"I want to get blueberry wasted!"

Hey everyone! So, I didn't write an entry yesterday because I was doing TONS of canning at my mom's house. It was so much fun!

We went blueberry picking on Thursday and ended up getting 9 lbs. of blueberries! It only took us about 1 hour to pick them all.

Sorry. Crappy cell phone pic.

So I got to my mom's house early yesterday morning and we started right in. We ended up making Spiced Blueberry Jam and Blueberry Lime Jam. They are delicious! We are probably going to go back and get more blueberry towards the end of next month when we pick peaches. Then we will be able to make even more jam. In a couple weeks we will be working on making the Zucchini Relish and Zucchini Pickles. Yum!

Ma mashing the blueberries.

Me spooning the jam into the jars.

The final product!

Other than the canning not much going on. We are doing a bunch of chores today. How exciting. Going to the farmer's market down the street and getting a ton of fresh veggies. Love it!

On the diet front, I have lost 1 pound. That's not bad. Wish it was a little more, but I will take what I can!

Well, I'm off to run errands! Have a great weekend, everyone, and eat fresh veggies!! :)

~Jenn

I'll just have a sugar packet or 2.

It was quite a day yesterday. I had a job interview at the local hospital for a housekeeping position and I got hired on the spot! I'm totally psyched! It's seems like it's going to be a great place to work and they have a lot of benefits for their employees. My position is part time on call, but once I make it to full time status, there's medical, dental, and all that, but they will also help pay for schooling if I decide to go back for something in the medical field. I think that's totally awesome. I went to school a few years back for massage therapy and while taking the medical courses, I found that I really enjoyed learning about medicine. So who knows where this might lead!

Last night I decided I was going to try a recipe I had seen on a cooking show on PBS. It was lasagna with eggplant in place of the pasta. I thought "This is great! Less carbs and more veggies!"  I used no fat ricotta, sauteed mushrooms, onions and fresh garlic, and some herbs from my patio garden. Yet I ended up gaining back the 2 lbs I lost yesterday.  So today I need to be really good with my diet.

My mom and I are going blueberry picking today. I'm so excited cause this starts the canning process for the rest of the year. We are making Blueberry Lime Jam and Blueberry syrup tomorrow. Not the most healthy, but better for you than the stuff bought in the store. Next month we are doing peaches, and then my favorite: Zucchini Relish. YUM!! I can't wait. After my wedding and once everything calms down in the fall, we will be doing apple picking and canning applesauce, apple butter, and a bunch of other apple things. We might make pumpkin butter too.

I need too get on a schedule for my exercising. I need to force myself to get up early and really focus on getting in my exercise time. I've decided that I need to it in the morning because otherwise I won't get it done. Once I start working again, doing it during the day is out, and then I will be exhausted at night, so that's out too. I thought about trying to start jogging in the morning, but I have arthritis in my knees, so I'm not sure how that will work for me. Another idea is to get one of those mini trampolines and put it in my living room, and I can use it while watching a show at night. I've been using the exercise ball we have and my abs are definitely feeling it. So at least I have that.

I've been working a lot on my family tree and it's coming along great so far. I've found a lot of information yesterday that was nowhere in the binder I had. I found a ton about my maternal 2nd great-grandmother's family, which I thought was totally awesome. I've typed out about 35 pages of family information in the past 3 days, so I feel like I've really accomplished something with it.

Well, that's about all for today. I will be back in tomorrow to let you all know how my blueberry picking went!

Eggplant-y, cheesy goodness.

~Jenn

2 lbs down!

Unbelievably, just since my post yesterday I have dropped 2 lbs! I'm not really sure how I did it, but I did! Yesterday was somewhat of a slow day, exercise wise anyway.  I worked a lot on re-typing what I had of my family tree. This was quite the task. I have a binder that had been in my great grandmother's house for years and Mom took it when my Nana passed away in 2000. So this book hadn't been worked on since the mid-70s. I wasn't even in the family tree yet. A bunch of people weren't in it. So this required gathering more information such as birthdays, birth places, spouses birthdays and birthplaces. All I can say is thank God for Facebook.

I suppose you could say I got some exercise in when I walked around a local cemetery to see if I could find one of my distant relatives and get a picture of the stone for the binder. The cemetery was huge and there were a lot of old stones in the back that had broken or had just worn away. I was still looking around when the large gusts of wind started and the sky got really dark. I started back to my car (which was all the way at the other end of the cemetery) then it started raining. I was full on running back to my car as the sky grew darker. Then the rain just stopped and everything was still for a moment. I got into my car and got some awesome pictures of the sky. Soon after the downpour began and I decided it was time to head home.

So I headed home and being on the back roads, I had some great opportunities for pictures of the storm.

It was a pretty good storm. I was drenched by the time I got home, and I hadn't found the stone at the cemetery that I was looking for, but it was still an interesting outing.

So, going back to my diet and exercise. I did well yesterday as far as not eating a lot of bad foods. A little cottage cheese with fresh herbs for breakfast, hummus wrap for lunch, and a black bean wrap for dinner. I had a few popsicles last night, but other than I did okay.

Mike said I should explain to you guys how I came up with the blog name "Pleasantly Obese". It all started a few years back when my sister had been having problems losing weight after the birth of my niece. She went to her doctor and they did a few tests and found out she had a thyroid problem. They gave her medication and she started to be able to just shed the pounds.

I thought, "Hmm...we are related, maybe it's a genetic thing". So I went to my doctor and had tests done. The results came back and my doctor told me I had a normal thyroid. To which I replied "Oh, then I'm just fat." He then proceeded to tell me I was morbidly obese. Ok, now, I know I am quite a bit overweight, and at the time I was probably 30- 40 lbs heavier than I am now. But MORBIDLY obese? Come on.

So, I told Mike this story, and we kinda chuckled about how far off the doctor was, and I stated that "I'm not fat, I'm just pleasantly obese."

And to end this entry, I'd like to add a picture of me when I was the most fit and when I was at my heaviest...

Me at my Graduation party in 2001.

Me with Jamie Bamber from Battlestar Galactica at MegaCon 2007.

~Jenn

So it begins....

So, here I am. Writing a blog in which I'm openly admitting my struggles with my weight. I'm not being negative in this sense, I am being honest. I need to be honest with myself and see where I need to improve in order to reach my goals. And I mean, what better way to do that than share all my failures on the internet...(Great idea, Jenn.)

Actually, I got the idea from a friend of mine who also has had troubles with weight loss. She has a blog as well and lists her struggles so that she can be totally open about it. I thought it was an awesome idea. Even if no one ever reads this, it's there for me to read back on and see where I went wrong.

Although, this blog isn't all about my weight, but also other things I'm going through. However, most of them stem back to my weight and how it affects other aspects of my life. This just shows me that I need to lose more weight to feel more comfortable in my skin.

I'm getting married in September and my dress is a bit snug. I'm confident I can lose the weight before then, (whereas it's only a few pounds I need to lose) I'm just afraid of not being able to keep it off. My fiance, Mike, and I eat fairly decent, with an occasional treat. However, this week, we went out for ice cream (which we haven't done in a very long time). That was Saturday and now it's Tuesday and I still feel crappy. I've realized this is the second time I've gone out for ice cream this year and my stomach couldn't deal with it. So apparently I'm partially lactose intolerant. Yay.

I've been unemployed for over a month now. I'm broke and can't afford to eat as healthy as I'd like. That doesn't mean that I only get junk food, it's just that I get the same stuff all the time. Good thing is that Mike and I have cut red meat, pork, ham and all that junk out of our diet. We still eat chicken and fish but that's about it.

Anyway, I spend a lot of my time looking for recipes that are cheap and healthy. As I find some I will add them here.

I'm also getting more into finding information on my family tree. I've been doing a ton of research and have found a lot of info. Actually found some of my distant relatives at a local cemetery yesterday, and I'm going to the local town hall for more info. It's just cool to know what your family was like 100 years ago. A hundred years from now, my relatives will find this......Ugh.

~Jenn