Hello from Spain!!

Hello, everyone! Long time, no blog! I've been living in Madrid, Spain since September 2011, and I pretty much stopped blogging - and meal planning, and journaling, and tracking points - when I moved here.

Why, you ask? Well, for anyone who has ever lived in a foreign country, you will be able to empathize with these hard facts of life: it is really hard to a) meal plan when you can't find basic items that you are used to finding in a hundred stores at home (like 100 calorie pop corn, fennel, Pam - oh, Pam! how I miss you!, and feta cheese), b) you are getting used to a new eating schedule (yes, I eat lunch at 3pm.. sometimes 4pm), and c) you are pretty much too busy enjoying life and work to worry about silly things like weight loss!

How has that worked out for me, you might wonder? Well, I have lost about 6 pounds living here, which brings my grand total to 28 pounds!! There have been a few weeks where I was down another 2 or 3 pounds, but I tend to revolve around my current weight with little to no effort. Plus, I gained about 2 pounds thanks to Christmas (which is why I have to tell you that I've lost 6 instead of 8! Argh!).

Even though I am very proud that I have been losing or maintaining weight loss for 11 months (yay me!), I have decided that it's time to kick things up a notch and start working on the next 28 pounds. It's time to put away the Christmas cookies and Nutella and start back on my healthy eating habits.

I spent a few days thinking about a realistic way of going about continuing to lose weight. Unfortunately, a lot of things got crossed off the list quickly. I decided not to dive in head first to the Dukan diet (very popular right now in Europe, but the thought of eating ONLY protein and oat bran for two weeks didn't sound very healthy)... I crossed off the Weight Watchers idea, since nutrition labels here generally give you the values per 100g of the product instead of per serving, and I am not a math wizard. Furthermore, even though I have an awesome new smartphone, the Weight Watchers apps aren't available in Spain. So I figured it was time to go back to the basics:

• Meal plan, while realizing that my meal plans will often be "wish lists" (see also: "I can't find fennel so the tomato and fennel salad is out of the question")
• Food journal, which was a very important key to my success when I was actively losing weight, and for which my blog will serve
• Pray that I will still have support from my briends ("blog friends") even though I've essentially ditched them for the past 5 months!! Puh-weasssse??! :)
• Cut out diet soda and desserts and breads for 1 week to give my body time to get over the "sugar crave" stage. Have you ever gone through this? It's like the more trash I put into my body, the more it wants!
  

I started with a meal plan, which went something like this:

• Monday: Breakfast - eggs and apple; AM snack - yogurt and tea; Lunch - Salad and Ricotta cheese; PM Snack - fruit and yogurt; Dinner - meat and veggies

You'll notice that I am pretty vague on my plans until I get back from the supermarket, because I never know quite what I will find. One glorious trip had me toting a bunch of kaki, or persimmons, while others have left me wondering how I'm going to get excited to eat my food for the next week.

So today, I went to Carrefour (one of the local supermarkets) and the fruit shop and picked up my food for the week. Behold!

What are some of the more interesting items?

• "Pavo de jamón" - which translates to "turkey of ham"... imagine it something like the love child of Spam and turkey breast. Despite that introduction, it really is quite delicious. I love to cut it into cubes when I get back from the store, and I eat it on everything from salads to by itself for a protein-filled snack. It has about 25 calories per 40g (oh, did I also mention that everything here is measured in metric? I have no idea how much 40g is, but I know that since the package is 400g, that means about 1/10 of the package).
• Honey mustard dressing, or shall I say "Salsa miel y mostaza". This is one of my luxury items, but it turns an everyday salad into something AMAZING! I use it on almost all of my salads, although I did pick up a bottle of caesar dressing this week to see how that goes. Gone are the days of fat-free and low-calorie salad dressings, I'm afraid.
• I <3 Zero popitas, or the Spanish equivalent of low-calorie popcorn. I long for the days when I could buy 10 bags of 100 calorie popcorn for about $3.00, but now I buy 2 bags for 2€ (about $2.60) and treat them like my first born.
• Salad ingredients: chopped ham, chopped turkey, lettuce, "Mediterranean white cheese cubes" (or, as my roommate calls them, "a distant second cousin on the mother's side of Feta cheese), veggies, sliced olives and dressing. Yum!
• Canned sardines. Ok, I realize that this one is a little gross, but I was surprised at how amazing canned sardines packed in tomato sauce can be! I learned how to cut them open and extract the spinal column (blech!), and I eat them instead of frying up a chicken breast when I am feeling lazy. I am trying sardines packed in lemon this week, and I'll let you know how it goes.
• My biggest guilty pleasure: mini cans of manzanilla olives stuffed with anchovies. About three weeks ago, I became an olive whore. I couldn't get enough. I dreamed of olives, ate them twice a day, and ignored the woman from the posh supermarket who smugly informed me that "three olives have as much fat as a veal chop". Screw her; they're delicious. Each mini can has about 15 olives, which contain about 70 calories and 2 Points Plus. (I needed a calculator to figure that one out!) However, they make an amazing snack because they contain fiber, protein and fats, with no carbs. I eat them with a piece of fruit or a cup of tea - nom nom nom!
• Various fruits and veggies!
  

So now you have an idea of what trips to the grocery store are like in Spain. Prepared foods and ethnic foods are hard to come by, but my weight loss with relatively little effort attests to the fact that it can be a healthy way of eating.

Now on to food journaling for today! I had a fat free yogurt (1PP) for breakfast, a glass of water and some ham bits (1PP). While writing this blog, I had a glass of tea with some milk and a can of olives (2PP). For lunch, I had a salad with lettuce, turkey, cheese, olives and caesar dressing. It was good! I was so hungry this afternoon that I had: a yogurt, an apple, a banana and a cereal bar (over a stretch of 4 hours). For dinner, I made some pasta shells and chicken breast (with cayenne pepper) and put on top: tomatoes, olives, artichoke hearts, ricotta cheese, Parmesan cheese and a little bit of olive oil. Check out the picture below; it was delicious! And yes, I did have one Christmas cookie for dessert... :(

If I successfully food journal until Friday, I am allowing myself to shop at the posh supermarket (El Corte Inglés) for my next grocery trip. Hopefully that will keep me motivated!!