Tag: Peanuts

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General Weight Loss Tips

Birthday Food

I have a secret to share. Are you ready? If it’s your birthday, and you approve of my cooking, there’s a good chance I’ll make you something delcious to eat. Because I love you. Just ask my husband.

For his birthday I put together this easy Vietnamese dish that happens to be one of our restuarant favorites. It’s a good thing I know how to make it because the nearest Vietnamese restaurant is three hours a way.

This dish hits all the important notes, sweet, savory, slightly salty, tangy and a little sour.

Grilled Pork Vermicelli with Nuoc Cham Sauce

This recipe is extremely easy to put together. And I love that because it looks pretty darn impressive. Here’s what you do. Purchase a small roast of pork picnic/shoulder/roast. I’ve bought this cut of meat many times and it’s gross and big. I’ve warned you. I use a sharp knife and slice off the layer of fat from the roast and then I cut thin 1/4 inch slices of meat for marinating.

For the marinate I’ve made this Nuoc Cham Sauce several times without fail. Chopped greens onions are helpful too. Let your pork marinade in half the recipe of Nuoc Cham Sauce for 1-4 hours.

I boil water for vermicelli or angel hair pasta. Once the pasta is cooked rinse it under cold water and portion into bowls.

Grill pork inside on a griddle or outside. This is important, the grill makes it magical.

Chop up a few carrots, peanuts or cashews, ice burg lettuce (this is one dish where ice burg makes all the difference), cilantro or mint, and cucumbers. A wedge of lime and bean sprouts are good too.

Arrange all the ingredients in the bowl and top with more Nuoc Cham Sauce. Sprinkle with peanuts. So, so good!

Please let me know if you make this dish, only so we can talk about how awesome it is.

I wanted to share a couple more things with you.

First, here is a photo Josh took of the cats and rabbit on the bed. I wasn’t in the house when this went down.

Yup two cats and a rabbit on our bed. Nothing strange about that. Apparently the rabbit scared the cats away.

In other news, I’ve been taking one-two days a week off of my “eating better for me” plan to enjoy carbs. It hasn’t hindered my weight loss too much as I’m down 15 lbs. so far. It’s helpful to be flexible, and I’m honestly okay with it as long as I continue to count calories.

And for even more news, I’ve been cleaning out my office because I’ve hired a real live project manager to work with me three days a week in my home office. This is a big deal, as I’ve dreamed of working on projects with another person since I started my business(es) a year ago. It’s scary and exciting to have someone to give work to. I just love that I’m in a place right now to afford health insurance and hire a part time employee. Trying to stay positive, and not negative which is a default of mine when things start going well. I worry about the most insane things when things start going well. Am I alone here?

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Weight Loss Exercise

Protein in your diet | protein in diet




Protein is one of the basic building blocks of the body so it is an essential part of your diet and can influence your strength but probably not your energy. Your muscles are built with protein and in fact protein is made up of 20 amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein and 9 are essential, they cannot be created and must be eaten meaning the other 11 amino acids can be created by our body.

Many times we hear that you need to eat steak for energy but in actual fact as we learned earlier carbohydrates are the body’s favored energy source. I always think of muscles as being made out of protein but really muscles are mostly water and protein so if you think about how people tend to diet they will cut out things like steak and carbohydrates so the body is not getting as much protein and carbohydrates as it needs to burn for energy so it will tend to burn protein and fat in equal parts to get energy. This is great for losing weight and good for losing fat but it is really bad to lose muscle. One of the ways to stop your body from burning muscle for energy is to do a fair amount of exercise, especially weight training to increase your muscle mass on a consistent basis.

So what kind of foods contain protein and how much do we need? Full proteins are found in steak chicken and fish and non-full proteins (those without all of the essential amino acids) are contained in lentils, beans, corn, peanuts. A can of Tuna has 20-25 grams of protein and if you look around you can probably get about 80 grams of protein a day comfortably.

One critical thing to look out for is the amount of protein that you eat at each meal. Your body can only metabolize about 25-30 grams of protein at a meal which is only about 4 ounces of steak or chicken. In the past I had taken digestive enzymes with my main meals to help to metabolize more but I now think that this may be a bit of shaky science behind it.

Some bodybuilders will eat 250-500 grams of protein a day but realistically if you have protein in a couple or three of your meals you are doing pretty good. One of the things to concentrate on is drinking a lot more water when you are eating a lot of protein, a lot of water is needed for your body to break down protein so if you are increasing your protein intake drink more water to help take the load off of your kidneys.


Protein in your diet

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Categories
General Weight Loss Tips

Muffin Head

For Tuesdays breakfast I had a blueberry nut muffin with 1/2 cup whole organic yogurt, 1 T all-fruit strawberry jam and 1 T cashew honey butter. 445 calories

Later on in the day I had another muffin: 200 calories

For lunch I made Jamie Olivers/The Pioneer Woman’s Asian Noodle Salad (300 calories per serving)

Isn’t it beautiful?

I added almonds slivers and peanuts to mine.

I had two servings at lunch for a total of 600 calories.

Dinner was a shared frozen pizza. Appetizing eh?

Nothing like a greasy pizza photo taken with the flash. Total calories: 600

Total calories for the day: 1,845

Exercise: 45 minutes of Insanity, burned 400-500 calories

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