14 Things About Me

1.  I teach Latin, an ancient language (don't call it a dead language; you'll save yourself a rant from me)
2.  When not teaching, I work in the technology department in school.  Talk about merging the ancient with the modern!
3.   I watch Top Chef as often as possible.  It's the only TV show I watch with regularity.
4.   I love to crochet.  I make lots of baby hats and afghans.  See here for a few things I've done.
5.   I dislike green peppers a lot.  I want to like them, since it would make my life a little easier, but I can't.
6.  I love shoes.  It's my favorite reward for losing weight.  Two more pounds to go and I gets these.
7.  I grow my own raspberries and make homemade jam every year.  It's about as close to God as you can get here on earth.
8.  I am a recovering Mountain Dew addict.  I allow myself one Dew per month.  The rest of the time I drink unsweetened iced tea.
9.  Pride and Prejudice is my favorite book of all time.
10.  I love the song "Be With You" by Mr. Big.  It's a love I don't usually share.
11.   I love old movies, especially Hitchcock ones.  My husband impressed me the most on match.com by admitting his favorite movie is "The Wizard of Oz."
12.   Spends a large amount of time on Pintrest.
13.   Loves all things purple.  Especially purple shoes.
14.  I am scared of ticks.  I hate them and freak out if they are found.

Product of the day: Excedrin

I'm sure this isn't a doctor-approved method, but for me it worked very well.  Once I made the decision to get up early to exercise, I found myself hitting the snooze alarm a lot.  I don't know about you, but I need at least one snooze alarm cycle to fully wake up.  My problem was that I kept hitting snooze and didn't get up.  This all started happening during one of my bouts with seasonal allergies, which often manifests itself as a bad headache. So, one morning (between the snooze alarms) I took two Excedrin.  Excedrin is a headache medicine containing aspirin, acetaminophen (Tylenol) and caffeine.  Twenty minutes later, I was awake thanks to the caffeine.  I got up and got some exercise in.  This became my routine:  alarm goes off, take a couple Excedrin, be wide awake soon enough and get up to exercise.  Once this became a habit for me, I was able to stop taking the Excedrin.  Now I can get up and exercise most mornings (unless the kids wake me up a lot during the night).  In fact, I know I will feel better if I do.  This has allowed me to break the weight plateau I was stuck on.

Vegetable Poached Eggs

Tonight's dinner is going to be Vegetable Poached Eggs, recipe adapted from here. I found that the recipe can be played with quite a bit. As long as the vegetables are plentiful enough for you to cook the eggs, you can vary them based on what you have on hand. The original recipe calls for zucchini and mushrooms, which my family won't eat. I have increased the amount of carrots and broccoli as a result. I serve with wheat English muffins on the side.

This is all part of my attempt to have Meatless Mondays, which doesn't always fall on Mondays, but does happen at least once a week. I have to be very particular in which meatless meals I can serve my husband--he doesn't do tofu.

Vegetable Poached Eggs

2 cups chopped broccoli

2 cups spinach

1 large onion, chopped

3 medium carrots, cut into julienne (matchstick) strips

¾ cup tomato sauce

¼ teaspoon pepper

8 eggs

¼ cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Spray 12-inch skillet with cooking spray; heat skillet over medium heat. Add vegetables; cook 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are crisp-tender.

Stir in pasta sauce and pepper. Cook, stirring constantly, until thoroughly heated.

Make 3-inch holes in vegetable mixture, using large spoon. Crack 1 egg into each hole. Cover; cook about 5 minutes or until egg whites and yolks are firm, not runny. Sprinkle with cheese. Serve immediately.

Sunday's picture

I don't have any more pictures of me, but here are my two little girls ready for reading night at school. Fox in Socks and Llama, Llama, Red Pajama.

Happy birthday Rome!

I just got done with a day of birthday parties for Rome. April 21, 753 BC, Rome was founded. As a teacher, I see the need for having a party on occasion, but boy do I hate them. The organization, the mess and especially the food. In Junior High, the food makes the party. Luckily, the kids bring it all, but it is still difficult to be around all the yummy food and not have any. Today I managed to eat a cupcake, some cheese, bread and some sparkling grape juice ("wine"). Not too bad, but not that good either. Bread may be my downfall. I would never succeed at any low carb diet, since I love bread too much. I can (and have) given up meat, sugar, and even cheese. No way to bread. I was trying to avoid the cupcake, but ended up getting a little frosting on my finger when I was closing the box, and licked it off my finger. After that I couldn't stop thinking about eating a cupcake.

Now I'm sitting in my office surrounded by leftovers. I am full, so I will not be eating any more today, but it will still be here on Monday. I don't know about your workplace, but this is what I know about mine: food disappears in the teacher's lounge. I have put many a leftovers in there and teachers eat them without ever knowing the origin. This has saved me many calories over time. Too bad it's Friday afternoon; I'll have to wait until Monday to move the food over.

My experience with Gestational Diabetes

One of the motivating factors in my weight loss is diabetes. Namely, I want to avoid getting it at all costs. Both of my pregnancies I developed Gestational Diabetes. For those of you who have been pregnant lately, that's the test you take where you drink some sugary substance and they take your blood one hour later. If you fail that one, you have to drink a sweeter substance and get your blood drawn one, two and three hours later. There's nothing more fun than hanging out in the doctor's office (and the uncomfortable chairs) for three hours. It's especially nice that you have to fast for the three hour test, so you're quite hungry the whole time. For my second pregnancy, I was still in the first trimester when I took the one-hour glucose test and still in the nauseous phase of pregnancy. When I failed that one, I refused to take the three-hour one and just began monitoring my blood sugars instead.

To monitor your blood sugars, you need to get a monitor, which is a small computer-like device. Four times a day (when you wake up, and after your meals) you get to poke a hole in your skin, extract some blood, and feed it into the monitor. Depending on your numbers, you need to adjust what you eat or take medication to help your numbers.

One big difference between gestational diabetes and type 2 is that there are a number of medications that help regulate your blood sugar, but since you are pregnant, they don't let you take any of them (which is the case for most medications, except of course Tylenol). So early on, I began a regime which started with one shot of insulin a day and evolved into four. No matter how perfectly I ate, my numbers were off. My body simply wouldn't follow the rules.

Even with the shots, I still had to continually check my numbers and adjust accordingly. One of the misconceptions of diabetes is that you can't eat carbs. The opposite is actually true: you need to eat carbs, just not too many or too little. There is a middle ground of a perfect number, so you can help keep your glucose levels regular. It's a delicate balancing act, since a number of things can affect your glucose levels. Exercise, stress and the types of carbs you eat all have a factor. The one time I went too low involved a school trip with LOTS of walking. I didn't take that into account and didn't have enough carbs for breakfast. All of a sudden, outside Ford's Theater in Washington DC, I became very shaky and didn't feel right. I ate some peanut M & Ms and soon felt better.

After all this work, I ended up with two beautiful babies and was able to walk away from my glucose monitor and insulin shots. I'm left with a much higher risk at developing Type 2 Diabetes. That is what drives me to exercise and eat better. I finally managed to kick my Mountain Dew habit of 15 years. I now allow myself to have one Mountain Dew a month, rather than one or two (or more) a day. After living with diabetes, I know what it's like and I know that I never want to deal with it again. I even have days where I try to run a little longer on the treadmill. I found that imagining that I was being chased by an insulin shot is excellent motivation.

Livestrong: My Plate

I'm going to devote Tuesday posts to things that have helped me in my quest to lose weight. Today's tool is My Plate on livestrong.com. This tool helps you track calories and nutrients in the food you eat. The nice thing is there is an app that goes with the website, so I can log food on the computer or my iPhone. It has a rather large database of food, so you can usually find brand name foods already in there, with all the nutrients already entered. You just log that you ate a bowl of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and it will input the data onto "My Plate."

Some nice features of the site: you can log meals. For instance, I usually eat Kashi Autumn Wheat cereal for breakfast. I always have my bowl with flax seeds sprinkled on and I use whole milk (one of the by-products of having an 19 month old child. I refuse to buy two kinds of milk.) I have this set as my "Kashi breakfast" so I can input all three items at once. You can also input a recipe, so you can figure out the nutrition of something you make often.

If you're really enthusiastic, you can log your exercise in too. You can even set a weight-loss goal and it will tell you how many calories you need for the day (subtracting the ones you burn from your goal). There are "dares" you can take such as eating less sugar or talking a daily multivitamin. You can join groups with similar goals as you. There are plenty of articles and blogs to read as well. All this, and it's free. I'm sure there are some fancy features if you are willing to pay, but I am not.

I've heard that there are other sites that have similar types of things. Sparkpeople is the only one I know off the top of my head. I'd already been using Livestrong when I heard of Sparkpeople, so I decided to keep using it. I've been an on-off user for a couple years now. If you want to become friends with me on Livestrong, my user name is kestie77.