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Pancakes that Make you Lose Weight?

New year, New Me! Crowds gather at a 5km local park run as part of a strategy to make 2018 a healthy year. 

It’s the New Year and judging by the turnout at the local Parkruns (weekly free 5 km volunteer organized running events), there is a large cohort of people who made 2018 the year get in shape. While exercise is a great start to shed some of those excess kilos that we gained over the holidays, it alone isn’t enough. We have all heard of the saying that abs are built in the kitchen, meaning that what we eat has a far greater bearing on our physique than exercise.

Many studies suggest that if we ate well, 80% of the job would be done.

 

If eating well was easy we would all look swimsuit models, unfortunately, the reality is that many of us are pretty fallible when it comes to diet. We all know what we should eat but sugar, refined carbs, fat and salt are all too damn delicious. Given the choice between pancakes and quinoa after a long stressful day at work – most of us would choose the former. While quinoa is the healthier alternative, cooked quinoa (that is not drenched sauces) is blander than cardboard – it is utterly tasteless.

A few days ago I wanted to make pancakes (anyone who knows me will be aware that pancakes are one of my favourite guilty pleasures – they were the first thing I learned to cook at the tender age of nine) but a part of me was unwilling to make them in the traditional manner.   I wanted to transform them into a snack that was both delicious and healthy. Continue reading “Pancakes that Make you Lose Weight?”

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Cake is Not the Best Vegetarian Food

If you are switching to vegetarian food for health reasons, make sure that you choose healthy food, as well as cutting out meat, and exercising.

Carrot Cake

Carrot cake, has healthy carrots, but does not a balanced meal make.Whatever your diet, remember to have a varied one, and to be conscious of what exactly makes up your food. A vegetarian diet should include a number of healthy foods, depending on what is available and what you like to eat, such as legumes, various leafy greens, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and some grains.

A varied vegetarian diet, with consciously chosen foods, is better than a vegetarian diet of just cake, for example.

-Graham

graham@thevegetarianman.com

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My First Steps as a Vegetarian

Your first steps as a vegetarian can be daunting, but with a few tips, it is much easier to follow.

Spinach quiche, thevegetarianman

Spinach quiche, thevegetarianmanVegetarian meals as a bachelor used to be quite haphazard. I decided to explore alternatives. This is the story of that journey.

I used to eat a lot of meat, perhaps twice what I should have, even if I followed the most generous of the mainstream eating guides. I started to read up on eating in a  healthier way. This lead me to learning more about the vegetarian diet and the reported benefits of it. I soon found that there seemed to be three key themes. These were:

The animal cruelty is easy enough to understand. We raise animals artificially, fattening them up, and then slaughter them to eat. This seems unfair and wrong. (But then, what about protein? I’ll cover that in the next post “What about protein“).

Okay, what about waste reduction? Yes, the inefficiency of the meat industry is well documented. The amount of grains needed to fatten up animals is excessive, with a lot of waste incurred when compared to us just eating the grains efficiently.

Lastly, and perhaps the deciding factor for me personally, was that eating a lot of meat has been found to increase the chances of one getting diseases, such as suffering from cancer or heart attacks.

After reading further into the matter, I found that the vegetarian diet was the best step I could take. I started as a week-day vegetarian until I was happy that I could be healthy on a vegetarian diet alone (see the article on Weekday vegetarians, flexitarians, ovo-lacto vegetarians, vegans and more).

So if you’re thinking of eating more vegetarian food, I would say, go for it, just remember to continue to eat healthy vegetarian food (I ate cake and poor food when I first started as a vegetarian, so avoid that by reading “Cake is not the best vegetarian food“).

 

-Graham

graham@thevegetarianman.com