Tag Archives: Aside

SLOW-CARB + GOOD FOOD

This diet is all about being creative.  For those of you following it, I encourage you to search and experiment until you find foods you love.  Here are a few meals and snacks I have discovered this past week that ROCK!  Try these out, and let me know when you come up with something good.

CHICKEN AND HUMMUS

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Slow-Carb Diet and…. Chuy’s??????

I know many of you are wondering if Jeremy and I have had to give up our favorite Tex-Mex food, and the answer is… absolutely NOT!  It’s actually extremely easy to eat mexican food on this diet.

We have stumbled upon Chuy’s 3 times this week and I would like to share the secrets with you!

Sadly, I couldn’t eat chips.  I missed them very much!  Good friends and conversation really helped take my mind off of my habit of reaching in to grab one of those crispy chips and scooping up some fresh salsa and creamy jalapeno.

I ordered chicken fajitas, substituted the rice with extra beans, and asked them, “PLEASE don’t bring me any of those delicious warm homemade tortillas”.  I just couldn’t bare having them in front of me.  I also asked for my own bowl of creamy jalapeno.

I mixed the chicken and vegetables with the beans, guacamole, fresh salsa and creamy j.  IT WAS SO GOOD!  I intended to take a picture of it before I ate… at both meals. However, my mind must have shut down when I got my food and  didn’t even think about the picture until the food was GONE!… both times!!!

I do have pictures of us enjoying Chuy’s in Houston when Taylor was 2 years old!

To sum it up, there are plenty of options at mexican food restaurants.  I was filled and satisfied.

This is NOT allowed in the Slow-Carb Diet – sad! – but if you have been faithful and committed to your diet for 6 days, I think you should enjoy this to reward yourself!

See you at Chuy’s!

Slow-Carb Diet at Panara Bread

I had lunch with a friend today at Panara Bread and stayed true to my Slow-Carb Diet plan.  I honestly didn’t even know they had salad…and I always order soup in a bread bowl and eat it all… the bread is the good part!  So I broke my focus off of my usual area on the menu and ventured over to the salads.  This salad is new on the menu. I ordered 1/2 salad and a cup of vegetable soup.  I enjoyed my meal… but I did miss bread.  Oh well, I’ve got a goal to reach so I must stay focused!  By the way, I forgot to remove the croutons before I took the picture.  As good as they looked, I did not eat even one.  Go Me

Pinto Beans

I soaked these beans for 2 days and cooked them today.  It’s a good recipe I found on Allrecipes.com called Terry’s Texas Pinto Beans.  If you don’t already use this website, I totally recommend it.  It has made cooking so much easier for me!

Normally I would add cheese and sour cream to the beans, but I am sticking to my SLOW-CARB diet for 6 weeks and can’t have dairy 🙁  Instead, I added diced tomatoes and avocado.  It was all right.  I’m more excited about using these beans tomorrow when I cook Chicken and Corn Chili – from the same website.  Now that is a good dish, and totally in my diet plan!  

A Quick, Delicious Snack

This is one of my favorite foods to eat.  It’s simple and packed with flavor and nutrients.  

First, I dice up tomatoes, add feta cheese- preferably goat or sheep feta – and season it with basil, salt and pepper.  Last, I drizzle extra virgin olive oil over the top. Yummmmm

Even my kids, who don’t eat tomatoes, like this!

A Late Dinner

Today I grabbed a workout before my personal training session and realized, at the end of my day, I hadn’t had dinner… and it’s 8 pm. Ooppps! This is later than I ever want to eat.  Skipping a meal is not an option and I need it to be low maintenance and quick.  I have had enough protein today, so I opted for a veggie plate.

I don’t LOVE eating veggies, but I do LOVE hummus… so

this will be perfect with my vegetables.  Easy, quick, healthy and filling= perfect!

Black Bean Soup

I fixed this black bean soup today for lunch and the kids LOVED it! Any time I hear Iver say, “MOM, fix this EVERY day!”… I know I scored.  It was legal and yummy for me to eat as well.  It was a dry soup mix we bought from our co-op and will look to see if we can buy something similar at our local store, since I’ve been told to make it “EVERY day”!    I served it with fresh avocado and diced tomato.  The kids got to add cheese and sour cream.  I resisted adding that to mine, and didn’t even miss it.  This meal took me 10 minutes to fix!  I would say that’s a win for this meal!

Breakfast this morning…

This is a quick, simple, healthy, YUMMY breakfast I eat most mornings.  I grab whatever veggies I have-onion, bell peppers, squash, spinach, garlic, jalapeno, tomato (I know it’s a fruit) and saute it in real butter for a few minutes until soft.  Be creative.  Sometimes I use a lot of veggies and sometimes I only add 2 depending on what’s in my fridge and how much time I have that morning.

Then I add 1-2 eggs and scramble them up with the veggies.

After I put it in my bowl, I add a little flax seed oil to get more omega 3’s.

Easy and Delicious!  Try it and let me know what you think.

New Slow-Carb Plan

We try out new ideas on exercise and nutrition before we ever encourage anyone else along that path.  This slow-carb diet is a newer concept to us and it makes a lot of since, so here goes! 

Basically, Jeremy and I will be following a few dietary rules for a period of time (me for 6 weeks and Jeremy for longer) and take measurements once a week to see the results. Look forward to some before and after shots… be brave and join the challenge with us! 

For full details of the diet, go to his website or buy his book on amazon.

Fuel for our body

You would think that most of this blog would end up relating to fitness and physical movement.  Interestingly enough I feel like the majority of my posts for some time will actually relate to nutrition so here goes:

Let’s start with the basics:  Food is Fuel.  Let’s now follow that metaphor a little further, I was putting gas in the Jeep today when I thought about the consequences of not actually using gas.  What would really happen if I decided to put sand/water/Extra Virgin Olive Oil/Etc. in my car?  The result is that it would not work, not simply run poorly or maybe run, maybe not.  The car absolutely would not work.  We must therefore have the same imagination about our body.  There is God-given natural food, supplements that have been constructed to aid food and then stuff that only passes for food because it technically has food building blocks and can be calorically measured.  Given the choice between a nice lean piece of chicken breast and a twinky it should be no surprise which one I would rather taste, but which one was designed from the ground up to make my engine run and which one will not only be “not good” but make my engine stall?

I’m not going to lay out a special eating plan during this post or even begin to meddle in your refrigerator (well, not yet), but I simply want to invite you to expand your imagination of what food is and does for you.  The old paradigms of Good food = Taste Bad and Bad Food = Taste Good simply no longer apply.  Rather I want you to imagine food as either making your engine run or stall, no in-between.  So go ahead and enjoy that Bear Claw in the morning, scarf all the pizza you want down as you watch football this afternoon, but start to think about the food you are eating as you do, no guilt, just think.