#GetFitMarch – Yogurt, Half Full Meals and Bhel

It’s all about choosing the lesser evil

First thing in the morning, I had to make a choice – between 1 tsp sugar in my tea OR eating 2 biscuits with a sugarless tea. Biscuits are my weakness. Ginger biscuits are my HUGE weakness. I never go as ballistic as eating the whole pack in one go, but even eating 2-3 with my tea puts me on a trip to Guiltsville. I like my morning cup of tea or coffee with 1 sugar and the rest of the day, in case I have more, I’m okay with no sugar. So I had to decide if I would give up on the sugar or the biscuits, and I took a decision that I will skip the biscuits. Hopefully, I will stick to it for March.

30 minutes++

May be it is a sign of the universe acting to help me with my goals, a slot of 30 minutes freed up in my mornings beginning today and I grabbed those 30 minutes to do a walk-run, actually it was 35 minutes in all. I ran more than walked, compared to yesterday. happy sweats

Food diary

For breakfast, I had a bowl of fresh homemade yogurt, which for some strange reason, had given up on me in the last 3 months or so. I added a teaspoon of liquid nolen gur* for a bit of sweetness, so delicious! Next time, I shall reduce it to 1/2 tsp as it was quite sweet this time.

Read my tips on how to make yogurt at home. 

Usually, Mondays are supposed to be my fast days, which means I (try to) stick to 500 cals or less for the whole day, as a part of the 5-2 lifestyle I follow. Today I had to attend a family function where it would not augur well to leave without eating lunch, so I postponed my fast day to tomorrow and decided to have a normal eating day today. That’s the beauty of the 5-2 and the flexibility it offers. Okay, a lot of questions may be popping in your head now or you may be even get very ‘judgey’ thoughts like “HAW! She follows a fad diet!”. Deep breaths. Tomorrow being my fast day, I shall write a bit on this way of life and I’m open to your questions too – leave me a comment.

So that’s the ‘half full meals’ part of the post title. However, I am proud that I did not belt 4 courses of rice, triple helpings of chips and double portions of akkaravadisal (a kickass dessert). I took small portions of everything and ensured I didn’t come away feeling like a beached whale. Trust me, this requires a lot of special skills. And restraint. Especially when everything that wants to take a place on your banana leaf is more delicious than the previous item.

To balance out the somewhat heavy lunch, I had a Bhel and another cup of yogurt for dinner.

This bhel recipe totally stuck to my rules of #getfitMarch 🙂

RECIPE

How to make a Healthy Bhel:

#GetFitMarch - Yogurt, Half Full Meals and Bhel

It's all about choosing the lesser evil

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Ingredients Method Notes

Ingredients

  

• 1 cup moong green sprouts - blanched
• Handful puffed rice
• onions tomato coriander Finely chopped , ,
• Lemon juice
• Coriander mint chutney
• Tamarind date chutney (optional)
• 1 tbsp peanuts roasted
• Lemon juice

Method

 

1. Mix together.

Notes

Here, most of the puffed rice is replaced by moong/mung sprouts

Mung sprouts are very low in calories at just 31 calories per 1 cup (104 grams), while being an excellent source of vitamin C, K and fiber.

Trust me, it take a long while to chomp down one cup of blanched sprouts with other raw veggies. By the time you reach the end, you're almost tired of chewing. And hey, in case you were wondering if I missed including the sev and the puris to top the bhel, I didn't call it 'healthy' for nothing 😛

Yogurt, Dahi, Curds, Thayir

Trust me, if you want to get on a healthy eating spree, yogurt is your best friend. And I don't mean FroYo or gelato or some fancy-schmancy brand, but plain, simple, unflavoured, unsweetened, homemade yogurt. Eat a cup of it anytime you crave for something unhealthy, and the cravings will eventually vanish, and yogurt wins. 'Curd rice' is not a 'worldfamous' food in South India for nothing. It's also a superfood blessed with many nutritional qualities that I don't have to enumerate. You can google that 🙂

My biggest downside today is I did not reach my goal of 2 Litres water, I guess I would have had 1 Litre max, that too because I started my day with 250 ml water. Must work on this tomorrow

Resources:

Nolen gur is available in Bangalore on towness.com

(c) Nandita Iyer 2006-2015