Last night I made kale and caramelized onion pizza, instead of tomato sauce I used pumpkin puree with some nutmeg, cinnamon and a bit of brown sugar.
The sweet pumpkin with the savory kale was amazing.
Happy PI Day! That’s 3.14 day. Bet you didn’t know today was PI day. These are things you learn when your Wife is a Montessori Elementary teacher. We made two pies last night for her to take into class, an Apple PI pie and a Blueberry pie. I sure hope her students enjoyed them!
For dinner last night I made a tofu scramble with a whole lot of veggies. Michelle suggested we make a cheezy sauce from the Veganomicon (one of our favorite cook books) to put over the top. It was delicious.
This high protein meal included tofu, carrots, broccoli, peas, russet potatoes, a green pepper, and diced onions. I started with frying the potatoes, carrots and onions in about a tablespoon of olive oil until the potatoes were tender. Then I threw in all of the other veggies and crumbled a block of tofu into the pan and cooked everything until it’s heated through.
You’ll have to buy the Veganomicon for the whole cheezy sauce recipe. It involved some vegetable broth, flour (we used rice flour), a tiny bit of oil, garlic, nutritional yeast, tarragon, yellow mustard, and some turmeric. It is really good and thickens up like a nacho cheese.
Here is the end result:
It was so good, I added a little ketchup to mine which really add to the flavor in my opinion. Michelle lucked out and got to take the leftovers to work today.
My perspective on working out has been changing quite a bit as of late. I have officially had 10 personal training sessions. With only 2 more sessions left I am kinda sad that I will not be working out with Beth one on one anymore. I am optimistic that I will be able to continue working out at least 3 days a week and I might even do one of her boot camps that she offers. What Beth has taught me over these past 5 weeks will stay with me forever.
At the beginning of this whole getting healthy journey of mine (back in August of 2009) I was pretty convinced that I should be going to the gym and just doing as much cardio as possible. Everything I read said that I should be counting my calories coming in, then burn as many calories as possible at the gym to create a calorie deficit and subsequently loose weight. While I did this for a couple of weeks and it seemed effective I quickly grew tired of it.
I was too focused on loosing the weight, on changing my external appearance and I eventually stopped making progress and started gaining weight back. Since the beginning of January I have been going doing full body workouts with every visit to the gym. My workouts have been dominated by body weight and free weight resistance exercises with a typical warm up of running on the treadmill for at least 20 minutes. The goal here is to build muscle, strengthen my core, and get my body moving.
The changes I have seen in my body since January 3rd (my first workout of the new year) have been so inspiring and motivating. I have begun to see definition where there wasn’t any before and the weight is coming off again! One of the advantages of working out like this is that as I build more muscle my body will automatically burn more calories throughout the day. The more muscle mass that I have the higher my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is the amount of daily energy expended while at rest. How cool is that. Essentially the more muscle I have the more calories I burn while sitting on my but watching a movie. Plus, after a full body resistance workout (which is what I have been doing) your BMR is elevated for the following couple of hours compared to a cardio workout where it is only elevated for the next 45 minutes or so.
All of this means that if I continue to do these types of workout and continue to build muscle that my body will continue to burn calories at a higher rate. If I can just control what I am eating and focus on healthful whole foods most of the time the weight will keep coming off and I will continue on the path of being a healthy vegan.
I had a moment of inspiration last night. After peering into our fridge last night I discovered some Tofu and I decided to us it. Now, I have the tendency to season with the same herbs and spices so that everything sort of tastes the same, well not last night. I made Coconut Crusted Tofu and it was amazing.
You wanna know how I made it don’t ya? Well it is surprisingly easy and pretty darn healthy.
The ingredients you will need:
Directions
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place a cooling rack inside of a cookie sheet (you can see it in the photo above) and spray with some cooking oil.
Drain the tofu as much as possible, if you like you can freeze the tofu and then drain it, this gives it a nice texture and make it easier to drain. Cut the tofu into strips. Pour the milk or creamer in a shallow bowl (I used coconut milk creamer and it worked great). Mix the breadcrumbs and shredded coconut and place into a different shallow bowl.
Now place as many of the tofu strips into the milk or creamer as possible, just let them hang out in there. Take one out and dredge it in the breadcrumbs and coconut. Make sure the tofu gets nice and covered. Place the tofu onto the cooling rack which should be sitting nicely inside your cookie sheet. Repeat until you have run out of tofu. If you are starting to run out of milk or the breadcrumbs & coconut mixture you can always add a little more to the bowl. After placing all of the tofu on the cooling rack I sprinkled some salt and pepper on top which really brought out some of the flavors.
Cook at 400 for about 35 - 40 minutes, flipping half way through. Take them out when the tofu appears to be crispy and slightly brown.
It was awesome, we had it over quinoa with two sides; raw massaged kale and some roasted beets, turnips, sweet potatoes, and apples from Boston Organics.
I guess it’s time I fess up and explain why I have not been putting any weigh ins on the site in a while. After making a conscious decision to take a break over the Holidays I got home from vacation and I weighed 258, I was ashamed.
I let myself go and I shouldn’t have. Every new day is an opportunity for becoming healthier and I made a lot of poor decisions concerning food over the week and a half that I was back in Maryland visiting family. Initially I was hoping that it was water weight or something like that and that I would be back to under 250 in a week or so, then I would put a weigh in up on A Healthy Vegan. A week went by and I did loose some weight, I went down to 252.4, a pretty big drop in a week. I have no doubt that this weight loss is do to my personal training (Thanks Michelle!).
Then we arrive at today, my “official” weigh in day. I stepped on the scale, sucked in and I had lost a little under 2 pounds since the last Friday. The scale said 250.2, I am disappointed but at least I am still loosing.
I will check in with you next week, I promise.
I posted this photo a couple of days ago letting everyone know that we got our first box of organic produce from Boston Organics and boy are we happy with it so far. Let me tell you a little about the type of box that we are recieving, it’s called the Dogma Box.
According to Boston Organic’s website the Dogma Box “includes produce sourced as close to Boston as possible. This is our only box that includes produce restricted geographically! We source produce close to home and move furhter out until we can provide at least 8 unique items.” Buying local and seasonal vegetables is an excellent way to reduce your toll on the environment. One of the reasons that we like to shop at Whole Foods is that they label where all of their produce is from and we can then decide to purchase those items that have traveled the smallest distance. The further a product travels to the grocery store the more gas and oil has been used to get to my plate. Part of being Vegan for me is reducing my impact on the environment and buying local helps me do that. In addition to all of this produce being local it is also all certified organic.
Currently here in the Boston area we are in the depths of winter so being able to get this organic seasonal produce is pretty amazing. We have been very interested in joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to get fruit and veggies during the spring and summer from a local farm. Unfortunately CSAs typically have a very large upfront cost, one that we always planned to save up for during the year, but never actually did. Boston Organics has solved that problem for us, the Dogma Box is $29 per week and we pay on a weekly basis. Plus, we are still supporting local farmers. Currently we have the box scheduled to come to my office every other week, if we end up eating all of the veggies in a week we’ll switch it to every week.
This week’s box had a bounty of delicious winter produce:
I used some of the red onions and carrots in last nights dinner, I had 2 apples with lunch today and I am excited to figure out how to use the rest of it. Tonight I am gonna try to make a Butternut Squash Risotto.
One of the exiting things about this particular box from Boston Organics is that it will always be changing a little bit and we will get to taste the seasons as the come and go. According to their website “in the summer time you’ll get a bountiful harvest of everything from lettuce to swiss chard, sweet corn to salad tomatoes. As autumn takes hold the box contents start to include more root vegetables, winter squash and apples, and over the winter you’ll see storage crops like carrots, potatoes or onions. Once spring has sprung, the growing season gets going again and the local box greens up with lots of early season produce.” It is going to be a lot of fun to experiment with all of the different veggies we get.
I am so excited about some things going on in my life right now and I would like to share them with you.
After having officially finished three personal training with nine more to go I am so happy with it. I am proud of myself for keeping up with it and I am so thankful Michelle decided to give this gift to me. Obviously I can’t expect my body to look different after only one week of working out hard. But I can feel a difference in my body and that is great motivation to keep going.
For 2011 I have made the decision to really focus on the kinds of foods I consuming. Too often I choose the easy way out of preparing a meal by going out to eat or having a frozen vegan pizza. While it is possible to have healthy meals out I have the ability to create wonderfully healthy meals at home for much less money. Timing has always been the issue for me, “if I only had enough time” I keep telling myself, well enough of that. One of the things we are doing to help us eat more veggies and whole foods is getting local organic fruit and veggies delivered to my office every other Tuesday. A local company called Boston Organics will be delivering them and I will take them home and I will have to cook them or they will go bad, so it is sort of a way of forcing me into cooking more at home. My first box should be delivered today and I am super excited. I will let you know tomorrow what was delivered.
The last thing that I am excited about is something Michelle and I are doing in February. In the most recent edition of VegNews, a vegan magazine, there is an interview with Kris Carr. Kris made a documentary a couple of years ago called Crazy Sexy Cancer, has released several books and currently runs the website CrazySexyLife.com. She is an amazing individual who has learned first hand about the healing power of foods and nutrition. Anyway, because of that interview we checked out her website and it turns out she is hosting a retreat in Stockbridge, MA which happens to be about two hours from us. It’s called Crazy Sexy Life: An Adventure in Health, Spiritual Wealth, and Happiness. We will be learning about nutrition, meditation, how to lower stress, and we will be eating some amazing wholesome vegan food while we are there. It is a whole weekend! We really can’t wait.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading.
This is what I looked like after my second personal training session. I was sore all over and wanted nothing more than to just lay in one position for the rest of the night. Even though I was exhausted I was really proud of myself.
Heading to the gym last night I was a bit concerned because there was still a lot of soreness from my previous workout. It didn’t matter though, I even got to the gym early and worked out on the elliptical for half an hour before my actual session. To be honest I was kinda hoping that this 30 minute warm up would mean we could move right into the resistance training, not so much. We started on the treadmill, switching between jogging and walking, I kept pushing myself and was jogging much faster than I thought I would be able to, we did that for 10 minutes to get really warmed up.
I enjoy resistance workouts more than cardio, it’s just more interesting. Yesterday we were doing 3 sets of 15 reps on various different machines to get a full body workout. It always seems that the weight I start with is lighter than it should be, but by that last rep on the last set it becomes clear that it is usually just right. On a couple of the exercises I pushed myself a little further and did an extra rep or two. I am trying to prove to myself and my new trainer that I really want this, that it is finally time. In addition Beth seems to think I have excellent form when working out, which makes me very happy. I have always heard that it is more important to have good form than to do a lot of heave weight.
Today I am much less sore than I was after my first session so I guess my body is getting used to the idea of a Tom that works out. My third day to the gym this week will be Friday and then I am meeting with Beth again on Sunday morning at 7:00AM (I can’t believe it either).
This past Halloween weekend Michelle and I took some time to go to the annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. We missed it last year for the first time we have lived in the Boston area and made it a point to go this year. This is the second year that they have spread the event over 2 days. Previously it has only been 1 day and it was crazy, so many people that it was literally hard to walk. Thankfully having the event spread over 2 days made it a little better, there were still some rude pushy people, but I suspect you’ll find those folks anywhere there are free samples.
Free samples are one of the main reasons to go to an event like this. From small local companies to international ones there were a bunch of companies there to offer up samples. Cafe Indigo, a New Hampshire company, was there selling some of their seitan products and giving out free samples of their amazing Carrot Cake. We also got to try a bunch of different teas, drinks, peanut butters, crackers, chips, cheeses, ice creams, and faux meats. After you leave it feels like you have just eaten a full meal. There was even a specifically vegan BBQ sauce that was so good I bought a bottle.
A lot of non food companies were there as well, sometimes these are the most exciting cause we find out about new places close by that specialize in vegan products or services. For instance we discovered a new Vegan Bed and Breakfast on Cape Cod that we are super excited about trying out next spring. A new vegan shoe and accessory store was there was well, Sudo Shoes, they are based out of Central Square in Cambridge and we will definitely be checking them out. In addition we renewed out subscription to Veg News magazine which we have missed very much for the past year.
I also got to meet one of my inspirations, Robert Cheeke, vegan bodybuilder and writer. He was there selling his book, Vegan Bodybuilding and Fitness, and Vega products. I’ve posted about Robert before and I was more than a little nervous. I don’t know the exact stats but standing next too him he seemed at least 6’2 and he is ripped. And, here I am still overweight and going up to this guy and telling him he is one of my inspirations. I don’t know why I was so nervous, guess I was just wishing I had lost more weight than I already have, but I was so nervous that I forgot to introduce Michelle to him. He is such a nice guy he thanked me for keeping up with him and for the kind words and we made some jokes. He was also selling Thrive, a book by Brendan Brazier, a vegan professional tri-athlete and inventor of Vega. Anyway, I’ve been thinking of buying Thrive for a while and who better to buy it from than Robert Cheeke and he even through in a ton, I mean a ton of free Vega samples. It was awesome meeting him and I had no reason to be so nervous.
Leaving the food festival Michelle and I stopped by the Vegan soft serve ice cream truck that was parked outside. It was called Like No Udder and they are based out of Rhode Island, a business built from the ground up. We both got a cup of chocolate and vanilla swirl soft serve with chocolate syrup. Even though it was the end of October it was so good, we might have to go down to Rhode Island and seek them out.
Well that was our experience at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival in a nutshell. Looking forward to next year already, maybe Robert Cheeke will be there and I will have lost the weight I want to. It would sure feel nice to shake his hand next year and say now I’ve lost 100 pounds.
I tweeted last night that when I weighed myself this morning I would have gained weight. After all I ate out quite a bit this week and was not always in control of what I was eating. But, I did do some calorie counting and I have not had any soda this week, just all water all the time.
So, what did the scale say this morning? 243.2, that’s right a whole .6 pounds less than last week. I was pleasantly surprised this morning considering I was sure I was going to gain weight. Let’s be honest though, it’s only .6 pounds. I have a long way to go and I am all starting fresh. I love making excuses for things like this. I’ll say to myself oh I’ll start on Monday or I’ll start next month. Well November is coming up and the 1st of the month also happens to be Monday, how much more perfect can I get?
I will report back on Monday with my plans for the week.
I'm Tom Scholfield and on August 16th, 2009 I decided to change my lifestyle. I decided to actually make an effort to become a healthy vegan. Since making that decision I had lost over 40 pounds.
After falling off track and several major life changing events I am back up to my old weight.
I am not a bodybuilder or an endurance athlete nor do I aspire to be. My simple goal for now is to be under 200 pounds, but becoming a healthy vegan is about much more than weight loss.
Living a healthy life is about embracing my passions, loving my life wherever it leads me, spending time with people I love, and being conscious of my impact on the earth. That's an easy statement to type but not necessarily easy to put into practice in my daily life. This site, A Healthy Vegan, is how I am keeping track of my journey. Thanks for reading.
