Satisfy your pizza craving!

Today I just have a quick lunch idea for you.  At the grocery store by the deli they have an assorment of wraps/bread products to try.  For many, many weeks now, I've been seeing some wraps called Flat Out.  They've intrigued me but I've not bought them.  I try to cut out as much wheat/grain products as I can (because my body works best that way), so I've resisted.

Yesterday, though, it just sounded good.  I've always loved pizza with super thin crispy cracker-like crust and that's what the Flat Out Thin Crust Flatbreads promised.  I bought a package and some veggies to pile on.

First off, the nutrition.  I went with the Spicy Italian flavor (and let me tell you, for this spice-intolerant girl, they did pack a bit of a punch).  One flatbread has 140 calories (not bad at all) and 26g carbs (not great if you're going low-carb, but can be doable with planning the rest of the day). 

I prebaked the bread per the package instructions, because I really do love a cracker-like crust.

While that was baking, I got my veggies ready - presliced baby bella mushrooms, thin tomato slices, red bell pepper and sliced kalmatta olives.  I also used 1/2 c. of shredded cheddar cheese. 

 

Once the bread had cooked, I took it out and layered on the veggies.  I started with the tomato slices as a subsitute for sauce, piled on the rest and then topped with cheese.  I popped in back in for a few more minutes, until the cheese was melted.  At this point I was following the directions on the package.  Next time, I will probably do some adjusting as the veggies didn't get cooked how I liked them.  I like them to get pretty roasted in the cooking process, so I might not precook the crust next time and cook it with veggies longer, throwing on the cheese at the end.

Overall, the pizza was great and satisfying.  I plan on freezing the rest of the package so when I get a pizza craving I've got some on hand!  According to estimates on My Fitness Pal, this pizza would about 328 calories, 32 g carbs and 20 g protein. 

My Story

Who Am I?

My name is Mary.  I am an ordinary person just like you.  I’m 35 years old, mom to two crazy-wonderful little girls and I teach kindergarten 3 days a week at a private school.  More recently, I’ve become a BeachBody coach.

 What’s My Story?

It’s simple.  I’ve struggled with my weight and fitness all my life.  Literally.  There are pictures of me as a chubby toddler.  So I mean, all my life.  I was a pretty happy, confident kid.  Until one day in first grade, a boy turned and pointed to a picture of an elephant on a wall, looked at me and said, “That’s you.”  Though I chose to not to believe him then, it was the opening of a door, a downward spiral of being teased and made fun of, and the slow deterioration throughout my youth of any confidence I had.

However, by the time I hit college, I was the fittest I’d been in all my life.  I didn’t see it, though.  I wish I could have appreciated it then, but I didn’t.

Fast forward many years.  I was married and pregnant with my second child.  Since getting married, my weight had steadily climbed to quite unhealthy levels.  Not owning a scale, I didn’t realize just how bad, until I went for my first doctor’s appointment at just 7 weeks along.  I was horrified seeing just how close to a dangerous threshold I was.  I watched what I ate – didn’t diet, but didn’t splurge on a lot of extra calories – and continued walking through that pregnancy.  It paid off and at my appointment on my due date, the day my water broke, I weighed in at the point I did not want to go past.  It felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

Despite not going past that point, after my second daughter was born, I found myself in a very bad place.  I was under a lot of stress, as we were having to sell our home.  Keeping a home presentable for showings with a newborn and a just-turned 3 year old was no easy task.  I had no energy at all.  Sitting on my bed, folding a load of laundry, I would have to stop to lie down and rest.  I was so miserable there were times I would just sit on my kitchen floor and cry, my 3-year-old patting my arm.  I’m not sure what was going on medically, though in retrospect, I think perhaps I was experiencing blood sugar issues.  I will never know for sure.

This picture is from Easter 2009, when my second child was a few months old.

What I do know is that I had enough.  I joined Weight Watchers for a few months, until we could no longer afford it, but it helped.  I lost 20 pounds and it was enough then to give me more energy than I’d had in a long time.

However, I was still pretty miserable, knowing that in all reality, I need to lose a good 50 – 70 pounds.  Over the next few years I tried, my weight going up and down, but thankfully, never to that scary place again.  I had found the most success a couple of years ago when our Y started offering Les Mills BodyPump classes.  I’ve always enjoyed lifting weights, so I found myself in love with this class that made me hurt so bad I could hardly walk. 

A year later, when I started teaching at my current school, I just couldn’t get to the classes like I had.  I could make it to only one with any regularity.  At one point, I had searched online to see if there was a home version, but nothing I found then indicated there was.  So in February 2013, when a friend posted on Facebook about doing a challenge group with Les Mills Pump – the at home version of BodyPump – I was ecstatic!!  I jumped on it right away.

Through the 90 day challenge group, I lost 12 pounds, many inches, and gained a ton of muscle.  It was a great feeling, being a part of a group that helped keep me motivated, even when I didn’t have a ton of it myself.  I’ve since lost almost 20 pounds and am still looking forward as I work towards my goals.  My story is not finished, I am writing new chapters each day.

This picture was taken the end of June 2013. 

I still have further to go, but you can see the difference.

 

Why Am I Doing This?

Simply because I know what it’s like.  I know what it feels like to be miserable in your own body.  I know how it feels to be always wishing for a stronger, healthier version of yourself.  To always be thinking about food – what you did eat, what you didn’t eat, what you should or shouldn’t eat, what you want to eat and feeling guilty for eating.  And I want to encourage you.

I’m not a miracle worker – I can’t do it for you.  But I can walk beside you, we can walk this road together, pick each other up and keep going when we fall.  Because we will.  And that’s okay.  It’s continuing on that’s important.  If I can help you, I want to.

Squats with knee problems? You bet!

First off, here is my non-professional declaration.  I am in no way, shape or form a professional of medicine, exercise, nutrition or health or anything related.  I am simply a 35-year-old woman who struggles with knee issues and has done a bit or research.  You should consult your doctor before starting any exercise program.

That being said, I wanted to take a moment to tell you why I think doing squats and lunges can be precisely the best thing for your knee pain.  When I was 14, I was running as a kid does, with a random burst of energy, when my left knee hyperextended.   Long story short, unfortunately it was diagnosed as a sprain, and for the next year, I walked around on a torn ACL, until it finally gave out on me.  I had to have an ACL replacement as well as 2 meniscus repaired.  Four years ago, I had to have cartilage repaired in the same knee, and at that time the doctor said they were able to see damage to the ACL and that probably in the next few years it would need to be replaced.  (So right about now?)

I started going to BodyPump classes at our Y in fall of 2011.  The squats were so, so hard for me, and I questioned whether I should even be doing them or not with a bad knee.  Then I read something in the book The New Rules of Lifting for Women by Lou Schuler.  There’s a really great section on how the muscles of the body are connected from head to toe and how muscles in one part of the body can affect others.  The eye-opening part for me was this:

 “At the start of an exercise program, women tend to be stronger on the front of their thighs than on the back.  Trainers use the phrase ‘quad dominant’ to describe this imbalance.  Put another way, women’s hamstrings tend to be weaker than they should be, in relation to their quadriceps. 

The problem is a big one to sports scientists.  Female athletes have several times the risk of knee injuries as men, and this strength discrepancy is thought to play a role.  Research shows that when the quadriceps are more than a third stronger than the hamstrings, a woman is at greater risk of damaging the ligaments that hold her knees together.

A remarkable study performed at Columbia University and published in 2006 discovered the source of the problem.  The researchers looked at male and female soccer players between the ages ten and eighteen.  The preteen, prepubescent girls were already at high risk of injury, due to the fact that their quadriceps were 75 percent stronger than their hamstrings.  But the teenage, post pubescent girls had an even bigger problem: their quads were 100 percent stronger than their hamstrings.  The strength imbalance actually gets worse with time.  Their mature hamstrings were stronger than before, but those gains were more than offset by even bigger gains in their quadriceps.

That’s the perfect illustration of quad dominance – because the used the muscles more, those muscles got even stronger as their bodies matured, and exacerbated what was already a problem.”

This opened my eyes to the fact that what would most help my knees was precisely the exercises I’d avoided for so long – squats and lunges.

It took me quite a while to truly get the hang of correct squat form.  What finally did it for me was the shower.  Yes you read that correctly.  I struggled to find a way to do squats that didn’t make my knees hurt.  I was in a state where I would stop in the middle of doing things around the house to try out a squat or two and see if I could get it.  One morning I decided to try one in the shower and it worked!! I did a squat and it felt right and didn’t hurt my knees.  I came to realize that the width of the shower only allowed me to put my feet so far apart, and that one of my issues must have been that my feet were not proper distance for the squat to be truly effective.  This went along with the “test” my BodyPump instructors would do in class for your set stance – in the beginning they would walk around with the 5 lb. weights and put them between students’ feet.  If your feet didn’t touch the weight, it was too far apart.

Once I got the stance right, I started oh so slowly.  In classes I would do just a few at a time.  It was a bit embarrassing to be in class and feel so weak, but I did what I needed to do.  To help myself out, I would do some every day, in the middle of my daily activities – while sweeping or doing dishes or whatever.  I also went down just a few inches at first, what I felt like I could comfortably do and as I built strength I would challenge myself to go down a little further each time.

The last thing that helped was advice from the Pump program videos.  The instructors are constantly reminding you to drive up from your heels.  Concentrating on putting your weight in your heels as you lower yourself and driving up through your heels on the way up really helps engage those muscles you need to strengthen. 

This advice is mainly for squats (to be truthful, I am STILL trying to work out my lunges properly, they are that difficult for me) but the summary should work for lunges as well:

 

1.       Proper foot spacing

2.       Go as slow as you need to in order to really feel/”get” the proper form

3.       Put your weight in and drive from your heels

I still have a long way to go with squats and especially lunges, but I've come a long way as well.  I can now squat down beside my children and use my legs to push myself up from that position as opposed to using my hands to push myself up like I used to do.  Take it slow, work on form and you can get there too.
 

A View of My Grocery Cart

I was challenged yesterday to take a picture of my grocery cart when I was finished going through the store.  Since I often hear people struggling to know how to feed a family healthy foods on a budget, I thought I would write a bit here.

Yes, this is my cart for a week's worth of groceries for my family of four.  The total was $120.  It was a bit over our budget because we were low on meat.  I aim for $100 a week.  See all the pretty produce? I like it when the cart looks like that.  And it has been more and more lately, as we work hard to get away from so many processed, pre-packaged foods.  I won't lie - there are some boxes and cans under there.  But not many.  And that's intentional.  The blue bag?  It holds the cold stuff.  The worst offender in there is probably the Danimal yogurt drinks, but the ingredient list on those things isn't as bad as most.

I am trying hard with my girls to get them away from the standard American carb-addicted diet.  Don't get me wrong.  I am not anti-carb.  I am anti-wrong carbs, and much of the typical American diet is made up of wrong carbs.  What are wrong carbs?  Processed-to-death grain products that have been injected with a cocktail of vitamins to make up for what it is lacking.  I know all too well how addicting they can be and the health problems they can cause. 

So my philosophy is,  "If you don't buy it you can't eat it." 

Some of the things I didn't buy: Goldfish crackers, granola bars, cold cereals, cheese/peanut butter cracker sandwiches.

I know it would make some parents' heads spin to think of not buying these items to have on hand to take as easy portable snacks for their kids, quick breakfasts.  It certainly did for me at first.  I truly felt almost panicked at not having these things tucked away for those whiney, "I'm hungry" moments.  So how did I do it?

I did it slowly and that's what I recommend for you too.  In my opinion, the easiest way to start revamping what you and your family eats is one meal at a time.  Start with breakfast.  Do your kids eat cold cereal or Poptarts for breakfast every morning?  I wouldn't rock their world completely, but I would start off with a goal of 2-3 mornings a week of having something healthier.  Eggs or whole-grain oatmeal, either the prepackaged low sugar kind (watch out for artificial sweeteners - that's a whole other blog post) or cooked on the stove top where you can control the amount of sugar added (just be mindful of exactly how much you are putting in).  Don't be fooled into thinking buying whole grain versions of your favorite standbys is better.  There are few truly healthy cold cereals out there.  And a Poptart's a Poptart, no matter how much whole grain you throw in. 

Snacks can definitely be one of the most difficult times.  We have had to work hard to revamp our snack expectations.  It did not happen overnight and I was not "lucky" enough to have birthed children who came out of the womb clamoring for vegetables.  If they had their way, especially my eldest, they would have crackers and cookies for every meal.  Maybe a cheese stick thrown in occasionally.  But over the years, we have insisted they try veggies and other new foods and slowly we've gotten to a point where yes, my children beg me for brussels sprouts in the store and on her Mother's Day questionnaire, my oldest said the thing I did best was make fish.  Yep fish. 

One thing I've done to help out snack time is to have a veggie tray policy.  I bought one of those $5 trays from Wal-Mart that you use to take veggies and dip to parties.  I try my best to keep it stocked with veggies they like and I put a small, dip-size plastic container of ranch dressing in it for them to share.  In the afternoon, they are allowed to eat as much as they want out of it.  Often I will let them have one cheesestick as well. 

Other snacks that work well for us are nuts, seeds and dried fruits.  Dried fruits we eat sparingly as most have added sugar (I realize that there are probably non-sugar versions available out there, but also that they are likely much more expensive).  And I do buy honey roasted peanuts for my oldest as she doesn't care so much for other nuts.  My little one will go crazy with them though - almonds, cashews (cash nuts she calls them), raw pumpkin and sunflower seeds.  Or even a spoonful of peanut butter can be a great snack.  We buy the JIF natural brand.  It costs a bit more than regular peanut butter, but has less sugar and salt and is less expensive than the fresh ground, peanut only kind.  I get the seeds and nuts from a store that sells them in bulk (for us, it's our local HEB).  They have those bins where you can scoop them yourself.  It really is a cost saver and kids don't need a huge serving, so they last a while. 

I also from time to time make homemade granola bars.  While they are still fairly heavy in carbs, they at least are void of the preservatives.  And it is cheaper to make them.  I have a great recipe for knock-off Nature Valley bars I will share another time. 

I know some of you are probably doubtful of what's under all that produce.  There are some cans of beans, a box of Cheeze-Its for my hubby, a jar of peanut butter, a whole chicken to roast this week, and some ground turkey.  Probably one of the truly worst things in there is the frozen popcorn chicken.  Like I said, we are working on things a bit at a time, including my cooking habits.

I will say, that I honestly believe that most families could at least make small improvements without breaking the bank.  I know there are some out there that are doing all they can on a very limited budget.  I'm thinking more about the families I know that feel the need to spend $10 on Poptarts because they are on sale and they can get a whole bunch, rather than spending $2 on a container of quick-cook whole oats that will last a long time. 

It's the little changes from boxes and packages to real food that will make the biggest differences in the long run.