.

I apologize for not blogging so much. You already know! School and life are being real trials right now! I wish I could take time to photo blog every day to make more use of my diet-accountability purpose, but I really don't want to make a promise I can't keep. So for awhile, I am sticking to just uploading whatever I've taken in one post. :) I actually have a whole bunch of photos I wanna share, so I'll make two separate posts.

Safeway's Eating Right Hamburger Wheat Buns with 1/3 tsp pesto, american cheese, and baby spinach. I decided to eat it along with strawberries - soo good.


This was my attempt at, I think, broccoli beef? Except I used chicken. Tried a new ingredient to my recipes: Rice Vinegar. Very nice touch. I figured since I don't make sushi a lot, I could use it for other things.


This has been my top filipino dish since I was a little girl. It's called Sayote and Pork Ginisang, and this was my first time making it. Sayote is sooo delicious! I added some baby bok choy, and it totally hit the spot. This was unhealthy though :(


Portioned breakfast of half a navel, mom's menudo (with some cilantro) and a thin bottom layer of white rice. (I get so lazy to cook brown rice, it takes forever.)


This was a chicken and veggie stir fry, I think I added some teriyaki sauce.


Ate it for dinner.


Finally tried a spinach-strawberry salad. It's great how the two go together. The dressing I made was 1/2 tsp honey mustard, 1/3 cup organic balsamic vinaigrette, a hint of lemon - all wisked together. I added some pepper, shredded mozzarella cheese, and sesame seeds to the salad.


Lunch that day. 1/2 Eating Right Bun toasted, 90 calorie fillet, and steamed broccoli with 1 tsp cheese whiz.

Wow has school been a heap load already. Taking an Illustrator class along with a Color (paints) class is just terrible. The exercises/assignments take several, several hours, depending of course on the students interpretations of his/her art. Not cool.

Since I haven't been able to document each day of my photographed meals, I'll post them as a group here.

Egg whites and brocolli w/ potatoes & herb seasoning.


30 calorie jalapeno cheese slice (addicting).


My failed attempt at lettuce wraps. Note: This image is deceiving.


Alfredo pasta w/ mushrooms and turkey sausage. Middle layer of spinach.


My first attempt at Eggs in a Basket: failed.
I flipped it over. Too soon.


That's more like it.

I signed up for Livestrong.com's MyPlate this morning around 2am. It's not super accurate, and I doubted it big time, but it's pretty neat! It has been an enjoyment so far, listing down my meals and gaining a lot of simple information from them. During the fitness section for the day, I wondered if my leading worship dealt with any burning of calories! And to my surprise, it did!



Well - that's me, including my half hour of worship practice and next half hour of worship during the service! It placed a little smile on my face just seeing that for some reason. Unfortunately, I didn't get to stretch today though. Should prob get to that now...

Here was my afternoon snack the other day that I mentioned did not get uploaded yet:



Doesn't spinach always look amazing? I had some more today except with EVOO/lemon vinaigrette, which today was my first time making it. We never have lemons! I also added a little chunk of grilled catfish. It was such a pleasurable combination! Here it is:



My first meal of the day actually was after church.

• 1/2 cup baby spinach
• 1 tbsp cauliflower rice
• 2 tsp EVOO/lemon w/ pepper
• itty bitty portion of grilled catfish :) (mixed into salad)
• 4 pc pork emputido w/ some sriracha (you know you didn't put enough if you can't tell where it is!)
• 1/4 cup of blueberries

This was my breakfast yesterday.

• 1 egg + 1 egg white scrambled w/ baby spinach and chopped cauliflower
• 1 slice of whole wheat bread
• 1/4 cup of blueberries

You can't see the cauliflower, but I promise it's mixed in there! I've been making an effort to replace rice with cauliflower, so expect to see a lot of that in my meals. Also, if you look up cauliflower rice or cauliflower faux rice, you will see what I'm talking about. Actually, it's in my next photo..

For lunch!

• 1/2 of a medium banana
• Stir-fry teriyaki chicken w/ asparagus and mushrooms
• 3/4 cup cauliflower rice
  

The teriyaki dish was something I made for the first time. It turned out well, but I should have marinated it longer. My dinner pretty much consisted of the same thing, except with less cauliflower and on a bed of baby spinach. It tasted so much better!! I am a bit of a sucker for baby spinach, but at least it's a good thing. I actually took a picture of it, but I may just post it the next time I blog because it's still in my camera.

As of my meals from today, mostly the same thing! I don't have too much of a variety right now, just been grocery shopping for what we could afford. This whole week or the past two weeks, I've been cooking things for the first time. Meaning the dishes I cooked were first timers! If that made sense. :( There was spaghetti (yup) w/ground turkey, curry chicken, and sopas (google it!) with spaghetti noodles and Vienna chicken sausage which was freakin' delicious. Anyway, hope this was pretty cool for my first food post! I wish my food looked super duper pretty, but who cares it tasted wonderful.

Obviously I ended early on the drawing challenge. I wasn't too interested in the topics, so I just stopped.

After months and months, I'm finally publishing a new post which usually means I am up to something again: I decided to try and do some kind of ongoing blogging of photos of my meals. Yeah. At least whatever I take photos of. Since mid last year, I have been sick on and off. A lot of it has brought me to some occasional depression, anxiety, and dissatisfaction in my life. I came to many realizations that I could possibly and eventually be transforming into some insane hypochondriac (seriously/no offense to anybody either). I won't go into much detail on my sicknesses, because I don't even want to dwell on those anymore. Anyway, towards the end of 2010, I realized my negativity in my health was not helping me whatsoever. Additionally, my lack of complete trust in God was failing to bring me back up. It all affected many aspects of my life..

I'll come clean and honest with you all that I struggled a lot with the battle of fear and spiritual dryness for a long time during many of my sick days (sometimes months). I just wanted to be healthy again and feel normal. But I needed to take better care of my body and my health. Change up some things in my life. This includes my eating habits most importantly, more body activity, more positivity in my life, basically more self-discipline. Since I started getting sick a lot, I've been eating less and gradually healthier. Had smaller appetites when I was sick, it kind of stuck with me most of the time. I even looked into new diet plans. Which brings me to my point, months later, tonight, that I would like to share some of my healthy yummies with all of you. I'm not the most perfect health freak out there, but I feel it would be something to help me in my journey to feeling better about my health and my journey in continuing to praise God in all circumstances — all. Hopefully even gain a few feedback from some of my readers, especially any kind of positive accountability as well.

So besides this crazy health life! I am also currently working on some new art (not digital this time!). I wanted to spend a lot of time during my Winter break getting back into hand drawing and painting. I will be starting to sell some items hopefully soon, but literally nothing big. So to whoever even reads this blog, keep an eye out for those (possibly on my Flickr as well). :) Oh yeah, and I made a new donate button (located on there on the sidebar) so feel free to feel generous! ;) Just kidding, but thanks to anybody who is willing to support financially. Any contribution is greatly appreciated, you don't even know..

Let's make sure I don't give up on these challenges this time! Keep me in touch, people.

I hope you guys can look at these experiences of mine (or any for that matter) as a refreshment, a more positive outlook on life, and of course a chance to rejoice in the mercies God has yet to bring each new day.

PS - Check this out. And this, too.