Carb Lovers Unite

I’ve never owned a scale and have never followed a diet of any kind simply because I love food and don’t typically do well with anything that’s forbidden. If I’m told not to do something, or not to eat something, I tend to want to do it more, or eat more of the said foods.

That’s why the #NewYearNewMe challenge appealed to me. I was eager to lose weight and get back in shape after our baby was born and was even more excited to learn that I didn’t have to follow a strict diet with rules that I would  feel bad about breaking.

The CalorieStory app on Facebook has helped me track my calorie intake and although I haven’t been vigilant about tracking my meals every single day, it has made me more aware of what I’m eating/drinking on a regular basis.

The CarbLovers Diet book that was sent me for this challenge has helped me out as well. Filled with some amazing recipes and helpful hints, I’ve learned quite a bit about healthy eating and losing weight without having to give up the carbs that I enjoy.

Health magazine editors, Ellen Kunes and Frances Largeman-Roth, RD, are behind this helpful book and inspire readers to be more creative with family meals instead of eliminating certain items from your diet, like so many other weight-loss programs tend to do.

These 4 CarbLovers Rules helped maintain my excitement over this challenge and I hope it encourages you as well.

1. Eat a CarbStar at every meal. Carbohydrate-rich foods contain two types of starch. The one we hear about most often is high-glycemic starch (found in the foods we’ve been told to avoid) which is absorbed quickly and raises blood sugar. It also causes a spike in energy.The other type of starch is called Resistant Starch – a weight-loss powerhouse because it does not get absorbed into the bloodstream or broken down into glucose.CarbStars include oatmeal, bananas, beans and lentils, potatoes, whole-grain pasta, barley, brown rice, peas, rye and pumpernickel bread, polenta and potato chips.
2. Balance your plates. CarbStars should take up around 1/4 of your plate. The rest of your meals will be filled with great weight-loss boosters like lean meats and low-fat dairy products, good fats, and fruits & veggies.
   
3. Never let yourself go hungry. The meals found in the recipe section of this book will leave you feeling fully satisfied. Research shows that when you feel full, you’re much more likely to stick with a new weight-loss plan.
   
4. Enjoy what you love to eat. Most diets out there dictate what we CAN’T eat even though there’s solid research out there that suggests we end up bingeing on the foods that we’re forbidden to eat. On the CarbLovers Diet, you won’t have to give up anything. You can indulge (in moderation) every day.

Other great things to keep in mind about carbs:

• CarbLovers carbs curb hunger better than other types of foods. They’re rich in fiber and low in calories.
• People feel happier when they include carbs in their diets and crankier when they restrict them.
• Carbs prevent fatigue. Resistant Starch carbs help your body burn fat more efficiently so you stay energized longer.

Caribbean Mahi Mahi with Banana Chutney

The list of Resistant Starch foods are some of my favorites so this “diet” is perfect for me. The foods found in the recipe section made my mouth water and I marked at least a dozen that I want to start including in our weekly meal plan. These are healthy meals that support your weight-loss goals and that your entire family will love.

Tell me these recipes don’t sound delicious: Black Bean Tacos, Polenta Fritters with Asparagus & Eggs, Zucchini & Potato Scramble with Bacon, Black Bean & Zucchini Quesadillas, Bistro-Style Sirloin with New Potatoes, Caribbean Mahi Mahi with Banana Chutney. My mouth is watering already.

The book also includes a section on a workout routine that you can easily incorporate along with these yummy recipes. The fact that this weight-loss challenge has me more excited about food is a good sign that it’s a diet that will be much easier for most people to follow than others that “encourage” you to eliminate certain things from your pantry.

If you would like to win a copy of The CarbLovers Diet, there are several ways you can enter. One winner will be randomly chosen on February 1st.

• Leave a comment below stating what CarbLovers recipe you’re most excited to try.
• Leave a comment below listing what you had for breakfast this morning and the number of calories consumed. You can keep track on the CalorieStory Facebook app and monitor your intake as well as taking the challenge (you’re entered to win some great prizes through the sponsors when you do).
• Earn an extra entry by sharing this post on Twitter (leave a separate comment when you do with a link to your mention).
• Earn an additional entry by sharing this post on Facebook (leave a separate comment after you do).

Good luck and Happy Dieting!

Happy Healthy Hip Parenting
Peace Begins in the Home

Emptying the Nest

While I have been busy dealing with the expansion of our family unit, others moms in my circle have been preparing for the empty nest phase. I can’t imagine another transition that comes with more stress or emotion.

Today’s young people are growing up at such a fast pace. Parents are having to educate themselves on how to best prepare their offspring for life in the “real world,” even as the world evolves faster than most of us can comprehend.

As a Parent Educator, I work with parents of young children, for the most part. Their main concerns are trying to help their kids become more responsible and respectful, hoping to instill these qualities at a young age so that when the time comes for their kids to head out on their own, they’ll be perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and dealing with issues as an independent adult.

It’s certainly not easy.

Dr. Brad Sachs, a psychologist and father of three young adults, has written a book on Emptying the Nest, a book that is meant to reach parents before their children are launched into the world, unprepared.

In his clinical practice, Dr. Sachs realized that it was fairly common for young adults to unsuccessfully make the transition to independent life and his book serves to encourage parents to help their tweens and teens become more competent and resilient.

In analyzing this cultural phenomena through his own case studies, Dr. Sachs discusses the role of smaller family size, suggesting it may result in more helicopter parents:

Raising fewer children more easily creates the possibility of focusing too intently on those children, which in turn makes their eventual emancipation more involved and emotionally fraught for everyone involved.

These type of parents show uncertainty and ambivalence when it comes to striking the optimal balance between support and enabling, between care and overprotectiveness.

Modern technology is a contributing factor as well:

These perpetual electronic umbilical cords [instant messaging, text messages, email, video chat] can work against the process of separation…particularly when the young adult is feeling insecure about his capacity to strike out on his own.

Financial independence is also a challenge for many young adults, especially with the economy taking a turn for the worse over the last few years. “Tough economy or not…young people have simply not been expected to practice financial self-sufficiency and restraint during their adolescence, which hobbles their capacity to do so as young adults.”

Dr. Sachs goes on to discuss the developmental stages of letting go and exactly how parents can help prepare their young adults for true independence.

We see our children at various points in their development through the lens of how we remember ourselves when we were their age. And we nurture them according to how we were raised when we were at that stage.

I strongly advise parents to think back on their early adulthood with as much accuracy and objectivity as they can so that they operate with as much flexibility as possible, rather than unconsciously repeating old patterns, or reflexively opposing them.

In addition, it is worthwhile to consider being more honest with your young adult regarding what your life was like when you were his age.

He devotes an entire chapter on the relationship between mom and dad at this stage of their children’s lives:

While we tend, as mothers and fathers, to pay very careful attention to how our child-rearing behaviors affect our children’s development, we tend to minimize or even ignore how our marital behaviors affect our children’s development and the interaction between our lives as couples and as parents.

The relationship between a husband and wife can have an enormously positive or negative impact on a young adult’s efforts to separate and become self-sufficient.

With each stage of our children’s lives comes new challenges but I’m excited to know that there are great resources available for parents at every one of them. And knowing that focusing on my relationship with my husband will benefit all of us is even more encouraging.

I’m scheduling our monthly Date Night now just to keep us on track for the long – and exciting – journey ahead.

Happy Healthy Hip Parenting
Peace Begins in the Home

The ABCs of Working Parents

Working moms (and dads) manage the greatest balancing act you could ever imagine. Whether these parents work from home or leave the house – and the kids – every day, there are so many things running through their mind on a regular basis that it’s overwhelming the amount of things they can accomplish on any given day.

Mother of three and Managing Editor of Real Simple, Kristin van Ogtrop, somehow managed to find the time to put together a great encyclopedia of “Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom” in her new book, “Just Let Me Lie Down.”

In alphabetical order, van Ogtrop lists the phrases that many working parents will recognize. I found myself nodding in agreement and laughing out loud at the many experiences Kristin shares from her own experience as a multi-tasking, very sleepy, mother and full-time employee of the corporate world.

Here is a sample of what you’ll find inside:

Accounting error: The irrevocable mistake you make when you decide to have one more child than you can actually handle.

Best of luck: The happy realization that you have accidentally stumbled upon a career that you really love.

Confidence man: The guy in your life who believes in you above all others, thinks you are smart and beautiful, and loves you despite your manifold flaws.

Delusions of SAHM grandeur: The phenomenon by which a working mom will actually believe that just because she is at home for a few days with the kids, it means she will be as talented/capable/patient/sane as her full-time stay-at-home-mom friends.

Emotional intelligence: A fundamental part of the grand human machine that, mysteriously, many people seem to lack.

Friends with benefits: Will pick your child up from school when your babysitter is sick; Will go out of her way to fill you in on school gossip that you may have missed; Will not be offended when you are too busy to socialize.

Guilt curve: The process by which your feelings of shame and inadequacy about being a working mom grow and then diminish.

Heartbreak by babysitter: The unique, surprising loss you experience when the person who has been watching over your children exits your little world, even if you have forced that exit.

It takes a village: The nifty if unrealistic notion that we can all just band together to attain the unattainable when it comes to the care of our children.

Juggler’s lament: The daily complaint you inflict upon anyone who will listen that enumerates, in tedious detail, all the balls you are dropping because no one can possibly manage to have so many in the air at once.

Kingdom of No: A magical land that exists only in your fantasies, where “no” is always the answer and you never feel guilty for saying it.

List paradox: The Catch-22 of managing your life. You make a to-do list because it enables you to feel as if you are in control of your life and helps you see what you can accomplish. Therefore, it boosts your self-esteem. However, there will always be more items on your list than you can actually cross off, which makes you feel worse. And so you start to cheat: writing things on your list that you have already done just so you can cross them off.

Mid-conversation screen saver: The thing that unexpectedly happens when your husband is talking and suddenly you start thinking about whether you should take that chicken out of the freezer to defrost and if you should wear your black pants to work tomorrow because it’s only Monday and you might be able to get away with wearing them twice this week without anyone noticing if you put enough days in between.

No child left behind: The reminder running through the head of nearly every working mother after just one brush with disaster… (All mothers have a story about leaving their child somewhere, or locking them in the car, or…)

Oppositional advantage, or Newton’s law meets your life: The fact that having two opposing forces in your life – work and children – vastly improves your ability to put things into perspective…to every action (pursuing a career) there is an equal and opposite reaction (trying to raise children).

PTSD (Post-Thanksgiving stress disorder): The state of extreme anxiety you experience during the month of December.

Quest through the chaos, a.k.a. quest that leads straight to madness: The search through your entire house for an important document, photo, or piece of memorabilia that your child needs to take to school – tomorrow.

Ravages of time: The damage you inflict upon those around you when you find yourself with too much to do and not enough time to get it all done.

Separate issue: The children you bear who will, inevitably, spend most of their lives apart from you. And your issue? That you will never stop missing them, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Triumph of the caregiver: When children injure themselves (or damage valuable property, or get into physical fights, or just generally make really bad decisions) not on your babysitter’s watch, but on yours.

Unmilestones: Important developmental moments in the lives of your children that no one notices but that, regarded as a whole, present the depressing truth that your kids are growing up and away from you…Part of the reason people have more children is to relive the moments they weren’t paying attention to the last time around.

Very, verrrryyyy sleeeeepy…: Your constant state. No hypnosis required.

Women not on the verge of a nervous breakdown: The rare working moms among us who are in charge of every committee and board and project and task force and who still have time to run marathons and make birthday cakes from scratch.

X marks the spot: The imaginary end of the imaginary treasure map you wish existed for all the times – that is, about a dozen every day – when your child claims he can’t find something that is either right in front of him, lost in the disaster zone that is his bedroom, or left in his locker at school.

Young and restless: Your children at the dinner table…eating dinner as a family is so stressful that it feels like it should be part of the workday.

Zip it: What you must tell yourself when you are at that conversational tipping point when you really want to say the thing that will anger your husband, make your child storm out of the room, or cause a co-worker to think you are unreasonable.

Let’s face it, the above concepts are all too familiar to all of us parents who are honest with ourselves – and who still have some sense of humor remaining. That’s the only thing that gets us through it, the humor and those adorable kids that wake up on the right side of the bed when we least expect them to.

Kristin captures life as a working parent perfectly in this great compendium of experiences we’ve all gone through at one time or another (or will at some point in the near future). She said it best when she described the great balancing act working moms and dads manage on a daily basis: “There are things we do because we love our families and there are things we do because we love our jobs, and sometimes these things try to cancel each other out.”

If you’re reading this at work, on your lunch break, after the kids are in bed or before they wake up, you may be a working parent and I commend you for taking a few moments for yourself.

Happy Healthy Hip Parenting
Peace Begins in the Home

You’ll Lose the Baby Weight (and OTHER LIES about pregnancy and childbirth)

If you’ve ever been pregnant before, you’ll appreciate the humorous take on this nine month adventure as Dawn Meehan (author and mom blogger) explains the details in her newest book, “You’ll Lose the Baby Weight (and OTHER LIES about pregnacy and childbirth).”

Meant to entertain and amuse, Dawn’s true-to-life accounts of pregnancy will ring true with anyone who hears the word, “Mom,” over a 100 times a day. Of course, Dawn probably hears that word more often since she has six kids and has been pregnant for about 4 1/2 years altogether. Nine months doesn’t sound so bad after that, does it?

Even though I’m in the final stretch of this pregnancy I’ve pretty much forgotten what it was like the first time around. Thanks to Dawn’s book, I can truly laugh about the challenges I’ve had to face during the first two trimesters and remind myself what I have to look forward to over the final few weeks and in the delivery room.

Check out a sampling of Dawn’s wonderful advice:

• Although I don’t believe there’s any evidence that cleaning your house is bad for you during pregnancy, I think you should pretend it is.

• A well-rounded diet:

1. Dairy – a chocolate shake and half a pound of cheese should do the trick.
2. Vegetables – a sixteen-ounce container of spinach dip will do nicely.
3. Fruit – a quarter of a cheesecake topped with raspberry sauce fulfills your fruit requirement
4. Bread – a  loaf of King’s Hawaiian bread (you need something with which to eat the spinach dip) and a pound of butter cookies takes care of your bread requirement.
5. Protein – sausage pizza, a big, fat hamburger, and twenty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (What? Peanut butter has protein!) fills the need for protein.

• On giving up caffeine, Dawn says, “If you plan to give it up altogether, just wear a sign around your neck to give others fair warning. ‘I”m pregnant and I haven’t had any coffee.’ “

• And of course, the Murphy’s Law of pregnancy – “Your baby can be kicking for twenty minutes straight, but the minute you try to get your husband or mom or friend to put their hand on your belly so they can fell her move, she’ll stop. Without fail. Every time.”

Pregnancy is a true adventure for women – and their partners – and humor is a good skill to have to get through it. You’ll Lose the Baby Weight was a book I had a hard time putting down. I will definitely be adding this to my list of perfect gifts for the mom-to-be.

Happy Healthy Hip Parenting
Peace Begins in the Home