Creamy chicken tortilla bake in an example of a MyPlate dinner with 1 cup mixed salad greens, a whole-wheat roll, and a cup of red grapes. I promise to work on improving my food photography skills in the future to better portray how delicious this really looked.

Alright folks, here it is. Late in the day but as promised, a delicious new protein-packed entree. I’ve seen several like this on the interwebs, but this is my own personal design. One serving of this recipe will count for 3 ounces of protein, a half a cup of vegetables, and a half-serving of dairy on the MyPlate meal plan. For this recipe you will require:

2 large boneless skinless chicken breasts

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 large sweet onion

1 large green bell pepper

1 medium jalapeno pepper

1 can (15 oz) low-sodium black beans (drained and rinsed)

1 medium tomato (chopped)

1 can heart-healthy cream of mushroom soup

Ground red pepper or cayenne pepper to taste

2 ounces whole corn tortilla chips

1 cup shredded low-fat cheese (Mexican blends work well here)

1/2 tablespoon dried or 1 tablespoon fresh chopped cilantro

Prep time: 20 minutes

Cook time: 50 minutes

1. Bake chicken breasts at 400 degrees for 10 minutes on each side, or until cooked through. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
2. While chicken is cooling, chop onion and peppers. Saute in olive oil over medium heat until soft.
3. Shred cooked chicken with a fork and place in a large bowl. Add sauteed vegetables, black beans, tomato, soup, and spices (some like it hot!). Stir well.
4. Crush the tortilla chips with your hands and spread half on the bottom of a 9″x13″ pan. Spread half of the chicken mixture on top of that, followed by half of the cheese.
5. Repeat layers one more time: chips, chicken mixture, cheese.
6. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and top with cilantro. Delicioso!

Recipe makes about 12 servings. Each serving contains 229 calories, 14 g carbohydrate, 5 g fat, 31 g protein, and 301 mg sodium. Nutrition info calculated using www.myfitnesspal.com.

Today is my third day on vacation while following my diet, and I thought I’d update you with a few tips I’ve accumulated:

• Look for fruit and vegetable sides. Enough restaurants offer these as options that it’s not actually that difficult to find them. I was thrilled to find an epically awesome fresh fruit bowl (actually fresh and flavorful, can you believe that?) at a cafe in Portland with lunch, and a salad with dried cranberries and soup for dinner in the airport. Yesterday we went to a restaurant that didn’t have fruit sides, so I bought a bottled 100% fruit smoothie to drink instead.

• Don’t look too hard. I was so focused on getting the seemingly elusive fruits and veggies that I ended up missing my protein goal for the first day by nearly half. Oops…overcompensated .
• Try to choose low-sodium options. Every time I’m teaching about a low-sodium diet, I tell patients to expect to blow their sodium goal out of the water when they eat out. I did – the recommendation is for 2,000 milligrams of sodium each day, but I topped out at 3,300 on my traveling day (yikes!). The best way to keep that under control is to go for fresh options and avoid things like processed foods, breads, lunch meats, and soups. My biggest mistake? Soup for both lunch and dinner.
• Pay attention. My body is really pretty good about telling me what it wants. I’m usually pretty good at ignoring it. My lunch portions, for example, were about the same as I might have eaten pre-MyPlate, but I got full part of the way through. I didn’t eat all the fruit and I gave my fiance part of my soup.
• Work it off. If you expect to creep past your calorie goal for the day, find some activity to do to compensate. On my flying day, I was about 150 calories over. I carted my backpack and carry-on for a brisk lap around the airport during my layover and closed the gap some. Yesterday, Abbie wanted to take me to a delicious Mexican restaurant (with gargantuan portions) and I expected to be quite a bit over my calorie goal. But after snowboarding for 4 hours and a 40-minute hike with a beautiful view of Lake Tahoe, my calorie tracker actually put me at 500 calories UNDER my goal because of the activity I had done. And check out these views…totally worth it, right?

You may or may not know that energy provided through our diets (measured in calories) comes primarily from three different substances called macronutrients. If you’re not sure what they are, I’ll give you a hint – check the post title! Carbs and proteins each provide 4 calories per gram and fats provide 9 calories per gram. I mentioned on Monday that the MyPlate diet was leaning me in a more carb-a-licious direction than I’m used to. Left to my own devices, I tend to focus more on protein in my diet. For healthy adults, the Dietary Guidelines recommend that 45-65% of our calories come from carbohydrate, 10-35% from protein, and 20-35% from fats. Here’s an analysis of what I ate Monday and Tuesday on the MyPlate diet meal plan:

My fat intake for yesterday crept up because I chose to use my discretionary calories on cookie dough ice cream (yum!), but you can see that I’m still within the ranges for everything based on the plan. That’s all well and good, but where do these percentages come from?

An excellent question. The ranges are based on the Dietary Reference Intakes (formerly known as the Recommended Dietary Allowances) created by the Institute of Medicine. The process for creating these is similar to that for creating the Dietary Guidelines: experts, committees, research, deliberation, gigantic reports, and finally, the guidelines themselves. The guidelines represent what the experts have determined to be a safe, healthful, and adequate intake of any given nutrient. Each macronutrient plays a different role in the body.

• Carbohydrates are anything that can be broken down into sugar in the body. Most of that sugar ends up in the form of glucose, which is processed to create energy.
• Proteins are often referred to as “building blocks”. They make up the cells of the body and act as transmitters and transporters. If dietary carbohydrates are restricted, they can also be used for energy.
• Fats provide a concentrated form of energy as well as components of hormones and other vital goodies. They also provide a medium for delivering fat-soluble vitamins to our tissues.

Since it is the first thing I noticed about my newly-adopted menu (and for the sake of not deluding myself to think you’d read 10,000 words on macronutrients), I am looking into the carbohydrate recommendations first. According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, the recommendations for carbohydrates are a range between the minimum amount of carbohydrate needed to provide fuel for the brain and maintain weight and a maximum recommended amount to prevent weight gain and decrease risk of chronic disease. It goes without saying that obesity and the loads of diseases associated with it are a significant problem in our country, so I looked further into the weight aspect of the recommendation.

We have all heard of low-fat, low-carb, or high-protein diets being promoted for weight loss. Just for context, the “low” and “high” qualifiers here are in reference to intakes that are outside of the recommended ranges I mentioned earlier. In the Dietary Guidelines 2010 Report, the authors wrote that “no optimal macronutrient proportion was identified for enhancing weight loss or weight maintenance” and that “there is strong and consistent evidence that when calorie intake is controlled, macronutrient proportion of the diet is not related to losing weight.” Two paragraphs later, however, they reported that twenty research studies showed no difference in macronutrient proportion for weight loss, thirteen showed that low-carbohydrate diets were more effective than either high-carbohydrate or low-fat diets, and six showed that high-protein diets were more effective than low-protein diets. So you might be having the same issue I am here – what is strong and consistent about the evidence? Nearly HALF of the total studies included are in disagreement with the conclusion. Now granted, not all research studies are created equally. The DGAC has a scoring system that rates the impact of the study based on the quality of the research, which may have led certain studies to be considered more relevant than others. Still though, I’ll have to look into the research articles myself a little more to see how it all really pans out.

In other news, I begin my traveling tomorrow to visit my friend Abbie in Lake Tahoe for a weekend snowboarding excursion. As I will be continuing my diet through the trip I informed her ahead of time of my situation. Fortunately, Abbie is an excellent sport and fully supportive of my diet plans. Thus, I will actually be flying all of my groceries to Lake Tahoe with me (thank goodness Southwest allows a free checked bag). I am sure at some point that I will end up straying from the meal plan, but I will still aim to eat MyPlate meals and meet my calorie goals each day. After all, adaptability is an essential life skill, is it not?