Mango Chicken

Mango’s are really plentiful and pretty cheap fruit here in Queensland at this time of year, although they are a little higher in carb than some other fruit they are delicious and nutritious, full of vitamins and fibre. Here’s a recipe for a change to your chicken, I like this with just some salad or vegetables but if you wanted you could serve it on rice.

Ingredients:

• 2 skinned & boned chicken breasts
  2 tablespoons coconut oil
• 2 mangoes, peeled, and chopped into chunks
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 60ml pineapple juice
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp fresh crushed ginger
• 1 capsicum, cut into chunks
• 1/2 cup slivered almonds
• A little salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:

1. Combine soy sauce, pineapple juice, brown sugar, and ginger in a separate bowl.
2. Heat oil in wok or large frypan.
3. Cut chicken into 2-3cm cubes and brown in oil.
4. Add capsicum and almonds to wok and stir fry until slightly tender.
5. Add soy sauce mixture to wok and stir until thoroughly heated.
6. Reduce heat and add sliced mangos, salt and pepper. Stir only gently so the mango doesn’t get crushed or squashed.

 

Six good reasons to find time to exercise

I find it hard to get back into a regular exercise routine, between finding the time and battling the heat and humidity it can be difficult. So I decided to list out my reasons why I have to make the time and effort:

 

· I will burn fat more effectively. Your body produces hormones during aerobic exercise that activate the breakdown of stored fat for use as fuel.

 

· I will burn more kilojoules. A daily 30 minute walk, if you put a bit of oomph in it, burns around 6300 kilojoules a week. Ok on its own its not that month but in 6 months that is 5kg of fat blasted.

 

· My metabolism will increase and be more effective. Even once you finish exercising your metabolic rate stays elevated, and the more intensely you exercise (or for longer) the longer the rate will stay elevated after you finish. So if you your 30 minute walk will help you burn an extra 200-300 kilojoules though out the rest of the day after your walk.

 

· It will improve muscle tone. Dieting can result in muscle loss but by exercising you can stimulate the release of growth hormones that assist in the development of muscle tone.

 

· I will become fitter. Then I can exercise for longer and lose more fat – or have heck of a lot more energy to play with family and friends.

 

 

· It will reduce my appetite. Apparantly it’s true, exercising before lunch or dinner can help control your appetite and make you feel more satisfied with less.

 

Menu planning

One thing I have found when I try to eat well and fit a bit of exercise into my day is that I need to plan a bit better. If the food isn’t in my fridge when I get home from work then I won’t be able to eat it, and if I don’t pack my lunch the night before I’m going to end up down the food-hall picking the best of the bad options come lunch tomorrow.

So now one night during the week I make the menu plan for the following week and turn it into my shopping list for the weekend. Not only does this help me eat clean for the week but it means less waste as I buy what I need when I need it and I’m using it.

To make it all a bit easier and for a neat looking list I can pin up on the fridge I found this link to a printable menu planner form today.

 

Week One

Well week one wasn’t as hard as I anticipated and I dropped 2.5kg of fat – yeah!

The hardest part for me was getting my daily water intake up over 2 liters I really struggle with drinking water, it makes me retch if I try drinking it too fast and I hate the taste. I started upping my water intake (from a zero starting position) a couple of weeks before I started the diet and was really surprised to find that now only a couple of weeks later I can drink a glass or even two straight down without gagging. I’m getting through over 2 liters a day now without too much of a struggle as long as I keep a glass or bottle handy through the day.

The second dilemma was figuring out what to do for weekend lunches, in the end I just stuck with omelette’s but will be searching around for some new alternatives in the coming weeks or it is going to get really boring. I like something we can sit down together and enjoy not grab on the run during the weekend but I like lunch to be different, not a replica of dinner so I need to kick the imagination up a gear.

Other than that I am feeling better, I had a few headaches and dizzy spells over the first few days but given this was a detox after a lot of eating junk this year I had expected it to be worse than it was.

In my second week I need to bring a bit of exercise into the mix.

 

Coconut coated chicken

For dinner tonight I made a style of chicken that I’ve come across in quite a few low carb forums, sites and books. In place of breadcrumbs dried cococunt flakes are used as the coating. It has a divine flavour and keeps the chicken really moist.

• 500g chicken breast sliced into thick strips or chicken tenders
• 1 egg
• Coconut flakes (I used the dessicated but still slight moist coconut flakes but I am sure any would work)
• Moroccan spices (cumin, ginger, coriander, cayenne, cloves, allspice and pepper)
• 1/3 cup melted butter

Wash and dry the chicken and moisten in the beaten egg. Blend the coconut and spices and dip the chicken into that, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t totally coated, just aim for a good even coating. Place into a baking dish (I lined it with baking paper for easy cleanup) then pour the melted butter evenly over the chicken.

Place in an over heated to 180c and bake for 30 minutes turning once.

 

How many calories do I need each day?

It is important to eat enough calories each day to support your bodys basal metabolic rate (BMR) if you don’t your body thinks things have got really tough and there’s a famine going on, after all your body knows you are pretty smart and know how to get it food, your not dumb enough to stop feeding it so it needs to help out. It does that by switching down the metabolism and using energy as slowly as possible. In turn this slows down your fat loss and your functioning, you may find you’re heads a bit foggy, your reponses slowed and energy levels drop.

To achieve optimal fat loss you need to feed your BMR enough calories for its vital functions this still leaves a significant gap between the calories you eat and the amount your body needs for fat loss and you can increase the gap by adding in or increasing your active time and exercise programme.

So what is my BMR, it is the amount of energy your body uses to perform its vital functions such as breathing, heart beat and maintaining the body temperature. This takes 60-70% of the daily energy requirements.

In addition to BMR the body uses energy for physical activity, this is another 20-30% of the required calories and for the thermic effect of food, the energy used to digest it is around about 10% of the calories consumed, it depends a bit on what you eat.
So our minimum level to keep burning is to feed at lest the BMR, for women this is roughly calculated as 655 + (weight in pounds * 4.3) + (height in inches * 4.7) – (4.7 * age in years). For men the calculation is 66 + (weight in pounds * 6.3) + (height in inches * 12.9) – (age in years * 6.8).

To roughly calculate the total calorie burn of the body in a day you can select your activity level and calculate as:

• Sedentry – BMR = 30%
• Moderately active (cardio exercise every second day) – BMR + 30
• Active (cardio exercise every day) -BMR + 50

 

A new beginning …… 2008

Well if at first you don’t succeed what choice do you have but trying again.

I decided well before Christmas that the 1st of January 2008 was a fresh start; a detox, a diet of pure real food, fitting in some sort of exercise 3 hours a week, time for me and with my DH, and enjoying all the fun that our new home in Queensland offered.

Well it is only day 4 to be fair but so far so good.

• I’ve purged the kitchen of processed and starchy carbs, trans fats, and almost everything that contains artificial colourings, flavourings and thickenings.
• I’ve shopped up a storm of new healthy ingredients
• I’ve eaten only fresh clean food and drunk my daily 2 litres of water
• I’ve spent time with family and friends, and
• I’ve finally set up my gym in the mezzanine area allocated to it several months ago

I’ve also revisited this blog to keep me honest in my efforts and as a ‘notebook’ for myself and others on useful information, hints and recipes found along the journey.

My eating plan isn’t a mainstream diet, I hate to call it any sort of diet as I’ve learned over the years I only feel good when I eat clean so I need to do this for life not till I hit a number on the scales. The plan eliminates processed carbs and strongly restricts starchy carbs such as potato and rice but has heaps of fruit and vegetables, it also includes any lean meat, fish, seafood plus nuts, beans, cheese, cold pressed oils and dairy. The hardest part of the adjustment is planning and using my time well as all the food has to be prepared from scratch, there are no fast food backup plans of time saving jars of prepared sauces.  I know I will have meals and situations where I have to compromise – but lets think about that another time, not on  day four.

 

The awesome nutrition in mushrooms!

You might have noticed already that I use a lot of mushrooms, not only are they delicious but they are:

• Low calorie
• Low fat
• Low carb
• Nutrient packed, and
• Versatile

A mushroom isn’t actually a vegetable, although we usually talk about it as one, this gives a couple of big advantages – firstly it can’t synthesise sugar like most plant foods, therefore it is low carbohydrate (ideal for low carbers) and secondly unlike other plant food it manufactures vitamin B12 (which makes it great for people who can’t eat red meat or choose to limit the quantity they consume).

A 100 gram serve of mushrooms contains only 12 calories, virtually no fat and no cholesterol. It is however packed with nutrients including Niacin (to help the body cells obtain energy from foods), dietary fibre, folate and other B complex vitamins.

There are also a huge variety of mushrooms now available in our stores and markets so watch out for them and find new ways to add them to your weekly menu.  I’ve added a couple of recipes to this site to get you started.

 

Calculating your BMI (Body Mass Index)

The Body Mass Index, commonly referred to as the BMI, is a tool used in the medical and health industry. It identifies whether an individual is in a healthy weight range or under/over weight. It is designed for an ‘average’ individual and will not provide an accurate position for an extremely muscular person nor someone with certain physical disabilities but in generally this is a good tool to be aware of.

You calculate your BMI by taking your weight (kg) and divide it by your height (m)³ but the easiest way is to use an online calculation tool that will let you input values in either metric or imperial measures. I like the BMI tool at Calorie King Australia which is nice and easy to use. While you are there you might want to take a look around the site, it has a lot of useful information and I particularly like the food database which is great for Australian and New Zealand products (they have a separate US site that covers US product).

I found calculating my BMI and where that placed me in the healthy weight scale was a good wake-up call – and it gave me something tangible to target, the numbers on the scale on their own don’t have as much meaning to me, using the BMI I can work out what is a healthy weight range to target.

 

A variation on mushroom pizza

Inspired by the Kimkins Portabello Pizza recipe but limited by what is left in my cupboards in the lead up to the move we made these for lunch today. They turned out really well, yummy and full of nutrients. You can add a green salad for a more substantial meal but these are quite filling and the mushrooms are a good source of vitamin B12, niacin and folate.

Ingedients

• four large portabello mushrooms
• red capsicum
• onion
• tomato
• low fat chicken bacon
• low fat cheddar cheese ( I use the weight watchers one)
• hummus (love the extra garlic one)
• herbs and seasonings to taste.

Remove the stalk from the mushroom and chop finely, along with capsicum. Cook bacon and onion and also chop finely. Mix ingredients with small amount of hummus to bind and season to taste.

Grill the mushrooms ‘bottoms up’ for 4 minutes, tops up for 3 minutes – then remove from grill and fill with stuffing mix. Sprinkle small amount of grated cheese on top and put back under the grill for another minute or two until bubbling.

Add fresh herbs or additional seasoning and serve.