Hello and Happy Thanksgiving!
As anyone who has ever tried to lose weight will tell you, the winter holidays present challenges to the dieter that are not present for the rest of the year. Our culture has rich traditions of big food at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it is hard to escape those traditions if you have to interact in society for family, work or social reasons.
For me, things are a little easier in that regard because Hubs and I now live a fairly simple lifestyle at holidays. Since neither of us have family in the area, we usually have quiet holidays which we plan ourselves. We don't have to cook for others, and we don't have to eat with others and be influenced by their needs and desires for holiday fare.
This year, we had several conversations about what we could have for Thanksgiving that would be special. Both of us like pumpkin pie, and Hubs makes a WICKED-GOOD pie with my grandmother's crust recipe. After putting his recipe into my Weight Watchers Recipe Builder, we found that 1/8 pie slice would be 11 pts. That's very high. That's 1/3 of my daily allotment of points. Then we discussed other options. I did some online research about lower calorie options, and we decided that it is the crust that is the problem. The canned pie filling itself is relatively low. Grandma's pie dough recipe calls for 2/3 cup of vegetable shortening. She used to use Crisco. Remember the Crisco of the '60s? O-M-G ! Both of my grandmothers and my mother used Crisco A LOT! I think my mother fried something in Crisco probably 2-3 times a week. If you've seen the movie The Help, you will remember Minnie's instructions to Celia about frying chicken in Crisco. In fact, it does make fried-chicken-to-die-for, but it was also highly unhealthy! Crisco has since been reformulated, but any vegetable shortening is still very high in WW points. Even though Hubs now uses Canola oil, it's still high. (Side-note: I blame 2 staples of the '60s for at least some of my excess bulk - Crisco and High Fructose Corn Syrup, which also used to be in just about everything I ate. Additionally, my mother put sugar on strawberries! We NEVER ate them in their natural state, and every vegetable we ever ate had to be cooked in butter - green beans, carrots, peas, everything!) Anyway, I digress....
Back to the pumpkin pie dilemma. What to do? Hubs suggested maybe we should not have pie at all, but I was determined to have it because I know that if I start denying myself the things I like, then the whole attitude thing is going to kick in and hurt my chances for success. WE MUST HAVE PIE!
Next I looked into alternative pie crusts. I settled on 2 options: Keebler reduced fat graham cracker crust, and shortbread crust. I brought home one of each. For each of them, a 1/8 pie slice would be 3 pts for the crust. With the filling being 4 pts, that brings the total for 1/8 slice down to 7 pts. That is more manageable than 11 pts. So, that's what we went with. I chose shortbread for this time, and we can do the graham cracker for the next hazard-laden holiday in December.
So much for the "adaptations" portion of this entry. Now let's get to the "frustrations".
Technology. Oh how we love it....... when it works. Oh how dependent we've become on it! If you will remember it was the WW App for my smart phone that really got me started on this Odyssey. It was also the straw that led me to get my iPhone 6. Well, let me tell you about frustrations..... WW decided that Thanksgiving week was the best time to launch its "new & improved" website. It also decided that the day before Thankgiving was the day to "update" its App. Seriously. Thankgiving week. When all of us who have become totally dependent on the WW technology for our very survivial and success in weight-loss are facing some of the biggest food challenges of the year! Of course, there are MAJOR bugs in both the website and the App because we all know that "new & improved" websites NEVER work right when they are launched. (Remember the Obama-Care website-launch debacle?)
WW has a "give feedback" button at the top of the new website. I can't even count how many feedback messages I gave in the first few days of using the new website. I'm guessing I was not alone because even though the feedback button is still there, when you try to send a message on it, an error message pops up. I'm guessing they got so much feedback they had to disable the button. Also, when I tried to go to the Tech Help Chat thingy, they gave a link to a page that basically says they know there are problems and they are working to correct them, and they apologized for the inconvenience. The good news is they get it. The bad news is I have NO confidence in their ability to fix the problems. All of the meals I set up are wrong, and my recipes are also incomplete. I have no idea if I can trust the other "favorites" that I set up in my account. It also randomly reduced me from 30 pts a day to 29 even though it was in the middle of a week with no recorded changes in my weight. Trust. Trust is essential. I am heart-broken that I can't trust WW any more. I have hope that they will make things right, but when? Soon? I have been doing this long enough, that I know the pts for most of my common foods, and I can look things up in a book, but ........... I have no idea how long I will be able to tolerate doing this without the convenience of the App. How long before my attitude says "F--- it" and I give up? My motivation HAS to carry me over this hump!
As far as progress goes, I have been stuck at -26 lbs for 12 days. I'm not gaining, but right now it doesn't look like I'm going to make -30 by Nov. 30. 4 days of 7pt pie slices, not withstanding, I am determined to hang on. (Lucky for me, dark meat turkey is only 1 pt per oz.!)
Ok folks! That's it for the Thanksgiving edition of Amy's Odyssey. Stay tuned for tech updates and that other holiday......
Thanks for stopping by!
:)Amy
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