Food and recipe pages everywhere are full of highly unappetising images, all to entice you into skinny, healthy dishes. Guess what – I’m going to do the same. I am myself struggling with a couple of pounds (euphemism) that I’d like to get rid of. Even though it was a no-Christmas Christmas, I – and we all I hope – cooked nice things and baked nicer things. Plus all the chocolates we bought as usual, forgetting there would be a quarter of the chocolate eaters around.
I’ve said it before, I say it again: Eat Half As Much (aka Eat HAM) is the best diet there is. Half or thereabouts, it’s about kickstarting the scales into showing more sensible figures than they have been recently.
Of course being stuck at home again doesn’t help. I’m trying to keep myself occupied straight after lunch so I don’t linger in the kitchen finding tasty bites begging to be eaten. Instead, I cook wholesome and filling dinners like baked rice with brown shrimp, or smoked mackerel salad.
Stir fries without fillers in the shape of noodles or rice work well too: just use more vegetables than the recipe states and you won’t go hungry. Anyway, we all know it’s not about ‘going hungry’ but about curbing your greediness for a bite of this after a bite of that. Sizzling beef, sticky pork, velvet fish or ginger vegetables – and you can pick and mix those recipes too.
Prepare lots of seasonal, root vegetable salads. They are chunky, firm and make you feel you’ve eaten more than you actually have. Classic remoulade made with celeriac and carrots, or winter rainbow salad, raw beetroot mixed with cooked beetroot or fennel with ranch dressing. Grill some fish to go with it and it’s such a virtuous dinner it will put you off chocolate for afters.
And if you feel you need to reward yourself at the weekend for being good all week, make a batch of date and walnut nougat meringues using up Christmas fruit and nut stocks and the egg whites from the freezer. Have one, instead of two you’d fancy – that’s my Half As Much!
Have a healthy week!