Dinner At Olive Garden

I ate out at Olive Garden last night and found a great low point meal. It is their Unlimited Soup and Salad. It's not on the evening menu but it is available upon request for a little over $10. You get their Fresh Garden Salad (2 points per serving if you have Low Fat dressing, 4 points if you use regular dressing) and the Minestrone Soup at 2 points per serving. You have total control of how many points you add up by how many servings you choose. I skipped on the delicious looking bread sticks but left feeling totally satisfied and filled up. I had 2 servings of salad and 1 1/2 bowls of soup. Total points for my dinner was 12 points. You could do better than that with the low fat dressing. I decided to splurge to celebrate my 4.6 loss for the week.

    

            

Eat Less, Exercise More

Well, the more I deal with weight issues the more I am convinced that the key to success in losing weight can be summed up in those 4 simple words…Eat Less, Exercise More. Several different times in my life when I have had significant weight loss through dieting.  It happened each because I reduced the volume of food I ate and increased the amount of exercise I did.  It worked, plain and simple.

Over the years I have seen a variety of weight loss programs and they seem to have that same thing in common.  Oh, they call it by different names and have different ways to encourage people to modify their eating and exercising behaviors but in the end it always seems to add up to, you guessed it, eat less and exercise more.  I’m sure some of you are familiar with some of these programs.  One such plan involved purchasing meals from the program you were on.  I noticed that most of the time the items were smaller than normal portions.  One plan from the past had people dealing out cards from various categories of food and placing them on a large planning board with pockets.  There again it looked as though the intake was reduced when following the plan.

As you probably have read in my other posts, I started with Weight Watchers in September of this year (2014) and am having success with that program.  I really like the way it is set up and the tools that are available through the program.  I also like the focus that you aren’t on a diet but are developing life-long changes in the ways you view and use food.  They don’t focus on calories but, instead, use a points system which simplifies keeping track of, or  “tracking”, the food being consumed.  I have done both and find that the points system works much better for me.  They also encourage increases in your physical activity.  They have an electric monitoring device called “ActiveLink” that tracks your daily activity and helps you set goals to keep building on your weight loss successes.

Another feature of the Weight Watchers program that I like is that most fruits and vegetables are counted as zero points.  This encourages you to use your available points each day on good food choices and then use fruits and vegetables as “extra” food for snacks, etc..  As I understand it the old system included points for fruits and vegetables and folks would skip eating them so they could use their points for other food.  Now you can eat this healthy food anytime for snacks or to complete a meal without costing you those precious points.  It’s a great encouragement to eat healthier.

In my case, I have tracked my foods daily as a means of keeping my food intake under control.  I purchased the Activelink to help monitor my exercise and track my daily efforts at increasing exercise.  It’s been a great encouragement in ramping up my efforts.  I have found that, for me, the easiest exercise is simply to walk.  I started trying to walk for half an hour each day and have been able to increase that to 1 to 1 ½ hours per day.  I am walking outside and hope that I can continue that because I have found treadmills to be pretty boring.  I think my walking regimen has been key to the success I have had so far and plan on continuing with it.  I will also be adding some weight training in the future to build additional muscle tone as well as burn more calories.

The Canadian government came up with a phrase that I have adopted.  They called it “Participaction”.  Really, it’s simply a call to ‘get moving’ and that makes perfect sense.  Whether it’s walking every day, parking at the edge of the parking lot, walking a lap through the mall before stopping to shop or one of a number of other techniques, the idea is to ‘get moving’.  It’s not new, just another great reminder that an increase in physical activity is just as important as reducing the calories of food that you eat.  Some people attend meetings without monitoring their food intake while other keep closer tabs on their eating but can’t find time, for whatever reason, to increase their exercise (burn more calories).  They seem to meet with limited success.  If folks can combine tracking their food intake AND increasing their activity level they usually find success in their weight loss journey more readily.  ,I’ll probably write more about all this in a future post but for now won’t you join me as, together, we EAT LESS AND EXERCISE MORE!  God bless and, oh yes, get moving!  J

Fran's Spinach Bean Soup

 There was a lot of interest in this recipe when I posted it a while back on the “What I Ate Today” site so I decided to include it in my blog as well.  It’s really easy to make.

INGREDIENTS:

½ package of Frozen Spinach

1 can – Great Northern Beans

1 pkg. – Ramen Noodles (with seasoning packet)

1 Garlic clove, chopped

1 box – fat free Chicken Stock

2 teaspoons Basil

1 Onion - chopped

This is another of my wife’s oh-so-simple soup recipes.  

-          saute the onion

-          add the chicken stock and bring to a boil

-          add all the remaining ingredients and simmer until the noodles are cooked.

This recipe makes about 4 cups with 3 ppts. per cup.  It’s pretty tasty.  Enjoy!

Fran's Crock Pot Smoky Cabbage Soup

 

Here’s a great recipe my wife cooked up tonight.  It’s very filling and teaming with great flavors and textures. The secret ingredient that gives it that unique smoky taste is the addition of a little diced Polish Sausage.  It’s so good!  Here’s the easy recipe.

INGREDIENTS:

1 Onion, chopped

2 Celery stalks, chopped

1 Garlic clove, minced

2 cups of Cabbage, shredded

2 Potatoes, diced

1-16oz. can of Chopped Tomatoes

1 box of Beef Broth

1 can of Kidney Beans, rinsed

½ pkg. (7 oz.) of Keilbasa, diced, sautéed and drained to remove fat
2 Bay Leaves

Salt, pepper, paprika and chili powder to taste

This is so simple.  Combine all the items listed above, prepared as directed, in a crock pot and cook on low heat for 5-6 hours.  That’s it!  It’s delicious and makes about 8 one cup servings.  The greatest part is with all this food and flavor it works out to just about 2.5 ppt. per cup.  Enjoy!

Savor the Flavor

I wanted to share something I have learned already in my new weight loss journey.  Food is even better when you take the time to taste it.  Read on…

I am a fast eater.  I always have been.  At least I used to think so until we had a son.  That boy could wolf down an entire meal in minutes!  He worked on a local farm as a teenager and on many occasions he would stop in for supper but was anxious to get back over to the farm.  He would devour the meal in no time and then head for the door.  His mom would say, “Hey, why don’t you slow down and taste that food?”  His response was, “I’ll taste it later.”  Unfortunately, I would have to confess to eating in a similar fashion.  But my fast eating wasn’t guided by the need to leave.  I guess that I ate quickly so I could eat more.  I didn’t realize it at the time but as I look back it seems like that is what was taking place.  More food meant a ‘better’ meal.  Boy was I wrong.

I love sandwich cookies.  We would sometimes have them for a quick dessert after supper.  My wife would take 2 or 3 and slowly enjoy them.  I, on the other hand, would start with 6 or so and eat them, one cookie per bite.  I’m not kidding. I’d toss one sandwich cookie in mouth (that’s right, all at once), take a sip of coffee, chew a few times and swallow.  That meant a large burst of overpowering sweet followed by an empty mouth.  So what do you do next?  Pop in another cookie and repeat the whole process multiple times.  So let me share something with you that I have learned.  When you take time to chew each bite…stuff really tastes good!  No, I’m not kidding!

I don’t care what part of the meal it is, if you take the time to chew it the “juices” start to flow and your taste buds get bathed in great flavors.  I understand that such slow chewing also lets your saliva do its work in beginning the digestive process on that mouthful of food, making its nutritional value even better.  Who knew!?  I’m here to tell you that everything tastes better when I take the time to chew it and, as the title of this post reads, savor the flavor!  At times, especially when I’m out for a long walk, I will carry a WW Pecan Crown treat in my pocket for a burst of energy if I need it.  The ‘old’ Bob would pop one of those little devils in his mouth, give it a few, very few, chews and then swallow.  The ‘new’ Bob has learned to let that sweet thing sit in his mouth and slowly melt away.  First, the chocolate coating takes it’s sweet time, and I do mean sweet, to dissolve and guess where it sets.  Right on top of those taste buds.  “Boom”, there’s a burst of great flavor.  After the chocolate is about gone you are still left with the pecan and caramel center!  The whole taste explosion happens all over again.  You would be amazed at how one candy (for 1 ppt.) satisfies that chocolate craving when eaten this way.  I’m learning!

Just this morning I was reminded of how great wheat bread toast tastes all by itself when eaten in this same manner.  One bite…chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, and the flavor really intensifies.  I used to think of toast in terms of the number of slices on the plate.  Now I’m looking at it I terms of the number of bites I’m getting out of just one slice!  I’ve applied this not-so-new knowledge to the rest of my eating and am seeing benefits from it as well.  After each bite of food I put my fork down.  Yup, I literally set it down on my plate.  This reminds me to take the time to thoroughly chew that mouthful before I take the next one.  This has caused me to take a lot more time enjoying the meal, the food tastes better, and with that extra time I start feeling full before all the food on my plate is gone.  Just last night I was enjoying a meal which included 2 small portions of pork.  By the time I had worked my way through the first piece of pork, along with the other parts of the dinner, I really didn’t feel like eating the second one.  And you know what that means…LESS POINTS/LESS CALORIES!  YAY!

So, my advice to you is the same thing my mom used to tell us as kids...“Slow down and enjoy your food.”  What do you know, Mom was right all along!  It’s weird but absolutely true.  Food does taste better when you slow down and “Savor the Flavor”!  Happy, healthy and even more tasty eating to you all.  God bless.