Summer heat

As we head towards the end of August, we wait for the heat to stop, for coolness to arrive, morning early, evening late, to at last make the hot days manageable again.

Food is not really on our minds, coolness is, a perfect time for fruit, salads, ice creams.

And lots and lots of liquids, water being the best.

Drink enough water, cool, clear, crisp, clean. Chaudfontaine, Perrier, Spa, there are so many delicious waters to try. They all taste different, try some and find out.

 

I have been eating fruit, mostly.
It’s the best,
cool, sweet, simple.

Fruit requires no more work than a quick cut of the knife.
Eat raspberry, melon, watermelon, strawberries, grapes, apples, now apples are really crisp and cool.

Try something you don’t usually eat, passionfruit, papaya, dragon fruit or cactus fruit. I have, not just as they are, but chopped up and mixed in delicious bowls of fruit salad. They need nothing else.
Delicious new flavours, wonderful sweetness without the bane of refined sugars, which like cheese we know we shouldn’t really eat.

Fruit.

Quite possibly the healthiest food on the planet.

Glorious food shopping

groceries

I love shopping.
Specially shopping for food.

Today I ran around happily in three different supermarkets and the greengrocers looking at all the delicious wares on display.

Scouring the shelves for exotic fruit and heirloom vegetables, I also find unusual grains and nuts. For a moment I thought the supermarket was all out of tofu! That would have been a disaster!

I feel like a hunter gatherer, foraging for all that is good and healthy, fresh and interesting. Recipes shunt through my head in quick succession as I pick up prickly pears and orange blossom honey. Minneola oranges are carefully bagged up. I find beetroot so fresh the green stalks are still crisp and leafy, such freshness I simply could not resist. Passionfruit and limes fall into my basket along with little gem lettuces to turn over on the BBQ. Glorious aubergines, a rich, dark purple, are absolutely at their best now and so versatile.

I sort carefully through the Spanish garlic and fill a bag with shallots. My mouth starts to water. I can hear it frying gently in the pan.

I leave the supermarket clutching my swag closely to me. Smug at the huge haul and sporting a wide grin on my face. I know I have gone a bit mad, I have so much I can barely lift it all. I make a quick getaway to the next shop.

Saving the best for last I head for the greengrocers, it is my favourite shop. Here I spy out fresh coconut and black grapes. Thai basil, fresh ginger, turmeric, lemon grass, and a pineapple. The smoothies are going to be so delicious I just know I’ll make one the minute I get home.

Happy shopping everyone.

The diet game



Most of us have been on a diet at one time or another

I think I must consistently be on an overeating diet. I eat just what I like when I like. I do try to do meal planning because I have to shop for the food. However I never stick to it. I open the fridge every day and see what is there, from this point I choose what I feel like preparing today.

It’s always too much.

So the trick would be to create smaller meals, dish up smaller portions, use smaller plates. This, however only leads me to go back to the kitchen later and find something else to eat.

I appear to have no control over my appetite, I wonder if anybody has any control, at all, really.

I avoid the scales, and wear stretch jeans and long flowing tops to hide the bulging stomach. I hide my body, I am scared of wearing a bikini, and I hate that.
Yet I still overeat, nothing I read or decide or do changes the amount I eat, as if my body and all its organs are ganging up on me. Is this true? Am I really not in control? Is anyone at all in control?

We all should know by now that diets don’t work, fad diets, crash diets, calorie controlled diets, low carb diets, keto diets, vegan diets, even the no-diet diet, I could go on and on, and on.
It’s a trap, it’s a game, we cannot win, we cannot break even, but we can get out of the game.

I enjoy food too much to stop eating it, all of it, as much as I can manage to stuff down me as it’s all delicious. I am a good cook, my husband is a good cook, the restaurants we go to have excellent cooks, in fact they are such good cooks they are called chefs.

How to get out of the diet game? I believe it lies on the plane of enjoyment and going for the healthy options, which are always more delicious than any kind of junk food. Remember you are what you eat, so I’m made mostly but not only of vegetables, which sounds pretty cool. We can enjoy our food and not overeat if we stick to a few simple actions and decisions. All of which are hard to make as we are all creatures of habit.

I didn’t say it was easy, changing habits never is.

Change by doing all of the above, and above all savour every morsel, taste every mouthful, eat slowly letting the taste buds do the work they were meant to do. Restrain yourself from gorging no matter how delicious, change the habitual way you eat, where, when, how and what.

You’ll be lucky! It’s a game, but can you win? Is it an unchangeable  way of life? I can’t sustain this diet game, can you?

Welcome

Hello sweethearts, just wanted to welcome you to my blog.

Mostly about food.

I came by the title in my adventures as a health conscious foodie.
I found that I could be a perfect vegan for quite long periods of time; except for cheese.
It was very hard for me to stop eating cheese as I was addicted to it
Since being a perfect vegan required that I stop I found a way to do so.
However I have fallen from my perfect foodie pedestal often, because of cheese.

The thing is I really like my health, I also really love food.

All kinds of food.

I would prefer to be a perfect vegan at all times,
it’s not as if I could go straight for the carnivore diet, I don’t even like meat that much.
Mostly i’m really suspicious of meat (was that really run down on the road today?)

And I’m also a social coward so when someone dishes up platefulls of delicious traditional fodder they have spent hours preparing in hot steamy kitchens I feel obliged to try some before quietly mentioning I actually prefer vegetables.

Yes, vegetables.

The look of horror on their faces is sometimes quite surprising, then they always ask.
“Where do you get your protein from?”
They don’t even KNOW that proteins are made by plants, they really believe they all come from animals. How crazy is that! And they also can’t work out why I haven’t dropped dead yet from malnutrition and how come I am so strong? They find this all very suspicious. but that’s OK, the message gets across.

And yes, I still sometimes accidentally eat cheese and sometimes other bits of dead animals too.

It’s a big secret.

But please don’t tell, I wouldn’t want it to become a habit.

This site is mostly about my adventures with food, recipes, eating out, and general dieting.

Some nutritional science might be alluded to.

It is also about staying healthy and all the circumstantial evidence which might actually support how to do this.

I hope you enjoy!