The lazy dieter
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lemurcat12 wrote: »Sodium also affects weight loss. Higher sodium causes lots of water retention. If you were truthful with your recipe inputs, you might find out that those so called healthy meals you've been making, aren't so healthy after all. Give the recipe builder a shot.
Adding salt to recipes doesn't affect weight loss. It precludes losing water weight, maybe, but you don't continue to gain or mask all fat loss for some extended period of time just because you add salt to your home cooking.
I add salt, and have lost weight without problem, and I never log it.
I have no problem with either of these posts, but I wanted to just redirect the energy put into them away from sodium as a weight loss issue and more to sodium as a cardiac and hypertension issue.
All that glitters is not gold and all dietary concerns are not about the bathroom scale or the waistband of your pants.
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I don't use salt when I cook unless it's ground beef/turkey. On chicken, pork, steaks etc I use a variety of spices and I never log them. I guess I *could* but all the nutrition labels say is 0's all the down so I just save myself the trouble and leave it off. I guess that confirms the lazy thing though eh?0
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Totally the other way around for me. Processed food just isn't filling enough.0
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ShannonMpls wrote: »I am starting to get the sneaking suspicion that all those guys and gals that only eat fresh, non-processed home cooked food, really don't bother with keeping track of calories or nutritional content at all (or at best they are completely guessing most of the time).
I kinda get the sense that they are really just ballparking it. Like guessing that their caloric intake for the day was roughly somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 calories (uhm, give or take about 1,000 calories in error one way or the other).
This made me laugh. A lot.
I cook dinner 99% of the time. From scratch. The fact that the barcode scanner on the MFP app's recipe builder app is currently missing doesn't matter to me, because the vast majority of what I cook with doesn't have a barcode to scan. It's primarily meat (from a farmer, so no labels), produce, grains (usually bulk bin purchases, so again no label). I weigh every ingredient that goes into a recipe and record it.
This is not the definition of "ballparking".
And, for what it's worth, I lost more 130 pounds in 15 months. I've been maintaining it - very easily - for more than two years. I'd say my method is pretty accurate, don't you think?
Awesome! I wish this board had a "Like" button.
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lemurcat12 wrote: »
Oh, and I'm not angry. I just disagree with the premise...
I hope that wasn't directed at me. When I look at the inkblot that is the internet forum post I see butterflies not bats.
Emotion doesn't sway my opinion or influence my thoughts in that way.
And when you're posting to me, don't worry about being overly polite instead of intellectually honest. I know that idea is a radical departure from how the rest of the interwebs works, but I'm crazy like that.
Anyway, I hear you.
Thanks for posting.0 -
I cook, on average, 18 meals a week. Lean Cuisine is a vacation for me. And I LIKE the taste of some of them.0
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For searing, cast iron pans are awesome. Sometimes I will sear steaks without a drop of additional oil, just get the cast iron pan hot, put the meat on, wait a few minutes until it naturally releases from the bottom of the pan, and flip to see the beautiful searing.
OK, confession time. I have never really used cast iron pans. I have heard that you need to break them in for years before they reach their full potential.
If you are really being honest that a brand new, never before used cast iron pan will sear meat well without a drop of butter or lard or oil or fat or shortening or anything else... well, I'm going to pick one up tonight and give it a try.0 -
They just add stuff I guess? Or sauces I don't want or whatnot. Rather make my own for less calories. Plus this way I don't depend on the honesty of companies with their labeling (can be off by 20%, plus things never weigh what the package says they weigh). So, if I'm going to weigh processed food anyway, might as well use fresh stuff, lol (I still use some processed stuff like bread, yogurts, pasta, crackers etc).0 -
Well personally I don't usually add salt unless the recipe calls for it. I use other herbs and don't miss salt. I eat enough sausage and the like to get enough sodium in my normal diet. Last night I made chicken with butter, onion, and rosemary as the only seasoning. Very much to my tastes.
But if you want to eat frozen meals do so. However, there are a ton of reasons to cook your own including fresher food, can cook exactly to your tastes, the fun of cooking, etc. There are no downsides to home cooking that can't be overcome if it's a priority to you.0 -
For searing, cast iron pans are awesome. Sometimes I will sear steaks without a drop of additional oil, just get the cast iron pan hot, put the meat on, wait a few minutes until it naturally releases from the bottom of the pan, and flip to see the beautiful searing.
OK, confession time. I have never really used cast iron pans. I have heard that you need to break them in for years before they reach their full potential.
If you are really being honest that a brand new, never before used cast iron pan will sear meat well without a drop of butter or lard or oil or fat or shortening or anything else... well, I'm going to pick one up tonight and give it a try.
We have a 10yo one. My husband swears by it. I hate the thing, pain to clean and I can't just let it dry naturally or it rusts.
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lemurcat12 wrote: »Nobody who advocates home cooking has even addressed the sodium issue at all except to say that they ignore it or don't care about sodium. Yet the only who person who gave a concrete example about what they imagined was bad about processed food, incorrectly thought that it had too much sodium in it.
This seems counterintuitive to me. While you can get processed food that's low sodium, the easiest way to control your sodium if it matters to you is by avoiding processed food and just paying attention to how you prepare it.
I don't care about sodium (because my levels are pretty low anyway, due to eating mostly whole foods) so I don't track that dash of salt when cooking, but if you do care about it cooking yourself and, well, not adding salt would seem an easy way to manage. There are other spices or herbs you can use for flavor that wouldn't pose a health issue. Or log the salt; seems simple.
I'm NOT saying it's bad for you to rely on packaged food if you really prefer to do so (more on that in response to your other post). I'm just saying there's nothing about MFP or logging that should discourage home cooking or using whole foods.
Ahh, one of the sensible ones. OK, I'll switch gears and explain what I mean without trying to be silly..
I agree that you can certainly better control your sodium intake by preparing your own food. But, my position was not that people could do it, but rather that they do NOT do it--or rather that the people who make healthy processed foods do a better job of it more often. I had that prejudiced opinion because I am conscious about sodium intake and yet I still find it impossible to keep an accurate measurement much of the time. So, I simply presented the dilemma and asked what other people did to monitor these things. The most frequent response was that everybody else just ignores it altogether.
Example of one real world problem: how do measure the amount of sodium you use to season meat when only a small portion of it actually sticks to the meat? It isn't insignificant when you realize that a dash of salt is about 360 mg of sodium and seasoning a peace of meat takes one heck of alot more than a dash. Think about that for a minute.
So, do you simply stop seasoning all your food with salt when you cook? That is a reasonable theoretical answer, but I would be strongly suspicious that any home cook who told me they did that were either outright lying just to prove a point on an internet diet forum or just really lousy cooks.
I am not as closed minded as I sound. I suppose if enough people adamantly insisted that they don't season their food when they cook, and gave concrete examples of suitable alternatives (like Mrs. Dash brand seasonings for example), and that it WORKED well and their food doesn't taste like decomposing shoe leather, well... OK, I'd be motivated to try home cooking that way instead of just swiping barcodes.
That changes matters.
Most of us are concerned with calories and many of us are concerned with macros, so that is what we track. Those of us who are concerned about micros aren't concerned about ALL micros, so we track what's important to us and ignore the rest - something that food companies do too. They put on the label what's required by law, not every nutrient out there.
So. You're concerned about salt. Specifically how to account for what sticks to the meat. Question: how do you salt your meat? I use a salt grinder set on fine (finer than table salt). I grind what I want directly on the meat. The salt pretty much instantly dissolves on the meat. There's maybe a couple of bits of salt dust that fall off. More would come off as meat juices and rendered fat wash it away, but there's no way to measure that and the amount would be a tiny fraction of what was added.
One solution for you, do similar but grind the salt and weigh first. You'd need a specialized scale to weigh such small amounts. A kitchen scale wouldn't cut it.
Second solution (assuming sodium is the problem), don't use sodium-based salt. Use potassium chloride instead. ETA: might be a bad taste, I wouldn't know.
Third solution - use salt-free herb mixes. I use several, but not for seasoning meat before browning (ick, burned herbs). Baking, roasting, etc, yes. Penzey's has a good selection.
Fourth solution - keep eating processed food, but if you enjoy cooking you're going to miss it.0 -
geneticsteacher wrote: »I cook, on average, 18 meals a week. Lean Cuisine is a vacation for me. And I LIKE the taste of some of them.
Yes. I agree.
The heresy I spoke was not about how they are a nice vacation from preparing your own food from scratch and not even that some of them are NOT horrible tasting. The heresy was that I have actually paid attention to the nutritional content on the packaging and had the sheer audacity to challenge the dogma of conventional wisdom.
I think the old "TV Dinners" of the 1960's and 1970's were evil concoctions of slow roasted death. I'm not talking about the taste since that was before my time. I'm talking about the nutritional content.
By the time microwave ovens and nutritionally sound healthy frozen food was being packaged for mass consumption in the 1990's and beyond, it was too late. Every nutritionist, personal trainer, and internet know it all had already heard the gospel about the evils of "TV dinners". They drank the cool aid and are true believers. Their religion allows no converts.
I think we have moved beyond the frozen pizza and TV dinners of the 1960's; unfortunately we've moved firmly into the twilight zone of urban legend and internet rumor that all processed food is bad and (even more bizarrely) the notion that any untrained home cook can and DOES make food that is healthier and better tasting than anything you can buy pre-made in a grocery store.
Give me enough seasoning, fat, butter, oil, wine, etc and I can make a steaming pile of cow dung taste delicious, but take away the fat, the butter, the salt, the seasonings and all the rest, and it is damn difficult to make something taste better than what I can get out of a box in the frozen food isle of my local supermarket. Maybe not impossible, but DAMN difficult.
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All that glitters is not gold and all dietary concerns are not about the bathroom scale or the waistband of your pants.
Agreed, but in the absence of actual health issues (and my tests are all fine and always have been), I don't believe that adding a little salt when cooking is unhealthy. Especially if one drinks plenty of water and gets enough potassium. It's one of those things (like overconcern about saturated fats, IMO, or the endless fears about sugar) that people worry too much about. If one has a generally good diet and doesn't artificially increase sodium by eating lots of canned or other kinds of processed foods that contain it (not all processed foods do), I don't think it's worth worrying about.
If I did, I'd log my salt, though.
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What are your thoughts. What really got TAPF angry enough to respond? What is it about responding with thoughtful, if not a bit facetious, responses to your posts instead of mindlessly agreeing with TAPF made you the most angry??
Your smugness.
Example one:
You really have never heard of searing meat in a hot pan? Oh well, for those of you who don't know what searing meat is, here's an article to check it out:
(sidenote: I successfully sear meat regularly with a tablespoon of butter or oil. Call Hogwart's, for I am performing magic.)0 -
I do get lazy too, but usually that means I'm eating the same thing over and over, which makes for easier logging.
This, I'll still do home-cooked meals but there is a lot of repeats so that it's easy to plan and track. I do tend to eat a lot of canned soup when dieting too which helps with satiety and because I'm lazy.
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Give me enough seasoning, fat, butter, oil, wine, etc and I can make a steaming pile of cow dung taste delicious, but take away the fat, the butter, the salt, the seasonings and all the rest, and it is damn difficult to make something taste better than what I can get out of a box in the frozen food isle of my local supermarket. Maybe not impossible, but DAMN difficult.
This is purely subjective, so I'm not going to argue with you about it, but I totally disagree. I mostly use salt (not a lot), pepper, various herbs, garlic, and onion as seasoning. I used to cook a lot with wine and butter, but now I rarely have wine on hand and save butter for when it really matters (use it maybe once a week), and I typically use spray olive oil or coconut oil at most. The calories added from all this is minimal, and we've discussed salt. To my taste, my home cooking, even without all the fat, etc., tastes tons better than any boxed meal I've tried. In particular, the meat and veggies which tend to be the central feature of my meals are both tastier and more substantial than what one gets in boxed meals. You asked Francl if it was psychological, and for me it's not--my meals are larger by volume than a Lean Cuisine, because I have more veggies and more protein, and are probably somewhat plainer. Relatively plain home cooked meals are tasty to me, though--I've never understood why people needed to add butter to roasted chicken (which is common) as the chicken tastes so good with just its natural fat (of which it has plenty, of course).0 -
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ShannonMpls wrote: »
(sidenote: I successfully sear meat regularly with a tablespoon of butter or oil. Call Hogwart's, for I am performing magic.)
And when you used that tablespoon of butter your meal now has about 50% of the calories and 100% of the fat of my processed dinner while the pan was still empty. Now that is magical.
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To answer your question about cast iron:
I cook most of the time with regular or enameled cast iron. If I am searing meat and do not plan to deglaze, I use the naked cast iron. These are inexpensive pans by Lodge that you purchase pre-seasoned. They worked from day one and have only gotten better with use. I absolutely can and do sear meat with small amounts of fat - one tablespoon or less.
Enameled cast iron (mine are Le Creuset) doesn't have quite the same nonstick properties, but I still prefer to use them to sear a cut of meat if I deglaze. And I still use only a tablespoon of fat, if that.
There is a learning curve as you learn to use both of these. I ruined a whole lot of meatballs when I first started using Le Creuset - to sear a meatball in enameled cast iron takes a lot of oil; naked cast iron is a better choice for me.
And speaking generally of fat: I decrease the oil in almost any dish I cook. For example, I made this last week:
http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Maqloubeh-Upside-Down-Rice-With-Lamb
It calls for more than a cup of oil! I made it with 4 tablespoons (the dish serves 8). It was about 440 delicious calories per serving.0
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