Mr Pink taco from Torchy's

As I drove through Torchy’s Tacos for lunch the other day, I saw that there was a Turkey Mole taco on the menu.  My girlfriend, Jamie, LOVES mole.  And when the opportunity strikes, I love to show up at her gift store with lunch.  We eat fast & talk a little.  Early November brought one such day!  My boss had also been reminding the office to get our holiday cards together, so I actually killed two birds with one stone by taking Jaime lunch!

When I arrive she was busy as usual.  And Linda was there too!  I’d forgotten it’s November, and Jaime’s mom Linda  is often in the store working with her through the holidays.

“How can you eat THAT and look so GREAT?” Linda exclaimed.

First of all, I LOVE it when anyone tells me I look good.  It just makes me feel great and that much further removed from the 45+ pounds I’ve shed.

Second of all, I’m not positive as to the exact why, but overall I think it’s because I’m more body balanced than unbalanced.  Meaning, when I ingest food my body puts it to work or eliminates it.  I also don’t over indulge often.  That day I was having a Mr Pink Taco from Torchy’s.  Let’s check out the calories – I rarely count them.  (I haven’t had a diet where I counted calories since 2009.)

So, Mr. Pink is actually quite good for me when I need lunch on the go near the office.  I assumed as much since it’s a big piece of salmon slathered with veggies. The fresco queso is in a very small container, so I take advantage of it as well.

I like Torchy’s because they use fresh ingredients and cook tacos as you wait.  I don’t add filler sides, and I eat my tacos on corn tortillas vs flour or wheat.    I typically have only one taco. Once I had two and was full for days. It also gets pricey.

Lunches on the go or casual eating out has evolved for Craig and I as we’ve lost weight and improved our health.  Below is our list of go to restaurants and why. Torchy’s is at the top of my list and this list has also evolved as I’ve begun planning to ‘be caught off guard without lunch.”  Knowing my go to healthy alternatives is essential these days for more reasons that diet…

Torchy’s Tacos: fresh and cheap if you don’t over indulge. Servings are not too large which I like.
Quick burger: I often grab a regular hamburger from P Terry’s.  Again, natural beef and made fresh. This is a great filler with more carbs than I’d normally like, but it’s fast, easy, and satisfying.  It’s quite imperative I leave out fries on the average day, I don’t add cheese, and unsweetened tea is my drink of choice at a drive through. If not at P Terry’s, I go for the smallest burger on the menu, same description as above.
Chic-fil-A: Easy chicken sandwich on the run.  I usually get the grilled sandwich or 6 nuggets.
Tino’s Greek Cafe: I just LOVE their chicken…it may not be very ‘organic’ but it’s great chicken on a salad.
Chipotle: Local, natural, sustainably raised meats used.   (I subtract rice from my bowl if I’m in weight loss mode.)

Mickey suggested I felt guilty and I should ‘release’ the guilt.  She said this plainly as if everyone sits around ‘releasing’.  Seriously?  “How do you do that?” I asked.  She explained you simply say to yourself, “I release this guilty feeling.”  It didn’t matter if I could identify the exact thing I felt guilt over, the over all ‘letting go’ of it was all I need tend to…Seriously?

But it worked.  Those dreams stopped.  Huge relief. Fast Forward to 2010.

So in 2010 when Nina first made this suggestion I related it back to Mickey.  Therefore I was pretty willing to give it a try.  I began releasing all the time, everywhere.  Specifically I thought the thought, “I release ________________, ” or “I let go of ____________________.   Nina said it would work, and it was effortless so I released compulsively for 6+ months.

I started with big-ticket items I was angry about, miserable about, and eventually I moved to broader topics.  Specific releases  were mainly thoughts that popped into my head uninvited over and over, judgements, aggravations that I hadn’t accomplished all in one day that was set forth.  Broader topics today are stress, anger, or whatever ‘I don’t know I’m holding on to’.  Today I think about replacing what I’ve released with what I need: support, confidence, power, happiness, integrity…whatever it is I need during that situation, on that day or during the upcoming week.

May sound weird, but works like one heck of a charm.  This is probably my biggest ace in the hole.  Releasing keeps the monkey off my back, and it replaces ugly thoughts with space or something positive.  For example, I would never get mad at myself today for not working out.  In the past that would have meant I was “lazy, just getting old, or my working out is useless anyway.”   Today I move the work out to another day or time, or I incorporate the time off into my big picture plan. There is no distress if the work out moves.

Really, if I think hard about it, this health journey really began when I found out there was a benign tumor in my left tibia in 2006.  The tumor grew from thumb sized to the size of a hard-boiled egg hollowing out my bone in less than 3 months.  My bone actually cracked.  The tumor turned out to be a bone cyst – common in young children but rare in adults.  The surgeon was able to fix me right up.  But why did that thing grow so fast in the first place?  This was what concerned me.

I’d been wanting to see Nina Rowan for a while by this time.  She had a really cool testing system that could help me understand how alkaline my body was or was not…I’d been reading that an acidic body is a harvesting zone for the growth of diseases…and an alkaline state of being does not encourage similar growth…So this is really where I began searching for real information regarding food and what I put inside of my body.

That was in 2006.  Meeting with Nina was insightful and helpful, and I took all of her suggestions in the groovy binder she created for me with my analysis and I kept it close for the next few years.  I ate mostly off of her ‘approved’ foods list that would encourage my body to process foods the easiest.  I began drinking closer to the amount of water I should be taking in daily…and that was about it.

I ran into Nina again in February 2010 and learned she was offering health coaching.  I’d been up and down in weight twice since 2006, and I’d begun figuring out food and how the body works with that chiropractor…And I knew I needed something more to really push through the barriers I’d been battling all of my life.  We figured out that we’d be health coaching, and I signed up for the six month program.  I knew I needed the accountability and Nina.  I assumed she’d be very similar to a trainer evaluating my daily intake and output…boy could I have possibly been more wrong?

To be continued…