My take on enchiladas

The guy’s dinner

Recently my guy moved in with me, so I’m looking for new recipes that we can share, or easily adjust to our own requirements. I found this great recipe for (zero weight watchers flex points) tortillas, and I decided to add some filling and make some kind of ‘open’ enchiladas. I used the exact recipe mentioned above, and added 2 cloves of garlic to the mixture before baking. I made 5 tortillas with it, 3 for the guy, 2 for me. I really thought I would still taste the cauliflower, but I didn’t, they’re really great! It made me decide to use the remaining cauliflower in the white sauce, and it was amazing.

 

My dinner

What I used for the guy’s filling:
– 200 gr low fat minced beef
– 80 gr corn from a can
– 35 gr black beans from a can
– 200 gr diced tomatoes from a can
– 1/2 green bell pepper diced
– 1/2 small onion cut small
– 1/2 crushed garlic clove
– Chili powder, cayenne pepper, oregano, salt and pepper

What I used for my filling:
Exactly the same but used a mixture of minced turkey and minced low fat beef. The whole recipe for me was 11 weight watchers flex points. Quite a lot, but so worth it!

I made a white sauce: (1/4 for me, 1/2 for the guy, refrigerated the rest)
– 10 gr real butter
– 1 table spoon flour
– 100 ml low fat milk
– 1 cup riced cauliflower
– 40 gr grated parmesan cheese
– Salt and pepper

Instructions:
I made the tortillas like the recipe said. I used 2 nonstick pans for the filling, for both I just fried the meat, then added the onion, garlic and bell pepper. After a bit of frying, I added the diced tomatoes and spices. For the white sauce, just melt the butter in a pan until it’s bubbling, then add the flour (it becomes crumbly), slowly add the milk while stirring. Add the cauliflower, a bit of water if it’s too thick. Add the parmesan cheese and keep stirring. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Fill the tortillas, add the white sauce on top and a bit of extra parmesan cheese if you want. Bake in the oven (200 degrees Celsius) for 15 minutes. You can easily make this meal ahead, put it in a oven dish and pop it in the oven when you want to eat!

Mindset over diet

I am a stress- and emotional eater. I eat fast, I eat a whole lot of bad stuff in as short time frame, I eat when I’m not even hungry, I grossly overeat when I really am hungry. When something that’s unhealthy in my mind touches my tongue, I go overboard and think ‘what the heck’. I anxiously try to eat healthy and try to keep count of everything I eat in a kind of obsessive way, to make sure I eat healthy all the time. My thoughts about food are really black and white. In my mind, I know it’s nonsense, but changing the way you feel about something is really hard. Last year I decided I needed to seriously change my thoughts and behavior, because just following a healthy lifestyle or a diet didn’t change that for me and I ended up relapsing and gaining weight again.

My current method is to stop and stand still. I try to do yoga regularly, I meditate, I have therapy and I think everything together is working for me. I’ve watched a TED-talk about addiction some days ago, which I also thought was really helpful. I thought it was a bit like mindfulness, the speaker talked about letting cravings or bad thoughts be there, accept that they’re there, but you don’t have to act on them. It works better than fighting the thoughts or cravings, because it’s like the ‘don’t think about a pink elephant game’. It only makes you think about it more! So here’s the video, I hope you guys get the same out of it I did:

 

 

Protein bars (made with protein powder)

Hi there!

I currently like to eat protein bars as a snack, because they’re easy to take with you, they’re tasty and the ones I’m eating (clean protein bars from http://www.bodyenfitshop.nl) are also quite filling. But also very expensive! So I was looking to see if I could make them myself using protein powder, which is less expensive. I combined some ideas I saw online and came up with these tasty, easy to make and no-bake bars:

Recipe is for 8 bars:  
1 bar is 2 sp for you ww people out there

1 bar contains 106 kcal, 6.4 gr carbs, 2.8 gr fat and 12.6 gr protein.

Ingredients:

• 1 banana
• 100 ml (1/2 cup) of unsweetened almond milk
• A splash of liquid sweetener (to taste)
• A few drops of vanilla and rum essence (or whatever tastes good to you)
• 50 gr coconut flour
• 20 gr unsweetened peanutbutterpowder
• 100 gr of coconut flavour whey protein powder (I use whey perfection)
• 15 gr raw cacao nibs
• 20 gr psyllium fiber

Mix the liquid ingredients with the smashed banana, set aside. Use a sieve for the flour, peanutbutter powder and protein powder, and mix with the cacao nibs and fiber. Throw like a teaspoon of this mix in your pan/mould to ease removal afterwards! Now pour the liquid mix on top of the ‘dry’ mix, and mix until it becomes like a dough. If it’s too dry, add a bit of extra almond milk. It shouldn’t be too wet, because it will not really dry up anymore. Press the dough into a pan, a mould or whatever has a shape that suits you. Put in the fridge for a couple of hours, remove, cut into 8 pieces and use a bit of baking paper to wrap them, because they’re still a bit sticky! Store in the fridge, enjoy!

Veggie lasagna

My mom gave me the Jamie Oliver’s superfood cookbook for Christmas and I’ve been using it to get some new ideas. Of course I’m not going to completely copy somebody else’s recipe, but I like to use it as inspiration to come up with something that fits my lifestyle, so here is the veggie lasagna recipe everybody’s waiting for 🙂

It contains 291 kcal per portion, 26 gr carbs, 11 gr fat and 24 gr of protein. It’s 6 sp on weightwatchers!

Ingredients for 2 portions:

• 1 squash/pumpkin (the long type)
• 1 zucchini
• 1 onion
• 2 tomatoes
• 2 hands of fresh spinach
• 20 gr sunflowerseeds
• 200 gr cottage cheese
• 20 gr parmesan grated
• salt, pepper and italian herbs

Preheat your oven to 340 degrees F or 170 degrees C. I use a silicone cake-shape baking mold to get it in the shape I want. Use a cheese slicer or any other tool to make very thin slices of zucchini and squash. When you reach the middle of the vegetable, it won’t give you nice slices, so cut those piece up and use it in the sauce. Lay the nice slices out on some plates (you’ll also get some bad slices, use them in the sauce!) Sprinkle some salt on the slices. It’ll draw out some of the water which you can remove with some kitchen towell. Repeat once. In the mean time, cut the onion, tomatoes, zucchini and pumpkin pieces and fry it in a nonstick pan. Add the spinach and let it shrink. Make sure it get’s thick and most of the moisture is gone! Add the salt, pepper and herbs.

Start layering your ingredients, start with pumpkin slices and use your imagination to make the rest of the layers. Be aware that normally the pasta plates absorb a lot of moisture. Making lasagna without the pasta will create a lot of moisture, so make sure you drain the cottage cheese before you use is and make the sauce as thick as possible. End with the pumpkin slices again and sprinkle with the parmesan cheese.

Put it in the oven and bake it for about 30-45 minutes, check it regularly for getting too brown. After this, remove from the oven, cut it in half and remove. Let it drain a bit on a plate to remove some of the excess moisture and enjoy!

Three degrees of contagion (yes, being fit is contagious)

As you may or may not know, I recently started my residency in psychiatry. This week I’ll attend a lecture about the network theory. As a total nerd, I wanted to know more about it before I even go to the lecture, so I started some reading. The network theory is just a very abstract theory that can be applied to so many things, so I started to think about it in terms of my own losing weight/getting healthy and fit journey.

You can apply the theory to your own social network. You put yourself in the middle as a dot, and everybody you are close to is also a dot, connected to you by a line. For all those people, they’ll also have their own people they are close to, represented by a dot, connected to them by a line. If you make a graph like this, up to the third layer, there will be a lot of dots and lines, this is your social network (you can make it bigger by dotting everybody you know vs everybody who’s close to you and go up to the sixth layer, but let’s keep it simple). Ok, so statistically, it has been researched that up to the third connection (this is the ‘three degrees of contagion), your behavior can influence the other people in your network. For example, if you’re very happy, your first connections have a 15% higher change of being happy themselves, the next connection 10% and the third connection 6% (all statistically significant and free from bias).

I find this theory very interesting, especially when I think of it in weightloss terms. A lot of us (former) fatties complain about the fact that our environment is not helping us in our journey (bad food around us, inactive people/work). This is very true and can also be scientifically explained by the network theory. BUT, we can also turn it around. What if I decide that I’m going to live a very healthy and active life and be fit. This will mean that my direct surroundings will also have a higher change of living such a life. I’ve seen it happening, my 2 brothers have also started weightwatchers and my youngest brother’s fiancé too. My sister goes to the gym more often and my mom too. My collegues have started bringing healthier things and want to go on my lunch walks with me. And in a more digital world, my IG friends get inspired by me and start mealprepping or other fit stuff. I find this very inspirational and really, it helps my own journey too! Both my brothers celebrated their birthdays recently and both served healthy snacks (yay). So in other words, you create your own environment! By changing yourself, you can help others to change too (without telling them to change), and they’ll help you to stay on track. This is how we create a fool proof world for ourselves. So spread the lifestyle people!

Mealprep week 6 breakdown

I always start with the fact that I don’t think everybody should mealprep, I’m writing this because I want to show people a way that most think is impossible or very hard. It can be done and it’s not even that hard! For more tips go and check out this mealprep 101 post. I kept it relatively easy during this weeks mealprep. So what did I make:

Breakfast: superseed oats with pb and a banana (and I add blueberries and goji berries): With pb:7 pp, 275 kcal, 23 gr carbs, 13 gr fat, 16 gr protein. Without pb: 5pp, 224 kcal, 22 gr carbs, 9 gr fat, 14 gr protein. Check out this post for the exact recipe.

Snack 1: carrots and 1/2 bell pepper. 0pp, 64 kcal, 1 gr fat, 12 gr carbs and 2 gr protein.

Snack 2: banana-protein bread, The whole bread contains 1441 kcal, 30 gr fat, 179 gr carbs and 101 gr protein. A 1/6 slice (which is BIG) contains 5pp, 240 kcal, 5 gr fat, 30 gr carbs and 17 gr protein. Check out this post for the exact recipe.

Lunch: sweet potato, chicken, tomatoes and sugar snaps. My serving is 8pp, 408 kcal, 6 gr fat, 37 gr carbs and 47 gr protein.

Snack 3: 2 clementines. 0pp, 54 kcal, 0.4 gr fat, 11.2 gr carbs and 0.8 gr protein.

Dinner: yellow brown rice, cauliflower and a pork sausage (100% clean). 7pp, 348 kcal, 11 gr fat, 30 gr carbs, 28 gr protein.

Nutritional information of 1 day: 27pp, 1389 kcal, 36 gr fat, 143 gr carbs, 110 gr protein.

IMPORTANT: this is a VERY basic mealprep. I will add at least 1 questbar to get to my daily allowance, but will add more food on the days I workout. This is meant for an average women to lose weight when already close to goal. This will NOT be enough for an average male or female who doesn’t need to lose weight or for a very obese person! Calculate your specific needs on www.iifym.com.

Instructions:

I’m not going to write a complete shoppinglist anymore, because the chance somebody wants to do this exact prep is very small and it’s a huge time investment on my part. So generally, I do my preps like this:

I wake up Monday morning and start with the breakfast prep (recipe over here). Sometimes I already put everything in the pan on Sunday evening for easy and fast cooking. I eat 1 of the breakfast, then I’ll go shopping for the rest of the ingredients. When I come home, I pop the chicken (4 200gr pieces of boneless chicken) in the steam cooker, while I peel and cut the sweet potato (4×125 gr). I add those in the top layer of the steam cooker. Total steam cooker time is 60 minutes. Meanwhile, I preheat the oven and make the dough for the banana-protein bread (recipe over here). When the bread is in the oven, I wash the brown rice (4×30 gr) and boil it with tumeric, salt and hot curry spices for about 30 minutes. I also throw the sausages in a pan and fry them slowly for about 30 minutes (turning them from time to time). Usually around this time I have some waiting to do, I’ll use this for cutting/cleaning my veggies and put them in the tubs. Now some of the things are finished, I’ll let it cool down before I put them in the tub. I let the bread cool down partially and slice it into 6 pieces (eat 1 right away, nom nom). Let everything cool down properly before you put the lids on! Divide your portions using the weighing method I describe in my mealprep 101 post!

Enjoy!

Banana-protein bread recipe

So I’ve been looking for a good alternative for questbars. I love my questies, but I’ve been eating sooo many of them, some days up to 3 or 4! I track everything, don’t worry, but it’s been heavy on my wallet. They used to cost even more over here, now it’s about 20 euro’s for a box containing 12. I’ve tried a couple of different homemade protein cupcakes, but in the end it wasn’t really what I wanted. Until I found a basic recipe for a nice bananabread by the lovely @jonboklofffitness on instagram. I adjusted the recipe quite a bit to fit my needs, here it is! It is so delicious! It contains more carbs than a questbar, but hey, it tastes good and has 17 grams of protein in 1 slice! The whole bread contains 30 pp, and because I want it to be 5pp like a questie, I divided it by 6, but those are huge chunks, so it’s easily divided by 8 or 10, making it a lot lower in pp per piece. I used oatflour and coconut flour. You can experiment by using different type of flours, but adjust the amount of ‘wet’ content when you use less coconutflour, because this type of flour makes stuff more dry and your bread needs more wet ingredients to compensate.

Nutritional information:

The whole bread contains 1441 kcal, 30 gr fat, 179 gr carbs and 101 gr protein. A 1/6 slice contains 240 kcal, 5 gr fat, 30 gr carbs and 17 gr protein.

Ingredients:

• 2 bananas
• 80 gr of oatflour
• 70 gr of coconutflour
• 4 egg whites
• 15 gr of raw cacao nibs (or the powder)
• 20 gr of peanutpowder ( I used the natural type, with no other ingredients besides peanuts)
• 1 apple (pealed)
• 2 scoops of protein powder (I used 1 scoop of peanutbutter flavoured and 1 cookies and cream flavoured, my protein powder is 3pp per scoop)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• Cinnamon
• Ground cloves
• Vanilla extract (or use a bit of pumpkin spice to replace all these spices)
• Pinch of salt
• 150 ml of water
• 15 gr goji berries (optional)
• 15 gr mulberries (optional)

Instructions:

Put the oven on 180C or 350F. Use a food processor to puree the following ingredients: bananas,apple, cacaonibs, goji berries, peanutpowder and mulberries. Put it in a bowl and add the eggwhites and the water. Put all the dry ingredients (except for the baking powder) in a separate bowl or plate and mix them a bit. Now add the flour mix slowly to your bananamix and use a mixer if you have one, because it clots easily. Now add the baking powder and mix shortly. Put everything in  cake-tray, or any type you want to use. Baking time might be less for those flat large trays! I used a silicone one, because you don’t need oil, paper or anything because nothing sticks to it! Now spread everything evenly and bake for 35-40 minutes. After this, I put the oven on 140 C or 280 F and let it bake for another 15 minutes. Let it cool down a bit before you cut it!

Costs:

Somebody commented about the costs, worrying that the flours and berries are costly and that this is an expensive bananabread. I was also kind of curious on how much it actually costs to make this, so I calculated everything, except the salt and the spices, because I don’t really know how to calculate them. The most costly thing was actually the eggs, as I used the best forest bred organic eggs. If you use egg whites from a box like I know you can buy in the US, the costs will significantly reduce. I used specific oat flour, but you can also process normal oats in a blender or mixer until its like flour, which can also reduce costs. The costs might also be different in different countries, but I don’t believe they will differ much! The whole loaf was 4.83 euro, which is 5.44 dollar. 1 slice would be 0.80 euro or 0.90 dollar. For me, a questbar is about 1.67 euro/1.88 dollar so it’s half of the price I would pay for a questbar.

• Mulberries: 250 gr is 5.90 euro, 15 gr is 0.35 euro
• Goji berries: 500 gr is 7.99 euro, 15 gr is 0.24 euro
• Bananas: 2 for 0.40 euro
• Apple: 1 for 0.50 euro
• Oats flour: 1 kilo is 2.90 euro, 80 gr is 0.23 euro
• Coconut flour: 500 gr is 3.90 euro, 70 gr is 0.55 euro
• Eggs: 6 eggs for 2 euro, 4 eggs are 1.33 euro
• Cacaonibs: 500 gr is 6.96, 15 gr is 0.20 euro
• Whey protein powder: 1 bucket is 81 scoops is 34.90 euro, 2 scoops is 0.86 euro
• Peanutbutter powder: 454 gr is 3.90 euro, 20 gr is 0.17 euro

The scale…. and why it´s not the scale but the mind that needs a change!

If you’ve ever followed a diet, you know the detrimental effect the scale can have. Getting on that scale after a week of very good behavior and a lot of exercise, only to see that you’ve gained a pound. Angrily, you walk to the pantry, get out those cookies and eat the whole package, because that healthy eating doesn’t even make you lose weight. Been there, done that!

So what is weight exactly? Weight is something that’s a man-made agreement, measuring the gravitational force that’s pulling your body down on this earth. So, if you read this again, you see that it says nothing about the amount of fat, bone, muscle, water, other tissues or intestinal content (lol haha, I’ll talk about poop a lot in this post). We tend to zoom in on that fat, so  when we lose weight we think we lose fat and when we gain weight we think we gained fat. Fortunately, it’s not that simple!

Nowadays it’s popular to say ‘Oh, that’s water weight’, or ‘muscles are heavier than fat’. The last one always makes me lol, gaining a pound of muscle in 1 week…. really…. tell me your secret, because no bodybuilder on the heaviest schedule ever gained a pound of muscle in one week! There is some truth to it though, a very muscular person weighing 150 lbs will look much thinner than a non-muscular person weighing 150 lbs. Muscle doesn’t ‘weigh more’ than fat, muscle is denser than fat, so 1 lbs of fat is much bigger than 1 lbs of muscle. Ok, so let’s get back to the scale and your bodyweight.

Your body doesn’t have a calendar. It doesn’t know it’s weigh-in day. The body only cares about surviving and having homeostasis. Homeowhat? Homeostasis is a difficult way of saying: the body wants the internal conditions to remain stable and relatively constant. Examples are temperature, acidity, amount of salt dissolved etc. So, for example; you ate a lot of salt, the body wants a certain amount of sodium to water percentage, so to be able to maintain that percentage, your body will try to retain more water and you’ll weigh more. How to get rid of water weight? Why? Why do want to get rid of water weight? The body will autocorrect and automatically in a day or two it’s gone. It’s not fat, it doesn’t cause any harm, just relax, move on and let your body take care of itself!

So now let’s talk poop! This is a big contributor to weight fluctuations. How? Well, food eaten travels through your intestines until all nutrients are taken from it and you finally excrete it like poop. This doesn’t happen in a few hours. It differs from person to person and from time to time within the same person. It’s influenced by what you eat, how much you eat and how much you drink. Sometimes food takes more than a week to finally end up in the toilet. Did you know that carbs need a lot of water to digest? So if you’ve eaten a carb heavy meal, there’s a lot of water inside your intestines. No worries, when it’s digested, it’ll also leave again! A lot of women are obsessed by going to the toilet. They feel like they need to go daily or else something is wrong and they say they’re constipated. Actually anything between going 3 times a day and twice a week is normal! You don’t need extra stuff like those intestine improving yoghurts… Just eat enough fiber, fresh fruit and veggies and drink enough water, it will come! And go if you feel like it, because keeping it inside because you’re at work actually does create constipation….. So how does it affect your weigh ins? Well, if you just had a great, nice and big poop, of course you’ll weigh less than before you pooped. Does that affect your weight loss progress? Not at all!! The same can be said about eating something. You´ll weight more after a big meal than you did before you ate the meal. Does that make you instantly more fat? No! I sometimes read stories of people who weigh in at night and don’t eat anything during the day, only water and tea. That really sounds silly to me, because the weight of the food in your stomach doesn’t make you fat, and don’t you want to measure fatloss?

Ideally, weight shouldn’t be measured weekly if you can’t handle these fluctuations! Weekly weigh ins are great to track your progress though, I do it too, sometimes even daily! But I don’t let it ruin my mood, it’s just like that, the body takes care of itself and will regulate perfectly without us stressing about it! The long term progress is what counts, so please, do yourself a favor and don’t stress too much about those fluctuations. They are very normal and natural and sometimes don’t show the fat you’ve actually lost. Don’t worry, go on, you’re doing great!

Nutrition is the key to weight loss!

Nutrition is such a big and important subject in weightloss! You can’t lose weight without changing your eating habits! Really! I know all these extreme weightloss programs focus on exercise, you see people running and jumping all day and losing weight fast. Why? Because it’s good and fun television! It’s kinda boring to watch somebody eat their healthy food every day, saying no to cake at work and doing their healthy groceries. I do really love how motivating this Chris Powell is! And not to mention the amount of eyecandyness 😉 The same counts for those online fitness profiles. Don’t get me wrong, I love them too, like Katyhearnfit and followthelita on IG. The thing is that it’s just really exciting to see somebody build their body with exercises. Don’t forget me when you look at their vids!

As you might know, I follow the Weightwatchers program to lose weight. I love it and it really fits me, but other programs can also work. Losing weight is actually really simple, eat less energy than your body needs and it will burn your body fat to compensate for the amount of energy it still needs to function normally. There are so many ´rules´ people came up with and they really complicate things, like: don´t eat after 8 pm, don´t skip breakfast, don´t eat too many carbohydrates (I’ll refer to them as carbs from now on), don’t starve your body, eat more protein, don´t eat carbs for dinner, don’t eat gluten, don’t eat soy, don’t eat lactose, take vitamins, take meal replacements, eat every hour, eat 6 small meals, eat clean, eat paleo, don’t eat sugar, drink applevinegar every morning, don’t use light products, do intermittent fasting, make mealpreps, eat 10 bananas a day, stand on your head while drink a glass of cold water…. All these opinions makes me nuts and really confused. What to do??

Well, for starters, I’ve tried sooo many of these things. I really think some stuff might work for people, but I gotta tell you, most of these things don’t work for me. I like to keep it kind of simple, because if you give yourself so many rules, then there are also so many ways to fail and for most obese/overweight people failure leads to overeating/emotional eating and self hate, so my first advise is: set up something that you cannot fail! How do I do it? Well, I actually allow myself to eat everything. Yes, I can eat cookies, ice cream, pizza, wine, whatever. So, by allowing myself to eat everything, I cannot be mad at myself when I do J You can hear a big but coming… BUT: I track everything and I try to plan it and of course not every day and not in the amounts I used to eat them. I also don’t give myself time restrictions. If I want to eat something at 11 pm, I eat it. If I want to eat carbs at dinner, I eat it. There are some rules I gave myself though, the most important one is to eat enough protein. When you’re losing weight, your body is struggling to get energy and the stuff it really needs. If you don’t eat enough protein, your body might get some of its protein from your muscles and really, that’s the last thing you want when losing weight (less muscle=less energy burned). Protein is also necessary after weightlifting, because your muscles need it to build and get stronger. I also gave myself a ‘1-banana (or any other type of high kcal fruit) a day’ restriction. Weightwatchers lets you eat fruit and veggies without counting them, but some fruits like banana’s can contain a lot of kcal, so I try to eat only 1 a day. The last thing I try to do is to refrain from light products and try to eat as natural as possible (but enjoy my non-natural foods when I eat them!).

What I also learned during my journey is that not everything that makes you lose weight is healthy, and not all healthy things makes you lose weight. You get me? Let me give you an example: Avocado’s are healthy, they contain a lot of unsaturated fat, fiber, vitamins etc. One avocado contains roughly 230 kcal. So, if you normally eat 2000 kcal daily and you maintain your weight like that, and you add a daily avocado, you’ll eat 2230 kcal daily, which will be more then you need and you start gaining weight. So now another example: You eat 2500 kcal daily and you are overweight and maintain your weight with this intake. You want to lose weight and decide to eat 1800 kcal daily. You start making different food choices and take light products to reduce your energy intake and get to the 1800 kcal daily. You’ll lose weight. But… is it healthy? Personally I believe light products are generally unhealthy as they add a lot of chemicals to it and sometimes uses sugar as fat replacement (I’ll talk more about sugar later). With this ‘diet’, you can also eat cookies and donuts every day, as long as you stay under your 1800 kcal goal. So, to conclude, by only eating foods that are considered healthy, it’s still possible to not lose weight and even gain weight. The other way around is also possible, you can lose weight while eating unhealthy things.

There are a lot of opinions and only a few scientific papers about the fact that not all calories are created ‘equal’. I think I’m kind of leaning towards this, instead of ‘a calorie is a calorie’, whether it come from an apple or a burger. Many people follow IIFYM (If it fits your macro’s). Macro’s are macronutrients, in other words; fat, protein and carbs. You count your daily intake and count kcal, fat, protein and carbs. So if a donut fits into your daily macro allowance, you can eat a donut. The same counts a bit for weightwatchers, if you have points for a donut, you can eat a donut. Though I like this idea of eating a donut daily (nomnom), the problem is that it is full of refined sugar and carbs. I’m not a carb-hater, really, but refined carbs I try to avoid as much as possible (but again, enjoy them thoroughly when I do eat them). Why? Well, it used to be a real popular opinion that we should avoid fats and dietary cholesterol to keep our arteries and heart healthy. Guess what, lately more and more research is showing that the beginning of atherosclerosis actually starts by small inflammations caused by fast rising bloodsugar levels (which you will get from eating refined carbs). Fast rising blood sugar levels also creates fast rising insulin levels to bring down the blood sugar. It sometimes ‘overshoots’ so the insulin rises too fast and the blood sugar falls too fast, creating hunger and feeling lightheaded, leading to eating more!

Did you know eating artificial sweeteners can also make the insulin levels rise? Our body is such a great working machine, when you taste something sweet, automatically, there are hormones produced to induce digestion, making the enzymes and making insulin to prepare for the coming blood sugar rise. BUT, if you only take something with artificial sweeteners (like diet coke), there is no rise of blood sugar, so your blood sugar will get lower because of the already made insulin, again creating hunger and lightheadedness. I sometimes do use artificial sweeteners, I just always combine it with something that contains complex carbs (like oatmeal), so I won’t get that blood sugar drop.

So again, I’m not a carb-hater paleo eating health nut. I do think that eating healthy is more than just reducing your calorie intake! It’s all about that balance, eat healthy on a daily basis and enjoy your indulges when you decide to take them.

Soon I will post something about vitamins, superfoods and supplements for weightlifting. Next post will be about that damn scale and why we should avoid standing on it!

Recipe for stuffed pepper with mashed sweet potato

This dish had me in heavenly bliss. It is so incredibly delicious! Especially the combination of these two dishes is very tasty, the strong flavor from the cheese mixed with the sweetness from the potato mash…. Yum! Make sure you calculate your macro’s and pp with your own ingredients, as they may differ from the ones I used! (especially the coconutmilk, there are so many different types, ranging from 60 kcal per 100 ml to 200 kcal per 100 ml)

 

Sweet potato mash: (5pp per serving, makes 4 servings)

1 serving: 249 kcal, fat: 7 gr, carb: 35 gr, protein: 4.5 gr

500 grams of peeled and diced sweet potatoes

1 teaspoon of olive oil

2 onions, cut finely

1 clove of garlic, squeezed/finely cut

2 teaspoons ginger powder

2 teaspoons cinnamon

100 ml of coconutmilk (or 200 ml skimmed one)

1 cup dry white wine

4 heaped cups of cut kale

Salt and pepper

 

Instructions:

Boil or steam the sweet potato until very soft. In the meantime, heat a non stick pan very slowly, with the olive oil. Add the onions and caramelize in about 15-20 minutes. Add the garlic and after 2 minutes the wine. Let it simmer for 5 minutes. Then add the coconut milk, the spices, salt and pepper and the kale. Stir and add the potato. Mash with a fork or a mashing spoon, but make sure it is not completely smooth. Finished!

 

Stuffed bell pepper: (6pp per serving, makes 4 servings)

1 serving: 279 kcal, fat: 20 gr, carb: 5.5 gr, protein: 20.5 gr

4 bell peppers

300 grams of lean minced beef

1 onion

2 cloves of garlic, squeezed/finely cut

1 teaspoon of olive oil

100 grams of Roquefort cheese (or any other strong blue cheese)

1 tomato

1 teaspoon Italian herbs

Salt and pepper

 

Instructions:

Heat your oven to 190C or 275F. Take a non stick pan and glaze your onions in the olive oil. Add the minced beef and garlic and stir until loose and fried (5-10 minutes). Add the Italian herbs and salt/pepper to taste and take the pan from your heating source. Cut the top from your bell peppers and clear the insides. Now, divide the cheese by 4, and divide the beef mixture by 4. Now fill your peppers with some beef and put some cheese in between. Put a slice of tomato in the middle. Now put in your oven for about 30 minutes, make sure to check once in a while to make sure the peppers are not becoming too brown. Put the ‘pepper lids’ in the oven after 15 minutes to bake along.

 

Enjoy!