Pro-Sports

As part of my efforts to encourage my son to increase his repertoire of healthy foods, I have started buying more easy-to-consume, healthy foods like bananas, avocados, and yoghurt.  Unfortunately, Gavin balked at the bananas (who would have figured I would have a kid that would dislike one of the most kid-friendly foods around?) and avocados.  The yoghurt has been sort of successful when I tell him it’s “ice cream”.

Since they say that flavours of the foods nursing Mums eat tend to come out in their milk, I have been running a little experiment on Gavin.  Over the last week or so, I have been consuming more of these foods myself.  I’ve been blending avocado “milkshakes”, banana smoothies and yoghurt oatmeal puree for breakfast.

My MIL observed me doing this one morning and said to my SIL2 that she should do the same thing to help her lose weight.  Although my original intention was to increase the flavours of healthy foods in breastmilk in the hopes that Gavin would familiarise with them and start eating them on his own, I’ve discovered that the beneficial side effect was that I have lost weight!  At least I think the cause of the weightloss is related to the fact that I started having these smoothies for breakfast because everything else has remained the same - level of activity during the day and consumption of food during lunch and dinner.  Admitedly, this is hardly an exact science since I am not in the habit of monitoring my activity levels or food consumption.

However, if you are looking for a relatively easy way to lose weight, you can give this a go.  I must warn you, though, this doesn’t appeal to everyone’s tastebuds.  Personally, I really like stuff like this so I love it.  My SIL2, on the other hand, took one look at what I was making and decided that she really wasn’t that desperate to lose weight.

I’ve got to add that I’m a person that doesn’t really believe in diets.  I believe that if you want to lose weight by altering your food consumption, then it has to be a sustainable change.  That is, if you can’t imagine yourself eating the sort of food you plan to diet on for the rest of your life, then don’t even bother trying that diet.  It is not for you.  Look for another diet plan instead.

Although I can’t guarantee that you’ll lose weight following this plan, at the very worst, you’ll be a little bit healthier because the smoothies make for a pretty healthy breakfast. 

So this is what you have to do:

Instead of eating your usual breakfast, make yourself a smoothie.  These are the recipes for the smoothies I’ve been drinking/eating (sometimes the consistency is quite thick so it’s almost like eating oatmeal).

Banana Smoothie

• 1 Banana (I’ve been using the large bananas, not the small, local, finger bananas)
• 5 Tbsp Ski Divine Yoghurt (yeah, this is the good stuff, not the diet d’lite stuff)
• Add enough milk to bring it up to about 350ml

Blend everything together and pour it out into your cup for breakfast.

Oatmeal Smoothie

For a thicker shake, you can add 4 heaped tablespoons of rolled oats.  When I ran out of bananas, I started adding the oats plus another 4 heaped tablespoons of Nestum original flavour cereal.  This makes a pretty thick consistency, so if you don’t like it too thick, then add more milk to thin it out so it’s drinkable.

I generally find that after this thickshake, I’m usually too full to eat anything else.  It also keeps me pretty content up to lunch time and sometimes even up to a late lunch.

For the rest of the day, just eat what you would normally eat.

Popularity: 35% [?]

So the hubby and I - or rather, just I - keep a small stash of chocolate in the bedroom. Usually it’s a 250g block of Cadbury Chocolate. Now I can finish that block all by myself in just three days (well, I could finish it in a day if I really wanted to, but I don’t).

The hubby, who claims he isn’t a sweet tooth, asked me for a piece of chocolate one evening and exclaimed when I told him there was none left. I believe what he said amounted to something along the lines of, “But that was a new block opened just three days ago! I can’t believe you finished it so fast!”

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The hubby can finish a large bag of Ruffles in two sittings and I pointed that out to him.

His reply? “But that’s chips. This is chocolate!”

And the difference between them is what exactly?

I did a quick calculation of the number of calories consumed and it works out to be about the same - a 250g block of Cadbury consumed in three days has the equivalent to the number of calories consumed per day as a bag of chips eaten over two days.

As my friend once told me: “Get me chocolates for my birthday and remember that I prefer quantity over quality because I don’t savour, I gobble.” Well, I think she pretty much described me, too.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Last night, hubby and I attended our third prenatal class at Pantai Hospital. The two hour session was split to cover two topics:

1. Nutrition during pregnancy, confinement and lactation
2. Pain Management options during labour (I’ll write about this topic in the baby blog)

The senior dietition took us on a speed course through the topic of “nutrition during pregnancy” since all of us, save one person, were in our third trimester and the person that was not was already in her second trimester. Again, there was very little that hubby and I had not already read about. By the end of the session, hubby was starting to complain whether any of this was useful to us. Perhaps it would have been if we had had the course while I was still in first trimester before we got all those books to read…

What was news to me was that the recommended weight gain for a regular pregnant woman should be about 9-13kgs. What I had heard was a recommended weight gain between 12-18kgs. I wonder - no, I hoped she was using the old guidelines which had stipulated a lower allowance for weight gain during pregnancy. Looking at my 14kgs of excess mass, it’s a little too late for me to rectify the problem.

The pregnancy diet isn’t really any different from a regular healthy diet, save a little more focus on the nutrients that the baby needs. The main ones are folate, iron and calcium - which I’m being supplemented for. She also was of the opinion that cravings don’t have any significance to any lack in your diet (specifically because most women crave sweets, chocolates, ice cream and other unhealthy foods). While it is okay to indulge in such cravings every so often, the dangerous cravings are called “pica” - when you start to crave for things like chalk, sand, and other non-food items.

An interesting point to note is that calcium from milk is more readily absorbed by the body compared to calcium in the form of tablets. Likewise calcium from animal products (e.g. milk, cheese, fish with edible bones) are also more easily absorbed than the calcium from vegetable products (e.g. toufu, soy milk). Failure to obtain sufficient calcium means that the baby will rob Mum of her own calcium stores, leaving her with brittle bones and a higher risk of developing osteoporosis later in life.

Regarding iron intake, some good take home points to note are:

• Iron is better absorbed if the meal contains Vitamin C (so I guess that bowl of Vietnamese beef noodles I with a glass of orange juice certainly went down well…)
• Iron supplementation can also lead to constipation (a common pregnancy problem
• Chinese tea should be avoided because the tanins inhibit absorption of iron

Folate is usually present in food such as green leafy vegetables, citrus fruits and juices, and fortified cereals. Since it is easily destroyed during the cooking process, supplementation of folate is often a good idea.

Other noteworthy points:

• Avoidance of raw, uncooked, potentially unhygienically prepared food. This includes half boiled eggs, medium rare beef, sashimi, soft cheeses. Cheesecakes are acceptable if they are baked. That means tiramisu is also out because it contains mascapone cheese that is not cooked. I ought to add a qualifier here since the locally produced tiramisu also includes coffee flavoured cakes that have no mascapone cheese. When in doubt, err on the side of caution.
• Limit/avoid foods with no nutritional value, such as your cravings for sweets, sugars, etc. as these are empty calories that contribute to weight gain but provide no additional benefits to you or the baby
• Fish oils provide Omega-3 fatty acids are good for the development of baby’s brain, eyes and nervous system. The recommendation is to consume fatty fish (such as cod and salmon) twice a week.
• Make sure you don’t forget to eat your carbohydrates, like rice, pasta, noodles (more specifically complex carbohydrates rather than the refined carbohydrates) because you need energy and carbohydrates are your best source of energy.
  Fiber from fruits, vegetables, grains, cereals will help prevent constipation. Generally your meal portion should be one bowl of vegetables to one bowl of rice (refering to the chinese rice bowl size).
• About 8-10 glasses of fluids for adequate hydration and to facilitate the function of your fiber (fiber without water is totally useless for treating constipation). I was somewhat surprised to see that coffee and tea were included since they are diuretics. Generally, for every cup of coffee that is consumed, an additional cup of water should be taken to replace the lost fluids.
• The part that was more important to me was the section on confinement diet. The dietition debunked a lot of the usual superstitions associated with confinement, such as not being able to drink cold drinks, but I guess I’m still going to get nagged on this one regardless of who says it’s okay. On the question of alcohol, try not to consume, but if you have to, take small quantities with plenty of water immediately after breastfeeding so that the alcohol is no longer in your system when it is time to feed the baby two hours later.

Interesting that I sat through all that just to listen to one short paragraph…

Popularity: 14% [?]

Just for the record:

I will never again buy lemon-line powergels. They taste like a glob of cough medicine that’s stuck at the back of your throat. This has definitely got to go down on the list as one of the most disgusting things I have tasted.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I ought to be shot. I had three serves of ice cream today. They say that carbo-loading before a long-distance race is good, but even I have to concede that this is hardly a pretext for behaving like a pig. I did not even have to read the following article to know that ice cream contains too much fat to be of much use as a carbo-loading food:

http://www.scottdouglas.biz/Articles/marathoneats.htm

Although it did provide me loads of useful information on how I should carbo-load for the up coming marathon.

I also discovered that Baskin Robbins is the most expensive ice cream, compared against Lecka-Lecka and New Zealand Ice Cream. Regrettably, I had to learn through the most painfully embarrassing means of not having enough money to pay for two miserable scoops of ice cream. Although, I will concede that BR does give pretty big scoops.

The hubby and I were wondering through Midvalley when we both decided we were a little peckish. I handed my ten dollar note to the hubby so he could get himself a KFC meal. Unfortunately, I forgot that all I had left was seven bucks. Now I have to suffer the snide remarks from the hubby every time he asks me if I have enough money. If I reply, “Yes,” he’ll ask, “What? You have more than seven bucks?”

I guess the rationale for choosing BR would have to be the exciting array of flavours they offer in their ice creams that surpasses all the other ice cream brands currently in Malaysia. Not only do they provide interesting flavours, but they also offer an assortment of textures in their ice cream that go beyond the norm.

The hubby prefers the taste of New Zealand Ice Cream because it is not as sweet and he finds the texture to be smoother. To my indiscriminate tongue, I did not perceive there to be any difference, though for two thirds the price of BR, I can deal with having less flavours to choose from and a slightly smaller scoop of ice cream.

Lecka-Lecka offers the softer texture of Italian ice cream, gelato. The milk-based flavours in gelato are not as rich in cream, providing a slightly healthier alternative to relieve a craving for an icy dessert. They also present a wider selection of fruity flavours which might be more appealing to the health-conscious.

Why the analysis? Well, I had to provide a legitimate excuse for stuffing my face since the carbo-loading defence was not justified.

Popularity: 15% [?]