Holy cow. It’s time for me to get back into a healthier routine. I was doing great with my diet and weight loss during the school year. I walked an awful lot each day and avoided most sugar and carbs. I am kind f still in the same smaller size, but things are getting tight and I know I need to in the very least start taking my fat burner twice a day again. I do much better during the school year, when I have a routine that varies very little from day to day.

Of course, little things like the iced coffee I have sitting here on the desk are not helping. I used about half a cup of whole milk and some real sugar when I made it. In the past, I would have used Splenda or Truvia and skim milk. It’s not that hard to make smart choices, I just have to want to do it.

Finally, I got myself a good haircut! It’s been a long time. I have been wearing my hair longer and going in to have it trimmed and shaped, but I have not had a real hairstyle for years. Yikes. I had no idea how out of control it had become.

I have very thick hair. The strands are each quite thin, very fine and silky. I just have a lot of them. A lot. So, I had the hairdresser thin out my hair and you should have seen the pile on the floor. And still, the hair left on my head looks thicker than most people’s.

It helps to find a hairdresser you like. I have a hard time with that. Often, it takes me years after a move to find someone to cut my hair that I feel is skilled and confident enough to meet my expectations. I had a phenomenal hairdresser when I lived in Morgantown, WV (Spa Roma). Here in Florida I have only found one hairdresser I really loved in the 11 years I have been here, and he was up in Gainesville. So, finding Jennifer up at my corner salon was a surprise and a blessing.

I feel like a new woman. Please please please remind me to never neglect having a good stylist on hand ever again.

I know. I am not that old, but I still look in the mirror and feel such confusion that the face looking back is that of someone nearing 40 instead of the porcelain-skinned teenager who never had to deal with acne or blackheads. My skin is great for my age, but I spend more time than I ever had to before in making sure it looks good. I know for a fact that when I was a teenager, all I had to do was wash my face and occasionally dab on some moisturizer at night.

A lot of people spend great amounts of money to turn back the clock, so to speak. I know there are cosmetic procedures that would slough off a few years, but since I am ahead of the game anyway (I look younger than I am), I figured I would avoid spending the money and taking the health risks and just make sure I keep up with a good skincare regimen.

Still, I never said I wouldn’t do while kicking and screaming all along the way.

She fought hard. She had the money to fight hard. She had resources most people will never be able to access, due to money. And still, cancer is relentless. You can fight and use all the money in the world to try and find a way to beat cancer, but in the end you are powerless.

My mother has cancer. She has been fighting hard for over 14 years now. Mom living this long with the sort of cancer she has is a miracle. It is nearly unheard of. And still, if cancer wants to win — it will. I suppose that’s the reality that makes me feel so out of control when it comes to understanding my mother’s illness. She tries every day to live life as though nothing is wrong. After all these years, I have to believe that her ability to keep on living and to not give in to the cancer by giving up onn a normal life is why she is still with us.

I have Farrah’s family in my heart today. I know they must have all had a similar outlook after watching her fight so hard. They must have been focused on life as usual and the reality that we can often beat cancer. In the end, cancer won, but I am convinced that Farrah and everyone around her learned a lot about love and faith along the way.

I have not actively been on my diet now for over 3 months. I have not lost any more weight, but neither have I gained any weight. I have successfully learned to maintain, which is a great skill to have. I can eat pretty heartily and maintain my weight, due to my activity level and a relatively good metabolism for my age.

I want to jump back on the train soon, though. I will not be going back to a weight loss doctor, because I can no longer afford it. Now that the school district has given my job to someone with more seniority, I am in a position where I have to wait and see. I need to wait and see if any positions open up this summer and I need to wait and see what sort of instructional positions will be posted for the upcoming academic year. I have to wait and see, and in the meantime I am without a paycheck and moving quickly into a situation where I will need to pay COBRA fees out of pocket in order to maintain my health insurance.

So my plan is to start back on the menu my doctor gave me and look into reviews to find the best weight loss pills that are available over the counter. I was getting a prescription at the office where I went for weekly check-ins, but I know there are medications more readily available that are just as safe – if not safer.

I had one friend tell me that I should continue seeing the doctor I was seeing; that I should consider it a financial sacrifice worth making. I told her that even when was working it WAS a financial sacrifice. I made poverty level wages in the position I had with the school district. Now I am making nothing, so it’s a sacrifice beyond reason.

I have been able to get through every day of this past week without taking a single diet pill. I feel like it’s a start. I must mean I am finally learning to eat enough protein often enough during the day to not feel as many hunger pangs as I used to.

Still, my cravings for sweets and carbs are as yet an issue in my life. I am eating the sweetened ricotta I mentioned earlier, but I’d love a little chocolate one night. When I am working to maintain my weight, I find I actually can eat some candy and bread and pasta. When I am actively working to lose with, though, I need to absolutely cut out those foods.

So, I am still just down the 40 pounds I lost when I started the diet. I took off about two months, because I was just plain wearing of dieting, I maintained during that period and did not gain. Now, I need to start back up and make this diet work for me. I would like to lose another 40 before I take another maintenance break.

I do. I miss mascara. And lately, I have been missing eyeliner.

I am so very ready to go back to normal eyes. My eye allergy season generally lasts about a month, but it has been longer this year. I have a hard enough time wearing my contacts when my eyes are swollen from pollen. Adding mascara or eyeliner just makes my yes even worse – and when made to choose, I choose contacts.

My depth perception is way off when I wear my glasses and that just leads to overall mental fogginess. Mental fogginess is decidedly not a good thing when you are working with high school kids all day. They are lovable, but you need to be on your toes at all times.

Somehow, not wearing makeup on my eyes makes me feel more like I blend into the crowd. I have always thought that adding a little eyeliner has quite a dramatic influence on my face. It’s night and day, so to speak.

On top of the makeup issue, my yes just plain hurt. They are sore and sensitive, weepy and red. It’s across the board uncomfortable.

It is SO comforting to finally see science and the media outlets talking about Oral Allergy Syndrome. I have had it since I was a pre-teen and my daughter developed it by age two. I had to learn about it years and years ago by reading obscure allergy journals and other scholarly publications I would find in the moldy stacks of university libraries.

Even when I try to explain to people that I can eat cooked apples, but not raw apples (and peaches, plums, pears, cherries, etc.) I get looks of disbelief. My own family struggled to understand. I went through years of assuming it was due to pesticides. Then, I finally figured out it was due to enzymes in the fruit — or proteins if that makes more sense to you.

 CNN is currently running the most concise explanation I have read to date:

Have you ever experienced itchiness or hives in your mouth area after eating raw fruit or vegetables? Do you also have seasonal allergies?

If so, you may have oral allergy syndrome, whose symptoms occur because the proteins in some fruits and vegetables are similar to proteins in some pollens.

“They’re not identical proteins, but they’re similar enough to confuse the immune system to have these reactions,” said said Dr. Robert Wood, chief of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

That’s not to say that everyone with pollen allergies has oral allergy syndrome. A person may sneeze all spring long and not have any obvious food sensitivities.

But oral allergy syndrome may help explain why some people have seemingly mysterious reactions to certain foods — for example, raw apples but not cooked apples. That’s because there are proteins in raw apples that are very similar to the proteins in birch pollen, experts say.

Cooking the offending fruits and vegetables will “denature” or change the shapes of these proteins, so people with oral allergy syndrome will usually be able to eat them without a problem, said Dr. Stanley Fineman, allergist with the Atlanta Allergy and Asthma Clinic.

Some people find that the peel of a fruit has more allergens than the meat, so peeling first helps, Wood said.

Because the reaction is usually localized to the mouth area, including lips, tongue, and throat, some people will choose to ignore the symptoms and continue to eat offending foods, Wood said. For people with reactions confined to the mouth, this is a “reasonable” choice they could make.

“Patients will typically decide on their own, without any discussion with a doctor, whether they enjoy the apple enough to put up with an itchy mouth, or whether they hate the itchy mouth enough to avoid the apple,” he said.

But in rare cases people with oral allergy syndrome experience anaphylaxis, a life-threatening reaction that may include blocked airways, hypertension, anxiety, vomiting and diarrhea. The most severe reactions require the use of an injection of epinephrine to subside, which is why many people with food allergies carry auto-injectors for emergencies.

Over-the-counter antihistamines alleviate symptoms of reactions for some people, experts say.

Studies have shown that some people who undergo allergy shots for pollen allergies will experience relief in oral allergy syndrome, Wood said, but at this point no one should get shots just for that reason, since they don’t work on most people’s food allergies.

“If you are a good candidate for allergy shots otherwise, this may be a side benefit,” he said.

While other kinds of food allergies present in the first two or three years of life, pollen allergies that contribute to oral allergy syndrome develop more slowly, Wood said, peaking in the teenage and young adult years. Some people may develop allergies even later in life, he said.

A person who moves to a new part of the country, having never been exposed to the native pollens there, may become allergic to those pollens and have some spill-over into food allergies, Wood said.

Typically, once people start to react to some foods, they will also react to other foods in the same group. People may find that their allergies to raw fruits and vegetables subside during the season when the associated pollen levels are low. For example, a person may react to raw apples from March to October, but feel fine when eating them from November to February, when birch pollen is low, Wood said.

About half of people with pollen allergies have improvement from puberty through adulthood, which correlates with associated food allergies, Wood said.

“The better the pollen allergy gets, in most people, the less the food allergy will occur,” he said.

I have to admit I am getting weary of weekly weigh-ins. I lost a good deal of weight this winter, and I have been at a stand-still now for a month or so. I am just tired of the complete mental focus it takes to always be planning meals, counting calories, and making sure you have eaten every few hours. I work a job where it is very difficult stop and eat on the clock. It’s not like I can just whip out a small meal in the middle of a class. And, between classes I am nearly always interacting with students.

SO, I have considered giving the supplements and diet pills a break until this summer. Or, maybe just another month. I need to mentally and emotionally allow myself a break so I can start back over and approach weight loss as a “new” adventure again. I’ve proven I know how to eat to maintain now. It’s just a matter of putting myself back in the mindset of actual weight reduction. It’s work, yes, and I I need to approach it wholeheartedly.

I do stop and wonder sometimes if I am not just being lazy. Yes, it is easier to grab a sandwich at home with my daughter than it is to plan out several trips a week to the produce market and to keep gulping down high protein foods like lean meat and low-fat cheese. I like those foods, but a little variety is nice as well. I am looking food boredom right in the face and I am pretty sure I am losing the staring contest.

An appropriate start to an ominous day. I woke up at 4 a.m. to the sound of my daughter’s voice. She told me she was too hot to sleep and her skin hut. In my half asleep twilight state of mind, I simply turned on her ceiling fan and told her to go back to sleep. When we woke up at 5:30, she was hot to the touch. I took her temperature and found she was 102.4ºF.

I found some flu medicine and fever reducer and talked my mother into staying home with her so that I could still go to work. While the fever reducers kept her temperature down, it shot back up every time the meds were ready to wear off. By the time I got home from work, I could tell I needed to get Gigi in with our pediatrician. It’s never good to start out sick on Friday and have to risk the walk in clinic over the weekend.

When we reached the peds office, my daughter’s temperature was up to 104.4 ºF. The first order of business was to get the temperature down. Once we accomplished that, we were able to rule out a lot of things and settle on either the flu or a sinus infection. I walked out with a lot of good advice and a prescription for a heavy antibiotic.

Also, even though we always use a saline mist before blowing our noses in the morning, the doctor talked to us about full our sinus irrigating. It’s a good idea, really, and I have considered it a lot in the past. We take on a lot of illness that we would not have had to if we could all just maintain a healthy sinus cavity.

Wish us well. On top of the fact that my daughter and I are already pretty physically taxed from fighting off the severe pollen level sin Florida right now; the flu is making rounds in our area. I have a sneaking suspicion that the rest of the family will be sick by Monday.

When I went to see my doctor last week, I was down 35 pounds from my starting weight. That’s encouraging progress for just a little over eight weeks of work. However, this week I had gained back about 4 pounds. We could tell from the printout they gave me that more than half of that was water. I knew I was retaining water after all of the restaurant food I had last weekend when we celebrated my daughter’s birthday. I am super sensitive to salt.

Those other two pounds, though, were simply the result of allowing myself comfort eating this week. I have been feeling stress due to things my ex-husband is doing, as well as some pressure to get multiple projects completed. I let myself eat a good deal of bread and sugar. My body jumped at the carbs and held on tight

I also needed to stop and admit that appetite versus hunger is still a huge issue for me. The weight loss pills my doctor prescribed may indeed be an optional part of my weight loss plan, but I am not ready to stop taking them yet. I look forward to the day when eating becomes less mental, less emotional – but that is not today.

And so, I am scaling my menu back to the basics. Thankfully, I really enjoy all of the foods that are included in re-starting my diet. I adore mushrooms and dark greens, spinach and cabbage. I love lean proteins like chicken and low-fat cheese and low-fat ricotta. I’m not facing a hardship by eating these foods at all. I merely have to work harder to train my mind to not want sugar and carbs as often.

I was watching an episode of Eleventh Hour last night. I had saved it to my DVR and finally had some time to sit and catch up on shows. This particular episode featured a boy who had been cured of his cancer using stem cells that had been collected form his own cord blood and then stored. His sister needed the stem cells that had been stored for her and the obstacle was that they had been stolen.

It was a pretty good episode, but I had a hard time keeping my mind off of the situation surrounding the birth of my own daughter and how even though we had signed up with Cryo-Cell to have her cord blood stored, there was a communication mix-up at our hospital and they ended up donated instead, My sister and one of my best friends have their kids’ cord blood stored with Cryo-Cell, though.

That got me thinking about the new service being offered at Cryo-Cell (which is a local company here in my area, but they serve an international clientele) called C’elle. C’Elle offers another way to collect and store stem cells. In this case, the process captures the stem cells found naturally in menstrual blood.

You use a simple collection kit and by storing the blood, you have future access to cells that can be used to treat conditions like breast cancer, diabetes, and Parkinson’s. Plus, studies show that these cells may even come into play for wound-healing and anti-aging technology.

For example., there are scientists in Japan that have proven that that cells taken from menstrual blood can be cultivated and used like stem cells to repair damaged heart tissue. They published their findings in the medical journal Stem Cells. You probably already understand that they reason stem cells are so miraculous is because they can potentially become any cell in the body.

Right now you can Order C’elle Now and save $200 on their annual storage plan. It’s the beginning of a new year, as well as a new age of medical breakthroughs and milestones. Now is the time to look into C’elle and put a buffer of safety on your own future. Take a look at some of the C’Elle Testimonials to learn more about why this could be such an important decision for you.

In a word, yes.

In the past I have been very skeptical about the use of fat burners to aid in weight loss programs. I have to say that now I am a believer. I read a lot of studies prior to embarking on my current diet and weight loss plan. I looked at statistics that showed how adding things like calcium pyruvate and various amino acids could help increase how much weight a person can lose weekly, when combined with an appropriate diet and healthy exercise.

So, I have started using a combination of the calcium pyruvate and amino acids and found that my own weight loss has come easier than in the past when I just changed my diet and added additional exercise to my daily routine. I know my weight loss I not in the range of miraculous, but I have to think that most people would agree that the fact that I have lost 23 pounds in six weeks is pretty great. That is verging on about 4 pounds a week and I’m doing it without starving myself or over exerting physically. Yes, I made drastic changes in WHAT I eat and WHAT I do for my daily physical activity, but I’m absolutely not making changes that will risk my health. I have to believe that the fat burners have aided in that.

Today was the first day of finals exams for the first semester at the high school. What a crazy day. I am not sure how I feel about the District allowing students in all grades exempt exams. I understand seniors with good grades and attendance being able to do so, but I think it is a reward you need to earn and giving it to just seniors would make it so much more special. Of course, it’s not my call.

We had a staff meeting and they served pizza and brownies. Pizza and Brownies! Are you kidding me? *sigh* I love pizza and brownies, very much so. But, you will all be happy to hear that I was VERY good. I sat and socialized and did not touch a single bite. I snacked on pumpkin seeds throughout the day, so my hunger was in check. I just had to hold back on the sheer desire to eat such yummy food. It’s getting easier as time goes by, and I have to remind myself that in the first month of my diet I lost 17 pounds. Not bad, huh?

It’s funny that I would look at current headlines and see a peanut butter recall due to a salmonella outbreak that has sickened people in 42 states since September. OK, not Ha Ha Funny, but the kind of funny that makes you grimace uncomfortably.

I was just with one of my students last week as he sat in his Nutrition and Wellness class learning about food borne illnesses. The kids were mostly shocked to hear that you can get salmonella poisoning from tainted peanut butter. They were actually surprised at quite a lot of information contained in that particular lecture.

And so here we are, looking at yet another food recall involving peanut butter. This time it seems to be centered in Ohio and King Nut Companies has recalled two brands of peanut butter after finding that an open jar tested positive for salmonella bacteria: King Nut and Parnell’s Pride with lot codes that begin with the number 8.

Although distributed by King Nut Companies, the product is actually manufactured by Peanut Corporation of America in Lynchburg, Va. The two brands in question are not sold in grocery stores, but rather used in institutional settings, including nursing homes, schools and colleges.

Keep in mind that the tainted contained was discovered in the kitchen of a nursing facility and very well could have been cross contaminated by another food source. That is something all of us should think about more often in our own kitchens.

Just about two years ago we had that big national peanut butter recall. ConAgra recalled all Peter Pan brand peanut butter (which included Wal-Mart’s “Great Value” brand), which caused at least 625 salmonella cases in 47 states.

So, just how does peanut butter become tainted with salmonella? While we know that poor hand washing, poultry, meat, and eggs are the most common source of the bacteria, fruits and vegetables can sometimes be infected if they come into contact with livestock fecal matter. Keep in mind that the FDA does not regulate the safety of produce. In the past, salmonella outbreaks in peanut butter have been most likely due to post-processing contamination with fecal matter.

Salmonella in peanut butter is actually very rare. You face a greater risk, in reality, from aflatoxin, a potent carcinogen. This toxin is produced by a mold that grows on peanuts while they are in the ground. The USDA allows peanuts to be certified and sold as aflatoxin-free as long as they contain less than 25ppb, or below 20ppb in peanut butter.