Weekend catch up!

Wow, it's Monday afternoon and my weekend flew by! I'd like to give you all the recap because I had a FANTASTIC couple of days!! :)

I had a delicious bowl of three kinds of cereal for breakfast today topped with Kefir. It had puffed Kamut, Abundance cereal, and MixMyGranola! Totally delicious, especially because I woke up pretty hungry. I played racquetball at 11am (woke up at 9:30, much needed!) so I tried to go slightly lower fat, since it takes longer to digest.


We played racquetball for about 70 minutes plus I did a 16 minute fairly intense Expresso bike ride. I feel so great right now! :)

It's a beautiful 80 degree day here, so I got home and was pretty hungry. I wanted something cold, so I had leftover barley, veggies and tofu, plus cold green beans and leeks. (I cooked these over the weekend, see below).


And I had a small bowl of cereal too.


Starting with Saturday morning, I got up and taught from 10-1pm, getting home around 2pm. I made a bowl of oatmeal, but there's no picture of that because of the weekend and the roomies were around. In the car ride home I had this ThinkThin bar:


I actually don't like white chocolate, but this is my favorite flavor of these bars. The other ones are all a little grainy and not great textures. It took me a while though to buy this flavor, but I'm glad I did.

While teaching I mixed this into a packet of water. I do really like these energy drinks, and they're great to have in my purse. (I had another one of these today after working out).


I skipped a workout on Saturday because I needed a quick nap and then I ended up cooking a bunch of veggies that needed to be made because they spoiled. I boiled green beans and leeks (inspired by Mi at wholefoodswholeme) and sauteed a huge pan of a white onion, purple cabbage and red kale. Plus I threw in some tofu and hot sauce! Yum!

On the drive up to the orchestra concert I drank this:

I love these drinks. I don't drink much diet soda and I try not to drink TOO many low calorie drinks with artificial ingredients, but I think they are absolutely fine once in a while and I really enjoy them! :)

The concert went well, minus a blackout in the auditorium during the middle of a piece! Luckily it was right at the end of the 3rd movement of a piece, so we had to stop for a while while they got the lights back on! After the concert there was a free reception, so I snagged this goodie plate.


I'm not sure what it all was, but basically:

-slice of toast with cream cheese spread (the one with the olive)
-3 bites of meat with mustard (ham + turkey)
-spinach pie (greasy, but so yummy!)
-the bite right in the middle is some sort of salmon-y thing
-I still have no idea what the rolled fried thing or the thing at 7pm (between the spinach pie and the toast) are. They were delicious though! :)

I came home around 11pm to a house full of guests for game night. They had already started playing but it was SOOO much fun to join them! Plus we had so many snacks and desserts set out! OMG, I had:

• 3 bite sized coconut chocolate chip blondies
• 2 mint chocolate bite sized brownies
• 1 "butter bar" (don't know what's in it, but definitely lots of calories; luckily it was only about one square inch!)
• 1/2 a large chocolate PB rice krispie bar (this was incredible)
• one tiny bite of a moist fruity brownie
• several hazelnut Nut Thin chips
• 2 glasses of Shiraz red wine
  

The weird thing is that I woke up today and my body fat %age according to my scale is down 1%, which I had sort of guessed because I feel leaner...somehow. I know it could totally just be the time of the month or something but I'm not sure. I have been trying to stress the working out, and I've been enjoying working out (definitely NOT to a DE amount of working out as evidenced by the fact that I skipped two days recently). Yes, I had a bunch of desserts, but I was also running around quite a bit and I wasn't eating meals as substantial as they normally are.

In other words, I feel like it was eating RIGHT for maximally enjoying life. By that I mean that I enjoyed sweets totally guilt free with my body naturally compensating for the extra calories with feeling less hungry for other food. I don't want to do this all the time, as I want to give my body nutrient rich foods. But it was good to be reminded that I don't have to eat super healthy all the time and it's going to be just fine. My body will take care of me, which is an amazing gift we have! After my ED year, I was still eating disorderdly for about another 3-4 years. I was eating way too little (~1200 cals) and exercising an hour a day or more. (I had left treatment after reaching a weight probably a bit low for me and I wasn't completely recovered). I had about a 12% body fat and wondered why my periods weren't coming back. Well, DUH! I was still mentally unwell and I was constantly thinking about food because of my still undernourishment levels. I would engage in other unhealthy behaviors and binge occasionally when I got too hungry. All the while I was keeping up the "I'm recovered" image. Umm, no not really Lisa, but nice try. So anyway, eventually I decided that I couldn't keep doing that my whole life. I couldn't keep turning down social events because of unhealthy food being the only option. I couldn't keep playing the violin well and having energy on the amount of food I was eating. I didn't want to try and sustain it. Exercise was literally painful. I had a HUGE list of foods that I wouldn't allow myself to eat and my obsession with healthy eating was...exactly that: an obsession.

And I got tired of living that way.

I decided that I didn't want to do that anymore. I came to grad school and decided it was time to actually get rid of the DE. I conscientiously chose to eat foods that I was scared of. I accepted social event invitations. I upped my calories. And I DID gain weight. Quite a bit of weight in fact. But the beautiful part is that eventually my body stopped gaining weight because it knew that it was going to be starved anymore. It settled where it needs to be, which is about 10 pounds more than my pre-ED weight. My periods are only now (about 5 years later) starting to come back. They're still very irregular and some months I don't get them at all. I still have post-prandial hypoglycemia on occasion which is an after effect (in some cases) of anorexia. I am anemic (which I'm not sure if it's ED related or genetic, or both perhaps). But the fact of the matter is that I feel strong and healthy. I have the energy I need to be FULLY engaged in life. I can give my full attention to my violin students and devote my whole heart to helping and loving people. I am discovering new hobbies even now and am greatly enjoying this beautiful life. And I wouldn't trade these things for the world.

Anyway, those are just a few of my thoughts on EDs and stuff. I feel really strongly about fighting EDs, in case it wasn't quite clear. ;-)

Alrighty, this is going to be a long post. Oh well, I need to finish telling you about my awesome weekend! :) My boyfriend came over for games night and we all had a great time. Around 2am when everyone was going home, he asked me if I wanted to go check out a local event happening that had artwork by local artists on disply from 6pm on Saturday through 2pm on Sunday. So all night, in other words. So we went down there from 2-4am and I slept from 4:30-5:30am. Yes, ONE HOUR! Because we had to be up for him to perform at that same art event. I met him at his house at 6am and we had a wonderful morning listening to local musicians and talking with a lot of his friends. He was so sweet; he brought me coffee and two small Jimmy D sausage breakfast sandwiches (maybe 300 calories each? So 600 calories? I really have no idea). They were quite good! Later in the morning, around 9:30am I had this amazing FREE cookie:

We went to church together and I came home and taught two violin lessons. At this point I was crashing hard from the caffeine high and lack of sleep so I took a nap for 45 minutes. Then I woke up, still felt awful so I had dinner of more cabbage, barley and tofu. Plus several more desserts leftover from the games night. About 5 bite sized coconut blondies. :) I had a rehearsal Sunday night from 7-9:30 plus an hour drive each way, so my day was pretty much over when I got home because I was exhausted. I felt much better today after sleeping for 8 hours. Yay!

Here are some back pictures from Friday afternoon/evening.

I made this "sandwich" with this sausage:


I put a slice of cheese on this bread:


Added the sausage and folded it over.


For a protein packed snack, I love PB on uncooked tofu.


Self-explanatory:

Boring but tasty carrots. I believe these were eaten on my way to rehearsal.


I'm going to go outside and enjoy this amazing weather! :)