Meal Prep Sundays: Cook One Day, Eat All Week

I love meal prepping.  One thing about doing it post RNY surgery is that I don't have to spend all day Sunday in the kitchen!  I just come up with a couple things that will last us all week, and voila!  Done in time to do my other favorite Sunday thing:  NOTHING!  (I have to have a certain amount of down-time these days, so don't judge).

Here is what is on the menu for this week.  Even though these are bariatric-friendly, they are still good meal ideas.  They just tend to last all week around our house.

Sweet Potatoes & Rotisserie Chicken

Rotisserie chicken is the shit.  Why did I not buy this before surgery?  It's so tasty, and moist, and easy to clean to put into any chicken recipe you need.  I prefer this over baking my chicken, since baking it tends to dry it out.  Grilling would probably be a good option, and we bought a nice new grill last year - we just never use it.  We are pretty much vampires when we are not at work.  We stay in our house.  We love it.  Don't judge.

Picked up some white and garnet sweet potatoes this week.  I'll just bake these off in the oven at 425 for about an hour.  Take 'em out, peel 'em, and then put into a storage container INTACT so we can use them for lunches this week.  Put the sweet potato in a bowl, throw some chicken on top, and lunch is prepared.  We will nuke this for about 30 seconds or so and then drizzle a little honey mustard on top before eating it.  Moistness is key for us bariatric folks, so we usually have some sort of sauce or something on most things.

Eggy Muffins

I use a variation of this egg muffin recipe from Kalyn's Kitchen.  I've used it for years and is a staple in my routine.  Since surgery I haven't had much luck with eating eggs.  'lil Bastard doesn't care for them much (that's my loving nick-name for my stomach pouch).  Ben does fine with them though.  He usually puts a little of the Herdez Guacamole Salsa on them and he's good to go (again with some sort of sauce on food).  He eats a lot more often than I do because of low-glycemic issues he has so when I make a batch of these they will last all week long.  Score. 

Tipsy Beefy Tips

One of our favorite recipes before WLS was this one from Tasty Kitchen.  Good Lord this was good - I could just drink the au jus from a glass.  I've been searching for something similar for post WLS, and have come close, but not quite.  Although the original recipe was quite tender, it's better to use smaller cuts of meat now, like tips, stew meat, or this week I'm using beef that was marketed for carne picado.  It's basically thin slices of beef that I hope get really tender while being slow-cooked. 

I sliced an onion and put it in the bottom of my crock pot, added the meat, and then mixed 3 packages of beef gravy mix with a bottle of beer.  I added another beer and two beef bouillon cubes because I thought it looked a little dry.  We shall see how this goes and I will report back.

Strawberries!

The only other thing we eat a lot of I don't have to prep much for.  I just buy a crap-ton of yogurt, make sure we have every granola known to man, and clean fresh strawberries to have for the week.  This is one of my favorite things right now.  My favorite combo is honey Greek yogurt with about a teaspoon of Truvia added, some cinnamon granola, and fresh strawberries.  'lil Bastard is powerless against this goodness.

Do you meal plan and prep?  Or do you wait for inspiration the day of?

One Year after WLS

It may be our one year surgiversary for bariatric surgery, but it was actually a lifetime in the making.

Ben and I have always been big.  It was part of our identity, until we decided to change it.  It took a while before we finally gave in to what our doctor had been asking us every year at our physical "what about weight loss surgery?"

We were adamantly against it for years thinking we could just do it ourselves.  I'd meal plan and cook and do everything right and Ben would have some success, but the weight would just NOT come off of me.  I have PCOS which makes it damn near impossible to lose weight.  I tried Atkins, had some success with it, but once you quite doing it, the weight comes back, and then some.  Plus I started working at an office that requires me to be sedentary for about 10 hours a day.  I packed on over 70 lbs during the first 9 years of working there.

The deciding moment was October 2014.  We went on vacation to Washington DC with our bestest friends.  I loved the trip - the walking? Not so much.  I would walk a little, sit for a little.  My back, hips, and knees were killing me.  The day we went to Arlington we had to do the bus tour because there was no way I could walk it.  When we went to Robert E. Lee's home I couldn't go upstairs because my right knee was swelled so bad I could hardly bend it.  When we went to Monticello on our trip back, I spent most of the time seated while the boys walked down to the gardens and grave sites.  That's when I decided - and Ben was totally on board.

January 2, 2015 I called and made our appointments at the Vanderbilt Surgical Weight Loss Center for our consultation.  I was at the highest weight I had ever been.  We were fortunate enough to have the head of the department as our surgeon.  After that we just had to follow the guidelines set forth by the insurance company and submit for approval sometime in May.  We were approved rather quickly, and we had surgery the same day.

I'll probably post again about everything that happened after surgery, but this was the best decision we have ever made.  Not just because we can buy smaller clothes.  We were cute fat, so we are still cute now that we are smaller.  But we just FEEL so much better.  I have virtually no pain anymore, and I can shop, shop, shop and not even sit down!

The next time we go on a trip, we will be able to walk wherever the hell we want to!

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Life Lessons: The Golden Rule

My parents were not religious.  The only time I remember going to church as a kid was when I went with friends and their families, or when my favorite Aunt Sue and Uncle Herbert took me to church when we were in "the country" on weekends (tiny unincorporated city of Breeding, KY).

In spite of this (actually, BECAUSE of this I think), I could not have asked for better role models.

These two people literally worked themselves into an early grave. Now as I am getting older, and I have been without them for so long, I see even more the effect they had on me.  One of those things were to treat others the way I would want to be treated.  Another one is that my rights end where someone else's begin (I can still see my Mama sitting at the table telling me this).

I think above all things, this is my favorite lesson I learned.  Although I am human, and I get mad, and have actually said things back to people when I was standing my ground or when I felt that I was wronged, and I always ended up regretting it.  There is no reason to talk badly to people.

I also teach this at work.  I am in sales, and I take my job very personally (remember, my mom and dad working themselves to death?  Yep - it's hereditary).  I always tell the new kids "be the kind of sales person to someone that you would want to deal with yourself."

Sometimes they listen, but mostly I'm sure they internally roll their eyes when I try to give life wisdom within a sales training sesh.

Also, whenever I see a list of traits of certain archetypes that I do NOT want to be considered in with, I always do a mental mini checklist of myself to make sure I don't have those same characteristics.  If I find that some of them hit a little too close to home, then that's where I'm going to work as soon as possible.  The only thing I hate worse than a mean person, is a hypocrite.

Introductions

Hello.  My name is Amy.

I am in my early forties.  I've been with my husband since I was 14 years old, worked in the same industry for nearly 21 years, and we live in the same neighborhood my husband grew up in; in the first house we ever bought.

No, I don't have any children.  Wasn't in the cards for us.

You can see why our lives could be considered a bit "mundane."  But we are trying to change that a bit.

We've been on a path the last year or so to really enjoy this little life we have together.    We like simple things.  And we like the quiet life we have.  We just want to do more with it instead of sitting in our house when we aren't sitting at our desks at work.

We are getting there.  I wanted a way to keep up with our goings on, as well as post about things I love and the things I've learnt in life.   I don't have kids to pass my wisdom on to, so I thought I'd share with you.  Boy, are you lucky.