Schrodinger's Kittie

…when you start monitoring all that goes into your mouth.

I mentioned, the other day, that I had started using My Food Diary to try and track things and see if it’s overeating or under-performing (thyroid) that is causing my weight gain.

Considering I got yelled at by the site, yesterday, for not eating enough – it could be a completely depressed metabolism.   But!  Something I decided to do, since I’m also being yelled at for way too much sodium – was to check some things out.  Like, most of the time, I make stuff almost 100% from scratch.  So I decided to do a comparison between what we had for dinner last night in its “from scratch” manifestation vs its “quick and easy” manifestation.

From scratch:

Quick:

Colour me shocked.  A difference of over 490mg of sodium.  Wow.  No wonder I prefer it when I cook from scratch.

As for breakfast cereal?  Yeah, I’m pretty much cutting that out and am going back to what I used to eat at Broadwing every morning for breakfast…

Though the fruit changes, the rest stays consistent. Sometimes raisins, sometimes pomegranate, some times nectarines, sometimes peaches…yanno – whatever I felt like that morning.  I don’t put anything else in the oats – just the oats and the fruit.  The oats are soaked in boiling water and then mixed in with the fruit once they are the way I like them done (ie. not mush, but not bits of sand either).

The results:

A girlfriend of mine doesn’t handle carbs well, so she shuddered when she saw this.  For me, carbs have never really been an issue – it’s been fatty foods that I don’t burn well.  So, for someone like me – this is a spectacular breakfast…and, much better so far as sodium intake is compared to a breakfast cereal that has 180mg sodium in one serving.  I’ve considered trying to get used to drinking coffee without the half and half…but, I’m not rushing into that one if it’s not necessary.

For those of you who have been around me in person any length of time, you know that I’ve been having issues with rising weight in the last year.  Since July of last year, I’ve gained significant weight.  I’m up from 140 (which was ok weight, but I’d have liked to have lost about 10 pounds) to 160-165.  This makes me a size 12 and not comfortable in my own skin.  I am particularly concerned that it might be my thyroid shutting down.  Thyroid issues are not uncommon in my family.

However, before I start to panic or get overly concerned, I figured I’d get serious about tracking calories for the first time in my life.  In pursuit of that, I found this awesome site called My Food Diary.   Why this particular site?  Well, the first thing that caught my eye was the large food database they have.  Much larger than most of the other sites I’ve come across.  Then, if they don’t have it listed, you can add it manually.  And the capper for me where food alone was concerned – I can enter my recipes manually, and they will keep it stored with all the nutritional information for me.  Each item in the recipe is most generally already in their database.

Then the thing that made me grin was the excercise lists.  They have anything and everything that can burn calories listed – well, a significant number anyway.  For pity’s sake, they even have shopping, grocery shopping, washing the car, washing the dog, sweeping the floor.  I’m not kidding.  It’s awesome.  So…I figure I will use this site for a month or two.  Use the calorie portion of it to keep an eye on what I’m actually eating and drinking.  And I mean a serious commitment to enter everything. This is a first for me and isn’t easy for me to do – I really hate feeling like I have to monitor every bite that goes into my mouth. But, if it’s what it takes for me to get a handle on this, then that’s what I’ll do, eh?

As I was driving home last night, I decided I so did not want to deal with traffic.  I figured I’d pull in to the Westlake Drive area and hit the Chili’s there and nosh until the traffic lightened up.  Lo and behold, Chili’s there has been closed.  Bugger.  So, I looked around a bit and noticed a cafe on the other side called Thistle Cafe.  I’d never been there before. Never heard of it before for that matter.  But, I really didn’t want to deal with traffic and I needed dinner.  So, in I went.

Wow.  I had one of the best dinners I’ve had in quite some time.  I started out with calamari and a glass of decent Reisling. Then the main course came – pan seared mahi-mahi covered in a crab cream sauce with saffron rice and sauted spinach. 

I am not one for sauted spinach.  I don’t care for it in the least.  However, when I mixed it in with the saffron rice and the cream sauce – wow.  It worked well together and I actually enjoyed sauted spinach for the first time in my life.  The mahi-mahi had a zest and zing to it that awakened the taste buds and made them want to shout for joy.  Every bite was a delight.  Then…as if dinner itself hadn’t been sinful enough. I ordered coffee with chocolate silk cream pie for dessert.

Now, there’s chocolate silk pie and then there’s chocolate silk pie…this one was a little slice of heaven.  I’m pretty sure Zeus is throwing a hissy because someone snagged a sniffer of his best ambrosia to mix in with the pie’s ingredients.  One bite and decadence exploded across my tongue and little dancers leaped through my brain with streamers of exquisite delight shivering through my body.

The coffee was a perfect foil to the rich and creamy pie. By the time I was finished with my meal, I could have faced Hades himself with a smile on my face…much less plow through the traffic between me and my front door.

I will definitely be making Thistle Cafe a regular stop on my dining circuit.