60 yrs and up

Chocolate Protein Pancakes

Makes eight large servings at 354 calories each

Batter is very fluffy and aerated when mixed so be prepared to bake immediately because it will go flat in about ten minutes. So…..Prepare two large sheet cake pans by lining with parchment paper Preheat oven to 350.

1/2 box Devils Food Cake mix

252 gr Kodiak Buttermilk Flapjack Mix

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp baking soda

40 gr cocoa powder

30 gr Powdered whey protein (I use Naked plain powdered cow whey)

Peanut butter powder

Mix dry ingredients well

add:

339 gr fat free cottage cheese (1.5 cups aka 3 servings)

2 single serve tubs plain applesauce

480 gr (aka 2 cups) skim milk OR liquid whey if you’re a home yogurt or cheese maker or know someone who is. you can be generous with this I often use 2.25 or 2.5 cups Liquid whey takes these next level and makes them rise well

276 gr liquid egg whites (aka 6 servings) Add this last!!!!!! The eggs reacting with the salt in the baking soda and powders is what makes your batter frothy

If you don’t like cottage cheese lumps in your pancakes (they mostly bake away), mix your liquid ingredients in a blender

Blend until most the lumps are gone, pour into prepared pans

I have a very fast and hot oven Mine are usually done in 15 minutes. You’ll need to check yours for doneness like you would a cake They’re thin, of course, so will finish faster than a cake

don’t let them sit in the baking pan for long they’re very moist, and the parchment paper will cause them to go soggy on the bottoms

I serve with Chocolate PBP mixed with hot water and spread on top, OR some well drained Greek yogurt/labneh spread, and De Ruiyter hagel (google it), and lately, a sprinkle of ground pecans I’m trying to use up

I bet these would be good with a little instant coffee n the batter 🧐

also works well with red velvet cake mix (remove the PBP, keep the cocoa), carrot cake mix (add shredded carrots, remove PBP and cocoa, make ya some labneh spread- it’s very good on carrot cake pancakes ) and even birthday cake sprinkle mix (not my favorite, the vanilla is too steohh n and too artificial .)

to make labneh, which I use as a low cal cream cheese substitute, drain regular low fat or fat free greek yogurt for a couple of days in cheesecloth or a yogurt strainer. This makes a very thick, spreadable “cream” cheese. Use the leftover whey that drains off to make your pancakes. If you don’t like the labneh, which is tangy like yogurt,, salvage it with herbs and use elsewhere.

labneh makes a banging substitute for cream cheese in a low cal cheesecake, too.

Ann, I’ve admired your beadwork in the past. You’re very talented. Your work seems like it would be very satisfying to do, but how long did it take you to work up to that level? 😱

These are pieces I’ve picked up traveling. I’d like to learn how to do it. Some are probably loomed and some freehand.

and just for fun, since it’s beads,

beautiful wooden boxes with seed bead inlay, from a particular area of Ukraine:

Thank you @springlering62, very kind of you to type that all out in great detail! So many good ideas it gives me too 😉

I am in British Columbia, 🇨🇦 (hence my moniker 😆).

for the record, I’m a hella lot better off now that I was at 225. I’ll happily, and informedly, take my chances , but…….sheesh. Just… sheesh!

LOL. My husband’s career was as a Statistics Guy.

I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve been lectured over “sample sizes” and data manipulation that came up on the evening news. “Wait a minute, bub!!!!! I’m not the one responsible for that story!”

Yet i got an earful of Statistics Guy ire.

Hey-o, I'll still eat chicken 🐔 lol 😋And use Stevia for that matter! But I do try to eat healthier and make most meals from scratch, using many fresh ingredients. But frozen too of course, and some canned (like tuna).

My goodness @springlering62, I am totally visualizing your HAD climbing your back - ouch!

I went for a very scenic drive and then walk on the weekend, it's called the Sea to Sky highway and we drove the part that follows the coast north from Vancouver. We ended up at a new indigenous development called Oceanfront, and the park with walkways is open. Super breezy but such an enjoyable walk!

That's me, zipping along! They have quite a few cool sculptures installed, but the mountains and the sea are hard to compete with. 😍

Hi! Im retired and gained a bunch of weight that I want to send packing, so here I am on My Fitness Pal and its community site. Looking forward to getting to know you all better and help encourage you on this journey we are taking together.

welcome to MFP @Debbi0 !!!

Things an awesome, supportive group of folks. Sincerely hope we’ll see you posting around here.

I would (could!) not have made it to goal without the support of posters here.

Welcome @Debbi0

What strategies are you going to use to send that excess packing?

With apologies to others . . . @springlering62 , I've been thinking about your bead weaving plans. I don't know where you are with that. I felt like I could add maybe a little more about where to start, if you haven't?

I'd put this in a spoiler to annoy others less, but I think we can't put photos in spoilers anymore. 🙄

I'm going to copy in one of the photos from your PP, which I hope will work.

If it doesn't work, it's the one with the multiple necklaces.

Something like the red one in the lower right would be very easy: It's basically just branched fringes coming off a string of beads. Something like that would be a simple starting point, and there are easy variations - some not as time-consuming - so you wouldn't have two of the same necklace, or you could go for a complementary bracelet or earrings (using purchased earring backs or if you have pierced ears, ear wires). "Beaded branched fringe" would be a search term.

The multi-colored one upper left is also technically fairly easy, I'd say . . . but quite time-consuming. The technique is one of the netted beadwork variations. This one looks similar to some of the African netted beadwork collars, though that's not the only region that's associated with netted work. The basic netted beadwork stitch can be used in a super-wide variety of projects with very different looks. It can also be a good starting point as a stitch to learn. There are simple projects all the way up to complicated embellishments, things similar to your necklace but also ways to make tubes, long tubular strings to hold a pendant, beaded beads, and more. It looks like the back neck strap of the multi-colored flower necklace in upper left may also be netted. I have Diane Fitzgerald's book "Netted Beadwork", which is good. "Netted beadwork" would be a search term.

The two in the center could be mostly loomed, maybe more likely so if Native American, but a similar look can be achieved with beaded square stitch. It's hard to tell which they are from a photo, easy to tell if one can see the thread path. Either way, fairly easy, but uniform bead size very much matters.

The other flower- and leaf-like pieces are more complicated to achieve, but doable. I just wouldn't start there, personally. They appear to use some of the above stitches, but also possibly brick stitch, peyote stitch, right angle weave, herringbone, etc.

A surprisingly easy and beautiful way to make a necklace or bracelet is some of the spiral stitches. (In my PP, the rope part of the 2nd & 3rd photos are spiral variations.) I'd absolutely follow a pattern exactly about bead brand/size to use, especially as a first project. Cellini spirals are particularly wowza, IMO. It's time consuming, and you have to be careful and meticulous - as I know you can - but they're not complex to do even though the end result appears so.

I don't have a finished one around, and the one I have isn't even close to top-end fabulous (was my first experiment, done when traveling, with limited bead choice), but to give you an idea, it's the one at the arrow in this photo I took to keep track of some UFOs. (For you non-crafters, that's UnFinished Objects.) Web search "beaded Cellini spiral" to see more glorious examples. Yes, weaving in thread-ends is tedious.

Side note, for any of this the right needle makes a big difference in ease of work. Some go best with a short hard beading needle, others with a long more flexible one.

OK, I'll stop now. I think. 😬

Apologies to the non-crafters.

I made ham biscuits and beans for dinner last night.

The biscuits were so dry they were inedible. I checked the box to make sure i still had the ingredient proportions of these things (which I’ve probably made hundreds of times) right in my head.

Bisquick has changed their ingredients and the recipe now includes oil. WTF?!!!

Sacrilege!!!!!!

WHO puts OIL in their biscuits? It’s one thing to cut butter in to scratch biscuits with a pastry cutter, like you’re supposed ta when you got time, but liquid OIL???!!!

That explains why I went through a period where my pancakes were so dreadful until I changed to Kodiak. And the last time I made a coffee cake, it was dry and crumbly.

What a debacle. It’s like New Coke all over again. The complaints on the Betty Crocker website are priceless.

It’s useless to complain to manufacturers.

Walden Farms did the same thing. We used to buy that stuff by the case from Vitacost. I’ve bought exactly one bottle since our big order with the new recipe came in. We gave two cases of the stuff away. We kind of hoped they’d changed it back, but I ended up throwing it away the other day. It was so disgusting, it sat open and subsequently unused in the fridge for six months before I got tired of looking at it.

For the record, someone I know strongly advised against the rollout of New Coke, but they did it anyway. The blind taste tests were positive but he tried to tell them it was going to be a fiasco, that Coke was pretty much religion, but there was a lot of ego involved.

Those were the days he’d come home, shake his head, collapse on the sofa with sympathetic dachshunds climbing all over him, and I’d hear him muttering under his breath. “It’s just colored sugar water. It’s just colored sugar water.”

Bisquick? Shame on you, Betty Crocker, ya modern tramp! Waaaaaaaah!!!!!!!

@bobbinalong

You can contact MFP support through the Help link that's on most pages, by emailing support@myfitnesspal.com, or by sending a direct message (DM) to one of the MFP Community support staff members, whose IDs are listed in this thread:

You can even @-tag them in posts here in the Community when that seems appropriate, though usually if someone's doing something bad in public in the Community it works better to use the Flag options right under the problem post. The spam and abuse flags are more like demerits, the Flag/report option is the one to use to get a human moderator to look at that Community post the soonest, though it can still take the mods a bit to get to it.

that's funny Ann. I am on day 2896 logging streak and maintenance since 2017 (which only means I lose and gain a lot less over time vs just going up and up and up).

there are a lot of friend requests from the same trolls over time. Since we don't really have a lot of interaction with friends I just delete them all unless it is someone from a forum I know who wants to chat. Most come from the same guy I think. over and over..

I am a bit grumpy today because one of my employees came to work with a cold on Monday. I did not know until a few hours in to the day unfortunately. I thought I had escaped but yesterday evening I started to get symptoms and today I am sure I have it. No fever. But it gets me kind of cranky that he did not mask up or stay home remote …. I thought we had learned something in 2020? 🤬🤬🤬 and it's not like I don't allow them to remote as need be or take sick time.

and this reminds me of a conversation I overheard in the dressing room at the gym this morning.

Several ladies discussing packages they’d mailed at the post office via priority mail. One got an email saying she was short on postage and needed to pay the difference, referencing her tracking number. She paid and then discovered it was a fraud.

One of the others piped up and said the same thing had happened to her sister, and her coworker, who actually worked for the PO and both thought it was legit.

These weren’t the oh we can’t deliver click here scams. These were women who had actually gone into the PO, used the machine or the line to mail parcels, and got scammed.

That was scary.

It might be that the site is hacked, but it's also possible that the path between your computer and their computer - which has hundreds or thousands of different machines and wires along the way - is being nefariously monitored to catch particular data packets with information that can be used to scam people.

The internet is less vulnerable in that way than it used to be, and encrypted transactions avoid it to some extent, but there are still vulnerabilities. That whole process can be automated/scripted so humans don't have to do any of the steps.

There's also the possibilities of things like keyloggers on our personal devices, but that approach would be lower yield for something that a relatively small percentage of people use, like the toll charge scam.

But yeah, lots of computers are infected, and many businesses aren't doing what needs to be done. Partly, doing everything that maybe should be done is very expensive, and gets more expensive all the time. In general, this stuff is like an arms race between the good people and the bad people. Sometimes the bad people are winning.