Cheese

I originally thought that the probability of finding a place with  a selection of cheese other  than paneer in Bangalore would be very low. Thanks to a neat little travel blog I found two interesting spots (and visited one).

The neat little blog is called This is Expat India and features the exploits of a mulit-year expat from the uk living in India. The are a lot of good tips in this blog if you scan through it and it is very professional looking. On the blog in question I found two sources of cheese in Bangalore, the first is a foodie shop called Foodhall and it has a whole counter of world cheeses. I didn't buy any this time around  as I was a few days from leaving the city, but I definitely will make a stop here next time. It also has a selection of meats (salami, bacon, beef, pork etc...) and tons of speciality items and food. I would put it in the very expensive category.

The  second cheese related story on this blog was about a monk from India that travelled to Italy, fell in love with cheeese and after making a few batches and experiemnting onfriends, started making some. He know sources quite a few of the 5 star resturants wih the cheese. Apparently he will also sell to people that seek him out, so another adenventure to be had.

Proteins

Eggs are available at Mores as well. For us north americans, seeing eggs unrefrigerated is an odd sight. Surely they cannot last... well they do. I pick them up and immediately refrigerate them though as habit and the need for a clean counter top. 

One of my next quests will be to find free range eggs as you can bet your last dollar the eggs in the More's store came from chickens that are leading pretty shitty lives. 

Frozen shrimp is one of my staples, again More's to the rescue. Well not quite, they are quite small and I question the freshness. Always cook them and don't even think abut making ceviche. 

I picked up some frozen lamb chunks. The picture looked really good. However they were raw and 99% bone. I still managed to make a pretty fine meal out of them last night.

Eggplant, chilies, onions, garlic and tomatoes make up the stew base, I set that aside and then brown the mutton. Add the stew base back in, add water, cook for 30 min or so and then add fresh coriander. I still make sure the coriander is cooked as I'm not up to eating uncooked veggies yet. 

Boneless skin less chicken breast is again readily available. As usual I buy too much. A 3 ounce serving is about 1/2 a breast so buying 8 was silly in retrospect. It will get eaten this week but I did freeze 4 of the 8 so the will need to be unthawed in the fridge over night. 

I tend not to eat beef while I'm here, but the driver tells me that there are reputable places to get it. He also cautioned against the Russell Market. 

But what about lovely cheese you ask. Cheese will be a topic of another hunt (likely in 3 or 4 weeks). Paneer is readily available but if you want so variety or cheese to go with a glass of wine, its not paneer. 

So you've got a place to cook, now how do I get groceries

Find those low calorie alternatives and cooking for myself one of the big motivations for moving from a Hotel environment to an apartment. 

Now the hunt begins for food that I can prepare or eat as is...

A big part of my daily routine is the dairy. I'm currently addicted to 0% MF Greek style yogurt. Now to find it or the equivalent in Bangalore. 

Well the aforementioned More Store  on has low fat, which in this case is 2%. I need something infinitely lower. I searched a few other locations but came across it in a store called Westside. 

Its initially quite firm, but get watery quickly when stirred and left to sit for 10 minutes. Still not Greek Yogurt, but I was pleased to find something pretty damn close. 

For fats, cashews, almonds and as I mentioned peanut butter are readily available. Avocados are huge and relatively inexpensive here. 

Fresh fruits and veggies can be gotten from places like Mores, but you really have to try going to the local market like I did yesterday, Russell Market 

Named after Indo-Canadian Russell Peters. 

Me in the veggie and fruit aisle. 

The market also sells fresh fish, live chickens, goats, rabbits. I would advise against it and it stinks like the living dead. Blood flows in the streets. Try not to think about it and keep moving.

I also found out that there is such a thing as a red avocado. I previously thought they were only green! Who knew.

The Apartment

Seeing as I'm in Bangalore 75% of the time for the next 5 months, I've decided to get an apartment. For those of you who think relestate might be cheap in India, I can put that to rest right now. Housing is very expensive and while I'm not expert, based on the apartment I ended up renting I'd say it was more expensive than many large cities in Canada.

It's a 3 bedroom, has 5 balconies a servants quarters (which I won't require and are criminally small), gated building with more security guards than I can count, manicured grounds, walking distance to a grocery store, a pool, parking space (which I cannot use because no body from away drives here). What more could I ask for....well it could have been better cleaned. The kitchen was really not cleaned properly for years and I literally spent the better part of a day and 1/2 getting it into serviceable condition. A number of small leaks in the bathroom and kitchen sink, some faulty electrical and several pissed off calls/emails later, most of it is fixed. Sink leak should be fixed tomorrow I'm told.

The huge plus here is that I can cook for myself and that is worth the initial irritation. I keep telling myself this until I believe it.

The Hotel Experience

During my first trip to Bangalore in July (note that I'm posting in August so a little behind in my posting :) ) was among other things, to find a suitable place to stay.

I ended up staying at the Sheraton Bangalore which is quite a nice hotel, 4 running machines, small pool. The restaurants were accommodating and tried to help where they could. Breakfast is the easiest  meal of the day as they have eggs, fruit. I usually grabbed an apple and orange to eat through the day. Note that you need to wash all fruit and veg before eating and I have yet to eat raw veggies. Raw veggies might be what I miss the most so far. Cooking your veggies is less convenient for sure. 

Again I had brought protein bars with me for lunches as well as almonds and cashews for fats. So choices were not too numerous and meals are slightly boring. Dinners were were challenge more from the point of saying no to the numerous request from the serving staff to try x/y/z or try to pour you more wine than you want.  Eating in restaurants is very time consuming as well and it would be nice to just get something and get back to your room to relax or work. 

Work is interesting when you travel. People in NA think that your basically on a holiday. In reality, you work like 6 hours longer/day as they come on time and you interact with them through email. Add jet lag to that and I didn't leave the hotel area other than to hit up the mall to buy a shirt and some peanut butter.

Speaking of peanut butter, its readily available in Bangalore but its not like Kraft. Less sugar and more peanutty taste. I actually prefer it.

Here is one variety available (imported obviously) but available in More Stores.

On this July trip I also travelled to Delhi for a few days. Even for very short flights, they try and serve you a meal on the plane. I just skipped that entirely. I stayed at the Leela in Delhi which is again a fantastic hotel. The staff here were terrific and absolutely went out of their way when I explained my restrictions. The morale of the story here is if you are staying in the hotel, don't be shy about telling them exactly what you want. The 5 star hotels can have some great chefs and they can make tasty meals from simple ingredients.

Being prepared for hotel living by bringing a few protein and fat supplements was the way to go. If you are going to have a dessert, plan for it a day ahead so you can prime yourself to say no or to adjust other elements of the diet to support having that dessert. Also remember that hotel portions can be rather large. Practice not finishing the food. Its very hard to leave 1/2 of your favourite tiramisu gelato on the plate, but scarfing down the whole thing only leads to regrets and depression eating. 

I've also been learning to stop rewarding myself with food. So when I hit milestones like (215 lbs or 200 lbs), I bought a print instead of saying I'll have a slice of cake. Avoid things like, "Its the weekend, or its Friday night so what the hell." I've need to change the way I think about food. Portion control, elements of the meal, grazer style of eating, planning ahead and avoiding spontaneous treats are all valuable changes to my life style that I am planning on sticking with during the maintenance period, which should be in a few weeks. 

Having slagged the hotel food a little, this particular meal at the Sheraton Bangalore was rather nice. Grilled shrimp on a bed of baked beans in a tomato sauce.

Yes folks, this is on the diet. The 3 what I would call normal size shrimp make a 1.5 oz or a single serving. In this case, the shrimp are quite a bit larger than what I would call normal. Getting out ones weigh scale at a restaurant is pretty inconvenient, so lets just say 2 make a serving, and there are 6 shrimp so there is 3 of the 9 daily servings. I knew I'd be eating out tonight so I planned for it and left myself 4 servings. Eating a scoop of beans covered that base off. There is undoubtedly oil in this preparation, so I tick off a fat, 1 of the 5 daily servings. The glass of wine replaces a fruit serving, some would argue two.

And I forgot to mention, I drink water (carbonated in this case) and always bottled in India. Never drink the water if you don't see the bottle opened. I've been sick 10 previous times and the last 5 have been great because I'm being more careful and not taking any chances. Trust me and do not touch street food, sweet coconut is amazing but I saw god I was so sick.

Planning ahead will get you through those difficult restaurant meals. And if you didn't plan on having dessert, don't have it.

The flight

My first mistake for the flight was assuming that if I selected a "low cal" meal option that it would possibly fit in with my dieting regime. Wrong. It was some kinda pasta so I couldn't eat it. Luckily I had taken some low cal (~100/150 cal) protein bars with me as well as a small bag of almonds. So while I couldn't fill out all of the dietary needs, I was at least not going over the allowances. I subsequently switched back to the "normal" meal option for the flight as I will be able to better pick and choose what I can eat from the menu.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to use the airport lounge. Fresh fruits are available and while not fat free, they did have yogurt. For those of you who have access to the Maple Leaf lounge in Frankfurt, I'm sure you'll agree that they did a good job and nothing like being able to have a hot shower when you're travelling these distances. Reminder to all to bring a change a clothes as you'll feel like a new person!

Exercise is pretty much impossible on the plane, but stretching definitely helps to get the blood going.

Leaving Ottawa at 5:00 pm on a Sunday and getting to Bangalore at 2:00 am on Tuesday with expectation of getting into work at a decent time (9:00 am). Add the time for customs, luggage pick up, the drive, and check-in and its at least 3:00 am before you can put your head on a pillow.

I personally use sleeping pills for at least the first few nights to try and keep myself in the bed. When I've skipped the pill, I end up sleeping for 15 min, waking up and feeling like I've had like 5-6 hours, then feeling shit for the rest of the day. So far this trip it working on and off, with a couple of good nights and couple of very early mornings.

In the beginning...

I recently lost 60+ lbs through dieting and increased level of exercise (from none to running 3x/week) and I want to make sure I maintain that weight loss as I approach my goal of 75 lbs lost. This has been fairly easy to do in NA as the diet is very simple and built around a omnivores NA diet.

It's a low calorie 1700/day diet which consists of:

• 9 protein serving/day (A serving is 1 oz = Chicken/beef/cheese or 1.5 oz seafood, 1 egg)  
• 5 fat servings/day (A serving is 10 almonds/6 cashews/2 tsp peanut butter/slice of bacon/ 1/4 of an avocado)
• 2 Diary (A serving is 250 ml of fat free yogurt)
• All the non-startchy veggies you can choke down. (Cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, okra...)
• 1 restricted veggie serving (onions, carrots, beets, etc) 
• 4 fruit servings a day (A serving is 12 grapes, 1/2 cup blueberries, 1 cup strawberries, an orange, a pineapple ring)
• You can have two slices of bread or equivalent/day but I have left that out since I started the diet. 
• I do drink alcohol beverages, and they replace a fruit.

I eat sit times a day: Breakfast, snack, Lunch, snack, Dinner, snack.

For breakfast, I eat only proteins.

Planning out what your going to eat that day is important to ensure that you hit the foods up in priority order and generally if you have something with a high carb component you should eat it in the presence of a fat.

All of this is super easy to do and easy to source the food in any grocery store in North America.

And this is where the challenge begins. I've accepted a 6 month assigning in Bangalore, India. Now I've been to India many times before, in fact including the trip at the time of this writing its trip number 15. I mention this so people know that I'm not going in blind here.

I know ahead of time that eating on the plane and eating in the hotels/restaurants will be difficult as they tend to be heavy on the oil, frying many things, and starches are a staple part of the diet.

And so the journey begins with the flight to from Ottawa, Canada through Frankfurt and on to Bangalore (around 20-25 hours).

BTW, the diet works if you stick to it. 22 weeks, 62 lbs down, 10-12 inches from my waistline (depending on which manufacturer you believe).

BEFORE

WEEK 22