My Expanded Waistline

During the past ten months I have been very limited as to what I can and cannot physically do. Due to my back injury and slow recovery it appears that I have lost a large portion of my calorie burning abilities. Apparently, walking from couch to fridge and back or lifting one’s fork, spoon or chopsticks continually to one’s mouth does not constitute exercise. Consequently there’s considerably more than a little “muffin top” over my trouser’s waistband; it looks more like an over-yeasted loaf of bread, if you know what I mean.
This was never more evident than a couple of weeks ago when I tossed aside my usual wardrobe of expandable waistband sweatpants or pajama bottoms and attempted to put on a pair of dress pants that I hadn’t worn since last summer. Hah! When I tried to do up the clasp it wasn’t even close. Deb tried in vain to fasten the gap together with a safety pin and she almost lost an eye in the failed attempt. Yikes!
That incident got me all nostalgic for the old days when I could eat anything I wanted and as much as I wanted and I still couldn’t gain a pound. Aaahhh, those were the days. I had always been active enough through sports, working out and physical work that I never really had to worry about it too much before. On top of the expanding waistline my cholesterol was climbing through the roof, too, so now I had more than one reason to watch what I was eating.
I definitely had to change my eating habits. I would have to eliminate the szalonna (bacon drippings with bread) or 1/2 litres of ice cream at one sitting and I would have to eat more chicken, fish and fresh veggies. I’d also have to take a hard look at replacing my usual high-calorie beer with something like Molson 67 or some other low-calorie beer but I have a real hard time paying more for less, you know?
Anyway, in an effort to eat more lean meat we picked up some ground chicken and some ground turkey instead of ground beef. Although I’m no Blue Seal Chef I do know my way around a kitchen but I was lacking recipes for cooking ground chicken or turkey. I was guessing that you can’t just substitute ground beef with ground chicken or ground turkey and have the same results so I Googled some recipes to try.
I found a number of recipes but the first one to catch my eye was the Apple-Chicken Sausage recipe. The recipe looked simple enough requiring only ground chicken, an apple and some seasoning; make them into patties, fry and voila--sausage--or a close facsimile thereof. The red flag should have been raised when the recipe called for enough poultry seasoning for seven stuffed turkeys, but what the heck do I know, right, so I threw it all together and fried them up and they smelled pretty good but…Yech! I think that whoever thought that this concoction would taste like sausage hadn’t really tasted sausage before. It was close, but there would have to be considerable experimentation with the ingredients requiring lots of time and too much wasted ground chicken to perfect that faulty recipe. As usual…”too smart, too late”.
This whole episode just reinforced in me that anything good for you isn’t going to be easy. Sure it’d be nice to live off of Cheezies and beer, like I use to, but those days are long gone and as we age and draw nearer to our expiration date, (and attempt to delay the inevitability of that day), we sometimes just have to make adjustments whether we want to or not.
“For the first time ever, overweight people outnumber average people in America. Doesn't that make overweight the average then? Last month you were fat, now you're average - hey, let's get a pizza!”-Jay Leno.