Triumphantly I started week 4 yesterday, having lost nearly 8 kg, I am extremely happy!
Neither of us have cheated and we are constantly patting each other on the back for that :)
So, today at work, a colleague (a skinny, gorgeous colleague) said something to a patient that rang very true in my own life. She was talking about how South Africa is one of the fattest nations on earth, and she made the following claim: South Africans are always having a party.
Always having a party of course translates into always having party food - breakfast, lunch and supper.
This is so true for my former life, if I think about it now, weekends (the ones I don't work) were invariably spent in the kitchen, cooking and baking the most wondrous food creations, adored by family and friends, all too happy to accept frequent invitations to lavish dinners at our home. And in return, I loved cooking for them, nothing in this world gives me greater pleasure than making food for a loved one and seeing them enjoy it and asking for more!
Shopping for these dinners usually turned out to be very expensive, as I seldom planned them, I'd just start paging through my enormous library of gorgeous cookbooks for inspiration, go to the grocery store and start piling in ingredients, and usually by the time I've gathered what I deemed necessary and standing in line for a till, a second wave of inspiration struck, and more food needed to be bought. And of course the obligatory coke and chocolate for the drive home and a little treat for me to munch on when everyone's left...
You can see how I often ended up with way too much stuff in my fridge and an overstocked pantry with many goods way beyond their sell-by dates.
Even just supper with my husband was never just supper, no, I really made a party out of every meal, there always had to be pudding, even if it was just a chocolate after dinner. If I think back to my childhood, and what my mother fed our family - the difference is so vast. For supper we'd always have meat, except once a week when she'd make macaroni and cheese, other evenings we'd get a small portion of meat - 2 lamb chops or meatballs - accompanied by a warm vegetable portion, a salad portion and a starch portion, which was always rice or some kind of potato incarnation. In other words, an extremely balanced and healthy lifestyle.
Dinner in my house as an adult would frequently be nachos smothered in cheese and sour cream, spaghetti bolognese smothered in mozzarella - that cheese and starch pattern is fairly consistent as the list goes on...
I always wonder where I derailed from these principles, and I so suspect those diet pills are the ones to blame, instilling a lifetime of bad eating habits.
Anyway, so, in order to achieve a healthier lifestyle, party food will have to be reserved for parties from now on, this I solemnly vow.
This does of course mean that party food is still out of the question for the time being, since I still have loads of weight to shed.
However, one has to make due with the cards that one is dealt - so in my case - I try to come up with delicious recipes, ones that should fool even the most perverted of taste buds! Like my AWESOME roast red pepper and garlic dip - used to dunk crudite or stuff chicken with, the possibilities are endless!
Roasted Red Pepper and Garlic Dip
- 2 large red bell or pimento peppers
- 1 large head of garlic
- 1 tub of fat-free cottage cheese
Roast the peppers in a hot oven 220 degrees Celsius, until the skin in nice and black, you have to turn them once. Take them out of the oven and into a glass bowl and cover with clingfilm and allow to cool. Meanwhile, roast the garlic at about 180 degrees Celsius for about 30 minutes.
Take the skin off the peppers and deseed them, cut the top off the roasted garlic and squeeze out the roast garlic, it will be a luscious sweet paste with a gentle garlic fragrance, unlike the rather pungent uncooked version.
Blend in a blender, together with the cottage cheese and season to taste. Enjoy!
Have a great evening and God bless
Janie B
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