I haven’t been the first person to get excited about working in the kitchen. In the past I have not been very adventurous. A client of mine though has made two delicious meals from scratch and my mother in law makes these incredible meals all after a day of work. They’ve inspired me.

The other night I made meatballs from scratch. We had ground turkey, we did not have bread crumbs, so I used the magic bullet we have to crumble oyster crackers. They came out delicious. Tonight I decided to do something different with our kielbasa. I bought red and green peppers, a sweet onion and some French bread. I sauted everything in a large frying pan. It too came out really good and pretty healthy. I’m hoping to do more cooking and start thinking outside the box
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This was taken in June of 07 in Cape Cod. I cannot wait for spring this year, to get out on my bike. 2008 I don’t know even know what to say. I didn’t do anything physical just worked and slept. I am determined to not start my 30′s being the inactive person I’ve been of my 20′s.

I really enjoyed our bike trip that June. I had never been to Cape Cod and I was looking at everything with a fresh set of eyes. Maybe this time we’ll go for longer than 2 days.

While laying in bed last night, I was browsing around the app store and discovered the All Recipes iPhone app. I’ve been a fan of the AllRecipes.com website for quite a while. Their app is called DinnerSpinner, the concept is you spin the meal choice, then an ingredient choice and finally a preparation time choice. Ironically enough my day job has a client who wants to do something similar to this for their next website.

Here’s a sample view of the spinner. I’ve selected Appetizer, Cheese and Slow Cooker. You can also click a button that says, “Spin Categories”. That button is currently replaced by the “View Matches” button.

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TED: Carl Honore: Slowing down in a world built for speed: “

(Via swissmiss.)

It’s been a really long time since I’ve updated. After my back went out I got into a real funk and just feeling down. I also noticed my energy level was just dropping. This past week I realized I’ve been drinking coffee every single day since I started my new[er] job. For me caffeine will work for a while but then it will actually make me more and more exhausted. This week I’m taking a break from coffee. I’m having green tea and herbal tea only. The other benefit to cutting back on coffee is, I like my coffee very light and with half and half. Needless to say this is a good elimination from my daily routine.

I’ve decided to use iCal to track my health because I have it available to me at work, at home and on my iPhone. It’s very simple, I don’t have to pre-enter information and create databases. I’ve tried Traineo, but it didn’t track food as well as I’d like. I’ve tried Gyminee, and it’s ok but a pain to enter new foods in. I’ve also tried FitDay which also you need to pre-enter foods. If I’m spending my time entering foods, it’s a waste of my time.

In iCal I’m tracking my food for the day, exercise, weight and any other health related items in a separate calendar called “Health”.

I’ll post an update at the end of the week as to how this is working.

I’m putting this down as week 1 since, this is really the first official committment I’m making to logging this every week, and with that here we go.

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I have to document this week, just so I can look back at this in the future and truly appreciate how much I packed in. If you’ve written me, I was supposed to get back to you, I said I’d send you something, please don’t take offense, the week was very, very busy.

Work:

This week at my job we launched a national ad campaign website (not my design), completed the collection of a large amount of materials for a multimedia project, and 3 email campaigns sent out including one which had 27 unique pieces of content that were not dynamic. And in comparison to my boss and co-workers I think my load was lighter than theirs. Even up to Friday night at 6:00 we were still finishing up projects. Wow! I kept saying to people, the weather got nice and the projects just came rolling in.

Personal:

Well I didn’t have much of one until Friday night. Wednesday I took on waking up early. Thursday was semi-successful and Friday, well Craig and I both slept in thinking it was Saturday.

On a fun note. Friday night I met up with a fellow knitter who was thinking about buying a MacBook or MacBook Pro. We met at Starbucks and I showed her around the operating system, answered questions and had her try mine out. She was pretty excited, I told her to think about it, don’t rush. She was making the switch over from a Dell laptop to Apple, and it is a big decision.

This morning I got an email at 7:40, “I’m ready let’s go!”. We met at the Apple store in Danbury at 10am, and purchased her a MacBook Pro 15″. We left it with them to transfer over her files from her old Dell. I headed home and later in the afternoon we met at Panera to go through setting up her email, transferring bookmarks, importing photos to iPhoto and making sure iTunes was all set and running. She’s really excited and I got an email tonight that she’s having a lot of fun.

I’ve successfully switched 7 people from Windows to Macintosh. No complaints.

Goals:

I’m still working on getting up early. Might kick back my wake up time so it’s not quite as aggressive. I want to be successful not insane. As Colin reminded me, “Never give up”. Absolutely true! There’s no time table, no one’s going to punish me and it’s truly a win-win situation.

And… I will be posting on Tuesdays a Weekly Weigh-In, as part of TheDiet. In the sidebar I’m going to keep track of my exercise on Traineo.com. This week I made some much better choices food wise than I have in a while. All in time.

Last but not least, we watched the Transformers movie tonight. It was pretty good, dialogue sucked, but the effects were amazing. I’m such a sucker for cars and driving scenes. Speaking of I’ll be at the NY International Auto Show on Friday for the opening. Drop me a line if you’ll be there that day.

Putting all the puzzle pieces together on my health has been a long road. Heck I can go back on my blog to 2003 and find posts of melt downs wondering why I can’t tackle it. I have paper journals from 1997 with entries of “why can’t I get over this hurdle, why don’t I take it seriously“.

It’s taken a lot of growing up, getting through a lot of personal psychological issues in my own life and my family. For as long as I can remember, someone was telling me I was a brat and lazy. I’ll concede on the brat, when I was younger I was. Some might argue I still am.

Lisa McMillan recommended to me the book The Now Habit by Dr. Neil Fiore. All I can say is wow, every stage of the book I feel like it was my life that was the case study for it. It’s helped me gain a lot of clarity on why I do the things I do, why I react certain ways, why I get overwhelmed and just shut down.

The book also helped me focus on why I have yet to be successful at weight loss. I know how to exercise, I used to sit home in the summers of middle school and early high school watching and going along with Body Shaping. I love to be outdoors doing biking, kayaking or hiking. So that’s not an issue.

Eating. While I don’t choose to make the best decisions all the time, I do know what is good to put in my body and how much of it I should be having. I actually like many more vegetables than I ever did as a kid. Seeing the nutritionist for two months re-affirmed that I’m not clueless and have crazy eating patterns.

What was left… The psychological/mind barrier. Why do I find excuses? Why do I shut down and feel overwhelmed still? What is holding me back from being the successful person I know I can be.

Here are the thoughts that came to my head…

• I try to do too much at once, trying to tackle 8 life changing habits at once
• I think I have to be perfect the first time out, and any falter and I may as well give up
• I feel like I don’t have enough time
• I feel the pressure to go along with what ever others are doing
• I put way too much guilt and negativity on myself
• I put too much weight in others approval of me

Now that I know what the concerns are, I can start to make changes.

STEP 1:
Find time… This is my first goal. Become a morning person. Since my biggest complaint to myself and everyone around me is my lack of time, I need to focus on making more time in my day. Once I can establish that, then I can go back and change what I fill that time with.

That’s the plan!

Good Morning!
I’ve decided to focus on ONE goal for this week; getting up early, specifically between 5:00-5:30. I did ok this morning, I set alarms up to go off at 5:00, 5:15, 5:30 and 5:45. I did finally get up and going on the 5:45 one.

I cooked up turkey bacon, organic eggs, organic spinach, organic shredded cheese into an omelette. Had some Bolthouse juice and some organic coffee I brewed too! It was quite a morning.

I left on time for the Dentist in Danbury, got there 10 minutes early! Had a perfect visit, no cavities, no issues.

Oh and I even had some time to work on my scarf which I’ve neglected for quite a while!

And last night I “graduated” from physical therapy and am going to transition into their Wellness Program.

I’m feeling really good today!