Leida

Thanks to a lot of advice I’ve got, the books, trial and error, I managed to corner bread-baking for my high-altitude location. I discovered that:

- home-made bread is a little bit denser than store-bought, so it can be sliced much thinner reducing calories per slice

-there are really very few ingredients needed to bake a good bread.

-it’s crucial to stay on top of the process watching the bread - it may be the altitude.

-a few tricks such as folding the dough and using the oven for raising the dough help a huge deal.

 -I didn’t have much success with sour-dough.

-Lemon juice is helpful!

 My favorite bread so far? It’s 2.5 whole wheat + dark rye (1/2 cup), with 3 tbsp of olive oil (rubbed in before forming dough), 1 tbsp of lemon juice, 2 tsp of yeast, 1 tsp of sugar, 1 tsp of salt and 1 tbsp each of the yellow mustard seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, flax seeds + 2 tbsp of sunflower seeds. I roast all the seeds lightly. It’s a very nice light bread with mild flavors, and as far as I can tell super-healthy. I like caraway seed myself, but the baby doesn’t so as much as I was tempted by it or fennel seeds, I didn’t add them in I only had to buy bread once this week, hoping to bake all my own the next week!

NOTE: liquid volumes & temperatures differ slightly for lower altitudes - I’d start with 1 tbsp of oil less and reduce heat by 15 degrees on low altitudes. 

 The way I assemble it is:

 Toast seeds and set to cool.

Warm up the house to 24 C. Add sugar and yest to 1 glass measuring cup of warm water (comfortable to hold your fingers in), mix with a fork. Give it at least 5 min till foaming wildly.

In one huge bowl sift and mix flours and salt. Rubb in oil, like for making crust. Add yeast and lemon juice. Mix till the dough came together in a ball. Cover with the safe-same inverted bowl and let rest for 15 min.

Knead for 5 or so minutes till nice and elastic in the bowl. Add a bit of skim milk if the dough is too dry. Knead in the seeds.

Set oven to the lowest setting (170 F in my case), turn it off. Spray my bowl with oil spray and roll the dough to oil it. Pull the cirano-wrap over the bowl and put in the oven (if it feels too hot, open it for a bit to make it feel just like a relatively hot room). Put the dough in, close the door and check in 40 min to see if dough increased twice in size (don’t let go over that!)

Fold the dough (press it from a round shape into an oval and then fold the sides in in thirds, fold in half. Cover up again, let rise for 40 min or so, till doubles, in the oven.

Take it out, place one grill rack to the top 1/3 of the oven, and another - to the very bottom. Preheat oven to 475 F.

Spray loaf pan with oil spray, shape the loaf (I lightly roll my folded dough out), place in the pan, cover with a wet but not dripping towel and put on the oven top to rise two-fold.

Once the loaf is all nice and puffy, spray the top with the oil spray and sprinkle with spice or sea salt if desired. Empty a tray of ice-cubes onto a cookie sheet and slide it into the bottom rack. At the same time put the loaf on the top rack. Close the oven door and reducce heat to 415 F.  Bake for 40 minutes. Remove from the oven, let sit in the pan for 10 or so minutes. Put on the cooling rack.

You can slice it from there on, and keep on a wooden board with the cut side down. I do wrap it in a plastic bacg for the night though.

Yum!

Here is my Halloween without a Nightmare the Morning After:  

1. I will start my Halloween with a workout with or without my wee one.

2. Candies might be a staple, but so is the nutrition-packed, anti-oxidants rich pumpkin! I will wash & toast pumpking seeds for healthy snacking, and one of our pumkins was already half frozen and half pureed to become stews, muffins and soups in the future!

3. We will eat a protein packed mushroom omlette for breakfast and low cal pumpkin soup for lunch

4. Before we head out for a trick and treating session #1 in the local Recreation centre, we’ll squeeze in a family play in the pool.

5. We will do session #1 trick and treating and session #2 (neighborhood) at as fast a pace as an impatient 3 y.o would want.

6. We will have a nice nutritious dinner before doling the candies out ourselves.

7. We will not steal our child’s candies, and everything we will have left over will be split into 2 even piles that we will pack away very sturdily and stash in a secret and hard to reach location, and take to the office 1 week later, when everyone else’s offerings had run out and people are ready for more!

8. We will try to have our candie fix with the dark 70+ % chocolate instead of the less healthful sugary treats, and we’ll try to stay under 250 cals from treats.

9. We are going to rent a couple of cool movies to watch while giving the candies away to keep us occupied instead of munching & leave the candie bowl in a place remote to the couch

10. We will go to bed happy, and will not beat ourselves up if something didn’t go According to Plan! We’ll just plain forget about it.

11. We will make our Sunday a day of exemplary eating and slip in an extra hour or two of a good fast walking or hiking or doing anything else fun and active!

I decided to learn to make my own bread simply because it sounds like fun, and the smell is awsome. The problem is, that when I calculated my recipe (which tastes great!) even when it’s made with Splenda, and most butter is subbed to canola, a slice (and a pretty thin one) is still more than twice the clories of the commercial whole-wheat bread. Ie ~200 cals vs 80 cals. Most calories come from flour itself. Does anyone know how the industry ‘lightens up’ their loaves? I am guessing it has to do with making them puffier and making smaller amounts of dough to raise heigher? Also, how do they keep the bread soft for a few days? I am going to check a few books from the library to see if they have the answers, but I am curious if anyone knows.

My daughter brought a craft project back home yesterday. I looked at the spelling of her name on it and had a good laugh. Someone spelled her name as Kierra.

We spell it Kira. Four letters. The simplicity itself.

The morale: the humankind loves to overcomplicate things. But it’s not necessary, particulary in the healthy living department… just go with what feels good and is simple for you to do. You can’t make an elaborate meal plan? Then cut out junk &processed and eat from small plates, forgetting seconds. No time or inclination to hit gyms and discuss the fine points with personal trainers? Go for a walk or swim or a bike ride, or dance in whatever space you have for whatever time you have.

Become a simplifier, because we all know that there are plenty people and things out there who’d do the job of adding complications… because we are human and love doing just that.

I saw these photos (link below), and I was not only stunned by their beauty, there was also some sort of a thought nagging at me when I looked at it. I finally managed to formulate it, and it may have come out as a platitude, but here it is: 

A Grain of Sand Doesn’t Need to Become a Pearl to be Beautiful

Link: http://geology.com/articles/sand-grains.shtml

I (blush) made myself a motivational poster with it. I feel that I need that reminder, because I tend to lose the sight of the most important thing chasing perfection and numbers sometimes. And the most important thing is that being fit is the best thing for the body you are in.

Other than that, it was my birthday today, and my husband woke up at 4 am to congratulate me and give me my gift - heart rate monitor! Are you surprised I left for work half an hour late?

Hope you all are having a MAGNIFICENT DAY!

Our new neighbors have teenage sons, and a hoop in the driveway of our new house. Every time I drive around it, my heart goes pounding! I want to start shooting that hoop. Gods, I haven’t play basketball sine I was a teen. That’s what, 20 years? More? Scary. But I wanna. I think I will crack up and buy a ball one of this trips to super-market.

It was a glorious weekend. I went to the Fitness Theory course to start my fitness instructor certification process; really good information, awsome tips for my own workouts, lots of things I felt intuitevly explained… great!

My mood was dampened a bit by the second course’s cancellation, so I don’t know when I can re-schedule with our busy life, but I am determined to do it!

I had a couple beautiful runs. Weather tuned to autumn, and boy, is it perfect for running. Crips air, golden leaves, huge sunrises… Aww, nature wants us to be outdoors!

I took my toddler shopping for groceries yesterday night, after the course. Normally I dislike that, but this time I involved her into finding foods in our ever-changing Superstore layout, so we chanted together: Where are the Chickpeas?! Chickpeas, chickpeas!  Now, where is the pasta hiding?! and so on… so it was one giant Easter egg hunt. I stopped feeling tired half-way through it.

On top of it, I was not abnormally hungry yesterday. An awsome day… too bad it’s back to work today, after a whole weekend at an intensive course. But, I have a newfound mantra (got it during running hills): I am strong. I will prevail!

And now I want to play basketball.

… but did I pick a wrong day to have low-energy, slumlpy look and a bloat. A crisp good-looking male just made me all the more aware of how pathetic I appear today. The morale: one should never let herself to have a bad hair day in public!

So, on Saturday, I did my first serious run, exploring the trails in my new neighborhood. I went a wee bit too late to see the sunrise over the hills, so next weekend I will try it 15 or so min earlier.

It’s not as spectacular as my old places, where at some point I ran out on the bluff above the river, and could run trails on the terrace, but it is a good trail, that winds between the houses for a while, and then cuts between the two parts of the private golf-course for a bit, so you can see alot of the suburbia, plains taking off in the distance, and, if someone got up earlier - a glorious sunrise.

There is quite a few possibilities to extend a run (I was aiming for 30 min, but when it came close to 40, I did a couple of loops around our cul-de-sack to add it to 45).

All and all, I think it will be very nice, and I am looking forwrad to exploring it!

In the weightloss news, this month is shaping up as rather tough for keeping food on track. Housewarming party for 40 people or so on the 12th, United Way Bake Sale on the 15th (that’s where the leftover cookies from the HW party go, thankfully!), United Way Taste Of on the 6th of October and my daughter’s 3rd birthday party on the 10th.

So, I am putting my plans on hold for the moment, and will restart with a stricter diet in mid-October. Meanwhile, I will just try to stay under 120. I am having my doubts about it being wise to go lower than 117 anyway, since I am just not at my best that low. We’ll see.

Folks, since the food database is down, I went looking for an alternative. I tried SparkPeople before, and I really didn’t like their DB, but this one looks relatively easy, and has a lot of extras to the food journal here, such as plotting long-term trends:

http://www.fitday.com/fitness/Home.html?_a_Date=1251676800.

I will try it for a few days and see if I’ll stick with it, particulary of the DB here will get lost.

Other than that, things are not working out well for me. I doubt that I can reach my goal of 114 lbs safely. The dizziness returned, so I went back to above 117, and will be experimenting in 116 lbs-117 lbs range. I also couldn’t run. Foot’s hurting and no time.

 But a lot of work done in the new house and the yard. The closests are all unpacked, i found the box that we thought we’d lost with my hubby’s suits, and I finally pulled the second of the two ugly bushes from the flower beds (tough buggers!).  I just have one flower bed to de-weed, and the yard can be left like that till next spring when I’ll get the landscapers on it! And all the unpacking that is now left is the office stuff, which I have to wait on my hubby for to move the furnuture around the way he wants to in the walk-out. Then I can finally have my excersise space freed up and kick up the intensity a notch!

So, yeah, that’s news. 

It seems that low intensity and eating very close to BMR worked for me in these 2 weeks. I am however surprised that I’ve lost that much in a week; I was thinking it would come off much slower. Must be all the gardening and unpacking! Lol, keeping busy, the first and foremost condition for the weight loss!

Weigh in Results: 115.8 lbs.

Measurements:

Chest: 33″

Waist: 26″

Hips: 35″

Thighs: 33.5″

So, 2 lbs in one week… that’s a lot for me. So far so good, no dizziness, no side-effects, so my long maintaining period (4 months) after losing the first 28 or so pounds helped. During my first leg, I couldn’t go under 117 lbs without feeling sick! Now I feel great. 

The inches are coming off the ‘right’ places, my waist and my thighs (I was 27″ in the waist and 34.5″ in the hips at ~118-120 lbs). So, I dearly hope that 2 more lbs is all I need to sculpt myself to size 2, which is 33-25-36.

I will apply myself to maintaining around 116 lbs for one or two weeks, since I do not think I will be able to sustain loss.