She won't KILL me, will she???

I do love photo slideshows. So in honor of my 50 pound loss, I put this one together. I'll eventually move this to the sidebar, but for now IT STAYS RIGHT HERE. At least until sister-darling gets off her butt and tells you about what she is doing to bust that plateau.

How's that for motivation, Janet?!

These pics also include a few of me, from childhood to morbid obesity. But the STAR of this show is JANET!

The slide show loads and starts immediately. Feel free to press play to restart, and pause to get a GOOD look!

Review: Product News! ~ Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers!

Yesterday I posted on Joy's Amazing Journey about an e-mail I got from Healthy Choice regarding their new product line, Cafe Steamers. That afternoon I picked up two of the dinners, the Grilled Whiskey Steak for me and the Grilled White Meat Chicken & Roasted Red Pepper Alfredo Sauce for Janet. I promised you a review once I taste-tested the dinner.

Once I took the dinner out of the box I realized how small all frozen dinners really are, even these. These Cafe Steamers, gram for gram, are the same size as an average Smart Ones and Lean Cuisine. It's the "all in one bowl that looks like a colander" that makes this particular meal seem smaller. But I loved the ease of cooking. No piercing, no cutting little film coverings, then peeling back after half the cooking time, stirring, then zapping for another 2 minutes. You take this baby outta the box, stick her in the microwave for a few minutes and you're done. Finis!

Just lift out the colander, dump the stuff into the bowl underneath, stir with the sauce that was in the bottom of the bowl that was steaming your food, and eat. And it was good! I mean really, really good.

On the plus side:

• WW points are given on the packaging.
• Dietary exchanges are also given (you'll know how many veggie servings you got).
• The veggies were perfectly cooked. And I mean PERFECTLY. The green beans were crisp and vibrant. The red-skinned potatos were tender, not rubbery like other frozen meals. The steak tips were tender and juicy.
• Half the sodium as many of the Smart Ones and Lean Cuisine that I've seen.

On the minus side:

• I haven't seen many "diet" or "healthy" meals with saturated fat lately. These dinners do have some saturated fat and cholesterol. Not much, but it's there.
• The portion size seemed small to me for some reason. With most meals having one serving of vegetables, that is half a cup of veggies. Not a whole lot. But to be fair, the portion size is equivalent to the Smart Ones, just under 300 grams in weight. And it may look smaller because of the unique packaging that steams everything in one dish.
• I paid $3.99 per meal at Shaw's Supermarket. That's more moola than what you shell out for Smart One's and Lean Cuisine. Is it worth it for perfectly steamed veggies and half the sodium??? Perhaps.

I'm not a real big convenience eater. I make it a point to eat clean, so I stay away from most processed foods. Even though I love the idea of a frozen dinner prepared in a unique way that keeps the foods appetising, I'm not sure this is enough to bring me to the dark side. For now, I'll stick to my tried and true diet that has gotten me this far (nearly 50 nasty pounds gone!) and still going strong. But it is nice knowing that if I ever get desperate enough for some steak and potatos I have some options that won't kill me at the scale.

Choose Your HARD!

Something that I have discovered over the years: It's EASY getting fat.
Truly. It is just so darn easy. All it takes is mixing a little bit of laziness with a handful of a love for food, mix in some complacency and let it rise for a few years. Presto! You are F A T.

Something else that I have learned: It's not so easy being fat. Being fat is HARD. It's miserable. It's painful, physically and emotionally, and the worst thing about that pain - you don't recognize exactly how painful it is while you are hip deep in it. Oh I knew I was unsatisfied about something, but I thought surely it's not me personally? I pointed at my work, the fact that I hate Maine winters (which is not difficult to understand considering they can last 7 months of the year!), and finishing my degree was - and is - taking forever. The vague unhappiness, that you wear like an itchy shirt, had a number of sources, but not one of them was the fact that I was 130 pounds overweight, and slowly killing myself.

Why? Exactly why I got fat would take far too long to explain. "How" is much easier. One delicious bite at a time. In my years of experience, dieting meant giving up all that deliciousness and starving myself while exercising like a fiend. A sensible diet? What's that??? Moderate exercise? Huh??? I was always an either-or person. Either I continued to eat like a King, or I starved myself like a peasant. No middle ground. Each attempt at weight loss was a sprint to the finish, and always ended in failure. No, worse than failure. I'd gain back everything and then some. Eventually, I simply gave up, and embraced my rotundness in all its glory.

Until...

My sister Janet joined Weight Watchers in February of '07, and hounded me. She was relentless, dog-with-a-bone persistent. I caved in mid-March. Something that I have discovered between March and now...

Losing weight is HARD! It is tedious. The rewards are slow to come. Some weeks, there are no rewards, only disappointment, even when you have done everything you are supposed to do, when and how you are supposed to do it. Eventually though, the rewards do come. The effort begins to show. It gets easier to run. You learn to love and crave healthy foods in appropriately-sized servings. But, it never stops being HARD.

So, to whomever visits this spot to see what those wacky "Two Fat Sisters" are up to, I know I speak for the both of us when I say:

Being fat is hard. Losing weight is hard. Chose Your HARD!