Author: jnni41

bean dip is supposed to taste good

Posted on by jnni41

It was a high of 80s with lows in the 70s in Australia today… or tomorrow, or yesterday (not really clear on time zone phrasing from where I live on the other side of the world and in a different hemisphere). Makes total sense that you’d have a frozen smoothie for breakfast. Here? Cold. Snow. I’m craving a warm bowl of oatmeal or something heated post workout/post shower. Well… we are in the positive digits degree-wise so that’s pretty warm I suppose. Anyway, breakfast is a raspberry and nut butter smoothie. Pretty solid. My raspberries didn’t have a lot of sweetness so my smoothie was pretty tart. I added lemon to make my fruit smoothie “bright” as my boyfriend tells me. My smoothie was red – and I left it in the blender container so the picture was pretty depressing. Not much to see when it’s all blended up anyway, and I’m not a pro so I didn’t take a cool layered shot pre-blend. The blending is too fun. And I was really hungry. Priorities.

A.M snack is this greens and white bean and yogurt dip with cucumbers. Problem: I don’t love cucumbers. I don’t hate them. But I definitely don’t love them, and eating them raw is on the “um, this isn’t awesome” side of eating. I also really hate yogurt. Of course this is unsweetened coconut yogurt, so it is tangy and tastes like there is some moldy yeasty bacteria growing inside a coconut scented plastic cup with a slight mouthfeel of slimy. Blah. So when I mixed greens (yum) and white beans (yum) and yogurt (blah) and eat it with raw cucumbers (ugh)…. this was not my jam. I tried it. My mom would be proud of me.

So, I took the nutritional value of the snack (128 cal, 9.8g fat, 6g carb, 2.9g protein) and the ingredients I still had that I wanted to use (basically just white beans) and found this gem: Rosemary White Bean Dip from Salt and Lavender. Natasha had me at “tasty recipes designed for busy people” – respect. I’ll peruse her site more in about 8 weeks, see ya then. I used herbs de provence because I’m not sure we even have just rosemary (not that I looked for it that hard) and it turned out just great. AND clocking in at 116 calories, 7g fat, 9g carb, 3.5g protein for 1/8th of the recipe, I felt this was a pretty good substitution. I ate it with the cucumber (and a couple of blue corn tortilla chips, I mean, I shoveled more snow today I DESERVE IT). I would have liked to have thrown some greens but alas, I am out of greens until I hit up a grocery store.

Lunch was fresh… not a typical food combination for me but I thought it was tasty and filling. It’s a peach, fennel, carrot, avocado, spinach salad. So peaches aren’t in season for the US right now (this happens relatively frequently with their meal plans…) so I used frozen. Totally fine, they were cooked anyway. I didn’t have buckwheat so I used quinoa – I think there are a lot of substitutions you could have done with the grain part of this. I don’t typically eat a ton of fennel, but to me it’s got a really mild flavor and some good crunch so it was nice to mix that in. If you’re super sensitive to that licorice taste, fennel is probably not your best bet here, but I don’t like licorice and I don’t find it overwhelming. Also. Licorice? What a word. Liquor ice. Lick her ish.

P.M. snack was another vegan ball 😉

Dinner is leftover beets and sweets from yesterday. Still delicious.

Total: 1284 calories, 54.8g protein, 75.8g fat, 78.2g carbs

That fat still seems high to me if I’m being honest.

Side note: while I was searching for why the fat content is so high for the vegan plan (can’t speak toward the other plans), I found a document that says if you do five f45 workouts per week, you should eat 350 more calories! And if you do 7 or more workouts, you should eat 500+ calories! Bless up. It is nice to know that what I’ve been doing IS TOTALLY ONE HUNDRED PERCENT endorsed by the cult meal plan people. Extra foods for me today: some blue corn tortilla chips with my bean dip (150 cal), an orange (90 cal), a sheet of nori (5 cal – but like, really good B12 vitamins and other stuff), banana chips (300 cal)… and I will probably have some more cucumber and bean dip (116 cal) because I have league late at night and I’ll need my energy.

Ok, not much to say about why there is so much fat here. The point of the first two weeks is to “eliminate inflammatory foods, reduce sugar cravings, improve digestion, increase energy levels, enhance sleep quality.” I really notice, perhaps because of the fat and the room that the veggies take up in my stomach, that I’m not really craving a ton of snacks or anything, like I feel pretty full and content. But the thing I miss the most is salty crunchy foods. Hence the chips (they’re a forbidden snack but shhh).

By the way, caffeine is included in the “forbidden inflammatory ingredient” list so… everyone in my AM work out class has been grumpy this week (but trying really hard not to be) 😉

i did not have a salad for breakfast

Posted on by jnni41

First meal of the day was supposed to be a raw keto style salad. No thank you. I substituted yesterday’s breakfast for today, forgot to take a picture, but overall liked it. It was a tofu scramble with greens, nooch, and tomatoes. I ended up adding a few things that were in my fridge that I didn’t want to go bad: a green onion, some cilantro. I might add chili powder next time. Pics next time, this meal will be in the rotation again.

Midmorning I told my boyfriend “hey, I made some really tasty vegan balls” which is a totally ridiculous thing to say but he rolled with it (ball jokes are up his alley and also yes this pun is intentional). You’re going to have to exercise some restraint for this snack – they look small, like seriously too small to be a snack, but they are dense and good. I was skeptical of using almond flour since that’s not typically a staple for me, but don’t sub it out. You need the texture and mealiness of it. It was actually great. Worth it. Buy a small amount from the bulk section of the grocery if they have that section. Wish all grocery stores had it.

vegan balls

Lunch was leftovers from yesterday. Sweet potato fritters, greens, and avocado. I had the fritters cold today instead of fresh out of the oven yesterday, but they were just as good. Strong turmeric showing again. Orange hands will be a new, weird fashion statement.

sweet potato fritters

Early afternoon I had to switch around a snack (not really a dealbreaker on the meal plan – sometimes you just won’t like something and you’ll just sub out a similar meal, snack for snack, dinner for dinner, etc. In this case, I forgot to prep the white bean and spinach dip so I’ll just do it tonight and have it tomorrow). I just had a yellow bell pepper and some peanut butter. To be honest, they recommended 1 tablespoon of peanut butter for basically a whole bell pepper. What a joke. I had two tablespoons and it tasted great. Not a combination I would have thought to put together, but I think I’d do it again in the future. I don’t think you need a picture of bell peppers and peanut butter. My knife skills are pretty good though.

Dinner was the best – I skipped ahead a couple of days because I already had the ingredients and I was looking forward to roasting stuff. Roasted beets and sweet potatoes with greens and seeds. Do yourself a favor. Put cinnamon on your roasted beets and sweets. Game changer. Lots of textures in this one. I would make this again. Pro tip, I separated the ingredients in the picture, but don’t do this IRL. Put the seeds mashed into the avocado so you don’t lose them when you mix everything together. Mine are seriously stuck to the sides of the bowl. Since this is a calorie limiting plan, you bet your bottom I will be grabbing a spoon and scooping every last morsel out. I also subbed herbs de provence instead of rosemary because that was the first seasoning I saw and I didn’t want to go spice-drawer-diving for the pure rosemary. I don’t feel too bad about it. If Australia calls because I’ve been too cavalier with their perfect and healthy meal plan I will a) be unhappy because the call is probably not going to be favorable for me time-zone-wise, b) ask them if Corey can really do squat jumps for 45 second likes he makes us do, c) tell them about the snow that’s here and ask them if they wouldn’t mind putting some warm breakfasts in the queue because having a frozen smoothie when it’s -30 outside is kind of cruel, and d) see if they’ll sponsor me to actually do this thing right and to stop using the word cult.

beetroot, sweet potato, avocado bowl

Total: 1305 cal, 52g protein, 66.5g fat, 55.1g carb

Because of my substitutions, I think the protein is a little low and the fat is a little high, but this is something I’ll keep an eye on. And if you read the last post, you know I supplement my meals because 1300 is not enough calories for my level of activity. I added a cup of green grapes (100ish calories), 1/2 cup blueberries (uh… maybe 50 calories), extra PB (90ish calories) and banana chips (150 calories). I shoveled a million miles of driveway today because of all the snow, so the banana chips were well deserved, thank you.

roasted vegetables

Posted on by jnni41

A thought occurred to me while I was roasting vegetables in the oven: I should blog about the f45 vegan plan. I get these moments of inspiration every couple of months or so where I think it would be just a fantastic idea to get my obviously important thoughts out in the world, and then I remember that sometimes I read blogs and I’m like “wow, I don’t care about this at all” and the blog-desire hides away until another tedious moment in my life causes me to think too much.

If you’re unfamiliar, f45 is a cult, sorry, it’s a cult, yikes, it’s a functional fitness cultcenter that I have been using for almost a year now. The programming is awesome – every day something new, alternating days of cardio and weight-training, awesome and encouraging community, started in Australia, has a robotic man named Corey who demos the workouts on a screen to remind you what you do at each station and you stare at him for 45 minutes trying not to think about how much your body hurts anything except your form and your breath… and four times a year they, the fitness leaders, encourage you to do an 8-week challenge.

The challenge is a total body transformation (their words, though I lost 4% body fat in 4 weeks so yeah, maybe they’re right)- you eat right, you workout to sweat, you take a magnesium supplement (more on this later), you get sleep, you drink lots of water… you know, be healthy and intentional about it. And there’s different phases of the eating to like, try to make you forget about sugar or cravings, or make you lose water weight, or crank up that muscle building foods, I forget. I mean, I just follow the plan because it’s ya know, one less thing to think about in my day.

This year they have a vegan option, so I figured I would share my non-professional photos and opinions about it. The plan is for 1300 calories a day. Yeah no. A workout at f45 for me burns in the 550-650 range for cardio and 400-500 range for weight-lifting… so that’s a serious deficit. I’m not looking to lose weight anyway. I aim to net 1500 calories a day, so yeah, I supplement a snack or make a slightly larger portion of food. That’s not the point of this. Most vegans want to know: is it tasty? Is it pricey? Will my s.o./kids be like “wow, this is vegan it’s so good!” << hahaha made myself giggle with that one.

Ok so. Boring part out of the way. That was background. My title has nothing to do with this post but I’m not one to look in the past. I should have put this at the beginning (but see previous sentence): I am going to log some pictures and some thoughts about the f45 vegan meal plan to convince you to join the cult give vegan food a chance since it’s really just food and not scary at all. And it can be delicious. And it can be affordable. And honestly, f45 needs to update their photos because sometimes they’ll have mushrooms in a picture and I’m re-reading the ingredient list like 20 times and there are no mushrooms in the dish (false advertising, smh). I can help them out if they want to send me a camera and tell me what to do with the camera.

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this picture came with the blog