the procedure here is how to consistently feel better after a few weeks (vs typical lazy cheap diets)
breakfast, buy:
plain (unsweetened) yogurt
honey
fruit (bananas or whatever berries are on sale)
granola (again, unsweetened)
dump together in bowl and eat. if you don’t feel hungry in the morning just do a very small serving at first.
lunch: whatever, avoid sugar/white bread
dinner, buy :
rice-a-roni red beans and rice when it is on sale (goes to 75 cents a box once every couple months at my local store)
bell pepper (or spicier pepper to taste)
olive oil
boil, then simmer 20 minutes
yes, this procedure can be improved upon. the advantage of this one is low activation cost as it is about as difficult as the regular bachelor diet of instant foods. if you’re trying to eat healthier but can’t find the motivation this is a decent compromise.
major thing to avoid besides the obvious: fruit juice and fruit flavored anything. you’re subverting your body’s desire for actual fruit. fruit juice is no better for you than soda.
I’m guessing this is mostly preaching to the choir here, but if this helps one person it was worth the 5 minutes.
Just about any vegetables can be boiled till soft, then put through the blender, salted and peppered to taste, and yield soup (cream is optional). A quartered peeled onion, half a bulb of peeled garlic, and a quartered peeled potato or two, plus a fair amount of peeled and roughly chopped whatever else (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, turnips, fennel, leeks, celery root or stalks, whatever) is a good template. Dump it all in a pot with water or stock. Boil till it’ll smoosh against the side of the pot when pressed with a spoon. Blend. Salt & pepper.
Less appetizingly, but probably more nutritiously, most green leafy vegetables can be blended with water or milk and consumed in milkshake form. I’ll often take three or four cups (that’s a lot) of spinach and blend it with two cups whole milk and chocolate protein powder. This actually tastes good, if not delicious; a portion half that size is probably a solid amount of food for most people. Even without the protein powder or other flavoring, it is drinkable. Lower portions of vegetables give you better taste for less nutrition. Not a great culinary feat, but a very efficient way to improve diet quality, and eating vegetables raw is probably more nutritious than boiling them extensively.
I’m surprised by the amount of cooking posts here so, questioning my own assumptions: is anyone put off doing this because you lack knowledge about preparing vegetables in the “whatever else” class, or picking the “wrong” whatever else foods, or even peeling things/etc.?
I feel silly even asking this (“Don’t be so patronising, who wouldn’t know how to peel an onion?”), but I’m interested to see if anyone replies.
Peeling onions can be surprisingly confusing. For instance, just under the really papery skin there is sometimes a layer which is partially or entirely thin, greenish, and rubbery. It’s not all that pleasant to eat unless it’s de-texturized (a puréed soup as described above will do the trick), but unlike the papery bits it’s technically food. Keeping it or removing it is a judgment call, but I could imagine finding it an intimidating decision to make if I didn’t know. The bits of garlic cloves that attach them to the base of the bulb are in a similar category. (I cut them off.)
Does anyone have a knowledge gap preventing them from cooking Alicorn’s “easy” soup?
I noticed myself thinking it was so basic that nobody would, but then wondered that such a thought might be completely wrong (given the overall post topic). Maybe there are people daunted by… not knowing how to prepare common vegetables, for instance.
Well here’s what I would say as someone who doesn’t understand cooking—certainly, that looks mostly very understandable and straightforward, though I’m not so clear on the exact procedure for boiling. (And pressed with what sort of spoon, if it matters?) Also there’s definitely some stuff that I think I can figure out but has not been made explicit (e.g., if I’m guessing correctly, we don’t want to include the water when blending, and that should be dumped/strained out first).
But since I don’t actually have an underlying understanding of cooking, I’d stil hesitate to actually use it. Because without that, I have no idea what corrections to make if I messed up, etc. If you just follow recipes without understanding, you can only handle the best case.
Any solid object will do, as long as it tolerates the heat. The only reason for using a utensil at all is that your hand does not tolerate the heat (and if it could tolerate the heat, then it would be unsanitary).
When stirring, the important aspect of the spoon is that it’s wide; a flat utensil would work just as well. (However, a spoon has the added benefit of allowing you to taste the soup, as you add salt, herbs, and spices. Use the spoon to pour a little into a small bowl, let it cool there, and then taste it, or you can just blow on the spoon.)
we don’t want to include the water when blending
You can if you want. It’s a trade-off between the trouble of removing the water and the capacity of your blender (or how many batches you want to blend).
In the final product, it’s best to keep as much water as possible, since thrown-out water includes thrown-out vitamins. (The exception is when the water is used to draw out unwanted flavours or other chemicals, which is not the case with ordinary vegetables but can apply to dry beans, for example.) If you have too much water after blending, return everything to the pot and simmer it uncovered until the water level has gone down, stirring occasionally. (Conversely, if your soup is too thick, return it to the pot, add more water, cover, reheat to boiling, and then turn it off.)
If you’re serving the soup right away, it’s nice to return it the pot anyway to keep it warm as people go back for second and third helpings. Use low heat (so that the soup is never too hot to eat), either cover or add water occasionally as needed (let it come back to temperature before serving after adding new water), and stir occasionally to keep it from sticking.
(Boiling water in uncovered pots escapes into the air, but the air inside a covered pot is quickly saturated with water vapour, after which no more water will leave the soup, or at least very little more water if the cover is not air-tight. However, it’s harder to remember to stir when the pot is covered. I often just let the soup thicken a bit through the meal, neither covering the pot nor adding water.)
In the final product, it’s best to keep as much water as possible, since thrown-out water includes thrown-out vitamins.
One way to avoid this trade-off is to microwave the vegetables rather than boiling them. It produces rather similar results otherwise, but doesn’t leach out water-soluble vitamins.
Regarding the blender, and mortar if you are a traditionalist, I would recommend blending without any liquid if possible. The liquid you use should be only enough to carry the food down to the blades in the blender. Any more liquid and you risk the food lifting away from the blades.
A similar problems occurs when mashing, for instance, beans in the mortar and pestle. Liquid allows the larger pieces to glide more easily out of the pestle’s mashing grind.
Dump vegetables into a pot. Pour in water or stock until it reaches the same level as the veggies (less if you plan to add cream, more if you’re nervous about burning it, less if you want thick goopy soup and more if you want thin soup). Put it on a stove burner, turn it up to High, stir at least once to prevent stuff from sticking to the bottom, and check on the smooshability of the vegetables every 5-10 minutes. Add more water if the vegetables are still unsmooshable and the water level has gotten significantly lower.
what sort of spoon
The only reason this would matter would be if you use a short-handled spoon, you will have to have your hand much closer to the boiling water, which is physically uncomfortable. Otherwise the spoon could be wooden, plastic, metal, slotted or not, whatever.
I definitely wouldn’t use the disposable plastic spoons that fast food places give out with their food. Those might actually melt, especially if pressed against the side of a hot metal pot.
While I wouldn’t prefer a fast-food-place plastic spoon, I don’t think it would be in danger of melting in this specific case. Boiling water is a fixed temperature and it will stay that temperature until the water is all boiled off, if I understand it correctly; and the spoon doesn’t spend much time pressed against the pot itself, since the idea is to smoosh a vegetable between spoon and pot.
The pot itself can’t get hotter than boiling either, as long as there’s a bunch of water in it. (This, btw, is how rice cookers detect when the rice is done.)
It won’t melt, but depending on the type of plastic it might become too soft and flexible to be useful for vegetable smooshing. From experience, some types of plastic spoons become too soft to even support their own weight when placed in boiling water.
I would bet yes. Part of the problem is not knowing the tolerance range of the parameters. Like when does the precise timing matter and when does it not.
Precision generally only matters with desserts (which is really a form of kitchen chemistry).
Any other meal has a lot of leeway.
Your first meals may involve veggies that are a bit extra squishy (overcooked) or crunchy (undercooked), or a nasty combination of the two (the temperature was too high or you didn’t stir often enough), but in all the above cases, unless there’s actual carbon (black) on the outside, then you’ll still be able to eat it.
This sounds like a case for apprenticeship. Is there anyone who’d be willing to have you be present, help with the easy bits (maybe—I’m not sure if that would inappropriately add to the stress level), and ask questions while cooking? I’m not talking about just once, though that would be better than nothing.
Is there any nutritional reason to distinguish between breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or did you give separate suggestions just to be compatible with american traditions about what to eat when? Am I missing something when I eat 2-4 meals per day all drawn at random from the same menu consisting mostly of what other people might call “dinners”?
I’m not sure about the other traditions, but eating foods with a high amount of carbohydrates (especially sugar) for dinner in my experience isn’t a good idea. Even fruit. It raises your blood sugar, so when your blood sugar drops again you find yourself hungry. It happened to me a quite a few times that I woke up in the middle of the night in desperate need of sweets. If don’t eat sweet things in the evening this doesn’t happen.
Obviously this only speaks against eating “breakfast” for dinner but not against eating “dinner” for breakfast. Which seems to be what English Breakfast is all about. ;-)
well I don’t have anything to back it up with, but I’ve heard that your blood sugar is low in the morning which is why you crave sugary stuff. the fruit alleviates that without being a shock to the system like fast sugars and the protein is more slow calories.
I presume many people eat out for lunch if they work a normal job.
but certainly if you aren’t forced into a rigid schedule eating 5 meals is better.
Is there any nutritional reason to distinguish between breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or did you give separate suggestions just to be compatible with american traditions about what to eat when?
There is a difference, but some say that traditions have it backwards. For breakfast you want to include at least 30g of protein. It contributes to both weight loss and energy levels.
Regarding the fruit juices, I agree that fruit-flavored mixtures of HFCS and other things generally aren’t worth much, but aren’t proper fruit juices usually nutritious? (I mean the kinds where the ingredients consist of fruit juices, perhaps water, and nothing else.)
But I drink orange juice with pulp; then the fiber is no longer absent, though I guess it’s reduced. The vitamins and minerals are still present, though, aren’t they?
Are you making this juice yourself by chucking a whole orange in the blender and then drinking it?
In that case, you probably—I don’t know—have enough fiber that it’s not that much different from just eating an orange, and fresh juices are said to be more nutritious than bought anyway. (Admittedly, the people who say this are people who own juicers, but that’s probably beside the point.)
But if you’re buying it from the store, then… no. It’s still mostly just sugar with a little bit of texture floating in it.
If you’re not gulping it by the gallon daily I wouldn’t worry about it, but it’s part of your healthy balanced breakfast—and not a huge part :)
You still get an enormous amount of sugar, with or without the pulp.
Regarding the vitamins and minerals, my understanding is that you need a certain amount of each of those to avoid various nasty and fatal diseases, and an amount over a certain limit can be poisonous, but there isn’t any real evidence that anything in-between makes a difference. From what I understand, it also requires a very extreme diet (by modern developed world standards) to develop provably harmful micronutrient deficiencies.
(One exception might be vitamin D if the winters are especially dark and cold where you live, but you won’t get that one from fruit juice.)
Fruit juices are very bad. They concentrate the sugar content of a lot of fruits into a small mass and volume. For instance apple juice is usually considerably more sugary than Pepsi, with around 11-12 g/100g sugar content, and also with a worse sugar profile, with 66% fructose, compared to HFCS’s 55 percent as it is commonly used in soft drinks (note: fructose is the worse sugar). Other fruit juices are usually above 8% sugar too.
They’re still high in sugar relative to how much you are likely to consume, and don’t offer the fiber or unprocessed-ness of entire fruit. It would usually be better to either eat a piece of fruit or drink water. (I ignore this advice because I hate water, so when I thirst between meals I drink juice.)
Incidentally, the lack of fiber is important for diabetics to consider. My grandmother is diabetic and is prone to insulin shock. She was told to drink fruit juice if she feels woozy. Well, she prefers fresh fruit, and she felt woozy one day and ate a peach. That pushed into full blown shock and another trip to the hospital. I had to explain to her that the fiber in fruit is like plant-based insulin—it prevents sugar from being used quickly. That’s why it’s important for healthy eating, but exactly the reason she needs to drink fruit juice to prevent diabetic shock.
I don’t like water myself. In my part of the world (a corner of India) we generally drink water boiled with a herbal powder and then cooled.
When the herbal powder is not available we just boil water with a pinch of cumin seeds. Not sure if you’ll like the taste any better than plain water though..
Ok—well on a related note… I find that I only like the taste of water if I’m actually thirsty… if I’m just drinking as a kind of fidgeting (or when some diet-book had told me I should “drink 8 cups a day”) I hate the taste too.
YMMV, of course, but worth considering.
As to the “8 cups a day”—my aunt’s a dietician and she says that the 8-cups is inclusive of the water that you consume via other sources (eg in your food or your morning cuppa joe)… whereas most diet books assume it’s 8-cups on top of all your other dietary sources.
There’s no evidence that 8 cups a day does any good—I can’t find a link, but when the debunking first came out, it turned out that there was no source for the idea that 8 cups a day was worthwhile.
I’ve found that drinking until it’s no longer a pleasure (I generally don’t mind the taste of water, though I think Aquafina tastes of plastic) leaves me feeling better than just drinking until I’m not thirsty, and the former takes a good bit more water.
Yup—I also recall that the human sense of thirst is particularly unreliable (though cannot remember the source).
It’s definitely less reliable than the sense of hunger—and we all know that that can be faulty.
There’s a “dieting trick” that I’ve heard of whereby if you feel a little like snacking—you should first try drinking a glass of water… because your body can often mistake one for the other.
Around here, Chinese restaurants tend towards jasmine tea
Jasmine oolong specifically? (I read once that oolong was the traditional kind of tea to drink after/during a Chinese meal, but haven’t seen any sources for it.)
Light-colored? Probably a kind of green, then; oolongs are usually pretty dark-colored (but on the other hand, greens can get bitter if they sit for a while).
You hate water? That seems like a very odd thing to hate.
Try learning to gulp rather than drink water. Or, what is the minimally flavored liquid you can consume that isn’t water? Are you already drinking 3:1 water:juice or something? Or why not drink low calorie liquids?
I’ve watered down some juices in the past, though usually thick ones that contain purées instead of just juice. I can drink water without hating it too much if I am really thirsty and if it’s really cold. I will tend to drink water automatically if there is some nearby (and wind up drinking a whole lot of it at restaurants). With meals (that do not take place at restaurants) I drink skim milk.
Though, like you, I really dislike water. Unfortunately, I’m trying to cut back on my Dr. Pepper intake and the only other thing I find convenient is water.
Yeah, I do. The water in my grandma’s house is less pleasant than most others (she lives in a suburb of Buffalo). I live in Durham, NC now and the water here is about as good as it gets.
Everyone in my area (Lincoln NE) hates the local tap water, but I think that it’s fine. They think that I’m going to die or something, while I think that they’re all chumps.
Having lived in Lincoln and enjoyed the nicely watery tap water, I think they’re just looking for something to grouse about. You often see groups of people start to dislike something because the rest of the group speaks ill of it, in a positive feedback loop.
Water is mostly tasteless, so people’s perceptions of its taste are especially sensitive to weird psychological stuff.
I think you’re mistaken, or at least I find—without discussing it with anyone—that the taste of Philadelphia tap water varies a lot—from good to nasty.
Not unless your tap water really sucks. (e.g. Adelaide levels of suck, rather than mere London levels of suck.) Given this is a matter of taste, do whatever tastes nice to you—first-world tap water is unlikely to harm you.
I like real juice, but (except for orange juice with pulp) I always water it down. It tastes the same when compared to long-term memory (although not when directly compared).
I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I eat the rice-a-roni red beans and rice almost daily. it is a box with dry beans, rice, and a packet full of spices.
The ingredient list says it contains “hydrolyzed protein” made from, among other things, wheat. That means it has gluten in it and it’s not gluten-free. It’s also not kosher for Passover.
Edit: Reading further, it also has “hydrolyzed gluten”, so… yeah.
The packet full of spices has much more than just spices in it, and it’s that which has the gluten.
the procedure here is how to consistently feel better after a few weeks (vs typical lazy cheap diets)
breakfast, buy:
plain (unsweetened) yogurt
honey
fruit (bananas or whatever berries are on sale)
granola (again, unsweetened)
dump together in bowl and eat. if you don’t feel hungry in the morning just do a very small serving at first.
lunch: whatever, avoid sugar/white bread
dinner, buy :
rice-a-roni red beans and rice when it is on sale (goes to 75 cents a box once every couple months at my local store)
bell pepper (or spicier pepper to taste)
olive oil
boil, then simmer 20 minutes
yes, this procedure can be improved upon. the advantage of this one is low activation cost as it is about as difficult as the regular bachelor diet of instant foods. if you’re trying to eat healthier but can’t find the motivation this is a decent compromise.
major thing to avoid besides the obvious: fruit juice and fruit flavored anything. you’re subverting your body’s desire for actual fruit. fruit juice is no better for you than soda.
I’m guessing this is mostly preaching to the choir here, but if this helps one person it was worth the 5 minutes.
Another easy healthy thing:
Just about any vegetables can be boiled till soft, then put through the blender, salted and peppered to taste, and yield soup (cream is optional). A quartered peeled onion, half a bulb of peeled garlic, and a quartered peeled potato or two, plus a fair amount of peeled and roughly chopped whatever else (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, turnips, fennel, leeks, celery root or stalks, whatever) is a good template. Dump it all in a pot with water or stock. Boil till it’ll smoosh against the side of the pot when pressed with a spoon. Blend. Salt & pepper.
Less appetizingly, but probably more nutritiously, most green leafy vegetables can be blended with water or milk and consumed in milkshake form. I’ll often take three or four cups (that’s a lot) of spinach and blend it with two cups whole milk and chocolate protein powder. This actually tastes good, if not delicious; a portion half that size is probably a solid amount of food for most people. Even without the protein powder or other flavoring, it is drinkable. Lower portions of vegetables give you better taste for less nutrition. Not a great culinary feat, but a very efficient way to improve diet quality, and eating vegetables raw is probably more nutritious than boiling them extensively.
I’m surprised by the amount of cooking posts here so, questioning my own assumptions: is anyone put off doing this because you lack knowledge about preparing vegetables in the “whatever else” class, or picking the “wrong” whatever else foods, or even peeling things/etc.?
I feel silly even asking this (“Don’t be so patronising, who wouldn’t know how to peel an onion?”), but I’m interested to see if anyone replies.
Peeling onions can be surprisingly confusing. For instance, just under the really papery skin there is sometimes a layer which is partially or entirely thin, greenish, and rubbery. It’s not all that pleasant to eat unless it’s de-texturized (a puréed soup as described above will do the trick), but unlike the papery bits it’s technically food. Keeping it or removing it is a judgment call, but I could imagine finding it an intimidating decision to make if I didn’t know. The bits of garlic cloves that attach them to the base of the bulb are in a similar category. (I cut them off.)
When in doubt, trim.
I cut the onion into a few chunks then remove the inner part. losing 1/8“ or 1/4” of the outermost stuff doesn’t bother me.
If it looks different from the rest, trim it away.
I’m confused as to what exactly you’re asking here.
Does anyone have a knowledge gap preventing them from cooking Alicorn’s “easy” soup?
I noticed myself thinking it was so basic that nobody would, but then wondered that such a thought might be completely wrong (given the overall post topic). Maybe there are people daunted by… not knowing how to prepare common vegetables, for instance.
Well here’s what I would say as someone who doesn’t understand cooking—certainly, that looks mostly very understandable and straightforward, though I’m not so clear on the exact procedure for boiling. (And pressed with what sort of spoon, if it matters?) Also there’s definitely some stuff that I think I can figure out but has not been made explicit (e.g., if I’m guessing correctly, we don’t want to include the water when blending, and that should be dumped/strained out first).
But since I don’t actually have an underlying understanding of cooking, I’d stil hesitate to actually use it. Because without that, I have no idea what corrections to make if I messed up, etc. If you just follow recipes without understanding, you can only handle the best case.
Any solid object will do, as long as it tolerates the heat. The only reason for using a utensil at all is that your hand does not tolerate the heat (and if it could tolerate the heat, then it would be unsanitary).
When stirring, the important aspect of the spoon is that it’s wide; a flat utensil would work just as well. (However, a spoon has the added benefit of allowing you to taste the soup, as you add salt, herbs, and spices. Use the spoon to pour a little into a small bowl, let it cool there, and then taste it, or you can just blow on the spoon.)
You can if you want. It’s a trade-off between the trouble of removing the water and the capacity of your blender (or how many batches you want to blend).
In the final product, it’s best to keep as much water as possible, since thrown-out water includes thrown-out vitamins. (The exception is when the water is used to draw out unwanted flavours or other chemicals, which is not the case with ordinary vegetables but can apply to dry beans, for example.) If you have too much water after blending, return everything to the pot and simmer it uncovered until the water level has gone down, stirring occasionally. (Conversely, if your soup is too thick, return it to the pot, add more water, cover, reheat to boiling, and then turn it off.)
If you’re serving the soup right away, it’s nice to return it the pot anyway to keep it warm as people go back for second and third helpings. Use low heat (so that the soup is never too hot to eat), either cover or add water occasionally as needed (let it come back to temperature before serving after adding new water), and stir occasionally to keep it from sticking.
(Boiling water in uncovered pots escapes into the air, but the air inside a covered pot is quickly saturated with water vapour, after which no more water will leave the soup, or at least very little more water if the cover is not air-tight. However, it’s harder to remember to stir when the pot is covered. I often just let the soup thicken a bit through the meal, neither covering the pot nor adding water.)
One way to avoid this trade-off is to microwave the vegetables rather than boiling them. It produces rather similar results otherwise, but doesn’t leach out water-soluble vitamins.
Regarding the blender, and mortar if you are a traditionalist, I would recommend blending without any liquid if possible. The liquid you use should be only enough to carry the food down to the blades in the blender. Any more liquid and you risk the food lifting away from the blades.
A similar problems occurs when mashing, for instance, beans in the mortar and pestle. Liquid allows the larger pieces to glide more easily out of the pestle’s mashing grind.
Dump vegetables into a pot. Pour in water or stock until it reaches the same level as the veggies (less if you plan to add cream, more if you’re nervous about burning it, less if you want thick goopy soup and more if you want thin soup). Put it on a stove burner, turn it up to High, stir at least once to prevent stuff from sticking to the bottom, and check on the smooshability of the vegetables every 5-10 minutes. Add more water if the vegetables are still unsmooshable and the water level has gotten significantly lower.
The only reason this would matter would be if you use a short-handled spoon, you will have to have your hand much closer to the boiling water, which is physically uncomfortable. Otherwise the spoon could be wooden, plastic, metal, slotted or not, whatever.
I definitely wouldn’t use the disposable plastic spoons that fast food places give out with their food. Those might actually melt, especially if pressed against the side of a hot metal pot.
While I wouldn’t prefer a fast-food-place plastic spoon, I don’t think it would be in danger of melting in this specific case. Boiling water is a fixed temperature and it will stay that temperature until the water is all boiled off, if I understand it correctly; and the spoon doesn’t spend much time pressed against the pot itself, since the idea is to smoosh a vegetable between spoon and pot.
The pot itself can’t get hotter than boiling either, as long as there’s a bunch of water in it. (This, btw, is how rice cookers detect when the rice is done.)
The inside of the pot can’t get significantly hotter than … right, he water just turns gas phase more rapidly.
It won’t melt, but depending on the type of plastic it might become too soft and flexible to be useful for vegetable smooshing. From experience, some types of plastic spoons become too soft to even support their own weight when placed in boiling water.
I would bet yes. Part of the problem is not knowing the tolerance range of the parameters. Like when does the precise timing matter and when does it not.
Precision generally only matters with desserts (which is really a form of kitchen chemistry).
Any other meal has a lot of leeway.
Your first meals may involve veggies that are a bit extra squishy (overcooked) or crunchy (undercooked), or a nasty combination of the two (the temperature was too high or you didn’t stir often enough), but in all the above cases, unless there’s actual carbon (black) on the outside, then you’ll still be able to eat it.
This sounds like a case for apprenticeship. Is there anyone who’d be willing to have you be present, help with the easy bits (maybe—I’m not sure if that would inappropriately add to the stress level), and ask questions while cooking? I’m not talking about just once, though that would be better than nothing.
Is there any nutritional reason to distinguish between breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or did you give separate suggestions just to be compatible with american traditions about what to eat when? Am I missing something when I eat 2-4 meals per day all drawn at random from the same menu consisting mostly of what other people might call “dinners”?
I’m not sure about the other traditions, but eating foods with a high amount of carbohydrates (especially sugar) for dinner in my experience isn’t a good idea. Even fruit. It raises your blood sugar, so when your blood sugar drops again you find yourself hungry. It happened to me a quite a few times that I woke up in the middle of the night in desperate need of sweets. If don’t eat sweet things in the evening this doesn’t happen. Obviously this only speaks against eating “breakfast” for dinner but not against eating “dinner” for breakfast. Which seems to be what English Breakfast is all about. ;-)
well I don’t have anything to back it up with, but I’ve heard that your blood sugar is low in the morning which is why you crave sugary stuff. the fruit alleviates that without being a shock to the system like fast sugars and the protein is more slow calories.
I presume many people eat out for lunch if they work a normal job.
but certainly if you aren’t forced into a rigid schedule eating 5 meals is better.
There is a difference, but some say that traditions have it backwards. For breakfast you want to include at least 30g of protein. It contributes to both weight loss and energy levels.
Regarding the fruit juices, I agree that fruit-flavored mixtures of HFCS and other things generally aren’t worth much, but aren’t proper fruit juices usually nutritious? (I mean the kinds where the ingredients consist of fruit juices, perhaps water, and nothing else.)
One orange is one or two servings of fruit… but a serving of orange juice is four oranges.
You’re getting all the sugar and calories of four oranges (4 − 8 servings of fruit!) without any of the fiber.
Fruit juices aren’t exactly the devil, but they’re not especially nutritious either.
But I drink orange juice with pulp; then the fiber is no longer absent, though I guess it’s reduced. The vitamins and minerals are still present, though, aren’t they?
Are you making this juice yourself by chucking a whole orange in the blender and then drinking it?
In that case, you probably—I don’t know—have enough fiber that it’s not that much different from just eating an orange, and fresh juices are said to be more nutritious than bought anyway. (Admittedly, the people who say this are people who own juicers, but that’s probably beside the point.)
But if you’re buying it from the store, then… no. It’s still mostly just sugar with a little bit of texture floating in it.
If you’re not gulping it by the gallon daily I wouldn’t worry about it, but it’s part of your healthy balanced breakfast—and not a huge part :)
You still get an enormous amount of sugar, with or without the pulp.
Regarding the vitamins and minerals, my understanding is that you need a certain amount of each of those to avoid various nasty and fatal diseases, and an amount over a certain limit can be poisonous, but there isn’t any real evidence that anything in-between makes a difference. From what I understand, it also requires a very extreme diet (by modern developed world standards) to develop provably harmful micronutrient deficiencies.
(One exception might be vitamin D if the winters are especially dark and cold where you live, but you won’t get that one from fruit juice.)
Fruit juices are very bad. They concentrate the sugar content of a lot of fruits into a small mass and volume. For instance apple juice is usually considerably more sugary than Pepsi, with around 11-12 g/100g sugar content, and also with a worse sugar profile, with 66% fructose, compared to HFCS’s 55 percent as it is commonly used in soft drinks (note: fructose is the worse sugar). Other fruit juices are usually above 8% sugar too.
They’re still high in sugar relative to how much you are likely to consume, and don’t offer the fiber or unprocessed-ness of entire fruit. It would usually be better to either eat a piece of fruit or drink water. (I ignore this advice because I hate water, so when I thirst between meals I drink juice.)
Incidentally, the lack of fiber is important for diabetics to consider. My grandmother is diabetic and is prone to insulin shock. She was told to drink fruit juice if she feels woozy. Well, she prefers fresh fruit, and she felt woozy one day and ate a peach. That pushed into full blown shock and another trip to the hospital. I had to explain to her that the fiber in fruit is like plant-based insulin—it prevents sugar from being used quickly. That’s why it’s important for healthy eating, but exactly the reason she needs to drink fruit juice to prevent diabetic shock.
I don’t like water myself. In my part of the world (a corner of India) we generally drink water boiled with a herbal powder and then cooled.
When the herbal powder is not available we just boil water with a pinch of cumin seeds. Not sure if you’ll like the taste any better than plain water though..
Cumin seeds are an interesting possibility. I might try that sometime.
Try tea—works for the English (among others) :)
I don’t like tea, except the kind they serve at Chinese restaurants, and that I only like with two or three little packets of sugar per teacup.
Ok—well on a related note… I find that I only like the taste of water if I’m actually thirsty… if I’m just drinking as a kind of fidgeting (or when some diet-book had told me I should “drink 8 cups a day”) I hate the taste too.
YMMV, of course, but worth considering.
As to the “8 cups a day”—my aunt’s a dietician and she says that the 8-cups is inclusive of the water that you consume via other sources (eg in your food or your morning cuppa joe)… whereas most diet books assume it’s 8-cups on top of all your other dietary sources.
There’s no evidence that 8 cups a day does any good—I can’t find a link, but when the debunking first came out, it turned out that there was no source for the idea that 8 cups a day was worthwhile.
I’ve found that drinking until it’s no longer a pleasure (I generally don’t mind the taste of water, though I think Aquafina tastes of plastic) leaves me feeling better than just drinking until I’m not thirsty, and the former takes a good bit more water.
Yup—I also recall that the human sense of thirst is particularly unreliable (though cannot remember the source).
It’s definitely less reliable than the sense of hunger—and we all know that that can be faulty.
There’s a “dieting trick” that I’ve heard of whereby if you feel a little like snacking—you should first try drinking a glass of water… because your body can often mistake one for the other.
Around here, Chinese restaurants tend towards jasmine tea. If you care, you could ask someone who knows about tea what’s typical in your area.
Jasmine oolong specifically? (I read once that oolong was the traditional kind of tea to drink after/during a Chinese meal, but haven’t seen any sources for it.)
I don’t know. It tastes flowery, is light-colored, and doesn’t get bitter if it sits for a while.
Light-colored? Probably a kind of green, then; oolongs are usually pretty dark-colored (but on the other hand, greens can get bitter if they sit for a while).
It’s possible that I don’t leave jasmine tea that long.
You hate water? That seems like a very odd thing to hate.
Try learning to gulp rather than drink water. Or, what is the minimally flavored liquid you can consume that isn’t water? Are you already drinking 3:1 water:juice or something? Or why not drink low calorie liquids?
I’ve watered down some juices in the past, though usually thick ones that contain purées instead of just juice. I can drink water without hating it too much if I am really thirsty and if it’s really cold. I will tend to drink water automatically if there is some nearby (and wind up drinking a whole lot of it at restaurants). With meals (that do not take place at restaurants) I drink skim milk.
Does the quality of the water matter? Tap vs. filtered vs. various brands of bottled?
It matters, but not the way you’d think—I prefer tap water to filtered (have successfully distinguished them in a blind test) and hate bottled.
Same for me.
Though, like you, I really dislike water. Unfortunately, I’m trying to cut back on my Dr. Pepper intake and the only other thing I find convenient is water.
Do you have preferences (or at least lower distaste levels) about tap water from different areas?
Yeah, I do. The water in my grandma’s house is less pleasant than most others (she lives in a suburb of Buffalo). I live in Durham, NC now and the water here is about as good as it gets.
Everyone in my area (Lincoln NE) hates the local tap water, but I think that it’s fine. They think that I’m going to die or something, while I think that they’re all chumps.
Having lived in Lincoln and enjoyed the nicely watery tap water, I think they’re just looking for something to grouse about. You often see groups of people start to dislike something because the rest of the group speaks ill of it, in a positive feedback loop.
Water is mostly tasteless, so people’s perceptions of its taste are especially sensitive to weird psychological stuff.
I think you’re mistaken, or at least I find—without discussing it with anyone—that the taste of Philadelphia tap water varies a lot—from good to nasty.
Not unless your tap water really sucks. (e.g. Adelaide levels of suck, rather than mere London levels of suck.) Given this is a matter of taste, do whatever tastes nice to you—first-world tap water is unlikely to harm you.
I like real juice, but (except for orange juice with pulp) I always water it down. It tastes the same when compared to long-term memory (although not when directly compared).
This is great! Thanks for your 5 minutes.
Especially for breakfast, what proportions do you recommend for the ingredients?
A significant fraction of the population will IMHO feel even better by avoiding all gluten, including of course the pasta in the Rice-a-Roni.
rice is gluten free AFAIK.
Yes, but Rice-a-roni is pasta and seasonings. It is added to rice (or to rice and beans).
Alternative suggestion though I’d skip the Knorr beef bouillion which is mostly salt and MSG.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I eat the rice-a-roni red beans and rice almost daily. it is a box with dry beans, rice, and a packet full of spices.
http://www.ricearoni.com/Products/Rice-A-Roni/Classic_Favorites/Red_Beans_and_Rice/Ingredients
The ingredient list says it contains “hydrolyzed protein” made from, among other things, wheat. That means it has gluten in it and it’s not gluten-free. It’s also not kosher for Passover.
Edit: Reading further, it also has “hydrolyzed gluten”, so… yeah.
The packet full of spices has much more than just spices in it, and it’s that which has the gluten.
ah, in that case i’d suggest replacing it with cumin, pepper, garlic, and bouillon cube.
Oh, sorry for the misinformation.
I was remembering a different flavor of Rice-a-Roni (and forgetting that the rice comes in the box).
It certainly helps me. I’ll probably add that breakfast plan to my diet. The dinner looks like it could use some chicken or beef.
alternatively you can add half a bouillon cube to increase satiety. it doesn’t “need” meat in the nutrition sense.