Sasha Is a Monster

Okay, after reading all your comments about my epic weight loss FAIL, I am planning to do the following things:

1) Consume more calories
2) Cut back on my exercise for a week or so, although I will continue to get in some long runs because it is very important to me to be able to finish this half-marathon in January
3) Drink (hemp) protein shakes once daily
4) Attempt to cut back on sodium, although I’m not even really sure how to do that
5) Contact a nutritionist … sigh.

How counter-intuitive do (1) and (2) sound??? But I really feel like maybe you guys are right, that my body is secretly in starvation mode, and I’m pushing it too hard.

I also made an appointment with my doctor to do a quick blood work-up, just to rule out hypothyroid or something like that. Plus after being on a strict vegan diet for a month, it’s probably a good idea just to make sure everything’s still functioning normally.

So Evil Beet was having some problems today, and, after a long chat with my host, we seem to have isolated the problem: a huge surge of traffic on the Jon & Kate Plus Eight threads. Specifically coming from the search term “days a week jon and kate filmed?” on — of all things — search.live.com. Like, thousands and thousands of searches on that term, from that search engine, from all over the country. And, to make matters worse, J&K fans are SERIOUS commenters, so the rush of them combined with all their commenting crashed the comments table.

What a strange world we live in.

Okay, so after I was so excited about the 1.5 pounds weight loss, I weighed myself again today and it’s right back on. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. So I’ve resigned myself to doing — gasp! — a food diary. I just started tonight, and it’s interesting to see how it all plays out.

This is just for one day, but it’s pretty typical of what I eat in any given day.

Calories: 1715
Total fat: 40.75g
Saturated fat: 3.6g
Trans fat: 0g
Cholesterol: 0g
Sodium: 3300 mg
Carbs: 270g
Fiber: 38g
Sugars: 80g
Protein: 75g

So, basically, I eat this ridiculously low-fat but high-carb diet. And I know carbs are supposed to be the devil, but there are SO MANY of them in fruits and veggies and whole grains, which are what we’re supposed to be eating, right??? I mean, NONE of these carbs are coming from chips or soda or ice cream or candy bars. They’re all from really natural, healthy sources. I don’t understand! MIXED MESSAGE OVERLOAD.

I should also add that, today, I ran three miles and played six games of pretty intense four-man volleyball, which is also pretty standard physical activity for me these days. Ha! How my exercise life has changed!

But it’s just really discouraging right now because I’m working soooo hard, and my weight hasn’t changed at all for going on four weeks now. It’s hard to eat much less because I exercise so much, and I am NOT someone who believes that a diet should involve being hungry. If I feel hungry, I eat. And when I don’t feel hungry, I don’t eat. There should be a way to make this work.

Thoughts?

After THREE AND A HALF WEEKS and being at the SAME WEIGHT despite constant exercise and healthy eating, I have FINALLY lost 1.5 pounds.

Hopefully it’s not gonna take another three weeks to lose more. I’m hoping it just took my body a little while to adjust to the new routine.

This is the vegan recipe I made last night (and again tonight!) and both times it was AMAZING. Tonight I was in a hurry, so instead of grilling the veggies in the marinade, I just skipped all that, put the veggies in the tortilla raw, and added parsley, fresh cilantro and a pinch of salt to it. So the whole thing was basically completely non-fat and delicious!

3 Tblspoon balsamic vinegar (left this out, not big on vinegar)
3 Tblspoon olive oil
2 Tblspoon chopped parsley
1 Tblspoon garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper (I left this out because I hate it)
4 medium portobello mushrooms
2 red onions, sliced
2 red or orange peppers, destemmed, deseeded and cut into quarters lengthwise
2 green peppers, destemmed, deseeded and cut into quarters lengthwise
2 jalapeno peppers, destemmed, deseeded and cut in half lengthwise (left this out too)
4 8-inch flour tortillas
Fresh cilantro (this wasn’t in the original recipe but I added it because I LOVE cilantro)

Whisk the vinegar, olive oil, parsley, garlic, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add all of the vegetables and toss well to coat the veggies with the marinade. Set the veggies aside and let them marinate for 15 minutes (I only let mine marinate for 5 mins and it was still fine). Place the veggies on a hot grill and grill for 3-5 minutes per side. Take the veggies off the grill and cut them into strips.

Then you just make the fajitas out of whatever veggies you like! For me, I added tons of fresh cilantro and extra salt to mine, but that’s probably not for everyone.

And if you don’t want to be completely vegan about it, this would of course be awesome with sour cream and/or cheese, but to be honest I found it to be totally satisfying without any of that, and it’s WAY less fattening, too. You could definitely also do a guacamole.

I’ll preface this by saying that I know I should be in no way complaining about my housekeepers during an economic recession, but it’s not really my housekeepers I’m going to complain about. And anyone who knows me will vouch for the fact that housekeepers aren’t really a luxury for me. I need housekeepers like you need running water. Seriously, my whole life just breaks down without them. Breaks. Down. Cannot. Function.

Anyway.

So my housekeeper is sweet enough to do my dishes. But she always puts the blender in the dishwasher with the blades attached, and my cheap-ass blenders always end up breaking in there. I’ve honestly gone through three blenders in the past two months this way. So instead of, like, just asking her nicely to not put the blender in the dishwasher anymore, or, like, — God forbid — washing it before she comes so that she doesn’t have to, I have found myself hiding the dirty blender on the days that she is coming. Honestly. I stash it far back in a cabinet, the grime still attached, and pull it out again after she leaves. How fucking insane is that? I am so weird. Who does that? And why? Why am I like this?

But I absolutely adore her, because she is great with Leo and she always lines up the twenty-odd bottles in my bathtub in descending height order, which, like, never stops being cool to me. Plus she always shows up when she says she will, unlike my previous housekeepers, who traditionally stop returning my calls or coming to clean after a month or so. I’m a difficult client, to say the least.