Reinvention 2013, and a new gizmo

I have never been a fan of new year’s resolutions, but I am a sucker for a seasonal re-adjustment and reinvention. Something about January begs for a little bit of belt-tightening and clean living after the excesses and chaos of the holiday season.

You might remember back in 2008, just after Lucas was born, over the course of about six months I managed to lose just over 30 lbs. I felt (and looked!) great, and I more or less managed to keep it off, but there’s been a bit of a weight creep going on for the last year or two. I’d like to lose about 10 lbs to get back to my ideal weight, or 15 lbs to get back to the lowest I achieved in 2009.

Even moreso, I’ve been getting a little too sedentary lately for my own liking. I’m a lazy creature to begin with, and one of my favourite ways to spend hours at a stretch involves me staring slack-jawed and motionless at a monitor while only my fingertips exert themselves. I need some sort of motivation to get up and get moving.

And finally, I’ve been seeing a phystiotherapist for the last few months for what I thought was a flare-up of my years-old knee problem. I love love love my new physiotherapist, though, because she’s shown me that the patello-femoral syndrome that’s been bothering me is actually a symptom of a larger problem with my hips and how I’m walking, and so I’ve been working on readjusting that, too.

My mind was swirling with this perfect storm of the desire for physical reinvention when I read Julie’s post last week about her own new year resolution to take 8,000 to 10,000 steps each day. I loved the idea – I’ve long known walking is an excellent form of exercise, and a perfect one for my lifestyle – and she had (gasp!) a gadget. Okay, it’s actually a pedometer, but it is the most fun and interesting pedometer I’ve ever seen. It’s called a FitBit and it uploads your daily steps, distance and calories burned wirelessly not just to your computer but to your iPhone as well. You can also record your food intake, something I know helped me lose the 30+ lbs in 2008.

Walking + motivation + accountability + gadgetry = perfect solution for me!!

Untitled

I’m in geeky heaven. I love stats and graphs and counting things, I really do. I got it this afternoon, and for the next day or two I’m just going to measure how many steps I take in an average day. I am guessing that will be around 6,000. If I can boost that up to 8,000, I’ll be burning around 300 extra calories a day, which will stop the pounds from creeping on. By boosting another 300 calories up to 10,000 steps a day, I should be able to carve off a pound or so each week, which means I’ll be back to my target weight for spring(ish).

Seems do-able, yes? That, and I want to do a better job getting more fruits and veg into my own diet and that of the boys. And pay down some of our debt. And swear less. And do a better job keeping on top of the household chores. And do a better job fitting in my daily exercises and stretches for physio. And be more mindful of the present, instead of spending so much time stuck to a device. And get back into my bloggy grove a little bit more. And I think I’m doing another 365 project.

Gee, it’s a good thing I don’t make any new year’s resolutions, isn’t it? *eyeball roll*

Anybody want to play along? What are you resolving (or not resolving) to do in 2013?

Still haven’t found that weight I lost

I got a really nice comment last week from Carolynn, saying she’s lost a couple of pounds after reading about Calorie Counter online here, and she asked for a Plan B update. Then yesterday, a friend said she’d just called Dr Bishop to make an appointment for herself. Actual requests for topics and the need for daily blog fodder? Perfect!

For those of you just tuning in, after finding myself last August at 192 lbs and a good 20 lbs heavier than I was pre-pregnancy, I went to see local weight-loss specialist MD Douglas Bishop and following a no sugar, low refined carbs diet of 1400 calories per day, I lost 30 lbs (and went from a tight size 16 to a loose size 12) in about six months.

The good news is, I’m still down about 30 lbs overall. Impressive, isn’t it? I hit my goal weight just before I came back to work in February, and in the almost three months I’ve been here I’ve been up a pound or three, down a pound or three, but mostly keeping it off. I’m right around 161 lbs, and seem to be half way between a size 10 and a size 12 in jeans. (I swear to god, I am *cursed* to never, ever have a perfect-fitting pair of pants!)

progress
This is my weight-loss chart from Calorie Count. It inspires me to look at that big drop!
(The blue line is the actual weight loss and the green line is the “trend”,
ostensibly to make you feel better over the peaks and valleys.)

The bad-ish news is that I’m slipping on my eating habits, and while it doesn’t seem to be sabotaging all my hard work right now, I’m sure it might in the future! I eat a lot less quantity-wise than I ever did before, but I’m still not eating enough fruits and veggies (that should improve with the summer crops coming in) and am starting to slip and have daily “treats” instead of occassional ones. I’ve been really good, though, about not buying lunch downtown when I’m working — I’m too busy at lunch time out scoping photo opportunities for my 365 project!

I’m still going to the gym every Saturday, and hope to add in a trip on Wednesdays in the summer when Beloved is home from work. Chasing after three little boys does expend a lot of energy (who am I kidding, it’s only Lucas that I’m chasing, but I’m chasing him every waking minute!) and I seem to spend a lot of breakfasts and lunches at home eating bites of something at the counter while I pack schoolbags, unload the dishwasher and tend to the other minutiae that make up a mother’s job, so maybe that’s a good part of why I can cheat and not regain the weight too drastically.

Funny, though, how I was so enamoured with my new sleeker design at Christmas time, and now with bathing suit season coming up, I look in the mirror and think, “Hmmm, a little flabby here and a few too many bulges there.” Just as I seem doomed to be forever in ill-fitting pants, I think I’m stuck living with my inner critic no matter what I do!

Plan B, six months later

Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been just over six months since I started my “Plan B” weight-loss plan. (And, for goodness sake, did none of you think to mention at the time that “Plan B” is a morning after pill as well? It took me months to figure out the google traffic!) Anyway, at the time of my last update back at the beginning of December, I’d just reached my goal weight of 170 lbs and hoped to be down to 160 lbs by the time I went back to work. Well, it took a little bit longer than that, but can you believe that for the first time since Beloved and I met back in 1995, I’m below 160 lbs?

In six months, I’ve lost almost 35 lbs (!!) and 6 inches off each of my waist, my hips and my bust, plus another inch or two off my thighs and even my arms. Woot! And to be totally honest with you, I’m not really even trying anymore but the weight keeps trickling off. Remember all those clothes I bought for back-to-work on Boxing Day? The pants and skirts are all too loose on me now! (Which begs the question: is it worthwhile to bring them in to be altered? Or do I have to re-buy in the next size down? And can you please just tolerate me bragging for one more second while I tell you that for the first time in my adult life I’m now wearing a size TEN in jeans?!? That’s down from a very snug 16 just six months ago!)

So because a few of you have asked me, here’s the six-month overview of how I lost 35 lbs without losing my mind!

  1. Sugar is evil. I think the number one most important thing I did in the active weight-loss part of this diet is cutting out as much sugar as possible. That means not only no cake and (whimper) cookies and chocolate bars, but really reading labels and trying not to eat anything that has fructose, glucose, maltose, honey, molasses or any other sugar derivative in the first five ingredients. In the first couple of months, I ate so little sugar that when I did eat a doughnut, my stomach actually ached. Now that I’m in maintenance mode, I’m a little more liberal with the sugar, but if my weight starts to creep back up, it’s going to be the first thing to go.
  2. Cut way, way down on refined carbohydrates and starches: bread, cereal, rice, pasta, crackers, pitas, oatmeal, tortillas, all that wonderful stuff. I tried to eliminate white flour products entirely and choose whole grains whever possible. (Whole grains are absorbed into your bloodstream much more slowly, leaving you feeling satisfied longer, and are altogether more healthy for you. And remember: multrigrain does NOT mean whole grain.) This was the hardest one for me. I’d eat one serving of organic heritage whole grain cereal for breakfast, and two other choices with dinner. Now it’s just routine, but a low-carb lunch was nearly impossible for a sandwich-lover like me at the beginning!
  3. Fat is not the enemy. (Sugar is the enemy.) I’ve kept a lot of full-fat foods in my diet, and I think they’re the reason I feel like I’m eating like a real person instead of eating rabbit food all day long. In the last six months I’ve eaten enough nuts, avocados and cheese to sink a ship. Seriously, not a day goes by that I don’t eat cheese of some sort. It’s so satisfying! And I’m not afraid to fry up some mushrooms in a little butter and oil for dinner, or drizzle a little oil on my veggies, or skimp on the salad dressing. Now, I’m not saying you should deep fry everything, but the official doctor-prescribed diet I was on called for five servings of fats per day, and I actually had to step up my fat consumption to meet it.
  4. Think whole: whole grains, and whole foods. Whole as in “not processed” or processed as little as possible. Real foods, as they come from nature, are better for your body than any chemically-altered pseudo-food advertised as low-cal or low-fat. Rather than eating a frozen entrée for lunch – which, by the way, is nearly impossible to find without some sort of pasta or rice or other enriched-grain product! – I’d cut a whole red pepper into slices, eat it with hummus (protien) and a couple of pieces of cheese (protien) and a glass of vegetable cocktail. My favourite lunch is either one of those mini-cans of spicy Thai chili tuna or a couple of ounces of sliced smoked salmon with a couple of ounces of cheese and a big handful of cherry tomatoes. In other words, the fewer ingredients the better.
  5. Don’t let yourself get hungry. In the beginning, I’d eat first thing in the morning (my 2/3 cup of cereal – and because it’s whole grain and full of fibre, there’s no sugar crash and I feel full for most of the morning), then around 10:30 (usually either a hard-boiled egg or a banana), then lunch, then another snack around 3:00 (often 10 almonds – surprisingly satisfying!), and dinner around 5:30.
  6. Dinner is for “normal” eating. Because I’d been careful most of the day, dinner did not really change much over what I used to eat. Hamburgers (home-made, of course!), fajitas or tacos, chicken parmasean with spaghetti, chili, pot-roast and veggies, hearty soup with crusty bread, even pizza… these are a few of the staples in our dinner rotation. Again, the key is moderation and portion control. And loading up on the veggies!
  7. Speaking of fruits and veggies, the last thing I’ll say is that it was a lot easier to load up on veggies when I started this back in August in the midst of harvest season than it is now in the dark heart of winter. I’m really trying to stick with organic produce wherever possible while also respecting a 100-mile rule, but there’s only so much you can do in Canada in February when you’re addicted to tomatoes and red peppers!

I really hope this doesn’t come across with the evangelical zeal of the recently converted reduced, but I am still rather shocked by my own success and am more than happy to share it. So far, even three weeks of sedentary cubicle life hasn’t had the detrimental effect I’d feared, and I’m the same weight today that I was back in 1995 when Beloved and I first met. Not bad, being on the cusp of 40 with the body I last saw at 25 — and three giant babies later, to boot! I guess I’ve earned the right to brag just a little bit. *grin*

Hey, guess what? I’m normal!

Now, I know y’all are standing in line to disagree with that statement, but it’s true! According at least to this definition, I’m normal!! Some time in the last week or so, I’ve lost just enough weight to trip me down to a body mass index (BMI) of 24.9, which is no longer overweight but normal.

Look!

normal!

See? Normal! And if it says so on the interwebs, it has to be true!

Holy crap, I actually did it!

Remember Plan B? The plan to lose 20 lbs in 20 weeks, to drop back down from 192 pounds to my pre-pregnancy weight before January of 2009?

I did it!! Yay me, I did it!! I lost 23.5 lbs in 15 weeks, and now I’m a couple of pounds under 170. From a tight size 16 to a comfortable 12. Not bad, eh? This is as small as I’ve been since June of 2005 — when, ironically, I joined weight watchers because I thought I was too heavy! My pre-pregnancy comfortable jeans are now too baggy and slidey-offy to wear, and I’m wearing my skinniest jeans comfortably.

So I wanted to be all clever and show you what 23 lbs of fat looks like. Unfortunately, the dairy manager of Sobey’s kept shooting me these really suspicious looks as I stacked pound after pound of butter into my cart, so I just snapped off a really quick shot instead of the artistic expressionism I had been imagining all these weeks as I crept ever closer to my goal:

23 lbs of butter

Then, I realized that there was something else in the cart that ALSO makes a pretty decent illustration of exactly what 23.5 lbs looks like:

23 lbs of butter and cuteness

Well, you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m absolutely thrilled with myself. I’ve never achieved this sort of weight loss before, and so I have no idea if I’ll have trouble maintaining it. For now, though, I still look a bit too much like a “before” picture than an “after” picture for my own comfort. That, and going back to my extremely sedentary desk job is sure to add back at least five or so of those lost pounds. So, I’m readjusting my goal to include another 10 lbs of weight loss by the time I go back to work in two months. That will bring me back to my pre-fertility treatments and pre-FIRST-pregnancy weight. The cookie turkey snacking holiday season will make it a challenge, but I think I can do it!

Plan B update: 8 weeks in

I’m still plodding along on my Plan B diet lifestyle makeover, and I’m still doing well. The first month was great. The results (losing around 2 lbs a week) were rather intoxicating, and it was easy to more or less stay on plan. I hit a bit of a slump a couple of weeks ago, and found I was having a lot of cravings, mostly for chips and cookies. My exercise dropped down to once or twice a week, and I was just feeling blah about the whole thing. I either plateaued or was up a bit, depending on the scale, but I managed to stay more or less on track. (I actually thought it might have been a little PMS, but there’s still no sign of the return of that particular nuisance. Thank goodness!)

This past weekend was my first real off-the-wagon splurge. I had pumpkin pie on Saturday, about two dinners worth of turkey and stuffing on Sunday, and then totally blew it with a pogo and fries for lunch on the run yesterday. Yanno what? I don’t really feel bad about it. Heck, ya gotta live. Well, I don’t feel bad about it emotionally. But when you go for eight weeks eating mostly whole, fresh foods and then you eat a pogo and half-serving of (really, really delicious and so worth it) french fries soaked in ketchup and malt vinegar, your stomach is so. not. impressed. Lesson learned: indulgences not only bad for scale, but bad for tummy, too. Funny how quickly your body adapts; that kind of thing would have never upset my stomach just a couple of months ago.

Back in the middle of August I went to see my GP for a handful of small concerns, including extraordinary tiredness and frustration with my inability to lose weight despite exercising three to four times a week. Coupled with my problems in producing quality milk for Lucas, I really thought I had a thyroid problem. My GP was away for the month of September, and so we set a date of early October for her to discuss the results of my blood work. It just so happened that I went to see Dr Bishop for the first time that same week, and started on the whole Plan B thing.

When I went to see her last week, I realized another huge benefit of Plan B: my energy level is back up to normal, if not better. I don’t feel that draggy, lazy, can barely be bothered to do anything feeling that I felt most of the spring and summer. My blood work came back normal for thyroid and blood sugar, but low on iron stores, so I’ll have to remember to keep taking my post-natal vitamins. But it’s good to see everything else in balance. And my GP is very happy with the weight loss.

As of Saturday morning, I’m down almost 14 pounds overall. Yay me! (I might be up one or two after this weekend, but I’m confident I can shave them off again.) I can really see a difference now, and I can feel the difference in how my clothes fit. It’s been great reclaiming clothes from my closet that I haven’t seen for a year and a half!

I still want to talk about the Plan B eating and the links with Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, but I have to clean up the breakfast dishes before Lucas wakes up! Any tips for encouraging baby to turn four or five 30-minute naps a day into one honkin’ big three hour nap?

Ten-pages-in book review: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written a 10-pages-in book review. This is largely because I am in the year of the series, working my way through all seven Harry Potter books, the His Dark Materials trilogy, Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, and I’m currently in the middle of re-reading one of my all-time favourite series, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts)(snicker). But this isn’t about those books.

The book I’m reading right now is Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I’d seen it mentioned here and there, and it was on the library’s express read shelf. In a fit of optimism (I read quickly, but never seem to have the time to get around to reading lately, and the books are due in seven days) I picked it up. I am so glad I did.

I don’t know if this book would have resonated so deeply with me if I weren’t already in the midst of my own dietary recalibration exercise, but the timing couldn’t have been better. Pollan’s book is an examination of how we in Western society have reduced food to nothing more than nutrients, and asks why in a society completely obsessed with ‘healthy’ eating we are more overweight and more sick than ever before. It’s fascinating reading: part history lesson, part self-help, part diatribe. Even with the library-imposed deadline, I couldn’t put it down.

Why does Pollan think food needs to be defended? He observes that over the last generation or so, we have slowly replaced our intake of actual food with highly processed foodlike substances. He says that in reducing food to its nutritional components (not only macronutrients like proteins, carbohydrates and fats, but micronutrients like omega-3 and vitamins) and reducing the purpose of eating to bodily health, we actually do ourselves considerable harm.

In Defense of Food is broken into three parts. The first is a historical examination of how we came to be in this “age of nutritionism”, as Pollan calls it, and how “fake foods” became so ubiquitous. We in Western culture are so obsessed with the nutritional value of food that we have elevated it to an ideology requiring an “-ism”. Pollan blames the unholy trinity of the food industry, nutrition science and journalism our current mentality, and for propagating misleading and even dangerous dietary recommendations: “[M]ost of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half-century … has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.” Not to mention, he observes, ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan illustrates this in the example of margarine, “the first important synthetic food to slip into our diet.” He notes that margarine was created in the nineteenth century as a cheap substitute for butter, but became the poster child for the anti-saturated-fat movement that began in the 1950s at the advent of nutritionalism. This (albeit lengthy) paragraph illustrates not only Pollan’s point but his rather entertaining style as well:

[M]anufacturers quickly figured out that their product, with some tinkering, could be marketed as better – smarter! – than butter: butter with the bad nutrients removed (cholesterol and saturated fats) and replaced with good nutrients (polyunsaturated fats and then vitamins.) Every time margarine was found wanting, the wanted nutrient could simply be added (Vitamin D? Got it now. Vitamin A? Sure, no problem.) But of course margarine, being the product not of nature but of human ingenuity, could never be any smarter than the nutritionists dictating its recipe, and the nutritionists turned out to be not nearly as smart as they thought. The food scientists’ ingenious method for making healthy vegetable oil solid at room temperature – by blasting it with hydrogen – turned out to produce unhealthy trans fats, fats that we now know are more dangerous than the saturated fats they were designed to replace. Yet the beauty of a processed food like margarine is that it can be endlessly reengineered to overcome even the most embarrassing about-face in nutritional thinking — including the real wincer that its main ingredient might cause heart attacks and cancer. So now the trans fats are gone, and margarine marches on, unfazed and apparently unkillable. Too bad the same cannot be said of an unknown number of margarine eaters.

Fake foods and nutritionism aren’t Pollan’s only targets. He notes that the problem starts in the industrialization of food production. Pollan notes that two-thirds of our daily caloric intake comes from four crops: corn, soy, wheat and rice. Think about that. TWO-THIRDS! Humans are designed to be omnivores, so this kind of restriction — not to mention the lengths to which those four crops are processed — is a completely unnatural diet. He also talks about how the way in which we produce food has slowly eroded the quality of the food in order to improve yields, pointing out that it would take three apples from today to equal the iron content in one apple from the 1940s. He goes so far as to suggest that maybe this “nutritional inflation” is an underlying cause of the obesity epidemic: we are the first generation that is overfed AND undernourished at the same time.

As far as dietary advice, Pollan’s prescription is poetic in its simplicity: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the last third of the book, in which I am currently immersed, he expands upon this advice with a few simple dietary rules of thumb like, “would your great-grandmother recognize it as food” and “don’t eat it if it has ingredients you don’t recognize and/or can’t pronounce.”

It’s an engaging, easy-to-follow and eye-opening account, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. And, as an aside, I think Pollan is the first published writer I’ve ever seen even more in love with the parenthetical interruption of his own stream of thought than I am. Read this book, because it will totally change how you think about food.

Coming up next: integrating these ideas into the Plan B diet.

Food week: leftovers

(Sorry, this post would have been up two days ago, but I keep getting sucked into Twitter. I can either blog or play on Facebook or follow Twitter, but have yet mastered the art of staying current on all three. Laundry is also optional.)

Found a few new food faves lately, and thought I’d share.

At Marla’s recommendation (no, really, it’s worth reading, we’ll wait here until you get back), I went out this weekend and bought some “Freenut” butter. Oh, sweet peanutty goodness, was it ever delicious!! It was a little more expensive than regular peanut butter, but about the same price as the organic stuff I’ve been buying since I heard peanuts are one of the most heavily pesticided foods. Less than $5 a jar, anyway. And did I mention delicious? No, really! I was eating it right out of the jar, and it makes a superb afternoon snack when you dip freshly picked apple slices in it. (Apple picking post to follow.) It’s made from soy nuts instead of peanuts, but I honestly don’t think I could tell the difference. And it’s healthier, too. Best of all, Tristan loves it. Marla, I bow down before your awesomeness.

Speaking of soy, I tried something else new this week. Have you heard of edamame? Also, YUM! They’re baby soy beans, kind of like snow peas but you don’t eat the pod (I learned after I tried to eat the first three and did a quick google to find out whether it was supposed to have the texture of twigs as I masticated it.) Fresh and nutty, and you eat them with a sprinkle of my favourite indulgence: coarse salt. They count as a protein in my Plan B diet.

And speaking of protein, I found an interesting new way to eat tuna this week, too. I’m a fan of the occasional tuna-fish sandwich, especially very cold and mixed liberally with mayo and finely chopped onions. Since I tend to save my breads and cereals for breads for breakfast and dinner, I’ve dropped the tuna sandwich from my lunch rotation. I know tuna is a reasonably healthy protein choice, but it’s just way too fishy to eat without that slathery mayo goodness, IMHO. Then I discovered spicy Thai chili tuna from CloverLeaf. The spice covers up the fishiness, and I ate the whole can (two servings of protein, only 140 calories) and some leftover grilled peppers and zucchini (free!) for a really delicious lunch.

And speaking of Plan B, I’ve now officially lost 10 lbs in 28 days! Yay me! Half way to my goal in the first month. Not bad, eh?

Food week continues: eating according to Plan B

Hard to argue with the results. Plan B appears to be working beyond my wildest expectations. I’m down a full seven pounds in three weeks, to 184 lbs. Fourteen to go!

You know what? After three weeks, I actually do see this as a sustainable way of eating. It’s easier when I’m eating most of my meals at home, but I’ve been able to accommodate eating in restaurants, at friends’ houses, and on the run. I haven’t fallen too far off the wagon or been tempted to blow it all off, either. And there’s even room for treats every now and then.

The plan I’m on allows for 1400 calories a day, roughly divided into the following categories: 3 breads, cereals and starches (and two or three days a week should be starch-free), 3 fruits, 1 “restricted” veggies (simple carbs like carrots and onions), 7 proteins (each ounce of beef or chicken or cheese is one serving, as is 1.5 ounces of salmon and 3/4 of a cup of low-fat yogurt), 3 dairy, and 5 fats (i.e. tsp of oil, 2 tsp of salad dressing, 1/4 of an avocado, a strip of bacon, 2 tsp of peanut butter or 10 almonds.) The idea is to eat several small meals with healthy snacks in between so you’re never starving.

If you want to see exactly how I’m eating in all it’s boring goodness, I’ve tucked it below the fold. Continue reading “Food week continues: eating according to Plan B”

Food week continues: the green tea factor

Funny how I never got around to blogging this, but did you know that I give props to green tea for not only helping me lose weight after my miscarriage in 2006, but for conceiving Lucas as well?

I started drinking a Grande green tea from Starbucks every afternoon because I was looking for something besides coffee to warm me up in the afternoons. I’d heard green tea was rich in antioxidants, and I found it pretty refreshing to sip from a 16 oz cup throughout the day. Plus, as I joked with Cait from my office at the time, I just liked to think of myself as the kind of person who enjoyed green tea.

I drank it pretty much every weekday afternoon for about three months, which happened to coincide with the three months it took me to lose 10 lbs. And at the end of May of 2007 I had to quit drinking it because I found out I was pregnant. You shouldn’t drink green tea if you’re pregnant because it interferes with the absorption of folic acid, apparently.

During the summer I was pregnant, I was looking up green tea on the internet to see if it was safe to drink at all during pregnancy (I decided it was best to just stay away) and found out that there is a positive correlation between fertility and green tea. Nice to know after the fact, anyway!

And then just last month, I heard something about green tea and weight loss, so I looked that up, too. Apparently green tea also improves your metabolism to the equivalent of burning up to 100 calories per day. Over a year, that’s a full 10 lbs of weight loss, just from green tea alone. You can get green tea extract in pill form, but I don’t know about that. I do know, though, that I’m now drinking 16 oz or so of green tea every day again, and the weight is melting off again. It counts toward my eight cups of water per day, is completely calorie free, is rich in all kinds of anti-oxident goodness, and it gives me a little caffeine boost. Even the boys have noticed that my Tim Horton’s drive-thru order has migrated from “extra large, three milks” to “extra large green tea with ice cubes, please.”

Green tea. Who knew so much goodness could live in such a simple little thing. It’s also been shown to be preventative against cancer, high cholesterol and heart disease. Speaking of which, I’m off to brew myself a cup right now!