A spoon-full of butter... does your taste buds good

Today's quota: 1529 calories - 1516 calories consumed

Julia Child was a woman who loved butter. In her book there are so many lush recipes, also pictured in the movie "Julia & Julia", that I never imagined her book would say something to me that I could hear. But after that omelette, I had to get the book, and I had to find it for myself.

Honestly? I'm still in the omelette phase. Call me a simple-minded person, but I was so happy with the omelette result, and I like eggs so much, I stuck to cooking it.

There were though, other simple things that I learned together with the omelette: how to wait for the pan to be hot before dropping the butter on it, how to wait for the butter foaming almost to stop before throwing the egg mixture. This I already used to sauté some vegetables and the result was quite pleasing.

1 tablespoon of butter has approx. 10g, which is 50 calories. Totally doable.

My little calorie diary is getting filled up: tomorrow I'll have completed 2 weeks of calorie-counting zig-zag diet. Overcoming unusual challenges like having arthroscopy on your right knee and staying grounded at home without being able to do any sports. And it's not only a diverse diet, but also inclusive: no food is left behind, I'm eating practically everything, but in smaller portions. Who would have thought I could resist my binge nature...

My parents have come to visit and are helping me out while I'm limping around: tonight my dad cooked Banana Flambe for dessert. 280 calories well-invested (40 cal for the honey, 25 for the butter, 180 for the banana and 35 for the cachaca).

And my weight? Still a mistery to me, shall weigh myself this Saturday. I'm guessing there's some lost weight, since I already fit into some phase 4 trousers. Life is no video game, but we all have phases, and my fat phases are roads I have travelled on for some years now...

The perfect omelette

Today's quota: 1400 calories - 1396 calories consumed

These past days I have been dreaming of a book. It all began when my boyfriend and I watched Julia&Julia together: I got inspired to write a blog on my trip to going thin, he got inspired to cook Julia Child's recipes. I was quite unamused that we could have such opposite interests: I could read sabotage a mile away!

Well, he bought Julia Child's book "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and set himself to cooking some recipes, posting photos on facebook with the results. I started counting calories and looking to save every calorie for a fulfilling healthy meal, and butter is of course the devil of diets, which should be exorcized from my life. So it looked like there were some clouds forming up in the sky...

I got to the point of bringing my own stuff to his house to cook (honestly, not a bad idea at all). But while I was there, resisting the cheesecake calling my name from his refrigerator (480 cal a slice!), he was all excited telling me about Julia's story he watched on YouTube, and convinced me to watch a take where she teaches how to cook an omelette (I thought that a no-brainer, but ok).

Immediately afterwards he decided to test it, and since we both knew I would not be able to resist eating it, too, I also made one for myself. We sat down in front of the monitor to watch the documentary on her life with an omelette on our laps. The first bite, and... Man!! What was that? The taste was incredibly better than any other omelette I had ever eaten! Unbelievable! What other simple tricks were there to discover, which could turn such a simple low-calorie meal (200 cal) into the tastiest food ever? Now I had to know.

The system: the 7 day calorie cycle (zig zag)

Today's quota: 1303 calories - 1170 consumed

In the book "Bridget Jones' Diary", she always wrote down her weight at the beginning of each day. It cracked me up, it was so totally female and hopeless. I think she also wrote something about calories, can't remember for sure. Anyway, that book was so funny, and on the risk of sounding unoriginal, reporting weight and calorie goals can go for me as well. Only that I have been so disappointed with my weight escalation the last year, I'll only include my weight in my posts if/when I get below 70 kg.

I will be following the zig zag calorie count, which I found in the very interesting site www.freedieting.com. If you fill in weight, gender, age, height, exercise level, they calculate how much calories you can ingest for maintenance and fat loss. They also advocate that, in order to avoid a plateau in your weight loss, it is much better to count calories in a zig zag fashion, so some days more, some days less calories. It is also less boring to follow, so I'll try it.

It will be an interesting experiment to observe if I'll indeed lose weight, when I follow my calorie intake limits but do not exercise. Also, talk about making every calorie worth its energy: I have been constantly thinking of smart ways to use my allotted budget. Has to be healthy, has to be fulfilling, has to taste good, otherwise it will be just another half-a-week diet.

And then light came from where I was least expecting. This is something I'll tell you about tomorrow.

A long way to go, baby...

Hey, this is me, a Brazilian living in Germany and writing in English :-).

After watching Julia & Julia, I was inspired to overcome my limitations by writing about them. Maybe that was also after I just bore my dear friend Andrea to death with about 2 hours of whining on my weight and my issues...

I also spent about 2 hours trying to work on Wordpress and then just gave up and went to old-and-easy Blogger. Here I am! Love me!!!!

So, today is the beginning of my story to go thin (again). Going thin is something that's been there for so long, and for so many women, one wonders: what's there that's new to be worth talking about? Well, probably nothing! But we like to talk about it anyway. And I'm writing about it, so most likely saving the tired ears of people around me.

Hard facts: today I'm 38, 74 kg, 25% muscle and 40% fat content pear-like distributed in my 171 cm. And I was diagnosed with lipedem phase I. I need to go back to 62 kg, decrease fat content to 30% at least, and increase muscle content to 36%.

Soft facts: I'm so nice! And sometimes funny.

Curious fact: I also have a cat (Shanti) who's overweight. Before you say "Aha", let me just tell you that when I adopted her she was already fat,and I have 2 other cats who I raised from kittens and they are slim! Shanti is 5.6 kg and quite a small cat, so she looks quite the plumpy one. She needs to lose 0.6 kg at least, better would be 1.2 kg. She's also renal.

Here's how it will be: I will do my very best to eat within my calorie-limit for the day, which should lead to fat loss. I will try to do this eating as less meat as possible, since going vegetarian is a parallel effort which I have been making the last years (which kind of makes me a flexitarian ;-)). Working out is also planned, as soon as I recover from the knee surgery that I will go through in the next month.

And this is me in a post. I hope you read me :-).