Damn Donuts!

I stepped on the sale yesterday. I didn't want to do it, especially not when fully dressed and after a 24 ounce glass of water, 12 ounce mug of coffee and cup of oatmeal plus fruit breakfast, but it was calling me. When my husband went into the bathroom I gently removed the item of torture and placed in on the flat kitchen floor, took in a deep breath, and stepped on.

It reads 5 pounds heavier than it did at 5 in the morning on November 21st.

I'll get an official reading tomorrow morning at 5am, after my husband goes back to work. I'm certain of a gain - one doesn't share in a few dozen donuts and fudge brownies over a ten day period, plus a few very salty meals (like Chinese food, even though it was low fat and vegan) and not suffer the consequences - but I'm sure it won't be a five pound gain.

I put the sale back into its lair under the bed and promised myself to stick to strict McDougall MWLP until I lose not just those 5 but an additional 130 pounds. We were on our own for dinner again so I made a pot of Broccoli Cheese soup from a post on the McDougall forums earlier this year, and Rainbow Skillet Medley, a MWLP recipe.

Three hours later my husband comes into the room with the dregs of the donuts and insists we finish them off. Like a good little wife I did as he requested. At least those things are now GONE and even he realizes we really can't handle them any more at our age. If either of us feels like something sweet, more than just a piece of fruit, it's going to be made from a McDougall-legal recipe.

Here's to a healthier December!

<<<<< Over There, On the Left-Hand Side of this Page

I guess nobody was looking over there in the left-hand column where I had all the McDougall-friendly and other vegetarian blogs listed. All but one that was suggested in yesterday's Comments is already there.

And I had to edit one of the widgets. It seems that Flickr has been inundated recently with a load of photos for the Walther PPK gun so all the photos appearing in the Flicker PPK widget was for guns and neo-nazi groups. Sorry about that. I changed the keywords to VWAV and Vcon and now all the good food photos are back. And I was able to add a slide-show for the McDougall Foods Flicker group photos, too.

Friends of the McDougall Plan

Aside from the official McDougall forums, a lot of people have no idea where to find other people who are following the McDougall Plan.

There's a list of bloggers who are/were recently/plan to following McDougall on my Bloglines RSS feed page which includes:

McDougalling With Chile

Rites of Passage

Awkward Elegance

Fun Crunch Files

caroveg

cheezyvegan

Jill Nussinow's Green Cooking with A Pressure Cooker (A McDougall Celebrity Chef and pressure cooker genius)

and

Jennifer McCann's Vegan Lunch Box (mostly eat to Live lately but still McD-legal)


The McDougall Community on LiveJournal.

McDougall Chat on Yahoogroups

McDougall Weight Loss Plans Yahoogroup

Susan Voisin's Fat Free Discussion Board

McDougalling Community on Facebook

McDougall Friendly Recipe Wiki which as much more than just recipes

Dr. Neal Barnard's Get Healthy Club on PCRM

and there's a whole slew of McDougallers on the Post Punk Kitchen forums

I think we have a pretty prolific presence out there, wouldn't you agree?

McDougall Group on Facebook

On the blog owned by caroveg (carolyn) she mentions a McDougall group on Facebook. I did a few searches and all I get are links to posts about Right Foods cups.

http://happyveg.blogspot.com/2008/11/caroveggie-takes-exercise.html

Her blog doesn't allow comments or I would ask her directly.

If anyone has the url for the group, would you mind sharing? It just might be worth finally making a Facebook acccount if it's an active group.

New McDougall Video

Dr. McDougall's Money-Saving Medical Advice
Maximum Weight Loss, Vitamins, Choosing a Doctor

The description on the web page:

Information contained in this DVD will save your life and thousands of dollars spent on diet gimmicks, supplements, and the wrong doctors.

In this series of lectures Dr. McDougall explains why:

Starches Are Essential. The current epidemic of obesity grew as starches became vilified. Historically, as well as worldwide today, people living on diets of potatoes, rice, corn, and sweet potatoes have always been trim, strong, active, youthful, and healthy. For maximum weight loss a few more green and yellow vegetables are added. Be careful! Too little starch results in feelings of hunger, fatigue, and frustration.

Vitamin Supplements, Save One, Can Be Deadly. Vitamins and minerals are essential for our health when delivered in their natural plant packages. Once isolated and concentrated into pills they can cause nutritional imbalances, sickness, and death. Vitamin D is actually a hormone made in the body with sunlight. Unnatural living can result in Vitamin B12 deficiency—this is the only supplement I recommend.

Choosing the Right Doctor. Sick people see doctors; your goal is to stay out of the medical businesses by being healthy. The McDougall Diet and a healthy lifestyle will prevent and cure common diseases. Select a generalist as your doctor-advocate. Specialists should be hired to do special things, not general patient-care. A consumer must be well educated, prepared, and skeptical when dealing with doctors and hospitals.

Chapter 1: Science Behind the Maximum Weight Loss Program

Chapter 2: Save Money and Your Health – Don’t Buy Vitamins (Except for One)

Chapter 3: How to Pick the Right Doctor

Happy Thanksgiving 2008

Jeff Novick YouTube, plus Overcoming Overeating & McDougalling?

His videos were there all along, but this time he made his own YouTube channel and has a few videos he says are rough drafts of his lectures. I haven't been able to see them yet (Need to borrow a faster computer or I'd be here all day waiting for one to load) but someone said the woman in the videos with him is his cousin.

And on another topic, I'm still trying to figure out how to mesh the principles of both McDougall (or just veganism itself) and Overcoming Overeating together. One restricts half the food in the world, the other says no food/food group is to be avoided except when it comes to your personal health (like diabetics avoiding sugar, celiacs avoiding gluten, people with allergies avoiding their allergenic foods). Maybe once the new group gets a bit better established I'll toss it out there, as avoiding fats and high protein foods but eating the OO way towards all the allowable McDougall foods are for personal health reasons.

Five ingredient recipes are beloved by everyone, and if they follow the rules of The McDougall Plan, so much the better. Dr. McDougall has a nutritionist in his employ named Jeff Novick. I may not agree with everything Jeff writes, but one of the things Jeff did that I do agree with is post his file of 5-ingredient recipes. Today's soup comes from that file. He calls it Longevity Soup.

Longevity Soup
1) 1 can whole tomatoes, 1 can pureed
2) Your favorite beans (I use kidney or garbanzo)
3) 1.5- 2 lbs of Your favorite frozen veggies plus 1 lb of frozen collards
4) Your favorite starch (potato, sweet potato, rice, barley) cooked separate then added
5) your favorite seasoning (I use fresh ginger, garlic)

I used a bit more tomatoes - 2 giant cans of crushed and a 15 ounce of diced. I added a small bag of mixed frozen vegetables as well as 2 giant chopped carrots and spinach instead of collards. Instead of adding a starch into the pot I'm making a loaf of bread to go with the soup. And garlic. Plenty of garlic. I also added 2 giant cans of water. It looks and smells fantastic!

The bread, on the other hand, has more ingredients than the soup. It's a new-to-me recipe and I'm making it for the first time, so let's see how it goes, shall we? I'm omitting the oil and using dried parsley and celery flakes and had to add a bit of liquid (I used water) to moisten the dough as it kneaded.


* Exported from MasterCook *

Veggie Bread

Recipe By :Sandra L. Woodruff
Serving Size : 12 Preparation Time :0:00
Categories : ABM breads Whole Wheat


Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method
-------- ------------ --------------------------------
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon vital wheat gluten
1 teaspoon yeast -- instant, bread machine
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon oil -- or lecithin granules
1 tablespoon honey -- or barley malt
3/4 cup buttermilk -- non-fat, OR
3/4 cup non-dairy milk and 1 teaspoon
vinegar
1/4 cup grated carrot
1/4 cup celery -- finely chopped
2 tablespoons green onion -- finely chopped
1 tablespoon fresh parsley -- minced

Put everything in your machine according to the manufacturer's
instructions, on the whole wheat setting if you have one.

Source:
"Smart Bread Machine Recipes - Healthy, Whole Grain, and Delicious"
Copyright:
"1994"
Yield:
"1 pound"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Per Serving: 97 Calories; 2g Fat (14.8% calories
from fat); 4g Protein; 18g Carbohydrate; 3g Dietary Fiber; 1mg
Cholesterol; 178mg Sodium. Exchanges: 1 Grain(Starch); 0 Lean Meat; 0
Vegetable; 0 Non-Fat Milk; 1/2 Fat; 0 Other Carbohydrates.


Nutr. Assoc. : 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Soup Weather

I've been making a lot of soup lately. This week alone I've made the Roasted Butternut Squash Soup from Vegan With A Vengeance, and today the Mary McDougall Quick and Easy Minestrone. To go with yesterday's soup I made the Roasted Butternut Squash bread that was mentioned in this Knead for Bread blog post and the recipe can be found here. For tonight's bread I'll make Focaccia Bread with Sun-dried Tomatoes, a Lora Brody recipe. Instead of all that oil I'll use jarred water-packed minced garlic, and use white whole wheat flour.

I wrote in detail about the recipes on my Richard Simmons and 100-Plus lists on Yahoogorups.

Richard Simmons even did a whole Message of the Day today about soup, but of course he insisted on using chicken broth and adding a cut up chicken breast for protein instead of veg broth and non-meat protein sources, like beans. Here's his message:

A MEAL IN A BOWL

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

Okay, I have a confession to make. I gained a pound! Hey, don't be laughing at me! Let me ask, when you gain a pound, don't you get upset? I know I did! Oh, that sneaky little one pound came on in only one day, too. My mistake was to let myself go a little and I ate too much of a good thing.

See, I made these delicious enchiladas and I ended up having too many of them. Of course, I made them using only healthy ingredients and they were also very low in fat. But, as good for me as they were...I just ate too many of them. And you know what? I blame it all on CNN! That's right...and let me explain.

See, I was watching election coverage last Tuesday night and was getting all caught up in it. I'd watch a little CNN then eat an enchilada. But the race was just so interesting, I wasn't paying attention to how much I was eating. So I think I have a right to blame both the Presidential candidates, too!

After discovering my weight-gain, I decided that one pound had to go and I intended to lose it with...soup! So every night for a week, I've had soup and salad for dinner. Here's how I made my soup:

I take a big soup pot and fill it with about three cans of chicken broth. I love cooking with chicken broth and I use it all the time. I keep at least a dozen cans of it stored away in my kitchen cabinets. I use it to make chicken dishes, rice dishes and just a whole lot of other dishes. It goes so well with so many things. Hmmm, I think I'll write the Swanson's people and tell them about it. Oh, let's get back to my soup!

I turn the fire on the chicken broth very low and while it's simmering, I cut up some vegetables for the soup. I add sliced carrots, onions, celery, water chestnuts, parsnips and finely chopped fresh parsley.

I let all of those ingredients simmer until the vegetables are al dente. Now before I began making my soup, I'd placed three skinless, boneless chicken breasts into the freezer. I do this to make them a little firmer. And why do I do that? Because, and I've told you this before, I'm going to slice those chicken breasts very thin for my soup. And when the breasts are a little firmer from being in the freezer, they slice so much better.

After I've sliced them up, I drop the chicken slices into the pot with those simmering vegetables and let them all cook together for a few minutes longer. Lastly, I add a small can of diced tomatoes, some crushed basil, black pepper and a little dash of hot sauce.

So in my soup, I'm getting my protein with the chicken, I'm getting lots of vegetable windows in there, and just a very little bit of fat. You know that chicken broth is always labeled "fat-free" but there's always a teeny bit of fat in it.

To make my soup even tastier, here's what I do. First, I put a serving into a bowl then add one teaspoon of fat-free sour cream and stir it into my bowl of soup. I can't tell you how amazing it tastes. You'll have to make it for yourself to see just how good it is. I can tell you that it's warm, crunchy and oh-so yummy!

To complete my healthy meal, I make myself a salad of lettuce, shredded cabbage, cucumbers and a few sliced black olives. I use a little oil and vinegar for my dressing. It's a very satisfying dinner and the best news is, since I've been eating like this for a week...I've lost that pesky old pound I'd gained! Hoo-ray!

And the moral of this story is this: Don't eat enchiladas while watching election returns on CNN!

Love,

http://www.richardsimmons.com/j15/index.php?option=com_dailymessage&Itemid=31
The link stays the same but the message changes daily, so if you click this link you'll get that day's message, not the one from Nov 11, 2008 if you're reading this on another day.

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