What are you doing for your diet?

At some point, we all recognize that our current lifestyle and body image may not be what we wanted or like at all.  In that moment, people want to change and most often, it can be done by doing a completely new and different holistic lifestyle.  By holistic, I mean using whole foods and items instead of diet pills or magic drinks and concoctions.

Anyway, I got this idea of the diet by reading my Christmas present which was the third book from Alton Brown: http://www.dashrecipes.com/slideshows/dr/4-alton-brown-good-eats-3-preview.html

So, in the book there was a chapter where Alton Brown, himself, was watching a past episode of his show that had him walking around in craw fish farm in 2009.  "The day after I viewed this hideous image I stepped on a scale for the first time in several years and was shocked to find the number 213.5 staring back at me." 

He wanted to shed 50 pounds and over the course of 9 months, he did so. While not being a dietitian or a physician, he doesn't recommend this diet for everyone.  It is just what he did and decided on for himself.  This diet, or at least an off-shoot of this diet, is what my wife and I are following:

1.  Foods I must consume daily:
      Fruits                                           Nuts
      Whole Grains                               Carrots
      Dark Leafy Greens                       Green Tea

2. Foods I must consume at least 3 times a week:
     Oily Fish                                        Sweet Potato
     Yogurt                                           Avocado
     Broccoli

3. Foods I can consume only one time a week:
     Red Meat                                      Dessert
     White Starch                                  Alcohol

(This list can be found on page 285,Good Eats 3, from Alton Brown)
 
Now, he also has suggested that he will stay away from any Fast Foods, Canned Soups, Soda, Processed Meats and anything that is "Diet" like diet drinks.  Of course also keep in mind that no diet plan will work without exercise. 

Now, while I was doing this I thought of a friend of mine who has been on a diet and healthy lifestyle kick. My friend Mary has lost 55 pounds over the course of about a year.  Losing it slowly is the healthy way. She was 210 lbs and now is 155lbs.  How did she do it?  She says that first she started running 6 miles a day, for the first few months but then just moved it to an hour of cardio exercise. She limited her red meat, ate dairy still and worked out with weights.  She also stayed away from fast foods and stopped eating starches.  She was really smart as she created her own low GL diet which meant that her body could deal with any sugars entering her body before making fat.  She would then burn any fat she had, thus losing weight. This means that both my friend and Alton Brown, think alike and have had some similar ideas.  Red Meat is higher in fat content, the white starches are full of sugars and carbohydrates which your body doesn't need if you are not running a marathon every day and then turns into fat, and fast food was stopped as well.

I know that now, sometimes the term "Fast Food" has become synonymous with all food at non-sit down restaurants and the term has been stretched too far.  Subway, is not a fast food joint. Neither is Quiznos.  The fact that you can get the food fast or quickly is only a true sight that you can see that it is made from fresh ingredients and nothing really changes.  For instance, I can stand in line and watch them make my sandwich at Subway.  I know exactly what goes on it and they have fully disclosed everything online on their website.  So, it just so happens that they can finish my sandwich before a fast food join can pull a soy/hamburger out of a microwave and slap it onto a high fructose corn syrup bun with a slathering of 1,000 calories of mayonnaise.

Anyway...

Mary also said that she didn't change that much of her lifestyle, she still went out to bars and drank and even skipped a day every once in a  while.  What made the difference was the exercise and the diet change.  You could exercise all day, but if you are taking in more calories than you burn, you will gain weight.  Awesome job Mary.

Food in video games. Eat all you want without the calories...

Okay, I have to say that although it is not directly related to food, Skyrim is the best all time game in the whole of the universe.  Hands-Down!  The game is immense and just so, gosh-darn-fun and quirky.  There are plenty of the wtf issues and glitches and strange going-on's but you are left with a more simple and real core system.  So, besides talking about my new addiction for a paragraph, what does this have to do with food? Everything.

Back a while ago, I wrote my first article on food in video games and talked about an assortment of games where you get things from roast beef to a bag of chips to increase your health or another attribute. (http://tasty-magazine.blogspot.com/2010/10/video-games-and-food-my-two-great-loves.html)

Well, I was thinking of this while I was playing Skyrim.  In Skyrim,unlike Oblivion, the food is mostly there to increase your health.  In Oblivion, it was there for making potions or poison.  For instance, in the Oblivion game, bread is used to Restore Fatigue, Detect Life, Damage Agility and/or Damage Strength.  Mixing it with something else that does one of those four characteristics could produce a poison.  In Skyrim, bread can restore 2 health points when eating.  What makes Skyrim even more fun, is that you can actually combine items and "cook" to make something better that heals more.   It is funny that you could have this mid evil character who has never seen anything before, through the use of a fire and a pot, create a stew that could sustain them and restore health and stamina.  I like how one ingredient or sometimes two are all that is needed to create a "cooked" item.  For instance, a chicken breast and a salt pile can be used independently but, when combined, one can cook a grilled chicken breast.  It sounds or makes cooking sound amazingly simple which either is this way for easiness for the game or because the makers didn't care about cooking.  There are probably close to 200 books within the game of Skyrim which are filled with words from over to cover about the strangest and most magical topics.  Yet, putting some complexity into a cooked meal didn't even come up.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Cooking

One of the recipes is for a tomato soup.  The ingredient list is a leek, tomato and salt.  While those items may work great in a tomato soup, I would dare add an onion, garlic, thyme, basil and some water.  I think that making a more complex recipe requirement for the game would add that little bit more role playing and would make the game a bit more fun.  On the other hand, I could hear the frustration from the hard core gamer who try to do everything possible in the game and are running all over the map looking for an onion or basil. (Neither onions or basil exist in the game.)  I think a culinary expansion should be released which would allow people to experiment and create new cooked items.  Take some bread and some roast beef and mammoth cheese and add it together to make a meatball sandwich.  It could happen, but isn't likely.

The savior, so far...

My wife did this trick the last time she was dieting and we are pulling out all the stops this time.  One of her favorite snacks which is low calorie is popcorn.  Unbuttered has about 31 calories per cup.  So, what we do is get a heavy pot on high heat, pour about 2 table spoons of extra virgin olive oil in and let it get warm.  I then add about 1/4th of a cup of corn kernels.  I cover immediately and leave a tiny crack in the lid.  In a few minutes, when the popping stops, I turn off the fire and remove the pot from the heat and a few minutes later I open the lid.

Now what I do is take some quart sized ziploc bags and fill them with pop corn.  These bags will last about 2 weeks being and tasting fresh still.  I figure that each bag has about 2 and 1/2 cups which is less than 80 calories and is a good sized snack.  So, if you are dieting also, get some popcorn!

I will not cheat

I told my wife of my strange dream.  Even though I'm actually underweight, I shouldn't be on a diet, but yet I want to stay on it.  I originally was going to go on the diet with my wife to prove to her that she could do it and now I find myself wanting to stay on for the health benefits.

I'm 33 years old and the proud recipient of some incredible metabolism abilities.  Much like my father's side of the family, I am able to eat, whatever I want and not gain a pound.  In fact, several months would go by of me eating over 4,000 calories a day and only gaining 1-2 pounds over the course of that month!  Everyone thinks it is a blessing but I think of it as a curse.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to gain weight, in a healthy manner?

Still, I'm not trying to lose weight for weight sake, but I am just trying to be healthy.  It is just difficult and I need to go through this to know and learn and better advise people, just how difficult it is to say "no" to certain things. I can eat a $1 package of 8 mini 3 Musketeers bars from Dollar Tree, without any weight gain or consequence.  But, I don't want to.  That is hard to do for a chocoholic such as myself.

  

What is better than steamed vegetables? Broiled ones.

So, yeah, we are at the part of the diet where I start making large amounts of vegetables to eat with meals and snacks.  As someone who loves to eat, plain steamed veggies have never been on my favorite list.  I'm not saying that I don't like them, its just that when offered a bowl of steamed beans and a bowl of pasta, I tend to go for the pasta.

Steamed vegetables are easy to give flavor, even with a tad of salt and butter, but get boring after a while.  So, what I did was clean a bunch of vegetables and put them in roasting dishes.  Setting the oven to 450 and then sprinkling the veggies with extra virgin olive oil and some black sea salt and pepper, baby bok choy was cooked in 10 minutes, carrots were done in 20 minutes and the brussel sprouts were baked and then steamed in the oven for 20 minutes total.

 

So, everything tasted good, even for a super non vegetable lover like myself.  What the fourth dish was, the one on the upper right corner was a carrot dish from The Silver Spoon.  It was called Carrots with Lemon and was pieces of carrot cooked in a pan with olive oil and lemon juice and lemon zest.  Then you had some cooked onion thrown in with salt and pepper and everything was tasty and low calorie.

If you are interested in the recipe for the the Carrots and Lemon, buy the book: The Silver Spoon.

What looks good for dessert?

Okay, a new year means low calorie and healthy foods.  But what can I make that is a dessert?  I think for many of you, THIS is what you have been waiting for.

My wife had purchased some sugar pears at SAMS, 2 weeks ago and as they were starting to get soft, I had an idea.  I was first going to make a tart, then decided to make a jam, but finally rested on the idea from a Gordan Ramsay book.  This recipe was simple and I made some changes.  I took the rest of these pears, sliced them up in large chunks and then put them in a bowl and coated them with the powdered Stevia my wife and I found at Dierburgs.  The stuff acts just like regular powdered sugar, except it has 0 calories.  So, we have sweet sugar pears coated with fake powdered sugar and into a pan with a splash of olive oil they went.  I cooked them to make them softer and try to infuse the sweetness into everything.  I finished by adding a dash of some Moscato wine and then about a cup of blackberries.

All-in-all, it made a delightfully delicious dessert with the only calories coming from the little bit of extra virgin olive oil, the wine that didn't cook out, the pears and blackberries.

Thanks for being patient

This is what had happened.  Somebody had this bright idea to create a bill to go through Congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Now, while putting an end to online piracy is a good thing, the bill also does a few other things.  One of the biggest things is that it stops all usage by other people, normal every-day people like you and me, from using anything that isn't ours.  It also would allow the US Government to sue and shut down sites that were in violation of the copyright law, which is pretty lax right now.  What does this mean to you?

If it passes, and you have a picture of Edward Norton on your Facebook profile, from a photoshoot with Rolling Stones Magazine, you could not only get sued by Rolling Stones Magazine, but also have your Facebook profile deleted.  It gets worse as if you are doing a movie review site, like my friend Mike: (http://kaleldlt.blogspot.com/) is, and you use a photo or a video of a movie trailer that you found on youtube, then the owners of that material could sue you and have your site shut down.

When I do have pictures on my blog, they are all ones that I have taken, which I believe mans that I own the copyright. This also would and could remove sites that were deemed hateful or racist.  So, imagine if you had used your blog to say that you hate the way the Republican party is doing things.  Well, if someone from the party saw that, they could sue your blog host and have your site shut down.  So, say bye-bye to anything considered on the line and past, nothing anymore of free speech online or porn.  But youtube would essentially shut down.  It would now be illegal to upload a video clip from a show, or use any music that was not yours.  Even if you were uploading a  video of your baby's first steps and the TV was on in the background, you could be sued.

"Opponents of the bill include Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, Reddit,^[89] the Wikimedia Foundation,^[90] and human rights organizations such as Reporters Without Borders,^[91] the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch.^{[92]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act}

So, how stupid is this bill and the idea of making internet blacklists and suing regular people?  As stupid as this:

So, anyways, GoDaddy.com supports SOPA and I had tasty-magazine.com as a domain through them.  So, I transferred the domain to someone who does not support SOPA.  That is what took so long.  Thanks for sticking with me.