends to melt on the way to the Equator.)

3. Hide under the bed. Or in a closet. For the month of October. Maybe December too.

4. Fill a bowl. Every time you run errands, fill one pocket with candy. Many offices have a bowl of candy on the front desk, but instead of taking a piece, leave a handful. Secret Agent 00Sweet!

5. Give a handful to the child of the unfriendly mom who made a snide comment about your bathrobe at the bus stop. Then repent, forgive, and…oh, come on, people, it’s a joke, lighten up! It would be funny, though….

5. Make yourself a rule. For example, you can eat a snack sized Twix only after you’ve done ten pushups and thirty sit-ups and jogged up and down the stairs twice. Whatever balances you out calorie-wise so that your net intake is zero.

6. Human Piñata. Fill all of your pockets with candy and go to a play date with your children, grandchildren, nieces/nephews. Be the first ones to leave and as you walk past the children on the way to the door, “spill” the candy. If you want to make a little show of it, put headphones in your ears and groove to the music; the extra shaking makes it more believable when Starbursts and Milk Duds leap from your jacket pocket. Just be careful not to leave the room until you’re positive that your pockets are empty; you don’t want any unsupervised children following you home.

7. Candy Filter Giveaway. We’ve done this a few years in a row; it works great. Trick or treating is generally 6-8pm, so we go out with our costumed kids and collect candy from 6-7pm. We let the boys chose a piece of candy to eat and send them out onto the front porch while my husband and I quickly separate the chocolate from the non-chocolate candy. The non-chocolate, with very few exceptions, goes into the bowl with the tracts to be given out to trick or treaters from 7-8pm. (Why tracts? Because if you come to my house and ask me to fill your bucket, I choose to give you something of value. Candy rots your teeth for a day, but Christ saves for eternity.) By 8pm the bowl is empty and we only have a little bit of chocolate to contend with using #5.

Prepare yourselves for battle, Dessert Snobs! The victory is yours!

^“For the Lord takes delight in his people;
he crowns the humble with victory.
Let his faithful people rejoice in this honor
and sing for joy on their beds.”

Psalm 149:4-5 NIV

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: Interesting Tidbits. Tags: Chocolate, Christ, God, Halloween, Halloween candy, healthy living, low calorie diet, Weight loss. 3 Comments

Oct. ’13

Slurp This, Not That

Not all soup is created equal. That’s like saying all chocolate is the same. I extol the merits of soup and its ability to help you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, but I feel the need to define “soup”. To avoid confusion and – in the spirit of this blog – to keep a positive spin on things, we’ll call good, healthy, diet-friendly soup “sexy soup” to distinguish it from all the other “soups” out there that are worse for you than an Italian hoagie. (Note: Italian hoagies are awesome BUT I don’t recommend eating them several times a week if you want to lose weight…unless you bike the five miles to and from the hoagie shop.)

Sexy Soup IS:

Mostly vegetables and water,

Going to maintain a liquid state in the fridge and not congeal into some sort of glop,

Less than 150 calories per 1 cup serving,

Tastes so good your kids will eat it.

Cream of Broccoli Soup, for example, is not Sexy Soup. If you remove the water, it’s really a block of cheese with one stem of broccoli added for color. Have you ever seen it when it’s cold? It’s Jello. But if you love cheese Jello like I do, then try this trick: Cook a bunch of broccoli and mix it in, about half soup and half broccoli (and water if you need to thin it out a bit). It won’t be quite as thick as the original, but at least it won’t be misleading to keep the word “broccoli” in the title anymore, and you’ll have calcium oozing out of your pores.

Canned soup is convenient, but it’s not Sexy. Some of the soup companies have created healthy lines of soup: “100% Natural”, “Light”, “Heart Healthy” and so forth. Not a bad idea, and these soups are on track calorie-wise, but each ONE cup serving gives you about 700 mg of sodium. That’s 30% of the sodium you should consume in an entire day. If they have less sodium, they add more sugar, as much as 3 teaspoons in a ONE cup serving. I don’t add that much sugar to my coffee, and I like it sweet!

Let’s not forget the main reason we love soup: it’s a warm, comforting, delicious way to eat lots of vegetables. Most canned soups don’t give you a lot of veggies; you usually get what you see on the label’s picture…a whole three carrot slices per can.

How do you make Sexy Soup that’s satisfying and rich without adding loads of dairy, salt, or sugar? The trick is to make the water feel like not-water in your mouth.

Option one: when the soup is cooked, pour half of it into a blender and blend it, then return it to the pot. Your “broth” is creamy, but there’s something left to chew. Note: this is a great way to get veggies into kids; if they pick out the carrots they can see, they still slurp down the ones they can’t.

Option two: add purees. Don’t pitch your decorative pumpkins! Did you know that pumpkins were a vegetable before they were décor? You can eat them! Not after you carve them, light a candle in them, and leave them on the doorstep for a month, no, but even in November and December, an unopened pumpkin can be cooked and consumed. Bake or microwave it, scoop out the now soft insides (not the seeds), puree it in a blender, and freeze it in little ziploc baggies to add to soups. Purees of cauliflower, yellow summer squash, and carrot also work for Sexy Soup.

Option three: add potatoes or rice. Potatoes and rice tend to thicken a broth when simmered for a while. Just make sure most of the soup is made up of colorful plants.

Option four: cheese or milk. If you add dairy, follow the Rule of Thumb for your veggie:fat ratio. One thumb of fat/dairy per one hand of veggies. Choose a strong cheese that you can taste; if a mild flavored cheese blends in too well, you may as well leave it out.

Option five: blend all of the soup and pour it into a large plastic martini glass. Put on sunglasses, heels, and lip stick, then sit by a pool and sip it through a straw. Sexy is as sexy eats!

“Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink.” Daniel 1:12

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: SOUP: Water and Vegetables. Tags: Diet, Fruit and Vegetable, healthy living, maintaining a healthy weight, SOUP: Water and Vegetables, Soups and Stews, Vegetable, Weight loss. 4 Comments

Oct. ’13

Label Poem

Read your labels every day

Read them first, before you pay.

Park your cart and block the aisle

Scan ingredients for awhile.

Read what’s in it, it will say.

Can’t pronounce them? Stay away.

Read your labels, every food

They can’t lie or they’ll be sued.

Not the front, or you’ll be wooed;

Read the back, the fine print, Dude!

Extra salt can take its toll;

So can Hydroxyanisole.

Cook from scratch as best you’re able,

Then you know what’s on your table.

Start with foods that look like plants

And block out all the “gee, I can’t”s.

Check your labels, every time.

Be sure that food is worth your dime.

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: Putting It All Together. Tags: Cook, food, healthy living, humor, labels, low calorie diet, Soups and Stews. 2 Comments

Oct. ’13

Late Night Cartoon

For the past couple of weeks, I have been struggling to follow my own advice on getting enough sleep. Therefore, this week I will be sharing my sleepy observations in the form of cartoons and going to bed early. The blog in its written form will be back next week. Enjoy!

Posted by Katie Robles. Categories: Putting It All Together, SEX: Sleep and Exercise. Tags: Chocolate, Diet, healthy living, humor, sleep, Weight loss. 5 Comments

Sep. ’13

How To Force Your Spouse To Lose Weight

You can’t.

End of post.

Why are you still reading?

Unless HE chooses to lose, it’s not going to happen. You can lead a spouse to water….

So, if you can’t sit on his chest and force feed him carrots, what can you do?

There are a few things you can do to help him get healthy, just remember to treat your spouse like a grown up and not a child who can be tricked into eating asparagus because you call them “magic wands”.

1. Read this blog to him. (Not necessarily today’s entry unless he’s familiar with me; start at the beginning with Sex, then move on to Soup and Two Fisted Eating. Starting any conversation with the word “sex” makes your husband already like where the conversation is headed.)

2. Get him to bed on time. It’s very simple and similar to the method we discussed for getting yourself to bed on time. An hour before he should be asleep, step between him and the TV and strip. Then smile and walk upstairs. He will follow. If you have “wobbly bits” (best Bridget Jones’ Diary quote ever) that haven’t seen the light of day since birth (yours or your childrens’), it’s okay to remove one or two selective articles of clothing to give him the general idea. For some men, this can be as little as a sock.

3. Stop buying donuts. And any other junk food he can’t resist. If he asks you to buy a certain item, buy it, but buy the smaller package. Men thrive when they are respected; treat him like the grown man that he is.

If your man is overweight, there’s nothing wrong with having an “I’m concerned for your health and I want you to join me on this weight loss journey” conversation; in fact, you probably should have one of those. But if he’s not ready, don’t push it. No one wants to live with their personal trainer.

4. Exercise together. Ask him to take a walk with you. If your spouse doesn’t exercise often, keep it simple, sweat-free and short. Ten minutes, maybe twenty. After dinner walks are also a great way to release some gas without him noticing. Or perhaps it’s without you noticing his. Either way, it’s great.

If he’s competitive, ask him to hold your feet while you do sit ups while watching TV. If you brag a little, he’ll probably try to beat your record.

5. Add more vegetables to his meals. He won’t fall for the “magic wand” gimmick, but neither will he notice if an extra veggie is added to his casserole. Speaking of casseroles, try making it in two small pans and freezing one for later. It’s hard to go back for seconds if there are no seconds.

6. Offer water. Don’t take offense if he doesn’t drink it; he’s not rejecting you.

7. The Number One best thing you can do (which is, of course, why it’s listed as #7) is to be a good example. When I began to serve myself smaller portions at dinner, I also began to serve my husband smaller portions. It was easier to dish up two identical plates and if he wanted seconds, he went and got them. He discovered that he liked the smaller portions, re-started his habit of working out in the mornings, and dropped twenty pounds in three months…less than half the time it took me to lose twenty pounds. SIGH.

But the point is that my example helped get him started, and now his example helps keep me on track. If I’m on my way to the kitchen at 9:30pm for a cookie and pass by my husband eating an apple, I think twice about that cookie. If he’s playing badminton with the kids, I’m likely to join in. If he offers me a drink of his water, I find that I’m thirsty.