Posts by jmm2008

In short: You are doing too much. Make some choices.

Look, it can be done but something suffers. You are on track for that something to be your health. I'm speaking from 10 years of doing it, and coming out 50lbs overweight. Unless you can over-organize yourself and plan those crockpot meals daily, stick to a meal plan and never the leave the house in the morning with breakfast, lunch and dinner packed alongside your books, and manage it all with a reasonable amount of coffee, then you need to cut something. If you're very serious about school, drop the alcohol and cut back to 1 cup of coffee per day - and no other stimulus drugs. If partying is an important part of the experience for you cut down on work and take on some debt.  What you deserve is to be healthy. All the hard work and achievement in the world will stop mattering if your health suffers signficantly because of it.

We spend between $400-$500 per month for 2 people, but we never EVER eat out (or, on the rare occasion we do, it comes out of the $400). We have found this is enough to buy mostly organic, mostly natural foods as long as we stay committed to cooking, avoiding most packaged food and eating out, and use every piece of every food. I watch the sales like a hawk and bulk buy sale items, particularily chicken and cheese and bread. Our top 5 cost-savers:

1. Steel Cut Oats: we put them in the crockpot the night before (1/4 cup oats + 1 cup water) and wake up to a hot, filling breakfast. The cost works out to $0.40 per pot of oatmeal, and a pot feeds us for two days.

2. Homemade Granola Bars: time consuming, and your teenagers are likely to eat the whole pan in one go, but delicious. A pan with my recipe works out to about $4 (12-16 bars).

3. Pizza: we make our own dough (it is suprirsingly easy) and can make a thin crust pizza with pepperoni and vegitables for about $4, a thick bready crust for $5. Thin crust feeds 2 or 3, bread crust feeds 4-6.

4. Beat Greens Salad: we use the leafs instead of lettus. We also use greens that come off any other vegitables as a salad base, preventing the purchase of several lettus' in a week.

5. Vegitable Ends Soup: I literally use all ends of vegitables that normally I wouldn't eat - broccoli ends, celery leaves, carrot & zucchini tips, tomato cores - and throw them in with some canned tomato soup.

Best of luck!

Your situation sucks and I wish you the strength to cope with it. I cannot pretend to understand what you are going through, but I raised a younger brother and sister and from the ages of ten through eighteen handled all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, etc. in my house. My dad drank and gambled. There were days without food. There were days of anger and explosions. If you feel like I felt then it feels like the weight of the world is on your shoulders but you have no power to actually do or fix anything, no power to make decisions like when to buy food or what to buy. None of it is fair. It IS a lot of pressure. But it must be coped with. If you truly have no food in the house find a way to talk to your mother about that. It sounds like your mother is trying to cope with a lot too. If there is food but not the kind you're used to or that's easy, search the 'net for recipes. You'd be amazed what you can learn to make with virtually nothing if you put some imagination into it. As for an outside job, that might make things better for you or might simply add more stress to your life, particularily if you are going back to school soon. Only you know which. Best of luck.

It's highish calorie but zero fat - 1/2 cup honey, 1/4 cup dijon, 1/2 tsp olive oil  for a delicious, honey dijon dressing. This is particularily good with spinach & carrots, and also makes a great dipping sauce for chicken.

I grew up in a house with a single, workaholic dad where I could name the days of the week by the food we ate for dinner: Thursday was always pizza, Wednesday always Macdonalds, Mondays and Tuesdays we were on our own (which usually resulted in mac'n'cheese or shakeNbake chicken breast made in the microwave), Fridays was "treat night" (chips, chocolate bar, slurpees at the convenience store) and the one day he did make food for us, Saturday, it was spagetti. In the last decade I have had to learn so so much about taking care of myself, and about my relationship with food. I like to think of it in terms of what I want to teach my future kids about food and role it plays in life:

1. Food does not come from a box in a freezer, nor does it come from a plastic, colourful store. Real food is carefully, lovingly prepared.

2. Eating is not something we do in a big rush on the way to something else. Time is taken out of the day to enjoy a meal in a relaxed fashion, and allow your body and mind to process that you have eaten. Even the truly time crunched can take 15 minutes to savour rather than inhale a meal.

3. It is ok to indulge sometimes. But like other indulgences, eating processed, surgary or high-fat food, or eating at a restaurant, should be planned for, reasonable and rare.

4. While it is ok to stop eating if you're not hungry, food should not be wasted. Try not to take more than you want, and eat what has been made before making something new.

5. Fresh, local food is not only better for you, it tastes delicious. Splurge for the better health benefits and the better taste, when you can.

6. It does not have to cost a lot to eat healthy. If you truly are broke, whole wheat pasta, a can of diced tomatoes and some spinach and onions costs $4.00 for two full meals of salad and pasta.

7. Contrary to popular belief, it does not take significantly more time to prepare simple, healthy meals at home than to eat out.

8. Breakfast is not optional. You cannot run a car without gas, nor can you run a brain and body without food.

9. There is a huge variety of delicious fruits and vegetables at our disposal. Salad for dinner does not mean lettus on a plate. There is an infinate number of tasty fruit/vegetable combinations that with a little chicken, fish or beans makes for a complete and healthy meal.

10. Vacations and fun at home nights are not about what you ate. They are about what you saw and did and who you saw and did it with. Just because you are travelling does not mean you have to, or are entitled to, eat three gigantic restaurant meals in a day.

I struggle with weight and eating because I have to remind myself of these things daily. My hope is that when I have children, I'll be able to teach them all of this by example.

My work has cookie and cracker time in the coffee rooms every day between 10 and 11am. High calorie high carb temptations - I sure wish they'd cut those! I can usually resist 4 days out of 5, but it's hard.

Starry, you're not alone. I think a lot of us are afraid of failing - yet again.  And lots of the advice given in answer to you is pretty good - especially about finding whats right for you. I just admitted to myself two days ago that I'm afraid of failing. I personally think that is a big step too.

I'm trying not to eat bread so I find the key is LOTS of protein at lunch along side lots of vegis and friut. I sort of plan my protein and work the vegitables around it.

A typical lunch for me looks like:

1.5  cups - slices of cucumber and tomato with cottage cheese

1/2 cup - black beans and salsa OR chickpeas with spices such as curry OR kidney beans with chili spices. (I know, there is a lot of salt here)

Fat free yogurt and an apple or other fruit

It doesn't sound like much but it keeps me going for about 4.5 hours and I think it comes in under 500 calories.

Because last time I was in Italy, I was 50lbs lighter and I'd like to get halfway there before I go again in May.

Because I want to have a baby in about three years, and I don't want to be bedridden for three months during preganancy with high blood pressure.

Because I don't want to be 300lbs after I have my kids. I'm 235 now, and a pregnancy is bound to add 50lbs. I want to be under 200lbs after I'm done bearing children, and be able to be an active mom with them.

Because I have a beautiful size 14 lime green silk dress in my closet and boy, what a lovely wedding dress it would make for my (hopefully) beach party wedding in two years.

Because most of the other women at my law firm see being over weight as a failure, and being percieved as a failure is not a good start to a career - I start back with them in 11 months, and to come back 30-50lbs lighter would be seen as a great success.

Because I actually enjoy the way I feel when I eat the right amount in a day, and enough fruit and vegitables to have energy. Because I actually love the gym and walking and bike riding.

Because I just turned 30 and if I'm not committed to this now, I don't see a time when I will ever be.

Because this year  is my last chance to make a serious effort, make weight loss my top priority for a year, and set the patterns that will let me sustain a healthier lifestyle for the next 20 years.

Me too! My highest ever weight was almost 280. I dropped 100 pounds in nine months - but not entirely in a healthy way - and  over the last 3 years have crept back up to 235. Over the next three years, I would like to get back to 178, and from there down to 160, the weight my doctor reccomends for me. I feel much less like a failure knowing others struggle with this too.