Fashionably Fit

There was a problem at our house earlier tonight.

A self-inflicted problem at that. I saw cinnamon M&Ms on a clearance end cap at Target and could. not. help. myself. I mean, cinnamon M&Ms? What are those? I had never heard of such a thing and had to know more. Plus, they were 90 cents. If they were terrible (unlikely) I could pitch them and little would be lost.

I don’t know about you, but I think Green is pretty chic in the snow bunny look.

The Biscoff spread, well, that’s a whole other story. I saw a jar of cookie butter from Trader Joe’s on Instagram and immediately pleaded on Facebook for someone to send me some. My friend Elin, being as amazing as she is, sent me a delicious care package from TJ’s that included the cookie butter, cocoa almond spread and a chocolate and coffee grinder that will be the perfect topping for the coffee cupcakes I still haven’t made.

My other amazing friend Kim also saw the post and didn’t say anything … but came to visit right before Christmas bearing a horseshoe necklace (“Your version of the Carrie necklace!” she told me, and I totally squealed) and, you guessed it, Biscoff spread.

I didn’t open the Biscoff spread right away, because we still had the cookie butter. We devoured the cookie butter far sooner than I’d care to admit and dove head first into the Biscoff, and when I came home looking forward to a spoonful, I knew things had gone too far. I was also pretty close to tearing into the M&Ms, for the simple reason that they were in my house, so they needed to go, too.

The thing is, if it’s a cookie or a cupcake, I can usually shut myself off. I know when I’ve had just enough and it’s time to call it a night. But with individual ingredients, I’m done for. I will eat small handfuls of chocolate chips until the entire bag is gone. Clearly I should have acted sooner, as I had exactly one-half cup of Biscoff spread left — just enough to make these Biscoff oatmeal cookies from Two Peas and Their Pod that I found via Table For Two.

Biscoff oatmeal cookies with cinnamon M&Ms

• 1 1/2 cups old fashioned oats
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tbsps all purpose flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour in an attempt to get rid of it and it was fine)
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup Biscoff spread
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• As many cinnamon M&Ms as you can fold in into the dough.

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside.

Using a stand or hand mixer, beat together the butter, Biscoff and sugars until fluffy; add the egg and vanilla and beat until blended.

Gradually beat in (on low) the dry ingredients, mixing just until combined. Carefully fold in those limited edition M&Ms. Refrigerate the dough for about 30 minutes; during this time you can preheat the oven to 350 F and line baking sheets with parchment or wax paper or silicone mats.

Bake for eight to 10 minutes, until they are just firm around the edges. Allow them to continue to firm up on the baking sheet for at least five minutes, then move to a wire rack.

Yep. You read that correctly — meatloaf muffins. This is not some perverse item I dreamed up to combine my loves of baking and meat. It’s just an easy way of making portion-controlled meatloaf.

I like meatloaf. Since I started cooking I’ve tried a couple different recipes, a couple Crock Pot varieties … but none ever tasted like classic meatloaf, ketchup glaze and all. It seems like when I make it in a loaf pan, half of the thing is lost to the grease on the bottom of the pan, and the rest of sticks to the pan, and it’s just a hideous mess.

Meatloaf muffins, thankfully, are not a hideous mess. And two of them are a serving, so there’s no hacking at a loaf and hoping you got the right amount. And just like its full-size friend, it tastes way better the next day.

Meatloaf muffins

From Cooking Light

Ingredients

• 1.25 to 1.5 pounds of lean ground beef
• 2 eggs
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 cup diced carrot
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• Minced garlic to taste
• 1 cup Italian seasoned breadcrumbs
• 1 cup ketchup
• 2 tablespoons yellow mustard
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Preheat the oven to 350 and coat a 12-muffin tin with nonstick spray.

Mix the carrots, onions and oregano together and sauté in olive oil; set aside to cool.

Mix the beef, eggs, breadcrumbs and remaining ingredients together, adding in the onion mixture when cool.

Scoop the meatloaf mixture into the muffin pan. My muffin cups were filled above the brim.

Bake at 350 until a meat thermometer reads 160 — this took about 35 minutes for me.

There is more to this cupcake than meets the eye.

It is a cookie-bottomed cupcake! An idea stolen from How Sweet Eats.

I don’t want to get all “the possibilities are endless!!” on you, but they kind of are. How Sweet Eats also features a snicker doodle cookie cupcake.

For the cupcake above I used the chocolate chip cookie recipe from How Sweet Eats. The cupcake portion is from a boxed chocolate cake mix, and the frosting is salted caramel buttercream. I cheated on that, too — I made my basic buttercream by beating together two cups of powdered sugar and two sticks of butter, then adding jarred caramel sauce (the horror!)  until the flavor and consistency were just right. I added a couple pinches of salt, but next time, I’d add more so the salt was more obvious.

I think recipe will be fun to play with for holidays and events — it’s a crowd pleaser for sure, and it’s so straight forward that experimenting is easy.

What kind of cookie bottomed cupcake combo are you dreaming up?

Sometimes I think about what would happen if I could travel back in time and introduce myself to my 300-pound self.

I know that thinking about yourself in the third person like that is really narcissistic and all I can say is that losing 100 pounds will do that to you.

But I think about what my 300-pound self would think. She’d see that going blonde was a really great idea and probably not waste a year thinking about it. She’d also be kinda disappointed to learn that even more than 100 pounds lighter, her future self is still kinda chunky, not rail thin like she’d have thought. I know she’d be thrilled to learn that not only will she eventually get married, she won’t be a fat bride.

I know what I would tell my old self. I would tell her that watching her body transform through a 100-plus-pound weight loss will be more fascinating and satisfying than she could ever imagine. There’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t even bother with because she’ll just have to figure it out as she goes, but there are two things I would get down on my knees and beg of her.

The first is simple: Start strength training from the very beginning. Pick up some dumbbells the first time you ever go to a gym. It will make a huge difference, and she shouldn’t have to wait several years to figure that out.

The second is a little bit more complicated: Don’t ever start running. And I mean it.

That might sound a bit odd coming from someone who was just bragging up her first half marathon two months ago. But that runner’s high wore off pretty quick, and I was left with a medal and 10 or 15 extra pounds and wondering why in the hell I ever thought that was a good idea.

Here’s the deal with running: It doesn’t make everyone ravenous or send them on a carb bender. It does have that effect on some people. I am one of those people. The weight I gain running is not muscle. It is fat, because running makes me  so hungry that I eat more than I burn.

I started running in 2009, and the last major change I saw in my body was in 2009. I don’t think those two facts are entirely unrelated. I did drop some weight between December 2010 and July 2011, when I stopped running and focused on strength training. It cost me more than $200 in wedding dress alterations. The seamstress’ gushing over how big my dress was was easily worth 10 times that much.

After the half marathon, I would pull out my medal and look at the sparkly details, glittering like fool’s gold, which for me, it actually was. Then I would look at the lumps and rolls of fat that had reappeared and couldn’t help but think of that 1990s safe-sex tagline that said something along the lines of “A few seconds of pleasure aren’t worth a lifetime of pain.”

And I know that my old self wouldn’t believe me. She’d think that running 13.1 miles sounds like an amazing accomplishment and not understand how her future self can think a 12:30 pace is an embarrassment when she couldn’t even complete one mile in less than 17 or 18 minutes when forced to “run the mile” in high school gym class.

But I would insist. I would assure her that fitting into a smaller size trumps crossing the finish line, it really does. Take up Pilates, I’d plead. You’ll love Spinning, I’d tell her — get up the nerve to go to a class sooner. Spend the money you would have spent on races on cute fitness clothes. You’ll look better in them if you don’t ever start running.

I’ve lost most of the weight I gained training for and running the half marathon. What I didn’t know when I set out to do it is that my life would have been 100 percent complete without the experience. I also know that I’d have always wondered about it if I’d never done it.

That’s why my current and former selves need to meet. They could learn a lot from each other.

I subscribe to several daily recipe newsletters, and almost every day, I’m disappointed.

I no longer get excited by subject lines promising me quick, healthy, delicious, inexpensive weeknight dinner recipes. Most of the time it’s either a combination of flavors and textures that just doesn’t sit well with me, even on a computer screen, or it’s carb based.

When Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food daily email arrived last week and the teaser shot was of chicken ricotta meatballs, I was intrigued. I clicked through. I held my breath. And it was something I’d actually consider making!

(Carb-based. Oops.)

I can’t really do a better job of telling you how to make chicken ricotta meatballs than Martha did, but I can tell you that if I had those 20 minutes of my life to live over I would definitely brown the meatballs in a skillet before throwing them into the broth. Oh, and I used a ton of Greek seasoning in both the meatballs and the broth, and I added pasta at the last minute, and I’m not usually a big pasta fan, but in this instance it totally worked.

One of the biggest challenges for me when it comes to cooking and planning meals is finding the right recipes. The right recipe for me is not carb based, is easy to put together, doesn’t have a ton of ingredients, and in an ideal world can  be made ahead of time and reheated. This soup was the easiest thing in the world to throw together on a Sunday night. The thing is, I like to cook; I just don’t always like to do it on a weeknight.

With my initiative to cook more this year, I’ve been trying to browse the web for recipes a little bit each night, instead of waiting until right before I need to go grocery shopping. I have a “meal planning” bookmark folder, and let me tell you, it’s a small change that’s already helped me in a big way.

I’d like to start digging through cookbooks more often to find ideas. I often lust after cookbooks in bookstores (ooh, those shiny pages and colorful photos …) but can’t bring myself to spend $10 or $20 on a cookbook when I might only ever use a few recipes. I had a subscription to Everyday Food because it came free with my Martha Stewart Weddings subscription last year, and I think I might renew it and also subscribe to Cooking Light and Food Network magazine. I had a Rachel Ray subscription but I don’t think her magazine is for me because I spend too much wondering how anyone who eats that many carbs stays so thin.

What cookbooks do you have? What magazines do you recommend? Where do you find your meals?

When I was about 13, I attended a Presbyterian church with my older cousin Jodi. The preacher would always wrap up each sermon by saying, “Story and we’re through,” tell a relevant story, and sure enough, we were done.

I feel like I should preface this recipe with that line: “Story and we’re through.”

The week after Christmas, the husband and I were cruising through Super Target with no game plan. In other words, a recipe for disaster, on the fast track to coming home with $80 worth of hair products, greeting cards, nail polish and not one damn thing to eat.

So I got on my phone and cruised over to Your Nutrionista, a blog I frequently check before grocery shopping, because Leah’s recipes are simple and healthy. There I was, standing the meat department and furiously thumbing through her archives when the Spicy Cajun Slow Cooker White Bean Soup with Andouille and Collards caught my eye.

Leah found the original recipe on Real Simple, and I made a few minor changes to suit our tastes and what we already had at home. I accidentally left out the red wine vinegar, and it turned out OK, but next time, I’ll definitely add that in.

White bean and sausage soup

Adapted from Real Simple via Your  Nutritionista

• 1 pound andouille sausage (I think spicy Italian would also work if you can’t find andouille), cut into bite-sized pieces
• 1 pound dried white beans
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 32-oz. boxes of low-sodium chicken broth (I ended up using about a box and a half)
• Thyme (I used several tablespoons of the dried spice; the original recipe calls for four sprigs of fresh)
• Chopped spinach, about two cups

Put the sausage pieces, beans, chicken broth and diced onion in the slow cooker; pour in chicken broth and stir. Cook on low for about 8 hours (I find that slow cooker times vary depending on the size of your slow cooker and how much you’ve put in it).  About 20 minutes before you’re ready to eat, throw in the chopped spinach. Before eating, throw in the red wine vinegar and salt and pepper to taste.

I have a confession to make. 2012 was going to be the year Fashionably Fit ended.

It had been dying a slow death for several months anyway, and I was going to pull the plug. But then my hosting company automatically renewed my account, and I now own this space until some time in 2013. My immediate reaction was just, ugh — talk about wasted money. As if the first year hadn’t been enough of a waste.

But I realized keeping the blog might help me with my goal for 2012: Cook more.

2011 was huge — I got married, ran a half marathon and had my gall bladder removed (sorry, no link). I baked a lot, mostly in the form of birthday cakes and treats for coworkers. But I didn’t cook as much as I should have. There was white chicken chili, of course, and a lot of baked eggs in my cute Le Creuset ramekins, and far too many outings to Taco Tuesday at Tijuana Flats (this will not change).

I was busy, first with the wedding and then with the half and always with work, but a lot of really busy people put dinner on the table more nights per week than I did. In 2012, I’d like to cook dinner three times per week, with at least one of those meals being a bigger meal, possibly from the slow cooker, with leftovers. I’d like to write about some of those meals, too.

We’ll see what happens. But in the mean time, I beg you to check out these champagne cupcakes from one of my new favorite blogs, Dessert for Two. All of the recipes are scaled-down dessert recipes to feed two people — how perfect is that? When I told my husband, who is generally disinterested in most things food blog related, about the concept, he said, “That’s brilliant!” I agree.

I made these cupcakes with a few minor changes for New Year’s Eve, and we had the other two for dessert on New Year’s Day, and now they’re gone. Too perfect.

Admittedly, I got too heavy handed with the champagne in the frosting, and it got runny — next time, I’ll stick to the directions.

Pink champagne cupcakes

Slightly adapted from Dessert for Two

Cupcake ingredients

1/4  canola oil
pinch of salt
1/3 cup sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
2 tablespoons pink champagne (I used Barefoot Bubbly Pink Moscato — judge all you want, it’s delicious and perfect for this recipe)
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon flour
1/8 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of baking soda

Preheat oven to 350 and line a muffin tin with four cupcake papers. Beat together the oil, sugar and salt on medium speed for about a minute, or until fluffy. Beat in egg, champagne and vanilla until combined. Mix in the flour, baking powder and baking soda by hand, being careful not to over mix.

Fill each muffin cup 3/4 cup full with batter. Christina’s recipe calls for a baking time of 19 to 21 minutes at 350 F, but mine were ready to go by 17 minutes.

Frosting ingredients

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup powdered sugar
2-3 tablespoons champagne

Beat together the butter and sugar, adding champagne by the tablespoon until you reach the desired consistency. Four tablespoons is definitely too many — I piped my frosting on just to watch it melt into a pile.

Serves four

A few months ago, I came across a post on Glamour.com’s Save the Date wedding blog asking readers to share photos of their wedding dresses. I immediately dropped everything I was doing or supposed to be doing and submitted a photo and story.

I had forgotten all about it when I got an email from the blogger this afternoon that it would be posted! Check it out. I loved my dress because to me, it is timeless and classic. But really, I loved a lot of dresses that I tried on. I love wedding dresses period. My heart races when I walk by a bridal shop. I might even leave my wedding band at home and go try on dresses again. When you think of style and what you wear as a form of art and expression, there is no more meaningful piece than a wedding gown.

I put together a post on our wedding (that is, slapped up some photos with three lines of text) here, because I felt that I should, after referring to my  now-husband as my fiancé for a year and a half. I thought about writing excruciatingly detailed “wedding recap!!!1!!1″ posts, but then I thought better. Archiving my own awesomeness is not really why I write this blog. It probably just seems that way 80 percent of the time.

Seeing my dress on Glamour.com made me realize what I did want to write about my wedding. As I said, it was the party of a lifetime. It was the most fun ever. I hear a lot of newlyweds say they’re so glad their wedding is over, and I just think, you totally did it wrong.

My wedding was fun because, after my dress, my top priority was a good time. I did not want to be stressed or snapping at people on my wedding day. I’ve seen it happen.

I remember saying to my mother the week before the wedding that if we’d spent more, I would have had a “more exciting” meal. At the wedding everyone raved about the stuffed chicken breast. I’m not kidding. I didn’t think it was anything special, but I’m glad everyone liked it, and I’m even more glad that we didn’t waste money on fancy food. When I thought about it, food is the last thing I remember about a wedding — unless it was terrible. People remember bad wedding food. They don’t remember the good stuff.

I also did things the way I wanted to do them. I did not do anything because it was a tradition or because I was supposed to. I walked down the aisle alone. I am not close to my father, but I also didn’t want anyone “giving” me away, as if my husband had traded some livestock for me. I lived on my own as a self-sufficient adult for several years before I met my husband. I did not go from being someone’s daughter to someone’s wife — I am my own person, and my marriage is something that my husband and I entered into together. It does not involve anyone else.

As an added bonus, I did not share the spotlight with anyone on my way down the aisle.  I loved that.

I didn’t have a flower girl or ring bearer. Too complicated. Too much risk they might steal some attention, too. I put “adult reception” on my invitations, and I meant it. I didn’t care if that hurt feelings or inconvenienced people because it was OUR DAY and that was how we wanted things. If you  want three flower girls and a crafts table for kids at your wedding, you should totally do that.

You should do whatever you want within reason and within your budget, because it’s true — the day is over before you know it. It flies. And the last thing you want is to be glad it’s over! That’s just plain sad.

I did it. I ran a half marathon!

On Nov. 5, I lined up with 23,000 new friends and set off on a 13.1 mile adventure through Savannah, Ga.  I knew I could do it, as I’d run 12 miles two weeks before the half and 10 miles six days before the half.

The 10-mile run was a race through a local cemetery on the day before Halloween, so I wore a butterfly costume.

Photo courtesy of First Place Sports – Do you like how that girl is totally killing herself to not be beaten by the weirdo in the butterfly costume?

But the 13.1 — completing it wasn’t a question, but how fast I’d be able to do it certainly was. It became evident to me after about a month of training that I lacked the time and interest to really give the half my all, so I focused on just completing the distance. I finished in 2 hours and 44 minutes, which equals 13.1  12 minute, 34 second miles. I did run/walk intervals, running 3 minutes and walking 1 minute.

I walked like I got beat up for the rest of the day after the half, and I had some pain in my right foot for a few days, but that was it. Immediately afterward, I was totally in love with the sport of running and the pursuit of half marathons and wanted to sign up for another, enthralled with the idea of what I could if I really put my mind to it.

My husband takes the best race photos ever.

Then the euphoria of crossing the finish line wore off and I remembered that I really don’t like running that much. I remembered that getting up at 5:45 a.m. on a Saturday to slog through a two-hour run kind of sucks, and how much I hated the insatiable hunger that follows. I remembered that I really like Spinning and how much I want that “Million Dollar Baby” back, and that the pursuit of that doesn’t involve the urge to eat entire bags of tortilla chips. A pair of jeans that were a little tighter than they should be reminded me that I gained weight training for the half, and that made me furious.

I am really, really glad I ran a half marathon. I can honestly say that crossing the finish line was one of my proudest moments. I started to get emotional when the volunteer handed me the medal, but then they started throwing a ton of free bullshit at me and I ended up wandering around with my arms full of Cytomax, bottled water and these disgusting Snickers “energy bars” with a bewildered look on my face until my husband found me.

Training for and completing a half marathon is an experience I 100 percent recommend to anyone considering it. I am certain it is something I will do again. But for now, I’m really glad it’s over.

I came across this piece in The New York Times during my regular web browsing earlier this week, and the topic immediately grabbed me: Do we have an “exercise set point,” a genetic predisposition for how much we move?

Even at 300 pounds, I enjoyed getting out and moving. I didn’t walk very fast, and I certainly couldn’t run, but I never minded taking my dogs for a walk. Granted, I thought a mile was a long way to go, and I was tired if I spent a day shopping, but I wasn’t quite the couch potato you might imagine. So it follows that physical activity was the major catalyst in my weight loss. The first time I ever stepped onto an elliptical machine, I was on it for 25 minutes, and I didn’t collapse at the end — at 300+ pounds.

Here’s what really grabbed me from the NYT story:

In animal studies, rodents bred over generations to voluntarily run for hours will, if deprived of their wheels, race around their cages until they’ve fulfilled their bodies’ seeming imperative for motion, while animals bred to be languorous and avoid activity will, if forced to swim or run, subsequently lie on their cage floors and not move for hours. They are not merely tired, Dr. Wilkin says, but obeying some inner physiological command. The animals seem to have a “genetically determined level of preferred energy expenditure,” he says, to which their bodies default.

 

This made me think of my grandmother, who is one of the most active people I know and is always doing something — washing clothes, fussing with flowers — to keep moving. Could it be that I was lucky enough to inherit that “seeming imperative for motion”?

When people ask me about weight loss, I often tell them exercise is the key. I preach over and over (just ask my husband) that a 30-minute walk each day is never going to negate the hours you spend sitting at a desk and we need to move, move, move as much as possible. In fact, I love to move so much that I have achieved fitness without losing all of my fatness.

But what if there’s more to it than being one of the lucky ones?

“Twin studies show that the environment, defined broadly as the physical and cultural environment, has a massive influence on the level of physical activity,” at least in children, says John J. Reilly, a professor of pediatric energy metabolism at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and the author of a commentary accompanying Dr. Wilkin’s study. Children’s physical activity is determined largely by their living conditions — in other words, not their biology.

I think it’s a slippery slope. You may be genetically predisposed to being less active, but you canmotivate yourself to get moving. You might not ever run a marathon, but you can get your ass in gear and go for a brisk walk, do some chores, yard work, and maintain a decent activity level. Maybe I’m genetically predisposed to wanting to eat burgers, fries and pizza every night (because I probably would if I could), but I choose not to do that.

What do you think about “exercise set points”?