Week One-ish ...

This is sort of a mish-mash of the different challenges I started doing unofficially. This week I am trying to do the July Veggie Challenge – eating veggies at every meal. It … is hard. This morning my gag reflex kicked in pretty strongly when I put a piece of lettuce in my mouth. I didn’t know if I’d be able to chew. When you’re on a budget, don’t like that many vegetables, and purchased salad fixings … you’re kind of stuck. With a salad at every meal. And … after a while it sorta blows. But we will see if it results in a nice weight loss this week. If it doesn’t, I am going to murder a tomato with a homemade shiv crafted from a celery stick.

Last week my (unofficial) challenge was cooking more! I cooked more and as it turns out, bringing my own chicken and potatoes to work was highly satisfying and inspired envy in my co-workers. Suck it, Lean Pockets (the most commonly stolen item in office kitchens!). Now, I don’t know if chicken and potatoes is absolutely the HEALTHIEST food I could eat ever, but at least they are both foods that occur in nature. My body definitely feels better when I eat foods that are naturally occurring. Baby steps. This resulted in a 1.6 pound weight loss for the week.

I also attempted to make some pancakes, and set off the smoke detector. Of the alleged 8 pancakes the recipe was to create, I had two edible ones. Unfortunately neither contained any of the blueberries that were part of the recipe. But they were not half-bad, meaning they were half-good.

I’m continuing this cooking challenge this week.

Tonight I will attempt to make the sweet potato recipe I found for delicious, parmesean covered sweet potato fries. (These recipes were both from the Biggest Loser Cookbook). I will probably end up eating them at lunch tomorrow instead of dinner due to the cracker debacle of earlier.

I am slowly going to attempt to perfect a few things until I get to the point where I have a lot of tasty recipes I can recreate perfectly in my arsenal. And then, like magic, I will be a healthy eater and chef! Voila!

Next week’s challenge: Working out every day. I will aim for AT LEAST a half-hour of gym activity every day. I hope to go above that but I think a half hour is better than nothing and a reasonable amount of time to devote.