I had a guy in Nebraska, I have JJ in the mornings via DVD, and now I have Sabrina. Remind me to get y'all a picture of Sabrina (who I desperately want to call Sabby for some reason but I'm sure she wouldn't like that) in action because that woman is on some other stuff. There are levels to this stuff with fitness and Sabrina on that expert nonsense!
What does that mean to you? It means I work out. I also carb cycle. Carb cycling is an interesting animal. It specifically means that I only eat yummy stuff like bread, cereal, and ice cream two-3 days a week. Let's look at a week of food around my house!
All the other days look kind of like this:
Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday
Breakfast
- Banana and chocolate protein shake
Snack
- Chocolate protein shake or 4 egg whites and 1 yolk
Lunch
- 8 oz. chicken and broccoli, green beans, or peas
Dinner
- 8 oz chicken or fish and another veggie
*** Now obviously I'm not always this good but I average less that 100 g of carbs and 160-ish grams of protein. If I'm super motivated we can rock less than 50g of carbs but honestly I have at least a spoonful of ice cream daily. ***
I'm even dutiful at work. I always bring my own food because the powers that be think grad students can live on pizza. This one cannot and will not! The calories just aren't worth it. I compare most things to Ben and Jerry's chocolate fudge brownie and if its not better than that…it doesn't get eaten by me!
My carrots and their pizza and wings.
Tuesday and Saturdays are the days I live for. These days I feel less guilty about my ice cream and actually relocate it to a bowl as opposed to eating it out of the carton. I also indulge in the likes of a sandwich, a post-cardio pre-lifting bowl of cereal, and once every 2-3 weeks some macaroni and cheese from none other than our awesome hospital cafeteria.
This is cafeteria food. Yup…I know I thought the same thing: YUM!
SN: Honestly, the hospital cafe is one of my favorite places to eat. The food is excellent. Though I don't eat the skin on any chicken, I know for a fact that the fried chicken is spot on! Someone's aunt is back there E'RY single day. Also when they get real fancy and decide to bust out collards, that same aunt calls in the mothers of the church and apparently actual Black grandmothers make those collards because let me tell you something: they're so good I gets me a double portion. Y'all can keep that steamed broccoli I get every day and go right on back to them greens. (grammar choices intentional) Yes Lord, I receive it!
Any way, I'm really disciplined in my own life. I always have that same breakfast pre-cardio and I'm pretty much good. I do have super low blood pressure. It's genetic. Even at my heaviest weight, I was rocking a 95/60 and now that I'm a "5-6 days in the gym/week" kind of girl we're hovering around a quality 80/55 so that complicates my workouts slightly as I have to watch it with sudden changes in body position if I'm slinging a lot of weight.
So I'm serious about my gym and diet UNTIL I get around my friends or my sister. Man…these folks don't want me to be great at all! Scratch that…they do want me to be great just NOT around them!
So every time I go to see my bestie Shannon and my little buddy LP there's some nonsense involved. We end up getting frozen yogurt, ice cream, cookies, cakes, AND candies. Shannon and I are bad news for each other's diets. Also we're lovers of milk products, our favorite being hot chocolate.
Shannon and I are serious about our hot chocolate. We make it from scratch sometimes. And we like it hot and never ending. Do you know what that does to your daily calories and your macro balance?
DE-STROYS it! Done. Finished!
And my sister. Forget it.
She doesn't want me to be great! She introduced me to this BBQ place that I now request every time I'm in her city!
My little sister is one of those who can eat what they want whenever and then they can hop onto someone's 30 day diet and be bikini ready 25 days into it! She makes me ill.
She's also one of those that likes to get "the itis." What's that? Oh its essentially a food induced coma. Now I know a whole lot about this particular condition. You see in college, my only love language was food and my roommate and I spoke it fluently and often. When we didn't have classes, we'd go down to the McD's and get a couple double cheeseburgers and McChickens and huge sweet teas. We'd sit on our beds, eat, and go straight to sleep. And I mean sleep. We'd get back and shower, put on lotion AND PJs cause we was in the for the night then we'd commence with the sitting, eating, and sleeping. And let me tell you…the sleep was DE-VINE! And if you were really serious like we were, you'd wake up after about 2 hours, grab a huge gulp of that sweet tea, check your cell phone, and promptly fall back asleep for another hour. We were experts on inducing "the itis" and we loved it!
I no longer believe in "the itis" and definitely don't try to induce it though it catches up with me once a month or so.
Back to my kid sister. Let's grab so examples of her being…herself.
We're on the phone and I say "Wow…that was a great Saturday workout."
Bench press life
Her response: "I just picked up Bojangles."
O_____O
Here's another one.
I haven't had a soda in years but there one in my frig because my sister came to visit.
Note: Soda is beside two lunch salads I prepped before hand. O_O
She calls me before 12 noon which means I'm trying to do the right thing and says "So should I get Panera or Bojangles for breakfast? I mean I want my blueberry muffin but I also want a biscuit."
Again O____O
That's my kid sister and Lord knows I love her but when we're together she doesn't care about this here diet. She wants to eat wherever she wants to eat and she wants me to eat there too. Thankfully she doesn't force me to drink alcohol or eat pork with her but I definitely end up eating things I wouldn't contemplate eating.
More proof? I got it!
We're road tripping it out to Meharry and every time we stop for gas she goes and gets what?
Really? Seriously?
A coke and a bag of the good skittles. You know what I'm talking about. The ones in the purple bag with all the great flavors that go together like perfection and you don't have to pick any of them out and throw them in the car trash bag. Yup she goes and gets the SHAREABLE size.
I'm trying to be responsible with my protein powder and everything but skittles in the purple bag?!?! You can only expect so much of me.
And then while we were out of town we our course had to go out to eat and that means what? We're ordering dessert. YES dessert.
Mango Tres Leches
Yes it was as good as it looks and yes I ate the whole thing! My sister wants me to be great…when I'm not with her but consistency is key when you're NOT HER!
Now one of my effusive ways to demonstrate my love for people is baking. Y'all know I can surely cook. "Come back twice and take a plate home with you so you know its real" kinda cooking.
Proof?
A fellow lab member's dissertation defense cake
The deets: 3 tiers with the bottom layer of chocolate while the middle and the top are is a sour cream pound cake. I also had cream cheese icing, buttercream icing, and homemade marshmallow fondant on that bad boy. And it was sho' nuff heavy AND it had an internal structure inside to keep it from falling.
Pound cake baking
Somebody just got some of this in the mail today and apparently they "SMASHED" and that does my heart glad. :-) Yes…if I really love you, its is possible that you could get cake Fedex-ed to your house.
A cake I made for a friend's going away party.
This is 2 layers of vanilla sour cream pound cake with a lemon curd filling and swiss meringue buttercream frosting. And I made all of it from scratch.
Teaching young master about whisking!
Banana pudding in the making with LP! Train up a child and all! Banana pudding is a specialty of mine. I make it every time I'm at Mom's house (ML's mom) and she's still slightly perturbed that I won't give her the recipe but I don't give out any of my recipes. My own momma can't get the recipes either so I'm equally stingy with my culinary skills and overly generous in the sharing of the food!
So now y'all know I can surely cook. My mother even asks me when I come home what I'm gonna make? For Christmas I made a pound cake, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, and a coconut cake so let me take you down this rabbit hole. I'm officially in charge of all baked sweets. My Momma makes the pies though cause I'm just not interested. Now let someone request a cobbler and you've got my attention and my heart!
My materials in my Momma's kitchen. Yup, I brought my own stand mixer too!
So at Christmas, I had the bright idea of making a coconut cake FROM SCRATCH. What does that mean? It means…
THIS!
So I decided I didn't want my coconut to come from a bag and I'd just buy a coconut and shred it myself. O_O
Now my cake was luscious, delicious, and divine but it also took forever because first you have to take a screw driver into the three holes of the coconut and break into that bad boy like a person locked out of their car in the pouring rain. Then you gotta get the juice out and save that cause you need it for the recipe. Next you need to remove the meat and shred it by hand. Now I was semi prepared by bringing my own shredder but that is BEYOND tedious.
But it was good and if I was taking a cake somewhere and they requested coconut I'd be right back outside on my parents back steps taping that screwdriver into another coconut.
I've digressed but the point is…I can't with these folks. I love to cook for them and they love to eat things that aren't on my diet. Thankfully I'm really decent with my diet most of the time so these little hiccups stall me somewhat but they don't stop me.
No comments:
Post a Comment