Grilled Cheese Please

Hey y’all! Happy Monday! I got a solid 8 hours of sleep last night but for some reason, the puffiness around my eyes and my need to be in the bed right now says otherwise.  So, I must make a confession.  I worked my butt off last week.  I exercised every day and cranked up the diet by cutting calories and when I weighed on Saturday, I was only down .6 pounds.  I didn’t take this news well and my cheat day stretched into Sunday.  I revolted I guess and I know that doesn’t help me but y’all gotta understand, I’ve been at this for years now and that .6 made me angry.  It doesn’t seem fair but you know, life isn’t fair so it is what it is.  I’m back at it today with only a small pity party.  I’m certain my rendezvous with cake and my mom’s goulash yesterday will make for a rough weigh in on Saturday but I’ll try to take my lashes with dignity.  My challenge for this weekend will be to limit my bad food habits to one cheat day while I’m out of town.  My Dad and I are headed to Atlanta this weekend for what I’ve been calling Redneckpalooza.  We are driving over Friday night and then Saturday morning, my Dad is doing a Richard Petty ride along where he gets to experience the high speed Nascar life.  Then, Saturday night, we are going to see Motley Crue.  It should be interesting.   I just hope I can keep it together on Friday and Sunday and stay on my diet.  I’ve also been back in my jogging shoes.  I ran 3 miles without stopping yesterday in this miserable heat.  I’ve been jogging once a week so I’m hoping to get in another 3 miles on Sunday.

One of my problems is that I mentally convince myself that I’m hungry all the time…especially when I’m counting calories correctly.  My Oma told me that you can eat around 27 or 28 almonds for 170 calories.  What she does is she spreads her serving of almonds out throughout the day.  If she feels hungry, she might have one or two almonds every hour or so.  I thought this was a great idea.  I tried this last week and it actually worked pretty well.  Eating a couple almonds does give you a sense that you aren’t quite as hungry.  I need to work on spreading it out so they last a whole day and not just half a day but I’m still going to recommend this as a good hunger busting idea. 

Last week I shared a Diet Coke Cake.  A couple of my friends joked with me that I didn’t exactly give the cake a rave review.  I’ve decided that there is no real substitute for chocolate so I think I’m never going to be a big fan of recipes that try to act as a replacement.  Since I came to that conclusion, I tried the recipe with different flavors and liked the results much better.  I mixed together vanilla cake and Diet Sunkist which gave the cake a bit of an orange cream flavor.  I think it’s really yummy and if you cut it into tiny squares (20 total for the whole sheet of cake), it’s only 80 calories per piece which isn’t bad at all! I much preferred this version.  It seems like there are many ways to do this dessert and the best part about it is that it’s SUPER cheap.

I love a grilled cheese sandwich and even though my boyfriend informed me that any grilled sandwich that included items other than cheese shouldn’t be called a grilled cheese sandwich, I’ve decided to defy him and call this thrown together recipe a grilled cheese anyway.  I love Greek Olives and in my opinion, they made this sandwich.  All I did was take spray Pam (makes the sandwich way lighter), add two pieces of the 40 calorie provolone cheese on top and bottom, deli meat that was flavored with spices and olives and it was delicious.  The best part about a grilled cheese is that it takes practically no time to prepare.  I served it with Pringles sticks.  My Mom showed me these.  They are low in calories and make a nice side item for lunch.  I liked this A LOT and it’s less than 250 calories.  I want one right now.

Some of you may know that I’m obsessed with rainbow sprinkles.  I know they are just crunchy pieces of sugar but they add texture and fun colors to my life and I absolutely love them! I even know when certain companies (ahem Yogurt Mountain) change out who they buy their sprinkles from because believe it or not folks, not all rainbow sprinkles are created equal.  Anyway, I saw the above contraption on Tumblr and while from what I’ve read, I don’t think you can purchase these yet, I am amazed by this product and want one as soon as humanly possible.

A fun time was had by all this weekend.  We celebrated Cassandra’s birthday and stretched the weekend out as far as we could.  We should have taken way more pictures but I guess we just forgot to.  All in all I’d say it was a success. 

I’m sure I’ll have stories to share from the upcoming weekend on Monday.

I hope you all have a great week!

Bye!