Tag Archives: food

Back to time restricted eating

Other than about 6 weeks of Keto a couple years ago, and a few training diets more than half a life ago, I’ve never really dieted. That said, for over a year and a half now, I’ve tried to practice time restricted eating (also called Intermittent Fasting) five days a week – Sunday to Thursday night.

I have only been doing 14 hours fasting and much of that was sleeping. What it primarily does is restrict my unhealthy snacking after dinner, and delays breakfast, which I’ve never enjoyed preparing and eating.

Covid has messed up my schedule, summer made it worse. My good eating habits that I developed with restricting my eating window have all disappeared. So, along with my wife, we’ve decided to set a strict 5-hour window for eating for the next few weeks. We have only water, and a morning black coffee during our 19 hour no-eating restriction. When school starts I will move to 16-8, increasing my eating window to 8 hours.

It was weird to start this on a holiday to Kelowna. It limited our schedule of wine and cider tasting tours, but we filled our days with hikes and visits to the beach, and neither of us struggled with hunger after day 2. The only oddity was doing a long drive with no snacks.

There is a lot of research being done on the benefits of time restricted eating. I won’t go into it now, but I will say that it has three really positive affects for me:

1. It cuts out unhealthy snacking.

2. It stops me from getting ‘hangry’ – angry when I’m hungry. My sugar levels seem to stay in check and food (or lack of it) doesn’t come with mood swings.

3. It eliminates breakfast, which I don’t enjoy eating. (Breakfast is breaking the night’s fast, it’s not a morning meal time… technically I’m having breakfast whenever I choose to start eating after sleeping.)

I’m less than a week in, and I’m not sure this 5-hour eating window will be enough when I start pushing myself on my morning workouts again… but I’m really happy to have restarted my time restricted eating.

Setting up for summer

I hope that all the dads enjoyed Father’s Day today. I spent most of it putting together a 12′ by 22′ above ground pool. With our big summer trip to Spain and Portugal cancelled, we’ll be spending a lot more time in our back yard this summer. So although it wasn’t a typical Father’s day, I spent it setting the foundation for a good summer ahead.

That isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the day. I got a couple nice gifts and I enjoyed BLT bagels with a couple eggs cooked in bacon grease (a favourite meal for me), and my wife made delicious fish tacos for dinner too.

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I usually spend more of Father’s Day with my girls, but my youngest had to work today, and the pool needed to be put together. Today was about setting things up for summer, and it was a good day.

Spicing it up

My sister is visiting and she is a foodie. I can’t believe how much I’ve eaten this long weekend, and she is preparing pork chops for a late dinner tonight. I’m actually about to get on the treadmill before dinner… I need to burn some calories!

She also brought me 3 versions of a family pepper sauce that I love and I’ve already had a meal where I portioned Spanish rice into three sections to try each sauce. This made me think about how different people spice their meals. Growing up, I had a friend who added salt to everything he ate. He wouldn’t even taste the food before giving the salt and pepper shakers a shake over his plate. I do this with black pepper into any cream soup. And certain meals I add pepper sauce to without tasting it first. For example, pasta with a meat sauce always tastes better with some of our family recipe pepper sauce. I don’t need to taste first before adding spice.

How often do we do this, we add a spice before even tasting what we are about to eat? We layer on the sauce or the gravy, or we add salsa or cream cheese to a meal. We get accustomed to what we like and we spice things up out of habit. This time with my sister has made me appreciate what it means to enjoy food and eating, and to think a bit about how to spice up my diet. It has also made me question my portion sizes when I enjoy a meal. Spicing something up and enjoying it shouldn’t mean that I also consume much more… but this weekend I really overdid the volume of food consumed.

I think I need to spice up my workout too!

The Eternal Pot

In Barbados there is a meal called Pepper Pot, also known as The Eternal Pot or The Poor Man’s Pot. It’s a dark broth with oxtail as the primary ingredient, and it is delicious! Many a day I would sit dipping soft bread into a bowl, soaking up every drop and finishing up with only the oxtail bones in the wiped-clean bowl.

Pepper Pot would be made in a massive pot that would sit for days on the the stove. It was known as the eternal pot because it stayed fresh as long as you brought it to a boil once a day. No need for refrigeration. For this reason it was also the poor man’s pot because it could sit in the stove continually being added to, as a poor family put what they had available in it. A lean broth for many days, and then meat added on payday.

For us, the first day it was cooked, pepper pot was for dinner. After that it would be an always available snack, a Saturday brunch, a late-night binge. It was a magical pot that seemed to last forever…

This reminds me of good friendships. Eternal in its ability to always be there. We gather with friends for a meal, connect for a while, things fade, but you know you can always spice things up when you have the energy to do so. Then you lose touch, but that’s ok, things will be back to full strength the next time you connect. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it works on certain levels.

I’ve gathered with a few good friends this break, shorter and longer visits, a few meals, all rich experiences… I’ve added stock and meat to the eternal pot, helping the friendships grow. We just need to remember to heat things up once in a while… to keep things fresh.

Remember to stop and break bread with your eternal friends.

7 Sins, Part 1 – Gluttony

The holidays seem to be a time when food comes in abundance. Snacks fill the table and side tables within all the living spaces, second helpings are an expectation, and when you feel absolutely stuffed then desserts come out. Leftovers fill the fridge and the eating continues the following day.

If this only happened once a year, it would be fine, but there is always a birthday or holiday celebration. What makes this challenging is that we have a gluttony of sugary snacks available in stores that make up some of the cheaper foods available. Worse yet, there are food deserts in poor communities that make buying junk food not just far cheaper but also much more accessible than eating something healthy.

Junk food is eaten in sinful amounts. The world is getting fatter. Diabetes is becoming epidemic. And sugary food is probably the addiction that affects more people than any other addiction in the world.

It is said that knowing the problem is half the battle. It isn’t. Acting on that knowledge is the hard part. Here are 3 suggestions:

1. Cut out snacks after dinner. Have a glass of tea, drink some bubbly water, or just go for a short walk instead of having a snack. I’m willing to bet that 99% of the snacks you eat after dinner are sugary and/or unhealthy.

2. Read the label before you buy. Ingredients are put in order of the largest ingredients first. If sugar is one of the first 4 ingredients, look for another choice to fill your shopping cart. If it doesn’t make it into your home, it won’t be able to tempt you later.

3. Eat on smaller plates.

You’ll enjoy the food just as much and can end up eating almost 1/4 less food.

Gluttony is easy to succumb to. It can take effort to overcome. Reduce the opportunities for food to tempt you and you will find pleasure in living healthier, rather than giving in to the sinful pleasure of eating too much.

7 Sins Series

  1. Gluttony
  2. Envy
  3. Pride
  4. Lust
  5. Wrath
  6. Greed
  7. Sloth

Corn on Pizza

We lived in Dalian, China for 2 years. While there, my family looked forward to having the occasional meal that reminded us of ‘home’. One of those meals was pizza.

Pizza Hut was around the corner, and for special occasions we’d go there. We actually celebrated Christmas there both years… my wife and kids both hate turkey.

One thing that seemed odd was that corn was like pepperoni… it was on almost every choice of pizza on the menu. And, when you can’t speak the language, you order food based on pictures on the menu. We started to enjoy it! Ham, pineapple, and corn actually tastes great on pizza, although I doubt that it would still be called Hawaiian. Meanwhile, there are people here in North America that think pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza!

Another odd topping we’d see was on desserts. Here in Canada, we routinely see cherries and strawberries on chocolate cake, but not cherry tomatoes, (which are considered a fruit in China). I can’t say that this combination was as good as corn on pizza.

Potato chips were a whole other experience. While ‘lemon and pepper’ was something that I might get at home, ‘shrimp and onion’, or ‘small spicy fish’ would be a little more difficult to find here. Snacks in general were a fun new experience and I was often surprised by what I would like and what I’d never buy again.

When I go to a favourite restaurant, I’ll often get the same meal… when you find something you really love on a menu, the other items are usually a disappointment in comparison. However, beyond my favourites, I love to explore and try new things. Food can always be an experiment, and a new experience.

Where in your life do you create the space to try new things? I’m not just asking about food, but where are you open to ‘corn on pizza’ kind of opportunities?