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It’s cookie time
Posted by: | CommentsPart of my current eating regime is eating a high protein snack for afternoon tea. I’ve tried protein bars, which worked really well but are VERY expensive. I switched to canned chicken and tuna, much better for the wallet but too many of them smell or taste like cat food. I’m happy to keep going with the canned meat but thought I’d explore other options.
I found this recipe on the net for some protein cookies so I thought I’d give them a go.
The cookies are very good, my wife ate three, and should be quite filling. I’ll be eating two of them for afternoon tea each day this week to try them out. Hopefully I might have an alternative to canned chicken on the weeks I don’t feel like eating that.
What have I been up to?
Posted by: | CommentsI realize I haven’t updated this blog in sometime with what I’ve actually been up to. I’ve enjoyed posting useful information about nutrition and recipes, but the main purpose of this blog was to talk about how I’ve tried to get from fat to fit.
I’ve continued my rugby refereeing over the season and have been quite successful, making the promising referees’ school and ending the season being appointed to the under 18 section 2 final. Refereeing is a great workout, but in isolation it’s not going to change your body shape.
With the longer days we’ve been having, I’ve started running again and have been turning out regular 7.5km runs. As always the initial goal is to just finish the run alive and I’ve been managing that well. On Thursday, without really trying to, I came home in under 40 minutes and turned out a sub 5:00 km.
In terms of my diet, I’ve adapted a scheme called Body for Life to my own lifestyle and it’s been working well. Essentially what I’m doing it eating less, but eating more often. Mid morning and mid afternoon snacks are important and I’m making sure I get them and snack on the right kinds of food.
So far I’ve been doing this for around three weeks and have already dropped at least 3.5kg. I haven’t actually weighed myself in about a week so I’m not sure of the actual figure.
Today I churned out another 7.5km run and came to the conclusion I’m not quite in as good a shape as I thought. Time wise I was fine, aerobic was fine, but both my lower calves ached for a good chunk of the run. By the end of the run they had come right, but it’s usually an indication of a lack of recovery.
At my peak I know I can run 10.5km every second day, but as I’ve pushed myself too hard in the past, I recognize the issues caused by too short a recovery period. Perhaps I need to aim for a 72 hour recovery window for another couple of weeks.
Hopefully I will be able to put more regular and more interesting posts up in the future and I hope you’ll come back to read them. Oh, and if you were wondering, I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol this month.
Recipe: Legendary kumara quesadillas
Posted by: | CommentsA vegetarian favourite in our house, this is a meal that’s low on meat and high on taste. Full of anti-oxidants and vitamins, it’s not just a taste sensation, it’s good for you too.
Ingredients
- 1 medium to large kumara
- 1 can of chopped tomatoes (Watties Mexican tomatoes are very good)
- 1 can of Mexican style beans
- 1 teaspoon of garlic purée
- 4 tortillas
- 1 cup of grated cheese
- sour cream
- guacamole
Chop the kumara into small cubes and boil for around 20 minutes until kumara is soft.
Mash and add tomatoes, beans, garlic and seasoning if desired. I quite like MasterFoods chili & lime. Simmer on a low to medium heat.
In a pan, heat a small amount of oil and add one of the tortillas. Turn every 10 seconds until the tortilla is crispy. Tortillas cook quite unevenly and can burn quickly so it is important they are turned often.
Once all the tortillas are cooked, place one on a plate and cover in kumara mixture. Place a second tortilla on top. Cover evenly with guacamole, then add cheese and top with sour cream.
This kumara mixture can also be used to make burritos or some yummy vegetarian nachos.
Time to get a Wii bit fitter
Posted by: | CommentsMy lovely wife bought me a copy of Wii Fit Plus for my birthday this year and I think it’s fair to say I haven’t used it nearly enough. It’s great fun to play, but since it involves your whole body really does require you to be in the right mood, a mood different from regular gaming.
But since winter is coming to an end and spring is just around the corner, I’ve found my motivation to get stuck back into the whole exercise and eating right groove.
Yesterday I was all fired up to go for a run, but it was raining and after a stop at the health food shop on the way home, it was getting dark. I thought about what I could do and decided Wii Fit was the way to go, burn some calories, have a bit of a laugh and get back to Prince of Persia, my current gaming fix, tomorrow.
Foolishly, I let the Wii pick the exercises for me and it started me out with a couple of yoga poses. The first one, downward facing dog, wasn’t too bad, the ones I really struggle with are the ones where you stand on one leg due to poor proprioception.The next two yoga poses were a nightmare, the tree, where you stand on one leg with your other foot on your supporting thigh, and a single leg twist which is a knee raise like exercise but the leg you are raising never returns to the ground.
After feeling like a total klutz, I moved on to a couple of exercises I can do and enjoy: rhythm boxing and rhythm kung fu. Both are simple to master, require only a small sense of timing and build up a good sweat.
Super Hula Hoop popped up next, again good fun and good work out, before I finished off with a nice relaxing round of Ski Jump.
All in all, I think that Wii Fit actually gives a pretty good workout and I think I’m going to make an effort to play everyday this week. It’s fun, it’s easy and it’s in my living room, basically it’s the perfect workout.
Hanging out to dry
Posted by: | CommentsLike many people, I enjoy the occasional drink but unfortunately alcohol and losing weight are opposites. So starting yesterday, I’m going dry for the next month, which is going to be tough as I really enjoy my Friday night beers and the occasional dose of absinthe.
Most alcoholic beverages are high in sugar which is something us weight lossers try to avoid but that’s not the worst of it when it comes to drinking. Alcohol inhibits your body’s ability to burn calories, meaning a couple of beers with dinner actually raises the effective number of calories you’ve just eaten.
Also, as Dr Brian Wansink notes in Mindless Eating, consuming alcohol inhibits both your memory of how much you have eaten and the signals to your brain that you are full. So really, a few beers or wines with a meal is a triple whammy for calories: you will likely overeat, the drinks are high in sugar, and they cause you to burn fewer calories than normal.
There is of course the added bonus of saving a bit of money, alcohol is expensive, especially when you like craft beers or extremely high alcohol spirits containing psychoactive chemicals. But for at least the next month, that won’t be a problem for me.
Can pizza be healthy?
Posted by: | CommentsWhen you think about pizza, you probably think about a company who will bring a tasty meal right to your door but also the fat that seeps from the crust and meat which cannot be good for you.
Pizza is a traditional Italian dish which was made with a thin crust, topped with tomatoes, cheese and olive oil. However, over the years the American take on the pizza with double meat, shortening laden bases and cheese stuffed crusts.
As I mentioned earlier, tomatoes have a number of anti-cancer chemicals in them including lycopene, and a traditional margherita pizza contains a double dose of them. Plenty in the sauce and tomatoes as a topping as well.
An interesting study conducted in Milan, Italy between 1995 and 1999 found that men were 40% less likely to suffer a heart attack if they ate pizza once a week, but once again this is the Italian style pizza.
Having read all this I decided to try my hand at making my own pizza. I’ve done this before and it has ended in disaster. Today’s effort was much better, firstly buying a pizza stone made a huge difference, giving the crust an extra crispiness. Making the dough in my breadmaker, an appliance which has been out of action for about four years, was also a great success giving me a light fluffy dough, the foundation of a good pizza.
Pizza sauce is something which you’ll find on many supermarket shelves, but that’s just not the way I like to do things. Instead I got a couple of cans of tomato products, after checking the ingredients, and mixed them with some garlic and herbs, leaving them to simmer for 30 minutes.
The end result? My margherita pizza was fantastic, and while there are a few tweaks I need to make to my technique, I think this is one meal which will be promoted to the regular rotation.
Practice what I preach
Posted by: | CommentsAfter posting about how we should eat real food rather than “edible food-like substances”, I thought it worthwhile to talk about what I ate for dinner and what it contained.
Tonight’s dinner was lasagne, and not that crappy packet kind, I made this myself. The primary ingredients were beef mince, cheese, butter, flour, milk and pasta, all wholesome real foods. In fact even the pasta listed surprisingly few ingredients, always a good sign.
To make the meat sauce I added an onion, a carrot, some garlic, a can of tomato paste and oregano. All but the tomato paste are fresh and single ingredient foods, in fact oregano contains forty times more anti-oxidants than apples. Checking the can of tomato paste I found that it contains nothing more than concentrated tomatoes, tomato juice, salt, sugar and citric acid, nothing sinister there.
The taste verdict on the lasagne was a good one, with Jess declaring it to be “delicious” and “the best ever” while I have to say I really enjoyed it, tasty and filling.
Further practicing the basic rules, I served myself up about two thirds of what I would normally eat and I resisted the temptation to have seconds. However it means I’ll have plenty for lunch tomorrow or we could reheat it for dinner tomorrow night.
Either way, I think this meal nails all three of the basic rules, so I’m very happy with it. Roll on tomorrow.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants
Posted by: | CommentsThree simple rules for a better diet from food author Michael Pollan, whose book In Defense of Food I am now extremely keen to read. Pollan has been an outspoken critic of US food policy and points out that the Western diet, the one we have invented for ourselves, is the only one which makes us sick.
The first rule, eat food, seems pretty obvious but what Pollan is getting at here is to avoid “edible food-like substances”. He cites the American example of the Twinkie, but you don’t have to look too hard in Kiwi supermarkets to find things like fruit flavoured “strings” and the like. Even some fruit drinks (not fruit juice, there is a distinction) can often contain nothing but water, sugar, flavouring and colouring, absolutely no nutrition there.
His second rule, not too much, is one that is largely ignored by most of us. How much is a serving of meat for dinner? Around 100g per person, and trust me, when you see that much on your plate your first thought will be, “where’s the rest?”
I was keeping a food diary a couple of weeks ago and was initially pleased with my results until one fateful Wednesday evening. I cooked up some delicious crumbed chicken, but noticed there were three pieces in the pack and I was cooking for two. Instead of doing the sensible thing and leaving one in the fridge, or even cooking it to eat for lunch the next day, I ate two and gave one to my wife. This sent me way over my recommended daily calorie intake and left me feeling bloated and over full. I just didn’t need to eat it.
Another interesting piece of information around this rule comes from the book Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink who is a consumer behaviourist. He claims that we are full 10 minutes before our brain tells us that we are, leading many of us to overeat. As Wansink is a behavourist he focuses very much on the why we eat, rather than what we eat which makes him a very interesting read.
The mostly plants rule really boils down to something we all should know, fill up on vegetables, not meat. Vegetables, or fruit for that matter, contain a great deal of the nutrition that we need and very little of what we don’t. The great philosopher Frank Zappa once said, “There are two things in life you can never have too much of: Sex and vegetables.”
Pollan also warns against what he calls “nutritionism” — an ideology that’s lost track of the science on which it was based. Many people think that food is a delivery mechanism for nutrients where really it’s the other way around.
In An Apple a Day, author Joe Schwarcz discusses an interesting study about the anti cancer effects of the nutrient lycopene. Lycopene was discovered to be effective at fighting prostate cancer and as a result of this research, lycopene supplements began to appear on the market. Researchers at The Ohio State University conducted a study on rats who were fed either lycopene supplements or tomato extract, a food high in lycopene. What they discovered was that while lycopene did reduce the risk of prostate cancer, the tomato extract was 40% more effective, suggesting that other chemicals in the tomato also play a role.
This heathy eating this isn’t nearly as tough as it seems. Most of us know the rules and either choose to ignore them, or convince ourselves that a few slip ups here and there aren’t really a big deal. But really, when it’s summed up in just seven words it’s pretty hard to ignore. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Runkeeper
Posted by: | CommentsSince I’m a geek, I have all sorts of gadgets, one of which is my iPhone. Apple’s slogan for the iPhone App Store is, “There’s an app for that!” and there most certainly is. Want to know how far you just ran, how fast you went and even the elevation changes in your run? Runkeeper can tell you.
The name is something of a misnomer, it can do running, walking and cycling. Runkeeper uses the iPhone’s built in GPS to track your activity, then overlays it with Google Maps to show you where you’ve been, how long it took you and other useful data.
This is me riding home from work on Wednesday, and it does include time stopped at lights, but it’s quite a neat application to track your fitness activities.
Unfortunately I won’t be using it for running when I start back up as it largely duplicates the functionality I already have with my Nike+ and my iPod nano. Plus the nano is just so much easier to carry on a run rather than a bulky and heavy iPhone.
Back on the bike
Posted by: | CommentsLong time no update, I know.
So recently I decided it was time for me to get back out into regular exercise. I haven’t exactly been doing nothing, I’ve been refereeing at least once a week, twice when I was doing mid week girls rugby.
But since the weather has improved slightly in that it’s not raining, it’s still cold, and petrol has gone up in price steadily, I decided to start biking to work again. It’s only 4km and takes around 15 minutes door to door which is roughly how long it takes in the car anyway.
It’s often freezing, as in 0ºC or lower, when I leave for work, but I’m not worried as I have a high visibility wind proof jacket, warm gloves and a full face balaclava. That’s right, when I bike to work, nobody can see my face.
One thing that I’ve noticed a lot since I’ve started biking again, and I know that six trips is not exactly a large pool of data, is that the cyclists’ mantra of “share the road” seems to be something of a one way street. I have yet to see any bad behaviour from drivers but bad behaviour from cyclists is a daily occurrence.
Today I stopped at a red light, a CYCLE red light might I add, it’s got a red bike and everything. There were two other cyclists waiting there, but as soon as a third arrived, slowed down and ran the red light, the other two joined him, leaving me behind to foolishly obey the traffic laws.
But traffic infringements aside, I’m quite enjoying my rides and I’m getting an extra half hour exercise a day and keeping my car off the road. I like to think I’ve already knocked 60% off my fuel bill for the week and will be on the bike again tomorrow, bringing the savings to at least 80%. And that makes it a win/win/win for me, the environment and my bank balance.