I have several good quality regular surface skillets. A 8 inch, a 10 inch, and a 12 inch. They are made by Wear Ever, and are restaurant quality. I also have a couple nonstick skillets as well, I have a Wear Ever 8 inch skillet that I bought 4 or 5 years ago. Maybe longer. I think the surface is Silverstone. I recently bought a 12 inch Wear Ever skillet. It has the newer Ceramiguard II nonstick surface. And today I bought a 10 inch Wear Ever skillet also with the Ceramiguard II nonstick surface.
Nonstick skillets are almost a must for low fat cooking. With regular surface skillets, you have to use oils to keep the food from sticking. But with the nonstick surfaces, you can use little of no oil for cooking. Often with the nonstick skillets, I can get away with a short spraying cooking spray.
The 10 inch skillet with come in had for various things. For example I made omelletes this morning. I made two, one after the other in the 8 inch non-stick skillet. If I had the 10 inch skillet that I just ordered, I could have made one larger omelette, and then cut it into two parts. I get lots of use from my skillets! And the new non-stick surfaces are tough. They recommend hand washing, but I have been washing them for years in the dishwasher with no problems!
Every once in a while I get a craving for cinnamon toast. I don’t eat it very often, but just every once in while. Today was one of those days. I was busy running on my treadmill, and suddenly wanted something to eat. And cinnamon toast popped into my head. So I made a low fat version of it. While it is low-fat, it has a bunch of sugar on it, so it is probably not real low-calorie. So would eat it alot. But if you get a craving for cinnamon toast, this version is healthier than spreading a bunch of softened butter on to your toast.
Ingredients:
2 slices bread
2 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp cinnamon
buttery spray (such as Olivio Buttery Spray)
Directions:
Mix sugar and cinnamon in small cup.
Spray one side of each slice of bread with about 5-6 squirts of buttery spray. Toast bread to preference.
Sprinkle sugar/cinnamon mixture on to buttered side of bread. Enjoy.
A friend who knows I read a lot, and that I recommend the Susan Powter approach to weight loss asked me whether she might be eating too few calories. She said she hadn’t felt very good the previous day, and had a loss of appetite. She had only consumed 1200-1300 calories of low fat food, and she had worked out for an hour and forty minutes. She was concerned that see might be burning muscle instead of fat.
I told her that when you eat less calories than you burn, you lose weight. In fact YOU HAVE TO eat less calories than you burn to lose weight. You need to burn 3500 more calories than you eat just to burn one pound of fat.
When there is a deficit, your body goes to the easiest source of fuel, your body fat (kind a fuel storage system). It will burn the fat, before it goes after muscle. If you go too low on calorie intake, your body might turn to muscle, but you would probably have to go really low. You body does need glyogen (sugar) to aid in the burning of the fat. Kind of like lighter fluid to get the charcoal burning. When you hear about people hitting The Wall, they have depleted their stores of glycogen.
I told her to keep eating healthy, and working out. You are doing a great job!
I recommended that she train with a heart rate monitor? With an HRM, you can train efficiently, and stay aerobic where your body is burning mostly fats. As you go harder into the anaerobic zones, you body can’t burn fat fast enough, so it swtches gears, and starts burning more glycogen, and less fat. Your body also starts producing lactic acid faster than you can get rid of it. Lactic acid starts breaking down the muscles. When you break down muscles like this, you need to rest for at least 48 hours for the muscles to rebuild. If you do alot of hard anarobic workouts abck to back with no rest, you are breaking down your muscles, and not giving them a chance to rebuild. This is a major cause of injuries.
Keep in mind, I am just regurgitating things I have read. There are lots of people on the message boards who are far more expert then me. But then I also dropped my own weight from 230 to current 170, and am one of the most physically active people I know. So I must be doing something right.
My wife and I love pizza. But it’s generally not anywhere near low fat. But we found some low-fat recipes for pizza in various cookbooks. Some were not very low-fat. We mixed and matched parts of the recipes, and came up with this recipe.
Ingredients:
1 Tortilla (maybe even fat-free)
2 Tbsp fat-free pizza sauce
1/4 Cup reduced fat or fat-free shredded mozarella cheese
Toppings: Your choice, but we used 97% fat-free ham, and pineapple.
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place tortilla on baking sheet. Spoon pizza sauce on to tortilla, and spread around. Sprinkle cheese over sauce. Evenly distribute toppings on top of cheese.
Bake for 10 minutes. Slice into sections and serve.
I was just reading a post on a message board I am active on. A friend of a friend was talking about how she is losing weight. And from everything I have read, she is doing an excellent job. One of her comments sticks in my head she was talking about the costs of eating healthy, as well as the preperation time of eating healthy. She feeds a family of 4, while I only have my wife and I. While don’t usually eat extravagently, we generally don’t worry too much about food costs. We buy boneless skinless chicken breasts, and Lean Cuisine meals, but we buy them on sale, and store them in our freezer. Generally preperation time is more of a concern to me. I hate being in the kitchen for hours, at least all the time. Once in a while I don’t mind.
I will have to look at gathering a collection of low fat recipes that are both fast, easy to prepare, and relatively cheap. Who knows, maybe I will publish a cookbook of recipes like that. I am sure there would be a market for something like that. There are already cookbooks for fast low-fat recipes. But I don’t think I have seem one for fast, cheap low fat recipes.