Sunday, March 27, 2011

Surviving the Nix the Fix week

I knew this week was coming so I was dreading it in a way since it is always a hard one for me ... but good at the same time. I appreciate the change in how to get the bonus points. in the past it was a bit of a hassle to figure out enough variety in our eating to earn all the bonus points possible. I like the ease of just 10 points for not giving inand eating empty calories and white sugar/flour products. Since my husband and I have started tracking our calories on the Livestrong site I have started seeing some movement in the right direction on the scale. I know it is a combination of limiting my calories, continuing with exercise and cutting out the sweets. Friday I did not get myworkout in first thing and I HAD to do some tasks around the house that I had been putting off for too long. Then we had an overnight guest coming so I got busy getting things ready for him to come and preparing for an all day outing on Saturday with the youth group. I missed working out and getting the points for it but I also knew I would be doing a TON of walking/hiking on Saturday too. We drove to Cuenca, a couple hours away from Madrid. We spent the morning walking around the town -- all up and down hills. We had a nice picnic lunch, everyone bringing their own. We brought big sandwiches for our kids (spanish bocadillos from baguette bread and spanish egg and potato tortilla inside.) Tim and I packed a variety of options for ourselves. We had some pizza left over from the night before (my homemade crust with honey, olive oil, yeast and whole wheat flour. Since I had plugged that recipe into the livestrong my plate site I knew the calories in each slice (just 112) and it would be easy to plug into our daily total. I also had some harboiled eggs in the cooler, some boiled chicken that we could make into sandwiches on 7 grain bread or just eat by itself, some yogurt, peanuts and apples. We each made good choices for lunch and then I had to hike around a little looking for two members of our group that had gone off by themselves and it was getting time to pack up and move on to the second part of our day. Again this hike was up and down a hill.

Part of sightseeing in new places here in Spain is trying out the local delicacies and specialties. I bought some honey flavored pastries and cut them up for everyone to try. I took a little bite to taste and it was different. I liked it OK but not enough to "waste" my calorie allotment on eating any more of it.

We left the city and headed about 30 km outside of town to a park called the "enchanted city". It is a fantastic natural park full of these incredible enormous rock formations. We hiked around the park for a couple of hours and then headed home.
One of my sons' friends came with us and his parents were so glad that we had gone out of our way to provide special food for his very difficult food needs that they had 3 spanish tortillas (homemade) prepared and gave them to us to have for dinner when we dropped their son off. It was so thoughtful of them to prepare dinner for us and the tortilla was delicious even if it did have potatoes in it. I went ahead and ate some. So I guess I will end up taking Saturday as my free day. If I had thought about that I might have gone ahead and had a piece of leftover birthday cake from Friday but I didn't think about it till today so I guess I lost my chance. :-)
Oh, and one more thing .... I still had some leftover oatmeal from the other day so I made another batch of scones. I was almost out of honey so I used molasses instead but lowered it from 2 tbsp to 1 tbsp. I think I may try to cut it back even more the next time. Not sure if any sweetener is really necessary. I added one small apple chopped up and 1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon and cut back the milk a little. The taste was much better than the first time. I think the cinnamon really makes the difference and it helps cut the sugar craving too.

2 comments:

Sarah DeSalvo said...

Oh, that is a great idea to put some apple and cinnamon in the oatmeal scones. I made them for the first time on Sunday and thought they were pretty good. My husband thought they were not sweet enough :-) So I think next time i will try the apples. Or Raisins would be good too. Great idea!

Unknown said...

you look great! What a fun excursion!

Keep on Springing!

Dani Joy