Fitness
This week, I'm going to add another few "limbering and stretching exercises" to my day. These exercises were included in an article by beauty expert Antoinette Donnelly in an article titled "Daily Exercise Aids Feeling of Fatigue" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 13, 1940). Donnelly recommended that her readers begin by doing each exercise 20 times. The first will be added to my morning routine:
7. Rise up on the balls of your feet, bring your arms up overhead, stretching, stretching, stretching everything from toes up, keeping chest high, abdomen in.
The next two will be the nucleus of an evening exercise routine:
8. Take your old friend the floor-touching one, but we prefer the floor-touching one in which you turn on the waist and attempt to touch the floor back of your heels.
9. Lie on your back on the floor with your arms stretched wide at shoulders. Keep head and shoulders on the floor while you raise your right foot over and cross the left, aiming to reach with a long stretch a meeting between your right-foot toes and your left-hand fingers. Then reverse, bringing your left foot and right hand into contact. At first the meeting will be very, very formal, the pair not getting together at all. But that’s all right. You’re doing something fine for yourself, your waistline, hipline, thighs, lower back and, indeed, the upper torso comes in for benefit, too.
Reducing
I'm transforming my desserts this week. I've long since made over my lunchtime desserts on weekdays. They're almost always some sort of decadent dish of fruit - berries, usually. Now it's time to do something about the desserts I eat after dinner and at lunchtime on the weekends. Ice cream was banished from my household several weeks ago, but it's been replaced with something possibly even worse --- peanut butter cups. I winced when I turned the container over the other day and faced the fact that three of these babies equal 180 calories. Yikes! I could easily eat six to nine of them in a sitting.
An article on reducing in the October 1945 issue of Good Housekeeping has three great dessert suggestions: baked custard, lemon sherbet, and pudding. Sadly, the recipe for each of these dishes includes saccharin as the sweetener. I'm not fond of artificial sweeteners. (Splenda, in particular, rips through me like a house afire.) What I figure, though, is that - even sweetened with sugar - if I stick to the recommended serving size, I'll be making a ginormous step in the right direction if I trade one of these dessert suggestions for my peanut butter cups:
1/2 cup fat-free rainbow sherbet = 120 calories
1/2 cup chocolate pudding made with 1% organic milk = 140 calories
Either one is a heck of a lot better than 360-540 calories' worth of peanut butter and chocolate! There are lots of flavors to keep me interested and they'll be sinchy to make.
Grooming
My face is powdered, my lips have been painted --- my hair may not be in vintage order, but it's been brushed 'til it shines and parted with precision. Here's the last step in the 1946 morning grooming routine for young women:
Take a last look, to be sure you are impeccable from top to toe.
I'm going to dust off that looking glass and take a good long look at myself in the morning before I leave the house. Wrinkles in my clothing? Lint? How does my hair look from the back? It's high time I take some responsibility for what I look like below the neck!
9 comments:
This isn't a 'period' dessert, but I often eat Life cereal about an hour or two after dinner. I am pretty strict about portion control, so my dinners are usually only about 300-450 calories, and I eat dinner early- like around 5:00- so I get hungry again around 7:30. A bowl of cereal (I just follow the suggested portion on the box)tides me over until morning and it is healthier then most other desserts.
Another option is fresh fruit, like strawberries, stirred with yogurt and 1/4 cup (or less) chopped nuts. This has the sweet, savory, creamy, and crunchy factor which can be decadent, but depending on your portion size, not super high in calories. Plus, none of it has 'empty' calories.
Thanks for the suggestions, TGH! (Life cereal is so good.) I think I'd like to give the vintage ideas a go - but if they don't work, I'll have to find something that will. Tonight, I'm going to try the sherbet. I haven't had any in years...
I find that, since chocolate is my FAVORITE thing with ice cream a close second, I need something that is creamy.
In my vintage cookbook, the baked custards and puddings have been more to my liking than the Jello recipes for that very reason.
I have no patience for artificial sweeteners. They do way more harm than a little plain sugar does.
Ah, yes, chocolate. The thought of being able to get that chocolate fix with chocolate pudding and baked chocolate custard seems like the right move. For awhile, anyway. When I get really good at this, I can make the desserts even better!
I just discovered a product in Mary Jane Magazine, called chillover powder. It is a non-animal, not a pectin product, gelatin alternative, This means you could make gelitin desserts at home with out animal gelitin.
Have you tried it or does anyone know about it?
I thought that sherbert was high in sugar? Did they have gelato back then as it is low in calories? I do not remember any.
Jeanne, I've never heard of the chillover powder. I'll have to do some reading up... One serving of fat-free sherbet contains 120 calories and 21 grams sugar. Compared to my typical night's dessert of peanut butter cups (360-540 calories and 38-57 grams sugar) it's definitely a step in the right direction in my book! Sorbet seems to contain slightly less of both calories and sugar than the sherbet, while gelato contains slightly more.
Chocolate pudding made from scratch - using nonfat milk - makes a good dessert. It can be frozen to make "fudge sicles" (sp), too. My daughter has been playing around cooking with coconut milk. I'll ask her what her successes have been. I know she buys coconut milk ice cream. Oh, yes, artificial sweeteners are soooo bad unless you are diabetic.
Packrat, have you had any trouble getting pudding made with skim milk to set just right? I haven't tried it myself, but the pudding box says something about it not setting the same way as pudding made with even 1%.
Jitterbug, I don't think I've ever tried using non-fat milk with boxed pudding mixes. I make my own mixes and store them in a Mason (canning) jar. (Super simple to do.) When cooked they set up just fine. Email me if you would like me to post the recipes. :)
PS I just found two recipes for Prune whip - one for chilled (raw eggs) and one for baked. I think I'd rather have the baked version. lol.
Post a Comment