An apple and an egg

In Germany, that's what you call an outrageously cheap price for something, as in "I bought these for an apple and an egg". 

For me, these days, it's also the measure of what I eat between breakfast and dinner. An apple plus a hard-boiled egg. Actually, it's what I eat when I come home in the evening. I have found that it is enough to quelch the hunger that has built during another workday of too-busy-to-eat, and, at less than 200 calories it's a lot less damaging than my former several handfuls of peanuts plus a chunk of cheese which could easily pack more calories than what I allow myself at dinnertime. 

I find that limiting my choices of what to eat is working fine for me. Most of all, it keeps me from grazing on a dozen different things, all the time justifying every bad choice by saying it's just a small portion. 

I used to do that a lot, grabbing one handful of nuts, then a slice of salami, then a piece of cheese, then a cup of yogurt with toppings, without thinking of all that as a meal. The old calories don't count if you eat it standing up or while in your car fallacy at its finest. Today, I keep reminding myself to sit down and eat, trying to concentrate on the act of eating. For someone like me who spent many years chewing almost constantly while doing something else, that sometimes still takes vigilance. But it prevents me from vacuuming a whole bag of cookies without being consciously aware that I am eating. Breaking that habit of constantly moving hand with food to mouth, eating without being aware of it, was hard at first. I would frequently catch myself entering my kitchen, for whatever purpose, and in passing dipping my hand into the cookie jar automatically. 

So I removed the cookie jar. I also stopped buying chocolate and most of these other snack foods. 

And I started to look at food and eating differently. What I used to do was the see-food diet, as in I see food and eat it, and food, to me,used to mean all those highly palatable, processed things that you can munch down mindlessly even if you are not hungry and which never leave you sated, either, just stuffed. 

Today, the processed crap stays at the grocery store. What I have in the house is mostly Real Food, to the exception of a few pre-prepared things like sauces or the occasional pizza (which is far less bad than you'd think because I found a brand that has a spelt crust, vegetable and yoghurt topping and just about 500 calories for a whole pizza). The sauces serve as toppings on vegetable-loaded dishes. Neither food invites mindless grazing. 

The grocery bills have, by the way, taken quite a nosedive. So much for people claiming eating more healthy food is too expensive.

Today's WI: down another pound. Looks like what I do is working.

Finally.

Julia

Pantry newcomers

Even though some people (hi, Norma!) abhor the expression, to me, recondensing has turned into a veritable journey of discovery. I keep finding out things about myself, and I find myself experimenting with the things I eat. 

Case in point: spinach. For the longest time, the only way I had ever seen that sold was frozen, chopped into tiny particles, and refined with cream. When cooked, that became a semi-liquid mush with a consistency like hollandaise sauce. Then, they introduced "leaf spinach", which was not chopped but still only available frozen. Upon thawing, it was as mushy as the chopped stuff. 

Which is why spinach was almost never served in our household, unless as part of a green pasta sauce. 

I got curious when people kept mentioning spinach as an ingredient in salads. So, when I discovered fresh whole spinach leaves at the grocery store, I grabbed a bag for experimenting. Guess what, the stuff makes for a better salad ingredient than lettuce. Much more nutritients, too. 

And for the dangerous first hour after coming home, there's a big bowl of apples sitting in my kitchen now.

Fresh food in its natural state. 

Isn't it sad that that can become a discovery? For someone who, like myself, has been fighting obesity for a long time, just eating food as the Creator made it is a bit of a revolution. Too many years of low-sugar this and low-fat that, all with the silent assumption that the real thing would not be good enough. So-called fortified foods that make believe they are better than the real thing. Realizing that all and sundry such food-like substances have less nutritients than the real foods they imitate was a big step for me, because it gave me back the right to chose which I had for the longest time delegated to diet or non-diet food processing companies because I was scared of making the wrong choices. What I ended up with were all the wrong choices, and cravings, binges and obesity as a consequence.

Switching to unprocessed foods has made the cravings and binges go away, as evidenced by the fact that they regularly return whenever I have eaten highly processed foods. 

I'm feeling better if I eat clean. And that remaining condensable matter on me? It will leave on its own time. 

The sooner, the better. 

Julia

It works

This morning's weigh-in: down half a pound from Saturday morning. So, that broken record does work.
I am, as per today, still grain-free except for rice and legume-free. The peanuts have been replaced with cashews and almonds. An interesting observation in that context is that those don't trigger the same urge to eat eat eat that peanuts do. I can eat one handful of them as a snack and stop, without having to fight the impulse of returning for another two or three handfuls.
Come to think of it, the same holds true for other legumes. Lentil soup, or split pea soup, for me always meant having at least seconds or even thirds, while a legume free vegetable soup had me satisfied after one bowl.
Which leaves me wondering about what other surprises might be ahead if I were also to ditch dairy. As a matter of fact, pure milk was never something I liked. In elementary school, there was a government-sponsored "school milk" program where every child got a 250 ml pack of either pure milk or cocoa a day. I regularly picked the chocolate version because the pure milk, to me, was disgusting. To this day, I eat cheese and yoghurt, but don't drink milk unless it has some flavoring agent inside to mask the taste. Now is that revulsion to the pure stuff my body trying to tell me something? Cheese and yogurt are both fermented forms of dairy which are supposed to be easier to digest for someone who is intolerant.
Going without bread has been alerting me to another factoid: there are foods that one would probably not eat in their pure state, but when they are put on a slice of bread, it's something that one considers a delicacy. Those Belgian pates, for example. I would probably not manage to eat more than a teaspoon of that stuff without bread, because it's so greasy. Or some high-fat specialty cheeses. Again, four slices on a slice of bread are no problem. The same four slices on a plate without bread would make me feel queasy.
Might it be that bread-eating and eating too-greasy food tie into each other? So that getting rid of the one will automatically reduce the other?
And what is it about foods that one only eats when they are heavily prepared, while the unaltered stuff would make one run? Real food should be so recognizable to the body that the body would also accept and digest it raw, barring cooking it for sanitary reasons.
Perhaps that is another thing to look into. Leaving out those things where my body won't accept the unaltered main ingredient.


Julia

May Day

Today is a legal holiday where I live, so I'm staying at home.
Yesterday's grocery run was quite a success, with a giant pack of pork schnitzels ( unbreaded) on sale which will make five meals' worth of meat. Two of them I put on the new ceramic grill for last night's dinner, and the rest went, bagged up in twos, into the freezer.
That grill promises to be one of the better investments in cooking appliances I made of late. That ceramic coating is absolutely non-stick, and after allowing the machine to cool down, wiped clean effortlessly with a wet microfibre cloth.
And the grill has already found its home. When not used, it sits on top of my microwave. Easy to grab and use.
Being able to fry a piece of meat, fish or poultry with no added grease and in less than half the time it would take if I used a pan will make preparing a home-cooked dinner even faster.
Most importantly, as I can clean it with soapy water, too, I can put fish on it without being afraid of everything after that coming out tasting, well, fishy. Which makes it even more versatile than my favourite cast-iron griddle pan. As those must not be cleaned with soapy water, no way I was going to fry fish in it.
Often, the range of our eating is determined by the range of equipment we have. The worst I had was a place where the only equipment was a fridge and a microwave. I ended up eating reheated prefab crap at home and bingeing on fast food when away from home. That underequipped kitchen was one of the things that conspired to get me above morbid obesity for the first time in my life.
Today, I am reasonably well-equipped in my kitchen. But there's still room for improvement. Especially after I removed a lot of things that were clutter.


Julia

Walpurgis Night

In Europe, the night between April 30 and May 1st, Walpurgis Night, traditionally is believed to be the night of the great witches' dance on Mount Brocken. In contrast, the First of May, apart being a legal holiday, is usually filled with less pagan merrymaking, dancing, and wecoming the arrival of spring.
Which makes it a good starting place for implementing the changes in my eating plan I wrote about, too.
I'm planning to do a quick grocery run after work, as we are out of eggs and coffee, and I'll pick up some fresh meat, too, and veggies and almonds or cashews.
For some time, I have thought about getting myself a foreman grill. What kept me from buying was that all the models I found had teflon-coated plates. In last weekend's flyer, the supermarket where I shop had a foreman grill with ceramic non-stick coating as a limited offer. If they still have them tonight, I'll give that a try. Any fat-free way of preparing meat or veggies is worth looking into.
I used to use teflon-coated cooking utensils quite a lot, actually, but after I found out what chemicals I was exposing myself to, I have switched to stainless steel or cast iron, both of which need to be greased to keep food from sticking to them. While that might be manageable calorie-wise, there are dishes that are difficult to prepare in pots or pans that heat up quickly and hold the heat for a long time, as both cast-iron and stainless vessels do. If the ceramic coating of the grill works as well as a teflon one, I'll be looking for a pan coated with that stuff, too.
And get rid of my teflon pans for good, while still be able to fry things without added grease.

Every bit helps.


Julia

Disposing of the enemy

This weekend, we were staying at our own place. I was attacking what Flylady calls Mount Washmore, namely, two weeks' worth of laundry that had backed up, DH had some paperwork to catch up on, and eating was good. Still, I'm up a pound. I don't know if it's due to TOM or the fact that I had a bit more rest than usual, but I'll take a variation of one pound up over one of four pounds up any day. At least I'm starting the week from a far better place than the last one.
As I have decided to go peanut-free for the next month, I did not restock these before the weekend. And DH, whom I have not informed about my decision, took a good share of the ones left, so they definitely will be out of the house by Wednesday. I'll get me some almonds and cashew nuts instead.
And I tried something new to me. Namely, I bought a big pack of raw spinach, which I used in a lasagna with salmon, onions, and a crumble of feta cheese on Friday, and on Saturday, I put part of the rest into a big bowl of salad.
Making that lasagna gave me another of those d'uh moments. What I used to do when preparing lasagna was, first of all, using four to five layers of noodles. The filling between them used to be the full contents of a pack of ground beef (500 g, that's over a pound). And on top went, regularly, a full 200 g bag of grated cheese. The whole thing, mind you, for two people. And there usually were no leftovers. While I did that recipe rarely, it was a caloric desaster every time.
Today, when I take home ground beef, I immediately divide the pack into two portions, one of which goes straight into the freezer. More than half of what goes into the new version of lasagna is vegetables. Onions, bell peppers, ratatouille mix. Two layers, at most. And I have found out that you can use pureed tomatoes to moisten up the whole thing enough that there is no need for a half-inch cheese crust, either. Which more than halves the calories. Those bags of grated cheese now last through one lasagna plus at least two salads or frittata.
While lasagna will never be something that makes regular appearances in our kitchen because it's rather time- and cleanup-demanding, just stopping throwing the whole package of an ingredient into it makes it a lot less damaging when I do make it.
The aha effect being that I had, at a time when I didn't own a freezer and had to do with a rickety mini refrigerator, gotten into the habit of using the whole content of a package of an ingredient if it was something that would not keep if stored at room temperature once opened.
Rather than throwing it away, I would use it up. What I literally never did was think about just how many servings there were in that pack.
Again and again, what it comes to is portion size. And daring to dispose of food that is too much for myself.
Which is actually a problem for me. There are still two dinner's worth of potatoes in the pantry, and I acually caught myself on a train(wreck) of thought that went like: I have to use these up before Wednesday, darn, if I eat that many potatoes I'll regain lots of weight and be thrown back in my weightloss effort- that was how far I got before stopping myself and realizing that there was absolutely no reason for me to eat those potatoes. If I want them out of the house, I can serve them to DH in small portions. I may even just throw them away.
What made my reluctance to dispose of the potatoes in any other way than by eating them myself even more stupid is that I actually don't even like to eat potatoes. If things were up to me, we would not even buy them at all. DH now, he likes some potatoes with his meat sometimes, so I buy them for him. Then why did I believe it was my responsibility to eat them, too?

And if anybody wants to chide me for having had lasagna at all, I had had nothing but two eggs and two strips of bacon all day because my workday was so darn busy that I didn't even get around to having a protein shake. So, in the toned-down version, it was well within my calorie allowance for the day.

And tonight, it will once more be big salad day.


Julia

Peanuts

When the banking crisis in Europe first hit the fan, one prominent spokesman of a large bank conjured up a shitstorm by calling a seven-digit sum " peanuts". The expression even went into common usage here in Germany. Peanuts=a trifle.
So this is what I am going to pull through in May. No legumes, including said peanuts. And no bread or pastry and such like. And no potatoes. And no sugar.
Rice in small amounts and durum wheat pasta, also in small amounts, will stay a part of my diet, so will dairy products and my usual protein shakes.
The mainstay of what I eat will be vegetables, fruit and lean meats, fish, and poultry. I'll also skip the canola oil for olive, walnut, and lard and cocos fat for frying.
If what the Whole30 guys say is true, there ought to be some improvement from that already.
What made me decide on this was an observation I made this week concerning my digestion. (attention, TMI).
After eating bread and donuts at MIL's last weekend, I had diarrhea for four days straight. My innards were bubbling like some cauldron, and what came out was completely liquid. I had no more bread or such after Monday, and today is the first day things are back to normal. As I had not eaten bread for some time before that, either, what I put my indigestion down to is bread, or probably gluten, though I suspect it might be something other not found in durum wheat, because durum wheat pasta doesn't have that effect on me bread does.
The four pounds I gained over the weekend are gone again, too. Now I must remember not to deviate from my eating plan on this weekend. Having wasted another week on losing the same four pounds over again is annoying. But then, I ought to have known, and employed better eating discipline.

Oh the 20-20 vision of hindsight...

Julia