My Favorite Breakfast

One thing that really keeps people from eating healthy is forgetting to eat breakfast. I know we have all heard it a million times, but it is really important to eat not only a breakfast in the morning, but a healthy breakfast that will also keep you satiated until it is time to eat again.

I for one, find that if I only eat fruit in the morning, I will be hungry again in a really sort amount of time. And when it comes to breakfast bars and breakfast substitutes you can just forget it.

This is the ingredient list from a Nutrigrain bar.

Another thing I hear a lot is that people are not hungry, or even disgusted by food, when they first wake up. I don't really see this as an issue because there are ways (like the recipe I am about to share with you) to bring an easy breakfast with you that make it possible for you to eat whenever you feel ready.

So here is a sweet potato quiche that you can make on a Sunday, cut it up, and freeze it for the week!

This is you cooking up your great breakfast

I got the original recipe from the Weight and Wellness website but I tweaked it a bit so this is how I make it.......

What you will need for 6 portions:
12 eggs
1 of the little cartons of whipping cream
1 large Sweet Potato
1/2 a chopped onion
1 bag of frozen spinach (you can use fresh too)
Olive Oil or Butter
Another veggie like Broccoli or Cauliflower, or some healthy sausage (whatever you like in your quiche, I like the Applegate farm sausage with apple!)
Some Cheese to sprinkle on top
Salt, Pepper, hot sauce and Garlic to taste

9X13 pan for the oven, and a big pan for the stove

1) So first what I do is I peel the entire sweet potato until you just have a big pile of peels.

Just keep going!

2) then I take the onion and begin to saute them in a big pan with olive oil and some garlic.
3)After a few minutes I add the potatoes and fry them until I basically have a big pan of home made sweet potato hash browns
4) While your potatoes are frying crack all of the eggs in a bowl and whisk them a little to break the yolks.
5) Add the cream and mix it in fully.
6) Take the 9X13 pan and grease it either with butter or oil.
7)Take the hash browns and spread them through the bottom of the pan. Try to make it even but it's okay if you have a few bald spots.
8)Take the Spinach and defrost it a little so you can work with it. You might also want to get any excess water out of it with a strainer. Then spread the spinach on top of the sweet potatoes.
9)add the eggs mixture, and then put in the sausage and other veggies you want to add.

Here are some fall veggie ideas that might be good ideas for add- ins

Bake at 350 degrees for about 35-45 mintutes or it looks golden(ish)on top.  When there are 5 minutes left you can add cheese to the top if you want to. This is a really great breakfast because it is healthy and also has a good amount of fat and protein to start your day and feel full for quite a few hours!

Enjoy!

OH MY GOODNESS OH MY GOODNESS!

So I was listening to my favorite show on the Radio, Dishing up Nutrition which I listen though a podcast. And I was listening to the menopause episode which I had missed a few weeks ago and all of a sudden I hear that they are making a shot out to my blog on the radio!!!!!!! I was so excited I started jumping up and down in my living room shouting! It was so unexpected!

So thanks to Dishing Up Nutrition! I find them so motivating to try to eat healthy and even though everyone slips up, they have been a HUGE part of my weight loss thus far. I love them and I can't wait to eventually have a phone consultation with them!

Now I am really motivated to keep this blog up since I might have people in the St Paul area looking at it! WOAH!

Busy Schedule Solutions

So I haven't updated in over a month! It's so sad but I just haven't had much free time since school started to keep up the blog. However, I have been trying to keep up with developing healthy eating habits, which in the end is what it's supposed to be about. It's not always easy, and requires a lot of planning.

A lot of people complain that they, like me, are too busy to make lunch and bring it to school/work. I think that this is one of the pitfalls for people trying to eat healthy, because they either end up not eating, or eating out which is very hard to control.

Healthy *LOOKING* muffins and the like start to look pretty good when you are on the run, hungry, and didn't pack a lunch. However, this really isn't what you want to be eating through the day (you can just ask my friend Martha, she was a witness and occasional causality to my former muffin addiction)

One thing that I find a real life saver is to make big batches of food, pre-package it into Tupperware and freeze it. Then I just pull it out through the week and everyone I eat with is jealous of me. It's great!

Tonight for dinner I came home (after a full day of school, just like you!) and made asparagus soup!

This is not the soup I made! But it looks just like it and I forgot to take a picture!

 

Here is what I did:

Ingredients: Asparagus, cauliflower, a can of chick peas (I think mine was around 10 oz), some butter, water, salt, pepper, garlic, and thyme

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: I originally was going to use a broth for the base, but obviously I didn't have time to make a broth at home. So I went to the deli under me and looked at the broth they had. College Inn was the only brand they had and it was FULL of chemicals including autolyzed yeast extract, which is actually a re-branded version of MSG. So be careful that you don't turn your healthy soup into a pot of chemicals!

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

1) I took a bunch of asparagus and cut off the white part at the end because I thought it would be too tough.
2) I took about 1/4 of a head of cauliflower and chopped it.
3) I boiled the two together in a pot of water for about 7 minutes with garlic, thyme, salt, pepper, and some REAL butter (This is all I had, but onions and other stuff would be good too)
4) I took out the veggies and put it in the blender with some of the water that I originally boiled it in (but not ALL of it, you sort of have to eyeball it to see how much is enough)
5) I added a whole can of chickpeas to add protein and thicken the texture
6) I blended it all and added more salt and pepper to taste, then sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on top

This was super super easy and I made enough for three meals. It probably doesn't really have enough protein to be an ideal dinner but I ate a lot of protein through the day today so I wasn't too worried.

So if you have time for Facebook and  showering and watching TV, you have time to make your meals most of the time. I'll admit that I don't ALWAYS have a lunch packed, but I try to do it at least four times a week or so. Now I need to follow my own advice and start blogging more regularly!

How much cooler are the french than us?

Prompted by my friend Connie's comment on my Seattle post, I decided to investigate and give my opinion on why America has such a different relationship with food than the rest of the world.

One example that is often referred to is the "French Paradox": how the French seem to be able to eat very palatable foods and as a population have a low heart disease and obesity.

Sign me up!

Although this is accepted to be true, I think it would be unfair to say that Americans are the only ones dealing with poor eating habits and obesity. America seems to have exported a culture of processed food that is now reeking havoc on previously healthy populations.

When I was in Italy I noticed that there was just as much processed packaged food in their grocery stores as there were at ours, and Italians have really welcomed McDonald's into their lives.

YEAH MCITALY!

As a result, most European nations are becoming increasingly concerned with a higher presence of obesity in their populations. I have even heard news stories reporting that there is even concern in Asia over an increase in obesity, especially among children.

Not only are the processed foods that we eat on a regular basis making us unhealthy, they are taking the fun and social aspect of nutritious food out of our culture. A family that prepares a totally home cooked meal every night in present day America is somewhat of a rarity. I am sure that it is no coincidence that the faster we consume and the less we cook, the bigger and less healthy we become.

I am actually reading a book that is highly relative to this topic. It is called The End of Overeating by David A Kessler MD. In it he discusses how Americans have literally become addicted through our brain's reward system to highly palatable, highly processed combinations of salt fat and sugar that leave us in a very tricky situation. We fall victim to food scientists' (who lets face it, know more about what I like and why I like it than I do!) and large corperations' brilliant ways of making us literally addicted and conditioned over eaters, having unhealthy emotional attachment to food, and losing a relationship with REAL food.

Evil scientist knows you can't resit!

And believe me, I KNOW how hard this can be to resist and I am not always successful. Knowing that it's not all your fault is helpful, but I think we need to find ways to really fight the odds. It is hard to plan meals and cook everything you eat yourself. The sheer availability of food at any time of day from any selection of lovely chain restaurants and convenience stores make success sometimes seem impossible. But if you have to make the choice between spending an hour on Facebook at night, or making sure that you cook something healthy and satisfying for the next days lunch, I think we should make an effort to prioritize eating healthy and enjoying eating food that we can be proud of, with people we care about.

Calorie Counting, striking a balance

I initially lost some weight by calorie counting. Basically, I would track EVERYTHING I ate as well as logging all of my work-outs and calculating my deficit. It could be time consuming but I really didn't mind too much. The problem is that this isn't a truly realistic way to lose weight and keep the weight off. Now that I am in school again, it is really hard to continue to calorie count.

Eating clan when you are always on the run really is hard, and I keep making resolutions to do better every day, but then something happens to mess it up. So this week (Friday to Friday) I want to try to see how closely I can eat to my healthy calorie counting ways and still lose some weight (hopefully 1 pound) without calorie counting. Hopefully I will be able to post often to report how this goes. Also, I want to try to not eat even a gram of refined sugar if I can avoid it and see how I feel. I have tried to do this a few times but I always mess up. It's amazing how food can just sneak up on you like that. This is Especially true if I wait until I am really hungry to eat, which I will have to try to avoid this week.

Long overdue: A trip to the west coast

So I haven't posted for a while! I was in Seattle for a week and then school started right away so I have had to play catch up.

The reason I went to Seattle and Vancouver for a week is that I was going with my boyfriend to the American Cheese Society conference in Seattle (he is a cheesemaker). We went to Vancouver first for a day and took a bus tour down to Seattle see a few really cool farms!

One of the creameries we visited along the way

The ACS is a really great because they are pretty grassroots and are focused on promoting American artisinal foods. However the BEST thing about the ACS conference is allllll the great cheese everywhere for the entire conference.

My boyfriend Dan making cheese at Beecher's cheese at the Pike Place Market

The other thing that really struck me was the west coast attitude about food in general. Even the people behind the counter where I would get coffee or a sandwich would be so stoked on the great food that they were serving. Although being a "localvore" is now labeled as a somewhat shallow food trend, these people were so excited to be serving products they could be proud of.

Great turkey sandwich from the Seatown Snack Bar that the guy literally talked to me about for like 5 min.

Even when I went to a coffee bar, the girl who took my order talked to me about the cool espresso beans they had, and then I had the same exact conversation with the guy who actually made my drink. And they were both SO EXCITED about the coffee they were serving that day.

And it looks pretty great right?

Not that New Yorkers aren't more interested in food than they used to be (including myself), it was really cool to see this attitude that people have about food where it isn't just something you grab and go with as a matter of sustinance, but something that you can really enjoy and be proud of.

I hope that we see more of that here on the East coast, along with a focus on healthy and environmentally responsible foods that people are excited about, not just eating because they want to lose weight.

Agave Noway

The first time that I remember hearing about agave nectar was when I worked at a tea shop in Chelsea Market. My boss there insisted that everyone used it as the new natural sugar. We had to endure plenty of customers complaining that we didn't have regular or artificial sugar. However, I was under the impression that agave was better for you! We were told at work that agave was a "natural" sugar that the body knew how to process better than other sugars. Unlike white or even regular raw sugar, the body supposedly knew what to do with agave, so that it wouldn't be stored as fat.

This is the type of marketing misinformation that is just ridiculous. Then there end up being plenty of people (myself included) who think that it's okay to have agave and that is better for you than regular sugar.

The problem with agave is that it has an even higher percentage of fructose than the dreaded high fructose corn syrup! It is also a myth that agave is unprocessed or "raw" although agave nectar is not AS processed as HFCS, it is processed to get it into the nectar state you buy in the store.

Also, I do understand that HFCS isn't much worse for you than regular sugar, so we should be just trying to avoid ALL processed sugar really, and the higher the fructose percentage, the worse it is.

Just as a reminder, these are the reasons why fructose in excess is so bad for you (weather is is in the form of regular sugar, HFCS, or agave) :
1) Fructose does not release the hormones insulin or lechten, which would normally tell the brain that you are full. Therefore if you are eating fructose you will continue to feel hungry even after you have eaten.
2)They raise your triglyceride levels and LDL cholesterol levels (all sugars do).
3) High fructose products are highly processed (including agave!)
4) Fructose is processed entirely by the liver whereas glucose is processed only 20% by the liver. This leads to the liver turning the fructose into fat cells and this not only leads to storing fat on the body, but also non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome or gout!

So I'm sorry that it turned out this way, but agave is not better for you than regular sugar, it is actually worse for you, because it has a higher percentage of fructose.

If you are interested in learning more about this on your own, I got the information for this post from the Dishing Up Nutrition Podcast, a q&a with Marion Nestle, and Sugar: The Bitter Truth .