Thursday 28 June 2007

Last Night's Dinner


Low-cal Dinner
Originally uploaded by cronuk
Japanese curry sauce with quorn chicken style pieces, asparagus, mango, ginger, onion, lime juice and shirataki. It looks a lot more greasy than it actually was. I didn't add any oil though, promise! The little block of curry had enough saturated fat on its own. I think it's just glistening from the mango.

~450 calories for the entire pan! COM said 445 but I don't have the nutrition info for the shirataki. I know they're pretty low cal so I'm just rounding up. This amount of food would feed 2 but I ate the whole lot because I had eaten less than 50% of my calories before dinner. I was really hungry!

The whole thing according to COM was 19g protein, 10 g fat, 59g carbs.

Recipe
25g Japanese curry sauce
100g Quorn chicken style pieces
89g Asparagus (boiled in COM)
6g fresh lime juice (could do with more lime. zest might be good too)
4g raw ginger
260g raw mango
60g raw onions (too much onion for me but I wanted to use it up)

COM says I was still under 1100 for the whole day but I wish I'd eaten more earlier on than be hungry enough to wolf down 2 bowls of curry before bed.

Also, what do people do if COM doesn't have a value for a cooked food? Is the raw value still ok to use? I guess it's always an approximation.

Tonight I'm staying at my mother's and tomorrow I'm going to a wedding reception. I'm going to try to adopt Robin's DTBIC attitude!

Friday 22 June 2007

"Healthy" food is relative

So yesterday after having a great CRON breakfast and lunch, I let myself down at dinner. Firstly with free gak at work with pizza and spring rolls (amongst others). This was a "gift" for working late! Secondly with muesli at my boyfriend's house after our MA session.

Overall, I'm quite annoyed at myself. I should have had better self-control. I let myself down because I caved into doing what other people want and expect me to eat. Moreover, I don't want to WANT to eat gak anymore. When I'm truely consistent with CRON I feel the best I've ever felt. I'm resolving to be more like April - "I want to live my life according to my own priorities and goals, my true will... not according to unconsidered and unquestioned biological compulsions, and not according to what will please others."

This is exactly how I want to be. First off I need to start questioning my own eating compulsions and take responsibility for my own bad choices. I don't want to feel deprived when I turn down gak, I want to feel like I'm saving myself. I want to see gak as something I just don't eat, like plastic or marshmallows (eww). I recognise this will take time. Secondly, I don't want to eat simply because it will please others. I want to eat CRON food when I want to eat it and when I'm actually hungry. The case in point is last night. I went back to my boyfriend's house and chowed down on a big bowl of muesli, dorset cereals to be precise. Absolutely divine but has had a serious laxative effect (ahem). Probably 500-600 cals worth for one bowl. What a waste...

What also keeps getting to me is that, like muesli, there are so many foods out there that people are duped into thinking are "healthy", pasta, rice, cereal and breads, fruit yogurts and other high calorie products. Really these things can have as many calories as a sweet dessert or piece of fried chicken. Of course, this all has to be taken in context body size and how many calories you should be consuming per day. If you're tall and muscular like my boyfriend then a bowl of muesli is a "healthier" snack to follow dinner. If you're small and slight like me, it's an extravagant dessert... equivalent to him eating a whole cake or something!

I think I can marry these two though. I want to reduce portion size and increase the quality of the food I eat. I also realise that a CRON diet has to involve some fun/enjoyable foods. Some recalculation is clearly required. Oh well, I'm sure the first year will be a learning process. I'm just thankful that there are so people out there in internet land who have done this before.

Thursday 21 June 2007

Tatsoi, figs and portion sizes

I've mentioned previously that I've taken to making my own salads for lunch instead of eating in the cafeteria at work. This has has had a great impact on my CRON, (except for one day this week where my leafy greens weren't so fresh and turned a bit watery during the course of the morning). One of the greens is something called Tatsoi which isn't listed in CoM. Very frustrating! I've been unable to locate it on nutritiondata either. Same goes for baby chard.

I've also been thinking about something I read on a CRON blog (can't remember which one) about fullness, portion sizes and how it's best to reduce portions, eschewing bulk due to fullness stretching the stomach. I generally make my way through my huge salad in one lunch hour (12-1) which leaves me satisfied but also a little bloated, which I don't like. I get quite hungry before 12 and can't wait for my lunch. I consume it within an hour and the fullness lasts for about 3 hours after which I'm hungry again and usually eat a piece of fruit. However, today I tried eating my lunch only until I wasn't hungry anymore and saving the rest of the salad until later. It seems to be working! Another tiny step forward in CRON. :)

This morning I had a little scrambled egg for breakfast alongside a lovely fresh fig with low fat yogurt and pumpkin seeds.

Saturday 16 June 2007

Drink calories and protein shakes

One thing I am grateful for with CRON is that I rarely drink alcohol. In fact, when I do it's usually due to social pressure rather than any desire to drink it per se. I like red wine but I also like water, tea, juice and milk just as much, if not more. I don't ever crave the taste of wine, beer or spirits. I'm just rather indifferent to them. My usual liquid intake consists of a huge mug of green tea in the morning along with several cups of water during the day and evening. Recently I've been having a vanilla whey protein shake in the evenings after my dinner as dessert to up my protein. The brand I use is met-rx supreme in vanilla flavour which I mix with unsweetened Alpro soymilk. I really enjoy the flavour and texture and it helps to keep my sweet tooth at bay but at 160 cals for 250 ml it bloody better. I'm also a total soymilk convert now, I find it tastes so much lighter and fresher than skimmed milk.

Sunday 10 June 2007

Low-cal Crab & Sweetcorn soup

Serves 2

600ml water
1/2 Chicken Stock cube - I used an oxo cube
115g (whole tin) of John West White Meat Crab in brine
115g Green Giant Salad Crisp Sweetcorn
30g Egg White
15g Spring onions
Ginger to taste - I used 4g

Dissolve the stock cube in a little water and then add to the remaining water and bring to the boil. Then add onions and crushed ginger (I dry fried mine first) to the stock followed by the crab and sweetcorn. Stir the soup while you drip the egg white into it so it forms little strands.

1 serving is just under 100 cals and provides about 13g protein.

For dessert I had 100g of mango with 70g low-fat yogurt for 93 calories. Yum!

Lazy

Woah - it's been over a month since I posted here. Though I think that's more to do with the fact I forgot my blogger password than anything else.

My CRON for the past month has been a mixed bag. I had one week of pure binging on Free Food on a training course which wasn't good and wasn't CRON. Also had a few meals out so I couldn't measure my calories there. However, when I'm at home I do much, much better and am measuring nearly everything I eat. Eating outside of the house is a bigger problem, unless I'm eating a pre-made wrap or something.

While I was on the training course I made a list of things to do to help improve my CRON, so now I'm going to see how well I've been doing at them!

1. Prepare lunch the night before and take with me to work. This has been going really well! I was always good at measuring my breakfast and I've now added lunch to the list. I usually have a big salad for lunch with spinach, rocket, other green leaves, tomatoes, mushrooms, spring onions, green and red peppers. I was adding tuna to the salad but have given up recently because it smells and I've become a little tired of it. Lately I've been adding in a small amount of cous cous to use up the packet I have in my cupboard. I find that some carbs with the salad really help control my carb cravings during the afternoon. I usually eat an apple mid-morning and then the salad at 12.30 or 1. I've also been adding in some of the vinegar/oil/cinnamon salad dressing April mentioned in her blog.

2. Don't even go into the canteen.
My work canteen is home to all kinds of tasty treats including some very "healthy-looking" lunches. I used to buy my salad there every day but that meant I couldn't measure and therefore didn't quite know how many calories I was eating. It also meant that other higher calorie (and higher priced) lunches caught my eye. Now I don't go in there at all so I'm not tempted to splurge.

3. Don't keep cash in purse. I have been trying to use this as a technique to stop purchasing impulse food and it has worked to some extent, but I've found that if I really want something I'll buy it anyway. The next point on the list has actually helped more than this.

4. Tell yourself NO and just walk away. When this works it really works well. I feel annoyed at myself for a few minutes sometimes because I might have really been craving that piece of chocolate or bagel but later on I feel better and am glad that I just walked past the temptation. There is definitely room for improvement here though.

5. Reinforcing thoughts. What I mean here is thinking how much better I'll be at exercising and how I'll fit nicely into my favourite clothes. If I do this with point 4 it really seems to work and helps me not to give in to petulant cravings.

6. Brush teeth after dinner or when I come home if I've already eaten. The idea behind this was that if I've brushed my teeth I won't eat snacks in the evenings because I'm lazy and don't want to go to the effort of re-brushing. I haven't been doing this very much at all though. One of the things I did when starting CRON was to replace my snack food with healthier snacks like almonds, hazelnuts, pumpkin and sunflower seeds. However, I've found that I am the kind of person who can eat several handfuls of nuts and seeds in one sitting. I was starting to eat way too many and they're so high calorie. So, I've decided that I'm going to stop buying the nuts get my fat from nut oils instead. I definitely don't feel like snacking on oil when I get home!

So although I've had some bad days I feel like I'm getting more control over my meals and snacks. Dinner is the next hurdle! So I've made some new points to add to the list.

1. No restaurant food until I've got down to my desired weight.
2. Avoid Free Food situations where possible.
3. Make (and measure!) as much dinner at home as possible. On this point I think I'm going to try experimenting with soups and steamed vegetables as they seem to be more filling and lower calorie than my usual dinners.
4. Find more nutritions fruit options than apples and bananas.