Saturday 20 January 2007

Crono-problemo

Still problems with cron-o-meter which may be down to enforced prohibitation on downloads on this PC by my employer. Fair enough. :-(

Bummer though. I was hoping this might be the holy Grail of nutrient trackers. Could still be too US-centric for me though, even if I do manage to get the thing working.

Tonight I went to a wonderful "promenade" concert of various compositions by Tallis, in Wells Cathedral (Somerset). I had tears in my eyes within the first 30 seconds, and spent the next hour sitting quietly, with my back pressed against centuries old stonework, my hair over my face, eyes closed, just listening to the voices.

I can understand now how one can believe in angels. Such beauty, such peace. My eyes were closed; but my mind was flooded with light. And I am not, at all, religious.

Dinner plans went awry though. We couldn't find anywhere to eat in town, and so headed back to our village twenty miles away. I didn't eat until an hour or so ago (10pm), and by that time I had drunk one large glass of carmenere. Another with dinner. Which was "grilled" aubergine with hummus and salad. Too much oil on the "grilled". And I ate two of the potato wedges from my friends' plates.

Which I guess takes me from my 400 cal estimate of today's food to... well, well over 1000. And all my nice nutrients down the pan...

Bugger.

Oh well. I guess these things will happen on weekends. I should have stopped at one glass but I was so hungry; I needed *something*.

Anyway, I have a friend coming for dinner tomorrow and we will drink wine, as we have done for... many years. Less now; she will be driving long distance early and I am so trying to cut down. I am planning to do a salad with raw fennel, chicory, watercress, sliced pear, and small pieces of gorgonzola and walnuts, and maybe some soup if we still feel like it - my friend is digging up some jerusalem artichokes at the moment. You take those, and some onions and garlic, and ONE potato, and simmer and blend - and it is heaven, and very CR friendly. I also have some squash/tomato/chilli soup in the freezer, and loads of other veggies for something impromtu. I guess that will do, with some rye toast if necessary,. Fortunately she is veggie too.

Linking. I'm reading round blogs at the moment and if I could link to them on this page, that would be very cool. The usual bunch... From April to Mary and so on... Is this the way everyone did it? I assume the bunch is usual anyway... :-) But I won't do it without permission, so if I can link to you please leave a comment. Unlike Hilary, I think LJ is better for this kind of stuff than Blogger... but here we are on Blogger. And I hope there is no offence caused by me admitting to being a CR blog lurker.

4 comments:

HkGrace said...

You know, Sara, you might be right that Livejournal is better with some features. But with everyone else on Blogger it seems like that's easiest with making comments, etc.

Robin said...

Hi there, Sara.
Feel free to link to me. I'll add your link to my blog.
I hope you can get CRON-o-meter up and running soon. I've been a bit worried that you might not be eating enough but it's so hard to tell without seeing the numbers.
Don't starve yourself! Remember, when your diet is mostly healthy veggies, you really do have to eat huge amounts to get all your nutrition. You should see the size of the kale salad I eat every day!
Until you get the software working, you can always look things up in Walford's nutrition database:
http://www.walford.com/nutrition.htm
It's definitely nowhere near as good as CRON-o-meter and it uses old RDA values, but it's better than nothing.
As for things being US-centric, I'm not sure how to help you overcome that problem but maybe Matthew can help. He's been CRONing for a while and lives in GB, I believe. Here's the link for his blog:
http://matts-cr.blogspot.com/
Maybe he'll have some helpful advice.

Emi at Project Swatch said...

CRON-o-Meter isn't too US specific - you can measure everything in grams. In fact, I even measure egg whites and suchlike in grams rather than cups, since British and American cups are different sizes. The only major problem you'll encounter is that a few foods have different names - rocket in Britain is arugala in the US, jelly is jello, etc. Marmite isn't listed, but "yeast extract spread" is, so I customized that to get the right values for each nutrient. (I'm a California girl, btw - just living in London at the moment.)

I found your blog from a comment you left on someone else's - I'll link to you if you'd like.

April said...

Sara!

I just found your blog.

It's so hard in the beginning. Have you read my old blogspot blog, from my first years of CR? It was exhilarating and fun, but it was hard to get my mind around the new healthy way of looking at food. And I always fight the urge to have one more glass of wine... I would much prefer a second, or third glass of a good French cab to a piece of chocolate or a dessert.

And when it comes to social life revolving around restaurants and bars... well, before I met MR, that was definitely the case for me. It was hard to get my friends to accept that there had to be some changes in my life. And I still drink with them... just a lot less than I used to.

Wow, I love your blog. You are so brave and honest. Keep up the good work. And link to me!

love, april