Looking for Food Lovers on a Diet!

One of my friends was cutting for a body building competition and he ate the exact same meal 3x a day for months. Unseasoned boneless skinless chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, and rice.

I find it absolutely baffling that some folks don't mind eating the same meals again and again. Props to them, but I could never do it.

I love experimenting in the kitchen, there are so many wonderful flavours to explore. I've recently been really enjoying reading through The Food Lab and trying Kenji's recipes!

I don't keep a diary anymore, but I love to cook. Nutritious can also be very delicious, but I think a lot of people think losing weight has to be this painful thing and that if something tastes good, it must be "bad"...that and I think the art of cooking has been lost to a great many people...

I enjoy bland flavours quite a lot more than richer “tastier” ones, personally

I'm not vegetarian, but I frequently eat meals that have no meat, and in many of my meals that do contain meat, the meat isn't really the focal point (i.e., you could often eliminate it and still have what I would consider a full meal). For example, tonight I logged about an ounce of dry salame with my dinner, but it was just what I was nibbling on to tide me over until I was able to actually fix dinner, which was black-eyed peas, white rice, and collard greens (leftovers from earlier in the week) with hot sauce and two of the batch of corn muffins I made this evening. I added some chiles, cheddar, and bacon to the corn muffin batter, but you could leave out the bacon.

How about hot corn salsa in a corn tortilla with slow cooker beans.

How about a peanut butter and honey banana sandwich on wheat or whole gain bread.

I can go on forever

I cook nearly every day, and if not then I've cooked for two days the day before

My way of cooking works like this: Meat is in the freezer in mostly equal portions (living along, etc). So I want to make a dish with mince and bulgur. I know the mince is roughly 100gr. I have a rough idea what else I put in and I want to stay within 550-650kcal. Another ingredient is feta, high in calories. So I decide to take 70gr of Bulgur instead of 80, cook and log all my ingredients at the same time. Feta comes last, so I can portion it such that it fits within my calorie budget, thus take a bit more or less.

Thus:
Meat calories is fixed due to what I've portioned and put in freezer
Rice, bulgur, potato, pasta, etc is fairly flexible, usually around 70-80gr dry.
Add oil, veggies and spices and log while cooking
If another calorie high ingredient is added then make it work.

For me logging and making it work doesn't take a lot of time.

i love to cook (and bake when someone is around i can give it away to lol). most of my stuff i do in the recipe builder so you see what it is but not a breakdown of ingredients. often the calorie counts are slightly higher in the diary than what i actually made, because i make lower calorie substitutions when i can or the serving size is smaller and i just dont care to recreate the recipe myself, though sometimes i will. i just consider it a slight 'padding' lol

i usually take leftovers of some variety for lunch.

ive lost 103 pounds so it works for me lol

I don't worry too much about people who do the second meals all the time. If it's working for them, that's great. Personally though, I can't. Hubby and I are both food people, and I love cooking. So we're doing more of an "eat what we want, but less" method. We keep breakfasts and snacks in check, but dinner is adventure time (with leftovers going to lunch).

We're not vegetarian, but I am trying to do one "ethnic" dish (we live in Houston, so culturally we have a huge variety in cuisine), one vegetable heavy dish (usually vegetarian, leftovers from our Hello fresh days when I tried to get vegetarian meals), and a free-for-all meal (whatever else sounds good).

Feel free to add me or just hit me up if you see a meal I ate and want the recipe. I have a growing Pinterest board of recipes to try this year.