About me, my path to Weight Watchers, and garden veggie soup

I love food!  But I've been overdoing it lately.  During the past 5 years my weight took on an unfortunate trajectory; I packed on an average of 5 lbs per year!  It wasn't really that hard to do either.  Think about it - there is about 3500 calories per pound, so if I gained 5 pounds in a year it means I had an 50 extra calories per day.  Which is equivalent to coming home and cracking open a lite beer at the end of the day!  

I'm single, young, and go out with friends a lot.  This means that I eat out at restaurants almost every night of the week.  It's not always bad or fast food per se, but the portions at restaurants tend to be big and my willpower to stop when full tends to be rather small.

A couple of lovely ladies at work joined Weight Watchers (WW) with fabulous results.  It didn't look too hard (I mean, watching what one eats is hard but I'm saying it looked doable) so I decided to join to get some accountability.  

Here's day 1 of trying healthier recipes and cooking at home.  

I went with a recipe with a low barrier to entry, a garden vegetable soup.  Lots of preshredded stuff from the grocery.  All I had to do was dice an onion, zucchini, and mince some garlic.  No problem!  The italian herbs really brought out the savoriness of the vegetable broth - almost forgot I was eating something vegan!  The cayenne added nice heat to the back of the throat, and a teaspoon of olive oil made the soup rich.  Only criticism I'd make is that I need to run the knife through the carrots to make them a little easier to eat.  Otherwise, success on day 1!

Recipe:

1 tsp of olive oil = 1 point
2 c vegetable broth = 1 point

Diced onions

Minced garlic

Assorted veggies: this soup included

2 handfuls of shredded carrot

1 diced zucchini

Diced tomato

1 handful of shredded cabbage

Italian seasoning 

Cayenne pepper

Heat olive oil and saute onions and garlic until soft.  Add in rest of the veggies, tsp of salt, italian seasoning and saute until soft.  Pour in vegetable broth and add pinch of cayenne. Simmer for 10-15 min. Add salt and pepper to taste.  Enjoy!