Cravings?

Oddly I have been struggling wth cravings for the past two days. I'm pushing through but so far it has been very hard to keep my mind focused (not picking up the food is the first and hardest choice to make. Lucikly i'm in Canada this week so getting exactly what  I want to eat is very helpful.

Heading home again..

Even though I'm back on the more restricted dieting for a few days, I'm trraveling for the next two days so to account for the time warp that I go through, I add a few proteins and fats to the diet. Seems to have worked in the past trips so lets how it works this time. 

The travel agent finally sorted out the low calorie meal option problem that was stuck in my file. This is good news as previosuly it restricted the ability to make healthly choices and left me with a lot of carb based food which I didn't eat. 

The appetizer on Air Canada was right up my alley! Salmon and shrimps. The salad was made from 100% restricted veggies and I so I skipped that bit (dinner had peas which I ate instead). 

The only bad things about this trip was that I forgot to bring my protein bars for the trip. Which reminds me that I will have to bring some food with me to the planned work offsite this week, (A fridge has been rder for my rooom so I can store things). 

Looking foward to it. Folks from all over the company coming together and working on common goals for a few days. If I remember, I'll blog about maintaining the diet while I'm there...

Been on maintenance for a few weeks now

So I've been on maintenance for a few weeks now (I believe 3) and my weight has stayed roughly the same. I dropped a few pounds and added a few proteins and fats, this week I could see my weight increasing daily so I cut back on to the strict for a few days to see it come down and it has. 

Yesterday I managed to get a walk and a very short run (10min) on the treadmill. I'm trying to take it slow as I return to running. Seeing the chiro for my back on Friday. 

I'm guessing that I'm retaining quite a bit of water so I means I need to drink more water. Also, since I kinda extract every nutrient out of the food, my body processes the waste slowly. 

I may have to invest in some medamucil or something high in fibre, but I'm quite reluctant.

Voyage home early tomorrow am (3am) so no sleep this evening. These trips certainly take their toll on my body.

Ah well, the adventure is worth it! 

Dessert

Did I mention fat free yogurt? We'll have a few times. I often eat it for dessert  in the evenings with fruit and some nuts. It's pretty darn good!

Pickles

Did I mention that on the diet, pickles are free. And I have become a pickle fiend. 

 There are four different kinds of pickles in the bowl (garlic, chilli, sweet and actually jalapeños which aren't pickles themselves but are peppers that are themselves pickled. And of course the other free thing on the diet is mustard! Both of these items were picked up from Natures's Basket here in Bangalore. 

Tonights dinner brought to you by the letters M and E.

If you don't get the reference look up Seasame Street and "brought to by the letters..." 

Well what do we have here....

3 oz of chilli chicken, cauliflower masala and cacumber salad made with cucumbers, tomatoes, white radish, and avocados. Normally I would put a little pit of onion in that. All in all this was a very diet conscious meal with only the chicken and avocados counting towards the daily allotment. 

I saved 1/2 of the cauliflower for meals later this week and I couldn't finish the salad (so I just picked out and at the avocado). Now this avocado was a large round green one, which again is different then the ones we get in Canada which tend to be small pear shaped ones.  It was pretty awesome and I only used 1/2 so the other 1/2 will get eaten tomorrow (maybe with more salad cause I gotta eatmore veggies   and use up what I have in the fridge.

In terms of spicing in the salad, I used salt/pepper and fresh coriander. In the cauliflower I used a veggie masala mix, and added garlic, a few cardamon pods (what the heck I thought i would try them) and finally I bought some curry leaves on recommendation of my driver. Good for your health he says. I don't know about health but they sure are tasty. 

DYU Art Cafe

Decided to go out for lunch and DYU Art Cafe was a recommended venue on a expat site. Took over an hour to get here from my apartment as it is in Koramangala which is to the south of where I live and you have to pass through some heavy traffic. 

In any case, Its quite a lovely little place. Tons of outdoor seating and nice atmosphere. Tables could have used a used a wipe though :) 

Ordered a French press which came in an actual Bodum. Also ordered an veggie omlette as it is the only thing on the menu that I can actually eat on this diet (even on maintainence) 

The coffee was quite good, albeit a bit on the strong side. The bodum mesh needs to be replaced as it was now allowing grinds to get through. 

Of course it came with bread which I won't eat. I wish I remembered to tell them (but come to think of it wasn't on the menu either :) 

The veggies inside, peppers, tomoatoes, mushrooms, carrots, onions were crisp and fresh and a heavy use of butter made it pretty tasty. It will take 3 protiens, my restricted veg and 1 fat off the daily allowance. 

I'm glad I didn't order it with cheese as it would have been too much (although it said it was a cheese Omelette, I think I confused them when I asked for "just veg" in it. 

Music was quite modern, alternartive rock (and all English) the 30 minutes that I was there.

A bit unfortanate that they don't have wifi, but then again, I read a few pages from an e-book I'm struggling with (the book is good, I just keep folrgetting I have it! lol.) Its called the Thief Covanent by Ari  Marmell. I've been using it as inspriation for a D&D 5th edition campaign I'm running right now. Using it for settings and such. 

Cozy little corners, but as I mentioned, they could use a more frequent wipe with being outdoors and also due to the lattes and capacinos. 

I liked the use of the sewing table base as a coffee table base. The wheel spins and the pedal can be pumped as they are not fixed in place. 

The meals today....

Well breakfast started with lentils and a rice mix (first time I've had rice in many weekend), then made dal for lunch , and when to another brewpub for dinner. Had olives as a starter (which included some pickles!! ) and shrimp as a main. Very yummy. 

I never ate all the olives (that would have been bad!) but I had the room for all of the shrimp on the diet, so this was right up my alley. Btw, the shrimp are called Chittinad style. Yummy. 

Lentils!

I cooked up a batch of yellow lentils with a little bit of green chillies, onions and salt/pepper a few days ago and I thought, what can I have for dinner? Lentil patties!

So I fried (a tiny bit of olive oil) and made patties for dinner tonight a few left over for tomorrows breakfast.

They were pretty good, but I boiled my lentils too long and they were pretty dry. Next time I will leave the lentils at soup consistency then reduce them if needed.

Still I enjoyed it. As a side I had eggplant and tomatoes and pickles. Lovely as that is all free on the diet.

Left me room for a couple ounces of cheese this evening and a glass of vino. Cheers everyone! Happy dieting in India.

Progress on maintainence

As I mentioned previously, I'm now in the maintainence phase of the diet. I've increased the protein portions by two to 11/day and the fat portions by 2/day to 7. 

So here is what I ate yesterday:

Protein

3 eggs, 

2 protein bars

1/3 cup of black lentils and red beans (dal malkani)

2/3 cup yellow lentils (dal)

2 oz of chicken

Fat

2 slices of bacon

2 tsp peanut butter

20 Almonds

6 cashews

4 Olives

Free Veggies

A chilli,

2 tomatoes, 1/2 caulifower and 2 more tomoatoes

5 pickles

Glass of tomato juice

another 2 tomatoes

Cucumber

Restricted Veggies

Onion

Dairy

Milk

Yogurt

Fruit

Apple

Pineapple

Beer (yes it counts as fruit)

 A ton of coffee.

I should have had one more fruit to complete the daily allotment, but I was stuffed. 

And down  a pound today. Consistently dropping since going on maintainence so I'm not getting enough and this is without any meaniful exercise due my achilles injury and my back needing to be iced constantly. 

So I haven't plateaued yet. 

I will add another protein serving and another fat protein.

This will be my new daily allotment:

12 Protein servings

8 Fat servings

4 Fruit servings

Unlimited Free Veg servings

1 Resricted Veg serving

2 Dairy servings

4 Fruit servings

Lots of water (or in my case coffee).

Still avoiding the carbs (bread/rice/pasta) but may allow myself another dosa on the weekend. Need to plan for that breakage. A friend told me about a south india fast food place called Adigas that I need to try and there is one around the corner. I'm a little leary of fast food as this looks like the pizza hut of India when I walked by...I'd prefer to find another interesting little breakfast joint somewhere. 

Another thing to note about the diet this week is that I have ventured into the realm of eating raw veggies in India. I still wash everything and avoid leafy veg with large surface areas. But so far I have had numerous tomoatoes, cucumbers, onions and apples, and few cauliflower florets. The later  is probably the most risky as it has a relatively large surface area. Knock on wood, I'm still good. 

Dal Makhani

So this is actually something with a little modification I can make and eat.

The base is black lentils and red kidney beans. Check, I can eat those.  

Next is onions and tomatoes. Again check and check. Well onions are a restricted veg, so just limit the quantity. Portion sizes pretty much take care of this with onions so not really concerned here.

I'm using a premix which in this case is just spices (no sugar) so check.

The next step is the only modification I made to the recipe and that is to skip the butter.  You could put a little bit of olive oil instead if you really need the extra taste. I found I didn't really need it. 

A serving on the diet is 1/3 of a cup. Might kit seen like a lot but 1/3 of a cup makes for a good snack size and 2/3 is a good meal size. 

My meals are generally 3 or 4 servings so for example tonight this will be 1/2 the allotted servings of protein. 2 servings of chicken (2 x 1oz) will make up the other 1/2 of the allotted servings of protein.

Breakfast!

Well after 25 weeks of not a single carb (other than beer), I broke that trend to visit Mavalli Tiffen Rooms to have a Masala Dosa. It was worth it. I've adjusted todays diet accordingly reducing some fruit intake to compensate for the sugars. I won't do this again until my wife and son come over for a visit.

These two chaps were seated with me as I was alone at a table for four. They worked for a radiator company in Rajasthan. Nice to chat with them even if we couldn't understand 90% of what the other person was saying. 

Cheese

I've mentioned Foodhall previously, but I found a chain of stores with international foods including a nice variety of cheese (also at North American prices I might add). It called  Nature's Basket  and there is chain of them in several major India cities. They also had a selection of India wine, with at least 10 different varieties. The cheeses I picked were, a soft, medium and a hard. So we have, Brie, Gouda with Nettles (had to try this) and Ramano. Tried an ounce of each tonight with a glass of cab sav from Fratelli .

Too tired to eat

After arriving at 1:30ish in the morning and getting a few hours sleep, I raided the apartment cupboard and had some protein bars, and a few olives. Packed my lunch (a few protein bars) and then remembered that I had a lunhc date with one of the vistors to the site at Sattyam http://www.sattvamrestaurant.com  (which was fantastic btw!). Second time I have been there and really enjoyed it. 

After a lite lunch we made a pit stop at at a place called Nature's Basket (naturesbasket.co.in) and found a few bottles of Indian wine for a Ottawa based friend of mine, plus the elusive Coke Zero and a number of other international cuisine items (like cheeses). I will try and return there this weekend and grab a few things. Seemed to be cheaper than Foodhall. Oh an bought an apple as I had no fruit today so far. 

After a full day of work, returned home at around 7:30 and stopped in a my local More's to get some of the essentials. Fat free yogurt, some fruit for this week, a few herbs, some chicken. 

Here are some of the prices for freash food:

Around 50 g of green chillies 1.5 INR. or 3 cents Canadian. Oh, btw, we no longer have the penny in Canada so this would cost you 5 cents.

A green pepper was 3.27 INR or 7 cents Canadian.

A cauliflower was 17 INR or 34 cents Canadian.

400g of yogurt is 59.40 INR or 1.20 Canadian.

5 small tomotoes was 5.49 INR or 11 cents Canadian

Coriander and Mint were 3 INR each or 7 cents Canadian each.

12 eggs was 52 INR or about 1.04 Canadian.

2 Cucumbers was 5.67 INR or 11 cents Canadian total. 

Around 15 garlics was 51 INR (and they come in a bag so you cannot buy just one), 1.04 Canadian.

A honeydew melon was 28.21 INR

My big ticket item was 4 boneless skinless chicken breast at 262.73 IN total or 5.24 Canadian, followed closley by 4 royal gala apples at 195 INR or 3.89 Canadian.

So broguht all the food back to the apartment and was too tired to cook. Had a few protein bars, a couple pickles, some olives. I tried to heat up a chili protein mix in the microwave and it ended up boiling over and was ruined. By 10:00 pm I was beat and hit the hay. 

And woke up at 2:00 am. Dang. 

For breakfast, I've planned to go to Mavalli Tiffin Room (MTR for short). http://www.mavallitiffinrooms.com and I'll post that review later today. Unfortunately that means I won't be eating for another 5:00 hours...and I've got a bit of a craving today for some reason. Its a good thing that I don't buy junk food anymore as I think I would be scarfing it down. 

Maybe I'll go for a walk on the treadmill...

Meals from FRA to BLR

Again my meal choice has been predefined as the the low cal option, which in this case is actually pretty aligned with what I can eat. 

About a serving of salmon and of chicken, cooked spinach, lettuce, fresh green salad. 

The lounge

I'm fortunate enough to be able to use the lounge, have a shower and grab a bite. All of the hot meals are inedible for me (cream sauces or carb based), but I did manage to find some of my favourites.

Meals on the way to Bangalore

Decided to document everything that they serve me. Unfortunately my requested meal option (which was no special meal) didn't get corrected on this leg. They still had "low cal" which is not atually something I can eat. Anyway, I got to pick something from the menu anyway which you'll see down below.

I didn't get to stop the stewardess before she served me a huge bowl of nuts. Now I love both almonds and cashews but this bowl is about 4 servings and for reference, I get 7 servings of fat per day brought my own that I count out, so I just have to push the bowl away. They are salted too... Tempting. 

Oops... So eating the food before I take a pic doesn't help the blog :)!

It was a veggie salad and it was right up my alley. Zucchini, eggplant. Sundried tomatoes, peppers all roasted. Yum!!

Had to pass on the fruit as I already had some today and wanted to have a glass a wine, which in this case was Geisen Sav Blanc from New Zealand, which should go well with the fish.

The halibut is pretty tasty and I can eat the chickpeas and zucchini. The dark stuff to the right is eggplant which was pretty good and on the diet! 

Portion size i would have to say that the fish was like 3 servings. I have 5 left for today soon I will have to have a couple of protein bars to make up the deltas.

Ah! No protein bars required! Cheese and roughly 2 oz! Perfect!

After sleeping for a few hours I managed to wake up in time for breakfast. This consisted of a selection of fruits, 2% yogurt (not on the diet but sacrifices have to be made) and 3  protein bars rounded out the meal  This meal marked the beginning of Thursday allotment of food. 

 

Also had 10 almonds.  

Flight delayed

Well luckily in had not left the house here in Ottawa before the flight in Germany to Bangalore was cancelled due to the Lufthansa pilot strike. I'm now rebooked for today. Let's see what happens.

My ticket says 'low cal' meal which the travel agent assure me has been fixed. We shall see. The low cal option is actually inedible and in better off getting the regular meal and picking out what I can eat. 

I'll try and remember to take pictures of every meal this time! 

Returning to India tomorrow

Techincally it will be tomorrow since it's around 12 minutes into Monday and I leave on Tuesday. I've moved into the maintainence part of the duet having reached my weight loss goal. 

For me, maintainence means adding 2 servings of protein and 2 servings of fat per day and then measuring progress. Unfortunately I won't see the weigh loss clinic again for three weeks so I will have to rely on my own scale while in India. 

My Achilles injury continues to heal slowly and I am hopeful that I will be able to at least use the treadmill for brisk walks while I'm in India for the next two weeks.

One added benefit of the weight loss is that I not longer need a cpap machine (woohoo!). Great news for two reasons, a) I don't have to take the machine withe and b) immigration doesn't have to stop me every single time to check it out

On this trip to India, my quest will be to find a source of free range eggs, decent coffee, and a good sharp knife. The kitchen knives u have there are embarrassingly dull and literally I cannot cut a kiwi with them. The diet goal of the trip will be to stick to the program and monitor for gains/losses.

Back in Ottawa this week

Well I'm here in Ottawa for a week and will have a few dieting challenges here too!
Buying the right amount food so that you dont get spoilage is important as no one likes to see food go to waste. Luckily we have a good selection close by at a local grocery store. Not always the freshest of foods, but you can certainly get through a week.

Fat free greek yogurt was one of my first purchases back. I seriously love the stuff and its the ice cream of the diet world to me. My wife did some groceries while I had a few friends over to play some board games. This is usually the first challenge. I provide snacks to them and there in front of me is a massive bowl of junk food. 24 odd weeks in and I have been able to supress the urge to nibble.

The second challenge is that I'm off my routine for evening snack and often either forget to eat it or eat it very late in the evening. Yogurt and blueberries are probably my favourite and I was able to have that last night before going to bed.

What has been really nice these past few days is eating veggies which are uncooked. I'm still not brave enough to try this in India, next week I will be back in India on the Thursday morning at 1:00 am and my goal is to try a few raw veggies on the Friday to give myself the cushion of being potentially sick over the weekend. Yes that sounds crazy to me too. I will definitely be washing them.

Speaking of washing there are a number of products out there that are sold as cleaners for food. However in blind testing they fair no better and sometimes worse that just plain rinsing with water.

I'll avoid broad leafy veggies this time and focus on veggies with flat surface areas (smaller relative surface area) like a tomato versus something like a cauliflower/broccoli which has a massive surface area to hid all those bugs,