So I’ve been experimenting with my winter breakfast this week, trying to find the right balance between nutrition and taste. This morning I think I hit the jackpot.

So the basis of my winter breakfast is wholemeal oats, cheap, tasty and nutritious. Instead of making it with soy milk, this morning I used water and added a little soy milk on top for flavour and protein.

The other thing I changed was swapping a processed sugar for a more natural sweetener. I used to use golden syrup, this morning I used agave nectar and it not only tastes better but I feel it kept me fuller longer.

Finally the other constant in my breakfast is a handful of dried cranberries. I’d like to use fresh berries but at this time of year that isn’t practical so dried will have to do.

It’s looking like this is the breakfast for me for the winter now and I must say I’m looking forward to waking up to this each morning.

Related posts:

1. Food diary: Breakfast
2. The accidental vegan

First things first, I’m NOT going vegan. I did, however, cook up a fantastic vegan chili on Saturday night which made enough to feed three adults, plus enough for lunch today and at least tomorrow for me. It wasn’t until after lunch today I realized my first two meals of the day had been completely vegan. For breakfast I have oats cooked in soy milk with dried cranberries and golden syrup.

For dinner we had some lovely vegetarian ravioli with a homemade tomato sauce. Ok, so I did deliberately avoid the cheese to keep my day entirely vegan so it wasn’t entirely accidental, but you know what? It was actually pretty good and I really enjoyed it. Could I be a vegan full time? No way, I like my meat and dairy far too much but I think I’ll make an effort to include one vegetarian or vegan meal in my week.

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I 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.

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When 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.

Related posts:

1. Some healthy snack ideas

After 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.

Related posts:

1. The accidental vegan

It is said that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and for those of us trying to lose weight it certainly is. It is most likely that you haven’t eaten anything in roughly 12 hours, so your body needs some energy to burn but don’t make the mistake of thinking that your body will burn fat if you don’t feed it first thing in the morning.

On the contrary, your body will think that it may never be fed again so it will hold on to those fat reserves, often burning muscle instead. However, if you feed the body with readily available energy, such as simple carbohydrates, it will gladly burn this for energy, then switch to fat reserves as your body thinks another meal is no more than six hours away.

Once you understand how your body works, it’s easy to work with it, rather than against it.

Part of the rules for my eating plan is to eat three servings of carbohydrates for breakfast, then stay away from carbs for the rest of the day. One of those servings for me is half a cup of rolled oats. In the winter I enjoy a nice warm bowl of porridge, but in the summer I soak the oats in milk overnight and eat them cold.

Cold porridge, you say? It’s surprisingly good on a warm summer’s morning, add in some sultanas and a little low fat yogurt and it’s very tasty. Also the yogurt and milk provide the protein for lasting energy throughout the morning.

After my cold porridge, it’s on to a couple of pieces of toast with either low sugar jam or Vegemite. It is worth nothing that anything you put on toast is likely to be of little or no nutritional value, for example honey is essentially pure sugar, while jams a high in sugar without any of the vitamins or fibre of fruit.

So that’s what I generally eat for breakfast these days, how about you? Any tips or suggestions?

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