Cheese, meat, sugar, and chocolate.
Are they magic foods or simply creating dietary mayhem?
We KNOW these edibles are fattening and loaded with calories. And when mixed together, they can be deadly to healthy diets.
Take sugar and chocolate, for example. Fat, sugar, and chocolate, when presented together as they often are – in desserts, candy, and pastries - present the perfect recipe for manufacturing and maintaining body fat stores. Without much trouble, they can stand solidly in the way of successful weight loss.
Watch this informative and enlightening video by Dr. Neal Barnard, author of Breaking the Food Seduction, to find out just why certain foods are so darn irresistible if not downright addicting.
In addition, Dr. Barnard provides the easy solution: a plant-strong diet, and a clean break with foods high in excito-toxins for 21 Days – enough time to set new patterns of taste.
Opiate activity in "innocent" food?
Caso-morphines in your milk?
Dopamine and endorphin cascades?
Sheesh, no wonder we hanker after these foods so much! Dr. Barnard explains why. Ignorance may be bliss, but it really doesn't help us in the long run, does it?
Filed under Blog, Diet & Nutrition, Plant-strong diet, Weight Loss by 
Yes, as you can imagine or may have discovered, eating "out" can be challenging when you want to eat healthy. It seems most restaurant menus are designed to thwart our body shaping and health goals!
Fat, butter, cheese and meat are everywhere and packed into everything possible. Of course to make food delicious. Is it any wonder Julia Child's cookbooks are such big sellers? Put gobs of butter in anything and it will taste good!
Case in point.
Yesterday, we loaded our bikes onto the car rack and drove to the valley to bike through the sunny wetlands. The birds of Northern California are just about gone from this stop on their migratory routes but there was plenty of heron, duck, and spring bird action. And temperatures were in the mid-60s, heaven!
We stopped for lunch at Casa Lupe, THE Mex restaurant in town. Looking at the menu, it was a healthy-choices dietary disaster. But I know I can put together something pretty good at Mex restaurants, as long as they have a pot of beans – without lard! 
No problem! Here's what I did.
I simply ordered:
- a big bowl of the non-fried beans
- a stack of soft, fresh corn tortillas
- a garden salad without dressing
- extra bowls of salsa (for dressing and for my crafted tacos!)
- lime and lemon wedges
Then I ate to my heart's content along with a perfectly chilled Dos X cerveza.
Filed under Blog, Diet & Nutrition, Plant-strong diet, Vegetarian by
"Love your body" lasagna?
To qualify as a true "love your body lasagna", it would need to:
- be delicious
- be chock full of phyto – nutrition (that means color, plants, fiber, and all their friends)
- be low on fat
In essence, it would have to have it all.
Look no further, here's the recipe that meets all of these requirements. As it so happens, it was my Valentine's Dinner recipe and had my honey swooning.
Talk about a recipe that fires on all cylinders!
This lasagna recipe is tightly based on the Raise-the-Roof Sweet Potato – Vegetable Lasagna from one of my new favorite cookbooks, Rip Esselstyn's Engine 2 Diet. I say tightly-based as I only needed to make a few minor adjustments to the recipe due to what I had on hand; those adjustments are noted below with an asterisk*.
As a person who usually passes on recipes with more than 5 ingredients, this was surprisingly easy to put together and made enough for multiple meals. This recipe is free of all animal products and has no added fats or oils. And it has enough vegetables to easily top off your recommended daily veggie minimum.
Raise-the-Roof Sweet Potato – Vegetable Lasagna
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 head of garlic, peeled and pressed (*I just crushed 6 cloves out of a jar)
- 8 oz. mushrooms, sliced
- 1 head broccoli, chopped
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 2 red bell peppers, seeded and chopped (*3 roasted red peppers from a jar, chopped)
- 1 can corn, rinsed and drained (*2 cups frozen corn)
- 1 package firm tofu (*I only had 1 cup on hand and actually you could leave this out, no problem)
- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (*eliminated)
- 1 tsp. oregano
- 1 tsp. basil
- 1 tsp rosemary
- 2 jars pasta sauce (* 1 1/2 jars of fat-free Trader Joe's marinara sauce)
- 2 boxes whole grain lasagna noodles (*1 box was plenty)
- 16 oz. frozen spinach, coked and mashed (*1/2 bag fresh baby spinach)
- 2 sweet potatoes, cooked and mashed (*yams)
- 6 roma tomatoes, sliced thin (*didn't have on hand, and eliminated – there was plenty of tomato with the sauce though in summer I'd put 'em on)
- 1 cup raw cashews, ground
Steam saute (that means in a little bit of water) the onion and garlic on high heat for 3 minutes in a pan. Add the mushrooms and the rest of the veggies, pop the lid on the pot and let them finish cooking to tender-crisp. (* I added 3 Tablespoons of Bragg's aminos and a pinch of sea salt for flavor). Drain the tofu and crumble it into the vegetable mixture. Mix it all together with the spices.
Assembly
Cover the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch baking dish with a layer of sauce. Add a layer of noodles, and cover the noodles with more sauce. Spread the veggie mixture next. Cover with another layer of noodles and another dressing of sauce. Add the spinach, and cover with the mashed sweet potatoes.
You can add another layer of noodles and sauce, but I stopped here because my pan was overflowing!
I also assembled this several hours before cooking, which made it unnecessary to cook the noodles first. By the time I got around to cooking, they had hydrated from the sauce and veggies and were perfectly done upon cooking.
Cover the lasagna with a layer of thinly sliced roma tomatoes.
Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes. Then sprinkle it with the ground cashews, and return to the oven for 15 minutes. Let it sit 10 – 15 minutes before serving – if you can stand to wait!
Filed under Blog, Diet & Nutrition, Plant-strong diet, Vegetarian by
Recent Comments