My guiding light…

Today will be the most torrid of the whole financial/tax year for me and for those like me who labour in the bookkeeping and accounting profession. A short month and on top of that the last day of the Year falls on a Sunday so we all have to have our returns in by midnight tonight. Aagh.. but for the wonders of SARS e-filing we would all be in a lot more trouble than we are already!

But that’s not what I actually want to write about.

It is a measure of my respect and trust that I will be making the time (on ‘Year End’ nogal!) to attend a seminar this evening presented by my guiding light, Dr Anna Hall. An expert medical practitioner and educator in all aspects of heart disease and lifestyle-related conditions, Dr Hall will be talking (and illustrating) to us about heart conditions, stents and all things ‘heart related’.

There will also be a presentation by a IT masters graduate providing information and illustrating how to (and how not to) look for reliable medical information on the WWW – world wide web. Good stuff.

Anna Hall’s informal seminars are always fun, informative and very interesting. The next seminar will be all about diabetes. Click on the link provided to visit her website and contact her if these regular seminars would be of interest and assistance to you.

Advertisement

Laziest cook on earth. 3

It’s 03h40 as I begin writing this post. I should be asleep or next door in my office finishing off VAT returns that are due today. As I am doing neither of the two things, I decided to post the third in a series of light yet healthy meal ideas for people with no time to cook.

Which reminds me …. I used to have cookbooks called No Time To Cook 1 and No Time To Cook 2. …detour to go check my bookshelves …. no, I no longer have them. Dammit. Could have used them now. That’s what I hated about having to clean out shelves and cupboards because we were ‘ going smaller’! In the event of fire, I think I would rescue my books before I rescued my husband! Then again, he would probably rescue the TV + remote before rescuing me so we’re quits there!

I also had two books by the same zany author called I Hate To Housekeep 1 and I Hate To Housekeep 2 .. but that’s totally another story. Then again, I also had all the Superwoman books by Shirley Conran – I must have been mad!…

Back to the subject at hand – Laziest Cook 3.

Chicken breasts – skinned and deboned – are so versatile and I often just do the following and eat either cold or hot.

600g deboned chicken breasts (cut into bite sized strips)
Chicken Spice (Ina Paarman or any preferred spice/s. See below)
5-10ml olive or avocado oil (I also often just use Spray & Cook if we’ve had our fats for the day)

Very generously coat chicken strips with spice; leave to stand a while.
Spray or heat oil gently to coat a non stick pan or skillet. (I use a flat cast iron skillet)
Toss in chicken strips and dry fry until just done. Don’t overcook.
That’s it. Eat hot with veges or cold with salads.

If you have enormous energy and dedication, you could try mixing up the following rub and keeping it on hand:
Taken from: Snacks and Treats for Sustained Energy 1.
Gabi Steenkamp RD (SA) & Jeske Wellamnn RD (SA)

TANDOORI RUB
5ml (1 tsp) of each of the following:
Ground ginger
Ground cumin
Ground coriander
Ground paprika
Turmeric
Ground cayenne pepper
Salt
Coat strips generously and leave to stand for an hour.

The recipe says heat an oven to 220 degrees and bake for 15 mins until golden brown.
To my mind, that’s too much electricity for 15 mins so I rather use my stove top method.

Have a good day everyone!

I am really upset…..

Today I learned that a friend and business colleague of mine has had his right foot amputated this last week. No prizes for guessing that he is a diabetic.

T scraped his foot in the swimming pool of the retirement village where he resides at Christmas time. Little did he know that less than 2 months later he would have first his toes,then his foot, then a few more cms of his leg amputated. The scrape on his foot did not heal, gangrene was a problem, his medical advisors tried all they could to save the foot without success.

An angiogram further revealed little circulation in the right leg below the knee and two weeks of sustained exercise under supervision did not help. We are told that a stent has been inserted to improve circulation to the stump; apparently successfully. A prosthesis (sp?) will be made and he should recover in due course.

The whole distressing matter has, once again, brought home to me that diabetes is a deadly disease and those who tend to take it lightly are literally playing with their lives. There is no such thing as mild diabetes.
You either have it or you don’t. It is not ‘ better’ to have type 2 rather than type 1. I could go on about this for pages but I think I have made my point.

May I strongly recommend having your glucose levels checked immediately if you have never done so.
May I strongly recommend that if you are already pre-diabetic that you take the matter VERY seriously.
May I strongly recommend that you implement lifestyle and dietary changes as a matter of urgency.

A new set of tables…….

 BMI (Body Mass Index) CLASSIFICATIONS

 

Classification	BMI (kg/m²)
Underweight	<18.5
Normal	18.5 to 24.9
Overweight	25.0 to 29.9
Obesity class 1	30.0 to 34.9
Obesity class 2	35.0 to 39.9
Obesity class 3	>40.0 +

  BF% (Body Fat Percentage) CLASSIFICATIONS

 

Description	Women	Men
Essential fat	10-12%	2-4%
Athletes	14-20%	6-13%
Fitness	21-24%	14-17%
Acceptable	25-31%	18-26%
Overweight	32-41%	27-37%
Obese	42%+	38%+

 

Laziest cook on earth. 2

Keeping up with my laziest cook on earth appellation, I offer the quickest pud on the planet:

APPLE DESSERT (per person)

100g Unsweetened tinned pie apples
100g Nestle Dialite Vanilla Frozen Dessert
Powdered sweetener to taste
Ground cinnamon to taste

Prepare in individual bowls.
Sprinkle pie apples with sweetener and cinnamon, stir lightly.
Top with the diet ice cream

Nutritional Information: (apples)
GI: Low
GL: +- 11
Weigh-Less: 1 x Best fruit + 1 x Good milk
Energy kJ: 602
Energy calories: 144
Protein: 4g
Carbs: 32g
Fat: 0.1g
Fibre: 8.2g

Variations:
Use fresh or slightly defrosted berries – sans the cinnamon – divine!
All the berries are wonderfully low GI; with gooseberries & strawberries carrying a particularly low glycemic load.

Weigh-Less fruit portions per serving would be:
Strawberries: 150g (yeah! not for nothing do we always see Patrick Holford holding a strawberry aloft!)
Blueberries, blackberries, mulberries: 120g
Gooseberries, raspberries: 100g

If you feel so inclined, this dessert can be dressed up with some (Low GI) muesli sprinkled on the apples.
Instead of the diet ice cream, you could use Lite Long Life Custard – lovely!
NB to count the added kJ etc!

Laziest cook on earth. 1

One of the comments I often hear is that ‘dieting is expensive’.
‘The foods you have to eat cost a lot more’, they say.

Well people in all honesty that can be true (frozen ready cooked slimmers meals), but also NOT TRUE at all.

One of the foods that we should all eat a lot more of is beans; in fact all of the dried pulses, legumes and grains. Plant protein and in the main dirt cheap. As dirt cheap as food can get these days that is.

To that end, I would direct your attention to beans.

Contrary to what some people may think, baked beans on toast is a good healthy fat free/low GI/lower GL meal. Just make sure that the bread is low GI (if it does not specifically state ‘Low GI’ on the bread bag, I will not buy it) and that you do not slather the bread with butter or margerine. The tomato sauce is more than enough liquid to ensure you are not eating dry toast.

My Benutriwise calculates the nutritional information for this meal as follows:

BAKED BEANS ON TOAST – Serves 1
1 slice toast (Albany Superior Brown Seed Low GI bread -yellow label)
130g baked beans in tomato sauce (Checkers house brand Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce)

GI: Low
GL: +- 20
Weigh-Less: 1 x Complex Carb + 1 x Protein
Energy kJ 844
Energy calories 202
Protein 8g
Carbs 38g
Fat 0.76g
Fibre 2.77g
Sodium 464.2mg
Other nutrients featuring in this meal include Vitamins A and some of the B’s, calcium, iron and zinc.
Depending on the time of day, add a good green salad and you’re good to go!

The cheapest of all beans are the dried variety and in my next post I will tell you how to cook and freeze quantities of these plant protein powerhouses.

I will also publish my favourite recipe for “Old Fashioned Bean Soup”. Lekker – not many of my crowd dislike the lovely beans, bacon and potatoes in this thick, chunky winter meal in a bowl.

Fiddler … not on the roof

I confess to being a fiddler.
What do I fiddle with? Now that would be telling wouldn’t it?!

Seriously, I am a fiddler in the sense that I cannot leave well alone. When I draft a post for this blog, I fiddle with it. I change the wording, I check repeatedly for spelling errors and typo’s, I delete whole paragraphs and re-do them.

In other words, I waste time and often at the end of it all, I just trash the post because it’s “not good enough” to post. I dislike spelling errors – we’ve got spellcheck these days for goodness sake – especially in newspaper advertisements. I mutter with annoyance when I see a “chest of draws” or a “four draw filing cabinet” for sale. (Makro sometimes!)

BUT, I have decided to stop fiddling with spelling and grammar as far as I can and ‘publish and be damned’! Maybe that way my faithful subscribers (thank you people!) will see more posts from me and maybe gain some inspiration on their own respective odysseys. Hope so.

Winter is just around the corner.1

Yebo, winter is just around the corner. Let’s prepare for it.
I for one have to; my goal weight target date is bang in the middle of it and that is not negotiable!

In our part of the world here in Cape Town, we see a distinct change in daylight hours from summer into winter. In winter we travel to work in pitch blackness lit by street lights. Added to that misery, we have a mediterranean climate with wet winters. So driving to work – and maybe dropping sleepy kids off at creche on the way – can be a really miserable experience.

I was saying to WJJ this morning that we all get the munchies in winter. Hot soup or hot chocolate are real comfort foods when you are cold, wet and tired. I will be looking at freezing soups in controlled portions and have found a product at my supermarket that you may like to consider:

Tuffy Fill ‘n Freeze Self Standing Resealable Storage Pouches

Wow, that’s a mouthful isn’t it!
Check them out – they hold 1 litre of liquid – and they could be used & re-used through the cold season.
Not only for soup but for pasta sauces etc.

Goodness sake … I didn’t mention it……

In yesterday’s post, I did say that I was a mere 200g above the target weight for the Sunday BUT did not state my weight loss to date.

It may sound like bragging…. oh alright it is bragging… but I am sure you will forgive my exuberance in the light of the multiple challenges I face.

Drum roll……. 21.1kg …… so I have broken the 20kg barrier …. not bad for an old chick hey?!

Has it been easy? NO!
Is it easy? HELL, NO!

My Odyssey demands my ALL and the making of ‘Continual Course Corrections’ as propounded by Brian Tracy. http://www.BrianTracy.com

Keep strong everyone; have a great Monday. Hope yours is not too dark a shade of blue. EJ

Sunday showdown

Well, it’s not really a showdown at all. It’s a weekly record of our weight which is recorded on a graph every Sunday morning. Our weight being that of my spouse W and myself.

It all started in September 2007 when the CT branch of our family started a weight loss competition to see who could lose the most weight before 1st December. The competition was fair in that total loss was measured as a % of starting weight!

What was so special about 1st December? Well, that was the day the CT family met the JBH branch at JHB International and all 10 of us flew off to Ile Maurice! Headed for 8 days at Le Meridien Ile Maurice resort to be exact. (If anyone is considering Mauritius for a holiday, we can certainly recommend Le Meridien.) What a magic holiday we all had and it is fitting that the sponsor of the costly junket was also the winner of the weight loss competition! We each contributed R100 to the game and the winner took all – pity the R500 did not go anywhere at all to off-set the cost of the joll!

The point of this rather rambling post is to remind us that keeping a record of our progress is key to success. I am one of those obsessive types who weighs in every morning of my life; the result is then recorded in my Benutriwise profile. I also have a weekly Thursday morning date at Weigh-Less as well so talk about overkill!!!! I hasten to add (and my spouse will bear this out) that I have learnt over the years not to stress over the scale results. The results are simply recorded without any dramatics on my part and I sit down every Sunday morning and quietly look at the week’s results. The process serves to keep me focussed and to make continual corrections on the great odyssey!

To graphically illustrate my progress against a weekly weight loss target of .5kg, I use an Excel graph. I print it in colour on Sundays and keep it in a file until the following week. A bold red target weight line descends from left to right and it is intersected with a bold green actual weight line which is my Sunday morning weight. Vertical axis shows target weight descending .5kg weekly from my starting weight down to goal weight at the bottom. Horizontal axis shows Sunday dates for 1 year! 9th August 2009 to 8th August 2010.

Wow! those dates really show what a commitment I have made don’t they? As of this morning, I am .2kg (200 grams sounds better) above target for today’s date. The green graph line fascinates me in that it meanders all over the place but always reflects an overall downward drift.

If you would like a copy of my Excel chart to adapt for your own use, let me know and I will send it to you. I believe it could really help to keep you on track to your own unique destination.