Saffron Trail

healthy vegetarian cooking

Nutrition

#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:

1 cup green moong sprouts – blanched

Handful of puffed rice

Finely chopped onions, tomato, coriander

Lemon juice

Coriander mint chutney

Tamarind date chutney (optional)

1 tbsp roasted peanuts

Lemon juice

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

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3 Comments

Comments

  1. Anonymous says: March 3, 2015 at 3:42 am

    Not the bestest follower around, but am going to try this March thingamajig. Does lassi with a tsp count as breakfast?

    Reply
  2. Anonymous says: March 3, 2015 at 5:37 am

    Did you buy the nolen gur solids and make a liquid out of it? much like how we make liquid jaggery?

    Reply
  3. Anonymous says: March 3, 2015 at 5:43 am

    Also would like to know more about the 5:2 diet – the way u follow it. I have read their book, watched the documentary, my Brother-in-law and his wife did it for the most of last year and saw good results.. I tried it for one day.. but I felt very weak on the fast day. If you could, can you please share a few days worth of your fast day meal plan? Thanks!

    Reply

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