Tag diet

Comfort Food

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Comfort Food

Snow Window Open

Note to self … Close car window during winter!

Who doesn’t love comfort food?

We need it even more when winter drags on & on. I was looking at green grass for most of winter but now, suddenly, I’ve got snow mountains on the sidewalk. And we have a polar vortex that’s chillin’ things down for a day or two. What on earth is a polar vortex!?! Never mind, I don’t really want to know. Just bring on spring. Please!

I’ve segued from one cold or flu to another for the past month or six weeks. Now I have a sore throat that just won’t go away. Combine all that with some winter blues & I’m pretty close to forgetting all about diets & weight loss. Almost!

I don’t think I’ve ever been sick enough to not want to eat. I’m not sure if there’s any truth to the old saw about feeding a cold & starving a fever, but I was never motivated to starve myself in either circumstance. Quite the opposite.

Feeling as I do, it would have been easy to give up on the diet. I didn’t (well, not completely anyway), but I still needed comfort. Lots of comfort. Instead, I made a huge pot of silly-hot beef curry, adding all those ingredients that I thought might carry some natural curative properties. Chilli powder, turmeric-laden curry powder, tons of hot peppers, garlic, onion, cilantro. And, towards the end of cooking, three big thumb-sized pieces of fresh ginger. Adding a topping of melting Jarlsberg cheese to my big bowl of “medicine” gave great texture, along with a Vitamin K2 boost.

Cure a fever!?! This stuff is hot enough to give you a fever! Wonder if my strep throat bugs are the curry-resistant variety!!!

I also went into free-fall on fresh & frozen fruit, bananas, raspberries & blueberries. All accompanied by chocolate & cream. Sadly, it wasn’t always the dark chocolate.

Has it cured me? … Not at all.

Do I feel better? … You bet! Especially while I’m stuffing my face!

I’ll worry about what the scale feels next week! 🙂

 

Results … Month #8

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Results … Month #8 (Down 40 lbs) results-month-8

I can’t believe it! I dodged a bullet. Again!

I’m down 4.2 lbs for the month. I could pitch that as another success story for this amazing dietary philosophy I’m practicing. But it just doesn’t feel like that. I blamed December’s lackluster results on the holidays, January’s on work travel, & I’ve been mentally preparing to talk about the winter blues & blahs as my excuse for February. While all those excuses are true, the really huge news in this month’s story is that I haven’t abandoned the diet. I’m hanging in there. Falling off the wagon, & that has happened several times, hasn’t resulted in some huge rebound.

I started this program by practicing for failure. Let’s be real here, most of us yo-yo dieters know that we start a diet on Monday. We enthusiastically make our way through Wednesday. By Thursday, we feel like we deserve a treat. The wheels come off on Friday. And we binge ourselves to a new high on the weekend. Just a little reward before we start a new diet the following Monday!

That’s why I needed to learn how to fail … first. And I’m not talking carrots & celery sticks here! You’ve seen pics of some of my failure foods along the way. When times are bad, I’m eating more failure foods, more often. During those times, I’m eating as I might expect to eat when the diet is “over”. It’s pretty good. I can live happily on a diet that includes French fries & ice cream. Though, even by my rules for failure, I’ll admit to overdoing it on the chocolate!

My big fear now is that things are tapering off. The downward slope of my weight-loss graph isn’t as steep as it was during the first four or five months. Is this the end? Is this as good as it gets? Or will the warmer spring weather, when it finally deigns to arrive, bring along some fresh enthusiasm for the program?

At this point, I am grateful that I haven’t done the rebound thing. But I’m not sure what happens next. I alternate between being cautiously optimistic and then, despairingly melancholic about ever getting to a safer, healthier weight.

The next couple or three months will be very interesting. I’m writing the story, but I have no idea how it turns out.

Welcome to March … here’s hoping it’s a good month for all of us.

Smart Way to Open a Blister Pack & Store Batteries!

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Smart Way to Open a Blister Pack & Store Batteries! 

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is battery-blister-pack1.jpg
Safe & Easy Blister Pack Handling & Battery Storage

I’m fed up talking about diet & weight loss at the moment so, today, I thought I’d share something useful instead. This is something I stumbled across recently. After decades of shredding my fingers & hands with the sharp edges of cut blister packs, I discovered this method purely by accident.

If you’ve ever found your hands in similar condition after doing battle with a blister pack, I hope this helps.

It had reached the point where I would take out the antiseptic ointment & some plasters ahead of opening a blister pack. Knowing that a sharp edge or corner was going to reef at least one digit during the process of extracting the ridiculously well-guarded product. This last time, I found the holy grail!

I’m using my favourite battery blister pack as the example in this case, because batteries come with an additional problem. Or at least that’s true when you’re OCD like me! I have a horrendous fear of a couple of batteries bouncing around in a drawer, in the company of a couple of paperclips & a tissue. I can’t but imagine the paperclips perfectly connecting the battery terminals, so as to complete the electrical circuit & to then create sufficient energy to set the paper on fire & burn my house down. I know, I know! But it’s just how I am. And there are stories out there.

Anyway, I like to preserve the condition of the formed blister pack, in order to safely store the batteries in it. Since they are already all nicely aligned, with the positive terminals all facing in the same direction, they stay that way if you can store them in the original pack. And they are protected from any potential contact with those dreaded paper clips & tissue paper!

If you hunt down online solutions to blister pack challenges, you’ll find people suggesting all manner of techniques. But many result in the destruction of the blister pack, rendering it useless for long term storage. They also suggest the use of tools ranging from tin snips, through scalpels, & on to box cutters. I’m almost surprised there aren’t more recommendation for power tools! Not only do you have to worry about cutting your hands, now you’ve got to worry about cutting through your kitchen counter top! You can even buy a custom tool, designed specifically for cutting blister packs. I have one. It’s useful but it’s not as good as this little technique.

In this instance, I just used my favourite scissors. I decided to cut off the big useless piece of cardboard at the top, as you can see in the top left image. This was just to make the package easier to handle. But then, I accidentally broke the little strip of card that remained along the cut edge. You can see this sticking out on the bottom left pic. It’s the little white strip sticking up in the air. As I handled the package to pluck this little strip off, the blister pack, with all the batteries, began to slide out!!!

Flipping the pack over, I then realised that the backing card on the blister pack was now the perfect sliding cover for my little battery storage box! That the pic on the right hand side of the collage. All my batteries are now stored this way. Of course they are stored in their own little basket. On a high shelf. With no paperclips or tissue paper anywhere in sight!!!

Come on now, that’s a neat little technique, isn’t it!?!

Have a great weekend! 🙂

Eat More Fat!

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Eat More Fat!yougurt copy

With advice from just about all of our governments, certainly in the west, & our medical communities, we have spent several decades now trying to reduce our fat intake. During that time, I think we may even have achieved that goal, but western populations continued to get fatter. Higher fat diets, though now far more prevalent, are still considered unhealthy by the majority. You don’t need to go any further than the dairy case in the supermarket to see which philosophy is leading in the popular opinion stakes. The low & reduced fat milks predominate. Low fat & 0% fat yogurts occupy most of the shelf space. This, still current, reality was more harshly brought to my attention when I joined a couple of Facebook groups over the recent holiday. I joined some Instant Pot® communities so I could learn more about my new toy. Then I realized there were probably groups out there for my much older T-fal Actifry® too. There were!

In both communities, you’ll find that supermarket pattern mimicked. The tone of many comments suggest that eating low-fat is just a given thing. Obvious & matter of course. An indisputable & irrefutable fact that goes unquestioned. Many people are trying to avoid the fat. Indeed, the Actifry was designed for that very purpose. When I first opened my Actifry, I threw away the little green spoon that suggest that I limit my fat! On the Instant Pot® groups, I shared my yogurt success with the 10% fat cream. The silence was deafening! And as other conversations resumed, most went back to talking about low fat ingredients again. Though there were some using, almost with guilt, that positively decadent whole milk!

I find it very difficult to lose weight without adding fat to my diet. While I’m still struggling with getting back on track after the holidays, fat is still very much a favored part of my diet. I can only diet well when I up the fat intake. Eating a good diet, for me, means that I’m not putting on still more weight during times of stress. And fat is equally useful when I’m trying to lose weight. Why is fat so important?

Consider the mainstream dietary regimen of choice during past decades, the recommendations all centered around eating less and moving more. That basically means eat a low-fat, low-calorie diet. Fat has more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrate, so it sounds like the obvious macronutrient to target. Protein is touted as the best macronutrient for satiety, so who needs fat? While all these are true, reducing fat in my diet has never worked well for me. Most often, it was because I couldn’t stick with the low-fat diet that remained.

Adding fat to my diet helps me stay the course better, & for longer. Will it get me to where I want to be? We’ll see.

Now I am not implying that I simply added a big dose of fat to the diet that was already making me fatter. Though even that might have helped displace some of the more truly fattening foods I was eating! The deadly combination, for me, is fat combined with sugar & processed starches. Though I can do a good job of gaining weight eating products advertised as low-fat, or zero-fat, too.

We’ll take a look at some of those fats that I consider good another time but for now, I’m off to enjoy some more of my 10% fat yogurt!

 

 

 

I Love Yogurt … Who Knew!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 3 Comments

I Love Yogurt … Who Knew!instant pot yogurt

I made my first batch of yogurt in my new Instant Pot® & it was so ridiculously good, I just can’t believe it! Check out the pic of that spoon standing upright in it. It is firm, with a really smooth texture, and it tastes so creamy that it’s hard to believe that it doesn’t contain any added flavouring. It is just the Natrel® 10%, with a couple of tablespoons of plain Balkan yougurt, a 6% fat version, as a starter. It may be the best yogurt I’ve ever tasted. I have taste-tested it with some skinny people, and even they like it!

This was done with what is known in Instant Pot® circles as the “No Boil” or “Cold Start” method of yogurt making. For this method apparently, the primary ingredient, the milk or cream, must be of the ultra-filtered or UHT pasteurised variety. Without boiling, the potential for bad bugs to flourish is higher in regular milks. The No Boil process, on the other hand, is the simplest thing I’ve ever done. Toss the milk in the pot. Add the couple of tablespoons of starter yogurt and blend this with the milk. Put the lid on & press the Yogurt button. The pot does its thing for 8 hours. You then remove the pot liner & stick it in the fridge to set. For this little effort, I just can’t believe the result.

Not everything has turned out so wonderfully well, on the first attempt, in my new pot. But this one is a winner. And, along with this yogurt being so good, it ticks many of the boxes I want ticked from a dietary standpoint too. It is deliciously higher in fat than most store bought versions. The 10% cream does have a few additives but I’ve regularly consumed far more processed products than this. Though I’m not lactose intolerant, it being lactose free should cut down a bit on the carb content. And it’s a very neat way to get some protein when you’re more in the mood for dessert than dinner. I’ll be adding some fruit & a little shaved dark chocolate to a big bowl of this for something positively decadent.

For taste, this outcome is a gourmand’s delight. Now I must see if I can replicate the amazing result, but with less expensive ingredients! Along the way, I will have to test drive the boil & cool method with regular milk (full fat, of course!) too.

Watch this space, I’m sure I’ll have some entertaining disasters to add to the list of Instant Pot® success stories along the way! 🙂

Natrel® is a registered trademark of Agropur, Instant Pot® is a trademark of Instant Brands Inc.