Tag Archives: weightloss

My Birthday in Food!

Scrolling back through the few days, I realized why I keep this blog. To keep myself accountable. “But it’s my birthday week and I lost 50 pounds this year?” I’m glad I have photographic evidence to remind me to only do this once a year!

The sweet Casey e-mailed me this morning and told me to “enjoy every indulgence imaginable!” Casey, I did not let you down!

I spent the day with my mom and was kidnapped back to NJ for the evening for dinner. (I wanted to have dinner with my parents but my dad had to work late, so NJ it was.) I went to the Sicilian Sun in Ho-Ho-Kus (yes, that’s a real town name) with my parents and two of my wonderful friends.

My dad and I started with spiedini di mozzarella, which is basically fancy mozzarella sticks or a fancy (breaded and fried) grilled cheese sandwich. It’s similar to another dish called mozzarella en carrozza. My dad and I always get it at our favorite restaurant, Portobello, which is also where I had my Sweet 16…11 years ago. Ah!

Then, I moved onto chicken parmigiana with some spaghetti on the side. (Note, we do not go to fancy Italian restaurants. They are nowhere near as fun, or as good, as the family-owned hole-in-the-wall kind of places.)

(I ate about half of it and left the rest. I was going back and forth with myself about whether I should bring it home, but once was enough for me!)

To be honest, “real” pasta is no longer as good to me as whole wheat pasta. I could taste the empty calories and realized I used to keep eating to get that satisfaction that never came. With white pasta, I’d go from not-yet-satisfied to wanting to burst in 2.5 seconds.

Yum ice cream cake! This? Worth. Every. Bite. But I did make my mom throw out the leftovers afterwards.

There you have it. I’m not perfect, but I”m going to get back to my healthy eating tomorrow and my healthy drinking habits…Saturday. I’m going out for dinner (sushi) with friends tomorrow night and then meeting people out for drinks afterwards.

THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR THE SWEET BIRTHDAY WISHES! XOXO

Nike+ Human Race: The Good, The Bad and the Just Weird

Since I am an optimistic person, I’ll start with the good about the race:

  • It was another race under my belt and my first 10K.
  • I ran at a pretty good speed, for me.
  • Prospect Park is pretty.
  • I ran it with new-friend-thanks-to-Tumblr Meghan and her awesome friend Libby.
  • It is just before noon, and I’ve already done my workout for the day.
  • My cabbie was adorable and decided to give me a history lesson about Brooklyn. This Manhattanite (that never gets old) by way of New Jersey and Washington, D.C. geniunely loved that at 6:50 in the morning. So amusing.
  • Despite the forecast calling for rain all day, it didn’t rain this morning.

The bad:

  • Started with the massive amounts of subway work the MTA has decided to do this fall. I went to get on the N/R at Whitehall to go out to Meghan’s in Park Slope, which should have been about a 20-minute-ish ride, and, of course $2.25. I walk down the steps to the subway, and the N/R just flat-out isn’t running from there. OH… so my $2.25 subway ride turns into a $15 cab ride.
  • I ring Meghan’s buzzer, and I hear a ridiculously loud thud. I actually got kinda nervous. Then Meghan’s head pops up and she opens the door. Turns out she totally wiped out running to the door and hit her head on the door. I hope she’s okay 🙂 She ran anyway.
  • Prospect Park? Pretty…PRETTY HILLY! It felt the entire time like we were either running up a hill or down a hill.
  • Yes, it didn’t rain, but it was also ridiculously humid. I had worn pants and a long-sleeved tee under my race shirt and I was pretty steamy by the time I was done.
  • My Nike+ says I ran 11.72K. Yeah. It was a 10K. NIKE FAIL. (Clearly my baby iPhone would never fail.) Side note — I guess I should callibrate it. That all messed with my run the entire time, since it was a good amount off. It would say “5K,” and I hadn’t even gotten to 3 miles yet. That was my first indication it was off.
  • The food and beverage selection at the end was pretty meh. I did try coconut water, and I wasn’t all that impressed by it. I was way more impressed by the chocolate-chocolate chip muffins at the Army Ten-Miler. What? It’s not about the food at the end? Oh…
  • They tried to cram way too many people into too small a space at the end.
  • They had a kiosk set up to check out your race time…that didn’t work.
  • So we watched a monitor to find out our times, and it went to a slideshow after we had been standing watching it scroll through the sub-60:00 finishers for about 15 minutes.
  • That time above is the gun time, not the chip time. For those of you that haven’t run races, unless you are an elite runner, your time is not the gun time. It takes you a few minutes to get to the start. My Nike+ may have been wrong on the distance, but I think the time was right: 1:00:45. Hopefully Nike will release gun/chip results too.

Just Weird:

  • The girl wearing bright yellow booty shorts that matched the shirt. (I passed her. Ha! You may have junk in your trunk, but I can run faster :))
  • Thousands of people wearing the same red shirt. I remarked that I felt like we were either marching to our graves or it was some sort of experiment set up by Kim Jong-Il to show us how blindly consumerist we Americans can be.  Either way, it felt very cult-like.