Age70

What if you woke up tomorrow . . .

/ Carol / Leave a comment

I was doing my usual morning scroll through Facebook this morning when I came across a post from Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital (officially Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University). In the post, they asked that people who were caretakers of children who received treatment at Vandy to post a photo of their child and tell a little about their story.

It was both heartbreaking and heartwarming to read the comments – over a hundred. Then I came across one comment that has stuck with me.

Morgan Fuller died at the age of 17 from cancer. She was treated at Vandy.  Until I read her father’s post this morning, I had never heard of her.  However, she seemed wise beyond her years – which is common among childhood cancer fighters.  Once, while speaking to a crowd at a Relay for Life event in 2016, Morgan said, ”What if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you thanked God for today?” Read that again:

“What if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you thanked God for today?”

What a perspective! God/Jesus/the Holy Spirit, family, friends, a home, food on the table, freedom, so, so many things to thank God for each day!

Right now my nightly routine after I get into bed each night is to recite to myself The Lord’s Prayer, and then Psalm 4:8. That’s one of my Atomic Habits.  I will add thanking God for all my blessings. What a wonderful and peaceful way to end each day!

Zero-Point Taco Soup

/ Carol / Leave a comment

The weather has turned cooler, and I saw something on Facebook about Zero-Point Taco Soup. I didn’t need persuading – that immediately became what I would make for dinner. I didn’t have taco seasoning on hand, and so I made a quick trip to Kroger to get some.

Within ten minutes of getting home, the soup was simmering on the stove. What could be simpler than opening a bunch of cans, a package of chicken breasts, and some seasoning, and dump it all in the cooking pot! The only other step was to shred the chicken after it had cooked.

I served it with a dollop of nonfat Greek yogurt (instead of sour cream) and a little grated Cabot 75% Reduced Fat Sharp Cheddar Cheese. Both of those are 0-points, too. If I used more (half ounce +) of the Cabot cheese, it would move to a point, but I kept it under 1/2 ounce. It was both tasty and filling. It tasted so good, I had a second bowl – and I counted the cheese as 1 point since I had two helpings of it!

The soup freezes well. So I will put some in the refrigerator to eat over the next couple days, and I will put some in the freezer to enjoy again in a few weeks.

Here is how I made it:

Zero-Point Taco Soup

  • 4 cans beans (black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, great northern beans – whatever kind you like or a combination of beans. I used Kroger’s Tri-Bean Blend)
  • 1 can diced tomatoes
  • 1 large can tomato sauce OR pureed tomatoes
  • 1 qt. chicken broth (you can use less if you want your soup to be thicker)
  • 2 Tablespoons taco seasoning (add more or less, depending on your taste)
  • 1 lb. boneless/skinless chicken breasts
  • diced onion, peppers, garlic – to taste (can use fresh or dehydrated)
  • salt/pepper to taste

Directions:

  1. Dump everything into a large saucepan (or crockpot)
  2. Bring to a simmer
  3. Once chicken is cooked through, take it out, shred it, and add it back into the soup.
  4. To serve, you can top with sour cream or Greek yogurt, grated cheese, corn chips – whatever toppings you like

Zero Points on WW Blue Plan. Be sure to add points for any toppings you choose.

Get Outside! An Atomic Habit

/ Carol / 2 Comments

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by [James Clear]Sometimes we come across a book that actually changes our lives. That happened to me a couple years ago when I read a book titled Atomic Habits by James Clear.  The basic premise is that if we set big goals, we often set ourselves up for defeat since big and perfect goals take so much time and effort. However, if we work on small habits – 3 minutes of exercise each morning, cutting out one teaspoon of sugar in our coffee, writing one thank you note each week, making two business calls before lunch – then it becomes like compound interest. The benefits snowball over time.

Back in March when this pandemic isolation began, I decided that one atomic habit I wanted to develop was getting outside for just a few minutes each day.  Here is a video I made on today’s walk. Excuse the breathlessness! I had just walked up a hill. I could’ve waited till I caught my breath to start the video, but this is calling “Living Real with Carol!” and the reality was that I was a little breathless at the moment.

7-Point Pizza (WW Blue)

/ Carol / 1 Comment

I made personal pizzas tonight – one for my husband and one for me.  Pizza is one of my all time favorite dishes!  The last time we had pizza was during the summer when I ordered one from Domino’s Pizza, and it was less than delicious. It was so bad, in fact, that it turned me off from wanting pizza for a couple months.  However, lately after eating so much chicken and tuna and lean beef, I have yearned for something a little more indulgent.

After reading about 2-ingredient dough, and then researching and finding an even better (supposedly) dough recipe, I decided to give home-made pizza another try.

First the dough. I got the recipe from My Bizzy Kitchen. Here’s that recipe:

Dough:

2 cups self-rising flour

1 teaspoon yeast

1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 cup Fage Fat Free Greek Yogurt

1/2 – 3/4 cup warm water

  • Heat oven to 450 (see notes).
  • In a bowl, mix the flour, salt and yeast together. Stir in the yogurt and mix until it starts to combine. Start with 1/2 a cup of water and see how the dough comes together. If there is still a bit of loose flour in the bowl, add a couple tablespoons of water at a time, until it forms a ball.
  • This dough can be used within an hour of making, but truth be told, I normally don’t use it until day 2 or 3. On the first day I let it rise in my microwave all day, then store it in a ziplock bag.
  • On the day of baking, add a tablespoon of flour on your counter. Wet your hands and grab desired amount of dough for your pizza. Most of my individual pizzas are 5 ounces. Top with desired toppings and bake for 10 minutes, or until desired doneness.

I didn’t  put my dough in the microwave to rise. As a matter of fact, I didn’t let it rise at all because we were making pizza right away.

I divided the dough into four equal parts. We used two of those for our two individual pizzas tonight. I put the other two parts in a Ziplock bag in the refrigerator for pizza later this week. (Note added: We used the extra dough three days later for another two pizzas, and it was perfect! So it keeps well in the fridge for at least three days). The flour is the only ingredient with points. So each of the four parts contain 1/2 cup self-rising flour – which is 5 points on WW Blue Plan.

The photo above shows our two pizzas ready to go in the oven. That’s mine on the bottom – and Ron’s at the top. He added additional sauce on top of his other ingredients. It looks like a barbecue pizza, but it isn’t – just lots of pizza sauce! That’s because he doesn’t usually each much pizza crust because of his blood sugar. Thus, he wanted to be sure he had plenty of the toppings.

In the photo above, the pizzas are on a pizza stone that I bought from Pampered Chef years ago. I had put the pizza stone in the oven while I made the dough. So it was piping hot when we put the dough on it.

I sprayed my hands with butter flavored Pam to smooth out the dough on the pizza stone. Then once we had it spread out, my husband and I added our favorite toppings.

Toppings

These are the toppings I put on my pizza:

Onion, finely chopped (0 points)

fresh spinach, torn into small pieces (0 points)

fresh chopped tomatoes (0 points)

Ragu Homemade style Pizza Sauce (1 point for 1/4 cup)

Sargento Light mozzarella string cheese (1 point per stick), cut crossways into thin circles. In the photo above, you can see the small circles of mozzarella.

3/8 oz Cabot Cheese, Sharp Cheddar, 75% Reduced Fat (0 points for 3/8 oz.)

At the top of this post is a photo of my baked and ready-to-eat pizza. I forgot to take a photo until I had cut it and put the pieces on a plate.  It was delicious! The crust has a little bit of a tangy taste from the yogurt. I really liked it. One great thing about this recipe is that the dough took only a few minutes to put together. And, of course, the toppings were delicious.

And the best thing of all is that the whole pizza is only 7 points. My first pizza in over two months. And I still have 5 points left for today!

My mother – my role model for good health

/ Carol / Leave a comment

My mother is 97 years old. She still lives on her own, although she is able to do that only because I have 3 siblings who live in her town and can check on her daily. My mother has been on her own since my father died in 1986.. Over the years she has developed some habits of good health. Here are some of them:

(1) Walk with purpose. She has always walked briskly in order to get a little more benefit for her health. Although she frequently uses a walker now, until the last few years, she was always a quick walker. How much better for our general sense of well being to walk briskly as much as possible. She still walks out to the mailbox to get her newspaper and mail each day, and she bustles around the house doing daily chores. She wears a Fitbit and keeps track of her steps.

(2) Eat an apple, a banana, and half an orange every day. She says the apple is important for regularity, the banana helps with leg cramps, and the orange is for vitamin C.

(3) Keep the refrigerator and pantry stocked with foods that build health: apples, bananas, oranges, low-fat milk, cheese, eggs, whole wheat bread, carrots, potatoes, butter, honey.

(4) She doesn’t have anything against pork, but she doesn’t eat it unless there isn’t another choice. She prefers beef over chicken or turkey because she remembers the days when chickens and turkeys were sold alive, and the housewife was the one who had to dispatch it and clean it before cooking it. I recall, as a young child, watching my mother kill and clean chickens that parishioners gave our family. She eats both chicken and turkey, but she prefers beef. Of course, if she had to butcher a cow or observe one being butchered, she probably would decide she didn’t care for beef either.

(5) Natural foods are the best. She doesn’t count points. As a matter of fact, I don’t recall her ever dieting. She eats whole wheat bread only, lots and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and small portions of meat. She drizzles local honey on her toast at breakfast.

(6) Use very little salt or sweeteners. When my father had a heart attack, my mother stopped using salt almost entirely. I complained at the lack of flavor in many of the foods she made, and I would sneak in a few shakes of salt whenever I could. However, in terms of health, my mother was right. We should enjoy the natural flavor of foods rather than depending on so much salt. Still, I like a little salt.

(7) Probably my mother’s only “weakness” when it comes to food is ice cream. She loves it. She keeps a couple of cartons of black walnut ice cream on hand at all times.

(8) She enjoys coffee – and she seems to especially enjoy the vanilla lattes I make for her when I visit. I used to go to Starbucks each morning to get them, but now I make them myself. She always drinks every drop and talks about how good it is. When she is on her own, she usually drinks a very weak cup of coffee with milk in it. She talks about how she and my father would always end a meal by sitting at the table, sipping coffee, and talking.

(9) She keeps her mind busy. She has always read a lot. Right now she is reading through the Bible again. When I talked with her yesterday, she said she was into the Psalms. She underlines as she reads.

(10) Last of all, she drinks lots of water. She takes TWO glasses of water back to her bedroom each evening to get her through the night, and she keeps a glass of water next to her during the day. Thanks to my sister, Janice, and my niece, Amanda, for reminding me about how my mother always drinks plenty of water and encourages all of us to do likewise.

That’s about it as far as the habits that I want to emulate. Just think, though, about how we could build our own health by following the 10 guidelines above.

Weekly Weigh-In – 9/4/2020

/ Carol / Leave a comment
9/4/2020

I’m pleased with this. I used all my weeklies in addition to my dailies this week. However I logged every single thing I ate.

My goals for this next week is to continue logging everything, drink more water, and to be more active.

I’m in Georgia right now visiting my mother. My weight was done on her scales, which has always matched my own scales.

Recipe: Pumpkin Muffins (3 points each)

/ Carol / Leave a comment

I made these pumpkin muffins tonight because I happened to have the ingredients already on hand – and, more importantly, I had exactly 3 points left and I wanted something sweet and baked. These were REALLY good. The batter is very thick so it doesn’t spread out in the cupcake liner. You have to take the spoon and kinda spread it out.

The recipe that is shared so much on the WW Facebook pages just has the pumpkin and cake mix. However, I had a large can of pumpkin – so I added a little extra pumpkin and put the rest in the refrigerator for something else. I decided to add an egg (since that is a zero point WW food) to help the muffins rise better since I added extra pumpkin. I also wanted to make the batter a little less thick.

Pumpkin Muffins (3 WW blue points each) *****

1 can pure pumpkin (15 oz.)

1 Pillsbury sugar-free yellow cake mix

1 egg

optional: Spices, to taste (cinnamon, allspice, cloves) 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare 12-count muffin tin with cupcake liners.

Dump all ingredients into a large mixing bowl and mix well.

Divide batter evenly between the 12 muffins.

Bake for about 25 minutes.

So now I have 11 muffins left over. I plan to put a couple in the refrigerator for tomorrow and Saturday. Then I will individually freeze the others for a quick and sweet treat in the coming week or two. Ron may want to try them out, too.

I give this recipe 5 stars. Now I’m anxious to try it with a chocolate cake mix. Supposedly it ends up being almost brownie-like – and that sounds wonderful to me.  

Small Steps

/ Carol / Leave a comment

I wanted a way to look at my goals as a “big picture” thing rather than getting hung up on whether or not I lose weight in my weekly weigh-ins. I thought a monthly tracker would be good. So I found this graphic that I liked. I love the colors and the soft and simple look of it. The first of each month, I will publish a post with my monthly and cumulative totals. I started WW on July 19, 2020. So the July total is for a week and 5 days.


I want to give myself a year to lose the weight I need to lose. No rush. It’s about making healthy eating and living a HABIT.

The new Weight Watchers plan – Green, Blue, and Purple plans – seems so much easier than before. I’m on the Blue plan. WW matched me with the Green plan, but after just a couple days, I knew that Blue was a better fit and switched to it.

A couple years ago, I read a booked titled Atomic Habits. It made a big impression on me. The book showed how developing small habits have a cumulative effect over time – like compound interest on money. So I’ve been trying to develop some healthy atomic habits.