Shavuot Menu, Keeping it Easy

Maybe someday I'll still do it. A number of years ago, I started writing a cookbook which I named:

The Lazy Cook Cookbook

For some strange reason, people told me that the title is awful. Am I the only person who looks for easy ways to prepare food? I don't like recipes that have too many steps and too many ingredients. Those of you who have seen my recipes already, must have noticed that they're pretty minimal.

Those of us who live very Jewish lives, according to halacha, Jewish Law, will be celebrating the Shavuot Holiday immediately after Shabbat. That means that since it's forbidden to do any preparation, whether cooking, setting the table or even cutting a salad on Shabbat for the Holiday, even the fanciest balabustas, Jewish housekeepers, should keep it pretty simple. The family and guests, if you have any, will want to eat as soon as possible, no doubt.

That's why I decided to serve me and my husband cream cheese, lox and salad. That's not something we have frequently or at all. I may serve a dairy vegetable kugel, which should heat up pretty easily, but I still have to make it today. With the added treat of ice cream for dessert, we should be ready on time to go to a Torah class. Neither of us learn all night anymore. We're not as young as we used to be.

For Shavuot "lunch," after synagogue, I'll make a version of my "one pot baked fish and vegetables" in advance. We don't have any guests for that meal either, so I can cook exactly what we need to eat.

Ever since we both began to "diet," I try to serve us only what we need. The only "unlimited" foods I have on the table are salad and low carbohydrate vegetables. We've never been on "starvation diets." Just the thought of one makes me gorge on forbidden foods. When we have guests, I put out more food, but many of our guests are "repeats" and have the same food preferences as we do.

I bought a couple of special cheeses as Shavuot treats, besides the ice cream. We won't starve for sure.

Soon I'll go to our local swimming pool, and then after breakfast I'll cook, Gd willing.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Shavuot Sameach To All

Diet's Not Doing Well, Lost Self-Control

This week I've barely had one day when I've stuck to my "diet," better eating regime. When offered temptation, I just can't say no.



One day a week eating what I shouldn't can work and still keep my weight down.  But this past week or so, it seems like every single day there's some sort of special/joyous occasion, irresistible food...or drink.

Even worse, my "at home pick me up" somehow morphed from cashews/dates to chocolate chips. They're all stored in the freezer. It hasn't helped that I read one of those "doubtful facts" on facebook that chocolate is a good cure for coughs. A few tiny chips are a lot less fat/sugar than squares of chocolate, but still...

Considering that I've been following the low carbohydrate eating regime for about a decade, I guess that these "little rebellions" are pretty normal. I must get myself back on the wagon, now, soon, tomorrow, after Shabbat.... whenever. I guess it will be whenever I can recharge my motivation, soon, Gd willing.



After all... tomorrow is another day

Could It Be The Cheese?

In recent months, I noticed a occasional increase in my "upper abdomen," but then it would go down. I kept blaming it on weight gain. A few unwanted kilos have been popping on and off. But this was still pretty strange for me, since that part of my body isn't the usual fat-storing spot.

I began to wonder if it was something I'd been eating. Recently, during those same months, I had made a couple of very small minor significant changes to my general diet, food choices.

• Since I'd begun craving carbohydrates, I added some periodically to my meals or snacks.
• For the first time in a decade I began buying and eating yellow cheese. At the time I lost weight, I was also unemployed and had stopped buying the cheese because of its expense. Recently I had started buyin it again and discovered that I felt much fuller/more satisfied after eating a slice or two.

Since I believe that our diet can affect all sorts of things, I decided to see if the carbohydrates, cheese or the combination were guilty in changing my body. Cow milk allergies are common in my family, and even though I love eating yellow cheese, I know that it's terribly processed and unhealthy. Just read the ingredients, if you don't believe me. So, I started with the cheese and eliminated it from my diet. 

The E-202 is a preservative,  Potassium Sorbate, which does cause stomach problems in some people.

And what do you think? Yes, my stomach went down once I had stopped eating yellow cheese. One thing we have to remember is that yellow cheese is highly processed. I've never heard of anyone making it at home, easily or not, while people do easily make yogurts and white cheeses. 

A decade ago, when I began making changes in my eating to facilitate weight loss, I also began cutting down/eliminating processed foods. In addition, I followed the basic principle of the Blood Type Diet, which for me Type O Blood meant eating more animal protein and less carbohydrates. 

As much as I like yellow cheese, I'm just going to have to try to avoid it. There are worse things...

Diet Dilemma: Will Water Exercise Get Weight Off?

After dropping to the lowest weight I had been for a couple of years, due to a few factors, including a Jewish eating Holiday and a weekend in a hotel, a few of those annoying kilo returned.

Last summer, although I exercised a lot in the pool, no weight left. If anything חבר הביא חבר chaver hevi chaver, a friend brought a friend, and I weighed more at the end of the summer than in the beginning.

So, I'm back struggling, trying to eat less, walk more and also tone my muscles in the water. This morning I was pleasantly surprised to see a better number on the scale, B"H. It's a struggle for sure.

Salad Could be a Meal

This salad could be a complete meal, if you're trying to cut down on carbohydrates. The seeds have protein. It can also be a side dish, served with any sort of meal.

The ingredients:
shredded raw beet
pumpkin seeds
fresh parsley
mushrooms
cucumber
tomato

The dressing:
olive oil
freshly squeezed lemon juice

This colorful and tasty salad was my contribution to our book club's pot luck dinner meeting. This month we read Rebecca. I find that the best way to make sure that there's something low carb at the meal is to bring it myself.

Nu, And How's The Diet Going?

It's certainly no secret that I have been struggling with my weight for a very log time. A number of years ago, I made it a very public diet which you can find by using the search engine of this blog by asking for "public diet," "diet saga," "low carbohydrate" and other labels.

I did manage to rid myself of about fifteen 15 kilo or thirty plus 30+ pounds, most of which has stayed off ever since, but about a third, five kilo found their way back about a year ago. When that unwanted weight had reached three kilo, I went to war, but lost the battle and gained another two kilo. But about six months ago, after the pool closed, I tried a few different tricks, about some of which I have blogged.

Over 12,000 steps is pretty rare for me.
12,000 is now very common.

The first thing I did was to make more time to walk, since the pool had closed. Three months of water exercise hadn't reduced much, except that my body looked and felt better. And even the experts say that walking is better for weight reduction than swimming. I increased my daily steps, as I could see on the pedometer.

The second thing I did to lose weight was to change my breakfast. For years I had been eating a large vegetable omelet, but not that long ago I felt terrible sugar/fruit cravings as soon as I finished it. I took that as a hint. Maybe I need to eat fruit for breakfast, since the omelets and vegetables weren't satisfying my hunger.

Now, for the past few months, I have fruit, fresh ginger and goat yogurt for breakfast. I must admit that there are days when I crave cashews afterwards, so I eat a few. It's clear that I need more protein early in the day in addition to the sugar/fructose.

Another thing I've noticed, and I do weigh myself almost daily on the same scale, is that the fewer restaurant or catered meals I eat, the lower my weight is. It goes up a bit when I've eaten out. And it's lowest when all the food I've eaten has been my own home cooking.

My weight seems to have stabilized close to where it was post-big diet, bli eyin haraa, let's not tempt the "evil eye." I do have days when I eat things I "shouldn't," but there are diet mavins who actually  say that once a week or two it is good to go off the restrictions. It stimulates the metabolism to work harder and burn calories more quickly. Also, it makes the "diet" easier to live with, and that is a major trick/technique. If you adopt a diet you find impossible to live with, you won't be able to stick to it very long.

And how is your diet going?

Fat, Fat Go Away

I guess that my diet saga will never truly end. I have very slowly gotten off about five kilo, 11 pounds after they had been vanished in a rather successful diet a few years ago. But I know well that they can return in an instant. Because it has happened.

Walking has helped. I've raised my weekly step count. That is until the flu stopped me. But at least I didn't gain weight with the flu. I still haven't returned to my pre-flu walking.

I caught the pedometer stop count davka at such a crazy number.

The hardest thing is to get a nicer looking body. I lost a bit of weight, but I am still very overweight and growing older. OK good news that I'm still alive. Thank Gd

Some Things I Should Never Buy...

The other day I walked into the health food store in Sha'ar Binyamin. I'm not quite sure why I went there. I didn't really need anything, but I bought a bit of nuts and then... I saw my weakness, what's called in Hebrew, the yetzer haraa. Evil inclination, temptation or chocolate covered mints. This health food store sells them by the weight.

I was able to resist all the dried fruit -yay- but not the mints. I love mint sweets, especially Hagan Daz mint ice cream. At least I can only get that in the states, and I doubt if I'll ever be there again. Sigh... Good news bad news...

I stored the mints in the freezer, with the nuts. And for the first few days I barely nibbled. But then on Friday I was so very tired, super-tired. And you know what they say about diets and not getting enough sleep. When your body craves sleep, it tries to overcompensate with sugar.

So, suddenly the mints got all eaten up by yours truly. Then I began telling myself that it was good that I ate them all at once. Now I won't have any to eat. No more temptation...  Does that make sense? Insufficient sleep plays with the brain and makes it a bit wacky.

May this be a much better and lower calorie week...

Losing The Diet Battle

People who see my almost nightly post about how many steps I've taken each day as I kick off my shoes must think I'm winning the battle. But the truth is that I'm making pretty much no progress in getting off the weight that snuck on the past couple of years.

A very important diet principle I stick to is to make/design an eating plan you can live with. That's because if you have a numerical weight goal, which requires a food and exercise regime that isn't really sustainable, you'll quickly go off of it and yo-yo. We all know what that means. It means that the weight will return "with interest."

Not only are we all different, but our bodies change with time. The medical experts say that even our metabolism gets sluggish, not just our minds with age...

So far, I like this pedometer application, and it's working well. The three numbers (you can set it to do miles and inches) I follow most carefully are:

• steps
• kilometers per hour
• time exercised

I've really been trying to keep to two hours of being active each day. Now, being active also means the simple walking around the house while doing daily chores. You can also see on the graph, that I have periodic heavier active times. Now that it has been raining, thank Gd, I also walk quickly around my house to get the steps increased. 

Food is pretty easy to control, since most meals are home, but after about a decade of trying to diet/keep my weight down, it is harder to deny myself some foods. But the good thing is that smaller quantities of food like dates and cake etc now satisfy my sweet tooth.

I hope you're not bored by this, because my diet saga will continue for the rest of my life. And how is yours going?

Revolutionary Health Diet Advice

Today as I was eating my breakfast, apple and fresh ginger in goat yogurt, I turned on the television and found myself watching a morning "health" show.

A woman in her late forties asked a doctor how to improve the health and weight of her family. She said that they, her children and herself, were always tired. The first thing the doctor asked was what they ate for breakfast.

"Sweetened coffee and cake."

The doctor replied that all that sugar has to go. They need to have something fatty in the morning, like real cream or coconut cream in their coffee, a slice of avocado, nuts, etc. He told them that he, too, has been working hard to remove sugar from his diet. Natural fats are healthy, much healthier than all of the sugar most people eat, whether added to coffee or within all sorts of prepared foods.

The doctor also said that he keeps a supply of nuts with him for quick energizing snacks. This all jives with what I've been hearing for years and suits my conclusions about which sort of diet works best. Anyone who carefully reads the ingredients of all the low-fat reduced fat foods comparing them to the full-fat varieties will discover that the fat is replaced by sugars and salts. That makes the low-fat reduced fat foods extremely unhealthy, much worse for us than the natural fat originals.

What's your experience with this sort of eating?

Tough Choices and Easy Failures for Dieters

I think that this week will be a bad one for my weight loss quest. Last week, even with the Jewish Holidays, I managed to reduce a bit. But this week, I'll be eating in restaurants a few times.

Yesterday I showed up for a brunch on a very empty stomach. I even made a point of getting a decent walk in beforehand. I was very hungry by the time I sat down. OK, I saved a few calories by being able to substitute a second coffee for the juice. You may not realize this but juice is just the sugar, the calories of the fruit without any of the roughage which is so good for your system. And also it takes a few apples/oranges etc to fill a glass with juice.

The breakfast/brunch I ate was like two meals, with two eggs, some lox, cheese, salad, a bit of bread etc. But I could rationalize that brunch is "two meals."

BREAKFAST + LUNCH = BRUNCH

But then... suddenly this irresistible calorie laden vision appeared in front of me:

I failed to resist. OK, I had half of the cake, none of the jam and just a spoon of the whipped cream --just to check if it was real of course-- Sometimes self-control deconstructs and just disappears.

To quote Scarlett O'Hara:
"Tomorrow is another day..."



And since today is yesterday's tomorrow...

Diet Update, Weight Loss

Like too many people, I've been struggling trying to banish unwanted, unneeded, unattractive and unhealthy kilos/pounds. And in addition, I've had an occasional though chronic cough* that annoys more than anything else.

About a decade ago I managed to lose about 15 kilo, 30+ pounds, by reducing carbohydrates and getting out of the classroom. The rationale behind the low carb diet was based on the Blood Type Diet which prescribes this sort of eating plan for those with Type O blood. And when I was teaching in the yeshiva high school in Beit El, my schedule made it difficult to eat well. But the real reason I was pushed/encouraged into trying to diet was a chance to join the StartFresh kosher diet program for free in exchange for blogging about it.

The vast majority of that weight stayed off until about a year or more ago when I noticed that three kilo, six or more pounds, had suddenly reappeared. I tried all sorts of painless maneuvers to remove them, but somehow instead of reducing I found that two more had joined them. That meant that I was well over five kilo or eleven pounds more than what had become my weight. Even at the reduced weight I was technically overweight, though not obese.

Of course, I blamed my return to the classroom for the additional two kilo. Then at the end of June I really retired. The pool opened, and I exercised in the water a few times a week. And, although I began to look better, the extra weight didn't budge.

I needed to "recalibrate."

I listened to my body, which had been sending hints. For a few months I had begun to crave fruit after breakfast. And you must understand that I was eating nice breakfasts of vegetable omelets, which were large and theoretically filling enough to be proper meals. But somehow they didn't satisfy me. I was craving something sweet afterwards, and I had been drinking lots of coffee with sugar earlier in the morning.

Hint! Hint! Suddenly I decided to listen. If my body was asking for fruit in the morning, maybe it needed a fruit breakfast. So, I began having fruit, oats and goat yogurt. And afterwards I even left out the oats. The biggest surprise was that a small bowl with cut up fruit and under a cup of yogurt was enough for me. I felt satiated and had no sugar cravings.

My next challenge was when the pool closed on the first of September. I needed to exercise and really missed the water. Friends suggested I join the sports center in Ariel, even though the swimming pool has very few "women only" hours. Many of my friends go dressed in modest swimwear, which I do have. I went to take a look, but it didn't appeal. It's part of the view from a restaurant, and there are men who just sit by the pool watching...

I decided on the low cost walking, both with a friend and alone. My walking partner and I even exercise together at her house on occasion, and I've even forced myself to exercise to the music in good musicals. 

goat milk

almond milk

An additional change has been in the milk I put in my morning coffee. Instead of regular cow milk and sugar, I've been experimenting with all sorts of other fattier milks* and leaving out the sugar.

Now for the results. In less than two months, plus the summer vacation, over three of the five kilo are off, bli eyin haraa. And during that time I've eaten out, had some desserts etc. I haven't put myself on a super strict eating regime. In addition, there have been days when I've hardly had any exercise. One of my long time "diet principles" is to find an eating routine you can live with. Don't focus on a "weight goal," since maintaining it may well be impossible.

So far, bli eyin haraa (not to tempt the evil eye,) every few days I do see that my weight is slowly going down. I don't know how long that will continue, but I feel that I'm on the right track.

For me this has been a reminder that we must keep on changing and adapting to the new realities of our bodies and life situations. Do you have similar stories? Don't be shy. Comment, please.

*I will blog about my milk and lactose changes and how they have affected my cough in a future post, Gd willing.

Fighting to Get Off Every Ounce, Gram

Just under ten years ago, I found myself going on a diet, helped by Start Fresh, for two reasons:

1. I was obese
2. I was offered the program for free in exchange for blogging about it.

One of the biggest reasons I continued dieting, my own version of course,  was that the weight just fell off. Really, it was easy. I was out of work that year for the first time in over a decade, so I was able to devote the energy to myself and take walks with friends. The switch from high carbohydrate vegetarian eating to carnivorous low carbohydrates was just what my body needed to shed about thirty 30 pounds, fifteen kilograms. In six months my body changed enormously. I hadn't looked that good for years.

In the past year a few kilo snuck back on. Maybe I'm not as careful as I was in the heyday of my big weight loss. But I am still very active, exercise and rarely eat carbs, except Shabbat. 

If only there was a simple magic formula... an abracadabra that could make our bodies become what we dream.

In the meantime, I just do my best and try to fight to get the weight back off.