Nutritionist and Chef

My husband and I LOVE food. Especially pasta! We could eat pasta every day of the week. BUT we have both gained some weight over the course of my pregnancy and being at home afterwards. We would both really like to lose about 30lbs. So we get to count calories. Fun... not! We started our healthy eating regime before the holidays, which probably wasn't such a great idea on our part, but we managed to lose 9lbs and 6lbs respectively. We know HOW to do it, but our heads like to play games and tell us that we want more food. To help combat our heads I've created a pretty spreadsheet to keep track of our calories. (I love my excel spreadsheets!) At the top it has our current weight, how many calories we need to consume a day both with and without exercise, then each day has breakfast, snack, lunch, snack and dinner with columns to put what you are eating, the portion size and the calorie count. The last line on the bottom keep a tally of how many calories you have left for the day. It doesn't do you any favors if you don't eat your required amount of calories. You're not going to lose weight any faster, in fact you might not lose any because your body thinks that you are starving yourself and therefore it holds on and stores any calories you do consume. It's best if you eat 5 smaller meals a day and keep your metabolism up throughout the day. You burn more calories that way.

In order to figure out how many calories we need per day we used a great tool on About.com
http://nutrition.about.com/od/changeyourdiet/a/calguide.htm for anybody who's interested. I like the fact that it breaks it down for you depending on whether or not you will be doing exercise, or not, and how long you have to work out. Now that we're on this healthy eating regime the big word in our house is PORTION SIZE! We are not attempting to be on a diet or to restrict ourselves from eating our favorite foods because they are high in calories, we are just being aware of how much we take in. We can have our pasta... we just can't have a huge overflowing bowl of it (to my chagrin). Healthy meals can be fun and tasty so I will be posting our eating plans as best as I can, follow along if you dare. Which leads me to my appliance of the week!My kitchen scale! It's old, it's ugly, but it was free and it works measuring in both grams and ounces! To count calories often times you need to weigh your food which is why this is my appliance of the week!

The white chocolate lava cake turned out very well. As promised, this is the recipe I used and simply substituted the dark chocolate for white chocolate and added about 2 tbs of raspberry jam I put through a mesh to get some of the seeds out. We also shrunk the portion size of the cakes so that it still fit in our healthy eating regime. Enjoy!

Really me,
The chef/nutritionist
Nik