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Steaming Vegetables

September 7, 2017 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

Up until quite recently I rarely bothered steaming vegetables. I’d happily plonk them in a saucepan of boiling water and go from there. However if you’re cooking things like mangetout or baby corn steaming is a good option.

Years ago I had various steaming equipment, but between various house moves stuff got misplaced, given away or simply discarded. Recently, as part of my new keto diet, I realised that I was going to be cooking more vegetables and steaming seemed like a good way to vary it. I ended up going for the Joseph Joseph Nest steaming pot set, which gives me 3 different sized baskets that are designed to clip on to the side of a reasonable sized saucepan.

Having 3 different baskets means that you can put a different vegetable in each one as well as handling different cooking times.

To make the steaming process a little more interesting and flavourful I generally add some freshly cut herbs into the water. It’ll add flavour to the vegetables, but won’t be overpowering.

I’ve been steaming broccoli quite a bit over the last couple of weeks, mainly because it’s currently pretty cheap, but most vegetables can be steamed quite easily. Over the last while I’ve had asparagus, mangetout, broccoli, cauliflower and french beans. Due to my diet restrictions I have to avoid things like carrots, which is unfortunate.

No matter what kind of diet you’re on, however, steaming is always a good option as it’s almost impossible to overcook the vegetables with it and they’ll retain a lot more flavour and goodness than boiling them. I often will add a bit of butter to the vegetables once they’re cooked to give them a little more flavour, though depending on what you’re preparing and how fresh it is that might not really be required.

Basic Equipment for Dieting and Weight Loss

September 2, 2017 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

Dieting isn’t just about what you eat, but also about your overall lifestyle. I’ll be the first one to admit that there are a number of aspects of my own lifestyle that are detrimental to my weight. I know that I need to sleep more (on average) and that I need to get more exercise.

So when you’re talking about equipment for dieting it’s not just about tracking what you eat, but also tracking other aspects of your life, as well as cooking decent wholesome food.

It’s fairly common these days to see people using activity trackers like the Fitbit. They’re not expensive especially when you realise that investing a little in your personal wellbeing is usually a lot cheaper than a trip to the doctor! I obviously track my movement with the Fitbit, but the other thing that I really keep a close eye on is my sleep. I’m trying to get a bit more sleep every night as I know that lack of sleep has a negative impact on weight loss as you tend to eat badly when you’re tired plus sleep is needed to keep your body healthy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I use MyFitnessPal as my “hub”. It’s not the only show in town, but it works well for my purposes. The key thing is you’ll need something to track your macros as accurately as possible. Using an app like MyFitnessPal, LoseIt or any of the other popular apps and services on the market means that you can leverage their extensive databases of food. You’ll probably find that none of them are 100% accurate and that sometimes you’ll need to choose a “generic” option, but as long as you track your intake fairly closely you should be fine.

A lot of my friends who have lost weight recommend taking a few photos of yourself at various stages of your diet, so that you can have a visual record of your progress. Not essential obviously, but it can help motivate you. You won’t need anything more complicated than your mobile phone for that one. I’ve taken a couple of shots of myself and I plan to take a photo about once every week or two as I go along. It’ll be interesting to see whether the changes are noticeable or not.

But what about actual equipment?

You’ll need a weighing scales. Personally I like the Withings, as it’s able to automatically record my weight and a few other metrics directly to MyFitnessPal. If you don’t feel like forking out for a wireless weighing scales you don’t have to. Just make sure you’ve got an accurate scales with reasonable graduations so you can easily see your progress and keep track of it. Personally I like digital scales as there’s zero ambiguity about what they’ve captured.

Tip: make sure that the scales is on an even surface or you can easily end up with inaccurate readings.

If you’re serious about going on a diet you’ll need to stop eating processed foods and start cooking. You don’t need to be a Jamie Oliver in the kitchen to cook for yourself. A lot of cooking comes from the quality of the ingredients you use and you’ll also find that cooking and preparing your own food works out a lot cheaper than eating out or buying prepared foods. How far you want to take it will depend on your confidence in the kitchen and how much time you want to spend on it. Personally I find cooking to be quite calming 🙂

However, no matter how good or bad a cook you are you will need one key piece of equipment – a kitchen scales. I’d recommend a digital one, but any scales that can clearly show you grams and goes up as far a kg or two should be fine. I’m currently using a Salter electronic scales that I picked up for about €10. It works fine and doesn’t take up much space when it’s not in use (though that’s rare!)

As for the rest of your kitchen equipment – that’ll be up to you and how much you want to spend on it and what kind of food you like cooking. You will need things like a decent measuring jug and to preserve your sanity measuring spoons and cups. A lot of recipes, particularly American ones, refer to “cups” or “1/2 cups” of various ingredients and unless you want to spend your life calculating what those measurements mean in grams etc., the measuring spoons and cups will save you a lot of time and frustration.

A few items I find that make things easier or better:

a food processor – very handy for making quick work of pancake batter or making sauces and many other things.
nutribullet – if you want to make smoothies the nutribullet is king

Apart from the above the most important things you’ll need are patience and a strong will.

Ketogenic Low Carb Diet One Month in

August 31, 2017 by Michele Neylon 4 Comments

I said I’d try this ketogenic low carb diet for a month and then decide what to do. That month is now up so it’s time to do the assessment!

I started this diet just over a month ago and the time has flown. Sure, there have been some low points, but overall things are going pretty well.

I’m not miserable and while a lot of foods are “off the menu”, I’m still able to eat pretty well most of the time. When I don’t eat well it’s my own fault, not the diet’s. I know that if I was feeling miserable all the time that it would have been nigh on impossible for me to stick to this low carb regime for this long. I like food. I enjoy cooking. I like eating out. However with this diet I’ve found that I can still retain my love for food, cook every single day and still eat out when I need to (or simply want to).

With other diets I found it impossible to stick to them when I was travelling for work or for pleasure. It wasn’t purely a matter of succumbing to temptation, but a matter of survival. If you’re on a complicated diet and have to count every single calorie it’s really hard. And that’s when you’re in a controlled environment. Once you are outside that “safe space” it becomes impossible, as I discovered. Sure, I could do my best to “be careful”, but no matter how hard I tried it would never really work. Admittedly I never tried to avoid things like beer before.

I’ve managed to stick to the diet fairly strictly for over a month without too much difficulty. Any of the issues I’ve run into have been due to either me not reading a restaurant menu properly or simply not realising that something I’d bought or ordered had a high carb load. (I’m still amazed at how many foods have added sugar!)

As I mentioned in a recent post, travelling while sticking to this diet hasn’t been that hard.

What about the key metrics?

I’m not on a diet “for fun”. I’m on a diet to lose weight and if I wasn’t losing weight then I wouldn’t continue doing it.

After just over a month I’ve lost around 7.5 kg (16.5 lbs / 1.2 stone). I’ll be doing another post about that, but I’m really happy that there’s tangible progress.

I feel pretty good overall and I’m not hungry all the time. I have meals that are tasty and filling. And when I don’t I’ve only got my own culinary skills to blame.

When I’m at home I start the morning by jumping on my smart scales (Withings Body Cardio) which then syncs my progress (or lack of it) with MyFitnessPal. If my daily weigh in shows progress ie. weight loss, then it gives me a nice boost first thing in the morning. If it doesn’t, which of course happens a lot of the time, then that’s okay, as I’ve found my weight will fluctuate by quite a bit from one day to the next.

Breakfasts are more elaborate than they used to be. Whereas before I’d have had a bowl of cereal or maybe some toast, these days I start out with a fry up of some kind (bacon and eggs is an easy choice) or some low carb pancakes.

Lunch most days is a salad of some kind. I try to vary it, so today I had beef, whereas yesterday I had crab meat.

Dinners vary as well and sometimes I’ll just graze on some chorizo and cheese.

The one thing I really need to add into the mix is regular physical exercise. That’s a “to do”.

For now I can see myself continuing to stick to this diet for the next couple of months. I’m not sure I’d be able to deny myself bread and all those other tasty carbs forever, but I also know that I need to avoid them until I can get my weight down low enough. Of course losing weight is only half the battle. I need to make sure that I keep the weight off. But let’s get it off first!

Sticking to the Diet When Travelling

August 28, 2017 by Michele Neylon 5 Comments

I’ve tried various diets over the years. Most of them involved following a plan of some kind pretty closely. For example, the Tesco Diet, was one I stuck to for several months. It sort of worked, but it and all the others ones fell apart as soon as I hit the road for business travel. As soon as I got out of my daily routine and controlled environment I found it very hard to stick with the diet and invariably I failed.

With the ketogenic diet so far I’ve found travelling to be relatively easy.

Sure, it’s not always “simple” and you do run into issues. However it’s possible to stick to the diet pretty closely without developing a massive headache or being miserable.

The ketogenic diet boils down to avoiding carbs and you’re meant to keep the fat content in your diet high. On a daily basis when you’re at home you can control exactly what you are eating. When you’re travelling you’re at the mercy of your circumstances.

But if you’re willing to accept that there will be a few speed bumps along the way it’s doable.

For the last few days I was in Stockholm (thence the photo!).

Breakfast in the hotel was easy – they’d a good choice of cold meats, fish, cheese and eggs, including an omelette station. Lunches weren’t too hard either. Even when they were provided it was simply a matter of avoiding bread, potatoes and other carb-heavy foods. When you’re eating out you can usually choose items from the menu that don’t include carbs or have the flexibility of swapping out the carbs for something else. Don’t want potatoes? Swap them out for a salad.

I probably had a few meals over the last few days that weren’t 100% keto-friendly, but overall I kept pretty close to the diet.

What I like about the ketogenic diet is that it’s “relatively” simple – avoid carbs and you’ll manage (mostly). There were a few things that I’d view as speed bumps:

airport lounges – I used to be able to snack before getting a flight without too much difficulty, but when bread and pastries are off the menu your choices are a bit limited
airport food – again you will find yourself a bit limited in your choices, since most airports seem to specialise in carb heavy options. With a bit of hunting around you can probably get something but your choices will be limited
business meetings / conference breaks – the coffee breaks at most events usually have some food available. Unfortunately that’s nearly always snacks of some kind that are built around bread or pastries, so they’re not going to be of much use to you

The solution? I guess I’ll have to start packing snacks in my carry on luggage! Something to munch on would help, though apparently intermittent fasting isn’t the worst thing ever!

Either way so far I’ve found sticking to the ketogenic diet while travelling and eating out has been a lot easier than other diets I’ve tried in the past.

Shopping on a Low Carb Ketogenic Diet

August 13, 2017 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

I’m now 3 weeks into this ketogenic low carb diet. So far it’s going quite well. Sure, I still miss being able to eat bread, pasta and a bunch of other things. It’s not so much a craving, but a quite radical change to my eating habits. When you walk past a bakery, for example, the glorious scent of freshly baked bread and pastries is painful!

Last weekend I cleared quite a bit of space in the kitchen cupboards by getting rid of pretty much all the carb heavy foods I had in there. There’s probably some more stuff that I could cull from there, but getting rid of all the pasta and rice has freed up a lot of space, as well as removing temptation.

Shopping when you’re on a low carb high fat diet is a little different. It’s not drastically different unless you are used to a diet of processed foods, but you find there are entire areas of the supermarket that you basically skip over completely. Conversely there are sections in some supermarkets that you end up spending a lot more time in. It takes a little getting used to!

Vegetables and fruit are important, but you have to avoid root vegetables and learn to love cauliflower, broccoli, kale and spinach. I’ve never been that big into berries, but since you can’t eat most other fruits you find yourself picking up packs of raspberries and blueberries regularly. As I mentioned recently, I’ve become a big fan of Aldi and their salad range. You can either use their protein or mix it up a little with things like tuna or other carb free sources of protein.

Yesterday I went to the local farmers’ market where I was able to pick up some fresh and locally produced vegetables. A lot of the vegetables you get in the big supermarkets like Dunnes, Aldi, Lidl or Tesco have travelled long distances and been chilled and stored for days or weeks before they hit the shelves. With a farmers’ market you can be pretty confident that the vegetables came straight from the farm they were grown in that morning. The other thing is the shape and colour. If you’ve ever grown your own vegetables you’ll know they don’t always look as photogenic as the big supermarket chains have been trying to convince us. And that’s not a bad thing.

One of my recent acquisitions was a Nutribullet. My thinking being that healthy low carb smoothies would help my overall diet. Getting recipes for a low carb diet can be a bit of a challenge, which I’ll touch on at some point.

However yesterday I did manage to put together a couple of really tasty low carb smoothies. Why is this pertinent to shopping? The ingredients.

When you’re doing low carb high fat ketogenic diet you end up buying things like coconut oil, tinned coconut milk and avocados. You’ll also find yourself spending time in the health food aisles in search of things like chia seeds.

I’ve also found myself eating quite a bit more fresh fish than I used to. Salmon, trout and other fish are readily available in several of the local supermarkets and Carlow now has a fishmonger (Omega Fresh Fish Centre), which is a great addition. Yesterday I was able to pickup a couple of fillets of salmon and served them with some sautéed wild mushrooms. There are plenty of ways to cook salmon, but I like keeping things simple – lightly frying them in some butter does the trick nicely.

But what about other low carb foods?

Or high fat ones?

Until I started on the ketogenic diet I rarely bought cream. I’d only buy it if I was planning on having some kind of dessert that would benefit from it and I’d often end up only using a bit and throwing out the rest after it went off. (Yeah I know, wasting food is bad, but chugging fresh cream is a little odd!) These days I’m using cream in a lot of things including my coffee in the morning. Some people swear by “bulletproof coffee”, but I honestly don’t think I could stomach something that filled with fat. Adding fresh cream to coffee instead of milk increases my fat intake without making it undrinkable.

But when it comes to the smoothies, for example, you end up using things like almond milk, fresh cream and coconut oil instead of ingredients I would have used previously like honey or banana.

Breakfasts often involve bacon and eggs if you want to keep it simple and 100% carb-free.

To mix it up a bit you can always add in proper butcher’s sausages ie. ones that are almost 100% meat. Bear in mind that most sausages use breadcrumbs, oats or other carb rich ingredients to add flavour to the meat mix, so you need to check the nutritional information on the pack.

Having bacon and eggs every single morning, however, gets kind of boring, so being able to get my hands on low carb granola has helped. A small serving of granola covered in my homemade yoghurt is a good start to the day and adds that much needed variety. I’d love to be able to find an Irish supplier, but so far I haven’t found one and have ended up buying it via Amazon. I could make my own low carb granola, but I simply haven’t got round to trying yet.

Drinking lots of water is meant to be good for anyone trying to lose weight. So I’ve been trying my best to drink at least two litres of water per day, though I often end up drinking quite a bit of herbal tea in the evening instead. My “go to” herbal teas are things like mint and green tea. I really don’t like the taste of green tea, but I’ve been forcing myself to drink it as I know it’s beneficial.

The key thing I have learnt over the last few weeks on the ketogenic diet is that you need to check the ingredients on pretty much everything you buy. You’ll be shocked to find out how many “innocent” looking items are packed with carbs.

Purging Carbs From the Kitchen Cupboards

August 6, 2017 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

Spanish chorizo and ham imported from Spain

Spanish chorizo and cured ham.

I don’t like wasting food. If there’s food in the cupboard it needs to be eaten at some point by somebody. However if you’re following a low carb diet you quickly discover that a lot of the food in the cupboard simply is not compatible.

Flour? Not unless it’s almond or coconut.

Pasta? Not a hope.

Sugar? No way.

Alpen muesli? Nope. The dried fruit is high in carbs no matter whether you choose the “no added sugar” version or not.

And the list goes on….

This weekend is a bank holiday here in Ireland, so I’m visiting family. So guess who gets to “inherit” all my carbs?

So between Thursday evening and Friday morning I went through the kitchen cupboards and did a purge. Within a few minutes I’d managed to fill two reusable shopping bags with pasta, rice, flour, breakfast cereal and other carb-heavy foods.

Taking the entire lot to my mother and sister means I know that they’ll get used and that is a lot better than having them sitting in my kitchen cupboards.

I also think it’s a good idea to not have things hanging around that I simply won’t be eating. If they’re in the cupboards then they’re temptation at some level. If they’re simply not there then there’s no issue. Also there’s the practical issue of space. Getting rid of all this stuff freed up quite a bit of space in the cupboards, so I’ll have more space for the kind of food I’m eating at the moment. And while many of the things like pasta have quite long dates they do go off eventually.

So when I get a delivery of ham, chorizo and other tasty keto compatible foods I’ll have space in the cupboards to store any of the tinned food, like the tuna in olive oil.

Tracking Carbs, Fibre and More With MyFitnessPal

July 29, 2017 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for years. However “using” is probably not the correct word. Most of the time I haven’t actively been using the app, but have simply had an account that I logged into. I wasn’t actively tracking what I was eating or keeping an eye on carbs, fibre etc., Sure, I’d log some of the food, but most of the time I logged only a fraction of what I was consuming. When I was trying to follow the Tesco Diet a few years ago I probably logged most of what I was eating, but generally speaking I’d log breakfast and a couple of other things each day, but that was about it.

What I have been doing, however, is using MyFitnessPal as a “hub” for other devices and apps. So, for example, my weighing scales (a Withings body cardio) ties back into my MyFitnessPal account, as does my FitBit. What that means is that changes in my weight get logged to MyFitnessPal automatically, as does my daily activity (or lack of it!).

I started doing the ketogenic diet a couple of weeks ago (17th July). Since then I’ve had to keep a very close eye on everything I eat or drink. With a ketogenic diet you need to keep a very close eye on your daily intake of carbs more than you do calories. (There’s a pretty good explanation here)

Of course you have to keep track of your calorie intake, but it’s not a calorie restricted diet, so while you need to keep your calorie intake under control the key metric you’re looking at is your carbs.

To help you tweak your daily calories, carbs and other metrics you can use a calculator like this one. Plugging in my data (weight, gender etc.,) I end up with something like this:

The red section of the pie is my allowed daily intake of carbs, which is under 5%, or about 25g. In reality I’m focussing on keeping below 50g per day, as getting much lower than that is proving quite awkward 🙂

It also gives you your daily calorie ration, as well as protein and fat which you can then plugin to your MyFitnessPal account settings in the “goals” section. You can do most things in the mobile app easily, though sometimes it can be a little easier to use the website.

Logging every single meal can be a bit of a chore, but like many things if you get into the habit of doing it it becomes that bit easier.

Tip: Don’t wait until the end of the day to log your meals – logging them as you go is a LOT easier

The food database MyFitnessPal uses is pretty good. However if you can’t find exactly what you are eating you’ll often find a generic alternative. Logging food when you’re eating out is usually the hardest, as it’s often awkward to match what’s on the menu or your plate against something that the app will recognise easily.

For me the most interesting and motivational bit of the app is the “progress” section. The app for my scales does give me the same information, but it doesn’t look as compelling as this:

Over the last few weeks I’ve managed to lose 4.7kg, which is great. In another post I’ll talk about what my actual goals are and why, but for now suffice to say I’m quite happy with my progress.

As I said recently, I’m committed to following this diet for a month. If I feel it’s working I’ll keep it up and if I don’t then I’ll have to move on to something else.

I’ve also recently upgraded to using the MyFitnessPal premium account, so I get handy little features like this nutrient summary on the home screen:

An annual subscription is cheaper than a trip to the doctor, so I think it’s a good investment 🙂

Of course MyFitnessPal isn’t the only “tracker” out there, there are hundreds of them. Choose whichever one you think works best for you.

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