Monday Mourning

Admit it, girlfriends, weekends tend to be the time when it’s easiest for us to choose less optimal healthy foods for our bodies. So many celebrations happen during the Friday-Saturday-Sunday timeframe: weddings, family get-togethers, happy hours, to say nothing of tailgating parties, Sunday football feed-fests, hot cocoa on the soccer sidelines, and all kinds of good things. Yes, good things, because you know I don’t believe it limiting your food choices -- it’s more portion control and fitting those choices into your daily calorie allowance. The trouble is, we do tend to overdo it a bit on the weekends, and then we’re faced with the dreaded Monday morning weigh-in, where we’ve discovered we’ve put on 2-3 pounds in the same amount of days! The phrase “beached whale” comes to our minds (because we are always so unduly hard on ourselves) and we feel bloated, sluggish and defeated. While it's certainly not the end of the world, it often is discouraging and tempts us to say, “Oh well, I blew it over the weekend, I guess I just will wait to get back on track for November. Oops – there we go down that slippery slope, kicked it the butt by Monday Mourning!!. Hang on, you have positive options!!

For those of us (me included) who are in Monday Mourning, instead of giving up, get back on track by eating especially “clean” on Monday. Stick with primarily fruits, veggies, and water, and let your body clean out all the junk from the weekend. For breakfast, have a big fruit salad (diabetics, watch those sugars), or maybe just some plain oatmeal with some blueberries and strawberries. At lunchtime, have a bahonkin' salad with kidney beans or chick peas for protein. At dinner, steam up a ton of veggies and serve over brown rice (1/2 cup brown rice is one portion, by the way). Most veggies are practically free food, so you can fill up. For mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks, bring raw veggies and graze away, maybe have a banana mid-morning with a few walnuts or almonds, and mid-afternoon have an apple with a tablespoon of organic peanut butter on it. Keep it light, keep it clean, and watch your portions. And hydrate, hydrate, hydrate with water!

While I’m not a vegetarian or vegan, I do tend to keep my diet fairly light. I don’t often eat red meat, and the bulk of my meat tends to be chicken or fish. However, this weekend I made a huge amount of meat sauce to go with my baked ziti dinner, and wound up eating the meat sauce/ziti yesterday as well as leftovers. You know the old phrase, “Don’t let it go to waste”? Well, remember, eating those leftovers can make it go to WAIST – YOURS! This morning I was up two pounds from Saturday. It happens. Don’t let it define your day or week. Just take positive, healthy steps to get back on track. Dig into that delish salad for lunch – join me, won’t you?

Exercise your body cleanse/back on track choices!


Blessings,

Linda