I made them with whole wheat sandwich rolls – they were delicious!
Recipe feature time! By far my husband’s favorite recipe from the Heart Healthy meal plan so far, these tasty sandwiches hail from a recipe from Eating Well. My husband said even other firefighters at work were enviously ogling this veggie-laden sammich.
The sandwiches are pretty high in sodium (likely one reason they are so delectable), so I was a little surprised to see them on the Heart Healthy meal plan, though the plan did keep me low enough for the rest of the day to keep me under my daily sodium recommendation of 2400 mg per day.
Heart-Healthy Tip: Use half the fish sauce and replace it with apple cider vinegar in the marinade to cut the sodium by 353 mg per serving.
The meat is flavorful and tender, the veggies are crisp and zesty. Give ’em a try – the full recipe is here!
One sandwich has 373 calories, 9 g fat, 8 g fiber, 858 mg sodium (505 mg with the heart-healthy modification), and 2 g saturated fat.
I know you are all just absolutely dying to know how I’ve been eating (note the heavy sarcasm font), so I thought I’d grace you with some sneak peeks of my heart healthy meals/snacks and the list of recommendations I’ll be following for the next 3 weeks.
Two days in to my Heart Healthy meal plan, my meals have been mostly enjoyable. My least favorites have been breakfast – too boring, too carby, and too lacking in protein. I’m starving by lunch, even with my morning snack. I have discovered two delicious recipes pictured above (Vietnamese Steak Sandwich, top left, and Warm Quinoa Salad with Edamame, bottom right)!
You can find the full page of recommendations from the American Heart Association here, but the quick gist is paraphrased below:
Use up at least as many calories as you take in (I’m aiming to hit the activity recommendations of 150 minutes of physical activity per week).
Eat a variety of foods from all the food groups.
Eat fresh, frozen, or canned vegetables and fruits without added sauces, salt, or sugars.
Choose fiber-rich whole grains for most grain servings.
Eat a variety of fish at least twice a week.
Eat poultry and fish without the skin. If you eat meat, choose the leanest cuts and prepare them without added saturated or trans fats.
Reduce saturated fat to no more than 5-6 percent of total calories (in my case, 10-12 grams per day).
Cut back on foods and beverages with added sugars.
Choose foods with less sodium and prepare foods with little or no salt. To lower blood pressure, eat less than 2400 mg sodium per day. Reducing even farther to 1500 mg per day may have an even greater effect on blood pressure.
Drink alcohol in moderation. For women, limit to one drink per day and for men, two. And yes, those drinks have standard serving sizes.
As with any diet recommendations these guidelines have been a subject of hot debate in nutrition, but that’s a topic for another day.
Now here’s your turn to help me out: pretend you have just had a heart attack (I know, scary – but the good news? You made it!) and you are presented with the recommendations above to lower your risk of it happening again. What are your initial thoughts? Overwhelming? Easy? What the heck does any of that mean? I want to hear it.
If you had to follow these recommendations, what would your questions be? What would you want from your dietitian to make you feel confident in taking care of your heart? Commence to comment in 3, 2, 1…
Welcome back – to you, reader, and to me. The absence has been long and so full of change and craziness. My life changes include a journey from being a bachelorette and part-time RD living in a travel trailer in my brother’s front yard to being a full-time RD and full-time wife with 2 stepkids. The transition made keeping up the blog just a lee-tle unrealistic, so it had to take a back-burner for a time, but I’m ready to get back into learning more about what my patients face when they make a commitment to improve health, prevent and manage chronic conditions, and change their lives.
I’ll be honest – at first I was intimidated about trying to follow a diet with a family in tow:
“Will I have to make separate food for myself? What if my family doesn’t like any of the food? Will it be too expensive to feed everyone on these diets? Ehh….I don’t think doing that blog really makes sense with a family.”
Satisfied with my very justified self-care decision, I went about my life but something kept nagging at me until I let it hit me – my patients have families. My patients have picky kids (and spouses). They don’t get the luxury of saying “Ehh…that’s not important right now.” They have to choose – figure out a way to take care of yourself with a family or simply don’t take care of yourself.
My hypocrisy got the better of me. So will I be eating separate things from my family? Sometimes. Will they dislike some of the food? Probably. But we’re going on this journey because that’s being healthy in real life – challenges and all.
So this time I’m back. For real. I promise.
And to assure you of my commitment, I grocery shopped for my next diet today. The diet I have chosen to use as I re-start is….
The Heart Healthy Diet recommended by the American Heart Association! The spoils of my venture are shown below:
Note that the pile is MUCH bigger than when I was cooking just for me – and this doesn’t even include some extras I bought for the fam.
Or the meat. Doesn’t that seem like a lot of meat? And yes, I smooshed a salmon burger on the way home. Sad.
The meal plan I’m using is courtesy of EatingWell.com and can be found here.
UPDATE: Eating Well has since changed this meal plan. If you click the link, you will see their new Heart Healthy meal plan.
As you may (or may not) have noticed, Dietitian on a Diet has been on a bit of a hiatus. This is bound to happen from time to time, as the project is a method of self-development that lands below a number of other things on my life priority list. As I’ve been rather busy with wedding planning, new job-ing, and enjoying some gorgeous weather, the blog has taken a backseat for a bit. I realize that this is probably depressing news, as I am certain you have all been waiting around with collectively bated breath waiting for the next riveting edition of my research and snarky opinions, but I’m afraid it is a reality of life that you shall all have to deal with. Please note my extreme sarcasm here.
In the meantime, however, I have been focusing my research and attention on a different area of nutrition than I have been working in until this point – sports nutrition. My new job is on a military base providing nutrition education, counseling, and intervention for our servicemen and women. Consequently, I have immersed myself into my exercise physiology and sports nutrition books and I am dusting off the cobwebs in those portions of my brain. I’m looking forward to working in a place that allows me to utilize my exercise physiology background as well as nutrition!
In other news, my fiance and I started a pretty intense exercise program which would have skewed data I might have gleaned from any diet experiment I might have tried, so I decided to let my body get used to that before changing my eating habits again. It’s likely the blogging, or at least the dieting, will be scarce until after the wedding and honeymoon are over in a couple of months, but if you’re interested I’d be happy to post about whatever I’m learning along the way! I’ll keep it nutrition-related though…I won’t blog about “10 Ways to Have a Wedding Reception Your Guests will Always Remember.” I promise.
This post has nothing to do with nutrition but I hope it will make you laugh. Today was my last day at my current job(s) and I’m feeling a little nostalgic. I thought I’d do something a little different today and share some of the craziest, sweetest, most hilarious and oh-my-goodness-worthy quotes from my beloved patients. Enjoy!
1. Patient: Where do you get your cream of rice? I’ve checked all the stores. I looked at Sears, Home Depot, and Staples and none of them have cream of rice.
2. Patient: You have a fiance, don’t you?
Me (wearing gloves – my engagement ring is not visible): Well yeah, actually, but why do you say fiance instead of boyfriend or husband?
Patient: You have that ‘engaged’ look. I can tell.
3. Me: Would you like me to take your blood pressure?
Elderly male patient (with strong German accent): Vhy yes…do you vant to sqveeze me?
Me: Umm….nope.
4. Patient (to another dietitian): Thank goodness it’s you. That other dietitian (me) was so scrawny.
5. Elderly female patient: Your eyes are so pretty. I don’t know why you wear your hair over your eyes like that…it covers up the pretty part of your face.
6. Me: Well, that’s all of my questions. We’ll check on you tomorrow and see how you’re doing. Have a nice day!
Elderly male patient: Don’t leave! You’re pretty!
7. Me: We have several types of nutritional supplements if you’d like to try any of those to help increase your calorie intake.
Older male patient: Do you have Boost?
Me: We sure do!
Older male patient: I love Boost! What flavors do you have?
Me: We have chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.
Older male patient: Strawberry! I love strawberry!
Me: Great! Would you like me to have one sent with each of your meals?
Older male patient (takes my hand, looks at me very seriously): I love you.
8. Patient: Are you skipping school to be here?
Me: I’m sorry?
Patient: You look like you’re fourteen!
Me (to myself): Make mental note not to wear braids to work. Ever. Again.
9. Me (working on teaching some diabetes education): The next thing on the nutrition label you need to look at is Total Carbohydrates.
Patient: Yes. Carbohydrates. Got it. How much money do you make?
Me: Why do you ask that?
Patient: Because I want to know. How much do you make?
Me: Well, I’d rather not say, actually. Is that alright?
Patient: Okay. How many hours do you work?
Me (teasing): Well, that depends on how long it takes to get through your handout.
Patient: How many hours do you work each week?
Me: Well, it is different every week, but these aren’t really relevant topics. Is it alright if we go back to looking at the nutrition label?
Patient: Okay. So how much money do you make?
aaaaand my personal favorite…
10. Older male patient: You look so pretty with your hair up. You should wear your hair up every day. If you were my girlfriend and you wore your hair up I’d say, “Da**, you’re a gorgeous wench!
Normally I love to use legumes (beans, peas, lentils, peanuts) as fiber and protein sources in my diet, so I got to wondering why it is that legumes are not allowed on the paleo diet. Honestly, I have no clue how they were introduced into our diets in the first place and thus no clue whether the hunter-gatherers would have had any or not. So I set off to do some research and found an article entitled “Why No Grains and Legumes?” on a paleo blog (eureka!).
So the author was claiming that legumes are out on paleo for a variety of reasons, one of them being their lectin content. I had never heard tell of such thing so of course, further research ensued. Come to find out lectins are proteins that hang out on the outside of plant and animal cells and bind carbohydrates. They just so happen to be found on legumes, particularly beans, as well as wheat, potatoes, and some other foods. It seems that one of their purposes is to prevent insects and critters from eating the plants. The lectins are actually toxic and they cause hemagglutination – which is a fancy word for “they make blood cells stick together.” When animals are fed raw bean diets, they develop lesions, fatty livers, and digestive/absorptive problems among other appetizing maladies. Other researchers have suggested possible (though not proven, as far as I can tell) links between lectins and diseases such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. Now I’m thinking, “What the heck? Why have I never heard about this before?”
Well most likely that is because according to the Cornell University agricultural website, wet cooking methods including soaking coupled with adequate boiling are sufficient to eliminate the toxicity of most of the lectins and render them safe for human consumption. Several paleo blogs I found, however, disagree that cooking eliminates all of the harmful potential of these little proteins.
What I find interesting (aside from all the disagreement) is that it seems these foods are not being eliminated from the paleo diet because the hunter-gatherers didn’t eat them, but rather because of these lectins. Since that is what I understand to be the premise of the paleo diet in the first place, the elimination of foods such as beans and potatoes seems beyond the scope of the diet itself. In fact, according to the Wikipedia page “Bean” (I know, we’re using big-time science here), beans have been around since 7th millenium BC. On top of that, the “Paleolithic” Wikipedia page says that we suspect humans in the Paleolithic era ate a substantial amount of tubers. Potatoes are tubers. So, I’m not exactly sure how the “paleo diet” crew latched on to the elimination of potatoes and legumes, but nonetheless, lectins have proven to be an interesting topic of research. I tend to agree with the following statement, courtesy of my fiance: “I’m pretty sure the cavemen ate whatever they could get their hands on. If they found some good eats they probably didn’t pass them up because of their lectin content.”
I gotta tell ya, this is the kind of stuff that makes being in the health field so difficult. Everybody is always saying something different from the next and unfortunately even well-done research is not perfect. We have to do the best we can with what we have and press on to the next topic. If you know anything more about lectins that you’d like to share, be sure to let me know in the comments!
This was by far the best paleo meal I ate in all of my three weeks on Paleo. Get the recipe here. I added cubed yams to the crock pot too, which was an excellent decision. I would (and will!) eat these any day of the week!
Fudgy Paleo Ice Cream
I adapted this one from a Vanilla Bean Paleo Ice Cream recipe I found here. And then I ate it. Lots of it. For days. This ice cream was so good!
Ingredients:
2 cans full fat coconut milk
1/2 cup raw honey
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup baking cocoa
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Freeze bowl of ice cream maker for up to 12 hours.
Whisk together all ingredients in a medium saucepan. Turn on burner to medium-low heat.
Whisk occasionally until mixture lightly simmers. Do not allow to boil.
Remove from heat and pour into a bowl. Refrigerate for about 2 hours until cool.
Once cool, process according to ice cream maker instructions.
Diet culture is determined to tell you that you have to be miserable to be healthy.
That couldn’t be more wrong.
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