…is their fondness for onions.
When you get beyond the pre-prepared foods, you have to cook your own, and most recipes contain things like onions (no-go in this house), lamb (we don’t eat sheep or goats), fish—ok, if it’s salmon. And you have to improvise.
Main thing is to keep it to half a cup of veggies and half a cup of entree. And bread remains verboten during the next stage.
The good news is we’re dropping the last-acquired weight, which will amount to about 7 lbs apiece. THis is ‘easy’ weight, so no big deal. I’ve dropped about half of it in two days on the diet, induction phase; Jane’s right with me.
Then we have to get rid of more ‘established weight’ which is harder. Sigh. And we’ll be on induction a while, maybe through the first 10 lbs beyond the 7. And then…
WE’re up against dieticians who believe that lamb, steamed fish and jicama is nice and bread is not. What I’ll have to do is just to start grilling meat (chicken, pork, salmon and beef) and steaming veggies in usual recipes, with, however, no starches. So a burger is a pile of hamburger with avocado and such piled on it. I can do better than that. Small steak or chop with mushrooms atop greens, no onions, but nice spicing. Nice ground beef with Mexican spice, raw tomato and peppers, sprinkle of cheddar cheese, and a little side of jalapenos and a spoonful of sour cream. I think I can do this.
This is their rethink of their anything-goes diet with fat and meat and alcohol: now it’s no alcohol and restricted fat, and no starch. And it’ll work for us, but I’ve got to take a different route to spiciness, and try to permanently reform our portion sizes.
It’s that old adage of ‘feed the person you want to become,’ and hold the servings down.
But we’re optimistic.
And fortunately the meals they serve all taste good. There’s a tiny bit of onion, but we can thus far cope with it…nothing enough to cause the symptoms a real dose causes.
We also can manage the South Beach Ricotta dessert, once we’re allowed to have nuts: some pecans, a few raisins, cinnamon, and a little ‘latte flavoring’ in a Splenda-sweetened ricotta, and there’s a nice semi-frozen ‘ice cream’ that’s perfectly legal, or will be when we get past this couple of weeks of induction.
Shave or grate bakers chocolate over any dessert for those cravings. Ricotta or cottage cheese with that is nice, even without the sweetening.
Thought I’d pass this along. One reason to research your genealogy is to find out what your genes were up to before you got them.
Lol, mine were all axe murderers. One killed 4000 prisoners in his fervor for his conversion to Christianity. Literally. One burned his cheating wive alive, in her wedding gown. Several were executed for treason…Finding one of mine who died in bed was at one point difficult. 😉 But seeing a few portraits of my immediate ancestors (including paintings! who’d ever have expected family paintings?) I can say they were all built like a brick outhouse, sort of straight up and down, not fat, but shall we say, they’d be the kid everybody would pick first in a game of Red Rover. We ARE not sprinters.
Congrats on losing some weight already!
I slice yellow squash and zucchini, drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper to death then bake at 350. Time for baking depends on the slice thickness. I usually cook to the thinnest pieces (around 10 minutes), pull the pans, put the veg in a bowl and microwave a few seconds to complete the cooking. You will get a lot of veg in your half cup with the squashes. I usually have a small bed, probably less than a fourth cup, with my fish filet and feel full.
I am restricted from gluten (especially the arthritis inflammatory-wheat), rice, potatoes, corn and other carbs so even when I cheat I lose a half-pound per week. When I don’t cheat, or if I’m more active, I lose more that week.
I just realized something – I don’t cook with onion. The first time I ever peeled an onion was when I decided to try my hand at chicken soup without a recipe) a few months ago. I sometimes use onion salt or powder and some of my spice mixes probably have onion but that’s it.
Just curious, but why are sheep and goat off your list?
I think I found the weight that CJ and Jane lost… 🙂
Lol—actually, I don’t like the flavor of mutton. I’ve traveled in Greece, where some enterprising folk, looking like McDonalds, sell small skewers of lamb roasted brown, and those are the best, but in general, the flavor puts me off. Goat—I dunno. I always supposed goat would be like mutton, only tougher. And I rather like goats: they have funny faces.
Mutton of any age, freshwater fish unless you count salmon, most saltwater fish except salmon, cod, haddock and halibut, crayfish, game birds, buffalo (texture like liver)are all on my list of things I consider survival food. I’m probably missing something good, but my taste doesn’t agree.
Chicken used to be on that list. I don’t like southern fried chicken, I discovered, not in the common mode. I’ll eat it baked, stir-fried, or barbecued, but there’s something ghastly that happens to the flavor if you dump floured chicken into hot grease. It tastes like old iron…and yep, I did try the outdoor pump in winter. If I eat chicken that manages to have that flavor, I’ll be off it for months.
I’ll try anything. But the fact that a lot of really objectionable things ‘taste just like chicken’ is pretty accurate, in my book. 😉
I detest turkey: it tastes like mildewed laundry. If you can pour enough spice and gravy on it, on Thanksgiving, I can enjoy it. But all those things they make with turkey that taste ‘just like real bacon, hotdogs, etc’—they don’t. Not to me. I accidentally got some turkey pastrami instead of the real thing for a pizza and had to throw the whole thing out…and I was hungry, too. But not quite into survival mode.
Mutton can be as tough as old boots. When I was growing up there were 3 grades of butchered sheep; lamb, hogget and mutton. Lamb is the best and youngest; mutton tough with a strong odour and hogget somewhere in between. Mum was frequently more than peeved at the butcher for passing off mutton as lamb. Eventually you could check the carcass for the pink stamp that said “lamb” which stopped that little practice.
I was brought up on lamb; would still have it every meal if I could.
Goat? I’ve had it and it’s OK.
We can get ground bison here … very low fat and quite good.
Mom, a Missouri girl, always used to say that even with lamb one had to peel the “silver skin” off the meat, to avoid it being “gamey”. That’s the tough, sinewy membrane. The same went for mutton, but I can’t say I ever knew I had mutton so not from personal experience.
And I agree with Tulrose, I liked Mom’s lamb very much! 🙂 Too bad we don’t raise enough sheep to make it affordable. (Perhaps another advantage of living in NZ?)
BTW, down a total of 7 pounds from the disaster level. Now we start into serious weight loss. It’s coming off fast, because we’d been eating for two months out of control, and snacking.
Now we’re into weight that’s been there a while, and the body doesn’t give that up as easily. Because we’re operating on 3 levels with these prepared meals: portion control, low carb, AND low fat, plus no alcohol, and no snacks, we’ve undergone quite an abrupt change.
On the other hand, we haven’t been ravenous. We went to bed a little hungry last night, but you can do that if there’s going to be a reward in the morning, and there was. We’ve been snacking on a half cup of shredded mozzarella in mid evening, but we didn’t do that last night, and we still were ok.
We’re supposed to be on this two weeks, but we have two things to balance: I’m sure it’s not good to lose pounds at the rate of two a day over an extended period of time, though 3-4 days is ok. And secondly, we need to continue this portion control thing until our bodies have gotten the word that this is what there is and it shouldn’t expect a banana cream pie.
So—we’re drinking double the usual water, taking our vitamins and minerals, and trying to do something active during the day.
It’s not hurting that the doc upped my thyroid prescription by a third. A lazy thyroid makes it real hard to lose weight. So my body has gotten a double hit, the diet and the increased thyroid med. OTOH, Jane is losing at the same rate. Let’s hope!
I’m allergic to dust, pollen and mold inhalants. Usually, I sneeze. A lot. Four or five times a day at best, at worse four or five times at a time when my allergies are acting up. I recently got one of those “gummy” calcium supplements. Each gummy has 500 calcium and 1000 IU vitamin D. I also take a vitamin D supplement. You’re supposed to take two gummies once a day, but I’ve been taking four. And since I’ve started doing that, I’ve quit sneezing. Sometimes days go by without a sneeze. Per my calculation, I’m getting about 5000 IU of vitamin D, which is within the current recommended range of 4000 – 8000 IU. Taking same is said to reduce your risk for breast cancer, colon cancer, multiple sclerosis, and type 1 diabetes. — No mention is made of a benefit to allergies either of calcium or vitamin D. I’m not complaining, mind. If improvement in my allergies is a side effect of my increased vitamin D intake, I’ll not quibble with it.
As for losing weight, no kind of diet is going to do me any good until I start exercising. I am woefully a deconditioned sofa spud.
You could try marinating lamb in yogurt before grilling or broiling it. (The other version is marinating it in chopped onion, but that’s right out.)
Lol—yogurt works well for chicken. Dunno anything could get past the lamb-ness. But thank you. If I ever have to.
I do take vitamin D, magnesium (depleted by synthroid med, and I naturally run low anyway), folic acid, hyaluronic acid/chondroitin/MSM, fish oil, and a broad-spectrum vitamin. My endocrinologist says bear down on the D. Curious about the sneezing. But D is quite useful on a broad range. We just fill one of those ‘week-at-a-time’ pillboxes at the start of the week and try to be faithful about it.
Might have mentioned this before. OtherHalf is also alergic to onion (the whole family, garlic chives leeks etc). One thing that does help add an ‘onionness’ flavour back into dishes is asafoetida. It’s pretty potent so you only want to add a pinch or so!
There are so many items that have onion powder added to them that we end up cooking from scratch all the time.