OCT '09-MWL GROUP-"ON PLAN, PLANNING TO STAY THAT WAY!&

[Letha..]

My entire day of eating was steel cut oats - 8 am, yellow split pea soup - noon, kate soup - 4 PM, Paul's two cup veggie soup - 8PM. I think that this would be great on nutrition. I was full all day, and it was a great way to eat! I may repeat it tomorrow. What do you think? Take care, LauraA

Hey LauraA, Your menu sounds fabulous to me. I love steel cut oats and soups. I ate tons of both of them in the past year with great results.

Debbie, You can find the recipe for Paul's Two Cup Soup Here.
http://mwlfood.wordpress.com/2009/03/03 ... ggie-soup/

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I'm doing well today. On plan and planning to stay that way. Hope everyone is having a great weekend.
Letha

[LauraA]

LET'S FINISH STRONG-
THERE ARE 75 DAYS LEFT IN 2009!

Hi everyone, 1/4 of our days are gone out of the hundred left that we started with. This year is moving right along - I hope that we all are moving with it, in exercise, weight loss, and/or staying on plan!
I'm going to repeat the soup and oats meals today. I do think that Paul's Two Cup Soup is pretty perfect nutritionally. I've never done the cron o meter, but I'll try to find it, and check the soup out. I now use 2 bags of the frozen mixed greens in the soup instead of one. I'm going to try to figure out how much of the huge quantity that I make is a single serving. I know that it wasn't weigh in day, but I stepped on the scale this morning, and i was down a pound. That's pretty good since I didn't weigh in on Thursday fearing that I was up. I'll do my official weigh in on Wednesday this week, because I'm leaving town on Thursday, and won't have my scale. Take care, LauraA

[Letha..]

Laura,
I really like the cron o meter for analyzing individual foods, like the rice, lettuce, and apple thing I’m doing now. But for analyzing the nutrition and calorie content of recipe, I like spark people’s recipe counter better. Occasionally you have to add a custom ingredient, like rice milk, but I find it easy to use and I like the format of the finished product. It will calculate a recipe for anyone, but if you register (free) and log in, it will save your recipes so you can look back at them later. That’s nice if you’re going to go to the trouble to type them in and everything.

http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

Playing with the serving sizes on a recipe is actually one of the fun things about the recipe calculator. If I make this 12 servings then its 160 calories and 2 grams of protein, but if I make it 8 servings, then its 230 calories and 3.5 grams of protein. Very interesting.
Letha

[toadfood]

LauraA, your day of soups sounds delicious. You're inspiring me -- maybe I will make some chipotle pumpkin-black bean soup today.

[MaryW]

Soups are great! I read somewhere recently (a Barnard book maybe? I read too much) that soups were more filling than food and water. Meaning that if you ate a soup with potatoes and veggies, it would be more filling and satisfying than steamed veggies, a baked potato and a glass of water.

LauraA--Congrats on your success with the scale! I was down this morning too. I'm moving into unchartered territory! Well, unchartered since I was a teenager.

Now that the weather is getting colder, I really want soups more. I just couldn't stomach them in the summer. I think I'm going to make some Caribbean stew in the crock pot today. I also need to try out that pressure cooker I found.

toadfood, do you have a recipe for your pumpkin soup that you can post? It sounds great! And I have a lot of canned pumpkin!

[amyla51]

Hi all and happy Sunday!
I decided to post a new Avatar-- a picture from this summer. I want a visual record of what I looked (past tense) like at my heaviest and will never look like again! This was the weekend of my son's wedding in August, and while I can't take back the way I looked then, I can make sure I am around for lots of anniversaries!
I also have to share my food find yesterday: Whole Foods! I know this is not news to most of you, but the nearest Whole Foods is an hour away from our house, so it was a trek. My DH and I were in heaven! Such great produce and so many different veggies! And then a vegan bar at the end to have lunch. Well, even though its a bit of a drive, it is worth, if we go every couple of weeks. The prices were comparable to our local grocery, and much better quality. Trader Joe's is also right down the road from this place, but I didn't find much last time I was there.
Have a great day.
Amy

[Letha..]

What is generally considered a serving size? For instance I bought a couple of mcd right cup that wear oatmeal and other grains. Now cooked it said it made two servings, 1 cup total cooked. I ate the whole cup and that means i ate 2 servings and i could of eaten two cups if I had them and that would of been 4 servings. Like your soups you are talking about, what is considered a serving? And am I supposed to eat a serving? I know while making rice the serving size is a 1/2 cup cooked, that doesnt seem like alot to me. Letha how much rice (servings) do you eat at each meal? I would guess by looking at you plate it is about 1 cup, but looking at a picture it is hard to estimate.

Checking in. On plan. Going shopping today. My husband is getting wood this morning and I am going to costco and the grocery store later, so I can walk tomarrow instead of shoppping. I am trying to find stuff for the kids to eat as snacks instead of crackers. I want to make them some granola, but I dont know how, does anyone ehre? My 4 yr old is always hungry and while I dont mind the crackers, it seems like I need to give her better stuff that is more calorie dense, all day long all I hear is "I'm hungry". So I want to find other stuff.

Have a great Sunday.

Deb

Hi Debbie,
Let’s say you occasionally want to check the nutrient content of your meals for the day. If you’ve made a soup then you’ll want to use some kind of recipe calculator to calculate the nutrients. For some recipes, you might be planning to eat the whole thing in one day. Then you don’t need to bother with serving size. But if you plan to share the soup with family or freeze some of it then you’ll have to determine how many servings the soup makes in order to determine the number of servings in a recipe. The way you do that is pretty arbitrary. I generally put the entire pot of soup into the sink to save on spills. Then I get out a soup ladle and a stack of 4 cup Pyrex bowls and start filling them up. I try to make the bowls pretty even. When the pot is empty I count the number of bowls on the counter and that’s how many servings the recipe makes. Here is a photo with eight 4 cup Pyrex bowls filled with Paul’s Two Cup Soup.



Regarding the Mary’s mini I’m doing now. I’m not measuring the rice on my plate, but based on how much rice I’m making every day, I’d estimate that I’m having about 1 cup of cooked rice, 4 times per day.

Regarding kids, I understand most kids will drink green smoothies and it’s a wonderful way to sneak some leafy green veggies into their diet. I’m not sure why you want to feed the 4 year old calorie dense foods. If they can get in the habit of snacking on fresh fruits and veggies now it will serve them well for the rest of their lives. Do the kids like rye crackers? If you look at McDougall’s list of approved packaged foods you’ll find several types of crackers that have no added fat. Also on the approved list is frozen fruit bars, fruit sorbet, rice cakes and Lara Bars.
Best Wishes,
Letha

[Letha..]

Hi all and happy Sunday!
I decided to post a new Avatar-- a picture from this summer.

My DH and I were in heaven! Such great produce and so many different veggies!

Amy

Hi Amy,
I like your new avatar. Isn’t it fun to fill the kitchen with beautiful healthy fruits and veggies?
Letha

[LauraA]

Laura,
I really like the cron o meter for analyzing individual foods, like the rice, lettuce, and apple thing I’m doing now. But for analyzing the nutrition and calorie content of recipe, I like spark people’s recipe counter better. Occasionally you have to add a custom ingredient, like rice milk, but I find it easy to use and I like the format of the finished product. It will calculate a recipe for anyone, but if you register (free) and log in, it will save your recipes so you can look back at them later. That’s nice if you’re going to go to the trouble to type them in and everything.

http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

Playing with the serving sizes on a recipe is actually one of the fun things about the recipe calculator. If I make this 12 servings then its 160 calories and 2 grams of protein, but if I make it 8 servings, then its 230 calories and 3.5 grams of protein. Very interesting.
Letha

Thanks so much for the recipe calculator website! That made my task so much easier. I've never used the cronometer, and it didn't look easy for what I wanted to do. I measured out everything when I made the soup today, and I came up with 16 servings of soup at 227.6 calories each, 9 g protein, 10.3 g fiber. I used mostly the recipe as is, but did change 2 cups of each veggie to 2.5 cups ( I make them overflowing), also added 2 bags of the mixed greens (2 pounds) , and 1.5 tbsp of brown sugar (rather than 1). I think that 230 calories is a great meal! I don't do this soup over rice, because there are quite a few starchy veggies already in it. Again, thanks Letha. I think that I'll also calculate my steel cut oats exactly as I make them. Oh, by the way - I was surprised to see that one serving had 20.8 percent of daily needed calcium. So much for needing dairy!! Take care, LauraA

[cowgirrlup]

On plan, but....its apparently one of those...Oh my gosh I am HUNGRY days for me.

For breakfast I ate a huge bowl of hash browns cooked with peppers and onions and then I poured salsa on top of it..it was very yummy in place of my usual oatmeal.

I am nice and comfortably full now, so I guess it did the trick.

WE can do this.

[LauraA]

Hi again - my steel cut oatmeal breakfast plus fruit comes to 341.5 calories, 10.1 g protein. I eat half of the fruit that I counted as a mid morning snack. This plus three bowls of soup, looks like a pretty good day of eating for me. My question, where would we get vitamin E? Mine comes to under 10 percent! Main sources seems to be nuts, seeds etc. One source is leafy greens, and I had a good bit of that in my soup. Where do some of you get vitamin E? Thanks, LauraA

I first measured my oatmeal using a banana as the fruit, I recalculated using frozen blueberries, and it comes to 243.2 calories instead of 342.5. I might still need a fruit mid morning, because I often eat the other half banana mid morning. Vitamin E still quite low.

[LauraA]

Hi again - my steel cut oatmeal breakfast plus fruit comes to 341.5 calories, 10.1 g protein. I eat half of the fruit that I counted as a mid morning snack. This plus three bowls of soup, looks like a pretty good day of eating for me. My question, where would we get vitamin E? Mine comes to under 10 percent! Main sources seems to be nuts, seeds etc. One source is leafy greens, and I had a good bit of that in my soup. Where do some of you get vitamin E? Thanks, LauraA

What are you considering 1 serving? your soup makes 16 servings, is that 1 cup or what. I get how make come up with the amount of servings, but how do you come up with what is considered a serving size? Like in conventional thinking, a deck of cards is considered a serving size of meat protien, I know that doesnt apply to us, but that seems to be what I am confused aobut.


Deb

Hi Deb - I was trying to find out what nutrients I was eating, so I calculated exactly how much soup I eat as a serving. I have soup bowls with sort of a rim around the top, so it is the same each time (it's about 2 cups). I didn't do it quite like Letha did it, because I store my soup in bigger pyrex dishes. Each of my pyrex dishes holds three of my servings of the soup, and I fill 5 dishes, with one soup bowl of soup left over. The three pyrex dishes would be 15, plus the soup bowl, and i get 16. I plan to calculate this for most of the recipes that I make real often (there aren't too many of them, and I'll always count my servings, so they may not apply to anyone else, unless you just divide the soup into 16 servings, and eat that! When I do the sloppy lentils, my serving of lentils will be smaller, but I eat that over brown rice, so I'll calculate the amount of rice that I use also. I've been putting off this calculation for awhile, but it was quite easy with the program that Letha mentioned today. I'm still wondering about other people's source of vitamin E. Take care, LauraA

[f1jim]

Be concerned about eating till you are full. And make sure it's ffod that is on plan. You will satisfy your requirements easily. Remember, vitamin E is one of those vitamins shown to have troublesome numbers when taken as a supplement instead of getting it in real food.
I've always been amused by seeing in charts, how much vitamin E is in stuff like corn oil, with no mention that corn oil comes from corn! Like somehow we have a better chance of getting it with margarine or mazola than we do with real, goshdarn corn!
f1jim

[LauraA]

Hi again - my steel cut oatmeal breakfast plus fruit comes to 341.5 calories, 10.1 g protein. I eat half of the fruit that I counted as a mid morning snack. This plus three bowls of soup, looks like a pretty good day of eating for me. My question, where would we get vitamin E? Mine comes to under 10 percent! Main sources seems to be nuts, seeds etc. One source is leafy greens, and I had a good bit of that in my soup. Where do some of you get vitamin E? Thanks, LauraA

What are you considering 1 serving? your soup makes 16 servings, is that 1 cup or what. I get how make come up with the amount of servings, but how do you come up with what is considered a serving size? Like in conventional thinking, a deck of cards is considered a serving size of meat protien, I know that doesnt apply to us, but that seems to be what I am confused aobut.


Deb

Oh, also Debbie - here's what you might mean. I put the whole pot of soup into the recipe in the program, then I say that it makes 16 servings (after I've measured). This then gives me the information for my own serving size. Take care, LauraA

[LauraA]

Thank you LauraA. the two cup bowl = 1 serving is what I was wondering.

My biggest reason for asking this is because I have no concept of what is a serving size. The way I have been eating is kinda like this: 2-3 cups rice or potatoes and 3-4 cups of some kind of veg per meal, 3-4 times perday. Now of course that is not everyday, but it is most days. That is alot of food, period. And I am generally still not full. And as a consequence, I am not losing wieght. I seem to have no concept for what is a realisitic serving size, that is why I am trying so hard to get the answer. Thats all.


Thanks
Deb

Well, I'm glad that you got an answer. Aren't you nursing? If so, you'll be eating a good bit more than others, and especially than me (I'm 63). You might want to figure out some calories per things that you like, in serving sizes that you are now doing, and you can then adjust - keeping in mind the nursing. I don't mean to really count calories, but just to get a general idea. For example, I've been eating this soup for about a year. If it turned out to be way more calories than I think that I should have, then I would have tried to cut my portion size. It looks ok for me, though, the way that I'm doing it now. Good luck! Take care, Laura
PS I think that health and nutrition during nursing is more important than quick weight loss.