Post-Op Week 12 Progress Report and Musings on Cooking

This week’s loss was a good one.  It would have been greater had I not been retaining water (thanks, Nature, you suck sometimes)–I was a little puffy in the ankles this morning when I got up.  But hey, a kilo lost is a kilo lost and I’ll take it!  I am finally starting to see my belly flatten out (about time!) and when I look in the mirror in the mornings as I am getting dressed, I can actually see the obliques on my right side.  I can see my upper abdomen flattening out some. This is encouraging.  I’m closing in on 3 months post-op, and feeling better and better about hitting my goal of -100 pounds by Thanksgiving.  I am hopeful that by New Year’s, I will have lost a total of around 115 pounds or thereabouts.  I want my surgeon to be impressed and proud of my progress.

I spent a little time cooking this afternoon, but not as much as I normally do only because I had to work today so that took 3 hours of time I would usually spend cooking.  So I prepped some things to eat for the week, but also prepped some things to put in the freezer for times like next weekend when I know I am not going to have the time to cook since we will be out and about all day Saturday and unable to shop for groceries.

Here are a couple of the things I prepared today:

I made up some chicken cordon bleu rolls with thinly sliced chicken, a slice of Applegate Farms uncured black forest ham and shredded Gruyere cheese inside.  These went into the freezer for next week.  The plan is to grill these. I also made some green beans with tomatoes and bacon as one of my veggie choices this week.

It kills me when I read on the VSG forum that I frequent that someone doesn’t cook, or doesn’t like to cook, yet feels like they can get a healthy protein-packed meal from convenience foods.  I think to myself, have you even READ the labels of those things?  I mean, seriously…so much sodium, so many carbs, so much fat, and so little protein for the amount of food they put in the box!  And never mind what they charge for that box o’ empty calories.  I say empty calories because I guarantee that if you eat whatever is in the box, you will be hungry again in a couple of hours.  Trust me, I know–I have eaten my fair share of those damned things and never felt satiated eating them.

You are better off cooking for yourself, controlling the amounts of salt, sugar and protein that goes into what you eat.  And besides, you can cook up something that will taste a whole heck of a lot better and will meet your nutritional needs better than a friggin’ Lean Cuisine or Smart Ones!   The way I see it, every week when I fix my meals for the week, I’m essentially making a Lean Cuisine from scratch that is cheaper, healthier and tastes better.  It is portion controlled, nutrient dense, and tastes pretty good.  I really don’t understand how people have this surgery and don’t realize that eating crap from the frozen foods section of the store on a consistent basis is NOT going to help them meet their nutritional needs.  I also don’t understand the “I don’t cook” mentality.  This is probably because I’ve been cooking for myself for over 30 years, so it is something I have grown up doing and enjoying.

Now I won’t lie, there are a select few frozen foods that I eat.  But they are things that I have either carefully scrutinized for protein and carb content (like the Trader Joe’s crab stuffed flounder that I love so much) or they are frozen vegetables (because it’s not practical to buy fresh since we eat such tiny portions).  I refuse to invest the money or time into eating Lean Cuisines or the like simply because the protein content is so low.  It’s just easier, cheaper and healthier for me to fix my own versions.  In our house, we didn’t eat a lot of pre-packaged foods to begin with pre-surgery because my husband has so many food allergies.  That hasn’t changed post-op.  We still don’t eat a lot of pre-packaged foods, preferring to eat and cook from fresh nearly all of the time.

Cooking is not so difficult that one must resort to eating out of cans or boxes.   If I could teach people to plan, cook and portion out their meals for a week at a time, I would.

So here’s what I ate today.  I kept things pretty simple today and managed to get in 86 grams of protein.

Today’s food choices, from upper left: multivitamin and calcium supplements x2; honey garlic marinated flank steak and green beans with tomatoes and bacon; Trader Joe’s turkey jerky; Trader Joe’s dark chocolate caramel wedges; leftovers of my cheddar barbecue chicken bowl from Genghis Grill; leftover Trader Joe’s crab stuffed flounder.

Final thought:  last night I dreamed I was running.  In my dream, I was wearing running shoes and workout clothes and I was running.  None of this jogging-trotting half-assed business either:  this was legit running.

I hope that this means in the next year I’ll actually get to run, and do it successfully.